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| Weapons stacked to the roof in Baquba ignored |
| 10.31.04 (7:29 am) [edit] |
Peter Bouckaert, head of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said he told American officials about rooms "stacked to the roof" at Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, with surface-to-surface missiles on 9 May 2003. But the weapons still had not been secured 10 days later, and were being looted daily.
Independent
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| Godly liars, religion and politics |
| 10.31.04 (6:18 am) [edit] |
In my last post I said I wouldn't be blogging about the election again until it was over. But, because of an email I received from a friend in Louisiana I find I need to. This email seems very innocuous. It directs Christians to fast and pray about the election. Nothing wrong with this, of course. But, they are directed to fast and pray because God needs a man who seeks His face in the White House. The author is careful not to mention names but it's easy to see who he is talking about. He ends the email this way:
"Finally, this is not a partisan issue; it is simply a righteousness issue. God must have a man in office who seeks His face. If all of us do our part, we will prevail in this election and see America take another turn toward righteousness and revival."
I have tried several times to counterattack the religious lies of this campaign because I realize the strength of the church politic that is behind the Bush administration. They have managed to distract Christians from a most simple truth. God does not lie. Therefore, it stands to reason if George Bush had actually been seeking the face of God he would not have lied in order to invade Iraq. This is easy stuff. You don't need a degree in theology to figure this out. All you need is common sense and a conscience.
A lie is a dangerous thing. Sometimes we feel a lie is necessary in order to keep from hurting someone's feelings. I have done this and would do it again. But, the lies that church leaders are covering up for the sake of religious idealism lead to death. In fact, they have led to the death of thousands in the past year. They have led to the deaths of millions down through history.
When the Christian leaders are not paying attention to the lies and in fact say God is blessing the liar all the stops and warning signs should start flashing. Instead what we find are people looking for biblical justification for the lies in order to continue supporting a man because he 'professes' faith in God, a prayer life and reads his Bible. Is this the real reason many church leaders today are supporting Bush. Of course not! But, it's something the simple church goer can understand and connect with. George Bush becomes one of them. It blinds the masses to the real truth behind church politics which say, 'we are the way, the truth and the life rather than Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.'
They have succeeded in taking eyes off of the fruit hanging from Bush's tree which is rotten indeed in order to further their own agenda.
God is not responsible for this confusion. This is counterfeit religion.
If someone could crumble this cornerstone Bush's house would tumble.
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| The cost of George Bush leadership is too high |
| 10.30.04 (8:27 am) [edit] |
I don't have the heart for the US electoral process and the insanity it inspires anymore. That George Bush is not only 'not' held accountable for his invasion of Iraq in spite of overwhelming evidence of trumped charges but 'even' stands a chance at re-election proves there is no sense of justice in America unless it's for Americans. This is, of course, not meant for those wonderful US citizens who have been fighting hard against their corrupt government these past months and years.
With November 2 staring us in the face I feel sure those that plan to vote know their candidate by now or think they do or just don't care... they will vote for Bush anyway.
If Kerry wins it will startle the world. I think most of us are hopeful but for America to have let George Bush continue in office, well, it staggers the imagination and makes us doubtful. We can find no reason in your madness. That so many of you refuse to acknowledge the truth because of fear, party or your personal bottomline is revealing to say the least.
Have a good life America. But, remember those living outside your borders have the right to life also. You are not special creatures on this planet put here by God to rule the world. But, if this power was given to you..you have failed miserably and dreadfully.
I will add this little bit of news. We can read in most newspapers that over 100,000 Iraqis have died because of the invasion. Humanbeings like yourself had their right to life taken from them. How do you reconcile this within your own heart? That is the question.
I will continue to follow and blog world news but I am done with the election until it's over. This blog and others listed in my blogroll are filled with pages outlining George Bush's illegitimate and catastrophic leadership.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence proving George Bush should have been impeached, at the very least. If all this information just leaves you confused then follow your heart, your sense of right and wrong.
I hope everyone who has the right to vote does so. It is a right many around the world do not have. I have supported John Kerry not because I think he will make a great President but because he is the only way to bring George Bush to the justice he deserves. He is the first step toward vindication of all the wrongs George Bush has done to so many around the world but especially in Iraq. America cannot continue to call itself the leader of the world yet say world opinion doesn't matter. The world has counted the cost of Bush leadership and said it is too high.
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| La. absentee voting hits record with 115,592 voters |
| 10.28.04 (4:25 pm) [edit] |
Total up 40,000 from 4 years ago
Absentee voting in Louisiana hit a record when 115,592 of the state's 2.9 million voters cast ballots early for Tuesday's presidential election.
In-person absentee voting ended Tuesday.
"The totals are astounding," said Renee Free, first assistant secretary of state, far surpassing the 75,000 Louisiana residents who voted absent four years ago.
The Advocate
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| Florida ballot papers missing |
| 10.28.04 (12:13 pm) [edit] |
Tens of thousands of postal ballots have gone missing in the US state of Florida, sparking fresh concern over irregularities in the poll campaign.
Some 60,000 absentee ballots were despatched by authorities in Broward County, north of Miami, this month.
However, only 2,000 of them have been delivered.
BBC
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| American Elections |
| 10.28.04 (10:47 am) [edit] |
Visited Baghdad Burning this morning to see what the girl blogging from Iraq has to say.
Here is an excerpt from her latest post entitled, "American Elections 2004."
Be sure to visit and read the entire article.
Who am I hoping will win? Definitely Kerry. There’s no question about it. I want Bush out of the White House at all costs. (And yes- who is *in* the White House *is* my business- Americans, you made it my business when you occupied my country last year) I’m too realistic to expect drastic change or anything phenomenal, but I don’t want Bush reelected because his reelection (or shall I call it his ‘reassignment’) will condone the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It will say that this catastrophe in Iraq was worth its price in American and Iraqi lives. His reassignment to the White House will sanction all the bloodshed and terror we’ve been living for the last year and a half.
I’ve heard all the arguments. His supporters are a lot like him- they’ll admit no mistakes. They’ll admit no deceit, no idiocy, no manipulation, no squandering. It’s useless. Republicans who *don’t* support him, but feel obliged to vote for him, write long, apologetic emails that are meant, I assume, to salve their own conscience. They write telling me that he should be ‘reelected’ because he is the only man for the job at this point. True, he made some mistakes and he told a few fibs, they tell me- but he really means well and he intends to fix things and, above all, he has a plan.....
.....Some people associate the decision to go to war as a ‘strength’. How strong do you need to be to commit thousands of your countrymen and women to death on foreign soil? Especially while you and your loved ones sit safely watching at home. How strong do you need to be to give orders to bomb cities to rubble and use the most advanced military technology available against a country with a weak army and crumbling infrastructure? You don’t need to be strong- you need to be mad.
Baghdad Burning
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| Trick or Treat |
| 10.28.04 (10:04 am) [edit] |
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| Down on the street |
| 10.28.04 (9:49 am) [edit] |
For many of the women, the issue is "foreign competition." On the Rue St. Denis, independent French prostitutes strut their stuff, uncomfortably close to their younger, foreign, mafia-controlled competition.
The Mairie of Paris estimates that foreigners now make up about 60 percent of the city's sex workers. In recent years there has been a dramatic influx of prostitutes from Moldavia, Ukraine, Nigeria and China -- almost all are illegal immigrants.
The situation for the independents is becoming more difficult as the organised foreign networks move in and and attempt to take over the streets. In some locations there have been tense face-offs between French and foreign prostitutes.
The French working girls complain their Eastern European and West African counterparts undercut prices and siphon off customers. The newer girls are also less aware of hygine and health issues, making the working environment more dangerous for everyone. And violence has increased dramatically.
Roughly half of France's estimated 15,000 prostitutes work in Paris. And in July 2002, the office of Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe announced an ambitious campaign to re-educate and retrain prostitutes to work in more socially acceptable professions. There is talk of fining and jailing clients and pimps. And the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is on the record with a proposal to expel
foreign prostitutes from the country.
There is even a debate about reopening brothels which are currently outlawed, but which, according to the defenders of the idea, might make it easier to bust the illegal prostitution rings. Other advocates of the brothel claim it would facilitate public health screening.
However, the women working the streets are skeptical. Many fear that any of the proposals would only hurt their ability to earn a living. The independent prostitutes are afraid of losing their independence.
And their fear isn’t groundless. A proposal to create a new offence called "passive soliciting," which could be interpreted to mean loitering on a pavement in a short skirt, essentailly takes away the legal status of independent prostitutes, threatening them with up to six months in prison and a fine equivalent to a few thousand dollars.
The new crackdowns have already pitted police against prostitutes on the street. Some of the women complain that the cops have taken away their condoms or even sprayed them with teargas. They say it is the first time that they have felt targeted by the police who have tolerated their presence here for years.
Earlier this fall the French Prostitutes' associations took their concerns public, with large street demonstrations. They protested that proposed laws make no effort to distinguish between the victims of criminal gangs and women acting of their own free will. They also pointed out that authorities are not doing enough to enforce existing laws against the organised traffickers.
Paris Tempo
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| Iron lady of France |
| 10.28.04 (9:40 am) [edit] |
France yesterday appointed a woman, Martine Monteil, 54, as its top detective for the first time.
Mme Monteil, the daughter and grand-daughter of policemen who is married to a senior police officer, has been blazing a trail for women in the macho world of law enforcement in France for 30 years. She was the first woman to head the Brigade Criminelle in Paris
For the past three years she has been, as the director of the Police Judiciaire in Paris, the top detective in the capital.
From next week she will be directeur central of the Police Judiciaire (the equivalent of the CID) for the whole of France.
Mme Monteil, small, slender and blonde, is known in the Police Nationale as the dame de fer, or iron lady. She likes to pose for photographs with a lamp made from an old police-issue Luger pistol, which used to belong to her father, a senior detective.
Her rapid rise was passed off at first as token gender discrimination but she has since forged a reputation as a tough and effective police officer. Announcing the appointment, Dominique de Villepin, the Interior Minister, said she was "the best, the most experienced and the most appropriate candidate" for the job.
Independent
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| Arafat Critical |
| 10.28.04 (9:18 am) [edit] |
Teams of top medics were to carry out further bedside tests on ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who was said to be in a critical condition at his West Bank headquarters.
Two teams of medics were due to arrive from Jordan and Egypt after offers from King Abdullah II and President Hosni Mubarak, Arafat's top aide said.
While some Palestinians sought to play down the seriousness of his condition, his Paris-based wife Suha is also expected to travel to her husband's bedside on her first visit to the West Bank for several years.
Arafat's health has been the subject of speculation after a team of Tunisian medics was sent to the West Bank to carry out tests over the weekend, when Palestinian officials insisted he had nothing more than a severe bout of influenza.
However cabinet secretary Hassan Abu Libdeh confirmed that Arafat's condition had taken a turn for the worse.
Official sources in the Israeli government, wary of being blamed in the event of his death, said that Arafat would be authorised to go "wherever he wants for treatment", including abroad.
AFP
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| Unprotected Computers and Modems Don't Mix |
| 10.28.04 (8:58 am) [edit] |
A couple of weeks ago, the German Federal Office for Information Security published a dire warning for Internet users. According to the information given in the report (in German) the danger of an PC infection by so-called "dialers" and "trojans" has become as easy as getting a cold. Due to a security lapse in Windows programs, manipulated photographs are able to install these kinds of malevolent programs on every unprotected computer.
Dialers are programs that use a computer's modem to dial a telephone number which accesses porn servers directly. Many Germans became aware of these scams in the 1990s when reports of Web surfers getting hit with huge telephone bills first appeared.
Fees for these salacious sites can range from around two euros per minute (118.80 euro per hour) to a flat rate from 20 euros up to 900 euros for a single call. In comparison, an ordinary porn DVD costs about 30 euros -- a very strong indication that the whole dialer industry rests on some very unsavory business practices.
Since very few Internet consumers wanted to use these extremely expensive services, Internet porn companies had to think of new ways to make a profit. Rather than traditional advertising campaigns, surreptitious automatic downloading by dialer programs turned out to be the most effective solution.
These crimes first hit users of apparently "free porn" Web sites. With porn pages becoming so notorious, soon dialers were also hiding behind serious Web pages. The risk of infecting one's computer just by opening and viewing an otherwise normal picture marks a new low in Internet crime. More sophisticated methods are bound to appear in the future.
Since the dialers' installation strategies are constantly adapting, the German Justice system had to take action. The district court of the German city of Osnabrueck ruled on Sept. 17 that Internet users don't have to pay the exorbitant fees from such Internet porn fraud, even if they didn't protect their PCs with security software.
The court said that one must regard this category of security software as an "intellectual luxury." Very few users know how to secure their computers and even experts aren't totally immune to such attacks.
Another type of malevolent code -- a trojan -- gives an external user the ability to totally control an ordinary user's computer. The name refers to the ancient Greek story of the city of Troy, whose brave citizens were finally defeated by a trick from their besiegers -- the famous Trojan Horse. Made of wood and packed with fighters like Odysseus, the hollow horse was camouflaged as a gift. Ironically, this method still works today in the digital world.
A trojan works by installing the "gift" code, say a game or other ordinary software package, but then it covertly adds programs that most users will be oblivious to. The coders of such trojans now also can use this Windows security lapse. In contrast to dialers, trojans often are completely invisible to the ordinary user.
The recent security lapse with digital photos has its origins in an error within the jpeg-parsing component "gdiplus.dll". A manipulated picture can provoke a so-called buffer overflow in a program, overwriting the original stack.
As a result of this process, the victim's computer is completely exposed to cyber attack. Precipitating such an attack is no harder than just reading one's email or viewing a compromised photo on a Web page.
For more information on the security update, you can go to this Microsoft Corp support page.
OhMyNews
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| Reservists and National Guardsmen being victimized |
| 10.28.04 (8:50 am) [edit] |
It is pretty clear to most people in the United States that President Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid being sent to Vietnam. Most Americans, including most reservists, also know that serious questions have been raised as to whether Bush fully met the requirements of his reserve commitment.
It strikes many as hypocritical that a president who joined the reserves to avoid combat and who seemed unable to meet the minimal requirements of a reserve unit during the Vietnam War could be so casual about mobilizing reservists for a year or more and sending them into combat.
In short, many reservists and National Guardsmen are being used in a manner that they didn't sign up for and some are being held longer than they signed up for. So, not surprisingly, trouble is beginning to arise.
The Bush administration took office promising "Army transformation."
However, the new technologies have been slow to develop, and key assumptions on which the Army of the future was based turned out to be wrong. As a result, the promised smaller, more lethal Army turned out to be a smaller, more fatigued Army.
By mobilizing reserve units for long-term service, the administration has been able to gloss over the problem. At present, over 40 percent of the troops in Iraq are reservists or Guardsmen.
Reserve and National Guard units are neither trained nor equipped to be used as a replacement for regular units, however.
Washington Times
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| Russian Parliament Ratifies Kyoto Pact |
| 10.28.04 (8:34 am) [edit] |
Russia's adoption is the final step needed among major industrial countries after the treaty was rejected by the United States, which alone accounted for 36 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in 1990.
The protocol needed ratification by 55 industrialized nations accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 1990. The pact will apply only to nations that ratify it.
DowJones
With Russian ratification, the second threshold has now been met. The Protocol enters into force, or takes effect, 90 days after the Russian government deposits its instrument of ratification with the United Nations. That is expected to happen within a matter of days. With entry into force, Kyoto’s emission targets become binding legal commitments for those industrialized countries that have ratified it (the United States and Australia have not).
Industrialized countries account for roughly half of global greenhouse gas emissions. Without the United States (the world’s largest emitter) and Australia, Kyoto’s limits apply to countries accounting for 32 percent of global emissions. Most experts and governments believe that much steeper emission reductions, 60 percent or greater, will ultimately be needed to avert serious climate change impacts.
Pew Center
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| NASA Expert: Bush Admin Stifling Global Warming Evidence |
| 10.28.04 (8:18 am) [edit] |
The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night.
"In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now," James E. Hansen told a University of Iowa audience.
Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and has twice briefed a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney on global warming.
Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that "fit predetermined, inflexible positions." Evidence that would raise concerns about the dangers of climate change is often dismissed as not being of sufficient interest to the public.
"This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster."
Hansen said the scientific community generally agrees that temperatures on Earth are rising because of the greenhouse effect - emissions of carbon dioxide and other materials into the atmosphere that trap heat.
These rising temperatures, scientists believe, could cause sea levels to rise and trigger severe environmental consequences, he said.
Hansen said such warnings are consistently suppressed, while studies that cast doubt on such interpretations receive favorable treatment from the administration.
He also said reports that outline potential dangers of global warming are edited to make the problem appear less serious. "This process is in direct opposition to the most fundamental precepts of science," he said.
White House science adviser John H. Marburger III has denied charges that the administration refuses to accept the reality of climate change, noting that President Bush pointed out in a 2001 speech that greenhouse gases have increased substantially in the past 200 years.
Last December, the administration said it was planning a five-year program to research global warming and climate change.
Hansen said he was speaking as a private citizen, not as a government employee, and paid his own way for the Iowa appearance. He described himself as moderately conservative, but said he will vote for John Kerry in the presidential election.
"He certainly is not in denial of the existence of climate change problems," Hansen said.
DowJones
Our weather patterns are changing dramatically and much faster than many predicted years ago. Glaciers are melting and storms becoming more severe.
Yet, George Bush refuses to sign the Kyoto accord which addresses this issue.
Bush recently got the worst "F" rating for his environmental record from the U.S. League of Conservation Voters.
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| Ex-Guantanamo prisoners suing US government |
| 10.28.04 (7:47 am) [edit] |
Four British men held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for nearly three years are suing the US government.
The ex-detainees are alleging torture and other human rights violations.
BBC
As these men were later questioned by the British police and released without charge it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
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| Dubya takes Australia offline |
| 10.28.04 (7:37 am) [edit] |
George W. Bush doesn't trust the outside world to view his US election campaign website, and that includes close ally Australia.
The US President's re-election aides said today it had cut off access to its website from certain foreign countries "for security reasons", but declined to elaborate.
"The measure was taken for security reasons," campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Paranoia: A psychological disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur
News.com.au
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| Algeria, truth remains elusive |
| 10.28.04 (7:26 am) [edit] |
French President Jacques Chirac, during a landmark visit to Algeria last year, described the Algerian war as "a long unspoken tragedy," without mentioning, as the newspaper Le Matin pointed out the next day, "the contentious history of the war, replete with torture, missing persons, massacres of which he did not utter one word."
Although the ceasefire accord reached in 1962 stipulated an amnesty by both sides, within weeks of the withdrawal of French forces the victorious National Liberation Forces massacred between 70,000 and 150,000 harkis and pieds noirs, as French settlers were called.
Only around 40,000 made it to France, where they faced discrimination.
Then president Charles de Gaulle is accused, along with his armed forces minister Pierre Messmer, of cynically allowing the killing as a means of limiting the numbers of harkis entering France.
"We still dont know what happened to 4,600 Europeans who also disappeared," adds Rene Mayer, author of "Algerie: Memoire Deracinee" (Algeria: Uprooted Past).
New revelations about the war and its aftermath are "issued timidly, then immediately denied or distanced from their original import," said Mayer, a pied noir whose family spanned five generations in Algeria.
"I consider it my duty to find the truth," Mayer said.
Deep scars remain from the war that left 1.5 million dead.
Tocqueville Connection
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| Violence stalks Egypt's homeless children |
| 10.28.04 (6:55 am) [edit] |
Social and human rights workers accuse the Egyptian police of addressing the growing problem of children left homeless by sweeping social and economic changes with methods they have also been condemned for using on criminals.
Orphaned and abandoned children traditionally sheltered in the homes of relatives in Egypt now find themselves living under bridges, in doorways and at the mercy of authorities, who resort to beatings and detention alongside adult criminals where they are exposed to further violence and sexual abuse.
New York-based group Human Rights Watch accused the Egyptian police in a 2003 report of subjecting Cairo street children to beatings with batons, whips, rubber hoses and belts and subjecting them to sexual abuse.
"In some cases this ill-treatment, aimed to punish, was so severe as to constitute torture," the report said.
Mohamed Tag el-Din, manager of a drop-in centre in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City, said the number of homeless children among the city's vast population of 17 million alone varied anywhere from 10,000 to 90,000.
AlertNet
Will extremist find 'believers' within these groups of poverty stricken children? Will extremists be the ones to give them shelter, food and hope?
This is where the fight against terrorism begins. We are failing future generations at our own peril.
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| Bush website blocked outside US |
| 10.27.04 (5:29 pm) [edit] |
I had to try it and sure enough I get 'you are not authorized to view this page.'
Well, I didn't want to anyway..I was just curious. But, what about the Bush supporters or undecideds living outside the US? This is weird. Everything about George Bush is weird.
Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.
The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.
Since then people outside the US trying to browse the site get a message saying they are not authorised to view it.
The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.
BBC
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| Iraqi children must work for families survival |
| 10.27.04 (12:57 pm) [edit] |
Iraq, which once boasted a large middle class, has been ground into poverty by decades of political turmoil. Successive wars have killed many breadwinners, leaving widowed mothers and orphaned children, and Iraq's child labor woes predate last year's U.S.-led invasion. Indeed, just before the war, the White House cited "instances of forced labor" among children and "military training camps for children" among its top 10 reasons for deposing President Saddam Hussein.
But since then, life has become even more grueling and dangerous for many of Iraq's youngsters.
"The situation was better before the war," said Ibrahim Nimat, an official at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. "There is no support for some families, and the absence of steady income is causing a loosening of the family. They push their children to work selling petrol or cigarettes. This used to happen before, but never to this extent."
In theory, Iraq has some of the most progressive child labor rules in the region. Iraqi law bars children under 15 from working and demands strict worker safety conditions for those 15 and over. By law, working children must receive the same rights and benefits as adults as well as regular health checkups. They must receive at least a third of an adult salary and cannot work more than seven hours a day, says Nimat, of the Labor Ministry.
But in practice, officials admit that few employers, parents or children abide by such regulations.
"Nobody obeys the law," Nimat said.
In poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Baghdad such as Sadr City, home to 2. 5 million Iraqi Shiites, the vast majority of children have jobs, often doing back-breaking manual labor for a few dollars a day.
"Everyone from Sadr City works," says Ahmad Naji al-Rubayee, a car washer who claimed he was 15 but looked no older than 10. "No one goes to school."
He takes one of the city's dilapidated buses to work, where he wipes down cars for six to nine hours for $3 a day. "Maybe I'll get 6,000 dinars ($4) on good days," he says. He gives half his income to his mother and alcoholic father.
At his young age, his whole life is centered on the struggle to survive.
"I've never thought," he says, "about what I want to do when I grow up."
SF Gate
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| From Conservatives to Conservatives |
| 10.27.04 (12:29 pm) [edit] |
Excerpt from The American Conservative Magazine
If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.
More at The American Conservative
Via BlondeSense
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| No Weapons Search |
| 10.27.04 (10:19 am) [edit] |
Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.
The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.
The disappearance, which the U.N. nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, has raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.
On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the U.N. Security Council to discuss the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the United States said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there was no need for U.N. experts to return.
More
In spite of the reasoning for the invasion of Iraq being changed at the whim of the Bush administration we know the reason publicly give was WMD. As such it seems strange that 'weapons' would not be the top priority.
And why doesn't the US want UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq? One would think they could use all the help they can get especially since the scale of the project is so huge.
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| French a dirty word in US campaign |
| 10.27.04 (9:47 am) [edit] |
Kerry has French relatives and speaks the language fluently. "I thought America was the great melting pot and I don't see why Mr Bush is picking out a nationality to criticise," said Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.
"It's exactly that kind of attitude by Mr Bush that has led America to be alone in the world."
Ever since French President Jacques Chirac held his ground at the United Nations early last year and refused to follow America into war with Iraq, there has been a backlash against things French in middle America.
"The level of international awareness in the United States is so low, I don't think the American public in general had a clear impression of France. If anything, prior to this concept, most Americans would assume 'looking French would have been a compliment. People would take it as a synonym for being attractive, worldly and cultured," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hall said this anti-French sentiment was relatively new.
Meltzer, a humanities professor at the University of Chicago and a dual French-American national, says the anti-French sentiment is mostly a phenomenon among middle Americans – middle in terms of geography and class – a main group of voters, along with Christian fundamentalists, targeted by the Republican Party.
"There is a kind of rage among middle Americans that the French are ungrateful because 'we saved you in 1944 and now that we need you, you're not there.' The French didn't come through after Americans came through for them," Meltzer said.
"It's true that America helped the French during World War 2 but after all, without the French, it would not have won the American Revolution, and none of this has anything to do with whether the French should be in Iraq," she added.
While Bush and Kerry share the same background – upper class from New England – Bush has cultivated his Texan roots and affects a slangy speech, with broken sentences and uneven pronunciations like "nucular" instead of "nuclear."
Kerry, on the other hand, is perceived as a multilingual intellectual who speaks with an expansive vocabulary, proper grammar and syntax.
"Not only does Kerry speak French. He speaks English well," Meltzer said. "In addition his wife is foreign – she speaks with an accent and she speaks her mind. . . That further contaminates Kerry. He's part Jewish, he grew up Catholic, he studied in Switzerland and he speaks French – this all combines to make him 'French', not really American.
"French really means un-American," she added.
Although Bush has a French tailor, Georges de Paris, and until recently enjoyed the culinary delights of White House French pastry chef Roland Mesnier, he has publicly shunned things foreign.
While on trip to France in May 2002, he chided an American reporter for asking Chirac a question in French during a joint news conference in Paris. "He memorises four words and plays like he's all intercontinental," Bush sneered.
Kerry, on the other hand, has even on occasion spoken French on the campaign trail. Opinion polls show Europeans overwhelmingly want him to win.
"Anybody who has been at the Statue of Liberty (a present from France) knows that America's greatest strength is its mix of nationalities and I think it's time for Mr Bush to take one more trip to the Statue of Liberty to find out what America is all about," Cutter said.
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| Electricians pledge to light up the world |
| 10.27.04 (9:24 am) [edit] |
A nongovernmental group of electricians, created 16 years ago in France, has recently reinvented itself and given new purpose to its movement.
The organization formerly known as CODEV has renamed itself Electriciens Sans Frontières (Electricians Without Borders), hoping to call more attention to their aim of bringing power to citizens of the developing world. CODEV, or Cooperation and Development, was created in 1985 by workers from Electricité de France who were looking for a way to use their skills for the benefit of the poor.
Today, the French energy company provides funding and also supplies over 600 volunteers to the international aid organization yet refrains from dictacting project locations or budget requirements.
While ESF has a noticeable presence in many former French colonies, it has also been invited to work in other developing nations such areas as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The International Energy Agency states that without strong new policies from governments around the world, over one billion people will still lack electricity in 30 years. ESF is committed to changing those statistics and raising public awareness of their campaign. Ongoing projects include a water pump installation in northwest Benin as well as electrical projects in small villages in Vietnam and Togo.
News From France
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| Santa won't make it to Darfur this year |
| 10.27.04 (8:02 am) [edit] |
The World Food Program Tuesday said more than one-fifth of children in Sudan's western Darfur region are malnourished as are almost half of the families in the troubled sector.
"The malnutrition rate for children in Darfur under the age of 5 was 21.8 percent, which is beyond the 15 percent rate regarded as a serious situation," the U.N. food agency said in its first survey of internally displaced persons and residents across Western Sudan, adding that nearly half of all families did not have enough food.
Other health problems were widespread with more than 40 percent of children suffering from diarrhea and 18 percent from acute respiratory infections. Children, women and pregnant women were also deficient of minerals and vitamins. More than half of the children and quarter of the women suffered from anemia and 25.8 percent suffered from goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid gland due to a lack of iodine.
More
1200 children under five die each hour, most from preventable disease. A child dies every 15 seconds from lack of safe water and sanitation. One woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth every minute.
No Nikes, video games or McDonalds for these children. As Christmas shopping madness begins in the Western world let's remember that literally millions around the world are starving. There will be no fancy Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. Santa won't make it to Darfur this year. Instead many mothers and fathers will watch their children die in their arms for lack of basic food, clean water and medicine.
Make a donation to CARE
Make a donation to MercyCorps
Make a donation to UNHCR
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| Economics more important than human rights |
| 10.27.04 (7:25 am) [edit] |
As were previous "counterrevolutionary rebellions," the Tiananmen movement for a more pluralist political system was crushed violently. The most prominent pro-democracy protesters were jailed or sent to labour camps, and then after their release fled China or were exiled. Most of those live in the United States.
High-profile protesters who remained in China were treated harshly and blacklisted by the government, schools and employers. The dissident movement largely has been sidelined and any questioning of the official verdict of the June 4 military assault is dispatched with authoritarian swiftness.
Jiang Yanyong, a retired military surgeon who became a national folk hero last year after he helped expose the government's initial cover-up of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Beijing, was arrested and held for several days around the time of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. He had written a letter calling for the government to reassess the actions leading up to the military crackdown, in which hundreds of people were killed and thousands wounded.
Dr. Jiang's case received only scattered attention abroad, prompting cynicism from a Chinese dissident in exile.
"Currently, Western countries are interested in making money in China, so economics is a priority. Human rights is second, even third," said Fang Lizhi, who teaches physics at the University of Arizona.
The same view is held by the New York-based World Policy Institute, a research and education policy centre that discussed the issue in a 2003 article called The Dragon Still Has Teeth: How the West Winks at Chinese Repression.
"As China becomes an increasingly important market and a more powerful force in global organizations, they [the media, non-governmental organizations and governments in the West] seem more and more willing to buy Beijing's rosy portrayal of its human-rights record," says the article, published in the institute's World Policy Journal.
Liu Qing lives and works in New York, where he heads Human Rights in China. He is one of the few exiles who remain engaged in promoting recognized human rights and advancing the institutional protection of these rights in China.
According to Mr. Liu, China's growing global economic and political influence has had a severe dampening effect on the West's purported interest in furthering democracy.
"The knowledge that China's civil and political rights have generally deteriorated over the past 15 years is inconvenient to people who want to believe that China is improving so they don't have to suffer a guilty conscience from dealing with the Chinese government," Mr. Liu said in an interview conducted by e-mail.
Over the years, Mr. Liu said, Beijing has become even more efficient at controlling and suppressing dissent. Even the so-called Tiananmen Mothers, relatives of those killed or injured during the crackdown, suffer persistent intimidation and persecution.
The World Policy Institute agrees. "Beijing is once again instituting repressive measures that equal or surpass in severity and scope those supported by the old guard in the early 1990s. Indeed, Beijing seems to want it both ways: to appear to be more tolerant even while relentlessly suppressing dissent," it says in the 2003 article.
Mr. Liu is saddened that although he and many other Chinese dissidents found safe haven in the United States, Washington puts trade interests first and does not back up its stirring words about the need for democratic change in China.
"The U.S. government voices a lot of criticism of the Chinese system but does comparatively little to influence or work toward positive change."
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| Geneva Convention provisions subject to legal interpretation? |
| 10.26.04 (9:27 am) [edit] |
As recently as May 2004, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reiterated in public testimony the administration's view that "everyone in Iraq who was a military person" as well as "the civilians or criminal elements" who were detained by the American authorities would be "treated subject to the Geneva Conventions."
Now we read:
A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.
They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
This is not only a flip-flop it's frightening considering this administrations handling of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo.
And what the hell does this mean?
A Justice Department official said, "No matter what the provision is in the Geneva Convention, they are subject to legal interpretation."
This administration is making up the rules as it goes along discarding any it's in disagreement with.
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| Students discover true relationship between U.S., France |
| 10.26.04 (8:00 am) [edit] |
An excellent article and as such I'm going to post the entire thing. There's still hope for US/French relations at least in the future.
By JoAnne Young
Erin Hilsabeck was thinking like a reporter as she stepped through the doors of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris on an early September day. With some connections, she had a personal tour on a day the museum otherwise was closed to the public.
And so the University of Nebraska-Lincoln journalism student walked from room to room in the converted railway station, past works of Monet, Renoir and Degas, their impressions of nature and people, to help her tell the story of how and why the French capital had become for the world a cultural treasure chest.
But as she moved in the quiet, hearing only her own echoing footsteps, the import of what appeared before her Nebraska eyes dissolved her purpose. And by the time she entered the Monet room, all thoughts of journalism had vanished. Her eyes fixed on a painting in the corner, glowing in natural light.
As if the artist himself stood beckoning her, she was pulled to the original 1873 "Poppies, Near Argenteuil."
"I forgot why I was there. I ditched my reporter instincts. I became selfish," she said six weeks after returning to Lincoln with 10 other depth-reporting students and four faculty members of UNL's College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
In those moments, Hilsabeck stood transfixed in front of the familiar painting, familiar because she sees it daily in Lincoln under her computer mouse. But the multigenerational copy on that mouse pad never struck her like that day. Never made tears well up.
"I could see texture. It was three-dimensional. It had layers to it."
She feels self conscious talking about it now, still has trouble finding the right words, but knows she will keep the memory forever.
Much like student Laura Schreier's visit to Shakespeare and Company, the legendary bookstore that was a center of contact decades ago for such English-speaking writers as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Elliot, Katherine Anne Porter. Or like Erica Rogers, who stood on a breezy amber night, gazing at an Arch de Triomphe that made American icons seem born yesterday.
Dirk Chatelain will remember walking along the Seine with Notre Dame 500 feet in front of him, a boat sailing by. "It could just as easily have been 1780 as 2004," he said.
The students and faculty arrived in Paris Sept. 2 for 10 days of reporting that will produce a magazine and documentary exploring the relations between France and the United States since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and France's resolute stand opposing it.
The trip abroad is the second for students from the journalism college. In January 2003, a class traveled to Cuba and produced a magazine, "Cuba, an Elusive Truth," which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and a documentary, "Cuba, Illogical Temple," which won a student Academy Award this year. The documentary played on national educational TV stations in a number of major cities.
"We're hopeful the same thing will happen with this documentary, as well," said Jerry Renaud, associate professor of broadcasting.
It is possible the project, which could be completed in March, could play in a theater on the outskirts of Paris, in French, or with French subtitles, Renaud said.
The documentary will focus on the historical relationships and differences between the United States and France. Among other things, it will compare the day-to-day lives of a French brother and sister, the brother living in the United States, the sister in Paris.
Renaud said the Paris trip was different from the Cuba project, in large part because of the freedom students had to gather information.
"In many ways, this has more potential internationally," he said.
In Paris, students fanned out over the city looking for the true relationship between the United States and its longtime ally and whether it had been damaged. Other questions will translate to a multitude of published articles:
* What is the significance of D-Day to both of the countries?
* What are the immigration issues in France today?
* How did 9/11 affect tourism there?
* How do the French feel about U.S. politics?
* What about this love affair the French have with Native Americans?
* What about the banning of Muslim veils on girls in public schools?
* What is it like for former University of Nebraska basketball player and Big Sandy, Texas, native Leroy Chalk, to teach English to a diverse group of young children there, having moved in the 1970s?
Students said they embarked on their journey knowing about French stereotypes held by many Americans. They were warned to expect a frosty reception, even hostility, Schreier said.
"Upon arriving, we realized that's not really true," she said.
The people they met were receptive and open-minded.
They were kind, said photographer Alyssa Schukar, and she felt welcome, when she was able to communicate.
If anything, the French are puzzled about American attitudes toward them, seemingly caused by disagreement over the war in Iraq, said Rick Alloway, assistant broadcasting professor.
September, especially Sept. 11, was an interesting time to be in Paris, he said.
Alloway was struck by the Parisians' interest in the upcoming U.S. election. People from every socio-economic level were informed and opinionated on the presidential candidates. Most have said they would vote in the election if they could — against Bush.
They view it as an election that will profoundly affect the world, he said. One French newspaper devoted four full pages to the first debate, with far more in-depth coverage than most U.S. newspapers.
"It is a highly literate and highly plugged-in society," he said.
Hilsabeck, whose memorable moment came in the Musee d'Orsay, learned more than journalistic lessons on this trip, lessons she believes will influence her life.
She observed that young Parisians are much more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and bilingual than she and her peers. "It was all in their confidence, in the way they carried themselves. They just have this air about them," she said.
Even though she has been all over the United States and to London with the Lincoln High School band several years ago, even though she comes from a good background, has had a good education and has worked hard for her accomplishments, she does not feel as worldly as the French students.
She went to the City of Light to learn about reporting and to test her skills.
She returned with much more.
They all did.
Lincoln Journal star
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| Afghan human rights |
| 10.26.04 (7:30 am) [edit] |
While Afghanistan has made great progress since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, "gross violations of fundamental human rights" continue, from extrajudicial executions to inhuman detention to the frequent abuse or assault of women and girls, a United Nations expert says in his latest report to the General Assembly.
Prof. Cherif Bassiouni, the Independent Expert on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, says the "key to understanding these violations" is the insecurity caused by the continuing military power of warlords and local commanders and the increasing economic power of those involved in heroin production and trade.
Bassiouni's recommendations for ameliorating the situation include increasing the number of foreign troops in the country, reducing opium and child trafficking, developing a system of land titling, and prohibiting warlords and drug lords from assuming public office.
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| Bill Clinton said: |
| 10.26.04 (7:00 am) [edit] |
"If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other is trying to get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the one who wants you to think and hope," he said.
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| Internet users not as safe at home as they think |
| 10.26.04 (6:40 am) [edit] |
Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers.
One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it.
The study being released Monday by America Online and the National Cyber Security
Alliance found that 77% of 326 adults in 12 states assured researchers in a telephone poll they were safe from online threats. Nearly as many people felt confident they were already protected specifically from viruses and hackers.
When experts visited those same homes to examine computers, they found two-thirds of adults using antivirus software that was not updated in at least seven days.
Two-thirds of the computer users also were not using any type of protective firewall program, and spyware was found on the computers of 80% of those in the study.
The survey participants, a cross-section of Internet users, were selected in 22 cities and towns by an independent market analysis organization, said AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein.
The alliance, a nonprofit group, is backed by the U.S. Homeland Security Department and the Federal Trade Commission, plus leading technology companies, including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), eBay Inc. (EBAY) and Dell Inc. (DELL).
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| Bush wants $70 billion more for war |
| 10.26.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year, Pentagon and congressional officials said Monday.
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| Islamic Law Obliges Margaret Hassan's Release |
| 10.26.04 (6:20 am) [edit] |
Given Margaret's heart wrenching plea for help on Friday (October 22 2004) it would appear that it is the Mujahideen that has captured her. And to every Jihadi involved I say uncompromisingly - Margaret is acting on no-ones behalf other than the people of Iraq. She is not an emissary, she is not a collaborator, and she is not a combatant. This is not a woman who represents the unjust agendas of the Bush, Blair or Howard Administrations.
Margaret has dedicated her life to helping the international community understand that there is no 'clash of civilisations'. Rather there is only 'we the peoples' who are entitled to enjoy our rights while fulfilling our universal responsibilities to protect our fellow human beings. 'We the peoples', whether in Iraq or Australia, are simply trying to go about our daily lives - working, discovering love, getting married, having healthy children, and finding solace and enjoyment in family and friends.
The last 15 years have taught me that 'we the peoples' have more in common than we differ. And Margaret has spent more than 30 years now trying to convince the international community of this while tirelessly working to ensure that all peoples enjoy their rights and uphold their responsibilities in dignity and in hope. I hope whoever has taken Margaret away from us realises the momentous mistake they have made and shows the generosity and compassion to right their terrible wrong.
Margaret is a woman, a community elder, and a humanitarian aid worker. She is protected under both international humanitarian law and the Shari'ah. As the Sunnah teaches us (Sahih Al-Muslim, Kitab al-Birr, Narrated by Abu Huraira, 59), the Prophet Muhammad himself privileged humanitarians - "[W]hosoever removes a worldly grief from a believer, God will remove from him one of the grieves of the Day of Judgment. Whosoever alleviates a needy person, God will alleviate from him in this world and the next".
Having wrongly abducted Margaret from the Iraqi battlefield as a prisoner of war, according to The Holy Qur'an (Chapter 47:4), her captors now have two choices - either show generosity and grant her freedom, or take a ransom and release her. These are the only options ordained under Islamic Law. Either way, Margaret must be set free.
EI
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| Wolfpacks for Truth |
| 10.26.04 (12:48 am) [edit] |
They told us we were shooting a Greenpeace commercial!
Wolfpacks for Truth
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| A diplomat telling undiplomatic truths |
| 10.25.04 (4:50 pm) [edit] |
Craig Murray has been hauled back to London and suspended on full pay after "losing the confidence of his colleagues" in one of the most embarrassing scandals to hit the august corridors of Her Majesty's diplomatic corps for many years. He faces a disciplinary inquiry and, almost inevitably, dismissal.
His crime is hard to pin down. Was it his telegrams to London which spoke in undiplomatic terms of torture and corruption, or was it his friendly press relations?
"While still in Tashkent I'd get two or three requests a week for interviews," Mr Murray explained. "And as is the rule, I routinely passed them on to London for clearance.
"Their response was always to tell the journalist, 'Mr Murray does not want to do interviews', which annoyed me because I really wanted to speak about the atrocities." Whatever else he has done, Mr Murray is a man of principle who felt compelled to detail the human rights abuses he saw in a country which, shortly before he arrived, had become America's New Best Friend in Asia.
Run by Islam Karimov, a post-Soviet apparatchik with a Stalinist mindset, Uzbekistan happens to border Afghanistan and was willing - for a large injection of United States money - to provide Washington with one of the region's largest air bases. Two months into his new posting, Mr Murray delivered a speech at the opening of new offices for the human rights organisation Freedom House that changed the tone of relations between London and Tashkent fundamentally and marked the beginning of the end of his career.
His mistake was to tell a stunned audience of diplomats, aid workers and Uzbek officials what they already knew. "Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.
"The major political parties are banned; parliament is not subject to democratic election; and checks and balances on the authority of the executive are lacking," he said.
Other incidents followed. Mr Murray spoke in public of the absence of reform and freedom of speech and about repression. The British embassy, seen as a backwater under its previous ambassador, became a magnet for dissidents.
"They turned up at my door with broken teeth and burns from torture. Some would spend the night in my home. On one occasion the grandson of a dissident I had met was murdered within hours of my speaking to his grandfather. They left his body on the doorstep. His hands and knees had been smashed with a hammer. It was a warning not to speak to me," he said.
"Very little can prepare you for the brutality and viciousness of the Karimov regime. Most diplomats isolate themselves from it."
More at the Telegraph
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| Talk of faith doesn't belong in campaign |
| 10.25.04 (2:57 pm) [edit] |
This quote sums it up nicely.
Today a public confession of faith by a presidential candidate is so deeply enmeshed in the calculating politics of manipulation that it simply should not be believed. Anyone who thinks a modern major-party candidate can talk about faith in a way that is not seen as angling for some political advantage, some movement in the polls, is asking the impossible.
Tom Beaudoin
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| France wants Kerry but sees no quick fix |
| 10.25.04 (2:40 pm) [edit] |
The US presidential race is being followed with close attention in France, where an overwhelming preference for a Democrat victory is balanced by the sober recognition that, whatever the result, there will be no quick fix for damaged bilateral ties.
The government of President Jacques Chirac naturally refuses to break protocol by endorsing either candidate, merely stating that it will continue to work with whoever is in the White House on matters of mutual interest.
But following the open rows in the last two years over the war in Iraq, and with a poll showing that nearly 90% of the French public wants John Kerry to win on November 2, it is reasonable to assume that a change at the top would not be regarded unfavourably in Paris.
.... to expect a return to a 1990s golden age of mutual understanding and goodwill is impossible, given the shift in America’s view of itself and the world that was taking place even before the drama of September 11, ‘01.
“I do not share the view that the politics of George W Bush are a temporary aberration,” said Pierre Lellouche, a deputy from Mr Chirac’s UMP party known for his “Atlanticist” or pro-US views.
“What is happening in the US is not neo-conservatism, but nationalism: in other words, the restoration of freedom of manoeuvre ... That America pre-existed Bush and September 11, and I fear the fundamentals will remain the same whatever the administration. That is why I think our relations with the US will continue to be strained.”
Mindful of the fact that a Bush victory looks every bit as likely as a Kerry one, government officials in Paris are stressing that beyond the obvious disagreements, cooperation between the two countries is actually strong, notably in the field of anti-terrorist intelligence gathering.
“Bridges were never burned,” said one Elysee palace insider, pointing out that Mr Chirac’s foreign policy adviser Maurice Gourdault-Montagne coordinates regularly with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
But for all the official pragmatism, the French government cannot be impervious to the overwhelming national sentiment of hostility to the Bush administration.
Apart from the UMP — which out of loyalty to Mr Chirac is publicly neutral — all the main parties are for Mr Kerry.
The over-riding hope is that even if Mr Kerry were unable to articulate radically different policies on Iraq or other matters, he would be less ideologically driven than Mr Bush and more inclined to seek international sanction.
Economic Times
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| Prodi backs Kerry plan on Iraq |
| 10.25.04 (2:25 pm) [edit] |
Commission President Romano Prodi has backed calls by US presidential hopeful John Kerry to hold an international conference on Iraq.
The statement is likely to be interpreted as tacit support for Mr Kerry’s campaign and a criticism of George W Bush’s policies.
In an interview with the Bloomberg news agency, Mr Prodi said that the conference, proposed by Mr Kerry to re-engage the international community, would help dissolve some of the splits over the execution of the war in Iraq.
"A conference is certainly a message of a new strategy: not war but negotiation, trying to solve the problems together", Mr Prodi said.
However he backed away from an outright endorsement of the Democratic candidate.
It would "not only [be] unfair, but indelicate to interfere or to make forecasts about internal political decisions", Mr Prodi is quoted as saying.
EU Observer
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| Passing the buck on slippery slopes |
| 10.25.04 (1:58 pm) [edit] |
A report that the CIA secretly transferred detainees out of Iraq for interrogation without notifying the Red Cross drew criticism Sunday from key members of Congress.
"The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on ABC's "This Week."
Not anymore Mr. McCain. The US invasion of Iraq and continued occupation in light of so many reports showing there were no WMD and no Iraqi involvement with 9/11 negates this remark.
McCain was responding to a report in Sunday's Washington Post that as many as a dozen detainees had been moved out of Iraq over the last six months, a possible violation of the Geneva Convention.
The Post cited a draft Justice Department opinion, written in March, as saying that the CIA can take Iraqis from their country for interrogation for a "brief but not indefinite period." Intelligence officials have not disclosed the names or the locations of the detainees removed from Iraq.
"These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason, because you get on a slippery slope and you don't know where to get off," McCain said. This latest disclosure, he added, is "another argument for new bosses at the CIA" and for an overhaul of the nation's intelligence-gathering operation.
Yes, George Bush is on a slippery slope now in Iraq. It's not just new bosses of the CIA that are needed but a total change in the WhiteHouse. The President is responsible for what's happening under his watch. Stop passing the buck!
LA Times
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| Ten Commandments for Israel's National Policies |
| 10.25.04 (1:37 pm) [edit] |
by Moshe Neeman
1. Dominate thy neighbor. No atonement necessary for an occupation that deprives the Palestinian population of life, liberty and even brief moments of happiness. We'll continue violating every international law and convention that stands in our way.
2. Nothing succeeds like success. The thirty-seven-year-old occupation continues in full force and will remain in place. With lands confiscated and settled, the territories as we knew them in 1967 no longer exist. And with every Israeli under 50 raised with the occupation in the background, the territories are no longer "occupied"--a term that suggests an interim condition--but rather transformed into areas permanently and irreversibly controlled by Israel. Incidentally, this process follows closely the "creation of facts" that took place in pre-state and immediately post-state Israel.
3. Deceive the world. Talking about redeploying occupation forces and removing a few fringe settlements while actually expanding many others across the West Bank will further strengthen our conquest and make the occupation ever more effective.
4. Apartheid rules. As many foreign visitors testify, the territories closely resemble South Africa's apartheid rule: limited, segregated areas (many totally devastated) for Palestinians, who no longer control their lands and natural resources, where the population struggles for bare livelihood, experiencing widespread child malnutrition and lacking health services and employment. Add to this roads for Jews only, and the picture becomes clearer.
5. Thou shalt assassinate. The occupied territories have become a free-range shooting gallery for military occupation forces and for settlers. Israel continues to use various assassination techniques on a daily basis--from a one-ton bomb dropped on a densely populated neighborhood to rockets aimed at moving vehicles--both constitute executions without a trial and both, routinely, result in the killing of innocent bystanders, including children. Palestinians react by trying to blow themselves up in areas frequented by Israelis or by occupation forces, typically stating what each act is in retaliation for. Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem (www.btselem.org) reports that between September 29, 2000, and September 15 of this year 2,859 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, among them 561 minors under the age of 18. During the same period, 916 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, among them 110 minors under the age of 18.
6. Deny, deny, deny: Never acknowledge any connection between a "terrorist act" and our own deeds, or the occupation itself: Theirs is "terrorism," ours is "defense"; theirs is "hate," ours is a "desire for peace"; theirs is wrong, ours is right. Always.
7. We have a God-given right to all of the biblical Land of Israel. Their right for a Palestinian state is, at most, conceptual--clearly, it does not apply to even 22 percent of historical Palestine--the areas generally known as the "occupied territories."
8. "No" to Palestinian statehood. To prevent them from achieving statehood, we will continue to carve out the territories so as to make an independent state no longer possible, and to crush their pre-state institutions: their infrastructure--roads, airports, hospitals, police stations and jails; schools and universities; computer systems containing demographic and medical records, and much more. The very same civilian institutions that enabled us to transition into statehood smoothly in 1948.
9. Money is no object, especially since it's American. We will devote most of our national resources to the occupation, at the expense of everything else, including social services to our own Jewish poor and needy, school lunches and the quality of education, and the very lives of our youth.
10. Our "Only True Friends" will continue to help us. Republican and Democrat alike will compete in offering us their unqualified "support." With such support our "occupation" can expand, everything else notwithstanding. We will continue to methodically transfer the land and natural resources to our own hands and, by further tightening the noose, force the undesirable Palestinian population away to distant places.
The Nation
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| Bush removes Iraq from terrorism blacklist |
| 10.25.04 (1:30 pm) [edit] |
Late last month, Bush instructed Powell to remove Iraq from the list citing "a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of Iraq." "Iraq's government is not supporting acts of international terrorism (and) has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future," the president said in a September 24 memorandum to Powell.
This is a joke. Iraq was not capable of supporting itself much less international terrorism when Saddam was running things. Now terrorism is rampant within Iraq and the country is run by Bush henchmen. Go figure...
Business Day
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| UN envoy, Qazi, warns against US offensive on Fallouja |
| 10.25.04 (12:49 pm) [edit] |
The new United Nations envoy to Iraq warned Sunday that a U.S. offensive in Fallouja could further divide the nation as it struggles to prepare for January elections.
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the U.N. special representative for Iraq, also said the international body was prepared to mediate a peaceful solution in Fallouja, the rebel stronghold that has been under almost daily bombardment by U.S. warplanes.
"There is a concern with respect primarily to civilian casualties which are taking place and the impact it could have for the political process," said Qazi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington.
LA Times
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| George Bush exploits suffering of 9/11 |
| 10.25.04 (12:37 pm) [edit] |
George Bush has exploited the suffering of September 11 and turned back decades of efforts to make the world a safer place, the former president Jimmy Carter says in an interview with the Guardian published today.
Attacking Mr Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq, Mr Carter calls the war "a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements".
He also criticises Mr Bush for "lack of effort" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accuses him of abandoning nuclear non-proliferation initiatives championed by five presidents.
The US "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Mr Carter says.
"He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon know."
American media organisations, he adds, "have been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved".
Guardian
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| Islamist Web sites debate Hassan kidnapping |
| 10.25.04 (12:35 pm) [edit] |
The kidnapping of British aid worker Margaret Hassan has generated a debate on Islamist Web sites, with many contributors urging the kidnappers to spare her life.
Hassan, 59, the director of CARE international's operations in Iraq who has lived here for 30 years, was seized Tuesday in western Baghdad. On a videotape aired Friday by Al-Jazeera television, the terrified Hassan made a tearful plea for her life, calling on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to withdraw troops from Iraq.
Hassan, who is married to an Iraqi and also holds Irish and Iraqi citizenship, is the highest profile figure to fall victim to the wave of kidnappings sweeping Iraq. As a woman who has spent nearly half her life helping Iraqis, her abduction has stirred passions even among people who have little sympathy for other kidnap victims.
"Spare this hostage. She is a woman who dedicated her life to supporting Iraq and its people. Is it religious that she is rewarded with murder?" said one Web site contributor, writing under the pseudonym "Hadeeth al-Zaman."
"Say the British government did this and that," he added. "Is it right that we take our revenge on an innocent person who is not involved with what her government does?"
AP
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| Challenged to Vote |
| 10.24.04 (4:24 pm) [edit] |
It's going to be election 2000 all over again, people. The US election process is becoming a joke. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad and downright frightening.
Challengers will be patroling the polls on Election Day ready to question anyone they suspect may not be a resident of that county. I can see the mad scramble now. How does one prepare themselves in order to look like they're a resident of the county. First priority would of course be white skin. This is sickening and so transparent.
Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the battleground states to register millions of new voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election Day.
Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.
Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.
"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''
The preparations for widespread challenging this year have alarmed some election officials.
"This creates chaos and confusion in the polling site," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, an international association of election officials. But, he said, "most courts say it's permissible by state law and therefore can't be denied."
NY Times
Ohio Provisional Ballot Ruling Reversed
A federal appeals court ruled Saturday that provisional ballots Ohio voters cast outside their own precincts should not be counted, throwing out a lower-court decision that said such ballots are valid as long as they are cast in the correct county.
The Mercury News
A Look at Lawsuits Ahead of Election
Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of the developments Friday:
COLORADO:
- The state's top election official told The Associated Press that Colorado could be one of several states that may hold up the results of the presidential election for days or even weeks because of new voting rules and potential legal fights. Political experts have expressed similar concerns about Colorado in recent weeks.
- Several voters have sued election officials in Boulder County, accusing them of violating the state constitution by printing serial numbers and bar codes on ballots. The voters believe the ballots could lead to an invasion of privacy. But officials say voters will not be matched to the serial numbers.
MARYLAND:
A federal judge blocked electronic voting opponents from stationing people at polling places to watch for problems with the state's machines on Election Day. The opponents claim the state has covered up problems with e-voting machines.
OHIO:
- The U.S. Justice Department got involved in a court fight over provisional ballots in Ohio, siding with the Republican secretary of state in a legal dispute that could have national implications. The battleground state's handling of provisional ballots could prove key in a close election.
- Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader asked the U.S. Supreme Court to order his name placed on the ballot in Ohio. The filing follows two defeats for the Nader campaign in courts in Ohio.
PENNSYLVANIA:
Republican lawmakers have accused Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell of trying to suppress military votes for President Bush by failing to push for an extension of the deadline to accept overseas military and civilian ballots. Democrats said there wasn't a ``single shred of evidence'' to back up the claim.
SOUTH DAKOTA:
The attorney general said six Republican notary publics face misdemeanor charges for illegally notarizing absentee ballot applications filled out on college campuses. The attorney general said there's no evidence of fraud, but the applications in question will likely be challenged in court.
Guardian
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| You've got to laugh |
| 10.24.04 (3:41 pm) [edit] |
Charlie Brooker has written a funny piece on Bush/Kerry and the debates.
His last paragraph is sure to get him some attention from Americans and Repugs in particular. He'll probably make the CIA's list of people to be watched.
"On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"
Anyone reading this will or should know it's jest. Certainly in Europe it will be seen as what it is. But, freedom in Europe is different from American freedom which seems to be diminishing daily.
Since I avoid Republican blogs like the plague I will miss out on the rage which will no doubt be there.
Guardian
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| Confessing Christ in a World of Violence |
| 10.23.04 (8:14 pm) [edit] |
This is so good I'm going to post the entire piece.
Our world is wracked with violence and war. But Jesus said: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Matt. 5:9). Innocent people, at home and abroad, are increasingly threatened by terrorist attacks. But Jesus said: "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). These words, which have never been easy, seem all the more difficult today.
Nevertheless, a time comes when silence is betrayal. How many churches have heard sermons on these texts since the terrorist atrocities of September 11? Where is the serious debate about what it means to confess Christ in a world of violence? Does Christian "realism" mean resigning ourselves to an endless future of "pre-emptive wars"? Does it mean turning a blind eye to torture and massive civilian casualties? Does it mean acting out of fear and resentment rather than intelligence and restraint?
Faithfully confessing Christ is the church's task, and never more so than when its confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism.
- A "theology of war," emanating from the highest circles of American government, is seeping into our churches as well.
- The language of "righteous empire" is employed with growing frequency.
- The roles of God, church, and nation are confused by talk of an American "mission" and "divine appointment" to "rid the world of evil."
The security issues before our nation allow no easy solutions. No one has a monopoly on the truth. But a policy that rejects the wisdom of international consultation should not be baptized by religiosity. The danger today is political idolatry exacerbated by the politics of fear.
In this time of crisis, we need a new confession of Christ.
1. Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture, knows no national boundaries. Those who confess his name are found throughout the earth. Our allegiance to Christ takes priority over national identity. Whenever Christianity compromises with empire, the gospel of Christ is discredited.
We reject the false teaching that any nation-state can ever be described with the words, "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." These words, used in scripture, apply only to Christ. No political or religious leader has the right to twist them in the service of war.
2. Christ commits Christians to a strong presumption against war. The wanton destructiveness of modern warfare strengthens this obligation. Standing in the shadow of the Cross, Christians have a responsibility to count the cost, speak out for the victims, and explore every alternative before a nation goes to war. We are committed to international cooperation rather than unilateral policies.
We reject the false teaching that a war on terrorism takes precedence over ethical and legal norms. Some things ought never be done - torture, the deliberate bombing of civilians, the use of indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction - regardless of the consequences.
3. Christ commands us to see not only the splinter in our adversary's eye, but also the beam in our own. The distinction between good and evil does not run between one nation and another, or one group and another. It runs straight through every human heart.
We reject the false teaching that America is a "Christian nation," representing only virtue, while its adversaries are nothing but vicious. We reject the belief that America has nothing to repent of, even as we reject that it represents most of the world's evil. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).
4. Christ shows us that enemy-love is the heart of the gospel. While we were yet enemies, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8, 10). We are to show love to our enemies even as we believe God in Christ has shown love to us and the whole world. Enemy-love does not mean capitulating to hostile agendas or domination. It does mean refusing to demonize any human being created in God's image.
We reject the false teaching that any human being can be defined as outside the law's protection. We reject the demonization of perceived enemies, which only paves the way to abuse; and we reject the mistreatment of prisoners, regardless of supposed benefits to their captors.
5. Christ teaches us that humility is the virtue befitting forgiven sinners. It tempers all political disagreements, and it allows that our own political perceptions, in a complex world, may be wrong.
We reject the false teaching that those who are not for the United States politically are against it or that those who fundamentally question American policies must be with the "evil-doers." Such crude distinctions, especially when used by Christians, are expressions of the Manichaean heresy, in which the world is divided into forces of absolute good and absolute evil.
The Lord Jesus Christ is either authoritative for Christians, or he is not. His Lordship cannot be set aside by any earthly power. His words may not be distorted for propagandistic purposes. No nation-state may usurp the place of God.
We believe that acknowledging these truths is indispensable for followers of Christ. We urge them to remember these principles in making their decisions as citizens. Peacemaking is central to our vocation in a troubled world where Christ is Lord.
Sojurners Via BlondeSense
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| 94 Reasons not to vote for George Bush |
| 10.23.04 (7:50 pm) [edit] |
It doesn't matter who you are or what you believe, George W. Bush has betrayed you, specifically and repeatedly.
Are you a law-and-order type? Then you should probably know that Bush has an arrest record (see reason No. 24). Are you a devout Christian? Millions of people just like you think Bush is defiling God's creation with his ruinous environmental policies (reason 20); and God's man on earth himself calls Bush's war wrong and immoral (reason 21). Perhaps you voted for Bush because you fondly recall the days when Republicans stood for fiscally conservative government? Those days are gone, friend (see reasons 64 to 71). Do you think of yourself as an intelligent, rational adult capable of making your own decisions about the world around you? Bush doesn't (No. 28). Maybe you're scared that the terrorists are coming, and think W. is the one who will stop them. Read reasons 1 through 16.
Unless you are the CEO of a large corporation (that donated heavily to Bush's campaign), Bush does not have your best interests at heart. Those are the facts.
Consider the material below a primer, the Reader's Digest version of why you shouldn't vote for Bush. There are thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of similar facts not included here for space reasons. Whole topics had to be cut; there's no mention of Bush's assault on civil liberties via the USA PATRIOT Act, for example, and no mention of the fact that he cannot explain why he didn't fulfill his commitment in the National Guard.
So pick a reason, any reason, and don't vote for Bush Nov. 2.
All 94 reasons here
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| Bush's Civil Rights Record |
| 10.23.04 (7:32 pm) [edit] |
Civil rights problems remain entrenched in American society, the stubborn result of unequal treatment over time. Discrimination in housing, employment, and the voting booth, unequal educational opportunity, and other problems still stand between some Americans and true equality.
Presidential leadership is necessary to break down obstacles and realize the promise of civil rights.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) examined the George W. Bush administration’s commitment to that end.
This report finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.
Some highlights of the report include:
Voting Rights: The Bush administration did not provide leadership to ensure timely passage and swift implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. As a result, Congress did not appropriate funds for election reform until almost two years into the administration.
Equal Educational Opportunity: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) does not sufficiently address unequal education, a major barrier to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students.
Affirmative Action: Instead of promoting affirmative action in federal contracting and education, the administration promotes "race neutral alternatives," in many instances not applicable and in others not overly effective at maintaining diversity.
Environmental Justice: EPA has taken few actions to ensure disparate impact of minority communities to environmental contamination.
Racial Profiling: The administration responded to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by instituting regulations that facilitate profiling rather than prevent it. Immigrants and visitors from Arab and Middle Eastern countries were subjected to increased scrutiny, including interviews, registration, and in some cases removal.
The report credits Bush for expanding and funding services for people with disabilities. But he seldom talks about civil-rights initiatives, it says. When he does, it's usually about removing discrimination against religious organizations. Bush's faith-based initiative "allows religious organizations that receive public funds to discriminate against individuals based on religion in employment."
Read the full report here
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| Chickenhawk betrayers of freedom |
| 10.23.04 (4:40 pm) [edit] |
This is an excerpt. Follow the link below to read the entire article.
Perhaps President Bush would likewise view war with horror if he had chosen to join John Kerry in the jungles of Vietnam. Instead, he chose to party in Texas and Alabama. The point is not whether he fulfilled his National Guard duties. The point is he chose, unlike Kerry, to avoid going to Vietnam. So did Vice President Dick Cheney and a lot of other Republican chicken hawks, like former Rep. Newt Gingrich.
As for Kerry's anti-war activities, he simply shared the same opinion of war as Eisenhower and Sherman because he had seen it and experienced it. Nobody can look back on the Vietnam War – which gained America nothing but 58,000 dead, a quarter of a million wounded and a divided country – and honestly say that Kerry wasn't right when he opposed it.
As for all these chicken hawks in the administration and the media who condemn anti-war folks as treasonous or disloyal, it is they, as Eisenhower pointed out, who are the betrayers of freedom. America is a lot closer today to fascism than it is to a free republic. When Americans can no longer voice dissenting opinions without being victims of character assassination, then indeed we are nearing the end of freedom's road.
I wish there were some way we could gather up all these chicken hawks, put them on a plane with rifles and parachutes and dump them out over Fallujah. If they're so enthusiastic about war, they ought to participate in it. Instead, they are like a bunch of kids urging someone else to fight so they can be entertained. There is hardly a more contemptible role a human being can play than being a vicarious warrior.
Too many Americans today are allowing a bunch of draft dodgers and chicken hawks to scare them with the boogeyman into giving up everything that makes this country worth fighting for.
If the president cannot fight terrorism and preserve American freedom at the same time, then he's obviously in a job well over his head.
Lew Rockwell
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| Bush Administration Suspends Aid to Nations Refusing to Shield Americans from War-Crimes Court |
| 10.23.04 (3:59 pm) [edit] |
A Bush administration policy of suspending military aid to nations that won't promise to shield Americans from the war-crimes tribunal, called the International Criminal Court, is reducing or canceling dozens of programs that further U.S. interests abroad, Newsday has found.
Among numerous examples, Croatia lost $5.8 million that was earmarked primarily for training troops - a process that would aid its entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Tanzania lost $450,000 to bolster security, even though it was the site of a deadly U.S. Embassy bombing in 1998. Elsewhere in Africa, Washington withheld more than $7 million from South Africa, $500,000 from Benin and $250,000 from Mali - funds earmarked for "strengthening regional stability" and decreasing reliance on U.S. peacekeepers. Ecuador, a key ally in the U.S. war on drugs, lost $15.7 million, much of it for military equipment that could help detect narco-traffickers on its border with Colombia, the primary source of cocaine entering the United States.
Trinidad and Tobago lost $450,000 in funding for its Coast Guard, most of it in training, for not signing a pact called an Article 98 that pledges to not surrender U.S. nationals to the court if they are suspected of committing crimes on foreign soil. It is among nearly two dozen nations whose military aid remains halted for not signing an Article 98 with the United States, the only government to seek such non-surrender pacts.
Jordan, one of the few U.S. allies in the Middle East, had a waiver, but Washington still threatened to withhold $100 million in aid for training Iraqi policemen - who are desperately needed to replace U.S. troops in Iraq - if it didn't sign an Article 98. Though U.S. officials capitulated after Jordan refused to sign, "It leaves a very sour taste, particularly because countries who support the International Criminal Court are traditional allies of the United States," one foreign diplomat close to the issue said.
Those allies include Croatia, where U.S. officials are withholding military aid even as they have asked the Croatian government to send troops to Iraq and expand its military presence in Afghanistan. Croatia already is facing fire at home for acceding to a request from Washington and other governments to send Croatians to a separate international court judging war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. "It would be very difficult to explain to the Croatian public how we can have one way of treating our own citizens and another for citizens of another country," Croatian President Stjepan Mesic said last year.
More at GPF
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| Hundreds of Palestinians Homeless |
| 10.23.04 (10:47 am) [edit] |
Israel's recent 17-day military offensive in the northern Gaza Strip killed 107 Palestinians, left nearly 700 homeless and caused more than $3 million dollars in property damage, a U.N. aid agency said in a report Friday.
Operation "Days of Penitence" was launched Sept. 29 in response to rocket fire on Israeli towns that killed five Israelis in recent months.
During the campaign, 107 Palestinians were killed and 431 wounded, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which cares for Palestinian refugees.
Ninety-one homes were demolished, making 675 Palestinians homeless, UNRWA said. In addition, 101 houses, home to 833 people, sustained damage, the report said.
UNRWA said it will cost $2.5 million to rebuild the private homes.
In addition, army shelling and bulldozers destroyed 19 public buildings and commercial properties, including government compounds, a mosque, two farms and three factories, among several other small shops, the report said.
Sixteen buildings were damaged, including eight UNRWA schools on the eastern border of the Jebaliya refugee camp, the focus of the army's operation.
Jebaliya, the main launching pad for Palestinian rockets, is the largest of the Palestinian refugee camps, with an estimated 106,000 residents living in an area about a half square mile.
Throughout the incursion, army bulldozers ripped up roads and dug trenches damaging around 12,000 square yards of roads. Water, sewage, and electricity networks were also damaged, the report said. Dozens of acres of farmland were flattened, it said.
AP
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| Ex-US detainees 'resume fighting' |
| 10.23.04 (10:42 am) [edit] |
The Pentagon says a number of detainees released from Guantanamo Bay have once again taken up arms against US and coalition forces.
According to a Pentagon official another former detainee who was a juvenile when he was first captured and is now a teenager was recaptured while participating in an attack near the Afghan city of Kandahar.
More
Oh I really believe this one. The Pentagon is a great source of truth. Bah!
Hmm If you had been captured and wrongfully imprisoned as a juvenile might this not have the effect of turning you into a freedom fighter? some people are so ignorant.
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| Abducted Aid Worker in Iraq Begs for Life |
| 10.23.04 (10:29 am) [edit] |
Trembling, haggard and weeping into a tissue, Margaret Hassan, the kidnapped British aid worker who has spent nearly half her life delivering food and medicine in Iraq, begged Britain on Friday to help save her by withdrawing its troops, saying these "might be my last hours."
The gaunt, 59-year-old woman's wrenching, televised statement — delivered between sobs — puts new political pressure on Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, a day after it agreed to a U.S. request to transfer 850 British soldiers from southern Iraq to the Baghdad area to free American forces for new offensives against insurgents.
"Please help me, please help me," Hassan, who heads CARE International's operations in Iraq, said in a grainy videotape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television. "This might be my last hours. Please help me. Please, the British people, ask Mr. Blair to take the troops out of Iraq, and not to bring them here to Baghdad."
More
Why with all the high tech means at our disposal such as Colin Powell's famous satellite photos before the UN are we unable to track down these people?
And why the hell doesn't Blair get his troops out of Iraq?
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| Bush's Debate Notes - Humor |
| 10.23.04 (10:18 am) [edit] |
But probably not far off.
All throughout the debate, Bush was seen taking notes on a piece of paper at his podium. At great risk to life and limb, we were able to smuggle out the notes and present them so that they are available for everyone to see. Many Bothans died to bring you this information ...
Bush's Debate Notes
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| Democrats making greater Net impact |
| 10.23.04 (10:09 am) [edit] |
Political observers, including Republican stalwarts, acknowledge that the opponents of President Bush have overtaken the conservatives at online fundraising and grass-roots organizing.
The Internet is ``made for outsiders,'' said John Pitney, who teaches government at Claremont McKenna College and was the Republican National Committee's deputy director of research from 1989 to 1991. ``If you want to take a whack at policies you disagree with, you can't do it through congressional investigations because the other party controls the governing institutions. But you can get on the Internet and start a blog, you can join a grass-roots organization.''
One measurable way liberals have trounced conservatives on the Internet is in fundraising. Dean's success with raising money online now pales next to Kerry's Internet booty: $82 million during the primaries. In comparison, the Bush campaign, which focused more on soliciting funds by direct mail, netted $14 million online over the same period. The Bush camp fell short despite having an e-mail list of 7.3 million supporters, compared with Kerry's 2 million.
``The Internet makes it so that we don't need to find people. They find us,'' said Josh Ross, director of Internet strategies for the Kerry campaign. The campaign spent only three cents for every dollar it gained via the Internet, he said.
The Internet also has become a hotbed of activism for progressives and liberals.
Even top Republicans acknowledge the dominance of MoveOn.org, founded by Berkeley entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades in 1998. The group boasts a membership of 2.8 million. Through its site, MoveOn.org has organized global vigils protesting the war and is asking members to ``adopt'' neighborhoods in swing states to help sway voters for Kerry.
The activism associated with liberal groups ``isn't what the right does,'' said Siobhan Guiney, executive director of Move America Forward, a conservative organization based in Sacramento. ``On the right, they vote as opposed to doing something with their feet,'' she said. ``They let the few do the activism.''
Slayton and Guiney attribute the difference to a generational gap. ``Groups like MoveOn . . . it's a young person's thing,'' said Slayton, who helped run the RNC's Internet campaign in 2000. Young people also are more adept at using the Internet than older folks, who are more likely to be Republican.''
More at Sun Herald
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| Foreign Observers See Problems in Election |
| 10.23.04 (9:53 am) [edit] |
Substantial threats to the integrity of the U.S. presidential election remain despite an improvement in election practices since 2000, an international delegation of election observers reported on Thursday.
The delegation of 20, including lawyers, diplomats, civic leaders and veteran election monitors from 15 countries, visited five key states last month to review preparations for the Nov. 2 balloting.
The group made several recommendations, although it acknowledged that it was probably too late for many of them to be implemented less than two weeks before the election.
It strongly recommended that new electronic touch screen voting machines that have been introduced in many states in the past four years be equipped to produce a voter-verified, recountable paper record.
Noting that tests of the machines have produced frequent errors, the delegation said the assumption that newer technology automatically led to more effective voting systems was short-sighted.
It urged that open source computer coding be incorporated in voting machines. At the moment, the source is proprietary and belongs to the companies that make the machines.
The report criticized the fact that U.S. elections are administered by political partisans, saying that it fell short of international norms
The delegation condemned the disenfranchisement of an estimated 4.7 million ex-felons which it said fell short of international standards.
Reuters
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| More than one way to win an election |
| 10.23.04 (9:42 am) [edit] |
The Republican party isn't worried. There's more than one way to win an election.
I heard the best story yesterday, which is someone from the state of Wisconsin received a ballot in the mail and it was a year 2000 ballot. It had Al Gore on it. It is extraordinary.
The basic problem in the United States is that there is no neutral election administration. The party that is in control of the state determines the electoral arrangements and throughout American history, political parties have manipulated election arrangements to their own advantage.
ABC
One woman living in Paris said she had received two absentee ballots from Palm Beach County. The first she filled out and mailed back. She received another one this week with identical instructions. What does she do? Was her first one counted? How does she know?
IHT
At least half of North Carolina's National Guard troops in Iraq failed to get their absentee ballots in time for their votes to be counted, according to an officer helping to handle voting.
JournalNow
With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the election's outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount.
The more Floridians learn about how voting machines work, the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless voting systems can accurately count and recount votes.
Problems in those counties -- home to just over half the registered voters in the crucial swing state -- could delay the results for days or weeks, and even force the courts to step in again and choose the next president.
NWI Times
With the electoral system it doesn't really matter if there is voter fraud because the electors are not obligated to listen to the voters anyway.
With most state legislatures populated mostly by Republicans doubt has been raised by some that the biggest voter fraud will be this election because if Kerry receives more of the popular vote, as Gore did, the popular vote will be ignored and George W. Bush will be chosen, this time by electors in the Electoral College and their justification will be that it is for the good of the country.
What then?
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| Fear of terror could mar U.S. vote |
| 10.22.04 (3:45 pm) [edit] |
The woman approached me after a talk I gave earlier this week to confess, somewhat sheepishly, that she was still one of the undecideds in this year's presidential race. On domestic issues, the choice was clear, but ...
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. Contemplating a change in leadership when the prospect of terror lurks around the corner left her simply afraid.
Who can blame her? Earlier that day, Vice President Cheney had painted a terrifying picture of the ``ultimate threat'': Terrorists stealthily invading one of our cities, armed with chemical, biological or - worst of all - nuclear weapons that could harm hundreds of thousands of Americans. We've got to get our minds around that concept, Cheney instructed, and only one presidential candidate has.
I can see why she's scared.
Fear is not exclusively a Republican tactic in the last, excruciating days of this election. The Kerry campaign is doing its bit to stoke the fears of young people that, if President Bush is re-elected, he'll yank them away from work and school, and order them to do battle against insurgents in Iraq without adequate equipment.
Yeah, I'd be scared, too.
But with plenty of material to work with and an anxiously receptive audience, fear is an especially potent weapon in the Bush campaign's attempts to persuade my undecided voter that only President Bush can protect her. Research shows that reminders of death increase the need for the psychological security of a strong, charismatic leader, and it is no coincidence that death and terror make constant appearances at GOP campaign stops.
Fear is a dangerous emotion to ignite during what should be a process of deliberation, and not only because it lets the heart rule the head when both should be employed. By overtaking other emotions, fear also suppresses debate. It puts fresh ideas and possibilities in a file at the far end of the desk, all but ensuring they'll never be considered anytime soon.
This is what happens to nations gripped by fear of terror. I've seen it in Northern Ireland and in Israel. Creative solutions, solutions that require a certain degree of risk and ingenuity, are off-limits because they challenge prevailing assumptions we cling to like a warm comforter when we are scared.
If fear didn't require the presidential candidates to outdo each other in displays of toughness and machismo, we might be able to debate the different ways to conceive of and confront terrorism. Yes, there are competing theories, though it's hard to tell from sound bites and attack ads.
There is the question of why human beings willingly blow themselves up in service of a cause. The notion that terrorism is fueled only by poverty and despair has been generally dismissed, especially after it was learned that many Sept. 11 hijackers were from the educated middle class.
But is terror motivated purely by evil? Hatred? Is it caused, or perhaps exacerbated, by American foreign policies and attitudes, or is that just a self-hating excuse?
There is the question of the best way to combat terrorism. Is it a struggle between states that promote terrorism and those that would exterminate it? Then bomb Baghdad, and maybe Tehran, Islamabad and Riyadh. Or is terrorism the work of ``nonstate actors,'' shadowy groups who exploit weak governments and frighten comfortable populations to create disorder and chaos? Then home in more tightly on the flow of money, weapons and intelligence that transcends state boundaries.
And there is the question of outcome. Must we always be forced to imagine the apocalypse, or can terror be contained and managed?
Debating the genuine nature of the threat would also allow us to more calmly consider the trade-offs needed to keep ourselves safer at home. If the terrorists hate our freedoms, how much of those freedoms need be sacrificed in service of this struggle?
Should the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution - freedom from unreasonable searches and unlawful imprisonment, and freedom of thought and expression - be more important than the freedom to board a plane quickly, drive a gas guzzler, or buy any weapon? Liberty has its priorities. What are American priorities in this frightening new world?
Fear shuts down talk of these difficult issues, lest candidates seem wishy-washy or, heaven forbid, unpatriotic. Perhaps that's inevitable. Heated campaigns are not academic seminars, and too much nuance this time of year will produce only a national headache.
But remember this: Fear also puts enormous power in the hands of those we allow to make us scared. A nation that refuses to be dominated by fear is also strong and hopeful enough to entertain any and all ideas on how to keep itself safe.
Fort Wayne
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| Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD |
| 10.22.04 (2:43 pm) [edit] |
or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda
Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.
Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.
These are some of the findings of a new study of the differing perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, based on polls conducted in September and October.
This tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information extends to other realms as well. Despite an abundance of evidence--including polls conducted by Gallup International in 38 countries, and more recently by a consortium of leading newspapers in 10 major countries--only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent assume that views are evenly divided, and 26% assume that the majority approves. Among Kerry supporters, 74% assume that the majority of the world is opposed.
Similarly, 57% of Bush supporters assume that the majority of people in the world would favor Bush's reelection; 33% assumed that views are evenly divided and only 9% assumed that Kerry would be preferred. A recent poll by GlobeScan and PIPA of 35 of the major countries around the world found that in 30, a majority or plurality favored Kerry, while in just 3 Bush was favored. On average, Kerry was preferred more than two to one.
Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush's international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)--and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.
"The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information," according to Steven Kull, "very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters--and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters."
If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Matthew 15:14
PIPA
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| Why expats must vote for Kerry |
| 10.22.04 (1:19 pm) [edit] |
Ever heard of Ambassador Syndrome?
Even if you don't know what it's called, you've certainly experienced it. It's the position you are put in when someone turns to you and says, "why are all you British people drunken louts?" or, "why are you French so self-important?"
Or "aren't you ashamed to be an American?"
That last one is probably still ringing and stinging in the ears of many readers from the United States.
The outpouring of compassion that flowed towards America — and American expats in Europe — in the weeks after September 11 changed within months to bitterness and criticism. And it was mainly down to one thing: Iraq.
The US Administration's policies over the so-called War on Terror, with its false claims of an imminent threat from Iraq to justify an early rush to war in the Middle East, have transformed opinion about the country from that of it being a victim of an appalling attack that deserved sympathy and solidarity — into an unruly bully boy.
And worse, it has turned a country that gave hope to the rest of the world through the ideals of democracy and freedom — and a promise of a better life — to one that, thanks to Iraq, rests on deceit.
While Bush's "with us or with the terrorists" policy might go down well within the United States among voters far removed from developments unfolding in the rest of the world, it hasn't worked so well with many Americans this side of the Atlantic.
Because those who have spent time overseas know that the problem is not quite as black and white as that — so black and white solutions are not what are called for.
It's not just about "good" and "evil", or about "freedom" and "oppression", or about "strong" and "weak". It's not — dare we say it — about God and the devil, however much President George W. Bush might want to preach that line to the American people.
It's a whole lot more complex than that.
Take "freedom", for example. That's a word that is used lavishly on the other side of the Atlantic. But what does it mean?
While no one mourns the passing of the Saddam regime, Iraqis, bombed daily following Bush's botched post-war plans, are finding one man's "freedom" anything but.
And "freedom" also means nothing to travellers to the United States, who are being fingerprinted, photographed and logged into a database that is likely to track their every move.
It means nothing under the Patriot Act — hurried through in the name of the War on Terror — which poses a direct threat to the very core of "freedom" as it is understood in a democratic society.
Sadly, the word "freedom" has been used and abused, twisted to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
The word now has little to do with building a safe and prosperous global future.
Much of the rest of the world understands this. That's why most of Europe is crossing its fingers for a Kerry victory on 2 November.
And Americans living abroad understand this too, with their access to a more diverse and plural media — particularly when it comes to television — coupled with daily exposure to views from around the world. Expats in Europe in particular are exposed to a huge variety of views thanks to the continent's geographic and political makeup.
And that's why expat opinion — and hence its vote — is a more informed one on world affairs than that of many people back home.
And why American expats have a duty to vote.
So here we have it. On one side, the prospect of a continuation of the last four years — increased US isolationism, new curbs on personal freedoms in the name of the War on Terror, further attacks (with or without UN approval) on countries that are claimed to pose a threat to America's security.
And on the other side? Well, at least we have a man who has a world view. Who is willing to work with other nations to combat terrorism as a global issue.
Who is smart enough — and respectful enough — to know that in the 21st Century we live in a global society that has to face global problems as one.
So who to vote for?
Unlike international affairs, this choice is indeed black and white. We believe that the current administration's policies are a disgrace for the world's greatest democracy. Expats have in pain watched the United States lose its right to promote the values of true freedom, the ideals of American society.
The United States desperately needs to restore a political leadership of integrity and responsibility. Its credibility and, in turn, the future of the world, depends upon it.
Expats know the urgent need for a change. It's time for Americans overseas to put their votes behind John Kerry.
Expatica
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| Iraq Journalists Bunker Mentality |
| 10.22.04 (1:11 pm) [edit] |
Security is tenuous for everyone in Iraq, but conditions for journalists have deteriorated to the point that many major news agencies now rely on local stringers and employees for newsgathering. Among nearly every constituency here, hostility toward journalists has increased.
Journalists, by necessity, are fixated on personal security. News organizations have established themselves in compounds of private homes surrounded by blast walls, or in large hotel complexes with extensive security checkpoints. Such precautions, though not unique to the media, reflect a change from a year ago, when journalists preferred lower-profile, less-secure accommodations on the theory that it would make them less likely to be targets.
This bunker mentality has taken hold among the press corps in Iraq for a few reasons. Insurgents have attacked less-secure hotels once used by Westerners, including journalists. The U.S.-led coalition is largely indifferent to journalist safety, and, worse, Iraqi authorities are openly hostile.
And with U.S. government contractors moving almost exclusively within heavily guarded compounds, journalists have become primary Western targets.
More at CPJ
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| America's Uncivil Liberties |
| 10.22.04 (12:56 pm) [edit] |
Following the lead of nasty and foul-mouthed pundits and pols, plenty of plain folk are slinging the mud, too. It's time for it to stop.
As the Presidential campaign winds down into its tight, bitter last phase, the negative campaigning will only increase. Much of it will be fair, I suspect. Many negative ads, after all, make valid political points, albeit crudely. But some of it won't be fair -- not by a long shot. In recent years, American political discourse crossed a line, and all sorts of once-taboo language and personal invective became acceptable. And that worries me.
I'm not talking about ads or speeches that contain inaccurate or distorted messages, though their incidence is way up this election year, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, who tracks campaign rhetoric. I'm talking about name-calling and ads that impugn a candidate's motives, such as the ones implying that President Bush is lying when he says he won't institute a military draft or those that suggest Senator Kerry volunteered for Vietnam simply to pad his résumé. We shouldn't confuse negativity, which is often justified and informative, with incivility, which isn't.
More at Business Week
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| France supplies US with anti-flu vaccine |
| 10.22.04 (12:50 pm) [edit] |
From France2 TV, "Aventis-Pasteur (Paris) will be furnishing 2.6 million supplementary anti-flu vaccines to the U.S. by next January...
"In total, Aventis-Pasteur will be furnishing 58 million doses, or half the need of the United States, where a serious lack of vaccines has provoked a crisis..."
"Aventis-Pasteur and Chiron are the sole two suppliers of anti-flu vaccine to the United States."
The TV news report went on to say that the administration "pleaded" with France for millions of doses.
I was unable to find this story in the US media.
Read the full story here (French)
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| Mad-cow fears in France |
| 10.22.04 (12:30 pm) [edit] |
Paris - France said on Thursday it was tracing 10 people who had received blood transfusion from a person now diagnosed with the fatal, human form of mad-cow disease.
The individual is the eighth French person to be diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the health ministry said in a press release.
A ministry spokesperson said the patient was "a young person who is still alive." The name, age and gender have been withheld.
The person gave blood "several times between 1993 and 2003", said the press statement.
Ten people received transfusions of red blood cells from the person "and will be told by their doctor as to the nature of the risk and the precautions to take", it added.
Plasma from the donations was also used by a French company, LFB, to make drugs based on blood derivatives, the statement said.
Rogue prion protein in the brain LFB has withdrawn all unused stocks of medications made with this plasma and has told pharmacies and clinics to take any remaining items made from suspect batches off their shelves, it said.
The ministry said the case of two people in Britain with vCJD pointed to an "increased risk" of contracting the disease through blood transfusion.
However, the risk of infection through blood derivatives remained unclear, pending the outcome of research.
vCJD is a human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), in which a rogue prion protein proliferates in the brain, turning it spongy. The disease is believed to have leapt the species barrier to humans who ate beef from infected cattle.
The epicentre of the BSE outbreak was Britain, which exported cattle and beef products to many countries within the European Union and further afield.
Tough laws introduced
BSE came to the fore in the late 1980s, but the source was only curtailed in 1996 with the introduction of tough European Union-wide laws on animal feed, the slaughter of suspect animals and the ban on the sale of animal parts most likely to have the prions.
So far 144 people have died of vCJD in Britain, where there are also five suspected cases, according to figures obtained Thursday on the official British vCJD website (www.cjd.ed.ac.uk).
After France, with eight cases, come Canada, Ireland, Italy and the United States, with one death each, according to official tallies.
News24
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| France to build 3rd generation nuclear reactor in Normandy |
| 10.22.04 (12:25 pm) [edit] |
French state-owned electricity generator EDF announced Thursday that it is to build a third generation pressurized water nuclear reactor (PWR) at Flamanville in Normandy, northwest France.
The decision was made at EDF's board meeting after extensive consultations in the region, said EDF.
The reactor, developed jointly by France and Germany since 1992, is planned to replace the France's 58 existing reactors at 19 nuclear power plants which currently produce 75 percent of the country's power but are due to go out of service in 20 years.
The reactor is expected to be built over the next five years and to become operational in 2007.
EDF president Pierre Gadonneix said in a statement that the reactor will "ensure Europe's energy independence in the coming decades."
"It will reinforce EDF's technical advantage and will be a technological window for its exportation market. This investment choice shows EDF will maintain its place as the world's premier nuclear electricity producer," he said.
Xinhuanet
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| 100 Facts and 1 Opinion |
| 10.22.04 (12:22 pm) [edit] |
The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration
The Nation
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| This is not an ordinary election |
| 10.22.04 (12:17 am) [edit] |
It is a referendum on President Bush's first term in office. He ran on the platform of a humble foreign policy in 2000. Then came 9/11, the Bush doctrine of preemptive military intervention and the invasion of Iraq. If we re-elect him now, we endorse these policies and we shall have to live with the consequences. As I shall try to show, we are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight. But if we reject him at the polls, we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and to break the vicious circle. Our future depends on it.
Why should you listen to me? Not because I have a lot of money -- although it helps to get my message out -- but because I have an unusual background and experience that may help throw some light on our predicament...
A personal message from George Soros
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| Fake Indignation |
| 10.21.04 (11:20 pm) [edit] |
Who gives a damn about Mary Cheny's sex life? BUT, Kerry ought to know better by now and why bring up anything like this which anyone with half a brain would know, Bush/Chaney will grab onto it. It is all they can
wrap their small minds around.
For reasons known only to America’s leading conservative thinkers, it is far more offensive to utter an inconsequential truth than to tell a long series of important falsehoods.
"On the pages of The New York Times, William Safire damns Mr. Kerry for inflicting "the lowest blow" and David Brooks indicts him for using "somebody's daughter to attack the father and his running mate." In
the Weekly Standard, William Kristol shrieks about the "shameless, ruthless, calculating cruelty" in the Democrat's "McCarthyite" mention of Ms. Cheney, claiming that it proves he should not be elected
President. From print and talk radio and cable television, the furious right-wingers roar in unison, as if Mr. Kerry had exposed a dire family secret and ruined a young woman's life."
Could this helpless victim possibly be the same Mary Cheney who has been "out" for at least the past five years? Isn't this the same Ms. Cheney who hired herself in 1999 to the Coors Brewing Company as a professional liaison to the gay community, so that the damaging boycott of Coors beer in gay and lesbian bars might be calmed? Isn't this the lesbian daughter to whom Dick Cheney referred so proudly in a speech last summer? Isn't she the Cheney daughter who shows up at
public events with her female partner? Isn't she the daughter whose acceptance by her family was praised during that debate by John Edwards, in a gracious exchange with her father? (Conason)
It is remarkable indeed that the Cheney remark could obscure the truly stunning moment in the last debate, when the President claimed that he had never expressed a lack of concern about Osama bin Laden—when the videotape showed that was exactly what he had said two years ago.
More at NY Observer
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| Students skip pledge, school flags parents |
| 10.21.04 (10:41 pm) [edit] |
Some Seabrook Middle School students who declined to say the Pledge of Allegiance a few weeks ago have ignited a debate among parents, the school principal, and an eighth-grade social studies teacher who believes she has been unfairly targeted by the administration for her beliefs.
Stan Shupe, principal at the Seabrook, N.H., school, said that a few weeks ago, he walked by the homeroom class of eighth-grade teacher Diane Dunfey and noticed that all her homeroom students, about 15 of them, were seated during the pledge.
He said he took time to ask students why they chose not to participate.
''There were different answers," he said. ''Some said, 'I was tired.' 'I didn't feel like it.' One or two students voiced opinions that they didn't support the war in Iraq. My response to it was to notify the parents of those students. I told students and parents that it's their choice either way, but I want parents to know."
Shupe said he understands that, by law, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is optional for students, but he said he could not believe all the students had good reason to decline participation.
''What called my attention is the entire class," he said. ''That was unusual."
More at Boston Globe
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| Picking on US Muslims |
| 10.21.04 (10:25 pm) [edit] |
Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims, is also the month of giving in the Islamic faith causing charitable activities to peak at this blessed time. To ensure the First Amendment right of U.S. Muslims to offer charity, a New Jersey-based organization, the American Muslim Union, has asked the U.S. government for a list of charities that have been cleared as avenues for donation. This request came to offer Muslims opportunities that are transparently legitimate, so that they can give without fear of negative legal repercussions. The answer from the government -- you are on your own.
The means by which terrorist-financing publicity has been handled is a sham. The U.S. public has been led to believe that virtually all mosques are financial centers for terrorism -- that is a myth.
Public opinion in the Muslim world has concluded that the United States is intolerant of Islam, since it has seemingly opposed and obstructed one of the five pillars of Islam: Zakat, which commands the believer to give to good causes. Even the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a November 2003 report, determined that arms trafficking and cigarette smuggling usually drive terrorism financing, not fundraising from mosques.
UPI
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| Americans get your flu shots...in Canada |
| 10.21.04 (10:17 pm) [edit] |
So many Americans are cross-border shopping for flu shots that the Vancouver health authority has set up a one-day clinic for Americans only.
Americans are flooding into clinics along the U.S.-B.C. border — including one at the Vancouver International Airport — looking for the shots that have become increasingly scarce in the U.S.
GlobeAndMail
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| Humans consume more resources than Earth can produce |
| 10.21.04 (10:13 pm) [edit] |
People are plundering the world's resources at a pace that outstrips the planet's capacity to sustain life, the environmental group WWF said Thursday.
In its annual Living Planet Report, the World Wide Fund for Nature said humans currently consume 20 per cent more natural resources than Earth can produce, and that populations of terrestrial, freshwater and marine species fell by an average of 40 per cent between 1970 and 2000.
"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," WWF chief Claude Martin said. "We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the Earth's ability to renew them."
Consumption of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil increased by almost 700 per cent between 1961 and 2001, the conservation body said.
"It is of pressing importance that governments, industry and the public switch to renewable energies and promote energy-efficient technologies, buildings and transport systems," it said.
The "ecological footprint" — or environmental impact — of the planet's 6.1 billion-strong population is alarming, with people in the West the worst culprits, said WWF in its 40-page report.
The footprint of an average North American is double that of a European but seven times that of the average Asian or African. The report warned of increasing pressure on the planet's resources amid spiralling consumption in Asia.
"Sustainable living and a high quality of life are not incompatible," said Jonathan Loh, one of the authors of the report.
"However, we need to stop wasting natural resources and to redress the imbalance in consumption between the developing and industrialized worlds."
GlobeAndMail
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| As God Is His Witness |
| 10.21.04 (4:11 pm) [edit] |
This is a good article for Christians to read. The points are those that I have made several times, as a Christian, in this blog. George Bush has done nothing in his term as President that bears Christian fruit. His words have the ring of Christianity but his actions do not. Do not be deceived.
The president’s storied faith journey began at the bottom of a bottle and led him all the way to the White House. But though these accounts ramble on for hundreds of pages about his steadfast leadership and prayerfulness, they all curiously rely on one single event to confirm that Bush is a man transformed by a deep Christian faith: He quit drinking and took up running instead. “I would not be president today," Bush himself told a group of pastoral social workers in 2003, "if I hadn't stopped drinking 17 years ago. And I could only do that with the grace of God."
Judging him on his record, George W. Bush’s spiritual transformation seems to have consisted of little more than staying on the wagon, with Jesus as a sort of talismanic Alcoholics Anonymous counselor. Bush came to his faith through a small group program created by Community Bible Study, which de-emphasizes sin and resembles a sort of Jesus-centered therapy session.
But sin is crucial to Christianity. To be born again, a seeker must painfully acknowledge his or her innate sinfulness, and then turn away from it completely. And though today Bush is sober, he does not live and govern like a man who “walks” with God, using the Bible as a moral compass for his decision making. Twice in the past year -- once during an April press conference and most recently at a presidential debate -- the president was unable to name any mistake he has made during his term. His steadfast unwillingness to fess up to a single error betrays a strikingly un-Christian lack of attention to the importance of self-criticism, the pervasiveness of sin, and the centrality of humility, repentance, and redemption. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine George W. Bush delivering an address like Jimmy Carter’s legendary “malaise” speech (in which he did not actually say the word “malaise”) in 1979. Carter sermonized to a dispirited nation in the language of confession, sacrifice, and spiritual restoration. Though it didn’t do him a lick of good politically, it was consonant with a Christian theology of atonement: Carter admitted his mistakes to make right with God and the American people, politics be damned. Bush, for whom politics is everything, can’t even admit that he’s done anything wrong.
More at The Prospect
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| Poetry Far from Home |
| 10.21.04 (2:54 pm) [edit] |
Last September, the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled that manuscripts from countries such as Iran, Syria and others with which the U.S. is under a trade embargo cannot be edited, translated or published.
This puts Niloufar Talebi – writer, performer and director of The Translation Project – in an awkward position, as her work is expressly designed around translating, editing and publishing Iranian poetry.
"In the post 9/11 climate leading to the U.S.-Iraq war, Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries have been mushed into one murky, Arabic-speaking, terrorist-threat-to-the-f ree-world zone," said Talebi, who lives in San Francisco. "Most Americans, even educated ones, are not aware of the vast differences in language, religion and government between Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – a shortcoming that can be corrected by introducing literature in translation into the American culture."
Though the consequences of the OFAC ruling are still murky, it is enough to spark concern in Talebi. Meanwhile, she's pushing forward with her project.
The Translation Project seeks to track the rich tradition of Persian poetry in the Diaspora since the 1979 revolution, now that so many Iranians reside outside of their home country.
Talebi was born in London to Iranian parents and lived in Iran intermittently until she was fifteen, leaving the country after the 1979 Iranian revolution (earning her the title of '79er from a fellow Iranian American friend who immigrated before then). Having grown up in a household surrounded by "inspired poets, passionately engaged in the creation of literature" it's not surprising that she would mastermind such a project.
"I don't look for poetry of exile, but poetry in exile. I'm always searching for poetry that's more personal and has fresh themes or new ways of describing the day to day life of being a person who doesn't necessarily belong where he or she lives, or can successfully blend the political with the personal. I find very little of that."
More at AlterNet
Poetry In English at The Translation Project
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| Insurance cover in Iraq may depend on type of terrorism |
| 10.21.04 (2:06 pm) [edit] |
Iraq may be a war zone but international medical insurers still seem prepared to offer cover there at no extra cost. Advisers urge expatriates in all threatened regions to check their plans or consult their provider.
In Iraq, high tax-free salaries, low cost of living and generous expenses have tempted hundreds of Britons to stay on, despite the risk of death, injury and kidnapping.
According to the Foreign Office, the kidnapping and murder of Kenneth Bigley has had little effect on the 2,300 Britons working in the former dictatorship. Much is explained by contractors' pay rates of £60 an hour for an 80-hour week. Some craftsmen can earn £5,000 a week.
Expats in the country and neighbouring states who become victims of terrorism could find themselves excluded from cover. Much depends on the policy wording. The type of terrorism - whether "conventional" or not - is also key. But brokers say exclusion is often more a theoretical than an actual risk.
They say that judging by past events, policyholders will be helped provided they have not acted recklessly or taken part in riot, war or civil disobedience.
The terrorism exclusion clause gives the insurer a get-out in the event of huge claims. But in reality this is not always exercised because of the bad publicity that a company would attract if it pulled cover on an innocent policyholder just when it was most needed.
Most good international policies expressly cover "conventional" terrorism. For instance, Axa PPP states: "We will cover customers if they are injured as a result of 'conventional' terrorist activity, ie caused by explosives, guns, knives etc."
But the company will not pay for "any treatment needed as a result of nuclear, biological or chemical contamination, war (whether declared or not), act of foreign enemy, invasion, civil war, riot, rebellion, insurrection, revolution, overthrow of a legally constituted government, explosions of war weapons or any event similar to one of those listed."
A spokesman for the company confirmed that, despite Tony Blair's description of current events in Iraq as a "new war," policyholders would still be covered, subject to restrictions such as biological attack.
Repatriation benefit would also apply for "conventional" acts of terrorism. It would also apply if required in case of "war (whether declared or not), act of foreign enemy, invasion, civil war, riot, rebellion, insurrection, revolution, overthrow of a legally constituted government, explosions of war weapons or . . . similar."
But once the individual was returned home under such circumstances, cover would cease.
Bupa International also distinguishes between conventional and "other" terrorism. It recently issued revised wording for policyholders. It reads:
Contamination, wars and riots: We do not pay for treatment for any disease, illness or injury resulting from nuclear or chemical contamination, war, riot, revolution, acts of terrorism or any similar event.
Exception: We pay for treatment provided that the company or employee have not recklessly put themselves in danger by entering a known area of conflict where active fighting/insurrections are taking place, or they were not an active participant, or they have not displayed a blatant disregard for personal safety, and there is a legitimate business reason for them to be there.
A Bupa spokeswoman said Mr Blair's comments had not materially affected policyholders. She said: "Our members are covered as long as they haven't put themselves into the situation on purpose, for instance going out onto the street when there is a gun battle."
Similarly, insurer Goodhealth does not expressly exclude treatment of those caught by a bullet or mortar round. But it draws the line at other terrorist weaponry.
Its policy schedule states: "Regardless of any contributory clauses, this insurance does not cover treatment of a medical condition which is in any way caused or contributed to by an act or terrorism involving the use or release or threat thereof of any nuclear weapon or device or any chemical or biological agent."
Insurance adviser Stephen Walker said: "People should read the small print in their policy and if any doubt they must seek clarity from the provider."
Telegraph
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| France Expelling Muslim Girls Over Scarves |
| 10.21.04 (1:47 pm) [edit] |
France has quietly begun expelling Muslim girls for wearing head scarves to public schools in defiance of a new law banning conspicuous religious symbols, treading carefully for fear of endangering two French hostages in Iraq.
The expulsions of at least five girls since Tuesday were the first since the law went into effect at the start of the academic year on Sept. 2. They were kept low-key because the French journalists' captors had demanded the measure be abolished.
Another five girls could be expelled this week as the Education Ministry gave school districts the signal to start taking action against 72 students who could not be persuaded to obey the law. Most are Muslim girls, but Sikh boys refusing to remove their turbans also risk being expelled.
The kidnapping in Iraq of journalists Christian Chesnot and Christian Malbrunot, who entered their third month in captivity Wednesday, forced education authorities to tread softly. The Islamic Army of Iraq, a group that claimed to be holding the journalists and their Syrian driver, has demanded the law be abolished. The French government refused.
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| Karen Hughes disputes televangelist’s Iraq claim |
| 10.21.04 (1:42 pm) [edit] |
Karen Hughes, that nice young lady from Paris, France who compares pro-choicers to terrorist continues to cover Bush's ass. Must be a tough job.
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he warned President Bush before U.S. troops invaded Iraq that the United States would sustain casualties but that Bush responded, ‘‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’’
White House and campaign advisers denied that Bush made the comment, with Karen Hughes saying, ‘‘I don’t believe that happened. He must have misunderstood or misheard it.’’
Robertson, in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday night, said God had told him that the war would be messy and a disaster. When he met with Bush in Nashville before the war Bush did not listen to his advice, Robertson said, and believed Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who needed to be removed.
‘‘He was just sitting there, like, ‘I’m on top of the world,’ and I warned him about this war,’’ Robertson said.
‘‘I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ’Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ’Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’ ’Well,’ I said, ’it’s the way it’s going to be.’ And so, it was messy. The lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy.’’
Traveling with Bush in the Midwest, Hughes said political adviser Karl Rove was in the Feb. 10, 2003 meeting with the president and Robertson in Nashville, Tenn., but Bush never said there wouldn’t be casualties in Iraq.
‘‘Obviously, we already had casualties in Afghanistan at the time. If you look at that, that (the comment) was not consistent with what was going on,’’ she said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, ‘‘Of course, the president never made such a comment.’’
Robertson released a statement about Bush late Wednesday in which he said, ‘‘I emphatically stated that I believe ’the blessing of heaven is upon him’ and I am persuaded that he will win this election and prevail on the war against terror in order to keep America safe from her avowed enemies.’’
Earlier in the day, Mike McCurry, adviser to the Kerry campaign, said: ‘‘We believe President Bush should get the benefit of the doubt here, but he needs to come forward and answer a very simple question - was Pat Robertson telling the truth when he said he didn’t think there’d be any casualties or is Pat Robertson lying?’’
Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1988, said he supports Bush’s re-election and believes the president is blessed by God.
‘‘I think God’s blessing him, and I think it’s one of those things that, even if he stumbles and messes up - and he’s had his share of goofs and gaffes - I just think God’s blessing is on him,’’ Robertson said. ‘‘And you remember, I think the Chinese used to say, you know, it’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor. And I think the blessing of heaven is on Bush. It’s just the way it is.’’
In January, Robertson told viewers during his ‘‘700 Club’’ television program that God had told him Bush would win re-election in a blowout.’’ In the CNN interview, Robertson said he believes Bush will win by a ‘‘razor-thin’’ margin but a substantial Electoral College victory.
Pueblo Chieftain
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| Bush's actions haven't made Israel safer |
| 10.21.04 (1:29 pm) [edit] |
Bush's supposed support for Israel is an illusion. The real Bush record on Israel consists of missed chances and neglect. Four more years of the same is unthinkable.
There's nothing abstract about this for me. I moved from the United States to Israel 27 years ago. The past four have been the worst. I don't let my children ride buses. I choose cafes on the quality of the security check at the entrance.
In recent months, Israel's army and security services have managed to reduce the number of Palestinian terror bombings. But military means can do nothing to alleviate the underlying conflict. The most moderate Palestinians, those who seek a two-state solution, cannot accept the status quo. Meanwhile, the Iranian- backed Hezbollah organization has increased its role in directing Palestinian extremist groups. Internationally, Israel's
position has steadily deteriorated, with the risk growing of European economic sanctions that would cripple this country.
Israel's most pressing strategic need remains peace with the Palestinians. Only the hope of an agreed solution will cut the supply of recruits for suicide attacks. Diplomatic progress is essential to restore Israel's political and economic relations, and to restore our children's confidence in their future here.
American diplomacy led to the disengagement agreement that has kept Israel's border with Syria quiet for 30 years. U.S. diplomacy led to the peace treaty with Egypt, ending the confrontation with what was once Israel's most dangerous enemy.
For over 30 years Israeli-Arab diplomacy has depended on the United States as intermediary. To break the deadlock of the last four years would have required a presidential-level U.S. commitment, but it hasn't happened.
Bush claims he's helping Israel by creating democracy in the Mideast, as the precondition to peace. It's a slogan divorced from reality. Democracy is an admirable goal, but neither Egypt nor Jordan had to become a democracy to reach peace with Israel.
And Bush's most significant action in the Middle East, the poorly planned invasion of Iraq, has unleashed ethnic conflict and terrorism. As Guy Bechor, one of Israel's leading analysts of Arab affairs, points out, the Iraq experiment has only created a perception elsewhere in the Arab world that democracy is dangerous.
Newsday
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| How many Iraqis are dying? |
| 10.21.04 (1:01 pm) [edit] |
By One Count, 208 in a Week
It began with the killing of two Iraqi civilians in a suicide bomb attack against an American military convoy in the northern city of Mosul last Monday. It ended Sunday evening, when a car bomb killed seven Iraqi police officers and civilians at a Baghdad cafe where police officers had apparently broken their fast during this month of Ramadan.
A weeklong effort to tally Iraqi casualties shows soldiers, insurgents, politicians, journalists, a judge, a medic and restaurant workers among the victims. They included Dina Mohammed Hassan, a television reporter killed by three men who called her a collaborator, and Ali Hussein's son and nephew, nighttime guards who died when Americans bombed a restaurant in Falluja.
From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.
The deaths of Iraqis, particularly those of civilians, has become an increasingly delicate topic. Early this month, the Health Ministry, which had routinely provided casualty figures to journalists, stopped releasing them. Under a new policy that the government said would streamline the release of the figures - which were clearly an embarrassment to the government as well as to the Americans - only the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers is now allowed to do so.
"It's a political issue," a senior Health Ministry official said last week.
According to a report by the Health Ministry, which last April began compiling figures for all regions except the Kurdish north, 3,040 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents during the 22 weeks from April 5 to Sept. 6 - a little more than 138 deaths a week. The dead included 2,753 men, 159 women and 128 children. There are no agreed figures for civilian deaths in Iraq over all since the war began in early 2003, but the best estimates, by private groups and independent news organizations, place the figure in the 10,000 to 15,000 range.
More at NY Times
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| Big Brother Under Your Skin |
| 10.21.04 (12:49 pm) [edit] |
Have you seen it? Did you check out the pictures? Microchips the size of a grain of rice, programmed with all manner of data and inserted just under your skin and it's all completely legal and government approved and it's happening right now. I mean, who knew microchipping your pet and implanting livestock would lead to this? Oh right -- everyone, that's who.
The wait is over. No more Philip K. Dick sci-fi fantasia, no more far-off Orwellian Big Brother. We are there. Or, rather, here. This new chip is already being implanted in medical patients for the alleged purpose of tracking their health needs and speeding treatment and it is right now being used in the flesh of employees working in high-security areas to ensure they don't swipe top-secret pens and classified pads of Post-it Notes.
Which is to say, you have been warned. Human skin has already been penetrated. Alarms are already sounding because it's one of those things wherein you can't even fully comprehend all the weird and creepy and potentially dangerous possibilities, but it doesn't even matter because all you need to hear is those four magic words: Microchip. Implant. Human. Flesh. And all your intuitive senses go, whoa.
Oh sure, the initial benefits will appear harmless and helpful. They will say the chip will mostly be used for health reasons and they will say it's to be strictly monitored and there is no way the tiny implants could possibly be corrupted because it's just a cute little itty-bitty microchip containing cute little itty-bitty bits of helpful medical data to help doctors diagnose you ha ha sucker.
This is what they will say. This is how it starts. This is how it always starts.
More at SF Gate
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| Japan Opposition Urges Cautious U.S. Ties |
| 10.21.04 (12:34 pm) [edit] |
Japan should resist deepening its alliance with the United States so long as Washington claims the right to launch a pre-emptive attack on another country, the head of the country's biggest opposition party said Wednesday.
The Bush administration has returned to a time before U.N. restraints on pre-emptive attacks existed, said Katsuya Okada, the head of the Democratic Party of Japan.
"I believe the United States hopes that Japan will play a role that goes beyond the Japan-U.S. security treaty," Okada said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The treaty, he said, is aimed at ensuring peace in the Far East, but Washington wants to expand the relationship to cover all of Asia and possibly the Middle East.
"The United States, the Bush administration, is pushing unilateralism and the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike. This violates the idea of the U.N. Charter," Okada said.
"So long as the Bush administration doesn't change this way of thinking, we need to be cautious about deepening Japan-U.S. cooperation," he said.
"Russia now claims the right to a pre-emptive attack. America claims the right, Russia claims it, then another country — it returns us to the situation we had before World War II," he said.
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| Tahsin Hassan and the nightmare of his wife's kidnapping |
| 10.21.04 (12:29 pm) [edit] |
So suddenly, it happened. I didn’t sleep last night, and I won’t sleep tonight. After 30 years of marriage, and so suddenly. I cannot believe it is true.”
It was a normal working day for Mrs Hassan when she left her home in west Baghdad to make the short drive to the offices of CARE International.
The charity’s former Baghdad base was abandoned a few months ago in favour of a discreet unmarked building in a residential street. But there was one precaution that Mrs Hassan refused to take despite her husband’s urging: she would never carry a gun, or allow one in her house or car.
“I wanted to have a weapon at home, but she always said no,” Mr Hassan said. “She said that it was dangerous. She said, ‘If you get mad, you might shoot it, and hurt someone without meaning to.’ It is a principle for her, which most Iraqis do not have. She has the very European mentality.”
More at The Times
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| GOP tricks in the mail |
| 10.21.04 (12:22 pm) [edit] |
Presidential candidates do not have a monopoly on distortion and scare tactics this election season. Those strategies are poisoning state political campaigns, as well.
Consider recent mass mailings in the Senate district targeting state Representative Karen Spilka, the Democratic candidate for the seat being vacated in January by David P. Magnani of Framingham.
It is not easy to paint a former Parent Teacher Organization president and School Committee chairwoman as an ally of child molesters, but the Massachusetts Republican Party seems to think that all it will take is one twist of one vote on one half-baked amendment to discredit Spilka.
In the last two weeks, 300,000 voters in Framingham, Natick, Ashland, Holliston, Medway, Hopkinton, and Franklin have received four different post cards from the state GOP accusing Spilka of voting to protect sexual predators in the schools. It would be a shocking revelation about any public official. It would be especially alarming news about a lawyer and a mother of three who began her professional life as a social worker investigating child abuse and neglect cases, about a lawmaker honored last spring with a "Friend of Children" award by the state Department of Social Services.
It would be, if it were true. It is not.
More at Boston Globe
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| Fear in perspective |
| 10.21.04 (12:17 pm) [edit] |
I am not unmoved by the tragic loss of nearly 3000 lives on 9-11-01, however all situations require some perspective. Every month in the US more people are killed in automobiles or by the negligence of doctors and hospitals than have been killed by terrorist attacks on our soil in the past ten years. More than 3000 die every month from the effects of cigarettes, alcohol consumption and pollution. However, because of the events of 9-11 we have mobilized the world’s most powerful army and invaded two foreign countries. We have passed a draconian Patriot Act that erodes the few rights we have left, and we have come out with a color coded system to predict terrorist threats the same way we do for pollen counts. In violation of the principle of due process we have opened and filled prisons such as Gitmo and Abu Ghraib where the rule of law is only an annoyance and we practice torture at our convenience. We have people hired to fondle and harass travelers at airports, and instituted a watch list that stopped a world renowned peace activist, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from entering our country.
I think of the countries that have a tiny fraction of the military that we have that have spent years dealing with terrorist attacks, and they battle these criminals without putting their countries into lockdowns. I wonder what they must think when they look at the mighty United States and see the cocoon we are trying to spin for ourselves to create a fleeting and imaginary sense of security. I think they see us much the same way we saw that kid in the raincoat back in grade school, and they think we have become a bunch of nut jobs, whackos and freaks. Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would trade liberty for a little security deserve neither.” He was right. Maybe if we would quit interfering in the functioning of foreign governments that would help more than all the other stuff combined.
More at Yellow Times
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| NRA backing Bush - Another reason to elect John Kerry |
| 10.20.04 (6:13 pm) [edit] |
In an interview with the Washington Times, Kayne Robinson said the NRA is launching a $20 million ad campaign against Kerry between now and the Nov. 2 election.
The 4 million member NRA has endorsed President Bush. Robinson praised the Bush administration for opening up federal lands to hunters that had been off limits and for opposing a United Nations small-arms treaty that could threaten Second Amendment rights.
The president of the National Rifle Association claims Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is the most anti-gun candidate we've ever had.
Another reason to vote for John Kerry.
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| Federal judge rules for Dems in provisional ballot dispute |
| 10.20.04 (5:09 pm) [edit] |
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that ballots cast in the correct city or township but wrong voting precinct in Michigan must be counted, overruling a state decision to only count provisional ballots cast in the proper district.
Michigan's Republican Secretary of State and the US Justice Department had opposed the policy enunciated in the decision, claiming that it invites confusion and fraud while overburdening elections officials.
Michigan Democrats hailed the ruling as a victory for voters' rights, saying that it prevents the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.
The state is expected to appeal.
Jurist
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| U.S. tax bill deals cuts to richer expats |
| 10.20.04 (5:05 pm) [edit] |
The 2004 tax bill just passed by Congress contains a provision that will significantly lower taxes for high-earning Americans overseas, and also preserves the foreign housing exclusion, which had been under threat of elimination.
The bill, formally the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, won final approval in the Senate last week after being passed by the House. It now goes to President George W. Bush, who is expected to sign it swiftly.
The bill raises to 100 percent the amount of foreign tax credits that can be used to offset the alternative minimum tax, an extra tax on top of regular income tax that was created to prevent the wealthiest Americans from escaping taxes via loopholes. Previously, foreign tax credits could be used to offset 90 percent of alternative minimum tax.
"This is the most important part of the act for high-earning overseas Americans," said Richard Van Ham, an American tax accountant based in Paris, "because any American couple living outside the United States who had more than $59,000 of nonexcluded foreign income was required to pay U.S. tax no matter how much tax they were paying in their country of residence."
Nonexcluded income is income above the $80,000 covered by the foreign-earned income tax exclusion for overseas Americans. Only about three million individuals - both in the United States and abroad - now pay the alternative minimum tax, but tax experts say that number is expected to increase tenfold over the next decade.
In its final version of the bill, Congress also decided not to eliminate the foreign housing exclusion. In an earlier version, housing expenses paid for by an expatriate's firm would have been effectively counted as income, significantly increasing taxes for some overseas Americans. Nearly 300,000 Americans working abroad claimed the housing exclusion in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
IHT
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| Family of Six Found Dead in Iraqi Home Hit by U.S. |
| 10.20.04 (4:49 pm) [edit] |
Rescuers dug the bodies of six members of one family -- a couple and their four children -- out of the rubble of an Iraqi house bombed by U.S. warplanes on Wednesday, witnesses said.
The house was destroyed during air strikes on the insurgent-held town of Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
A Reuters cameraman filmed the dead bodies being removed from the rubble of the house.
U.S. forces say their strikes are carefully targeted against fighters loyal to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a self-declared ally of al Qaeda who the U.S. says is hiding in the town.
But Falluja residents say they know nothing about Zarqawi -- some even doubt his existence -- and that the air raids regularly kill civilians and destroy homes.
Reuters
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| Profiteering Inflates Costs of U.S. Reconstruction Projects in Iraq |
| 10.20.04 (4:40 pm) [edit] |
The cost of building materials in Iraq has soared as much as tenfold amid fears of shortages, threatening the pace of the already troubled U.S. reconstruction effort, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Local suppliers have jacked up the prices of such basics as lumber, gravel and bricks in the expectation that a U.S.-funded building boom is poised to take off and will drain stocks of the materials, the officials said.
The price of cement, for instance, has increased from about $8 per ton before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to as much as $110 per ton, they said. Concrete blocks have shot from $75 per 1,000 to $450.
The surge in costs largely reflects profiteering, not actual shortages, Iraqi officials said.
Work has begun on 442 of the 2,800 planned projects, which include schools, clinics and water treatment plants. Of the $18.4 billion Congress set aside for Iraqi reconstruction, only $1.24 billion has been spent.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, estimates that only about 27 cents of every dollar is reaching ordinary Iraqis, with the rest siphoned off by security, waste and overhead costs for the big American companies that have taken the lead in rebuilding. According to one recent estimate, it can cost as much as $5,000 a day to provide security for a single U.S. businessperson in Iraq.
But American executives at the conference said that penetrating the Iraqi market has been difficult. Major U.S. companies such Halliburton Co., Bechtel Group Inc. and Parsons Corp. have won most of the large U.S.-funded contracts, and Iraqi and foreign firms have snagged many of the smaller ones financed by Iraqi funds.
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| War on Iraq 'has fuelled terror threat to the world' |
| 10.20.04 (4:33 pm) [edit] |
Al-Qaeda is present in more than 60 countries and "radical Islam" is increasing in western Europe, where Muslims often feel marginalised, a well-respected military and defence think-tank here has said.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said Westerners and Western interests in the Arab world appeared to be facing greater peril now than before the invasion of Iraq.
The US, through its invasion and occupation of Iraq, had demonstrated a desire to change the political systems in the Arab world to advance American strategic and political interests.
"Al-Qaeda seeks, among other things, to purge the Arab and larger Muslim world of US influence," IISS said.
"Accordingly, the Iraq intervention was always likely in the short term to enhance jihadist recruitment and intensify al-Qaeda's motivation to encourage and assist terrorist operations."
As examples of this increased threat, the IISS cited the attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey, the train bombings in Madrid, and the gathering of foreign fighters against the US-led coalition in Iraq.
The assessment is given in the institute's 2004 annual report on the military capabilities and defence economics of 169 countries.
It said although 15 of al-Qaeda's 30 senior leaders and perhaps 2 000 rank-and-file members had been killed or captured, a "rump" leadership remained intact with 18 000 "terrorists potentially at large".
"Radical Islam appears to be on the rise in Western Europe."
Islamic terrorism had become the "principal threat to Europe".
"The sources of European Muslims' grievances are increasingly social, economic and political marginalisation in host countries."
Britain and France were singled out among European nations for their swift response to the terrorist threat since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The IISS noted that co-ordination throughout the European Union had been "harder to forge".
It also noted the importance of coalitions in conflicts and after conflicts and compared the achievements of Nato in Afghanistan with operations by the US-led coalition in Iraq.
"The Iraq coalition lacks cohesion among the 10-15 contributing states that make up a multinational division."
An important lesson the US needed to take from Iraq was that peace-support operations were "manpower-intensive and require extra skills". The use of partly trained reservists with the wrong skills could have disastrous results, as shown by the prison abuse scandal in Iraq.
The IISS noted peacekeeping was expanding and EU nations had contributed 55 960 troops and military observers, up from 46 312 in 2002, to such missions.
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| British MPs wary over US troop request |
| 10.20.04 (4:19 pm) [edit] |
UK defence sources are reportedly concerned that if US soldiers become involved in a lengthy battle in Falluja, Scotland's Black Watch regiment could be in for the long haul.
Commenting on President Bush's request, Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay said: "It may well be because Senator Kerry has taunted him about the extent to which there is a coalition but I think it is probably just a glib request which has been given too much importance in Whitehall and wasn't knocked back early enough."
Fellow Labour MP Eric Illsley fears a political motive: "It could well be that this is a gesture for the Americans to show that we are in there with them and that we are part of the coalition. So I'm worried about the timing and the reasoning behind it."
More
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| 'Spider-Man' Alain Robert, again climbs Paris tower |
| 10.20.04 (4:12 pm) [edit] |
Alain Robert, 42, who is renowned for climbing without ropes or other equipment, has also scaled the Eiffel Tower and more than 30 skyscrapers around the world, including New York's Empire State Building in 1994 and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia in 1997.
On Sept. 22, he scaled the 59-story Montparnasse Tower. At 689 feet, it is higher than the Total building — which he scaled in April 2003 to protest the war in Iraq. The building was then the headquarters of TotalFina Elf.
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| Team Bush declares war on the New York Times |
| 10.20.04 (1:58 pm) [edit] |
During the closing weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign, at a campaign rally, George Bush spotted a veteran political reporter and turned to Dick Cheney, standing next to him on the platform, to remark: "There's Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times." "Oh yeah, big time," replied Cheney.
Unbeknownst to them, their locker room exchange was caught by an open microphone. Four years later, nobody connected with the Bush-Cheney campaign appears even slightly concerned about being caught denigrating the Times; they are more than happy to do it on the record, as the White House has all but declared open warfare on the nation's leading newspaper.
The latest volley came over the weekend when Republican campaign officials accused the Times's Sunday magazine of fabricating a provocative quote from Bush in which he bragged - behind closed doors and speaking to wealthy supporters - that he would announce plans for "privatising of social security" early next year, after his re-election. When Democrats jumped on the remark, dubbing it the "January surprise", the Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, dismissed the Times's work as "Kitty Kelley journalism", insisting Bush had never uttered the phrase attributed to him.
But the Times stands by the 8,300-word story by Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill, a revealing account of the former secretary of the treasury published earlier this year.
That confrontation, and the Bush campaign's harsh accusation that respected journalist Suskind and the editors of the Times are liars, come on the heels of a series of denigrations by the White House: the Times reporter was recently banned from Cheney's campaign plane; and in his acceptance speech before the Republican Convention Bush mocked the paper by distorting, out of context, one of its columnist's writings of almost 60 years ago.
Early in his administration, Bush set the contentious tone when he broke with tradition by refusing to sit for an interview with the Times. He finally granted the paper a sit-down, just 30 minutes long, in August.
"Presidents like spin and secrets; journalists don't, so this is a relationship fraught with potential discomfort," says Times executive editor Bill Keller. He observes that the paper has dealt with difficult episodes with various White Houses in the past, but adds. "I admit we're puzzled over what seems to be a more intense antipathy at this White House, especially since the campaign heated up.
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| Big three in last ditch talks with Iran |
| 10.20.04 (1:52 pm) [edit] |
France, Germany and the UK will meet Iranian officials on Thursday (21 October) in a bid to persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear enrichment plans or face possible UN sanctions.
Senior officials from the three countries will meet Hassan Rohani, Secretary-General of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, in Vienna, it was confirmed today.
Tehran agreed last year to suspend its uranium enrichment plans - which purifies uranium for use either in nuclear power plants or nuclear weapons - but has yet to honour the deal.
German foreign minister Joschka Fischer said Iran should "fulfill its commitments and ... avoid miscalculation that will lead us into a very serious situation", according to Reuters.
Iranian officials countered that they would not give up their right to enrich uranium but insisted that they had no plans to build nuclear weapons. Mr Rohani hinted yesterday that Iran might suspend some nuclear activities but it still wants to be able to produce its own enriched uranium.
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| Inside besieged Falluja |
| 10.20.04 (1:33 pm) [edit] |
Residents of the rebel-held city of Falluja in Iraq are packing their bags and leaving town after one of the heaviest US bombardments for weeks.
BBC News Online spoke by phone to a reporter in the city, contacted by the BBC's Arabic Service, who gave the following account of life there.
The mood in the city is grim.
It is the start of Ramadan, but there is nowhere to celebrate and no food to celebrate with.
Fighters are engaged in skirmishes with US forces in the eastern and southern areas. US positions are about half a kilometre from Falluja.
Two elements have been running the affairs of the city - the police force and local militias.
Relations between the two are good - I have seen policemen on the streets chatting to the fighters.
In fact, relations between local fighters and police have always been good - a deal struck some months ago means the police are welcome in the city provided they do not take orders from the Americans.
I am not aware of any foreign fighters in Falluja.
If there are any foreigners here, they have blended in very well with the locals.
Foreigners used to frequent the city in the past, but many of them were forced to leave under a deal the city's leaders struck with the government.
Ninety-nine percent of the fighters here are Fallujans.
The ordinary people of Falluja still want a peaceful solution - but they knew war was inevitable when Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued his ultimatum earlier this week.
The people believe they are being targeted because they inflicted heavy casualties on US forces during the siege earlier this year.
They say the Americans are attacking them because of wounded pride. They say they are motivated by revenge.
Most people in Falluja believe the Baghdad government is divided into two camps.
They believe the president, Ghazi Yawer, is a Sunni and heads the faction that wants to negotiate a solution to the crisis.
On the other side, they say, is Prime Minister Allawi, a Shia, who believes military force is the only way ahead.
But many people in Falluja, though largely Sunni, dismiss this.
They say Mr Allawi may be a Shia, but this is not why he is at war with Falluja.
They think he simply gives the order to batter Falluja because this is what the Americans want.
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| Voters angry at chaos in early US polls |
| 10.20.04 (1:22 pm) [edit] |
Early voting in the US election has been beset by computer hang-ups, two-hour queues, frayed tempers, and the resignation of at least one election official.
Voting ground to a halt in three Florida counties after the laptops used to check voter information stopped connecting to a central database.
Many polling locations had only one phone line dedicated to the purpose, and voters reported hi-tech electronic voting machines standing unused while queues formed at the laptops.
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| Iraq : Emergency humanitarian assistance provided to the inhabitants of Falluja |
| 10.20.04 (1:14 pm) [edit] |
The ICRC provided the main hospital in Falluja with 1.5 tonnes of emergency medical and surgical aid on 13 October to meet urgent needs.
Two ambulances from the health service in Anbar province made the delivery.
Aid was also sent into the area by truck for hundreds of families that have fled the city of Falluja towards the localities of Habaniya, Saqlawiya and Amiriya. 1,500 kits each containing 15kg of basic food necessities were provided together with 1,000 jerry cans and hygiene items.
The ICRC is very concerned about the growing violence in Falluja. It urges all parties to the conflict to protect civilians and allow the wounded access to hospitals for medical treatment.
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| Bush Receives Endorsement From Iran |
| 10.20.04 (1:05 pm) [edit] |
The head of Iran's security council said Tuesday that the re-election of President Bush was in Tehran's best interests, despite the administration's axis of evil label, accusations that Iran harbors al-Qaida terrorists and threats of sanctions over the country's nuclear ambitions.
Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body.
"We haven't seen anything good from Democrats," Rowhani told state-run television in remarks that, for the first time in recent decades, saw Iran openly supporting one U.S. presidential candidate over another.
Though Iran generally does not publicly wade into U.S. presidential politics, it has a history of preferring Republicans over Democrats, who tend to press human rights issues.
"We do not desire to see Democrats take over," Rowhani said when asked if Iran was supporting Democratic Sen. John Kerry against Bush.
The Bush campaign said no thanks.
Iranian political analyst Mohsen Mofidi said ousting the Taliban and Saddam was the "biggest service any administration could have done for Iran."
Mofidi added that "Democrats usually insist on human rights and they will have more excuses to pressure Iran."
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| Record 2.9 million voters on La. rolls |
| 10.20.04 (12:55 pm) [edit] |
Good news from my home state of Louisiana
The number of registered voters in Louisiana has hit an all-time high -- 2.9 million -- egged on by major voter drives and interest in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
Based on the latest Census Bureau figures, about 87 percent of the state's adults who are eligible to vote are registered.
There's been a major gain of voters since the 2003 governor's race; rolls are up 133,191 from a year ago.
More than one third -- 45,412 voters -- got added to the rolls since local elections in September. More than 10,000 of those newest voters came from Orleans Parish alone.
"It is a record, and we are not finished yet," said Secretary of State Fox McKeithen, whose office oversees elections.
McKeithen said another 10,000 or more registration cards haven't been put in the system and are not showing up in the statewide data bank yet.
"But they will be able to vote in the regular election," he said.
Over the last year, Republicans have signed up more voters than Democrats -- 48,685 to 30,234. But no-party registrants outdid them both -- 54,272 new voters.
Democrats still account for 55 percent of the state election base to the Republicans' 24 percent. The other 21 percent of the voters are "no party."
"What's up for grabs are these huge uncommitted. That's who Democrats and Republicans are fighting over," said McKeithen.
State Democratic Party Executive Director Derek Wooley said he's not concerned about Republican gains.
"That's not that much in the grand scheme of things. We are up on them by about 1 million voters," said Wooley.
New registration totals put Democrats with 1.6 million voters, Republicans with 694,843 and no party with 597,721.
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| Flu shots a political football? |
| 10.20.04 (12:45 pm) [edit] |
The loss of up to 48 million doses at California-based Chiron Corp.'s plant in Liverpool, England, cut the supply of vaccine in the United States nearly by half to around 50 million doses.
Long lines have been fixtures outside pharmacies, supermarkets, drug stores and public health clinics offering flu shots for weeks.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson a letter Monday warning the vaccine shortage had the makings of a public health disaster. Durbin said the White House was aware last year there were potential quality problems at Chiron.
"It is my understanding that U.S. officials were at (Chiron's Liverpool manufacturing plant) in June 2003 and again in August 2004. I am very interested to learn how your department responded to the 2003 discovery that quality manufacturing standards were not being met and would appreciate your providing specific answers to the following questions," Durbin wrote.
Specifically, Durbin wants to know if U.S. officials believe Chiron took all necessary steps to ensure a safe, plentiful vaccine supply, if not, what was done to rectify the situation, did HHS believe adequate steps had been taken to ensure vaccine supplies and "if not, why were more urgent actions not taken to prompt adequate remedial action, and why where other arrangements not made to fill the likely gap in the U.S. vaccine supply?"
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., accused federal health officials of being asleep at the switch and said she would introduce legislation to allow the United States to buy flu vaccine from Canada.
"They are more interested in tax cuts for the rich than flu shots for everyone who needs them, and we've paid a big price for their negligence," Clinton said at a Manhattan community health clinic.
Others question why the United States relied on just two companies to provide 98 percent of flu vaccine.
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| U.S. Muslims disappointed with Bush |
| 10.20.04 (12:35 pm) [edit] |
American Muslims have shifted massively from 2000, when a plurality supported President George W. Bush over Vice President Al Gore, to today, when 76 percent support Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and just 7 percent support Bush, a survey released Tuesday noted.
Other surveys and reports published this week also show that as many as 70 percent of the registered Muslim voters may vote for Kerry.
According to these surveys, the support for Kerry stems from a general dislike for Bush's domestic and foreign policies. Many Muslims blame Bush for making policy decisions that have made life difficult for them in America. Most of them are upset with the Patriot Act that they say has made it difficult for Muslims to come to America, as students or immigrants.
Policies of the Bush administration, they say, also have forced thousands of Muslims to relocate, forcing some to seek asylum in Canada while others had to return to their home countries.
Many complain that Bush's "war against terror" is actually a war against Islam and that the Bush administration has no regard for their faith or their community.
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| U.S. forbids Ramadan charity to 'terrorists' |
| 10.20.04 (12:31 pm) [edit] |
It is an old tradition among Muslims to give both fitra and zakat to the charities that assist Muslim minorities, Muslims living in war zones, or those struggling for freedom against foreign occupation.
This tradition became widespread during the Afghan war, 1979-1989, when the United States and its allied Muslim governments encouraged Muslims to give donations to Afghan groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces. Many of the groups now identified as financiers of terrorism by the U.S. government began their operations during the Afghan war.
Some also were set up in Bosnia and other parts of Europe during the 1990s to help Bosnian Muslims fighting Serbian troops.
It was also during this period that some of these groups developed links to the Taliban regime and al-Qaida. Both played active roles in the Afghan war and had developed links to other groups providing financial assistance to the Afghan resistance.
The third category on the U.S. list of terrorist financiers is groups operating in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon. There are also some that operate in Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, Chechnya and in the Muslim areas of the Philippines.
Such groups have long collected money from Muslims across the world, often from the worshippers after weekly Friday prayers, and despite a strong U.S. opposition, many Muslims still consider some of these groups as freedom fighters and continue to support them.
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| Situation with Margaret Hassan`s kidnapping is unclear |
| 10.20.04 (12:21 pm) [edit] |
Gunmen seized the head of CARE International's operations in Iraq a woman who has worked on behalf of Iraqis for three decades as the British government on Tuesday weighed a politically volatile American request to transfer soldiers to dangerous areas near the capital.
Margaret Hassan, who holds British, Irish and Iraqi citizenships and is married to an Iraqi, is among the most widely known humanitarian officials in the Middle East. She is also the most high-profile figure to fall victim to a wave of kidnappings sweeping Iraq in recent months.
The Arab television station Al-Jazeera broadcast a brief video showing Hassan, wearing a white blouse and appearing tense, sitting in a room with bare white walls. An editor at the station, based in Qatar, said the tape contained no audio. It did not identify what group was holding her and contained no demand for her release, informs ABC News.
According to Xinhuanet, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Poul Nielson on Tuesday condemned the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan, the country director of CARE inIraq.
In a statement issued here, Nielson said:" I am appalled to learn about the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan, the Country director of CARE in Iraq, who chose to dedicate her life to help the Iraqi people."
"Her abduction comes as yet another blow for the humanitarian community, and for all the vulnerable Iraqis benefiting from aid programs," he said.
CARE is a long-standing partner of the European Commission's Humanitarian department (ECHO) in Iraq, with a decade of experience in implementing EU-funded projects in the country.
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| Presbyterian Leader Criticizes Israeli Occupation |
| 10.20.04 (12:16 pm) [edit] |
On a visit to Syria's capital, the head of a U.S. Presbyterian Church delegation called on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories and said Monday that his church may withhold investments to pressure Israel.
"The occupation by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza [Strip] must end because it is oppressive and destructive for the Palestinian people," the Rev. Nile Harper said in an interview.
Harper, of Ann Arbor, Mich., warned that the General Assembly of his church, which holds investments in U.S. firms worth $8 billion, had instructed its investment agency to study the possibility of withdrawing its money from U.S. corporations whose products "are being destructively used against the Palestinians" by Israel.
The 24-member delegation traveled to Lebanon on Sunday and met with a commander of Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group but Lebanese officials view as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation of Arab lands.
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| France and Spain block asylum camp plan |
| 10.20.04 (12:08 pm) [edit] |
France and Spain combined yesterday to derail plans to reduce migration into Europe by setting up EU asylum-processing camps in north Africa.
Two days of informal talks in Florence among interior ministers of the five biggest EU nations ended in deadlock and a firm and public rejection of the idea from Paris.
The response is a blow to Italy and Germany who had pushed the idea as a method of combating the flow of migrants from Libya to the Italian coast. The initiative was also backed by the UK, which had put forward similar ideas last year, only to be rebuffed.
With human rights groups hostile to the initiative, the revived Italian-German plans met a similar fate yesterday. The French Interior Minister, Dominique de Villepin, said after the meeting at a Florentine villa that "for France, it's out of the question to accept transit camps or shelters of any kind". He added: "It is not for Europe to take this issue forward."
Spain's Interior Minister, Jose Antonio Alonso, also expressed opposition, saying the camps would not give humanitarian guarantees.
Critics say that refugee centres in countries such as Libya would not be able to guarantee the legal or human rights standards expected in Western Europe. They also argue that they may attract illegal immigrants and people-traffickers in the same way as the Sangatte camp in Calais did.
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| Poland slams US for aid shortage |
| 10.20.04 (11:57 am) [edit] |
The decision to send Polish troops to Iraq last year was supported by public opinion but, amid persistent unrest in the country, polls now show that more than 70% of the population want them back home.
Zemke said Poland had received $27 million last year from the US in military aid after supporting the US-led operation in Iraq.
This annual aid rose recently to $66 million, but is still less than the $100 million Poland spends a year in Iraq, excluding costs for sending and maintaining equipment.
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| Computer glitches mark early US voting |
| 10.19.04 (2:24 pm) [edit] |
Early voting for the United States presidential election began in Florida on Monday as activists urged people to opt for early ballots to avoid a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco, but computer problems and long lines soon emerged.
With memories still fresh of 2000, when the race in the key battleground state was so close it triggered weeks of recounts and lawsuits, black and elderly voters in particular lined up to cast ballots two weeks before the November 2 election.
"It was embarrassing last time. Florida looked like a third world country," said Marie Bond, adding she was voting early "because I want my vote to count."
'It was embarrassing last time. Florida looked like a third world country'
"I don't want the same like the last election," echoed Haitian American Jean-Jacques Ardoun as he waited in a line of several hundred that snaked from inside the Miami-Dade government centre outside.
"Last time they took the votes and threw them in the garbage."
Florida decided the 2000 election for President George Bush after the US Supreme Court halted the recounts, and both Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, have campaigned vigorously in the state.
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| Without a Doubt |
| 10.19.04 (2:10 pm) [edit] |
By Ron Suskind
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
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| Numb or Dumb? |
| 10.19.04 (1:46 pm) [edit] |
This is an old article from 2003 but it's as relevant today as it was then perhaps more so with the Presidential election around the corner.
Column Left by Robert Scheer
Are We Numb or Dumb?
[from the May 12, 2003 issue]
Forget truth. That is the message from our government and its apologists in the media who insist that the Iraq invasion is a great success story even though it was based on a lie.
In the statement broadcast to the Iraqi people after the invasion was launched, President Bush stated: "The goals of our coalition are clear and limited. We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world." To which Tony Blair added: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."
That claim of urgency--requiring us to short-circuit the UN weapons inspectors--has proved to be a whopper of a falsehood. Late Sunday, the US Army conceded that what had been reported as its only significant WMD find--two mobile chemical labs and a dozen 55-gallon drums of chemicals--"showed no positive hits at all" for chemical weapons.
But we now live easily with lies. "As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war," writes Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. The pro-Administration rationalization holds that the noble end of toppling one of the world's nastier dictators--assuming that the Iraqi people end up freer and not ensnared in an Iranian-type theocracy--justifies the ignoble means of lying to the world. Or, as Friedman puts it, "Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue.)"
Hyping? Is that how we are now to rationalize the ever more obvious truth that the American people and their elected representatives in Congress were deliberately deceived by the President as to the imminent threat that Iraq posed to our security? Is this popular acceptance of such massive deceit exemplary of the representative democracy we are so aggressively exporting, nay imposing, on the world?
It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of September 11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.
The only significant link between Al Qaeda and Hussein centered on the Ansar al Islam bases in the Kurdish area outside of Hussein's control. That's the "poison factory" offered by Colin Powell in his UN speech to connect Hussein with international terror. But an exhaustive investigation by the Los Angeles Times of witnesses and material found in the area "produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization." Moreover, the purpose of this camp was to foster a holy war of religious fanatics who branded Hussein as "an infidel tyrant" and refused to fight under the "infidel flag" of his hated secular regime.
The embarrassingly secular nature of the government was summarized in another Los Angeles Times story on the status of women: "For decades, Iraqi women--at least those living in Baghdad and some other big cities--have enjoyed a degree of personal liberty undreamed of by women in neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates."
Those freedoms--to drive, study in coeducational colleges and to advance in the professions--are now threatened by the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the invasion. The former US general now governing Iraq has stated that he will not accept a reversal of those freedoms, but our long history of cozy relationships with the oppressive Gulf regimes can't be reassuring to Iraq's women.
Such issues would be less compelling had the claim that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent security threat to the United States proved true. Our goal, the destruction of those weapons, would then have been clear, and once that goal was accomplished, an expeditious US withdrawal would have been justified.
But in the absence of such a threat, the US role in Iraq becomes inevitably stickier. For "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to be more than a catchy propaganda slogan assumes an enduring obligation to provide the content of freedom to the Iraqi people that Americans claim to believe in. It is hoped that will include the election of a leader who tells the truth.
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| Dear Limey assholes |
| 10.18.04 (9:27 pm) [edit] |
Last week G2 launched Operation Clark County to help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days, more than 11,000 people requested addresses. Here is some of the reaction to the project that we received from the US
Dear wonderful, loving friends from abroad,
We Ohioans are an ornery sort and don't take meddling well, even if it comes from people we admire and with their sincere goodwill. We are a fairly closed community overall. In my town of Springfield, I feel that there are some that consider people from the nearby cities of Columbus or Dayton, as "foreigners"- let alone someone from outside our country.
Springfield, Ohio
Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.
Wading River, NY
Right on! Just wanted to say thanks from California for your effort and concern. This IS a very important election ... There are so many people here in the States that care about the impact America has on the rest of the world. I am personally saddened for the loss of all innocent lives. The best statement Americans can make to the rest of the world is to not elect Bush for president. Thank you so much for getting involved in our world.
California
Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys.
United States
I am a student and life-long resident of Clark County, Ohio. I just wanted you to know that this is a wonderful idea you've initiated; people here love and respect the United Kingdom, especially the prime minister. I hope this campaign will be successful for your newspaper and for us voters.
Springfield, Ohio
KEEP YOUR FUCKIN' LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN'T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT'S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON'T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS ... TOUGH SHIT!
PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH!
You'll have to visit the site to read them all. I have been LMAO. You would think the Guardian would have expected this... maybe they did. What a hoot!
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| Baggage screeners miss one in four bombs |
| 10.18.04 (8:31 pm) [edit] |
During three months of extensive security tests at Newark International Airport, baggage screeners missed one out of every four fake bombs carried through security by inspectors.
Security staff at the New Jersey airport, which was one of those breached by terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001, failed to detect 81 out of 327 phony explosive devices and guns concealed either in hand luggage or under the clothing of Transport Security Administration (TSA) officials, the Star Ledger of Newark reported.
Chris Yates, aviation security editor at Jane's Transport magazine, said the results highlight what is a worldwide issue but the blame should not rest with the screeners.
"These latest security breaches do not surprise me," he said, "because the fundamental problem at most international airports is that we are relying on relatively antiquated technology.
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| No Muslim Peacekeepers in Iraq |
| 10.18.04 (7:08 pm) [edit] |
Just another example of Bush leadership. What a psychopathic moron!
President Bush rebuffed a plan last month for a Muslim peacekeeping force that would have helped the United Nations organize elections in Iraq, according to Saudi and Iraqi officials.
The U.N. has a skeletal presence in Iraq, with only four employees working full time preparing for January elections.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has refused to establish a new headquarters in Baghdad unless countries commit troops for a special force to protect it.
Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, lobbied Bush to sign off on the plan to establish a contingent of several hundred troops from Arab and Muslim nations. Abdullah discussed the plan in a 10-minute phone conversation with Bush on July 28 after meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations said.
Diplomats said Annan had accepted the plan. But the U.S. objected because the force would have been controlled by the U.N. instead of by U.S. military officers. Muslim and Arab countries, however, refused to work under U.S. command, and the initiative died in September.
The White House confirmed Friday that the U.S. military objected to the plan. "It was a serious issue for commanders," said a spokesman who refused to be named.
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| 20 acres of homes ground into the sand |
| 10.18.04 (6:37 pm) [edit] |
As the loudspeakers on the tanks ordered the families out, and bursts of gunfire sharpened the terror, Mrs Abu Radwan shepherded her blind brother and sister to safety.
"I grabbed them by the hand and shouted to my mother to follow us," said Mrs Abu Radwan. "Think of it - 25 children, two blind adults and my parents who cannot run. My sister-in-law left her three year-old behind in the chaos and had to go back to get him. When we came back they had destroyed all the houses."
While Mr Sharon agonises over how to draw 7,500 Jewish settlers out of Israel's Gaza colonies - offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to each family - the army has already bulldozed close to 9,000 Palestinians from their homes in the Gaza strip this year alone.
Most got no more than a few minutes notice to get out and lost all but the possessions they could hurriedly bundle together.
The latest target was Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza city. From dawn on Saturday the people came, trying to find their bearings amid the rubble and then scrambling across the sand where once there was an asphalt road.
A man ripped at the remains of his shattered home in search of anything that could be saved, burrowing out a picture, some clothes, a schoolbook. Another collapsed on to the wreckage, stunned and silent.
The tide began as soon as it was clear that Israeli tanks had pulled out of Jabaliya after 17 days of destruction and killing. The bulldozers left behind dozens of flattened homes and hundreds homeless.
The remains of the mosque were marked by its twisted steel minaret and loudspeakers. A sewage line torn from the ground spewed filth as people attempted to jump it. The only clue to the existence of a small orange grove was a few of the scattered fruits.
The scale of the destruction - about 20 acres of homes, shops and roads razed or ground into the sand - matched the Israelis' controversial assault on Jenin refugee camp two years ago. But the death toll in Jabaliya was double that with about 130 people killed, one in six of them children 15 or younger.
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| Sinclair Loses Ads Over Kerry Film |
| 10.18.04 (5:09 pm) [edit] |
Sinclair, the nation's largest owner of television stations, is running a significant financial and political risk by telling its stations, including WTTA, Channel 38, in Tampa, to pre-empt regular programming for the film "Stolen Honor." Already, Sinclair's decision has alienated some advertisers and enraged consumer and media watchdog groups.
Representatives of Sinclair did not return phone calls seeking comment. But the company, whose executives have been among the largest media contributors to President Bush, has claimed the documentary is news and as such does not fall under federally mandated equal-time provisions for political candidates.
As a result of the furor over ``Stolen Honor,'' advertisers such as car dealers, furniture makers, supermarkets and restaurants in cities such as Portland, Maine; Madison, Wis.; Minneapolis; and Springfield, Ill., have pulled commercials from the company's stations.
``It's a public trust. It seems they're abusing it,'' said Adam Lee, the president of Lee Auto Malls in Portland, who has ordered his company's advertising off the CBS affiliate, WGME. ``If it were a news show and they were really trying to do a fair and balanced story on both sides, that would be a different matter. I don't think they are.''
A host of consumer and media watchdog groups, including Common Cause, the Alliance for Better Campaigns, Media Access Project, Media for Democracy and the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, are putting together a database that will name all Sinclair advertisers and will try to persuade others to withdraw their commercials.
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| The World Looks at Bush and Votes Kerry |
| 10.18.04 (4:22 pm) [edit] |
There's something to be said for being on the outside looking in. Clearly, those of us living outside the US have more insight in judging the Bush administration than Americans do. Maybe I should say hindsight.
In Australia, Kerry Ahead Of Bush
Many Australians want John Kerry to become the next president of the United States, according to a poll by ACNielsen published in the Sydney Morning Herald. 54 per cent of respondents want the Democratic nominee to win the Nov. 2 election, while 28 per cent would choose Republican incumbent George W. Bush.
In South Korea, Kerry Would Defeat Bush
Many South Korean adults want John Kerry to become the next president of the United States, according to a poll by JoongAng Ilbo. 68 per cent of respondents want the Democratic nominee to win the Nov. 2 election, while 18 per cent would choose Republican incumbent George W. Bush.
In Japan, Kerry Preferred Over Bush
Many Japanese adults want John Kerry to become the next president of the United States, according to a poll by Asahi Shimbun. 51 per cent of respondents want the Democratic nominee to win the Nov. 2 election, while 30 per cent would choose Republican incumbent George W. Bush.
In France, Kerry is Favourite U.S. Candidate
Many French adults want John Kerry to become the next president of the United States, according to a poll by Sofres published in Le Monde. 72 per cent of respondents want the Democratic nominee to win the Nov. 2 election, while 16 per cent would choose Republican incumbent George W. Bush.
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| More personality s'il vous plait |
| 10.18.04 (3:53 pm) [edit] |
I received an email today...I get these from time to time from this blog. I received another one from someone looking for a soup recipe who was incensed to find not soup but partisan crap when he clicked on my link. I almost wrote him back asking if it would be partisan if I were campaigning for Bush. I don't have time for the pain so I hit delete.
Back to the email I received this morning. The writer wanted to know why I didn't write more of my personal thoughts. I've been thinking about it and have come up with a couple of reasons. This is an issue because I've been wondering if I will continue this blog after the elections and if so, what will I do with it?
I'm a loner. I have evolved into this over the years for one reason or another. I enjoy other people but only on my terms. I feel no obligation to open my door if you knock. My sense of self is not hinged on whether I am liked or not. It was not always this way. As I said, I have evolved into who I am today.
I started this blog to counter the Bush administration. As an American living in France I was and am increasingly outraged at what I see happening there. For awhile I would write scathing blogs venting my anger. But, over time I have seen that too many just don't care what is happening in the US or the world around them.
That George Bush is still in office and may even be re-elected boggles the mind. This has nothing to do with being a Republican, Democrat, Independent or any other party affiliation. It's not about who's a better debater. It's not even about whether George did his time in the Guard.
It's about this man falsely tying Iraq and Saddam to al-Qaida and the attacks of 9/11 and in doing so being responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
This is it in a nutshell. I post like so many others whatever incriminating evidence I can find to show the corruptness of this administration but what should be causing people, even Republicans, to remove this man from office is stated above.
So, being a loner is one reason for my lack of personality on this blog, being totally disgusted with humanity is another. All we do is talk which is cheap. We don't actually want to make sacrifices do we?
Where is the outrage at this President? Don't speak to me of Christian values in light of this President. He has none and if you support him you have obviously forgotten yours.
Don't speak to me of stem cells, abortion, and homosexuality in light of Christian values. Jesus Christ has nothing to say about these issues and homosexuals were very much a part of the world he lived in. But, he had much to say about taking care of the poor, sick and imprisoned the very things Bush policies do not take into account.
I have been here fighting my own war against injustice. Whether I will stay here after the election I have no idea. That this blog will change it's format to a more personal one is doubtful. I enjoy looking at other blogs and reading what people are saying. Only now and again do I have the desire to enter the conversation.
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| War On Terror Drowns Out Civil Rights |
| 10.18.04 (1:49 pm) [edit] |
Fears of a new September 11 have drowned out talk of civil liberties in the US election campaign even though the attacks led to legislation that campaigners say gave the government vast unchecked powers.
The last election debate between President George W. Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry which focused on domestic issues -- yielded no mention of basic civil liberties.
The two have clashed though over the Patriot Act, which was passed six weeks after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and gave the administration wide powers in the name of the war on terrorism.
Many of the provisions will end on December 31 unless Congress renews them. Bush, who has styled himself as a "war president", has launched a campaign to get backing for the law, whose full name is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.
Groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) say the act placed "an array of new tools at the disposal of the prosecution, including new crimes, enhanced penalties and longer statutes of limitation."
Ron Daniels, executive director of the CCR said civil liberties in the United States are "in a state of deterioration, to put it mildly."
"Under this administration there has been a subversion of the constitution, there has been a blatant attempt to circumvent international law, to ignore it in all of its dimensions as it applies to torture, detentions, the definition of detainees, the circumvention of the Geneva Convention."
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| Soldiers Saw Refusing Order as Their Last Stand |
| 10.18.04 (1:41 pm) [edit] |
The soldiers, many of whom have called home this weekend, said their trucks were unsafe and lacked a proper armed escort, problems that have plagued them since they went to Iraq nine months ago, their relatives said. The time had come for them, for her husband, to act, Ms. Butler said.
"I'm proud that he said 'no,' " Ms. Butler said. "They had complained and complained for months to the chain of command about the equipment and trucks. But nothing was done, so I think he felt he had to take a stand."
Nancy Lessin, a leader of Military Families Speak Out, which opposes the war, said she had been flooded with calls and e-mail from families with a simple message: What had happened to the reservists echoed the conditions their own soldiers experienced in Iraq: a shortage of armored vehicles, especially for part-time soldiers' units; convoy missions through dangerous stretches without adequate firepower; and constant breakdowns among old vehicles owned, especially, by National Guard and reservist units.
"This is absolutely striking a nerve," Ms. Lessin said. "People are saying, 'This is the same thing that happened to my son,' and if the Army tries to spin this as 'just a few bad apples,' people need to know that these are common problems and what these soldiers did required a tremendous amount of courage."
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| Study Says White Families' Wealth Advantage Has Grown |
| 10.18.04 (1:36 pm) [edit] |
The enormous wealth gap between white families and black and Hispanic families grew larger after the most recent recession, a private analysis of government data has found.
White households had a median net worth of greater than $88,000 in 2002, 11 times that of Hispanic households and more than 14 times that of black households, the Pew Hispanic Center said in the study, being released Monday.
Net worth accounts for the value of items like a home and a car, checking and savings accounts, and stocks, minus debts like mortgage, car loans and credit card bills.
According to the group's analysis of Census Bureau data, nearly one-third of black families and 26 percent of Hispanic families were in debt or had no net assets, compared with 11 percent of white families.
"Wealth is a measure of cumulative advantage or disadvantage," said Roderick Harrison, a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington research organization that focuses on black issues. "The fact that black and Hispanic wealth is a fraction of white wealth also reflects a history of discrimination."
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| America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court |
| 10.18.04 (1:30 pm) [edit] |
For years, Justices Scalia and Thomas have been lobbing their judicial Molotov cocktails from the sidelines, while the court proceeded on its moderate-conservative path. But given the ages and inclinations of the current justices, it is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land.
If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution's final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court's narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs. When the court struck down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence's right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police.
They were just as indifferent to the plight of "M.L.B.," a poor mother of two from Mississippi. When her parental rights were terminated, she wanted to appeal, but Mississippi would not let her because she could not afford a court fee of $2,352.36. The Supreme Court held that she had a constitutional right to appeal. But Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented, arguing that if M.L.B. didn't have the money, her children would have to be put up for adoption.
That sort of cruelty is a theme running through many Scalia-Thomas opinions. A Louisiana inmate sued after he was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the "insignificant" harm the inmate suffered.
This year, the court heard the case of a man with a court appearance in rural Tennessee who was forced to either crawl out of his wheelchair and up to the second floor or be carried up by court officers he worried would drop him. The man crawled up once, but when he refused to do it again, he was arrested. The court ruled that Tennessee violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by not providing an accessible courtroom, but Justices Scalia and Thomas said it didn't have to.
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| Daily Endorsement Tally |
| 10.17.04 (8:36 pm) [edit] |
Among the papers endorsing Kerry today were newspapers in key swing states: The Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, Palm Beach Post, Daytona Beach News Journal and Bradenton Herald in Florida; the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in Minnesota; the Daily Camera in Colorado, and the Dayton Daily News and Akron Beacon-Journal in Ohio.
He also got the nod from major papers in states already friendly to him: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury-News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and Modesto Bee.
Other papers backing him were the Kansas City Star, the Roanoke (Va.) Times, the Grand Fords (ND) Herald, Charlotte Observer, and the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. Clearly, many papers in the Knight Ridder and McClatchy chains have rallied to his side.
The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., which had backed Bush in 2000, switched to Kerry.
Besides the Dallas paper, Bush won The Freelance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the New York Sun.
The Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, which has backed Republicans since 1968, declared it would not endorse this year, given the choices.
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| All the President's Men? |
| 10.17.04 (1:43 pm) [edit] |
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources.
Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.
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| NY Times Enthusiastically Endorses John Kerry For President |
| 10.17.04 (1:32 pm) [edit] |
Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.
Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.
We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.
Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.
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| Is A Draft Coming? |
| 10.16.04 (2:04 pm) [edit] |
Although both the presidential candidates would prefer to avoid it, the draft has remained an important issue this election year. Several recent news reports have raised the issue, this Oct. 11 Time magazine story among them. Plus: Watch a video piecing highlighting TV coverage of the issue, featuring OpTruth's Paul Rieckhoff.
n October 5th, 2004, with no debate and on only hours notice, the House of Representatives voted on a bill that would have reinstated the draft. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. Why was it voted on at all? This vote was a political maneuver, intended to put this controversial question to rest before the election.
But the draft is still an issue. Everyone from Senator McCain to Ambassador Bremer have admitted that there is a troop shortage in Iraq. Troop retention and recruitment are down, and the proposals made by both presidential candidates do not adequately address these issues. The next logical contingency is the draft.
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| Paul Begala - Crossfire transcript |
| 10.16.04 (1:23 pm) [edit] |
Paul Begala tied things up quite nicely on CNN's Crossfire...
Terrorists exploded two bombs in the heart of heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad yesterday. Another bombing killed another American soldier in eastern Baghdad. Meanwhile, on the home front, the price of oil is hovering around $55 a barrel. The Bush administration has hit the debt limit of $7.4 trillion. They are using accounting tricks to keep the United States of America from going into default like a degenerate gambler with a bookie named Knuckles.
We are critically short of the flu vaccine. Health and Human Services says not to expect any vaccine from Canada, despite what President Bush said in the debate. And yet our president thinks he deserves reelection. In fact, he told reporters -- and I'm quoting here -- "I feel great about where we are."
Well, Newt Gingrich has a different take. "If you don't have some anxiety," the former speaker said, "you're not in touch with reality." Well, Newt, I couldn't have said it better myself.
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| Valium is a staple during wars |
| 10.16.04 (12:49 pm) [edit] |
Will asked if valium had become addictive after the war. Of course it has. Valium is a staple during wars. I remember when we were preparing for the war, we would make list after list of 'necessities'. One list was for pharmaceutical necessities. It included such basics as cotton, band-aids, alcohol, gauze and an ordinary painkiller. It also included medicines such as ampicloxine, codeine and valium. No one in the family takes valium, but it was one of those 'just in case' medications- the kind you buy and hope you never have to use.
We had to use it during the first week of April, as the tanks started rolling into Baghdad. We had an older aunt staying at our house (she had been evacuated from her area) and along with my cousin, his wife, his two daughters, and an uncle, the house was crowded and- at bizarre moments- almost festive.
The bombing had gotten very heavy and our eating, and sleeping schedules were thrown off balance. Everything seemed to revolve around the attack on Baghdad- we'd hastily cook and eat during the lulls in bombing and we'd get snatches of sleep in between the 'shock and awe'. There were a few nights where we didn't sleep at all- we'd just stay up and sit around, staring at each other in the dark, listening to the explosions and feeling the earth tremble beneath.
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| 250 leaders, but not US, back UN population plan |
| 10.16.04 (12:35 pm) [edit] |
More than 250 world figures -- but not the Bush administration -- have urged the United Nations to promote a population agenda that seeks women's education, health care and family planning.
The United States refused to support a statement from presidents, prime ministers and Nobel Prize winners, released on Wednesday, because it included the concept of "sexual rights," which had no "agreed definition," a State Department letter said.
At issue is the 10th anniversary of a 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo that abandoned population control goals. Instead it determined that if women were literate and had access to reproductive health care, they would choose to have fewer children.
The statement was read at a news conference by Ted Turner, the media mogul who funds the U.N. Foundation that contributes to U.N. agencies and helped organize the letter.
Among the signatories were 85 prime ministers and presidents, including those from all 25 European Union nations as well as China, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru and a dozen African countries.
Also signing were former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter as well as 47 Nobel Prize winners.
Since President George W. Bush took office, the $34 million annual funds for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) have been withheld on grounds that it supports forced abortions in China, a contention the agency denies and says Washington never proved.
Thoraya Obaid, head of UNFPA, told a news conference her agency suffered from the White House cuts until last year when European nations and foundations more than made up for the shortfall.
Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, who headed the U.S. delegation in Cairo and is now president of the U.N. Foundation, said that 134 million couples who wanted family planning services had no access to them.
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| Republican Evangelical Christians Embrace Kerry Presidency |
| 10.16.04 (12:15 pm) [edit] |
Republican Evangelical Christians who have witnessed the decline of the public education system, the environment and the economy turn to John Kerry realizing that George Bush is using his faith as a wedge.
Members of the ‘Christian Right’ resist the Bush campaign to politicize their faith and turn to vote for Kerry. Recently the Bush campaign called on evangelical churches to turn their members into political activists – church members like Dan and Julie Rakowski. Both Dan and Julie have been members of a nationwide grassroots organization “Republicans for Kerry ‘04” since this spring. “In many ways, I am typical of the ‘Christian Right’ you often hear about,” Dan said. “I’m passionately pro-life, moderately against gay-marriage, and pro-Second Amendment.” During the past four years, Dan and his family have witnessed the decline of the public education system, the environment and the economy. Dan regards the Bush campaign’s attempt to draft congregations into political service during this campaign season as an attempt to use the faith of theologically conservative Christians as a wedge. “If he keeps talking about social issues like homosexuality and abortion,” Rakowski observed, “Bush hopes we will look the other way with respect to his missteps of Iraq War, economy and education.”
“The measure by which a Christian should judge a candidate is to see if the walk matches the talk,” suggested Carmen Smith, a Cuban immigrant, lifelong Republican, and Christian for 40 years, who lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Environment is a key issue for her decision to support John Kerry. “As a Christian Republican I value being a good steward of God’s earth, which means taking care of the precious and fragile resources such as air, water and soil. Our President needs to be responsible enough to make this a top priority.” Citing Bush’s “misuse of his authority in this area, over the last four years,” Smith concluded, “I have more trust in John Kerry to do this job right.”
John Bugay, a writer who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a registered Republican and a conservative Presbyterian. He has been a strong John Kerry supporter since early this year, creating the first “Republicans for Kerry” website. In the GOP call on church congregations to become part of the Bush campaign, Bugay writes, “ … Bush is not appealing to our better natures, but to our worst fears. We ought not to give in to that type of fear. Many conservative Christians can already say ‘Bush has governed badly and doesn’t deserve another chance.’ At the very least, then John Kerry deserves an honest look by honest Christians.”
Brenda Farrell from Southlake Texas agrees. Calling herself “an old-time Republican”, Farrell worked in a Republican administration during the Reagan years. A Christian and an advocate of the separation of Church and State, she asks that her fellow Republicans and Christians, “not be lured by tangential emotionally-charged issues [such as gay marriage, abortion, etc. that will remain unresolved for a long time. They are brought up to rile up conservative voters who this administration thinks are too blind to identify the real issues that face this country.”
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| The Bush civil rights record leaves much to be desired |
| 10.16.04 (12:06 pm) [edit] |
Now that the presidential debates are over and campaign surrogates have tried to interpret or misinterpret what we saw for ourselves, there is no better time to ignore the rhetoric and check out the candidates’ records.
Because John Kerry and his Democratic vice presidential running mate, John Edwards, served in the Senate, their votes can be reviewed. And the same can be said for Vice President Dick Cheney, who served in the House. Like many groups, each year the NAACP issues a Civil Rights Report Card, grading members of Congress on issues important to African-Americans. Every year they were in office, both Kerry and Edwards received As. When Cheney served in Congress from 1977 to1988, he received an F every session.
Of course, President Bush has never served in the House or Senate, making it more difficult to assign him a grade. But the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has examined Bush’s White House years and last week issued a draft staff report titled, “Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration, 2001-2004.” The report is available online at www.usccr.gov/pubs/ bush/bush04.pdf.
The 166-page study by the independent, bi-partisan agency concludes: “President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.”
It explains, “Public statements are a means by which Presidents draw the country’s attention to important matters. However, President Bush seldom speaks about civil rights, and when he does, it is to carry out official duties, not to promote initiatives or plans for improving opportunity. Even when he publicly discusses existing barriers to equality and efforts to overcome them, the administration’s words and deeds often conflict.”
Although it is impossible to review all of the findings in this limited space, let’s look at a few key areas:
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| Voter dissatisfaction indicates it won't be close |
| 10.16.04 (11:58 am) [edit] |
Bogus polls mask landslide in the making
When I was in Philadelphia last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story in the local section that addressed increased voter registration. The final day of registration in Pennsylvania and New Jersey last week brought huge crowds to registration offices. As of September, Philadelphia had received 219,000 applications from either new voters or those who had moved or had been stricken from the rolls. With some 60,000 applications arriving on the final day, it is possible the city's volume this year could break the record of 293,000 applications set in the tension-filled mayoral race of 1983 between Wilson Goode and Frank Rizzo.
This trend of increased voter registration is replicated, in particular, in a majority of the battleground states.
According to the New York Times, voter registration campaigns in heavily Democratic areas have added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that far exceeds the efforts of Republicans in both states.
The analysis by the Times of county-by-county data shows that in Democratic areas of Ohio -- primarily low-income and minority neighborhoods -- new registrations since January have risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000.
In comparison, new registrations have increased just 25 percent in Republican areas. A similar pattern is apparent in Florida: In the strongest Democratic areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent higher than in 2000, while it has risen just 12 percent in the heaviest Republican areas.
Project Vote says it has registered 147,000 new voters in Ohio. Americans Coming Together said that, together with allied groups that are part of America Votes, it had registered 300,000 new voters. In New Mexico, the Secretary of State's office reports that since May voter registration has jumped from approximately 958,000 to a little more than 1 million, possibly all new registrants.
Those younger than 30 who are increasingly concerned about a potential draft are also registering in increased numbers.
These new registrants are not considered in most polling. A growing number of young people use cell phones as their primary phone number. This further diminishes the possibility that their support for either candidate would be reflected in polling data. Thus, they are the great unknown in this election.
My second reason, if history is any barometer, is that when incumbent presidents seek re-election, it is a referendum on the previous four years. Since 1932, 11 incumbent presidents have sought re-election; with the possible exception of 1948 and 1976, none of the races has been close.
When we want to keep a president, we keep him; Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton are prime examples. Likewise, when we want him out, he's out: Hoover, Carter and Bush 41.
More and more this race is shaping up like 1980. That race remained close until the last few weeks, when voters found a comfort level with then-challenger Ronald Reagan that allowed them to oust President Carter.
It difficult for me to believe the race is as close as the polls indicate, especially when one considers that 56 percent of the electorate feels the country is headed in the wrong direction. Moreover, it has been 16 months since 50 percent felt we were headed in the right direction.
Working For Change
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| U.S. troops in Iraq refuse to obey orders |
| 10.16.04 (11:46 am) [edit] |
The U.S. army is investigating up to 19 members of a supply platoon in Iraq who refused to go on a convoy mission, the military said Friday.
The reservists are from a fuel platoon that is part of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, based in Rock Hill, S.C. The unit delivers food, water and fuel on trucks in combat zones.
Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., who said her daughter, Amber McClenny, was among in the platoon, received a phone message from her early Thursday morning saying they had been detained by U.S. military authorities.
"This is a real, real, big emergency," Ms. McClenny said in her message.
"I need you to contact someone. I mean, raise pure hell."
Ms. McClenny said in her message her platoon had refused to go on a convoy to Taji, located north of Baghdad.
"We had broken-down trucks, non-armoured vehicles and, um, we were carrying contaminated fuel. They are holding us against our will."
"We are now prisoners," she said.
Ms. Hill said she was later contacted by Spc. Tammy Reese in Iraq, who was calling families of the detainees.
"She told me (Amber) was being held in a tent with armed guards," said Ms. Hill, who spoke with her daughter Friday afternoon after her release.
Her daughter said they are facing punishment for mutiny.
Patricia McCook, of Jackson, Miss., said her husband, Staff Sgt. Larry McCook, was also among those detained. She said he told her in a telephone call he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were 'deadlines'...not safe to go in a hotbed like that," she said, the newspaper reported.
More
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| Bush Banking on Power of Denial |
| 10.14.04 (1:18 pm) [edit] |
The savvy folks at Bush Central have bet the ranch on the belief that more than 50 percent of the voters do not want to hear that Iraq was a disastrous mistake. They've bet the White House on the very real and powerful pull of denial.
This is how the facts line up on one side of the divide. We were led into war on the grounds that Saddam's Iraq was an imminent danger. It wasn't. We invaded to pre-empt the use of weapons of mass destruction. There weren't any.
We were told we'd be greeted with flowers and candies. We were not told we'd also be greeted with chaos and suicide bombers.
The man who was developing nuclear weapons is now described as the man who wanted such a program. The reason for the war has morphed from a need to defend ourselves to a desire to liberate Iraqis. The front in the war on terror is now the breeding ground for more terrorists.
On the other side of the divide is a simple narrative line: Voting for Bush means never having to say you're sorry.
I don't say this glibly. Or lightly. We have to acknowledge the appeal of his mistake-proof world.
After all, the reality of the Iraq war raises questions that are by no means easy to answer. How do we tell the families of dead or wounded soldiers that their losses were a tragic mistake? How, as Bush asks continually, do you lead a war once you have acknowledged that it was the "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place"?
We cannot - as was famously said of Vietnam - declare victory and leave. It's much easier to believe this was the right war, the right time, the right place. It's much easier to believe we are people who do the right thing.
Denial is powerful precisely because it's so comforting. The refusal to admit being wrong is not just an attempt to avoid punishment, as if we were children caught with our hands in the cookie jar. It's also a desire to protect our self-image, indeed our nation's identity. Bush has linked America's innocence to his own.
READ THE REST
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| Open Letter to the Inept Bush Administration from a European Entrepreneur |
| 10.14.04 (1:06 pm) [edit] |
Christa Allen of Je T'Aime Petite may be petite in size but not in spirit.
Be sure to follow the link below and read the entire letter.
Open Letter to the Inept Bush Administration from a European Entrepreneur
I’d like to assure every decent person that at no time will I ever be disrespectful in any shape or form towards the Office of the President of the United States. I am most respectful of any lawfully chosen President, i.e. elected by the people, not ensconced by the Supreme Court. If such an aforementioned action were to happen in another country, the U.S. would undoubtedly promptly condemn them!
I am not the only individual who sees Mr. Bush as a bungling moron who had the Audacity to make jokes of WMD’s while attending a State Dinner! How devastating and heart-breaking this must have been for people who have lost their loved one in the war! This man is not fit to visit the White House, much less occupy it. Sorry, I am simply unable to call such a man “President” and urge everyone to do the only responsible thing and vote him and the other charlatans out of office because this Country can’t afford any more of their idiocy and incompetence!
I have seen Mr. Bush while he was Governor of Texas smirk (he does this a lot, perhaps he thinks it makes him look charming?) and joke about a prisoner who begged for her life! I am a proponent of the death penalty, however, I was appalled by this man’s callousness and cruelty, he seemed proud executing this woman. I am certain that it was the very same “higher power” who would counsel him years later to start his new and arrogant policy of “anticipatory self-defense and first strike.” One already could see a precursor to his sanguinary gruesome personality; why no one stopped this totally incompetent man and instead allowed him to cause such deleterious actions, how he is still able to convince so many people that he truly believes in God is absolutely beyond my comprehension!
I admit that when I first learned of the conspiracy theories I was appalled and didn’t believe them. I have never been involved in politics, I voted only one time in my life. (I am a Fashion Designer, I don’t pretend to be a writer, nor am I a contender for a literary accolade, so, please allow me some slack, yes?) I am simply an entrepreneur who did plenty of research and realized that if we continue the path we are currently on, insipid Bush and Company have too much of a chance turning this Country Totalitarian. I truly believe that the American people can’t fathom that their present government would be involved in the cover-up of a tragedy of such enormous magnitude, too horrendous to even imagine; I at first felt the same way!
One can only be astonished as to why the French were capable of foiling a Commercial Airliner attack on the Eiffel Tower in 1994; did they merely have better intelligence than the “most powerful Nation on earth” or was there no need for Monsieur Chirac to arbitrarily attack another country so he could don a fighter jacket, parade around a flight deck with a stupid grin and thus ensure his next election as “War President?” I can certainly empathize with millions of Americans who were aghast with horror at the constant terror threat’s, it left most of us unable to see where the real threat was coming from, at least until now! Thank God this administration’s spinners and fear-mongers are getting less effective by the day. I hope and pray that I can stir up enough emotion with my letter so people will at least be open to discover for themselves what really happened and why these power hungry buffoons are so adamant in firing and silencing those who are speaking out! If you don’t want your children and grandchildren to suffer the consequences of this inept “team”, please take responsibility and do your homework, I did!
READ THE REST
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| At Arizona State University Kerry is Winner |
| 10.14.04 (11:21 am) [edit] |
A high-tech polling method being used for the first time showed Sen. John Kerry as the clear winner in Wednesday night's debate at Arizona State University.
Valley residents watching the presidential debate on CBS 5 who also are Cox Digital cable subscribers had the opportunity to voice their opinions on the candidates' performance through an on-screen overlay. All they needed was their remote control to vote.
CBS 5 and Polimetrix, a nonpartisan polling organization based in California, provided Valley Cox Digital Cable customers a first-of-its-kind opportunity and more than 12,000 viewers participated.
According to the viewers, Kerry won the debate 54 percent to 43 percent over President George W. Bush, with 3 percent calling it a tie.
After each issue was debated, a question asking viewers who won the round was displayed. Valley viewers felt Kerry won on the issues of jobs and healthcare, while Bush held the edge when it came to immigration and the draft. On-screen questions were posed for each major issue addressed by the candidates.
The polling questions appeared as an overlay at the bottom of the screen during the debate thanks to Cox's interACTIVE technology. Viewers simply clicked the A, B or C button on their digital cable remotes to submit their opinions.
"We are happy that over 12,000 Cox customers participated in this unique polling opportunity," said Steve Rizley, vice president and region manager, Cox Communications. "This leading-edge technology is the next step in the evolution of television, and we were proud to partner with CBS 5 to provide it to our customers."
This sort of polling could be a harbinger of things to come when it comes to political races.
"Telephone polling is becoming more difficult to do because of the cost and the lack of response," said Lynn Vavreck, director of marketing for Polimetrix. "We're trying to pioneer quality survey work on the Internet."
Business Journal
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| An appeal for America to be American |
| 10.14.04 (11:07 am) [edit] |
By Joan Chittister, OSB
I have discovered that there is a lot you never find out, even about your own country, unless you go somewhere else.
For instance, Aug. 31 during the Republican National Convention, 203 Asian scholars from 13 countries published a public declaration, endorsed by 42 Asian organizations, appealing to U.S. voters "not to vote for a president who will turn Asia and the global society into America's enemy." The statement, they tell us, was released simultaneously in both New York and Japan, a nation that understands first-hand what war can do to a people for generations.
"Another America is possible," the declaration insists.
Maybe you heard about it but I didn't. Instead, they handed the document to me in Tokyo, amazed that I knew nothing about it at all.
The declaration makes four major points:
1. With the war in Iraq, America's leadership and its influence have crumbled worldwide. The Iraqi war, they say, is "immoral, unlawful and unjustifiable."
The real news about such a position as this is not that others are saying what the circumstances clearly demonstrate but that Americans, who claim to be the ultimate defenders of the rule of law, don't seem to mind the fact that they are in violation of international law. Nor does it bother them that the war was launched on insufficient and old -- very, very old --data. Nor does this church-going nation seem to think that the moral dictums they teach their children -- as in "thou shalt not lie," for instance, -- has anything whatsoever to do with politics and the standards we set for our politicians even when thousands and thousands of innocent people die because of it.
2. The unilateralism and militarism of the United States in this mis-directed war has evoked "broad and seething rejections from all corners of the globe." It is, they argue, only the first attempt of this new kind of United States to achieve US domination of the world.
Most ironic of all, they maintain, is the fact that because of US militarism, the world is much less safe than it ever was before the US launched its new doctrine of preemption. There is "unprecedented political unrest to the Middle East," they argue. And, most ironic of all, this campaign to "make the world safe for democracy" is now being used as an excuse for whatever political goals other authoritarian governments may have-as in the amendment of the Peace Constitution and the military rearmament of Japan.
They maintain that in its anger over 9/11, the United States has simply unleashed another arms race all around a world that is now using the fear of "terrorism" to justify it.
3. In a globalized and interdependent world, they insist, they have a right to make this appeal because this election is no longer a local affair.
What we do politically, as they see it, effects their countries as much -- sometimes more -- than it effects us. If the United States maintains its present policies, they mourn, "peace and democracy in Asia will be only a dream long gone" as other governments use the same tactics to eliminate human rights and suppress their own peoples.
"By the rest of the world, your country is looked at as an Empire," the document goes on, "looming large over the globe with pre-emptive strike doctrines and blind anti-terrorism policies depending heavily on macho military measures and ignorance of human rights ..."
It is easy to see how this letter could have been written to Julius Caesar, or Nikita Kruschev. But to George Bush II? To us? Have we really fallen this low? "The United States of American is looked at," the document says, "as the most dangerous and destructive nation in the world by civilized global societies."
4. Another America is possible, they remind us. The one that struggled against Hitler and Stalin, against Nazism and Communism, for the rights of all people everywhere.
It is an appeal for America to be American.
From where I stand, this is one of the saddest letters I have ever read in my lifetime. What else besides arrogance or ignorance can possibly account for the fact that as a nation these things don't seem to bother us at all? Most of all, how is that such positions never see the light of day in the very democratic country that stands to lose the most by being unaware of such anger, such pain, such global despair?
National catholic Reporter
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| Security Scholars Say Iraq War Most Misguided Policy Since Vietnam |
| 10.13.04 (10:30 pm) [edit] |
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the “most misguided” policy since the Vietnam War, according to an open letter signed by some 500 U.S. national-security specialists.
The letter, released Tuesday by a Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy (S3FP), said that the current situation in Iraq could have been much better had the Bush administration heeded the advice of some of its most experienced career military and foreign service officers.
But the administration’s failure to do so has actually fueled “the violent opposition to the U.S. military presence,” as well as the intervention of terrorists from outside Iraq.
“The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests,” according to the group which called for a “fundamental reassessment” in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation.
“We’re advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging,” said Prof. Barry Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the organizers of S3FP which includes some of the most eminent U.S. experts on both national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world.
The letter noted that “many of the justifications” provided by the administration for the Iraq war, including an operational relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s programs for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), have proven “untrue” and that North Korea and Pakistan pose much greater risks of nuclear proliferation to terrorists.
“Even on moral grounds, the case for war was dubious: the war itself has killed over a thousand Americans and unknown thousands of Iraqis, and if the threat of civil war becomes reality, ordinary Iraqis could be even worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein.”
Read the rest
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| America through an Iraqi lens |
| 10.13.04 (10:11 pm) [edit] |
How wide is the gap between Americans and Iraqis? In the twelfth of our Letters to Americans series, Iraqi blogger and mother of three sons, Faiza Al-Araji, writes to Anthony Swofford, ex-US marine and author of the 1991 Gulf war memoir, Jarhead.
Dear Anthony Swofford,
First of all, I salute you, because you have changed from a United States marines sniper into a writer who thinks, meditates, and reconsiders his views in a meaningful way.
A sniper? What life is possible for a man who is trained to become a professional sniper at the age of 19? Such a young man, training to be a professional killer! Such a profession demands a person to freeze his mind, annul his thoughts and pull the trigger, without thinking that the person in front of him is also human –with a name, a profession, and a family that loves him.
But the profession of the writer you became means loving man, and praising him as a creature who deserves to live. Such a difference!
I regret that I have not been able to get hold of your book, Jarhead, but I have read interviews with you on the internet. As I understand, you didn’t want to start your life in the conventional way: studying, looking for a job, getting married. You chose to enlist in the US marines as a way of looking for the unfamiliar; as an experiment in life, or a manner of dealing with it.
That is exactly what I have done too, since I graduated in engineering from the University of Baghdad in 1976. I was then engaged to be married, and I had to choose between two worlds. I could either get married in the traditional way, like all my friends and relatives; or I could go as a volunteer to Lebanon, where there was a civil war whose victims were Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.
Against all advice, my husband, a Palestinian, and I, an Iraqi, chose to go to Lebanon.
Read the rest
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| How To Watch Tonight's Debate |
| 10.13.04 (10:08 pm) [edit] |
A cure for issues guilt.
By Timothy Noah
You're feeling guilty. Tonight's the last presidential debate, and it's all about domestic policy, and you still haven't mastered the details of John Kerry's health care plan or President Bush's Social Security privatization plan. Well, I have a little secret for you. It doesn't matter!
Why doesn't it matter? Because by presiding over a sagging economy, slashing taxes for the rich, writing a blank check to drug companies in the new Medicare-drug bill, waging an expensive war in Iraq, and accelerating spending, President Bush has taken the balanced budget left him by President Clinton and turned it into a $422 billion deficit. Not bad for a conservative! His timing couldn't be worse, because, as noted in an Oct. 7 report by the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan deficit-hawk group, the first batch of retiring Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) will start collecting Social Security before the next presidential term ends. As noted in today's New York Times, Kerry's proposals would add $1.27 trillion to the deficit between now and 2014 (including $177 billion for his health-care plan). That might sound irresponsible if President Bush's proposals didn't total somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion during the same period. (The Concord Coalition says the total is $1.33 trillion but quickly points out that this doesn't include Bush's Social Security privatization, which would cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.)
Tonight, whenever either candidate mentions a domestic-policy proposal, ask yourself the following question: "Will this cost the government a lot of money?" If the answer is "yes," feel free to tune out discussion of the proposal's substance.
Instead of trying to master the details of complicated new proposed initiatives, focus on the following question: Which of these guys will do a better job cleaning up the horrible fiscal mess left behind by President Bush's first term? Because, when you get down to it, that's the only honest job description for the domestic-policy part of this gig. One way to answer that question is to compare Bush's $2 trillion to $3 trillion in new costs to Kerry's $1.27 trillion. Another is to see if you can identify which candidate even recognizes that there's a mess to clean up. Come to think of it, that isn't a bad method for sizing up the foreign-policy debate part of this job, either.
Slate
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| FBI Shuts Down 20 Anti-War Websites |
| 10.13.04 (12:10 pm) [edit] |
The US government move to shut down nearly two dozen antiwar, anti-globalization web sites on October 7 is an unprecedented exercise of police power against political dissent on the Internet. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the attack on the Indymedia sites and demands a halt to all such attempts at suppressing political criticism of the US government.
The shutdown was carried out by Rackspace, a US-based web-hosting company with offices in San Antonio, Texas, and greater London, in response to an order from the FBI requiring it to turn over two of its British servers that were hosting dozens of Indymedia sites. There are conflicting accounts of the legal process, with Indymedia attributing the order to a US federal district court, while the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which is supplying legal representation to the group, describes it as a “commissioner’s order” directly from the FBI itself.
A representative of the US-based Electronic Freedom Foundation said, “The Constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure.”
This intervention by American police to shut down antiwar web sites has been widely reported in Europe, with accounts carried in the British Guardian and Independent and by the French news agency Agence France-Presse, among others. But nothing has appeared as yet in the American mass media. This silence only underscores the role of the American corporate media as the accomplice of the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights, both at home and abroad.
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| Email Sinclair Broadcasting Execs |
| 10.13.04 (11:46 am) [edit] |
The Democratic National Committee has filed a formal protest with the Federal Election Commission over plans by a major broadcast group to air a film next week criticizing presidential hopeful John Kerry's anti-war activism upon returning from active duty in Vietnam. Sinclair Broadcast Group has asked its 62 television stations to pre-empt regular programming next week in order to show the film, which accuses Sen. Kerry of betraying American POWs through his activism. Democrats allege that the broadcast is an improper use of the airwaves and an illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign.
CNS News reports on a statement by Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps Tuesday calling the Sinclair broadcast an "abuse of public trust" just days prior to the presidential election.
"This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative.... This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline’s reading of our war dead in Iraq. It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away....
"It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communication Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger. Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous path," he added.
The Sinclair Broadcasting Group is a conservative broadcasting network that controls television airwaves in dozens of major television markets, including markets in battleground states such as Florida and Ohio. Recently, it has banned shows that are critical of the war on terror, ordered its stations not to air a tribute to our fallen U.S. soldiers, and now plans to air an anti-Kerry movie days before election day. The Sinclair Broadcasting Group has historically contributed thousands of dollars to Republican causes and its CEO also contributed the maximum to Bush-Cheney. DNC
This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline's reading of the war dead in Iraq claiming it was an attempt to "influence public opinion".
Email Sinclair Broadcasting execs to let them know how you feel about their "infuencing public opinion."
Mark Hyman, Vice President for Corporate Relations: mhyman@sbgnet.com
David Smith, CEO: dsmith@sbgnet.com
Joe Defeo, Corporate News Director: jdefeo@sbgnet.com
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| Israeli thinktank - Iraq War Boosted al-Qaida |
| 10.12.04 (11:09 pm) [edit] |
An Israeli thinktank has said the war in Iraq has given al-Qaida and its allies renewed momentum, disputing allegations by US President George Bush that the invasion made the world safer.
The Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University said instead of striking a blow against Islamist movements, the war "created momentum for many terrorist elements, but chiefly al-Qaida and its affiliates".
Jaffee Centre director Shai Feldman said that the vast amount of money and effort the US poured into Iraq has deflected assets from other conflict centres, such as Afghanistan.
Intelligence expenditures made necessary by the large US troop deployment in Iraq "has to be at the expense of being able to follow strategic dangers in other parts of the world", he said.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli army general, said the US effort was misdirected on the strategic level.
If the goal in the "war against terrorism is not just to kill the mosquitoes but to dry the swamp", he said, now it's quite clear that Iraq "is not the swamp".
Instead, he said, the Iraq campaign is having the opposite effect, drawing fighters from other parts of the world to join the "battle against the occupiers".
"On a strategic level as well as an operational level, the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism," Brom concluded.
In other findings, Jaffee Centre experts disagreed with the Israeli government's statements that its four-year-old ongoing struggle against Palestinian resistance fighters is part of the global war on terrorism.
More
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| Interesting debt numbers |
| 10.12.04 (10:48 pm) [edit] |
Some 1.6 million U.S. households -- one of every 73 -- filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
There are roughly 1.2 billion credit cards in use in the United States.
The original Diners Club card was issued in 1950 to let businessmen charge meals. It was pasteboard with a list of the 27 restaurants that accepted it printed on the back. The first plastic card came out in 1955. Today, there are about 20,000 different cards available in the U.S.
Studies show the average consumer is exposed to more than 3,000 marketing messages every day. In the last decade, it's been estimated, solicitations jumped from 1.52 billion annually to 4.29 billion.
Today roughly 24 percent of personal expenditures in this country are made with credit and debit cards.
Average per household debt in the U.S., not counting mortgage debt, is about $14,500 -- especially noteworthy because before the 1930s, most middle and working class people had no major debts. Banks would not lend to them; they rented their homes and if they did own a house, it was paid for as it was being built.
A typical credit card purchase ends up costing 112 percent more than if cash were used.
A $1,000 charge on an average credit card will take almost 22 years to pay, and will cost more than $2,300 in interest ($3,300 total) -- if only 2 percent minimum payments are made.
Some 40 percent of American families annually spend more than they earn.
About 60 percent of active credit card accounts are not paid off monthly.
Average credit card debt among all American households is $8,400.
Average card debt among people who have at least one card is $9,205 -- triple what it was in 1990.
Average personal wealth of a 50-year-old American, including home equity: less than $40,000.
A typical American family today pays about $1,200 annually in credit card interest.
The average interest rate on credit cards is 18.9 percent.
Last year the credit card industry took in $43 billion in card fees.
Nine of 10 Americans claim credit card debt has never been a source of worry.
But 47 percent would refuse to tell a friend how much they owe.
Twenty-three percent of Americans admit to maxing out a credit card.
Eleven percent of Americans admit card debts went to collection.
Thirteen percent of Americans have been 30 days late paying credit card bills in the past year.
The average graduate student has six credit cards and one in seven owes more than $15,000.
People using credit cards in fast food restaurants spend up to 50 percent more than when they pay cash.
The personal savings rate in the United States has dropped from 8 percent in the 1980s to just under 2 percent since 2000.
Medical debts sink the ship in one of every 20 bankruptcies. Typical health care debt: $25,000. Typical victim: a senior on a fixed income. Typical scenario: pricey prescriptions bought on high-interest credit cards.
Bankrate.com
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| Betrayed by Bush |
| 10.12.04 (10:38 pm) [edit] |
Patrick Buchanan says there is no conservative party in Washington. Instead there is a Republican party of big business, big government and big war
Spurning the counsel of John Quincy Adams, America now goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. We have treaty guarantees with 50 nations on five continents and troops in 100 countries. Some 150,000 US soldiers are tied down in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Should the United States confront another crisis anywhere on earth, the bankruptcy of our foreign policy would be transparent to the world.
President Bush has declared it to be US policy to launch pre-emptive war on any rogue regime that seeks weapons of mass destruction, a policy today being defied by North Korea and Iran, both of which have programmes to produce nuclear weapons. The President has also declared it to be US policy to go to war to prevent any other nation from acquiring the power to challenge US hegemony in any region of the world. It is called the ‘Bush Doctrine’. It is a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics.
In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, had not attacked us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have. His war cabinet assured President Bush that weapons of mass destruction would be found, that US forces would be welcomed with garlands of flowers, that democracy would flourish in Iraq and spread across the Middle East, that our triumph would convince Israelis and Palestinians to sit down and make peace.
READ IT!
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| Freedom to Fascism |
| 10.12.04 (9:54 pm) [edit] |
"There's no end to the rascality of these flinty-hearted bastards..."
-- Sen John Dingle (D.Mich) speaking of Republicans, quoted on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Nov. 11, 2003
What is the matter with the Republican Party? As one born within a tiny, tree-shaded Republican enclave in Missouri, raised by compassionate family-values-oriented Christian conservatives, and whose entire family remains staunchly, even militantly conservative, I think I have earned the right to ask that question.
So--what the hell is wrong with you guys?
History bumps along from dateline to dateline with no regard for party affiliation. That's why last week during the second presidential debate, when President George Bush slid off his stool, assumed his arms-akimbo "Super Hero" stance and childishly blurted out, "You can run, butcha can't hide," I was jerked into the realization that it's not possible for such a horrid, vacuous little creature to be the cause of the rampant madness zigzagging throughout our society today. Bush is the effect of it -- the natural result of a cruel, thoughtless and destructive movement within the Republican Party that had lain dormant from its inception, but like Stephen King's evil "Christine," shivered into life on November 22, 1963.
Republicans don't seem to realize that they are no longer individual members of a coherent "party," but are merely part of a mean-spirited and dangerous movement that is theatening to sweep away democracy as we know it. For example, on C-Span's July 31 Washington Journal show, Kellyanne Conway, CEO and president of the Polling Company, angrily demanded -- "Where does the middle class get the idea they're entitled to a big house, foreign cars and tuition for all their kids? We got off track in the mid and late 90s -- we need an administration that will get people back to the reality..."
Reality? Well, according to George Bush's little brother and Florida governor Jeb Bush, some people just can't handle the truth. Jeb once told retired Naval Intelligence Officer Al Martin (cited in Bushwhacked, Sept. 2002, by Uri Dowbenko)...
"The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can't deposit the truth in a bank. You can't buy groceries with the truth. You can't pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross -- all the way to the homeless shelter. And if you think that the million or so people in this country that are really interested in the truth about their government can support people who would tell them the truth, you got another think coming. Because the million or so people in this country that are truly interested in the truth don't have any money."
Just a few excerpts...Read the entire article Media Monitors
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| Straw formally withdraws 45-minute WMD claim |
| 10.12.04 (9:13 pm) [edit] |
The Government today formally withdrew its controversial claim that Iraq had had chemical and biological weapons capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.
In a Commons statement, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw disclosed that a further line of intelligence reporting on Iraqi production of biological weapons agents before the war had also now been withdrawn by MI6 Chief John Scarlett.
Mr Straw's statement means that the Secret Intelligence Service has now had to withdraw three of its main lines of intelligence reporting on Iraq's weapons prior to the war.
The report said that it meant that the grounds for the assessment by the JIC before the war that Iraq had recently-produced stocks of biological agent no longer existed.
No WMD
No grounds for war
More at the Independent
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| New Site |
| 10.12.04 (8:18 pm) [edit] |
Because of all the hassles I have with tblog..downtime, refusal to take my scripts I have started a mirror site
here. It's called..you got it..Bouillabaisse.
Bookmark it if you want to keep up with my news and occasional prose.
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| Impacting Sinclair |
| 10.12.04 (7:35 pm) [edit] |
From a reader to Josh Marshall
I’ve worked in the media business for 30 years and I guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They don’t care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions.
Here's how to have an impact on the local Sinclair stations: first, watch the station and make a list of all of the local advertisers. Then, write to the sales manager -- not the general manager, but the sales manager -- and tell him that you're going to contact all of the local advertisers to register a protest about the station airing this program. Be specific -- mention the names of those local advertisers. Then, actually contact them (if you write or email, cc the sales manager). These stations make most of their income (around 60%) from local advertisers and will NOT want to have that income threatened.
This has worked numerous times. A recent example was when a local radio morning show host in North Carolina told his listeners to aim for bicyclists on the road (he was ranting about how cyclists have no right to share the roadways). The station defended him for several days amidst public outcry, until the advertisers, under pressure from outraged cyclists, began to make noise. Suddenly, the station reversed itself, suspended the host for several days, and made him do public service announcements for weeks about sharing the road with cyclists.
Talking Points
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| Checking the Facts in Advance |
| 10.12.04 (1:44 pm) [edit] |
It's not hard to predict what President Bush, who sounds increasingly desperate, will say tomorrow. Here are eight lies or distortions you'll hear, and the truth about each:
Jobs Mr. Bush will talk about the 1.7 million jobs created since the summer of 2003, and will say that the economy is "strong and getting stronger.
Mr. Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a decline in payroll employment. That's worse than it sounds because the economy needs around 1.6 million new jobs each year just to keep up with population growth. The past year's job gains, while better news than earlier job losses, barely met this requirement, and they did little to close the huge gap between the number of jobs the country needs and the number actually available.
Mr. Bush will boast about the decline in the unemployment rate from its June 2003 peak. But the employed fraction of the population didn't rise at all; unemployment declined only because some of those without jobs stopped actively looking for work, and therefore dropped out of the unemployment statistics.
Mr. Bush will claim that the recession and 9/11 caused record budget deficits. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that tax cuts caused about two-thirds of the 2004 deficit.
Bush will claim that Senator John Kerry opposed "middle class" tax cuts. But budget office numbers show that most of Mr. Bush's tax cuts went to the best-off 10 percent of families, and more than a third went to the top 1 percent, whose average income is more than $1 million.
Mr. Bush will claim that Mr. Kerry proposes $2 trillion in new spending. The Washington Post pointed out after the Republican convention, the administration's own numbers show that the cost of the agenda Mr. Bush laid out "is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion" and "far eclipses that of the Kerry plan."
Mr. Bush claimed that he had increased nondefense discretionary spending by only 1 percent per year. The actual number is 8 percent, even after adjusting for inflation.
Mr. Bush will claim that Mr. Kerry wants to take medical decisions away from individuals. The Kerry plan would expand Medicaid (which works like Medicare), ensuring that children, in particular, have health insurance. It would protect everyone against catastrophic medical expenses, a particular help to the chronically ill. It would do nothing to restrict patients' choices.
Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.
Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success.
More by Paul Krugman
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| I Don't Have Time |
| 10.11.04 (1:35 pm) [edit] |
I don't have time for your problems, hon
Your hunger is distracting
the pictures make me feel bad
and disassociate me from my reality
I need some new shoes
some chic leather boots
to keep my feet warm
when I walk to my car
I don't have time for your disease hon
I have to go see the doctor
about these menopausal blues
the running sores
bloated bellies
they shouldn't show such things on the television
the pictures are so unsettling
Now I need my anxiety medication
I don't have time for your bloody war
I'm eating drinking and making merry
Thanksgiving
Christmas
I'm so busy
I have so much
to be thankful for
©Dianne Maire
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| Politics Is Not A Spectator Sport |
| 10.11.04 (1:17 pm) [edit] |
When barely half of the nation's eligible voters bother to bestir themselves from their respective sofas and cast their ballots in a presidential election, something is wrong.
There are two ideas that have polluted our democracy in the last century - that money equals free speech and that corporations are entitled to the same rights as individuals. Together, they have contributed to the increasing concentration of wealth in the U.S. into the hands of fewer and fewer people. The top 1 percent of the U.S. population has nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent combined.
With this wealth, the powerful can control our elections and our democracy. We have a single-party system (masquerading as a two-party system) that's under the near total control of corporate America. Voter turnout has steadily decreased over the past 50 years as Americans are turned off by the lack of real choices and the pervasive influence of big money in politics.
There's plenty of blame to go around - an educational system that doesn't educate students in their civic rights and responsibilities, a news media that entertains rather than informs and a political system that functions more as a cash drop for the wealthy than as a conduit for people to get involved in governing themselves.
Harry Truman hit the mark long ago when he said that GOP stood for "Guardians of Privilege." The people who want a nation where the wealthy are free to grow richer and corporations are free to grow more powerful have gotten nearly all of what they want simply by filling the vacuum left by those who've dropped out of the political process.
Yes, the things we've been reading about electronic voting machines and voter list manipulation are genuinely frightening. But these things are merely insurance for the right-wingers. Why steal votes when you can keep millions of people away from the polls simply by making voters feel demoralized and powerless?
It's hard to imagine that anyone who is able to vote in November will pass up the opportunity. Unless they've been in a cave for the last four years, any sentient human knows that the upcoming election is critically important to the future of our nation. Our mission is to make sure everyone who is able to vote does, that every American understands the importance of getting rid of the Bush administration and that every act, no matter how small, can add up to real change.
Voting really does matter. Participating in civic life does make a difference. Never, ever forget that in a democracy, power is derived from the consent of the governed. And if you don't give your consent, someone else will.
Randolph Holhut
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| Bush's Bogus Information Calls For Impeachment Not Re-Election |
| 10.11.04 (12:32 pm) [edit] |
John Dean wrote on June 6, 2003, "to put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked."
Alas, although Bush did indeed lead the nation to war based on phoney information, many for reasons only they understand continue to support him. For too many honesty in a leader is not a priority.
A few fraudulent statements by Bush in his effort to convince us that his warcries were legitimate:
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
(Radio Address, October 5, 2002)
"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." (Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, October 7, 2002).
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." (State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003).
Remember, this a government that impeached a president for accepting sexual favors in the oval office and lying about it. You would think that the punishment for taking a country to war on false pretenses would be worse.
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| Marine Frustration |
| 10.10.04 (10:56 pm) [edit] |
The Marines' opinions have been shaped by their participation in hundreds of hours of operations over the past two months. Their assessments differ sharply from those of the interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration, which have said that Iraq is on a certain -- if bumpy -- course toward peaceful democracy.
"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always going to be here. We're never going to leave."
Several members of the platoon said they were struck by the difference between the way the war was being portrayed in the United States and the reality of their daily lives.
"Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better,' " said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day."
Pfc. Kyle Maio, 19, of Bucks County, Pa., said he thought government officials were reticent to speak candidly because of the upcoming U.S. elections. "Stuff's going on here but they won't flat-out say it," he said. "They can't get into it."
"The reality right now is that the most dangerous opinion in the world is the opinion of a U.S. serviceman," said Lance Cpl. Devin Kelly, 20, of Fairbanks, Alaska.
Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones, 20, of Ball Ground, Ga., agreed: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong," he said. "We're catching them in a lie."
Perez said he came to think that war in Iraq was unrelated to his anger. "How do I put this?" he said. "First of all, this is a whole different thing. We're supposed to be looking for al Qaeda. They're the ones who are supposedly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. This has no connection at all to Sept. 11 because this war started just by telling us about all the nuclear warheads over here."
Snyder, who was listening, added: "Pretty much I think they just diverted the war on terrorism. I agree with the Afghanistan war and all the Sept. 11 stuff, but it feels like they left the bigger war over there to come here. And now, while we're on the ground over here, it seems like we're not even close to catching frigging bin Laden."
Asked if he was concerned that the Marines would be punished for speaking out, Autin responded: "We don't give a crap. What are they going to do, send us to Iraq?"
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| Bush's Trouble is Reality |
| 10.10.04 (12:03 pm) [edit] |
It’s on more contemporary topics that Bush’s answers Friday night were troubling. In numerous answers, Bush either failed to respond to John Kerry’s indictment of his presidency or turned his attention to his own alleged resolve and Kerry’s alleged inconsistencies and creeping Europhilia. “In order to be popular in the halls of Europe,” Bush noted disdainfully, “you sign a treaty.” That may be what girlie-man John Kerry wants, but not Bush, the American homie through thick and thin.
Reality
The president’s real trouble is less with Kerry than with reality. In the week between the first and second debates, a CIA-appointed investigator concluded that Iraq had dismantled its WMD programs in 1991, Paul Bremer revealed that he had complained to the White House about the shortage of troops in Iraq, the New York Times reported that the administration knowingly covered up the misgivings of our intelligence establishment during the run-up to the war, the job creation figures were underwhelming, and Tom DeLay was reprimanded three times by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee. Kerry took Bush to task on Iraq and job loss, and on the domestic issues that first came into play during this debate: the president’s preferring the drug industry over American patients, the lack of funding for Bush’s own Leave No Child Behind program.
The attack by Bush and Cheney on Kerry’s allegedly “big government” health care plan is a mark of the nervousness that has come over the president and his consultants. Kerry unveiled his plan, with all its particulars, fully 18 months ago in a speech in Des Moines. During those 18 months, neither health care experts nor the media -- nor all but a handful of Republicans, nor anyone in the president’s campaign, until just recently -- have characterized the plan as big government,” for the simple reason that its not. Its major component is to have the government assume the costs now borne by employers for catastrophic illness that cost more than $50,000. It also extends the coverage of children and the poor under existing programs. Only in the past several weeks has the Bush campaign suddenly realized that this is a “big government” program. You wonder, if Bush had a big lead, whether they’d even bother to mention the plan at all.
Kerry had several lines of attack on domestic issues he did not embark upon Friday, though he could be saving them for the final debate on Wednesday. The fact that by independent estimates, Kerry’s health care proposal would cover about 27 million currently uninsured Americans, and Bush’s would cover no more than 6 million, has yet to be mentioned. The fact that Bush’s proposed new spending comes to $3 trillion -- nearly a trillion more than Kerry’s -- has yet to be raised. The connection between Bush’s giveaway to the big pharmaceutical companies and those companies’ support for the president’s and other Republicans’ campaigns has not yet been discussed.
More at American Prospect
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| True Lies of Bush-Cheney |
| 10.10.04 (12:00 pm) [edit] |
...as the first Republican president said long ago, you can fool some of the people all of the time. All that takes is a contempt for the idea of democracy. It does not matter what you tell people if you believe they will probably not understand and probably not care when they realize they were deliberately deceived.
If you own a television set, you should realize that the people who wanted this war, Cheney prominent among them, were not telling the truth before, are not telling the truth now and will not tell the truth after. That does not necessarily mean that they were wrong to invade Iraq I thought they were foolish to do it, but that was not a compelling reason to pull back and let containment and sanctions do the job -- but we now know that to do what they thought was right they had to deceive us, lying about what they knew and when they knew it.
So I conclude by citing a lie by our president, an untruth that John Kerry did not rebut in his first debate with George W. Bush. The president twice used the line, "You saw the same intelligence I did before the war ..."
That is absurd, and it was foolish for Kerry to let it go. I have been around the White House under six presidents and have written, quite extensively, about their decision-making. I know, and so does Bush, that no one, no one at all, sees what a president sees. That is what the classification "Eyes Only" means. We now know that Bush was a wannabe war president who was holding back a great deal of pre-war intelligence for his own purpose -- and his purpose was to go to war.
Sadly, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were deliberately deceiving the people of the democracy. There are lies, and then there are deliberate lies. They did not trust the people -- and it is for that they deserve to be thrown out of office next year.
More by Richard Reeves
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| High School student Kirsten Kamrud removed from Bush event for wearing Wellstone t-shirt |
| 10.10.04 (11:58 am) [edit] |
Kirsten Kamrud, a high school student, wanted to see her president when he came to town. Her mother procured tickets for her and her sister. After they arrived at the event, Kirsten was kicked out almost immediately for wearing a Wellstone T shirt. Wellstone was a US senator (democrat) until October 2002 when he died tragically in a plane crash. Wellstone was a champion for civil rights and for peace; Wellstone was for the little guy. For some reason, the Bush people found this small girl in a Wellstone T shirt threatening.
The story doesn’t end here. Kirsten’s sister was also removed from the Bush event. Kirsten’s sister was not wearing a Wellstone T shirt. She was removed for being Kirsten’s sister.
Bush’s event handlers have a long history of removing persons from Bush and/or Cheney events for questionable reasons. During a recent visit to Mankato, Bush’s handlers removed two high school students from the event. A high school teacher, who is also a veteran, came to the boys' defense, and he was removed too. There is a lawsuit pending in one case claiming infringement on first amendment rights. Bush and Cheney have argued that they have the right to screen guests to their events using any criteria they desire because they are private events meant to reward loyal supporters. One issue raised by critics of Bush’s policy s is that local police and tax money provide support for these events; Bush does not reimburse cities for these services. Are lawsuits against this exclusionary policy part of the frivolous lawsuits that Bush speaks of? Bush is quick to talk about the freedoms described in the US constitution. He should read it sometime.
More
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| New and Unique Rational For War |
| 10.09.04 (10:36 pm) [edit] |
Mr. Bush delivered perhaps his most watered-down defence to date of his decision to wage war to oust Saddam Hussein.
"I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons," he said. "But Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, and the world is better off without him in power."
Saddam was just 1 of many dictatorial regimes in the world. With this new and unique rational for going to war who will Bush rid the world of next?
Hu Jintao, Communist China,
Kim Jong II, North Korea,
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe,
Fidel Castro, Cuba,
Omar Al-Bashir, Sudan,
Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Iran
Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia.
Than Shwe, Burma
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea
Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan
King Mswati III, Swaziland
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| Kerry bores you with the truth; Bush keeps on BuShittin |
| 10.09.04 (10:12 pm) [edit] |
Well, I just did manage to get through the transcript of last nights debate.
As I said in a previous post, it's really irrelevant who won the debate. Bush is not fit for the office and in all reality should be impeached. But, I read the thing and thought I would give my 2 centimes worth.
Bush did a better balancing act this time. I guess after the last fiasco he knew he better. But, so much of what he was saying..although it sounded good just wasn't factual. It seemed he had memorized bits and pieces out of previous Kerry speeches and quoted them all out of context. To the uninformed I'm sure it really sounded like the man knew what he was talking about. Bush tactics last night was to put Kerry on the defensive and in part he succeeded. But, Kerry was having to defend himself against Bush's distorted, twisted account of Kerry's stand on the issues.
Kerry continues to speak the truth about Bush's irresponsible leadership of the country, something he really shouldn't have to do. Bush defence is to attack Kerry's record and twist his words. Bush defence is to puff himself up like a big old peacock and act cocky. He's the perfect image of machoism. He really likes himself and fully expects you to be won over by his winning ways and sense of humor. He's a real joker. The invasion of Iraq was one of his funnier moments.
One woman ask Bush to give just 3 instances in 4 years where he has made a wrong decision. Bush had none to give. He has made no wrong decisions. I don't know any other human being on this earth if they're honest who could say this.
He would allow he had appointed some wrong people. They are the ones who made the wrong decisions obviously. How do you respect a man such as this?
It seems to me people don't want honesty. They want someone to tell them..you go back and play now. These things are for us big guys. I'll take care of everything. What I do may not look right to you but I know what I'm doing. Trust me. If this weren't true more people would be scandalized by the denial and fabrication of this administration rather than ignoring it and making plans to give the scoundrel another term.
Kerry's words sound stale and boring because he has to keep repeating them. That's sad. So many people refusing to listen to the truth.
Kerry may not make the best leader America's ever had but he will be a change and how much America needs change. The world is telling you..oh I forgot America doesn't care about world opinion.
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| 51 Percent of Young People Believe Bush Wants to Reinstate the Draft |
| 10.09.04 (12:18 pm) [edit] |
The National Annenberg Election Survey found that 51 percent of adults age 18 to 29 believe Bush wants to reinstate the draft. BillingsGazette
As Tim Ryan said: Not one thing, not one thing about this war that has been told to the American people or that has been told to these college students has been true. Not one thing. Bremer says we need more troops. The Pentagon says we need more troops, and this President cannot get them from the international community. There is only one option left. Let us be honest with the American people.
George Bush says he will continue his 'war on terror' as usual. America is running out of warm bodies. Bush doesn't even have enough troops in Iraq without calling out the National Guard and Reserve units some of these only trained in doing paperwork. Where do you think he's going to get the troops to fight his wars?
You can stop saving for your child's college tuition and start buying protective gear.
The lack of proper shielding has caused many needless deaths and wounds. According to a study by a defense consultant, first reported by Newsweek, of a total of 789 coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled grenade attacks. Almost all of those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs.
Military.com
Occupation Watch
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| God Talk and Burning Children - Ugly |
| 10.09.04 (11:46 am) [edit] |
By Larry Kearney
If you think God is talking to you and the result is a burned or crushed child, you're wrong. If you find yourself taking revenge in your head on everyone who ever insulted you, however slightly, you are not one of God's messengers. If the substance of the information you get from your God is that he requires you to kill in his name, the information is garbage.
If your word from God recommends punishing the innocent in any way, for any reason, your God is not God at all but a drifting sediment of resentment, greed and the ugliness that needs a dream of power.
Is this hard for us to grasp?
If the man on the screen, or at the podium, is telling us that other human beings have to be killed or tortured to make our God happy, he's lying. If the woman says that we need to make others, on pain of death, renounce their God and accept ours, the woman is evil.
If the subject is other than love, we are not hearing the word of God.
And if we act to the misery of children, it were better a millstone--no reprieve, no debate--to damage a child is beyond the pale. To damage a child for money is the dead center of evil.
Let's talk about damage.
A man in a stone room in Afghanistan has his three children on a table. He's half-bent and his hands are at odd angles, useless, unable to touch because they'd flame with the pain of it. Someone has taken a picture of him with his children who are all dead, from the smallest with the rosebud hands to the oldest, ten maybe.
Why are they dead?
Because there are forms to be followed and the only thing that it is not acceptable to invoke in a holy war is the real God, who brings clarity. When the flames are unleashed and the lies are trotted out, the only discourse that's beyond the pale is the discourse of the heart because the heart will say unerringly that this is what we did before and it didn't work. It not only didn't work, it brought us here again, on the great plain of the torn, burning children.
The same actions produce the same reactions. If you burn children their parents are likely to burn yours. Is this a secret?
But oh, they say, we'll win this time and then our children will be safe.
Is that the way it's been? Any examples? Any positive experience out there of the killing of blameless children? The infliction of terror and hideous physical pain on the helpless? The long-term postive benefits for humankind of creating a class of people who writhe in their heads with the memory of their dead loves?
Look at your own children. Do they deserve what's being done to the Others, the ones with the wrong parents? No, they don't.
And if we know they don't, and know that what's being done right now, at this instant, will guarantee that the inflictions will come to them as surely as the world turns, what the hell are we doing when we stick on our flag pins and lurch out to kick the asses of the peacemakers, those worthless bastards who don't want to set fire to our kids?
Don't we get it, at last? Men who will set fire to children at a distance, for money and a sickly dream of power, will set fire to our kids for a little more money, a little more power. These men have contempt for us, and every bloody lie we,re willing to swallow perpetuates their contempt and willingness to kill everything we love, whether by taking our money, deadening our souls with lies, or breaking our children to pieces in the street.
I watch this fool's parade of lying Neo Con fascists, vengeful bureaucrats. small-time think tank illiterateurs, screeching harpies and shameless thugs, all led by our shallow, vapid, secret, ignorant and purely evil frat boy sergeant-at-arms, and my head hurts so terribly I can think of nothing but my children and how it will be for them left to the tender mercies of these despoilers of God"these evil, self-satisfied, cowardly lords of a great Dream State of comfort for the right guys and a crushing iron wheel for the rest of us"slow, crushing death, you know? the kind they like. The kind that brings a secret sexual charge with it"a queasy tremor in their hidden genitalia.
But we kill because we,re fighting a war on terror, they say.
You can't fight a war on terror because terror is the weapon of those who have nothing to lose. You can't defeat a man who has nothing to lose and has been so brutalized himself by his own need for vengeance and respite that there is nothing he won't do--such as setting fire to your children.
So we have two antagonists--one is immensely powerful, though cumbersome, and the other is immensely weak, though swift and cunning. What do they have in common?
Either will happily burn your children in pursuit of the dream of holy power.
Again and again and again.
If the subject is other than love, you are not hearing the word of God.
How do you fight terrorism?
You simply stop doing the things that make it a preferred weapon, and that begins with ceasing to brutalize poor people, here or there..
What do we do in the Middle East? Well, we make it clear to the Arab emirates that it would be a wonderful thing if Palestine had money and a viable economy of its own; we contribute to Israel only the money it will need to help it detach itself from the Palestinian state; we cease flooding the area with high-tech weapons; we develop technologies which will ease us away from oil dependency; we speak to the downtrodden directly, as if they were people, and say that the guilt of centuries belongs to all of us and that it's time to stop doing the same things in the hope that just this once the outcome will be different.
We shun the minor demons of greed and brutality and the unspeakable monsters who would tell us that both are of God.
And in my rage and utter despair of the ugliness of the killing and lying and scheming and sheer, stinking hypocrisy that blankets America like a refinery cloud, I have to say, too, that these rotten, lying sons-of-bitches need not be killed, or have their children killed.
Because there is nothing in that direction but more of the same.
Counterpunch
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| Who Wins the Debates Should be Irrelevant |
| 10.09.04 (11:32 am) [edit] |
The question of who won the debates should be irrelevant. George Bush should be booed off whatever platform he's speaking from. The corridors and streets should be filled with people screaming for his impeachment. Petitions should have gone out long ago filled with millions of names calling for Bush to be removed from office. Yes, some petitons have been filed, there have been some people daring to take to the streets but oddly enough not enough to make a difference.
That this is not happening only proves huge numbers in America could care less that George Bush casually murdered thousands of Iraqi citizens on the basis of a lie. They can't wait to put him back in office to carry on with his imperialistic agenda. They don't care about the burned bodies of the children walking around with no arms or legs due to American bombs. It's not their child. They listen to George Bush add them to the list of sacrifices that must be made for his war on terrorism. Stupid people! You're only inviting disastor.
This fact can only increase the risk of terrorism. As we are seeing daily new groups of militants are rising up to fight American/Western hegemony. For every 2 that are caught 10 more rise up in their place. They can't be fought as we've seen in Iraq outside of destroying whole villages. Of course, the men, women and children living in said villages are seen as collatoral damage to the invaders but to the militants they are seen as more cause to fight.
While Mr. Bigley's family was doing all they could to get this old man released American troops bombed Falluja. Mr. Bigley didn't matter. The Bush/Blair way is to bomb the hell out of them. Just kill em' all. In spite of many in Iraq saying those they are fighting are predominantly Iraqi citizens who probably lost entire families in the invasion America continues to blast them without understanding.
Continue to throw your weight around, America. You will find that right rather than might will win the day in the end. It's about time.
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| Bush's Evolving Rationale |
| 10.08.04 (9:39 pm) [edit] |
President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue — whether the invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.
For those of you who don't understand. Bush and Cheney are now saying that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. If this doesn't make you stop, shake your head a few times and at least say..Hey, wait a minute! This is the reason President Bush sent our soldiers into war...well, I'm not sure there's any hope for you.
Bush's rationale for going to war continues to evolve (change, create mentally, develop). For many this seems to be acceptable.
Think about it...
Would anyone have agreed to the invasion if Bush/Cheney had used Saddam's abuse of the oil-for-food program as the reason? Of course not!
"You don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact." John Kerry
Wake up and smell the coffee people!
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| Tim Ryan: Why young people are afraid of the draft |
| 10.08.04 (9:04 pm) [edit] |
Mr. Ryan is talking truth.
Watch the video on Windows Media Player
Transcript:
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.
I rise in opposition of this bill, but I would like to clarify something. We are not trying to scare kids. This President's foreign policy is what is scaring the kids of this country. And people have said today, why are people believing this? Why are people believing this big Internet hoax?
It is the same people who told us that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11; the same people who told us Saddam Hussein had something to do with weapons of mass destruction; the same people who told us we would be able to use the oil for reconstruction money; the same people who told us we would be greeted as liberators, not occupiers; the same people, the same President who told us the Taliban is gone; the same President who told us that Poland is our ally 2 days before they pull out; the same President who tells us Iraq is going just great; the same President who tells us the economy is going just great; the same people who told us the tax cuts were going to create millions of jobs; the same people who told us that the Medicare program only cost $400 billion when it really cost $540 billion.
So please forgive us for believing what you are saying. Please forgive the students of this country for not believing what you are saying. Not one thing, not one thing about this war that has been told to the American people or that has been told to these college students has been true. Not one thing. Bremer says we need more troops. The Pentagon says we need more troops, and this President cannot get them from the international community. There is only one option left. Let us be honest with the American people.
Via BlondeSense Excellent, thank you! She has other links available if you don't have Windows Media Player.
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| Bush Record Fails the Test |
| 10.08.04 (11:30 am) [edit] |
Looking back at the past 3 3/4 years, I understand some things:
People who think it's a good idea to start turning Medicare over to drug manufacturers, insurance companies and for-profit health-industry conglomerates and open up Social Security for plundering by the brokerage-investment industry should favor Bush. People who believe that loosening regulations on polluters keeps our air and water clean should favor Bush. People who think the best way to help Americans who are hungry, homeless, sick and impoverished is to bleed aid programs dry and rebate taxes to the super-rich should favor Bush.
People who believe America can remain the world leader in science by subjecting scientists and their research to religious and political litmus tests should favor Bush. People who think that negligent corporations should be free to hurt consumers with defective products and that the injured should be denied their day in court should favor Bush. People who are convinced that government works better when career public servants take orders from political hacks and special-interest lackeys should favor Bush.
And people who believe that government should mind its own business, except when it comes to their neighbors' reproductive choices and sexual orientation, should favor Bush.
Many things, however, I do not understand, and at the top of that long list is this:
Why would anyone who is concerned about the safety of his family, the security of our country and the fight against Islamist terrorism favor Bush? His administration's record on these issues has been a litany of incompetence and failure.
Speaking in Des Moines last month, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that electing the wrong person in November could increase the danger that "we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set ... ." Bush owns nine months of that mind-set.
It's not fair to blame Bush for those attacks, although six of the 10 "missed opportunities" to stop them identified by the Sept. 11 commission occurred on his watch. But it is fair to hold him responsible for the rigidity of his White House bureaucracy and the lackadaisical attitude toward al-Qaida, both of which made America more vulnerable before Sept. 11, 2001.
The U.S. military won a stellar victory in Afghanistan in 2001, but Bush failed to follow through on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and, much more important, failed to fulfill commitments to secure and rebuild the country. As a result, tribal warlords again control much of the country, Taliban and al-Qaida elements continue to terrorize areas near the Pakistani border, the country is a cesspool of opium production, and the elections scheduled for Saturday are already tainted.
American forces delivered another victory in the spring of 2003 in Iraq, only to see their triumph dissolve into the wanton violence and chaos of today because of repeated administration mistakes.
Bush has blamed faulty prewar intelligence for his mistaken belief that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction required that it be disarmed. But even at the time, branches of the intelligence community were raising doubts about some information and the reliability of some sources. Bush failed to recognize the gravity and implications of these concerns and started the war anyway.
Bush failed to adopt detailed plans drawn up by the State Department for securing and managing the occupation of Iraq. He also failed to heed the warnings of seasoned commanders that more troops would be needed to maintain the peace. These failures, compounded by the hasty disbanding of the Iraqi army, have allowed competing factions of Iraqi insurgents to band together and mount the coordinated, lethal guerrilla war that ravages U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians alike.
Bush's failure to abide by the terms of the Geneva Conventions created confused conditions that contributed to the abuse, torture and deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's defiance of the Constitution in handling prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba, led to a stern rebuke by the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, Arab governments are even more reluctant to provide the cooperation we need to fight terrorism effectively. Meanwhile, incidents of terrorism worldwide have increased since Bush took office.
Here at home, Bush has failed to provide the resources necessary to equip first responders, secure hazardous chemical plants and many nuclear installations or inspect more than a paltry percentage of shipping containers entering U.S. ports. And we're still looking for the anthrax killer.
Bush doesn't like the idea of accountability. None of his cadre of principal advisers - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to name just two - has been fired, despite their repeated, flagrant errors.
In a 2002 interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward (thanks to syndicated columnist Richard Reeves for recently citing it), Bush described the dynamic in Oval Office meetings: "I'm the commander," he said. "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
Fine. That's what elections are for.
FortWayne
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| Why Don't Americans Care? |
| 10.08.04 (11:18 am) [edit] |
Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power.
Most Americans, in other words, have no idea what the hell a Halliburton is. Or a Karl Rove. Or a Donny "Shriveled Soul" Rumsfeld. Or a Lockheed Martin. Or a Carlysle Group. Or have any idea that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Or that WMDs were never found. Or that President Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in U.S. history. Or that Jesus thinks Dubya is "sort of a dink." Or where Iraq is on a map.
Fact is, in the past decade, TV-news ratings -- cable and network, combined -- has shrunk to a fraction of its former numbers. Newspaper subscriptions have been either flat or dropping for just about as long. Newsmagazines, radio, historical nonfiction: flat or dropping fast. Even the Internet, that vast teeming customizable firestorm of news and info streaming in from all over the planet, even the awesome Net draws far more people to its porn and gossip and shopping departments than any e-news joint could ever wet dream.
Is this unfair? Does it sound elitist and biased? It's not. There have been studies. And reports. And alarming indicators of all kinds telling us time and again that, for example, fully 50 percent of eligible Americans don't even bother to vote (a 15 percent drop since 1964), and many have no idea who's on the Supreme Court or what Congress does, and many can't even point to France on a globe.
Voter turnout, comparatively, in Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from 75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby.
You've seen the headlines. Alarming numbers of American high school students can't even identify the current vice president, much less name a half dozen presidents from history. Far too many citizens can't name the capital of their own home state or recognize their own senators, much less discern how Bush's environmental policy is poisoning their water or how Ashcroft wants to scan their email and tap their phones and suck the pith from their souls. A whopping 49 percent of Americans aged 18-25 can't find New York on a map, and 11 percent can't even locate the United States. Now that's patriotism.
Maybe this, then, is the most pressing question of our time: How to get the vast majority of Americans to care? To pay attention? To read? To effect change and demand accountability from bumbling spoon-fed leaders who count on voter apathy and force-fed ignorance to cram through their environmental rollbacks and homophobic laws and draconian Patriot Acts? Is it even possible? Are we too far gone?
How to make America more like, say, Europe, where knowledge of current events and political intrigue is not only hugely important to the vast majority of citizens but is also deeply woven into the very fabric of daily life, an integral part of the educational system and the café conversation and the workplace water-cooler chats, and to ignore it is considered, well, irresponsible and even a mite traitorous?
True, part of why they care so much is because America is the foremost bully on the block and it pays to know what makes the bully tick. And whine. And kill. In short, as the theory goes, most Americans don't give a damn because we're on top and we own everything and have more nukes than anyone and we're never the ones getting invaded. It's our unofficial motto -- America: We Don't Have to Care.
read the rest
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| US 'desperate' to get EU support on Iraq |
| 10.07.04 (2:36 pm) [edit] |
One of Washington’s top EU watchers Philip H. Gordon, has thrashed the current Bush Administration’s isolationist stance and urged the EU not to waste the opportunity presented in the aftermath of US elections to compromise over Iraq.
"We desperately need European support in the current international issues", assured the Director of the Centre of the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's oldest think tanks, speaking at a conference on Transatlantic Relations in Lisbon.
"The Bush administration is starting to realize that the price of our isolation is too high", he added.
Mr Gordon has been campaigning for a Roosevelt-like "New Deal" to save what he considers to be the "most successful alliance in History" for over a year. He warned the audience that the future of world security would depend on the successful relation between the two powers.
"After our election, whoever wins is going to have to come to Europe and ask: under what conditions would you be prepared to help in Iraq", he said.
In his opinion, Europe should not waste this opportunity to reinforce its presence in the Iraqi peace-building effort, strengthening the transatlantic bond.
He conceded that a Kerry-Edwards administration would be better suited for this rapprochement, but claimed that even the current Bush-Cheney administration would have to reach out to the international community if re-elected.
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| Clare Short: Iraq rebels just like French Resistance |
| 10.07.04 (1:19 pm) [edit] |
Former Cabinet minister Clare Short is at the centre of another political storm after comparing the insurgents in Iraq to freedom fighters.
The outspoken Labour rebel likened their cause to the French Resistance in the Second World War.
There was outrage among fellow politicians when she went on to claim that the IRA had "never targeted civilians".
In an interview with a newspaper in Dubai, the outspoken former international development secretary said that she "understood" the anger of Arabs who embraced Islamic militancy.
Ms Short said: "I think the killing of civilians is always wrong . . . but I think the cause is just.
"I understand their anger completely. My father came from Northern Ireland . . . and I understand why people think `I can't get justice in any other way'.
"I think it's always wrong to target civilians . . . because, even when you understood the IRA, they never targeted civilians.
"That's a terrible moral deterioration that's taken place.
Occupation
"But I understand the anger and the demand for action, and it's not good enough for the world to say state violence is OK and non-state violence is not OK.
"The American public fought against British colonialism with violence, the Free French fought against German occupation with violence, the Palestinian people are entitled to resist occupation, I mean, it's in international law (and) the Iraqi people are entitled (to resist occupation)."
The Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood also claimed that Tony Blair had "engaged in a whole series of half-truths and deceptions" to get support for the invasion of Iraq.
She said: "At the same time he was telling his party, Cabinet, Parliament and the country that he wanted to avoid war, (that) we would proceed through the UN, (that) we were determined to get the implementation of the Road Map, he had already given his word to Bush."
She predicted continuing bloodshed in the Arab world for "potentially decades" and the fall of governments in the Middle East.
Ms Short quit the Cabinet over Iraq in May 2003. She denied that her anti-war stance had hampered preparations for post-war reconstruction in the country.
Manchester Online
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| Influx of Wounded Strains VA |
| 10.07.04 (1:12 pm) [edit] |
Thousands of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental health problems are encountering a benefits system that is already overburdened, and officials and veterans' groups are concerned that the challenge could grow as the nation remains at war.
The disability benefits and health care systems that provide services for about 5 million American veterans have been overloaded for decades and have a current backlog of more than 300,000 claims. And because they were mobilized to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 150,000 National Guard and reservist veterans had become eligible for health care and benefits as of Aug. 1. That number is rising.
At the same time, President Bush's budget for 2005 calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles benefits claims, and some veterans report long waits for benefits and confusing claims decisions.
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| UN Staff Begs For Iraq Withdrawal |
| 10.07.04 (1:08 pm) [edit] |
Two organisations representing more than 60,000 United Nations staff members have urged Secretary-General Kofi Annan to pull all UN staff out of Iraq because of the "unprecedented" risk to their safety and security.
In a joint letter to Mr Annan, the staff organisations cited a dramatic escalation in attacks in Iraq and said the UN regrettably "has become a direct target, one that is particularly prone to attacks by ruthless extremist terrorist factions".
"Just one staff member is one staff member too many in Iraq," they said.
"We ... appeal to your good judgment to ensure that no further staff members be sent to Iraq and that those already deployed be instructed to leave as soon as possible."
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| Army Sends Weaponless Reserve Unit To Iraq |
| 10.07.04 (12:33 pm) [edit] |
About 800 members of the 98th Army Reserve Division from Rochester, New York will begin a year-long mission in Iraq next month.
The unit, which normally trains reserve and active-duty soldiers in the U.S., will find itself training Iraq’s new army.
The 98th is a non-combat unit that doesn't even have its own weapons or vehicles.
"This is a hard war and we, frankly, inside the Army Reserve have been not properly prepared for it,” said Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the U.S. Army Reserve.
KWTX
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| Paperwork Unit off to Iraq |
| 10.07.04 (12:28 pm) [edit] |
A Sacramento-based Army National Guard unit that usually processes paperwork for other soldiers going overseas was called up to serve for more than a year in Iraq.
The 79th Personnel Services Detachment was briefed Sunday about preparing to leave for Fort Lewis in Washington state where the 50 members will be notified of their duties for an 18-month assignment in Iraq.
The soldiers were told how to apply for life insurance and were told how much their children and spouses would receive if they were killed in action.
The Examiner
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| The Final Verdict on WMD |
| 10.07.04 (12:15 pm) [edit] |
Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of WMD or even the ability to produce them at the time of last year's invasion.
The report, delivered to Congress, concluded that Saddam's weapons programmes were less advanced in March 2003 - on the eve of the invasion - than in 1998 when international weapons inspectors left the country. It also found that Saddam's nuclear weapons programme had deteriorated since the Gulf war in 1991.
Mr. Bush now:
"There was a real risk that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks. That was a risk we could not take."
Mr. Bush before the invasion:
In a key speech in October 2002 preparing America for war, Mr Bush said Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.
"We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas."
US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said that not only did Iraq not have an active weapons programme but it had not pursued banned weapons since weapons inspections began in 1991.
"What you're telling us is that in addition to having no weapons of mass destruction stocks before the war, Saddam chose not to have those weapons," said Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the committee.
"Those are stunning statements," said Levin. "That is a 180-degree difference from what the Bush administration was saying before the war."
"The fundamental conclusion of the ISG effort means that the administration's two major arguments for going to war against Iraq were incorrect," Senator Carl Levin said.
Duelfer told the panel he found the remnants of a former weapons programme in delapidated condition, which could have been reconstituted at a future date if Saddam had the opportunity.
But lawmakers angrily noted that that risk was far from the immediate threat the White House had insisted the Iraqi leader posed at the time of the US invasion.
"We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction," Levin said.
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the U.S.-led invasion last year, a decline wrought by the first Gulf War and years of international sanctions, the chief U.S. weapons hunter found.
And what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.
"In short, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
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| George W. Bush & the “Mandate of Heaven” |
| 10.06.04 (3:22 pm) [edit] |
Since at least the epic of Job described in the Bible, humans have tried to understand why their God has inflicted cruelties upon believers. Many years ago, I recall my daughter of almost four, after we had been in an auto accident which injured my year-and-a-half-old son, asking my mother what had he done wrong to deserve such punishment from God?
Empires, such as that here in America, exalted by the neoconservative faithful such as William Kristol, are especially in need of rationalizations to explain the awful things happening abroad such as global “terrorism,” as well as the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add to that the most unusual hurricane season in decades, where such entities as “Ivan” don’t easily die, but are reborn and circle back, and some may ask what has America’s fundamentalist leadership under George W. Bush done to make God so angry at this nation?
The Chinese Empire, even as its elite outgrew primitive religion millennia earlier, was still faced with answering this same question. Since they had no intention of doing away with the institutions of empire, their only answer was to regularly replace specific emperors. Thus was developed the concept of the “Mandate of Heaven,” which linked nicely with the dominant neo-Confucianism of the Empire.
The Chinese believed that good things happened to the people and their Empire when the leaders lived lives of “truth” and “virtue.” When they did not, they had lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and needed to be replaced. Whether or not George W. Bush ever had such a “Mandate of Heaven,” even if he believes that he has—perhaps it was “bestowed” upon him by the Supreme Court certifying his election in 2000—he certainly seems to have lost it since then.
Now blathering on by Bush in speeches about virtue, or writing about it by the sanctimonious, compulsive gambler, William Bennett, or praying about it (or is it preying?) as do other U.S. leaders, is not a substitute for virtuous behavior.
These Chinese ideas, having filtered back to Europe in the 18th century Enlightenment, played a role in the discussions by American leaders in the founding of the republic. Thomas Jefferson was especially taken with them, talking about a “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue,” and an educational system of government schools which as the sinologist H.G. Creel noted, was clearly borrowed from China.
As the great economist Lord Bauer once mentioned to me, Alexis de Tocqueville, that insightful observer of America, when he saw these developments in early 19th century France, called it, “la systéme chinois” (the Chinese system), and the Japanese, in the late 19th century, searching for Western models, adopted the French educational system. What irony, Confucianism by way of France! Nations may “clash,” but civilizations tend to borrow from each other.
It was the usually dour John Adams, who in their correspondence, questioned Jefferson’s verbal constructs. He noted that there were all kinds of talents, not just the intellectual/academic ones favored by Jefferson, even a king’s mistress displayed certain talents, but most importantly, “how do you teach virtue?”
There is only one answer to Adams, as Confucius understood. Virtue is taught, or not taught, by the young emulating the behavior of their parents and elders, and by the people observing the actions of their leaders.
In this regard, has the U.S. reached new depths of degradation in pursuing an unprovoked war in Iraq and the declaration of perpetual war globally? Certainly, George Bush has lost the “Mandate” of most of the rest of the world, outside of a few client states and toadies; the President’s recent reception before the U.N. made that quite evident.
At home Bush piles on more and more “bread and circuses”, combining huge farm, education, Medicare and other pork and corporate welfare schemes with tax breaks mostly for the wealthier (but even a smidgen for the middle classes, as did the Caesars of old) with a paper money inflationary system (also borrowed from China). If one counts Off-Budget Expenditures (OBE) the U.S. government now owes over $72 trillion to its own people and the world, which the government will probably attempt to inflate away in the future if the system itself doesn’t collapse in the short run.
Just as with those empires of old, which sought what the historian Carroll Quigley (Bill Clinton’s guru at Georgetown University) called “Universal Empire,” that is, not just imperial centralization, but hegemony over their existing “Core and Periphery,” which today literally means the entire world, I believe that the U.S. has not only failed, but is in decline.
The Chinese understood that imperial states come and go. The great centralized, bureaucratic empires of Rome, China, Spain, Britain, and Russia have broken apart or declined.
Whether in Quigley’s terminology our social, political and economic institutions can once again be made into viable “instruments of expansion,” is the real systemic question facing us. George Bush did not create these tendencies that go well back into our history, but he has greatly accelerated and exacerbated them. In short, he has clearly lost the “Mandate of Heaven”!
But, who will tell him that he has no clothes? He rejected his father’s advice on Iraq. Perhaps, others in his family, which protected and elevated a mediocrity, his mother or his wife, will tell him he has lost the “Mandate”; even if, in a so-called Democracy, the voice of the electorate is considered the “Voice of God”!
But, perhaps it is really the American people themselves who have lost the “Mandate of Heaven,” since, after all, it is they who elect U.S. government leaders. Whether the American nation can be perhaps the first in history to eschew empire and return to a decentralized republic will be the great question facing us in the 21st century. Can Americans find leaders with virtue and vision who can restore the “Mandate of Heaven”?
William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University.
The Independent Institute
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| Neocons Want US Military Presence in the Middle East |
| 10.06.04 (3:08 pm) [edit] |
They'll do anything....
by Ed Ciaccio
I recently read an article arguing that the bloody chaos in Iraq is intentional on the part of the neocons so that US forces will be stuck there in 14 permanent US military bases and the largest US embassy complex on earth, all being built by those great superpatriots Bechtel and Halliburton, in order to provide a base of operations against Syria and Iran, as well as to control the entire Middle East, especially access to its oil and natural gas sources.
Whether or not its argument is sound, the results are the same.
Iran now has US forces in Afghanistan on its eastern border, US naval forces on its southern coast in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, US forces on its northern border in Turkey, as well as (and most Americans are unaware of this) in Azerbaijan, around and on the Caspian Sea (with much oil & natural gas there which the US is busily extracting & transporting), and in Turkmenistan (there are even US troops now stationed in formerly Soviet Georgia!). With Pakistan also a US ally, though a troublesome one, we have Iran completely surrounded. It's no mystery to me why Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons. They've learned well from our action against Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, and our reluctance to act against North Korea, which has a few nuclear weapons.
This US military presence in the Middle East is exactly what the neocons want, to supposedly not only add to Israel's defense (actually, Ariel Sharon & the Likud Party's defense), but to give the US a longterm presence in the Middle East regardless of what happens in Saudi Arabia (where we have now begun to withdraw our military forces).
The oil and natural gas in the Middle East and former southern republics of the now-defunct USSR (the Caspian Sea area, especially) are our "vital interests" and part of our national security (see The Carter Doctrine http://www.fact-index.com/c/c...) and our way not only of exerting leverage there, but also over Russia, China, India, and Japan, all of which will need more oil and natural gas in the 21st Century and all of which will compete with the US economically for the rest of this century.
Hence, the (logical?) extension of The Carter Doctrine is The Bush Doctrine, the most radical and aggressive transformation of US foreign/national security policy since the Monroe Doctrine (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc... for The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which is based wholly [no surprise] on the 2000 position paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses" of the Project for a New American Century [PNAC] found at http://www.newamericancentury... Page 63 of this paper chillingly states: " Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." So 9/11 provided their "catastrophic and catalyzing event," all too quickly and conveniently [for their purposes], in my opinion.)
These neocons, who are truly "fossil fools," cannot seem to accept that not only is global oil well past its peak stage of world production (hence their maniacal drive to drill in Montana as well as the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge), but that we now have the means to begin to provide alternative energy sources which will also avoid sending our kids around the world to fight energy wars (see U.S. Can Eliminate Oil Use in a Few Decades http://www.truthout.org/docs_...).
Blinded by their lust for power and greed, these neocons now in power are capable of taking any actions to preserve/expand that power. Given the history of the ruling class/power elite (both Democrats and Republicans) in our country, especially since 1898, when Hearst and McKinley worked together to expand the US empire to the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (early corporate media-government complicity), but also shown by the examples of Operation Northwoods (see "U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba" which can be found at: http://abcnews.go.com/section... and also http://www.whatreallyhappened... ) as well as the intentional exposing of US soldiers and civilians to radiation during nuclear tests in Utah in the 1950's (see http://www.fair.org/mediabeat... as well as http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/... and http://www.angelfire.com/tx/a...), and the secret testing of various chemical/biological warfare agents on unsuspecting American soldiers and civilians (see http://www.dissidentvoice.org... and http://www.apfn.org/apfn/expe...), they are capable of doing anything to any or all of us to further their "ends".
If these "leaders" would consider killing us, their own fellow US citizens, to start a war of reclaiming empire (Operation Northwoods); experiment on us using radiation and chemical/biological agents (1940's-1960's); lie to us to get us involved in unnecessary wars of empire which kill Americans as well as "our enemies" (1898, Vietnam, Iraq); and allow catastrophe to occur to precipitate their strategy and policies (9/11); they will easily and remorselessly sacrifice the children, women, and men of other countries (the Philippines, Guatemala, East Timor, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran) for their ends.
These people (the ruling class/power elite) are capable of anything and everything, so we must be prepared for the worst.
Correspondences.org
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| Top PM aide: Gaza plan aims to freeze the peace process |
| 10.06.04 (9:11 am) [edit] |
By Ari Shavit
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass has told Haaretz.
"And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
Weisglass, who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, was speaking in an interview with Haaretz for the Friday Magazine.
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Asked why the disengagement plan had been hatched, Weisglass replied: "Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector's group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot's letter]. Really our finest young people."
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| Blind in Iraq, eyeless in Gaza |
| 10.06.04 (9:04 am) [edit] |
By Simojn Tisdall
At first glance the violence in Jabaliya in Palestine and in the Iraqi town of Samarra appear to be unconnected. The Israeli army's incursion into northern Gaza looks like just another deadeningly familiar episode in the unending conflict between Palestinians and Jews.
The US-led weekend assault on insurgents in mainly Sunni Samarra seems to be broadly typical of the continuing turmoil in Iraq. But peer beneath the headlines and it is clear that these ostensibly separate events are far from routine, and are closely linked in many ways, directly and indirectly.
In both Jabaliya and Samarra modern armies with state-of-the-art weaponry and unanswerable air power attacked residential areas, causing numerous civilian casualties. In both cases the degree of lethal force used was grossly disproportionate to the assessed threat. Three US and two Iraqi battalions - about 5,000 men - were sent against 200-300 insurgents in Samarra.
In Gaza, in order to deter the sort of vicious home-made Hamas rocket attacks that killed two children in Sderot last week, the Israelis have deployed an estimated 2,000 soldiers and 200 tanks, and are threatening an escalation.
In both places, enormous damage has been done to homes and infrastructure, including basic services. The Palestinians are appealing for international assistance for what they say is a developing "humanitarian tragedy".
The Iraqi Red Crescent, reporting that 500 families were forced to flee Samarra, said the Iraqi interim government had asked for emergency aid. Present horrors apart, Jabaliya and Samarra both offer disturbing portents, and both have considerable political significance.
In Gaza, Israel seems intent on establishing a buffer zone on Palestinian land, the equivalent of the wall with which it is enclosing the West Bank and which, despite official denials, is prospectively just as permanent.
This is linked in turn to the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's controversial unilateral plan to evacuate most of the Gaza Strip next year while consolidating Israel's grip on growing swaths of the West Bank.
The US attack on Samarra, a relatively easy target, appears to be a dress rehearsal for coming attempts to seize control of better defended insurgent strongholds such as Falluja, Sadr City and Ramadi.
On the success of this campaign rests, to a large degree, the Bush administration's strategy for creating a democratic post-Saddam Iraq. And thus are the personal political fortunes of Mr Sharon and the US president, George Bush, bound up to a critical degree in what happens in places such as Jabaliya and Samarra.
Both men are fighting to convince sceptical electorates, and their own parties, that they know what they are doing. When elected, Mr Sharon promised to achieve security for Israelis. Mr Bush declared victory in Iraq more than a year ago.
Each man has a credibility gap. To fill it, it seems ongoing civilian carnage is not too high a price to pay. Jabaliya and Samarra may also be seen as linked symbols of a bigger problem. In Iraq and Palestine, two allied occupying powers - and democracies, at that - act with questionable or no legal authority and with evident impunity.
Resolutions and protests from the UN are ignored. European and Arab governments wring their hands impotently. Tony Blair is reduced to hinting at better times to come. Yet the bald fact remains: the US and Israel behave they way they do because they can; there is simply nobody to stop them.
And just as Israel's unbending stance, favouring force over dialogue, threatens a spreading conflict, drawing in Syria and Lebanon, so does an aggressive US policy, confusing power and legitimacy, intensify the risk of an Iraqi fragmentation embroiling Iran, Turkey and other neighbours.
Jabaliya and Samarra, officially, are distinct theatres in the wider "war on terror". But far from being unconnected, to many in the Arab world they look dismayingly like integral parts of a western crusade against both Muslims and Islam in general, to which violent resistance is the only possible response.
On both sides of the divide this downward spiral creates a kind of unseeing rage to which all are held hostage: blind in Iraq, eyeless in Gaza. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
Dawn
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| Saddam not linked to top terrorist |
| 10.06.04 (8:59 am) [edit] |
A new CIA assessment has found no conclusive evidence that Iraq's deposed leader Saddam Hussein gave safe haven before the war to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist with links to al-Qaeda.
The reappraisal, which was based on a mix of new information and a reassessment of old intelligence, raised new questions about US rationales for invading Iraq that highlighted alleged links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
US President George W. Bush and other top officials inside his administration contended that Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad before the war was the best evidence of Saddam's links to al-Qaeda.
"This mix of the new information and the reassessment - it does suggest the relationship was not as previously described," said a US official today.
"But I want to emphasise the point, it does not reach definitive conclusions."
Knight Ridder newspapers, which first disclosed the new assessment, said the new information included the arrests in 2002 and 2003 of three al-Zarqawi associates by the regime.
There are now also doubts about whether Zarqawi received medical attention at a Baghdad hospital in May 2002 as administration officials have asserted.
Agence France-Presse
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| Bush Allies Admit War Blunders |
| 10.06.04 (8:55 am) [edit] |
America's former proconsul in Baghdad delivered a damning critique of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq yesterday, saying the US had made two grave errors of judgment in the early days of the war.
Paul Bremer, who was America's most senior official in Baghdad until the handover last June, said the US committed two major blunders which compromised the course of events in Iraq: it went to war without enough troops and it did not contain the looting and violence after Saddam Hussein's regime fell.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Mr Bremer told a conference of insurance agents in West Virginia. "We never had enough troops on the ground."
Mr Bremer is the latest in a stream of US government officials to voice doubts on the administration's strategy on Iraq, but such criticism is surprising from a man who says he "strongly supports" the re-election of President George Bush .
The comments, surfacing only hours ahead of last night's vice-presidential debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney, were very badly timed for the administration - and a boon for the Democrats.
Mr Cheney is widely regarded as the architect of the war and came under renewed pressure to account for what the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, yesterday called a "long list of mistakes" on Iraq. "I hope Mr Cheney can take responsibility," Mr Kerry said.
Mr Bremer's comments are also a belated rebuke to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who overruled his army chief of staff and other military officials by opting for a smaller invasion force, and who famously dismissed reports of looting in April 2003 by saying "Stuff happens" and "Freedom is untidy".
Mr Rumsfeld attempted yesterday to undo the damage from statements made hours earlier, in which he acknowledged there was no connection between al-Qaida and Saddam. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," Mr Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations .
The statement - a u-turn on Mr Rumsfeld's assertion in September 2002 that the CIA had "bulletproof" evidence of a connection - appeared in line with a new intelligence review that failed to find a connection.
Mr Rumsfeld later said his comments to the council had been "misunderstood".
More attention was devoted to the comments from Mr Bremer, who shared Mr Cheney's and Mr Rumsfeld's views on Iraq, and who maintained yesterday that America was right to go to war.
The White House yesterday refused to say whether Mr Bremer had asked for more troops during his frequent visits to Washington.
Meanwhile, Mr Bremer released a statement claiming that his remarks were intended for a private audience, and that the US now had sufficient troops on the ground.
He also reaffirmed that the war in Iraq is an "integral part of fighting this war on terror".
However, Mr Bremer began expressing doubts about the administration's strategy before his speech to the insurance conference. During a September 17 appearance at Indiana's DePauw University he accused the administration of disregarding his advice to bring in more troops.
"The single most important change - the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout [the occupation]," Mr Bremer was reported to have said.
The debate on America's preparations for war on Iraq was opened in early 2003 when the then army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, said the invasion needed an occupying force of several hundred thousand soldiers - much to the fury of Mr Rumsfeld whose battle plans called for a streamlined force.
In January, the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, testified that western intelligence agencies "were all wrong" in their assessment that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Last month, a former CIA official Paul Pillar told a private dinner that the White House disregarded intelligence reports two months before the invasion warning that a war could unleash a violent insurgency.
Mr Bremer claimed that US planners had failed to anticipate the chaos that would follow Saddam's departure, saying that planners were more concerned with preventing a refugee exodus and a humanitarian crisis that did not arise. "There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said.
Guardian
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| Republican Lincoln Chafee won't be voting for George Bush |
| 10.04.04 (11:55 pm) [edit] |
One day after the Supreme Court sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush, his running mate, Dick Cheney, went to the Capitol for a private lunch with five moderate Republican senators. The agenda he laid out that day in December 2000 stunned Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, sending Mr. Chafee on a painful journey of political conscience that, he said in an interview last week, has culminated with his decision not to vote for Mr. Bush in November.
"I literally was close to falling off my chair," Mr. Chafee said, recounting the vice president's proposals for steep tax cuts, missile defense programs and abandoning the Kyoto environmental accords. "It was no room for discussion. I said, 'Well, you're going to need us; it's a 50-50 Senate, you're going to need us moderates.' He said, 'Well, we need everybody.' ''
For Mr. Chafee, who was a prep school buddy of the president's brother Jeb and whose father, the late Senator John Chafee, was close to the first President Bush, that day was the beginning of an estrangement with the president, whom he had worked to elect. In the months since, he has opposed Mr. Bush on everything from tax cuts to gay marriage and the war in Iraq. Now, this life-long Republican has concluded that he cannot cast his ballot for the leader of his party.
"I'm a pro-choice, antiwar, antideficit Republican.
Lincoln Chafee
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| Understanding the Kyoto Protocol |
| 10.04.04 (11:37 pm) [edit] |
Russia's government approved the Kyoto Protocol and sent the climate change pact to the State Duma lower house of parliament for endorsement.
Kyoto needs Russian backing to come into force after it was weakened by a U.S. pullout in 2001.
What is the Kyoto Protocol?
It is a pact agreed by governments at a 1997 U.N. conference in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during the five-year period 2008-2012. A total of 122 nations have ratified the pact or acceded to it, according to U.N. data.
Is it the first agreement of its kind?
Governments originally agreed to tackle climate change at an "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At that meeting, leaders created the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which set a non-binding goal of stabilizing emissions at 1990 levels by 2000, a goal not met overall. The Kyoto protocol is the follow-up to that and is the first legally binding global agreement to cut greenhouse gases.
So it's legally binding?
It is binding once it has been ratified by 55 percent of the signatories which must between them represent 55 percent of developed countries' carbon dioxide emissions. Kyoto has surpassed the requirement of signatories but has so far only received pledges from nations representing 44 percent of total emissions.
Russia holds the key to Kyoto's success or failure with its 17 percent share of emissions. President Bush pulled out in 2001, arguing that Kyoto was too expensive and unfairly excludes developing nations. The United States is the biggest polluter with a 36 percent share.
How will it be enforced?
Under a 2001 deal made by environment ministers in Bonn, Germany, if countries emit more gases than allowed under their targets at the end of 2012, they will be required to make the cuts, and 30 percent more, in the second commitment period which is due to start in 2013. They rejected the idea of a financial penalty.
Does every country have to reduce emissions by 5.2%?
No, only 39 countries - relatively developed ones - have target levels for the 2008-12 period, adhering to the principle established under the UNFCCC that richer countries should take the lead. Each country negotiated different targets, with Russia aiming for stabilization at 1990 levels and the European Union trying for an eight percent cut.
How are they doing so far?
Most countries are lagging their targets under Kyoto. The European Commission said in December, for instance, that 13 of the then 15 members of the European Union were likely to overshoot the target. Only Britain and Sweden were on track.
What are these "greenhouse gases?"
Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. The main one is carbon dioxide (CO2), most of which comes from burning fuel. The protocol also covers methane (CH4), much of which comes from agriculture and waste dumps, and nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly a result of fertilizer use.
Three industrial gases used in various applications, such as refrigerants, heat conductors and insulators, are also included - they are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
What happens to countries that miss the target?
The protocol provides for "flexible mechanisms" - ways for countries to reach their targets without actually reducing emissions at home.
These include emissions trading - where one country buys the right to emit from another country which has already reduced its emissions sufficiently and has "spare" emissions reductions.
Another is the "clean development mechanism" where developed countries can earn credits to offset against their targets by fundin | |
