An American Icon: Gore Vidal on Italy, Iraq - and Why He Hates George Bush

An American Icon: Gore Vidal on Italy, Iraq - and Why He Hates George Bush

by Peter Popham

The old fellow, incredibly, is as movie-star handsome as ever; even the lateral cleft that opens in his right cheek when he smiles or (more commonly) winces at the foulness of the world, only seems to enhance his glamour. The baritone voice remains robust and musical. Gore Vidal is not growing slack or fat or even particularly wrinkled in his old age, but instead seems to be taking on the quality of granite; taking up his place on Mount Rushmore even while still alive. I meet him at the Casa della Letteratura just off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele in central Rome, where he has been holding court for most of the morning. He is in Rome to appear at the city's famous festival of literature, under the arches of the semi-ruined Basilica di Massenzio which dates from 4th century AD and stands next to the Colosseum. He is billed to give a pre-reading press conference here, but he has turned it into a series of interviews instead: with a keen awareness of what journalists want from him. He is parked at one side of the desk in his wheelchair, immensely dapper in a tawny suit and matching tie. Gore Vidal (Photo/the Guardian / UK) As everyone knows, Vidal for many years spent much of the time in Italy - then two years ago he moved out after losing both his long-time companion, Howard Austen, and the ability to walk. He moved back to southern California on a permanent basis. I asked him if he saw things in his homeland differently now that he no longer lived abroad. "I was never an expatriate," he replies. "I was never considered to be that by anyone except for the far right. I had a house in southern Italy and another house in southern California - but in right-wing circles, that's enough to be considered an expat. America was what I always wrote about." How is it, then, to live full-time in the United States? "If you care about America it's dreadful," he said. "If you are making money you don't care. "Benjamin Franklin was shown the new American constitution, and he said, 'I don't like it, but I will vote for it because we need something right now. But this constitution in time will fail, as all such efforts do. And it will fail because of the corruption of the people, in a general sense.' And that is what it has come to now, exactly as Franklin predicted." We have arrived in short order at Vidal's core message. As he points out, he has "lived for three-quarters of the 20th century and a third of the history of the United States", and listening to him talk one feels in the presence of history as with few Americans. Companion to his blind grandfather Thomas Gore, a prominent Democratic senator, when he was still a young boy, backgammon partner of John F Kennedy (to whom he was related), friend and screenplay writer to Fellini, brave pioneer in putting homosexuality at the centre of his fiction ... Even now, aged 80 and though confined to his wheelchair, he refuses to give up his place centre stage. He remains the Bush administration's most pugnacious and learned and contemptuous enemy. Nobody has put the case against the neocons with more passion or precision. Why is it so dreadful to live in America, I asked. "We have been deprived of our franchise," he says. "The election was stolen in both 2000 and 2004, because of electronic voting machinery which can be easily fixed. We've had two illegitimate elections in a row ... "Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarised, everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of the government are in the hands of this junta. "Whatever you are," he goes on, "they say you are the reverse. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam - but they spent millions of dollars proving that John Kerry, who was a genuine war hero whatever you think of his politics, was a coward. "This is what happens when you have control of the media, and I have never known the media more vicious, stupid and corrupt than they are now." Gore Vidal has been lured back to Italy by Maria Ida Gaeta, the director of the Massenzio festival, who has a genius for attracting big names. He told her that the semi-ruined Basilica of Massenzio was the first place he saw in Rome on his first visit to the city at the age of 12. So this return would appear to have the character of a sentimental visit - except that Mr Vidal does not do sentiment. I asked him if there was anything he missed about Italy since moving permanently to California two years ago. "It's just a place," he says, the disdainful cleft opening in his cheek. "I'm not very sentimental about places." Come, Mr Vidal, try pulling the other one. For most of the year, for the best part of 40 years, he shared with Howard Austen a villa called La Rondinaia, the Swallow's Nest, rising from the steep cliffs to give infinite views of the hazy Tyrrhenian Sea and the next rocky, serpentine twist of the famously beautiful coast south of Naples; the sort of placewhich spells heaven to anybody who has ever yearned to get out of the rain and the smog. Vidal's life in La Rondinaia was the long culmination of his Italian period, which began in 1959 when the Hollywood director William Wyler hired him, along with the British playwright Christopher Fry, to work on the script of Ben-Hur. He moved to Rome to do the job. "Further down the corridor from my office," he recalls in an extract from a new and so far unpublished volume of memoirs which he read to the audience at Massenzio, "Federico Fellini was preparing what would become La Dolce Vita. He was fascinated by our huge Hollywood production... Soon he was calling me Gorino (little Gore) and I was calling him Fred. "Neither Willy Wyler nor Sam (Zimbalist, Ben-Hur's producer) wanted to meet him because both were aware of a bad Italian habit which was to take over the expensive sets of a completed American film and then use them to make a new film. I think this had happened with Quo Vadis. To prevent the theft of Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down. But before that I had sneaked Fred on to the set of 1st century Jerusalem. He was ecstatic..." Vidal played a cameo role as himself in Fellini's Roma and for the same director wrote a screenplay on the life of Casanova, later filmed. He and Austen first lived in Rome then snapped up the 5,000 sq ft Swallow's Nest, built by the daughter of Lord Grim-thorpe, a 19th-century British lawyer and politician who owned the far more pompous Villa Cimbrone a few steps away. "I end up with big houses because I have so many books," Vidal says. "If I didn't have the 8,000 volumes, I'd be in a one-room flat somewhere." "Despite the terraced acres," wrote one visitor shortly before Vidal's departure, "La Rondinaia seems all house and no land, rising abruptly from the narrow end of the property, where the last ledge tapers into a cliff. The house is aerial, not stately, relating to the sky and the view more than to the earth. It is the rare European villa with virtually no façades announcing an elevated social status." No article about Vidal is complete without a mention of his stellar friends, and it is true that the Swallow's Nest welcomed many fancy guests during its 30 years in the hands of Vidal and Austen, including Rudolf Nureyev, Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman, Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams and many others. Yet one old friend saw loneliness - productive loneliness - in Vidal's Italian perch, rather than society. "Gore is always working, but with the door to the big study wide open," says Barbara Epstein, editor of the New York Review of Books, remembering her visits. "At night, after you have this wonderful pasta-infested dinner in the small but beautiful dining room - Howard was a wonderful cook - you listen to music in the salone and have a little of the very good local wine. It's very relaxed, even cosy... "He's such a fabulous host because he loves company. It's really a house where he works - and he works hard - through the winter, and imagine he longs for company, as though he were saving up for you to come and be entertained..." He was working in Italy, but, as he told me, it was always America that was on his mind. Inducted into politics so young - thanks to the senator grandfather who had an obsession with the United States constitution - America and its ills is a subject that has never given him any peace; one suspects that, climate and food and views apart, Italy's chief merit was in keeping him at arm's length from his homeland and its problems. Fellini, Vidal says, explained that he had picked "Gorino" to play himself in Roma "because he is typical of a certain Anglo type who comes to Rome and goes native." But that was nonsense. "As I never spoke Italian properly, much less Roman dialect, and my days were spent in a library researching the fourth century AD, I was about as little 'gone native' as it was possible to be." "I'm not sentimental about places," Gore Vidal says - yet what seems more likely is that, behind his granite face and those dry, beautifully enunciated judgements, sentiment too painful to expose is festering. "I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my work room in Ravello," he tells the audience in Rome, and quotes a passage from Palimpsest, his earlier memoir: "A white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic grey sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever-more hostile sun. "As I quote these lines, I will myself back to then, when Howard was still alive and our world had not yet cracked open."

Secret U.S. Program Tracks Global Bank Transfers

Secret U.S. Program Tracks Global Bank Transfers

The Treasury Dept. program, begun after the Sept. 11 attacks, attempts to monitor terrorist financing but raises privacy concerns.

by Josh Meyer and Greg Miller

The U.S. government, without the knowledge of many banks and their customers, has engaged for years in a secret effort to track terrorist financing by accessing a vast database of confidential information on transfers of money between banks worldwide. The program, run by the Treasury Department, is considered a potent weapon in the war on terrorism because of its ability to clandestinely monitor financial transactions and map terrorist webs. It is part of an arsenal of aggressive measures the government has adopted since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that yield new intelligence, but also circumvent traditional safeguards against abuse and raise concerns about intrusions on privacy. Under this effort, Treasury routinely acquires information about bank transfers from the world's largest financial communication network, which is run by a consortium of financial institutions called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. The SWIFT network carries up to 12.7 million messages a day containing instructions on many of the international transfers of money between banks. The messages typically include the names and account numbers of bank customers — from U.S. citizens to major corporations — who are sending or receiving funds. Through the program, Treasury has built an enormous — and ever-growing — repository of financial records drawn from what is essentially the central nervous system of international banking. In a major departure from traditional methods of obtaining financial records, the Treasury Department uses a little-known power — administrative subpoenas — to collect data from the SWIFT network, which has operations in the U.S., including a main computer hub in Manassas, Va. The subpoenas are secret and not reviewed by judges or grand juries, as are most criminal subpoenas. "It's hard to overstate the value of this information," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said Thursday in a statement he issued after The Times and other media outlets reported the existence of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. SWIFT acknowledged Thursday in response to questions from The Times that it has provided data under subpoena since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, a striking leap in cooperation from international bankers, who long resisted such law enforcement intrusions into the confidentiality of their communications. But SWIFT said in a statement that it has worked with U.S. officials to restrict the use of the data to terrorism investigations. The program is part of the Bush administration's dramatic expansion of intelligence-gathering capabilities, which includes warrantless eavesdropping on the international phone calls of some U.S. residents. Critics complain that these efforts are not subject to independent governmental reviews designed to prevent abuse, and charge that they collide with privacy and consumer protection laws in the United States. Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the SWIFT program raises similar issues. "It boils down to a question of oversight, both internal and external. And in the current circumstances, it is hard to have confidence in the efficacy of their oversight," he said. "Their policy is, 'Trust us,' and that may not be good enough anymore." A former senior Treasury official expressed concern that the SWIFT program allows access to vast quantities of sensitive data that could be abused without safeguards. The official, who said he did not have independent knowledge of the program, questioned what becomes of the data, some of it presumably related to innocent banking customers. "How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?" the former official said. "And what do you do with the chaff?" More than a dozen current and former U.S. officials discussed the program on condition of anonymity, citing its sensitive nature. The effort runs counter to the expectations of privacy and security that are sacrosanct in the worldwide banking community. SWIFT promotes its services largely by touting the network's security, and most of its customers are unaware that the U.S. government has such extensive access to their private financial information. U.S. officials, some of whom expressed surprise the program had not previously been revealed by critics, acknowledged it would be controversial in the financial community. "It is certainly not going to sit well in the world marketplace," said a former counterterrorism official. "It could very likely undermine the integrity of SWIFT." Bush administration officials asked The Times not to publish information about the program, contending that disclosure could damage its effectiveness and that sufficient safeguards are in place to protect the public. Dean Baquet, editor of The Times, said: "We weighed the government's arguments carefully, but in the end we determined that it was in the public interest to publish information about the extraordinary reach of this program. It is part of the continuing national debate over the aggressive measures employed by the government." Under the program, Treasury issues a new subpoena once a month, and SWIFT turns over huge amounts of electronic financial data, according to Stuart Levey, the department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The administrative subpoenas are issued under authority granted in the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The SWIFT information is added to a massive database that officials have been constructing since shortly after Sept. 11. Levey noted that SWIFT did not have the ability to search its own records. "We can, because we built the capability to do that," he said. Treasury shares the data with the CIA, the FBI and analysts from other agencies, who can run queries on specific individuals and accounts believed to have terrorist connections, Levey said Thursday in an interview with The Times. Levey said that "tens of thousands" of searches of the database have been done over the last five years. The program was initially a closely guarded secret, but it has recently become known to a wider circle of government officials, former officials, banking executives and outside experts. Current and former U.S. officials said the effort has been only marginally successful against Al Qaeda, which long ago began transferring money through other means, including the highly informal banking system common in Islamic countries. The value of the program, Levey and others said, has been in tracking lower- and mid-level terrorist operatives and financiers who believe they have not been detected, and militant groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that also operate political and social welfare organizations. It's no secret that the Treasury Department tries to track terrorist financing, or that those efforts ramped up significantly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the SWIFT program goes far beyond what has been publicly disclosed about that effort in terms of the amount of financial data that U.S. intelligence agencies can access. The program also represents a major tactical shift. U.S. investigators long have been able to subpoena records on specific accounts or transactions when they could show cause — a painstaking process designed mainly for gathering evidence. But access to SWIFT enables them to follow suspicious financial trails around the globe, identifying new suspects without having to seek assistance from foreign banks. SWIFT is a consortium founded in 1973 to replace telex messages. It has almost 7,900 participating institutions in more than 200 countries — including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Citibank and Credit Suisse. The network handled 2.5 billion financial messages in 2005, including many originating in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates that the United States scrutinizes closely for terrorist activity. The system does not execute the actual transfer of funds between banks; that is carried out by the Federal Reserve and its international counterparts. Rather, banks use the network to transmit instructions about such transfers. For that reason, SWIFT's data is extremely valuable to intelligence services seeking to uncover terrorist webs. CIA operatives trying to track Osama bin Laden's money in the late 1990s figured out clandestine ways to access the SWIFT network. But a former CIA official said Treasury officials blocked the effort because they did not want to anger the banking community. Historically, "there was always a line of contention" inside the government, said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. "The Treasury position was placing a high priority on the integrity of the banking system. There was considerable concern from that side about anything that could be seen as compromising the integrity of international banking." Before Sept. 11, a former senior SWIFT executive said, providing access to its sensitive data would have been anathema to the Belgium-based consortium. But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to a new mind-set in many industries, including telecommunications. SWIFT said the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sent the first subpoena shortly after Sept. 11, seeking "limited sets of data" to learn about how Al Qaeda financed the attacks. Unlike telephone lines and e-mail communications, the SWIFT network cannot be easily tapped. It uses secure log-ins and state-of-the-art encryption technology to prevent intercepted messages from being deciphered. "It is arguably the most secure network on the planet," said the former SWIFT executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This thing is locked down like Fort Knox." SWIFT said it was responding to compulsory subpoenas and negotiated with U.S. officials to narrow them and to establish protections for the privacy of its customers. SWIFT also said it has never given U.S. authorities direct access to its network. "Our fundamental principle has been to preserve the confidentiality of our users' data while complying with the lawful obligations in countries where we operate," SWIFT said in its statement. Current and former U.S. officials familiar with the SWIFT program described it as one of the most valuable weapons in the financial war on terrorism, but declined to provide even anecdotal evidence of its successes. A former high-ranking CIA officer said it has been a success, and another official said it has allowed U.S. counterterrorism officials to follow a tremendous number of leads. CIA officials pursue leads overseas, and the FBI and other agencies pursue leads in the United States, where the CIA is prohibited from operating. Officials said the program is relied upon especially heavily when intelligence chatter from phone and e-mail intercepts suggested an imminent attack, conveying real-time intelligence for counterterrorism operations. The former SWIFT executive said much can be learned from network messages, which require an actual name and address of both the sender and recipient, unlike phone calls and e-mails, in which terrorist operatives can easily disguise their identities. "There is a good deal of detail in there," he said. As the global war on terrorism has succeeded in taking out some senior terrorists and their financiers, particularly within Al Qaeda, the organization and its many affiliates have sought to move to hidden locations and to transfer their money through proxies such as charities, aid organizations and corporate fronts. The officials said the SWIFT information can be used in "link analysis." That technique allows analysts to identify any person with whom a suspected terrorist had financial dealings — even those with no connection to terrorism. That information is then mapped and analyzed to detect patterns, shifts in strategy, specific "hotspot" accounts, and locations that have become new havens for terrorist activity. The SWIFT program is just one of the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 initiatives to collect intelligence that could include information on U.S. residents. The National Security Agency, which can intercept communications around the world, is eavesdropping on the telephone calls and e-mails of some U.S. residents without obtaining warrants. And it has been accused of asking telecommunications companies to help create a database of the phone-call records of almost all Americans. The Justice Department also has asked Internet companies to keep records of the websites customers visit and the people they e-mail for two years, rather than days or weeks, which would greatly expand the government's ability to track online activity. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against the government and phone companies, challenging the NSA efforts. The government has asked courts to throw them out, invoking the "state secrets" privilege and arguing that trials would compromise national security. The NSA's interception of telephone calls also has been criticized for lacking an independent review process to ensure that the information is not abused. The SWIFT program raises similar concerns, some critics say. Privacy advocates have questioned "link analysis" because it can drag in innocent people who have routine financial dealings with terrorist suspects. And no outside governmental oversight body, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or a grand jury, monitors the subpoenas served on SWIFT. Levey said the program is subject to "robust" checks and balances designed to prevent misuse of the data. He noted that requests to access the data are reviewed by Treasury's assistant secretary for intelligence; that analysts can only access the data for terrorism-related searches; and that records are kept of each search and are reviewed by an outside auditor for compliance. Levey said there had been one instance of abuse in which an analyst had conducted a search that did not meet the terrorist-related criteria. The analyst was subsequently denied access to the database, he said. During the last five years, SWIFT officials have raised concerns about the scope of the program, particularly at the outset, when it was handing over virtually its entire database. The amount of data handed over each month has been winnowed down. "The safeguards were not all there in September 2001," Levey acknowledged. "We started narrowing it from the beginning." New safeguards have been added, he said, noting that SWIFT officials are now allowed to be present when analysts search the data and to raise objections with top officials. Officials from other government agencies have raised the issue of accessing the records for other investigative purposes, but Levey said such proposals have been rejected — largely out of concern that doing so might erode support for the program. Asked what would prevent the data from being used for other purposes in the future, Levey said doing so would likely trigger objections from SWIFT and the outside auditor. A SWIFT representative said that Booz Allen Hamilton, an international consulting firm, is the auditor but provided no further details on how the oversight process works. Although the searches focus on suspected terrorist activity overseas, U.S. officials acknowledged that they do delve into the financial activities of Americans, noting that privacy laws don't protect individuals believed to be acting as a "foreign terrorist agent." Officials said the administration has briefed congressional intelligence committees on the SWIFT program. In contrast, information on the NSA wiretapping was shared only with key lawmakers. One senior congressional aide said the committees have "a good handle on what the executive branch is doing to track terrorist financing" and are generally supportive of those efforts. But the operation seems to have been kept secret from key segments of the banking industry, including senior executives in the United States and overseas. John McKessy, chairman of the SWIFT user group in the United States, said he was unaware of any such program. McKessy represents companies and institutions that are not members of the SWIFT cooperative but use its messaging system. SWIFT noted that its published policies clearly indicate that it cooperates with law enforcement authorities and that the subpoenas were "discussed carefully within the board," made up of members from 25 major banks. SWIFT said it has also kept informed an oversight committee drawn from the central banks of the major industrial countries. The SWIFT program plugs a gap in global efforts to track terrorism financing. In the United States, law enforcement authorities can access bank records if they get permission through the legal process. The FBI also has various legal ways to get almost instantaneous access to financial records. And U.S. banking laws require financial institutions to file Suspicious Activity Reports, but authorities believe Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups know how to evade the activities that trigger such red flags. U.S. officials, however, long have complained that they cannot get access to financial records overseas and that some requests for cooperation from foreign governments and financial institutions took months, while others were rebuffed. "The sort of 18th century notions on this stuff drive me nuts," said one senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "Somebody can move money with the click of a mouse, but it takes me six months to find it. If that is the world in which we live, you have to understand the costs involved with that." The Sept. 11 commission urged the government in its July 2004 report on the U.S. intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks to put more emphasis on tracking the flow of funds, rather than seeking to disrupt them, to learn how terrorist networks are organized. Lee Hamilton, a former congressman and co-chairman of the commission who said he has been briefed on the SWIFT program, said U.S. intelligence agencies have made significant progress in recent years, but are still falling short. "I still cannot point to specific successes of our efforts here on terrorist financing," he said. Hypocrytes!

Common Sense by Thomas Paine on MP3 Digital Download - Free Audio

Common Sense by Thomas Paine on MP3 Digital Download - Free Audio


Common Sense is perhaps the work single most responsible for the American Revolution. It brought the idea of freedom and liberty down from the intellectuals to the common American colonist. Written by Thomas Paine and published January 10th, 1776, it was the first publication to openly ask for independence from Britain.

When it was released, it was an instant best seller. Most every literate colonist was very familiar with it. In fact, it sold an amazing 600,000 copies to a population of only three million. Of the three million colonists at the time, twenty percent were slaves and fifty percent were indentured servants. For the colonies as a whole, it provided a rallying cry uniting the colonists in the common cause of liberty.

There probably is no other document that served such a vital role in creating American independence than Common Sense. Common Sense was used by Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and helped George Washington decide for succession. Many of the founding documents rely on it and without it, history would have no doubt played out vastly differently.

If you are at all interested in American history or the cause of freedom, take the time to listen to Common Sense.

Rebuilding Not Yet Reality for Fallujah

Rebuilding Not Yet Reality for Fallujah
http://DahrJamailIraq.com
*Inter Press Service*
Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil

*FALLUJAH, Jun 24 (IPS) - One and a half years after the November 2004
U.S. military assault on Fallujah, residents tell of ongoing suffering,
lack of jobs, little reconstruction and continuing violence.*

The U.S. military launched Operation Phantom Fury against the city of
Fallujah-destroying an estimated 70 percent of the buildings, homes and
shops, and killing between 4,000 and 6,000 people, according to the
Fallujah-based non-governmental organisation the Study Centre for Human
Rights and Democracy (SCHRD).

IPS found that the city remains under draconian biometric security, with
retina scans, fingerprinting and X-raying required for anyone entering
the city. Fallujah remains an island: not even the residents of the
surrounding towns and villages like Karma, Habbaniya, Khalidiya, which
fall under Fallujah's administrative jurisdiction, are allowed in.

Security badges are required for anyone wishing to enter the city. To
obtain a badge, one has to be a Fallujah native from a certain class.
That is, if one is from Fallujah and a government official, a high-class
badge of grade G will be issued. Journalists with an X-grade badge will
be allowed. Then there are B for businessmen and C for those who have
contracts with U.S. military in the city. Last are the R-grade badges,
which will not be admitted through the main checkpoint at the east side
of the city, and must seek entrance through "second class" checkpoints
elsewhere.

Having entered the city through the main checkpoint, the first thing
visible is the destroyed homes in the Al-Askari district. Virtually
every home in this area has been completely destroyed or seriously damaged.

"I could not rebuild my house again because rebuilding is rather costly
nowadays," Walid, a 48-year-old officer with the former Iraqi army, told
IPS. With sorrow in his eyes he told of how he built his home six years
ago. After the destruction, "They [U.S. Military] paid us 70 percent of
the compensation and with the unemployment in the city we spent most of
it on food and medicines. Now everybody is waiting for the remaining 30
percent."

Slightly different version of this same story could be told by the
hundreds of people who lost their houses in the April and November 2004
bombing campaigns.

Across the Euphrates River from the city sits Fallujah General Hospital.
Built in 1964, the hospital was unable to function during either U.S.
siege because it was being occupied by the U.S. military.

Doctors were reluctant to talk to IPS unless promised anonymity. "It is
more a barn than a hospital and we are not honoured to work in it," said
one doctor. "There is a horrible lack of medical supplies and equipment,
and the Ministry of Health is not doing much about it," added another
doctor, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

When IPS mentioned a new hospital under construction in the city, one of
the doctors replied, with irony, that half of the people of Fallujah
would be dead before that hospital project was completed. He said an
emergency plan for the existing hospital is essential, especially
because people are too afraid of seeking medical attention in any of the
Baghdad hospitals for fear of being kidnapped and killed by death
squads. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Ramadi
General Hospital, often used by residents of Fallujah, is no longer
accessible due to the ongoing U.S. military siege of that city.

During the interview of the doctors, patients and their companions
gathered around and started complaining about "the lack of everything"
in the hospital. "You press people always come here and talk to us, but
there is no result," said an elderly woman in a challenging tone. "If
you put me on television, I will tell the whole world how bad the
situation is in this city."

The doctors interviewed, however, did praise the role of some local and
international NGOs that had offered help to the hospital on occasion.

The people of Fallujah are struggling to survive amidst skyrocketing
unemployment, lack of supplies and ongoing violence in the city. At a
grocery market, there was another side to the story. Haji Majeed Al
Jumaily, 64, was a blacksmith before his hands weakened. He asked the
grocer a dozen times how much an item cost before saying, "I only have
2,000 dinars, less than a dollar and a half, to spend and I don't know
what to buy with it. Everything is so expensive and my nine family
members must be fed."

He told IPS how his two sons were killed by random gunfire from the new
Iraqi army two years ago. "Now I have to take care of their two wives
and six children as well as my wife," he said. The market was full of
people, but poverty is obvious from the way people wandered about trying
to balance what to spend with what they have in hand.

"Unemployment in Fallujah is a major problem that should be handled,"
commented Jassim Al Muhammadi, a lawyer. "The financial situation is
collapsing every day and people do not know what to do. The siege is
adding a lot to this problem."

Ali Ahmed, a 17-year-old student, interrupted: "We do not need press
releases in this city, sir. What we really need is a solution to the
everlasting problem of this city... The Americans and Iraqis in power
accused us of terror, killed thousands of us and now they are just
talking about reconstruction. Well, they are all thieves who only care
for what they can pinch off the Iraqi fortunes. Just tell them to leave
us alone as we do not want their fraudulent reconstruction."

Ahmed added that the U.S. military continues to kill and arrest people
for any reason whatsoever, and sometimes for no reason.

Infrastructure in Fallujah is just as bad as any other part of Iraq.
Water, electricity, cooking gas, fuel, telephone and mobile services are
very poor. All of the residents interviewed complained about the
government's indifferent attitude towards them. The majority believed it
was for sectarian reasons, although some others thought it is the same
all over Iraq.

The mayor of Fallujah was not available to interview, but in his latest
appearance on television he announced his resignation. In his statement
televised on Jun. 14, he declared firmly, "The Americans did not fulfill
their promises to me and so I resign."

Similar reports about the situation in Fallujah were made by the United
Nations Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) on May 21: "there
is still slow progress on humanitarian issues, according to local
officials."

The report stated that two-thirds of the city's residents had returned,
but 15 percent remained displaced in the outskirts of Fallujah, "living
in abandoned schools and government buildings."

"Approximately 65,000 people are still displaced out of Fallujah,"
reported Bassel Mahmoud, director of the city's reconstruction projects.

The IRIN report, similar to what IPS found here, said, "Despite Baghdad
allocating 100 million dollars for the city's reconstruction and 180
million dollars for housing compensation, very little can be seen
visibly on the streets of Fallujah in terms of reconstruction. There are
destroyed buildings on almost every street. Local authorities say about
60 percent of all houses in the city were totally destroyed or seriously
damaged and less than 20 percent of them have been repaired so far...
Power, water treatment and sewage systems are still not functioning
properly and many districts of the city are without potable water."

Residents complained to IPS that they had less than four hours of
electricity per day, and there was great frustration that at least 30
percent of the allocated reconstruction funds were shifted to pay for
extra checkpoints and security patrols in the city.

And while the residents continue to wait for the promised compensation
funds, of the 81 reconstruction projects slated for the city, less than
30 have been completed and many others will most likely be cancelled due
to lack of funding, according to a Fallujah council member who spoke
with IPS on condition of anonymity.

Current estimates of the amount needed to rebuild Iraq are between 70
and 100 billion dollars. Only 33 percent of the 21 billion dollars
originally allocated by the United States for reconstruction remains to
be spent. According to a report by the U.S. inspector general for
reconstruction in Iraq, officials were unable to say how many planned
projects they would complete, nor was there a clear source for the
hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to maintain the projects
that had been completed.

As for Fallujah in particular, security has eaten up as much as 25
percent of reconstruction funding, but even more has reportedly been
siphoned off by corruption and overcharging by contractors.

Last year, a U.S. congressional inspection team was set up to monitorreconstruction in Iraq. On May 1, they published a scathing report of the failure of U.S. contractors to carry out projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The report also noted that nearly nine billion dollars in Iraqi oil revenues which had been disbursed to ministries was "missing."

CEOs Earn 262 Times Pay of Average Worker

CEOs Earn 262 Times Pay of Average Worker

Well it doesn't take a genious to figure that out. Been there, done that. Still I wonder why so many other countries want to come here to work.- But we don't have enough jobs to go around.

Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data, a nonprofit think-tank said on Wednesday.

In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institutein Washington, D.C.

The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42,000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million, EPI said.

In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined.

For example, the chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found.

In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies earned 24 times a worker's pay. That ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000, according to EPI.

CEO pay is defined by the sum of salary, bonus, value of restricted stock at grant and other long-term incentives. Worker pay is hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory works, EPI said.

CNN.com - Cheney: Iraq pullout 'worst possible thing we could do' - Jun 22, 2006

CNN.com - Cheney: Iraq pullout 'worst possible thing we could do' - Jun 22, 2006

Cheney: Iraq pullout 'worst possible thing we could do'

Spoken like our true Dick.
Thursday, June 22, 2006; Posted: 8:22 p.m. EDT (00:22 GMT)

"If we pull out, they'll follow us," Vice President Cheney said of terrorists in Iraq. So? What is border patrol for, DICK?

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• Interview transcript

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• Cheney downplays Korean action

SPECIAL REPORT

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• Tracking Terror: Who's next?

• Interactive: Iraq's population

• Coalition Casualties

• Special Report

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Withdrawing American troops from Iraq would embolden terrorists and leave the United States and its allies vulnerable to new attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday.

"The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting," Cheney told CNN's John King in an interview at the vice president's residence.

Some Democrats have urged an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Others have pushed for a phased troop withdrawal. (Watch Dick Cheney explain that withdrawal "in effect validates the terrorists' strategy" -- 3:29)

The Senate voted 86-13 on Thursday against a proposal offered by Democratic Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin that would have required all U.S. troops be withdrawn from Iraq by July 2007. (Full story)

The Senate also rejected a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin by a vote of 60-39 that would have required a drawdown to begin by the end of the year but not set a timetable for a complete withdrawal.

Neither an immediate nor phased withdrawal would confer any protection on the United States, Cheney said. "If we pull out, they'll follow us," he said of terrorists.

"It doesn't matter where we go. This is a global conflict. We've seen them attack in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and East Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict. (Read the full interview transcript)

"And it will continue -- whether we complete the job or not in Iraq -- only it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in that part of the world."

Cheney said a pullout would signal the United States would not stand its ground in the war on terror.

"No matter how you carve it -- you can call it anything you want -- but basically, it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

North Korea strike dismissed

On North Korea and its possible test of a long-range ballistic missile, Cheney rejected a pre-emptive U.S. military strike, saying current diplomatic moves can deal with the issue.

"I think, at this stage, we are addressing the issue in the proper fashion," he said. "Obviously, if you are going to launch strikes at another nation, you better be prepared to not fire just one shot. The fact of the matter is, I think, the issue is being addressed appropriately."

Cheney was asked about a Thursday op-ed piece in The Washington Post from William Perry, defense secretary under President Clinton, and Ashton Carter, Clinton's assistant secretary of defense, which said the United States, if necessary, should strike beforehand and destroy the missile before North Korea tests it.

Cheney said that, while "I appreciate Bill's advice," such an action could worsen the situation.

Cheney declined to comment on the CIA leak investigation saying he might be called as a witness.

But he did offer support for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who faces perjury and obstruction of justice charges in the probe of the leak of the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Libby is "one of the finest men I've ever known," Cheney said. "He's entitled to the presumption of innocence."

The administration's 'Darth Vader'?

Asked if it were true he's become a "dark, nefarious source in the administration," Cheney said, "I suppose sometimes people look at my demeanor and say, 'Well, he's the Darth Vader of the administration.' "

Cheney was unequivocal about his plan not to seek another political office.

"My career will end politically with this administration," he said. "I have the freedom and the luxury, as does the president, of doing what we think is right for the country. ... We're not trying to improve our standing in the polls; we're not out there trying to win votes for ourselves."

Asked about those polls -- Cheney's approval rating is lower than the president's -- the vice president said, "We don't worry about the polls -- they go up, the polls go down. The fact of the matter is we're doing what we think best for the nation. And that's what the American people elected us to do.

"History will judge this president as a very successful, very effective leader," he said. "And I'm proud to be part of his team."