Vice-president told to put out classified information · No instruction to out CIA agent, says president |
| by Suzanne Goldenberg |
| President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday. The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution. The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme. According to the National Journal, Mr Bush told prosecutors he directed Mr Cheney to disclose classified information both to defend his administration and to discredit Mr Wilson. Elsewhere, the magazine quotes other government officials as saying that Mr Bush was very anxious to use classified information to counter Mr Wilson's charges, telling the vice-president: "Let's get this out." However, the president told investigators that he never directed anyone to disclose Ms Plame's identity. He also said that he was unaware Mr Cheney had directed his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to covertly leak the information, rather than formally declassify it. Mr Libby faces prosecution for lying to investigators about his role in the outing of Ms Plame. There was no immediate comment from the White House. The office of the special prosecutor also declined to comment yesterday. The revelation that Mr Bush instructed Mr Cheney to personally oversee the campaign to discredit Mr Wilson arrives at an inconvenient time for a White House vehement in criticising leaks. But I told you so. Last month it condemned as "disgraceful" a report in the New York Times that agents from the CIA and treasury departments had been secretly monitoring international wire transfers without court oversight. |
21.7.06
Bush Told Cheney to Discredit Diplomat Critical of Iraq Policy
19.7.06
Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer: What Bush’s Open Mike Revealed
Editor’s note: In the midst of a Middle Eastern crisis that threatens to destabilize the entire region and perhaps beyond, it was unnerving that what most seemed to interest President Bush at the G8 summit is that China is a long flight from western Russia.
Bombs were exploding and innocents dying, from Beirut to Haifa to Baghdad, and yet George Bush managed to pose for yet another photo op, smiling as he gave the thumbs up at the close of the G8 summit. Thanks to an unsuspected open mike, however, we could also glimpse the mind-set of a leader unaccountably pleased with his ignorance of the world.
What seemed to interest him most at that farewell get-together of leaders bitterly divided over a disintegrating Mideast was not some last-minute proposal for peace but rather the fact that it would take China President Hu Jintao eight hours to fly home from St. Petersburg to Beijing.
Bush had started the exchange by noting, absurdly, that, “This is your neighborhood, doesn’t take you long to get home.” Uh, yeah, incurious George, sure thing. Never mind that St. Petersburg is in Europe, on Russia’s northwestern corner, due north of Turkey, and Beijing is on the eastern edge of mainland Asia.
“You, eight hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country,” he said when corrected, sounding for all the world like an earnest kindergartner, processing new information. “Russia’s big and so is China.”
Unfortunately, Bush’s private remarks to British Prime Minister Tony Blair several minutes later also revealed a cluelessness about more important matters: Israel’s bloody assault on Lebanon, its causes and possible solutions.
“See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” he said, apparently referring to the guerrilla force’s firing of rockets into Israel. “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian leader Bashir] Assad and make something happen.”
While it is refreshing to note that our president employs language that would earn a radio shock jock a fine from his own rabid obscenity-sniffers at the FCC, his profound ignorance is appalling.
Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah all have their own hard-core agendas—Syria is just one player in the tortured region. Furthermore, Bush’s complete disinterest in the Mideast peace process—especially as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians—since the Supreme Court handed him the job in 2000 has paved the way for this moment.
But should we be surprised at Bush’s poor grasp of the world he supposedly leads? After all, the blundering of the Bush administration has seriously undermined secular politics in the Mideast and boosted the religious zealots of groups like Hezbollah to positions of preeminence throughout the region, from savagely violent Iraq to the beleaguered West Bank and Gaza.
But what is truly “ironic” is that the Bush administration, having overstretched our militarily and generated no foreign policy ideas beyond the willy-nilly “projection” of military force, has become a helpless bystander as the entire region threatens to burn.
Responding to Bush, Blair at least sounded somewhat constructive, offering to go directly to the Mideast and pave the way for a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In this, he seemed to be unwittingly aligned with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who expressed on Sunday frustration with her successor for not leaving the conference to engage in emergency shuttle diplomacy in the Mideast.
Where Albright was critical of the “disaster” in Iraq for distracting from the dormant Mideast peace process, Rice was shrilly defensive.
“For the last 60 years, American administrations of both stripes—Democrat, Republican—traded what they thought was security and stability and turned a blind eye to the absence of democratic forces, to the absence of pluralism in the region,” she said Sunday. “That policy has changed.”
While this is certainly a dramatic sound bite, the words have no logical meaning: The U.S. continues to embrace the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as has been the case for 60 years. In fact, Bush has added Libya to the “approved” list. Meanwhile, Israel is attacking elected governments in the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon with U.S. support.
As for the democracy in Iraq that Bush wants Russia to emulate, things haven’t worked out as neocons like invasion architect Richard Perle had hoped when he fantasized about Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi leading Baghdad to recognize Israel. On Sunday, according to Reuters, the notoriously divided Iraqi parliament unanimously passed a motion condemning the Israeli offensive and urging the U.N. Security Council and the meeting of the Group of Eight leaders to intervene “to stop the ... Israeli criminal aggression.”
Instead of creating a malleable U.S.-Israel ally, the overthrow of the secular Sunni leader Saddam Hussein has extended a fiery arc of Shiite-dominated religious fanaticism blazing across the Mideast skyline that betrays Bush’s claim to be bringing democracy and stability to the region.
COULD I INTEREST YOU IN A NEW WORLD WAR?
CALL YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS NOW AND DEMAND THEY CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE CEASE-FIRE IN LEBANON
TOLL-FREE NUMBERS: 888-355-3588 and 800-828-0498
ACTION PAGE: http://www.usalone.com/peaceteam/cease-fire.php
I'm writing this piece from a secret location far underneath a mountain in Colorado. There is everything here to sustain life just about indefinitely, a source of nuclear power, extensive underground farming facilities, of course a tap right to one of the purest aquifers of them all.
[POP]
Hey, I thought I was Dick Cheney for a second. Actually, my butt is hanging out exposed on the surface too, just like yours.
But in case you hadn't noticed, the marketing of World War III is already in high gear.
You can't turn on a cable news channel now without encountering a product placement ad for World War III. It's not just Gingrich. It's Gibson, and O'Reilly, and Hanity, and Woolsey and Ledeen, and every other prominent right wing operative who has been positioned to spit out synchronized talking points about starting a new world war. Actually, Ledeen was talking about World War IV, but they'll get him on the exact same message as everyone else before he makes another appearance.
And it's not just in our own media, Israeli prime minister Olmert made the accusation yesterday that the kidnapping of the two soldiers by Hezbollah was timed to distract from scrutiny of Iran's nuclear progam by the G8. The charge is ludicrous on its face. It is only Israel's extreme over-reaction to the kidnappings that gave them so much attention. But it represents just one more synaptic connection they are trying to plant in our minds, until like one of Pavlov's dogs they can ring the bell to attack Iran.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey just said this about the crisis in Lebanon:
"The last thing we ought to do is start talking about cease-fires and the rest."
And why is he so dead set against a cease-fire? Because they are working overtime to escalate this thing just fast as they can. And the LAST thing they want is to lose their momentum of insanity. And that is why a cease-fire is PRECISELY what we must all demand immediately. Call your members of Congress right now and demand an emergency sense of congress resolution that
1) There be an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, and that
2) Israel and Hezbollah cease all hostile operations against each other
TOLL-FREE NUMBERS: 888-355-3588 and 800-828-0498
ACTION PAGE: http://www.usalone.com/peaceteam/cease-fire.php
Let's take a body count so far shall we? From three kidnapped soldiers we are now up to 25 dead Israelis and about 230 dead Lebanese, mostly civilians. And do you know how many Hezbollah militants are included in those numbers? Not one that they know of. NOT ONE!
Hezbollah is firing wildly unguided rockets into Israel. Israel is attacking civilian infrastructure, and civilian settlements on unfounded suspicions that Hezbollah is nearby. How long can the slaughter of innocents go on before Syria feels threatened enough to act, or Bush feels he can get away with acting directly against it. Gibson was speculating openly on his show with Woolsey about which particular Syrian targets the United States ought to be hitting, to the point of egging him on about striking Iran simultaneously.
Both sides are doing absolutely everything they can to provoke the other into further escalations. And why? Because George Bush lost his shirt (and ours) in his WMD-less Iraq gamble, and is driven to double down and bet the farm with an even bigger war to try to win it all back.
At the same time, Islamic militants buoyed by the chaos they have created in Iraq and our entanglement there, believe the more war crimes they can get Bush to commit, the more power they will be able to seize themselves. A world war is an opportunity for radical changes in country boundaries. And every innocent Muslim raped or slaughtered allows them to further whip up their own populations for war.
And so the sales job is on full bore. It's going to be relentless, you'll hear the word Iran until it is coming out of your ears. And there is very little time to stop it. By the time you hear the words World War III and "done deal" in the same breath on your cable TV, it may be too late.
The last world war ended with the use of nuclear weapons. That is how they are planning to start this one. It was all the joint chiefs of staff could do to constrain Bush and Cheney from locking in plans to hit Iran with nuclear bunker busters a couple months ago. The escalation through Lebanon scheme may have been their primary plan all along. And Bush and Olmert are absolutely in sync on this. Bush's brain implant quote from yesterday was, "Syria is trying to get back into Lebanon, it looks like to me."
Please, folks. Even if you have never called a member of Congress in your life. You must do it now. Your life, and the lives of your children depend on it. The president and his whole administration are complicit in this. The mainstream media is complicit in this, especially because for them a world war has blockbuster entertainment value, just as sick as that sounds.
TOLL-FREE NUMBERS: 888-355-3588 and 800-828-0498
ACTION PAGE: http://www.usalone.com/peaceteam/cease-fire.php
And then when you hear the pitch man on your cable TV talking about how great it would be to have new World War, and how quickly we'd kick their butts . . . take a long, hard look at the product performance of the last two world wars.
How they dragged on for years and years.
Millions of people dead. Countries utterly destroyed. And understand that their new improved model (with more nukes) could put an end to all human civilization. And then yell at the TV as loud as you can, "I ain't buying it!"
17.7.06
Profile of US Senator Joseph Biden, Jr of Delaware
Liberal Politics: U.S.
US Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware
United States Senate: Senator Joseph Biden, Jr. of Delaware was first elected to the US Senate in 1972 when 29 years old. He was the 5th youngest Senator in US history. He's serving his 6th consecutive 6-year term, and will be up for reelection in 2008.Biden is a gifted negotiator who helped shape US security and foreign relations policies. He's a moderate Democrat who often bridges the bipartisan gap, and is an ebullient campaigner with loads of authentic charm.
Other recent notoriety came during Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings when he vehemently objected to the nomination of John Bolton to be US Ambassador to the UN. As a result, Democrats prevented Republicans from fast-tracking the Bolton nomination through Congress without proper due diligence investigation.
Committee on Foreign Relations, ranking Democratic member
Committee on the Judiciary, chair from 1987 to 1995
Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Victims' rights, ranking Democratic member
Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, co-chair
Senate NATO Observer group, co-chair
Senate National Security working group, co-chair
Congressional Firemens Caucus, co-chair
Congressional International Anti-Piracy caucus, co-chair
Congressional Air Force and National Guard caucuses
Education - BA in history and political science from University of Delaware; JD from Syracuse University Law School.
Family - Married, 3 children, 4 grandchildren
Faith - Roman Catholic
He lives in his home state, and commutes daily to Washington DC by Amtrak.
Young Joe Biden was a stutterer and was terrified to read aloud in class. He would memorize pages of books before class, to minimize stuttering in front of his peers.
~Rolling Stone magazine, June 2004. Well said and GOOD point.
"You Europeans use George Bush's excesses as an excuse for your own lack of commitment. You've been reluctant to do anything apart from criticize America---get over it." reported on a blog, on the subject of the 2004 Davos conference in Switzerland- Easy now, don't bite the hand of the Union that could save our ass.
Talking about the Bush 2006 budget proposal to shut Amtrak and force it into bankruptcy, Senator Biden said "This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines...and we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact....This is the ultimate in being penny-wise and a pound-foolish." Is that like saying Bush is a capitalistic Dipsh**? NBC News "Meet the Press" on February 27, 2005
"I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the President asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, 'Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not.' And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, 'Mr. Vice President, I wouldn't keep you if it weren't constitutionally required.' I turned back to the President and said, 'Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they've been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they've given you.That's why I'd get rid of them, Mr. President---not just Abu Ghraib.' They said nothing. Just sat there like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me." Rolling Stone interview, June 2004. How eloquent.
At least he know's the difference between right and wrong. That simple fact can make all the difference.
15.7.06
Close Guantanamo
It's Time to Close the USA's Torture Center
| The Bush Administration has finally admitted that the detainees at Guantanamo are covered by the Geneva Convention. Then in the same breath said that, of course, they were already being treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. BU*SH*IT! In point of fact, the express purpose of Guantanamo in their own words was to create the legal of equivalent of "outer space". Well, I don't know know where it says in the Geneva convention that you can "waterboard" someone into thinking you are going to drown them. I don't know where it says you can keep them living outside in all weather for months at time. I don't know where it says you can deny Red Cross visits. And I don't know where anything in America says that you can deny alleged criminals their attorneys! I have a Geneva Convention card, dated through March of 2009, so I am clear that the Bushevicks are NOT adhering to the contents of that Treaty. As a Candidate, as an American, I'm fed up with an Administration that squeezes through non-existent legal loopholes to get what they want. In this case it's the ability to abuse and/or torture men and women who haven't been proven guilty of anything yet. In one case, one man's attorney hadn't been able to see him for three years. The Supreme Court is beginning to take action to end the legal nightmares. Perhaps that is a beginning of a long legal process. But MOW is time for the American people to DEMAND that we end the abuse and horrors of our torture center in Guantanamo! We must live up to our American ideals or the terrorists truly have won. Write your letter below and fill it with your voice and your feelings. Our Congresspeople and Senators need to know that it is time to close GITMO! Click on the form on the link above and send your personal message to all your government representatives selected below, with the subject "Close Guantanamo." At the same time you can send your personal comments only as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper if you like. |
14.7.06
Washington is Losing 'War on Terror': Experts
If there was no war on terror before, and it was just a fabricated excuse for US to go to war, I can assure you there is a war on terror now, and for that you can Thank the USA
Despite high-profile arrests, security operations and upbeat assessments from the White House, the United States is losing its "global war on terror," experts warn.
Five years after Washington launched its hunt for those responsible for the September 11 attacks, the world has not become a safer place, and a new large-scale strike against America at some point appears likely, they say.
 A picture released by the US Army shows a US soldier patrolling the market center in the town of Bayji, north of Iraq. Despite high-profile arrests, security operations and upbeat assessments from the White House, the United States is losing its "global war on terror," experts warn. (AFP/US ARMY-HO/Staff Sgt. Russell Lee Klika) |
In May the influential US magazine Foreign Policy and a Washington-based think-tank questioned 116 leading US experts -- a balanced mix of Republicans and Democrats -- on the progress of the US campaign against terrorism.
Among others, they consulted a former secretary of state, two former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and dozens of the country's top security analysts.
The result? Eighty-four percent believe the United States is losing the "war on terror," 86 percent that the world has become a more dangerous place in the past five years, and 80 percent that a major new attack on their country was likely within the next decade.
"We are losing the 'war on terror' because we are treating the symptoms and not the cause," argued Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
"Our insistence that Islamic fundamentalist ideology has replaced communist ideology as the chief enemy of our time feeds Al-Qaeda's vision of the world," boosting support for the Islamic radical cause, she said.
For Leslie Gelb, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, the unity of views expressed by those questioned reflects a deeply critical attitude towards the administration of President George W. Bush.
"It's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force," he said.
Other experts questioned the very nature of the US campaign.
"It was a doomed enterprise from the very start: a 'war on terror' -- it's as ridiculous as a 'war on anger'. You do not wage a war on terror, you wage a war against people," said Alain Chouet, a former senior officer of France's DGSE foreign intelligence service.
"The Americans have been stuck inside this idea of a 'war on terror' since September 11, they are not asking the right questions."
"You can always slaughter terrorists -- there are endless reserves of them. We should not be attacking the effects of terrorism but its causes: Wahhabite ideology, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. But no one will touch any of those," Chouet argued.
Instead he said US policy in the Middle East, which had "turned Iraq into a new Afghanistan," was acting as a powerful recruiting agent for a generation of Islamic radicals.
The continued US presence in Iraq and "the atrocities committed by a campaigning army", the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and the "grotesque" US detention centre at Guantanamo in Cuba all "provide excuses" for violent radicals, he said.
The United States "have fallen into the classic terrorist trap -- they're lashing out at the wrong targets," causing collateral damage that boosts the cause of their opponents, he said.
Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, agreed that Washington was acting as its own worst enemy in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
"We're clearly losing. Today, Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and their allies have only one indispensable ally: the US' foreign policy towards the Islamic world."
"The cumulative impact of several events in the past two years has gone a good way towards increasing Muslim hatred for Americans, simply because they are Americans," he said, citing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the East-West row over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
"Each of these events is unfortunate but not terribly serious for Western minds. But from the Muslim perspective they are deliberate and vicious attacks against the things that guide their lives and their faith."
9.7.06
"Packing It In"
"Packing It In"
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 09 July 2006
Surprise, surprise. In an interview with John King from CNN last
Thursday, Dick Cheney said that withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be
the "worst possible thing we could do." FU-DC
Doing his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US
residents (let us be careful how we use the word "citizen"), Cheney said
of the terrorist groups in Iraq, "If we pull out, they'll follow us."
Because according to Cheney, "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.
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."
Lovely to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his
ilk, conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to
the US invasion/occupation. And one must love his "logic." For according
to Cheney, "whether we complete the job or not in Iraq" his beloved
"terrorism" will "continue" ... "only it'll get worse."
Then why stay in Iraq, Dick? (Oil, Darh)
Because when Dick said, "only it'll get worse," if he'd been referring
to the situation on the ground in Iraq, he'd have been 100% accurate.
For starters, things for the US military continue to disintegrate. With
raping and pillaging being carried out by soldiers who have long since
surrendered the war for "hearts and minds," other lesser reported
developments underscore the trajectory of the military in Iraq.
According to the Arabic al-Sharqiyah Television channel, on July 6th :
"Gunmen shot down two US Apaches in al-Zur village, north of
al-Miqdadiyah in Diyala Governorate, northeast of Baghdad. Security
sources and local residents said that both gunships were seen crashing
in one of the village's farms, and reported that a US APC carrying 15 US
soldiers was destroyed in clashes that raged in the cities and villages
located north of al-Miqdadiyah. The US Army is yet to comment on the
incident, which comes at a time when US and Iraqi forces are besieging
areas north of al-Miqdadiyah, including al-Zur village."
This comes at a time when the US military are once again aggressively
attacking the forces of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - an action which
threatens to spread violence deeper into southern Iraq as well as
unifying Shia and Sunni against the occupation forces. Think March and
April, 2004 - a time when Shia and Sunni were, at times, literally
fighting side by side against US soldiers in places like Najaf and Fallujah.
While the military futilely spins its giant wheels in the bloody sands
of Iraq, it continues to be the Iraqi people who are suffering the most.
Here is a recent email from an Iraqi friend:
/Dear Dahr,/
/ How are you doing? I hope you are fine. I'm sorry for not keeping in
touch with you, but as you know the situation is bad here and it gets so
much worse and worse that words cannot describe it./
/ I really want you to remember someone named Abdul Razak who you met
one day here. He was responsible for the corpses' freezer at one of the
hospitals where you visited. This was the man who helped you as you
nearly fainted when you tried to enter the freezer. This man,
unfortunately, was found killed and his body thrown away on a street on
the 4th of April of this year.
I met his wife and his five children. The oldest child is a girl who is 20 years old and the youngest is 6 years
old. They live in a rented house. The father's salary was the only source of money for the whole family. Now, as he is dead, they have no source of money. I tried to help them by getting some donations for them
from the staff working in the hospital where he used to work, but it seems that it is not enough. Of course for a big family like his, this makes it more difficult. But I hope we can ease their pain and help them
manage their life by finding someone who can donate some money. I am wondering if you can get some donations for this family to start a new life and construct a small project to help them manage their life. Thank
you in advance .../
I get these regularly, and several of my colleagues who have also worked
in Iraq are telling me that they too are receiving requests for help
nowadays.
Here is another email I received the day before the aforementioned, from
another friend in Baghdad:
/Dear friend,/
/ Maybe this is the last message I am going to send ... really I don't
have anyone here. I am like a foreigner in my own country. I am really
feeling very afraid. I am living next to Al Sadr City and the Al Sadr
militia is killing anyone who is Sunni, especially when any explosion
attacks the Shia. They come to our zone and take Sunni people from their
houses and kill them. They killed one of my relatives. They killed my
neighbor, who was only 26 years old. My friend, the situation now in
Baghdad is very bad. Do you know that there is no work and no safety,
even in my own house? I'm very sad to tell you that I am very tired from
changing my house. My family and I leave the house every month for three
weeks and we run away like some one who did a crime. What is our crime?/
/ We are in a very bad situation. It is so bad now. Please help, is all
that I ask as we need help now. We are living, just waiting for our turn
to die ... Please help us if you can ... I don't have any one to ask but
you./
So while Iraqis are being killed or fearing death as they suffer through
the daily hell that is the US occupation, Cheney, the real force behind
this "administration," tells CNN, "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."
Guess what, Dick - moral and sane Americans "don't have the stomach for
this fight" because this fight should have never taken place. And anyone with a soul, let alone a conscience, should be more than happy to see US troops in Iraq "packing it in."
5.7.06
Signing Away the Constitution?
by William Fisher |
| NEW YORK - Last March, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring Justice Department officials to give them reports by certain dates on how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers. |
4.7.06
Spreading Cancer
Depleted uranium turns Bush's lies into high-tech horror |
| by Robert C. Koehler |
| The unending game of “pretend” that the U.S. media allow George Bush to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though they were plausible — as though a class of third-graders couldn’t demolish them with a few innocent questions — feels like the journalistic equivalent of waterboarding. Gasp! Some truth, please! I suggest the prez has forfeited the right to command a headline, or half a story, or an uninterrupted quote: “. . . we’ll defend ourselves, but at the same time we’re actively working with our partners to spread peace and democracy,” he said last week in Austria. Surely “spreading democracy” should no longer be allowed to appear in print, between now and 2008, unless accompanied by a parenthetical clarification (“not true,” stated as profanely as local standards allow). And that, of course, would only be the media’s first step back into integrity with the public. The occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the entire war (to promote) terror . . . please, please, can these no longer be trotted out in consequence-free abstraction, but as the high-tech malevolence they are, actively continuing the incalculable devastation of countries and their populations? The bodies keep piling up, the toxic horrors spread. Hasn’t anyone in this place ever heard of depleted uranium? Is the health crisis in Iraq and, indeed, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, not to mention Kosovo and among returning vets for the last four American wars, somehow irrelevant to “the course” we’re asked to stay? “Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers — one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney — he had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. . . . My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.” This is Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the oncology center at the largest hospital in Basra, speaking in 2003 at a peace conference in Japan. Why is it that only peace activists are able to hear people like this? Why hasn’t he been asked to testify before Congress as its members debate the future of this war and the next? “Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning,” he went on. “They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most. However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the body and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common.” Depleted uranium — DU — is the Defense Establishment euphemism for U-238, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process and the ultimate dirty weapon material. It’s almost twice as dense as lead, catches fire when launched and explodes on impact into microscopically fine particles, or “nano-particles,” which are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin; it’s also radioactive, with a half-life of 4.468 billion years. And we make bombs and bullets out of it — it’s the ultimate penetrating weapon. We dropped at least 300 tons of it on Iraq during Gulf War I (the first time it was used in combat) and created Gulf War Syndrome. This time around, the estimated DU use on defenseless Iraq is 1,700 tons, far more of it in major population centers. Remember shock and awe? We were pounding Baghdad, in those triumphant early days, with low-grade nuclear weapons, raining down cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects and much, much more on the people we claimed to be liberating. We weren’t spreading democracy, we were altering the human genome. As we “protected ourselves,” in the words of the president, from Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, we opened our own arsenal of WMD on them, contaminating the country’s soil and polluting its air — indeed, unleashing a nuclear dust into the troposphere and contaminating the whole world. “We used to think (DU) traveled up to a hundred miles,” Chris Busby told me. Busby, a chemical physicist and member of the British government’s radiation risk committee, as well as the founder of the European Committee of Radiation Risk, has monitored air quality in Great Britain. Based on these findings, “It looks like it goes quite around the planet,” he said. While Bush mouths ironic whoppers — “We will be standing with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes for freedom and liberty are fulfilled,” he told the U.N. General Assembly a while back — his actions pass, in the words of former Livermore Labs scientist Leuren Moret, “a death sentence on the Middle East and Central Asia.” A war crime of unprecedented dimension is unfolding as we avert our eyes. Perhaps it’s simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what they’re doing and it will all turn out for the best. Meanwhile, the contagion spreads, the children die, the planet becomes uninhabitable. |
Gaza Power Plant Hit by Israeli Airstrike is Insured by US Agency
by Farah Stockman | |
| WASHINGTON - The Palestinian power plant bombed by Israeli forces Tuesday is insured by a US government agency, and US officials say they expect American funds to be used to pay for the damage. The destruction of the 140-megawatt reactor, the only one in the Gaza Strip, threatens to create a humanitarian disaster because the plant supplies electricity to two-thirds of Gaza's 1.3 million residents and operates pumps that provide water supplies.
Administration officials said the restrictions on working with a Hamas-led government could further complicate the repair of the electric facility, which could take weeks, if not months, to fix because of the escalating violence in Gaza. The bombing of the plant could become a lasting problem for the Bush administration, which is appealing for an end to the showdown between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli warplanes hit the power plant two days after Palestinian militants attacked an Israeli Army unit, killing two soldiers and taking another one hostage. Israeli forces responded yesterday by entering the Gaza Strip for the first time since Israel's historic pullout from the territory nine months ago, bombing the plant and three bridges. The power plant cost about $150 million and took more than five years to build. Plans for it began in 1999, when two private investors -- the now-defunct The project faltered when violence broke out in Gaza in 2000 and when Enron collapsed into bankruptcy, but Khoury continued to push forward. His construction company's US subsidiary, Connecticut-based Morganti Group, bought out Enron's stake in the plant. In 2002, the plant began operating, becoming the first such facility regulated by the Palestinian Energy Authority. In 2004, it reached full commercial capacity and its owners were able to purchase $48 million in ``political risk" insurance from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation , an arm of the US government that provides American businesses with financing abroad and promotes US interests in emerging markets. The US Investment Corporation -- set up in 1971 with US taxpayer funds -- had been supportive of the project from the beginning, arranging the first meeting between investors for the plant, according to the Bloomberg news service. Few commercial insurance companies insure such projects against political violence, but the US Investment Corporation does so to encourage development in emerging markets, according to Lawrence Spinelli, a spokesman for the Investment Corporation. The insurance that Morganti purchased covers ``political violence," which includes ``wars, acts of terrorism, things like that," Spinelli said. To be paid for the damage, the company must file a claim, and the Investment Corporation must determine whether the claim is covered by the policy, Spinelli said. The corporation raises its reserve funds through insurance premiums and other charges to its clients, but its funds are kept in the US Treasury and are controlled by Congress. That could be a problem for those who want to see the power plant swiftly rebuilt. After the election of Hamas in January, a host of congressmen introduced bills designed to freeze US assistance to the Palestinian territories to prevent any financial benefit from reaching Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization. In April, the State Department announced it would cut off all planned funding for infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. But advocates for Palestinians say that the plant must be repaired, even if the US government is forced to pay for it. ``If you take out two-thirds of the power in a place like Gaza, and if this is the source of electricity that powers pumps for water, you may have a major crisis on your hand in short order," said Ed Abington , a former consultant to the Palestinian Authority. |
