A couple days ago I wrote a post about how the government is trying to do the military on the cheap by doing things like capping some classifications raises at no more than 2%, and deciding it would be wasteful to pay an additional $6,000 to the families of soldiers who are killed.
Just to give a bit extra perspective, remember when there was the flap recently about the child care tax-credit? The Senate wanted to expand the credit to low-income families, but the House Republicans refused to unless they could also get an additional $82 million in tax cuts for the rich. Obviously, the House didn't consider that $82,000,000 to be wasteful. But a proposal that would have cost us $1,212,000 to date would be, according to the White House. (Based on a total of 202 US casualties in Iraq according to the Summary published by Lunaville.)
Somehow, I don't think most people would agree with those priorities, if only they understood what is really happening in Washington today.
I didn't know if it was possible, but yes, there is someone out there with more links on their sidebars that I have. Note: sidebars, as in 2 of them. But there's more to The People's Republic of Seabrook than just incredible sidebars (and I have to give him points - his sidebars are mostly text links instead of graphics, but....). He's also got adorable kitten pictures that you should be sure to check out.
I know I've mentioned it before, but the difficulty Obeidi had getting the plans and other information he had buried in his yard to us is just another thing that makes it seem like the Bush administration really isn't trying all that hard to find the WMD's - though I still haven't figured out entirely why. The list of things they're ignoring, difficulties people who want to give them information are having and the general lack of concern they seem to have about the whole issue is getting to a point where its hard to dismiss it as mere incompetence or coincidence.
Jeanne D'Arc at Body and Soul commented today on another odd development in the War on Terror™. Apparently, we are trying to set up our own "Peacekeeping" forces that would be an alternative to the UN peacekeepers, and we're also trying to block the UN from sending peacekeepers to the Congo and Liberia to help out with the situation there.
As I was reading the article, a recent move the administration made suddenly seemed to make more sense. Why are we standing in the way of sending a UN force large enough to actually accomplish something to the Congo? Lots of people have asked why we aren't sending troops, but the barrier we're setting up goes a lot farther than that -- we're stopping other countries from beefing up the UN force. Why?This administration seems to be playing a lot of games. It makes no logical sense that they wouldn't want to find WMD, unless there's something to be gained from it, nor does it make any logical sense to block other nations from joining the UN peacekeeping forces, especially in a situation that in as dire need of resolving as the ones in the Congo and Liberia.I don't have a well-thought out answer, but I do have a concern tugging at me: If we plan to set ourselves up as the world's "peacekeepers," do we really have any interest in helping the UN succeed in its current attempt at peacekeeping?
So what are we to make of all this? Prior to the start of the war, the administration repeatedly cited the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the US because of the biological and chemical weapons he had, and the nuclear weapons he was rebuilding. Now, we hear Colin Powell on NPR saying that
Our concern was that Iraq was keeping in place this capability, waiting for the day when they were free of sanctions and could go about putting all of their programs back in place. This particularly applies to the nuclear program. What I said in February when I spoke to the UN, was that they had the brainpower, they had the plans, and they were working on acquiring the capability, and whenever they were free of UN constraints or other constraints -- nobody was breathing down their neck -- there was no doubt in my mind Saddam Hussein still had the intention of developing such a capability.So, he wasn't an imminent threat, but a potential threat, and yet it was more important to use our military to take him out and to focus our energies on preventing him from being able to restart his programs in the future than it was for us to try and deal with the North Koreans who already have restarted their nuclear weapons program.
And while many in the pro-war crowd have claimed that ridding Iraq of a cruel dictator justifies the war, even if no weapons are ever found, we're trying to prevent other countries from being able to provide humanitarian military aid to people in Liberia and the Congo who are facing situations every bit as grim as anything the Iraqis had faced under Saddam.
Right now, I have a lot of questions, but few answers.
If you haven't yet read Josh Marshall's piece about the difficulty Obeidi (this Iraqi scientist who had nuclear plans and centrifuge components buried under a rosebush in his back yard) had in getting anyone to listen to him, you really should. It's astounding.
It turns out that Obeidi was trying to give up the goods almost from the moment US troops stormed into Baghdad. But our operation was so poorly run that we ended up making the guy into some sort of friggin' nuclear Diogenes, practically wandering the streets trying to find one competent person to turn himself in to.In the end, for Obeidi to be able to get anywhere in turning over this material, he had to go around to the international journalists ouside the Palestine Hotel, and approach them randomly until he was able to find someone who could contat David Albright, a UN inspector whom Obeidi had known when from when he'd been working in Iraq.
After several tries, Albright finally got someone at the CIA to listen to Obeidi, and arrangements were thought to have been made in regards to keeping him and his family safe, since he was still somewhat nervous about possible repercussions from his actions. I say they were thought to have been made because apparently they weren't made well enough. After turning the material over to the CIA, the Army showed up at his house and arrested him. Eventually he got things straightened out and he was released.
Then things got even weirder.
After Obeidi got out of Army slammer, the CIA started hedging on its promises to get him out of the country. Or at least that's what Obeidi thought.CNN checked out the story with the CIA, who asked CNN to hold off for a few days while they got Obeidi and his family out of the country."First they have promised that they will make all the attempts to safeguard me ... and then what happened they told me that they have looked and they have investigated this matter, and they have discovered that there is more that I can offer, and they are ready to take the news to the media."
At this point, Obeidi apparently started to freak and asked Albright what he should do. Abright told him to go to the media. And this, it would seem, is how CNN got pulled in -- as Obeidi's insurance policy that our folks over in Iraq didn't completely screw-up the situation or end up FedExing him and his nuclear parts to Osama bin Laden off in the wilds of Central Asia.
If you want to read the CNN story about this whole mess, it's available here.
They say in the south you can say anything about someone, no matter how mean-spirited, if you first, "bless their soul". Well... my husband, bless his soul, is a very bright guy when he takes a minute to think, but sometimes he just blurts out the first thing that comes into his head, and they're sometimes a bit too funny not to share.
For example, a couple years ago when I asked him to re-seed our lawn because some spots were looking rather bare. He looked at me with the most exasperated expression. Now, it didn't seem to me like re-seeding the lawn would really be that much harder than mowing it, and while mowing isn't his favourite thing, it's really not a big deal to him when it needs to be done, so I asked him what the problem was. "I really don't want to dig that many holes..."
My sides were still hurting the next day.
Another beaut comes from when he was still a teenager (I've known him for quite a while - we'd been friends for about 6 years before we started dating) and was impressed by things like designer labels and such. A girl at a weekly get-together we all went to was showing off her new purse by "LA Style". Proto-hubby gives an admiring "Oooohhh.. imported!" and the group just about fell on the floor.
Tonight he came up with one that's almost as good. He mentioned that his dad had just come back from vacation, and I said I hadn't known he'd gone on one, and wondered where he'd gone. "He went to Wyoming, and took a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon."
I really wouldn't want to see those saddle sores!
Turns out he really did go to Arizona, but it was pretty funny, nonetheless. I gotta say, though, I love having a life with a lot of laughter in it, and, thankfully, he quickly understands why what he said was funny and can laugh at it, too.
Just thought I'd share something that wasn't a rant for a change. :)
President Bush and his administration have spared little effort in talking about how important and how great our military is. Donald Rumsfeld's staff is calling towns and cities to give them ideas on how to honour our troops during the upcoming Fourth of July fireworks celebrations. President Bush wanted to declare "Mission Accomplished" with our soldiers (and, of course, play flyboy in the process). Dittoheads and other rabid conservatives are constantly screaming that liberals and others opposed to the war aren't "supporting the troops" and that we all need to be more "patriotic". The House passed a resolution promising to give "unequivocal support" to the military. None of them, however, seem to be willing to put their money where their mouths are.
Army Times features an editorial documenting the shortfall in benefits for our servicemen and women and their families.
For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.Other examples include the administration's stated desire to undo increces that were made recently in imminent-danger pay and the family-separation allowence, limiting raises for some ranks to no more than 2%, reductions in the amount of money available for repairs and other work needed on military housing among other projects, and failing to make "progress on minor tax provisions that would be a boon to military homeowners, reservists who travel long distances for training and parents deployed to combat zones, among others".
Talk is great. I'm sure our soldiers love hearing the praise and claims of support for their work. I'm sure they'd love it even more if the administration actually stood behind those words. Yet, once again, Bush talks big and then bails when it comes to the follow through. It's a pattern that's wearing thin - and when it gets applied to our troops, who deserve all the support we can give them, well, there's just no excuse.
Link via Eschaton
Letters soliciting funds for any political cause are always filled with bullshit, but sometimes you'll find one that manages to go above and beyond the call of duty. A great example is the e-mail from Dick Cheney on behalf of Bush/Cheney '04 sent to Talking Points Memo. No, not to Josh Marshall, the author of Talking Points Memo, but to Talking Points Memo, itself, asking it to be a grassroots leader for them in Talk, Alaska.
It gets better.
The letter points out how President Bush has kept his word to bring "dignity and honnor to the White House and change the tone in Washington", and talks about how he's "worked with Congress to pass tax cuts that are vital to economic growth, a major education reform package, important strengthening of our armed forces and our intelligence capabilities, and vital upgrades in our homeland defenses." That they neglected to include funding for many of these things in the federal budget apparently isn't worth mentioning.
My favourite paragraph, however, is this one:
Your support is especially critical over the next few months, as President Bush must devote his energies to his duties -- fighting the war on terrorism, continuing to strengthen our economy, reforming education, and working for Medicare reform and prescription drugs for our seniors.So, does this mean he won't be doing any fundraisers for the campaign, so that he can attend to these duties of his? Oh, wait - that's what he's been doing most of this week, isn't it? Raising money, of course, not devoting his energies to his duties.
If you have a second, be sure to read the whole thing. It's a good, quick reminder of why - aside from the whole Iraq mess - we really need, and deserve, someone much better.
Kos, of Daily Kos is largely responsible for the ePatriots program that the Democrats have put together to help with fund-raising. As a result, he recently had a chance to speak with Terry McAuliffe, the head of the DNC, about the upcoming campaign and how the blogisphere can be involved in helping with the 2004 election.
Kos, himself, offers a couple suggestions, and then opened the comment thread for others to leave their own suggestions, as he's promised McAuliffe that he'll be putting together a memo about it. If you have a minute, pop over to Daily Kos and read through the notes he made on his conversation, read the suggestions from other bloggers, and leave any comments you may have as well.
For a long time, many of us who blog have felt like there's not a whole lot any of us can do to make a real difference - and I know I'm not the only person who started blogging with the hope that maybe this would be a way we could start to have some sort of an impact. Blogs are becoming more powerful tools, now, when it comes to politics in general, and it's great that the DNC has recognized that and is willing to find ways to make use of blogs to promote their goals.
Just yesterday, in my post about the Supreme Court's "Texas v Lawrence" decision, I said:
I hope that this ruling will also overturn the odd "Romeo and Juliet" laws, such as the one Kansas has, where penalties for cases involving statuatory rape are reduced if the individuals involved are teens and within a few years of each other - but the reduced penalties only apply for heterosexual couples. As a result, a young man who - had his partner been female - would have been sentenced to 1 year in jail, instead was sentenced to 17 years.Well. It sure didn't take long. The New York Time reports today that the Supreme Court Justices have voided the 17 year sentence given to Matthew Limon and sent the case back to the state courts to be reviewed.
The way the law was structured, older teens who engage in sexual activity with teens can be given less severe punishments than would normally be given for statutory rape - but only if the couple was heterosexual. For gay couples, the stiffer penalties still applied.
The court's directive today that the Kansas courts reconsider the Limon case with Lawrence v. Texas in mind was tantamount to an instruction to set aside the prison term imposed on Mr. Limon, and perhaps to take a close look at what has been called the state's "Romeo and Juliet Law."
In returning the case to the Kansas courts, the Supreme Court is essentially saying that not only is it unconstitutional to make acts that are legal for heterosexuals illegal for homosexuals, but also that when it comes to sex crimes, the punishment for a crime committed by a homosexual must be comperable to the punishment for the same crime when commited by a heterosexual.
I know many writers have commented on just how huge this decision is - but I'm not sure if we've really got a good grasp yet on the potential scope it could have. Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, almost laid out exactly how the ruling can be used to challenge the ban on gay marriage, and the principles behind the decision - including the idea that, while many may find a certain kind of private behaviour to be immoral, they do not necessarily have the right to force that morality onto society at large through the use of criminal law - may have implications in a variety of other cases. Some have even suggested that it may have implication for the legalization of medical marijuana, among other issues.
The other bit of good news out of this is that the decision was by a 6 to 3 margin. There's been a lot of speculation that at least one, possibly two, Justices may soon announce their retirement. The most likely suspect is Cheif Justice Rehnquist, with Justice O'Conner considered a good possiblity also. Even if both do retire and are replaced by right-wing idealogues, there would still be at least 5 of the Justices who created this ruling on the Court, which would give an advantage to other cases that may make use of this as a precedent. Granted, there are many other issues where a change of even one member could tip the balance the other way, but there would at least be enough members left who support the principles in this case to have a profound influence on other, similar cases.
Welcome to the latest politician to jump on the "Weapons of Mass Destruction? Oh, no, they were never that big of a deal..." bandwagon - Senator Dr. Bill Frist!
The Republican leader in the Senate said that Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons of mass destruction was not the main justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq.For a choice selection of his comments made during the lead-up to the war, in which is proclaims strongly and frequently that Saddams WMD are such a threat that we must go after him now, check out Billmon, who has put together another of his wonderful quote compendiums from someone trying to duck as their own words come back to bite them in the bum."I'm not sure that's the major reason we went to war," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told NBC television's Today Show.
And Monster Limo notes that the same article quotes Frist's most ...unique... explaination as to why we can't find the WMD's everyone knew Saddam had.
Frist added that he was not surprised that weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq.Um, Bill? I think they usually try to keep those viruii and chemicals in some kind of container? Those might be a little easier to locate."The weapons of mass destruction that we're talking about today are new. They're little viruses, they're bacteria, they're chemicals, things you can't see, you can't touch, you can't smell. So intelligence is tough," he said.
"The administration made decisions based on the very best intelligence that we have available today," Frist insisted.
I just got done watching "The Pentagon Wars" -- again. The movie is based on the book of the same name by Col. James Burton, and explores the difficulties he ran into while trying to get realistic tests done on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It's one of my favourite movies, but since it's played as a bit of a farce, I know that there are most likely a number of liberties taken with the real story. So, tonight, I decided to do a bit of Googling on it to see what I could find out. Well, I didn't learn much more about the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but I did stumble across something I found rather interesting.
President Bush has made no secret of the fact that he wants to get some form of a missle defense system up by next fall (hmmm... any particular reason for that timing, I wonder?) even if it's not exactly functional at that point.
Back in February, Slate published an article on why putting over $9 billion ("with a 'B'") into a program that almost certainly will not be working properly by the time Bush wants to have the initial stages deployed isn't really that great of an idea. The article also notes how doing that - deploying part of a not-yet-fully-developed and essentially non-functional weapons system - could backfire and, rather than serving as a deterrent to countries like North Korea to keep them from developing their own nuclear weapons, it could push them to try and develop more, faster, so that they can either try to use them before the defensive system is working or create enough missiles that they'd be able to overpower any defensive system we'd have in place.
Here's the part that really struck me, though. Bush keeps talking about how we have to win the "War on Terror™", and what kind of threats we're facing right now from al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. We're seeing a general weakening of our civil rights on the excuse that the government needs to violate these rights so that it can better protect us from terrorists. He plans to run his Presidential re-election campaign on the alleged strength of his leadership in the War on Terror™, and how much progress we've made in making America safer.
Yet, in spite of all this - and in spite of the fact that even if he can deploy part of his beloved missile defense system by next fall, it won't do us any real good - when he was given the opportunity to take nearly a billion dollars from the missile defense program and give it to the Homeland Security Department to be used however he wanted, he refused the offer.
That's right. Bush would rather spend money on a high-tech defensive system that might (but certainly can't be guaranteed to) help keep us safer several years from now, than to spend it on programs and security measures that would help protect us better right now.
What might motivate him to put off better security now for possible security later? The article itself doesn't speculate on his reasons, but I will. The missile defense system is being developed by defense contractors. They get a good sized chunk of that $9 billion so that they can work on inventing the technology that the system will need in order to be functional in any meaningful way - and I think we all know that they take in a lot more money on projects like this than they need to. These are the people who come up with the $100 hammers after all, and they also frequently make big contributions to (mainly) Republican campaigns and politicians.
The next time you hear Bush expressing concern for the safety and well-being of Americans, or we're told about one of the many threats of impending terrorist attacks here in the country, or even when someone in the administration starts talking about how we need to give up more of our rights so that its easier for law enforcement to catch terrorists, remember that Bush's clear priority is not to protect America and ensure the safety of her citizens - at least not in the short term. His priority is to give as much money as possible to companies who, in general, support his campaign and, of course, expect to get their pockets lined in return.
There is no justification for Bush to have refused this offer. Many states are struggling under the burden of the costs for increase security as demanded by the Homeland Security Department - especially during times when we are under an orange alert. As a result, they're being forced to cut back in other areas, including funding of first responders and education. (One Senator even suggested that, to help save costs, first responders should be required to put in overtime hours without overtime pay, since we're at war, and our soldiers - who are essentially on duty around the clock while living away from home - don't get overtime pay.) That $817 million dollars could have gone quite a ways in helping states to pay for the security measures they need to take, and possibly even to help with increasing the security of our ports, which are notoriously underfunded at the moment.
Another interesting tidbit that the article mentions is that in addition to wanting to deploy components of this partially-finished missile defense system, the Department of Defense wants Congress to exempt the missile defense program from the laws that require all weapons systems to undergo operational testing before they're deployed. These laws were established following the situation with the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and are intended to help ensure that any weapons systems that are deployed are capable of doing what they're supposed to, and that they can do it safely, so that soldiers and civilians will not be put at any unnecessary risk from them.
But Bush and his team want to deploy an unfinished - and untested system next fall, without any way of knowing if it will ever be able to do its job and no indication of what could go wrong with it.
Does he think that our enemies won't notice that the system doesn't work? (They'll know that if they read our news, as its no secret now that there's no realistic way that it could be operational by that time, and I'm sure it won't be any secret if it's still not working when it's deployed in the field.)
In a way, I'm almost at a loss for words (present evidence to the contrary notwithstanding). The idiocy, illogic and audaciousness of this plan is astounding. I know I'd much rather have my tax dollars going to help the states with affording the cost of Homeland Security demands, or to beefing up our ports, or something that would do us some good now, and maybe wait an extra year on the Star Wars plan that may or may not be workable.
The whole thing is just insane.
I'm mirroring a copy of footage that The Memory Hole has obtained a from Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, taken on the morning of the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. A few seconds after the video starts, Bush's Cheif of Staff, Andrew Card, comes in and informs President Bush that a second plane has hit the second tower and that America is under attack. For the next five minutes, you can see him sit, listening politely to the children as they read from their story books, until the children stop reading, and the President joshes around with them and their teacher for a minute or so.
The tape ends at that point, but according to Cooperative Research's excellent analysis of the President's actions that day, he was in no rush to leave the school.
When Bush finally did leave, he didn't act like a man in a hurry. In fact, he was described as "openly stretching out the moment." [Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism - From Inside the Bush White House, by Bill Sammon, 10/02, p. 89] When the lesson was over, Bush said to the children: "Hoo! These are great readers. Very impressive! Thank you all so much for showing me your reading skills. I bet they practice too. Don't you? Reading more than they watch TV? Anybody do that? Read more than you watch TV? [Hands go up] Oh that's great! Very good. Very important to practice! Thanks for having me. Very impressed." [Transcribed from Booker video, Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism - From Inside the Bush White House, by Bill Sammon, 10/02, pp. 89-90] Bush still continued to talk, advising the children to stay in school and be good citizens. [Tampa Tribune, 9/1/02, St. Petersburg Times, 9/8/02 (B)] One student asked Bush a question, and he gave a quick response on his education policy. [New York Post, 9/12/02]I first read about this film clip at Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World in a post by Bob Harris. He has a suggestion for what to do while watching this film:The only source to describe what happened next is Fighting Back by Bill Sammon. Publishers Weekly described Sammon's book as an "inside account of the Bush administration's reaction to 9-11 [and] a breathless, highly complimentary portrait of the president [showing] the great merit and unwavering moral vision of his inner circle." [Publisher's Weekly, 10/15/02] Sammon's conservative perspective makes his account of Bush's behavior at the end of the photo-op all the more surprising. Bush is described as smiling and chatting with the children "as if he didn't have a care in the world" and "in the most relaxed manner imaginable." White House aide Gordon Johndroe, then came in as he usually does at the end of press conferences, and said, "Thank you, press. If you could step out the door we came in, please." A reporter then asked, "Mr. President, are you aware of the reports of the plane crash in New York? Is there anything...", But Bush interrupted, and no doubt recalling his order, "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET," Bush responded, "I'll talk about it later." But still the president did not leave. "He stepped forward and shook hands with [classroom teacher] Daniels, slipping his left hand behind her in another photo-op pose. He was taking his good old time. ... Bush lingered until the press was gone." [Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism - From Inside the Bush White House, by Bill Sammon, 10/02, p. 90]
The White House admits that Bush fully understood what was happening. So keep this in mind while watching: in New York, as these long, precious minutes slowly tick by, people are burning horribly, people are jumping 100 stories to their deaths, and more planes are very likely headed for other targets (the Pentagon, for example, as it turned out).As I watched this film, I found myself feeling quite nauseated. I remember when my husband came in and told me what had happened. I was asleep, but once I comprehended what he'd said - which took maybe 30 seconds, even coming from a deep slumber - I was up, had the TV on and was online looking for more information, trying to find out what was happening, how it had happened, why, what else was expected... anything and everything I could find out. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help, even though it was fairly obvious from the outset that there wouldn't be.Bush sits complacently, doing nothing.
Fighter planes desperately need scrambling. The Pentagon not yet been hit. This is a grave national emergency.
Five. Solid. Freaking. Minutes.
Watch the video. Watch it. Watch the damn thing.
And while you do, remember that morning. Remember where you were, how instantly you wanted to help, and how desperately you would have leapt to action given any opportunity to defend this country.
I cannot even begin to imagine what it would take to just sit there, entirely nonplussed, listening to these kids read, knowing that my country was under attack and wondering what needed to be done and what could be done to prevent further losses.
Even more interesting, though, is why the Secret Service did nothing to try and get President Bush out of the school. He was in a public place, at a pre-scheduled meeting. Anyone who'd wanted to know his planned public apperances could have found out about it. At the time he was sitting there, we had no idea what was going on. There was no way to know if the President, himself, might be a target - though an incident earlier that day, also noted in Cooperative Research's article, should have given the Secret Service detail reason for concern, especially when considered in light of the attacks themselves.
At about the same time Bush was getting ready for his jog, a van carrying several Middle Eastern men pulled up to the Colony's guard station. The men said they were a television news crew with a scheduled "poolside" interview with the president. They asked for a certain Secret Service agent by name. The message was relayed to a Secret Service agent inside the resort, who hadn't heard of the agent mentioned or of plans for an interview. He told the men to contact the president's public relations office in Washington, DC, and had the van turned away. [Longboat Observer, 9/26/01]On a side note, I had mentioned earlier that I'd posted my "Protest Restrictions" article to Blogcritics, and there's been a semi-active thread going in the comments section. It's been brought up that the reason for segregating people with anti-Bush sentiments to "free speech zones" where the protesters and the President can neither see nor hear one another is to help ensure the President's safety - and that given that there seem to be many people who strongly hate the President, such a precaution may be warrented. It seems odd, then, doesn't it, that the Secret Service would be so concerned about keeping people with "No War for Oil" signs away from the President, even if there is no other indication that they might be dangerous, but when the US is actually under attack and the extent of that attack is not yet known, the Secret Service has no problem letting Bush stay put, potentially endangering himself and all the children gathered there.The Secret Service may have foiled an assassination attempt. Two days earlier, Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, had been murdered by a similar ruse. Two North African men, posing as journalists from "Arabic News International," had been requesting an interview with Massoud since late August. Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary, said that by the night of September 8, "they were so worried and excitable, they were begging us." An interview was arranged for the following day. As it began, a bomb hidden in the video camera exploded, killing the two journalists. Massoud was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Tajikistan, but was pronounced dead on arrival (although his death was not acknowledged until September 15). [International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 10/30/01, Newsday, 10/26/01] The assassination is widely believed to have been timed to remove the Taliban's most popular and respected opponent in anticipation of the backlash that would occur after the 9/11 attacks. [BBC, 9/10/01, BBC, 9/10/01 (B), Time, 8/4/02, St. Petersburg Times, 9/9/02] The Northern Alliance blamed al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan's secret service, for the attacks. [Radio Free Europe, 9/10/01, Newsday, 9/15/01, Reuters, 10/4/01]
At any rate, take a few minutes to watch this footage. Make a mental note to yourself when Andy Card comes in, tells the President that the US is under attack, and recall your own feelings in the first few minutes after learning what happened. While it's obvious that the President can't react to feelings alone, and that he needed to extricate himself in a way that wouldn't overly frighten the children (though he had a perfect opportunity right when he was told, as they were between exercises, and he could have easily excused himself simply by telling the kids that he had something he had to attend to and reminding them that the President is sometimes a very busy man), but even given those circumstances, I couldn't imagine sitting there that calmly for that long.
Once again, here is a link to the footage. - 1 File, Quicktime format, 12.5 megs
Congratulations to all the gays and lesbians in Texas who now have a legal right to have sex with each other! And congrats those those in other states (like mine) where similar laws will now be overturned. I'm really happy for all of you!
Even though these laws have never affected me, personally (since I'm straight), I've never considered them to be fair or reasonable, and am glad that the Supreme Court - especially this Supreme Court in this administration - finally had the sense to realize that the laws were wrong.
I hope that this ruling will also overturn the odd "Romeo and Juliet" laws, such as the one Kansas has, where penalties for cases involving statuatory rape are reduced if the individuals involved are teens and within a few years of each other - but the reduced penalties only apply for heterosexual couples. As a result, a young man who - had his partner been female - would have been sentenced to 1 year in jail, instead was sentenced to 17 years.
The other bit of hope comes, oddly, from Antonin Scalia, who notes that the ruling may help in opening the way for the legailzation of gay marriage.
Although the majority opinion said the Texas case didn't "involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter," Scalia said the ruling invites laws allowing gay marriage.This ruling is a big step forward for gay rights, and it's about time."This reasoning leaves on shaky, pretty shaky grounds, state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," Scalia wrote.
On a side note: Blogging may be slow the next couple days. My copy of Harry Potter just arrived, and, well, I'm likely to get rather caught up in it (if it's as good as the last 4 were).
Ok.... Well, it seem the Supreme Court has decided that porn is a big enough threat to our children that libraries should be able to be compelled to install Internet filters, whether they want to or not. This is supposed to be a way of keeping curious little kids away from all the big nasty porn sites running around in the wild hinterlands of Cyberspace.
I wonder when they're going to do something about all the porn that may be coming to kids - unsolicited, and with no effort on the kids part - to their inboxes.
If you're anything like me, you probably get several pieces of pornographic spam ever day. Sometimes I get pictures of women with their legs spread wide and the stupidest looks on their faces (which I presume are supposed to look sexy but tend to look more like someone who's constipated and sucking on a lemon), pictures of women getting ready to suck on a guys dick, pictures of guys standing with their flags flying at full-mast, women with, um.... well, lets just say if there's any truth to proteins being good for the skin, they'll have a FANTASTIC complexion soon. You name it, I get it. And while Pagans may have a reputation for being sexually liberated, I'm a bit unusual in that way. Ok, I'm pretty much a prig when it comes to porn or even "near-porn" (lets just say one of my boyfriends used to tease the daylights out of me because anytime we sat down to watch a movie that might have some kind of a sex scene in it - even a PG-13 rated one - I had to have a Newsweek handy so I could just read that while he watched the action).
Sure, it's no problem for me to delete it, and I'm old enough that even though I absolutely loathe the stuff, it's not traumatic if I accidentially see it. But I know that I never gave may name or email address to anyone who would be sending out porn ads, and I've never filled out any surveys, visited any sites, or anything else to give any indication that I'd be interested in porn ads or sites.
I mention that because I think it's important - I didn't ask for any of this stuff. I get it, though, and I know there are probably a million ways for porn pushers to get my email. Companies I've given my e-mail to may well have sold or rented their list to someone. Web crawling bots may have scooped it up off of any website where I've ever had my email address posted. Some of it is undoubtedly from programs that can just blanket a domain with emails, without knowing the specific user names (or the part before the "@" sign).
Obviously, NONE of these methods take into account how old the person in question might be. The porn pushers simply don't care. They want to get their message out to whomever they can - and if some kids get sent it, oh well.
So here's the current irony - a kid goes into the library, surfs around at the sites allowed by the filter, maybe posts a couple messages on guestbooks, leaving his email address, or something of that nature. The next time he logs on, that address has gotten scooped up by a web bot, and sold off to "Big Bobs House of Big Boobs" or some such enterprise, and when the kid goes back to the library to check his email, well, whaddya know, he's got some titty pictures to look at.
Many Internet filters try to filter out anything that might be pornographic from email, but no system like that is going to be perfect. I've been working with one on my home computer that catches about 90% of them (I can tell because it just transfers them to a different folder which I scan through to make sure it's not deleting something I actually need to read), but I still end up with several rather unpleasant surprises each day when I go through my regular mail.
So, is the next step maybe going to be to prevent anyone from sending unsolicitated pornographic images through e-mail? I have to admit, on a personal level, I'd love it, though on a political level, I don't know if I'd like the prescedent it'd set. It just seems to be an odd bit of inconsistancy, though. Trying to prevent people from seeing porn in a public library but not caring who sends it to whom through email. Hmmm...
I dunno. Any suggestions?
[Note from Kriselda: Last week I had posted an entry called "Protest Restrictions", about a man who is being prosecuted for having an anti-Bush sign in an area where only Bush supporters were being allowed to gather. From time to time, I post copies of stories from here to Blogcritics, and had done so with this one. I edited it a bit, however, to make it somewhat clearer and a bit more polished. For the sake of completeness, I'm now posting the edited version to "different strings". So, this isn't anything new, it's more just for my own records, though if you want to read it, you're certainly welcome to :)]
Back in 1999, after discovering a website parodying his campaign for the Presidency, George W. Bush famously declared that "There ought to be limits to freedom". Since his installation as President, we've come to see that he was being quite sincere when he said that. Bush does not like to be aware of anyone disagreeing with him or his policies.One current example can be found in an article published by the Economist. Brett Bursey, a long time activist, had decided to join a crowd of people greeting the President at the Columbia, SC, airport. While the majority of the people gathered were there to show support for President Bush, Bursey brought a sign with him to express his opposition to Bush's policy in regards to Iraq. The sign said simply "No War for Oil". He was arrested by the South Carolina police for trespassing, but those charges were dropped. Soon after, however, he was charged under a federal statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas near the President. This rule, apparently, isn't invoked very often, but the Justice department has pressed for the prosecution of this case, in part, at least, to test out their ability to use it more often. It seems they want to spare President Bush the trauma of having to see or hear any indication that not everyone likes him.
The prosecutors say that Mr Bursey was not in a special "free-speech zone" that was set up for protesters half a mile from the hangar. The pro-Bush people did not need to be there because they were not protesting. Mr Bursey told the cops, defiantly, that he was under the impression that the whole of America was a free-speech zone.The prosecution is being brought specifically because Bursey was standing in the crowd to protest against President Bush. As noted above, none of the pro-Bush people were considered to be trespassing, and thus none were not arrested. The only difference between the pro-Bush people in the crowd and Bursey was the opinion he was expressing. In fact, one of the officials involved in his arrest told him "It's the content of your sign." He was also told that if he wanted to protest President Bush or his policies, he would have to go to the "Free Speech Zone" a half-mile down the road, out of Bush's sight or hearing. In essence, he could only say something in opposition to the President if he said it where the President wouldn't be subjected to it.
And, if all of that wasn't bad enough, when Bursey requested a jury trial - so that his guilt or innocence could be determined by his peers - the judge presiding over the case refused his request, saying that petty offenses, such as this, are not covered by the right to a jury trial.
Eleven Congressmen have written to Attorney General Ashcroft about the situation, asking that the charges be dismissed.
In the letter to Ashcroft recently released, the members of Congress called the prosecution of Bursey for carrying his sign outside the designated free speech zone "a threat to the freedom of expression we should all be defending."From the reports I've read, there was nothing in Mr. Bursey's appearance, demeanor or actions that would indicate he was any kind of a threat to the President. He was simply a man in a crowd with a sign saying "No War for Oil". He was singled out for arrest and prosecution under federal statutes and charged with trespassing because his opinion was someplace it didn't belong. I think that's the scariest part of this story to me. What we're talking about here isn't a matter of protecting the President's physical safety. If someone wanted to hurt or kill the president, they could easily blend in with a pro-Bush crowd if they needed to. It's a matter of saying that the government is now going to discriminate against certain people if they don't like the opinion being expressed - even if that opinion is entirely legal and protected by the First Amendment - and that expressing an "inappropriate" opinion in certain circumstances can now get you charged with a federal crime."As we read the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is a 'free speech zone.' In the United States, free speech is the rule, not the exception, and citizens' rights to express it do not depend on their doing it in a way the President finds politically amenable ... We ask that you make it clear that we have no interest as a government in 'zoning' Constitutional freedoms, and that being politically annoying to the President of the United States is not a criminal offense. This prosecution smacks of the use of the Sedition Acts two hundred years ago to protect the President from political discomfort. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. We urge you to drop this prosecution based so clearly on the political views being expressed by the individual who is being prosecuted."
I could understand if ALL members of a crowd - both for and against the President and his policies - were required to gather in a certain area, away from where he was appearing. I wouldn't necessarily like it, but it would be treating all opinions and opinion-holders the same way. The way it is right now, though, people who support the President are being given preferrential treatment, and those who oppose him are being pushed off as far to the side as possible. That is nothing short of a violation of the basic principle of free speech - one of the foundational values of this nation - and its a travesty of justice.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit posted a comment to this at Blogcritics, noting that John Leo of US News and World Report has done a column on this back in May, and that he (Reynolds) had posted about it at that time. The column by Leo, however, is now only available if you purchase it from USN&WR's archives.
Reynolds also noted in his comment that this kind of behaviour has been increasing since the attempted assassination of President Reagan, including during Clinton's administration. While I'm not aware of any cases that resulted in federal charges prior to this one (and the stories I've read about this case have indicated that the law Bursey has been charged under is used only "rarely"), if that's the case, it's just as wrong for a Democrat administration to determine who can demonstrate within the sight and hearing of the President based on their opinion as it is for a Republican one. It's also high time that this issue was treated with the seriousness and outrage it deserves.
Here's an interesting chart featuring quotes from Bush about various issues and contrasting that with the actual results of his policies. Generally, the quotes imply that Bush is in favour of something, and the results show him cutting funding to it.
Part of what makes this interesting is that it's been put together by the House Appropriations Committee, and is hosted at the house.gov site.
Remember back in 1999 when, during the campaign for the Presidency, George Bush was upset by a parody website and proclaimed that "There ought to be limits to freedom"? He was referring specifically to freedom of speech, and it appears that the occupying force in Iraq has decided to follow his lead. Today's Globe and Mail has a front page photo of a young Iraqi being lead off by armed troops, noting that he had "insulted occupying troops on his way to school" and had been "bound and taken away as a warning to others". [Here is a screen capture of the front page in case Globe and Mail has updated their site by the time you read this.]
This, of course, goes along with our shutting down of elections, declaring that we won't accept an islamic theocracy, banning Ba'athists from certain jobs, decreeing that images of Saddam cannot be shown in certain places, and trying to disarm the Iraqi citizens.
Last week, it was noted that we were forbidding any speech that would incite violence against the occupying troops. Are we now expanding it to include insults as well? Of course, not knowing what the kid said, it could have been something that might incite violence, but when it's reported that he's been arrested and taken away as "a warning to others", it doesn't sound like what he said was necessarily all that dangerous (otherwise, I'd expect to read that he was being arrested for "threatening" the troops, rather than "insulting" them).
Link via Eschaton
President Bush is now claiming that the reason we not yet found Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is that they may have been looted.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush defended initial administration claims about the existence of the weapons but did not promise they will be found, as he had on other occasions until recently. The president said documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned "in the regime's final days."If it turns out that this is he case, and if those weapons are being sold on the black market (which is a good probability - most people don't have a lot of use for WMDs themselves and know they'd fetch a good price from someone who wants them), then President Bush needs to be prepared to accept responsiblity for any deaths, injuries, sicknesses or other destruction done if and when those weapons are used.
Many conservatives will try to argue that it's Saddam's fault - that if he didn't have forbidden weapons in the first place, there would be no risk from them, and there is truth to that. Saddam, however, had neither used those weapons against the US, nor has any evidence supporting the contention that he was likely to sell them to other enemies of America been found. As such, the risk to the US from those weapons was much lower than it would be now, if, in fact, the WMD exist and have been looted. The only reason the weapons were able to be looted was because President Bush insisted on attacking Iraq in a pre-emptive war.
The irony, of course, is likely to be lost on many of the war's supporters. If President Bush is right and the weapons have been looted, his action in starting the war has just made the sale of those weapons to al Qaeda (or another of our enemies) much greater, and their use against us more likely - resulting in exactly the opposite outcome than what he intended in starting this war.
That, by itself, should be enough for reasonable people to see that under no circumstances should Bush be given a second term as President.
Susan Tifft has a good look at the repercussion of the sheer amount of public dishonesty we see in America today and the impact it has on American kids.
This Pinocchio culture has made kids alarmingly cynical: 43% agree that a person has to lie and cheat sometimes to get ahead, up nine points since 2000. The irony is that on many issues - school prayer and abortion, to name just two - young people today are more conservative than their elders. Yet they are surprisingly blasé about shading the truth.I was born when Lyndon Johnson was in office - a year after JFK was assissinated. I didn't know anything about the Vietnam war and I didn't understand the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident until recently. My political "awakening" was Watergate. I was still in grade school then, but part of my nightly routine was to watch the news with my Dad - and he was always willing to try and answer any questions I had about what was going on. We also had a subscription to Newsweek which I skimmed through every week (I've always been a rather obsessive reader - in the days before I discovered BBSs and the Internet, I'd been known to read the phone book when I was seriously bored and didn't have anything else to read in the house).They weren't born that way. They learned it from us.
One day soon they will be our politicians, lawyers, teachers, CEOs, auto mechanics and pilots, and they'll bring to those jobs the values they're absorbing now. Honor codes? Who knows whether they make a difference on college campuses? But the moment has come for our country's leading adults to sign one.
A lot of it was over my head at that age, but I read it nonetheless, and would then as my folks to explain what it all meant. They did their best - they had to try and simplify some of the concepts and smooth over some of the rougher spots - I was well under 10, after all - but I got the basic idea. They were also careful to explain to me that what President Nixon did wasn't the normal behaviour we expected from our leaders. They carefully told me that part of why everyone was so upset was because our President was supposed to be honest with us - unless there was something he couldn't tell us because it would put us in grave danger.
I accepted it, but part of me would always doubt after that. It's all well and good for my parents to tell me how honest our leaders have been (at least to the best of their knowledge), but when the first thing you become aware of politically is a scandal that least to a Presidential resignation, well.... trust just doesn't come quite so easily.
I found myself being rather fond of both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, but once Reagan took over the White House, something about him triggered that deep laid mistrust. Even today I can't put a finger on any specific thing - it was just the way he presented himself, the way he often "didn't know" things... along with the way things he said and plans he supported (trickle-down economics and Star Wars, to name a couple) didn't make much sense. The first George Bush, being his Vice President, and one who claimed to be "out of the loop" at that, was fighting a losing battle with me.
Then, of course, we got Clinton. I wanted to like him - I really did. I thought his policies made a great deal more sense, and he seemed to have a better idea of what was fair to the greatest number of people (as opposed to what best served the interests of the rich, something I had picked up very quickly as being of utmost importance to Reagan and Bush), but the man couldn't open his mouth without hedging, tap-dancing or outright lying.
And now. Now we have Bush the second. I don't need to recount all the questionable things he's said, claimed or done - just look through the blog and you'll find a pretty good accounting right there. Suffice it to say I don't believe anything he says. I can't.
I look at how cynical I've become over the years - how much I've been let down by this country's leaders over the years - and I wonder how any child growing up now can have any kind of faith in our government. Worse, I look at all the other scandals - be they with corporations, celebrities, academics, the legal system, among cops or wherever - and I don't know how they can have any trust whatsoever in the very institutions we're supposed to be able to rely upon to keep the country running.
Even moreso, I wonder how they're supposed to ever get the idea that being dishonest not only shouldn't be the norm, but should be viewed as wrong. I try to imagine what I would do as a parent, but I have no idea, really. There's so little we can point to any more and say "See, THIS is the kind of person you want to be."
I worry a great deal about the future - not just the future of the country, but of humanity in general. I remember when I was in school, if you got caught cheating, you got flunked. It was pretty simple. Now if you get caught cheating, it's more likely that someone's parents will sue the school than it is that the students will actually be punished for it.
What's the solution? No clue. Nothing's going to change if adults don't start acting like adults are supposed to - and if we don't start holding people in the public eye to a higher standard - you know, actually expecting them to be honest. But it seems these days that we only criticize dishonesty in people we are otherwise already opposed to. You hear it a lot, but it's very true - imagine what the reaction to the Bush administration's deceptions would be if Clinton were still in office - or if he were just a Democrat in general. There'd be so many investigations that nothing else would ever get done!
When we're to a point where the only reason dishonesty is ever pointed out as being a bad thing is when you can use it against someone else whom you want to bring down, there's something seriously out of whack.
The Orange County Weekly has a rather interesting article today about how Donald Rumsfeld's staff has been calling cities that have applied for fireworks permits to suggest to them how best to include tributes to our troops in the festivities. Note - it is Rumsfeld's staff that is calling the cities - the cities have not requested assistance. No, our Secretary of Defense has decided that his staff needs to spend its time making sure that cities get their Fourth of July tributes "right" - at least according to what he consder's "right".
Maybe Rumsfeld’s just looking out for his boys, helping to make sure the troops get the thanks they deserve. But it’s not as if our servicemen aren’t already swamped in bunting, praise and patriotic country songs. Do they really need Washington to orchestrate the public mood for them?Gee. I wonder why they might think they need to do that? Perhaps because people are starting to get a bit upset about having been sold the war under what, right now, at least, appear to be false pretenses?Apparently. The project even has a name: Operation Tribute to Freedom, putatively overseen by Air Force general Richard B. Myer. Check out the website at www.defendamerica.mil/otf/photos/index.html. Therein, it is claimed that Pentagon officials had been "inundated" with requests from communities asking how they could show support for the troops. Another press release remarks on the "spontaneous" displays of support for the military. And there doubtless have been many.
So why, then, does the Department of Defense deem it necessary to cold-call cities to sell them on a military salute?
"It seemed pretty obvious they were just trying to manufacture more public support for their war," said the city official.
I have a feeling - and I hope I'm right about this - that it's going to take more than a few stratigically designed "Oooohs" and "Aaaaahs" to get people to forget about the questions that have been raised lately in regards to why we went to war in the first place. It's too bad for them that some of us don't get distracted nearly as easily as we used to.
[Link via Eschaton]
I found this over at "Everything that Sucks". It was just to amusing not to post here. The Blue Pyramid site has developed a quiz to help you determine which of 64 countries you are most like - and it only has 6 questions. What's scariest? This isn't really all that far off. :)
You're Ireland!
Mystical and rain-soaked, you remain mysterious to many people, and this makes you intriguing. You also like a good night at the pub, though many are just as worried that you will blow up the pub as drink your beverage of choice. You're good with words, remarkably lucky, and know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of eating a potato. You really don't like snakes.
Take the Country Quiz at
the Blue Pyramid
That may sound like a silly question, but as I noted a few days ago, there seems to be something rather strange going on in the search for Iraq's WMD.
Prior to the war, we were slow to give information to the UN inspectors on where we believed weapons might be, and when we did finally give it to them, none of the information we provided led them to find anything. [That right there should have told the Bush administration that there was either a problem with their apparent policy of only paying attention to intelligence that supported their pre-conceived notion that there were WMD to be found OR that there was something wrong with the intelligence being gathered by the CIA and friends.]
After stalling for months, the United States finally shared some of its intelligence with UNMOVIC. But, according to UNMOVIC officials, none of the intelligence it received yielded any incriminating discoveries.Since the war has ended, things haven't been much better. We failed to secure many of the sites where we suspected WMD might have been hidden, and we allowed seven nuclear facilities to be looted by not securing them in any way. The administration has said that the military teams sent in to find Iraq's WMD have run out of places to look (this, in spite of arguments from the administration that our failure to find WMD so far doesn't mean there aren't any - and that because Iraq is such a big country, it may take a long time to find where the WMD are hidden), and that Pentagon intelligence experts will be coming in.
This last bit is interesting in light of two recent revelations. The first is what had prompted me to write the other day - it turns out that there is a plant in Baghdad that created and produced all of the missiles, rockets and warheads Saddam had or was interested in. While the site has been looted, the director-general of the plant says that there are still documents on all of these systems available for us to look at. These documents would detail any kind of weapon delivery system or warhead Saddam had, and is information the United Nations inspectors very much wanted to see. Yet when a reporter asked one of our missile experts about the site and the documents, he'd never heard of it, and there are apparently no plans at all to visit the site or check out the documents.
The other revelation is that Tony Blair - who is facing serious questions about the fact that no WMD have been found yet and the nature of the intelligence that the pre-war claims were based on - has been trying desparately to get the US to offer some of the higher-level Iraqi officials we've taken into custody some kind of leniency so that they will be more willing to reveal what information they might have about Saddam's weapons program - and so far, we're refusing to make any kind of a plea-bargain with any of them.
I honestly don't know what the deal is, but the more I think about all of this, the more apparent it is that the Bush administration either does not want to find whatever WMD Saddam may have had, or, at the very least, doesn't want it to be proven that Saddam didn't have any.
Think about that.
So, what's the deal here? Anyone have any ideas?
In our efforts to bring Iraq 'freedom' and 'demcracy', the US is sure banning a lot of things. So far, we've banned guns, declared we will not accept an Islamic theocracy (even if that turns out to be what the Iraqis want), forbidden people who were in the top four tiers of the Ba'athist party to have government jobs (which are about the only jobs to be had right now), decreed that images of Saddam are not allowed in public places or government office, and even decided that the citizens of Najaf weren't ready to hold elections, despite the fact that they'd already been scheduled and candidates had been campaigning.
And now? Now we've decided that true free speech is a bad thing for the Iraqis, too. Any expression that incites violence against the American troops has been forbidden, and we're going so far as to include raiding newspaper offices if we don't like what the paper is saying.
Last week the US-led coalition authority brought a strong hand down on the hurly-burly collection of new voices that have cluttered Iraqi newsstands, virtually absent of any advertising, since Saddam Hussein fell. The new law bans incitement of violence against American troops or against any religious, ethnic, or gender group, and prohibits any publication that promotes a return of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party.I'm sure the Iraqis are wondering what, exactly, freedom for them will look like. We may not be anywhere near as cruel as Saddam Hussein was, but even if our suppression is benign, it is still suppression. Before the war began, we promised the Iraqis freedom and a better life, yet all we seem to have done so far is trade one set of restrictive rules - Saddams - for another - ours. We're telling them what parties can exist, when they can hold elections, how they can express themselves and that they're not allowed to have guns - all things which we, in America, would never tolerate as part of our own freedom.US officials insist the law applies only to material that undermines civil order that is necessary for a free and democratic Iraq and that it is meant to prevent violence.
''It's not designed to be restrictive,'' said Charles Heatly, a coalition spokesman. ''We welcome the emergence of a free press, and we have no intention of stifling free speech.''
The act, which carries fines and prison sentences, has spawned resentment among members of the new media class, who argue that newspapers restrained from criticizing the American forces hardly constitute a free press.
''Would you agree to be constrained by a decision of President Bush?'' asked Mohammed Abdul Hadi, whose organization, the Supreme Council to Liberate Iraq, helps publish and distribute Sadda-al-Auma. ''Why do you apply these constraints on Iraq when they are not applied on Americans?''
I have no doubt that those in charge of Iraq feel that they are increasing safety for both the US military personnel and the Iraqi civilians; and that they believe they are making the transition to freedom "easier". Yet we should remember from our own history that freedom isn't always pretty, it isn't always safe and it isn't always easy.
Sadly, the Bush administration has already shown it's propensity for repression here in the states, so it's not surprising that they act as though some form of repression or another is the best solution for any problem. The Iraqi people have spent years under the thumb of a cruel, tyrant. We promised them liberation, and those who are trying to retroactively justify the war cite "liberation" as their reasoning. When, exactly, do we plan to let them have it?
May you each have a Blessed Solstice, and may Sunna grant you all the warmth, growth and light you may need!
Kriselda
The New Republic has a long, but well-worth-it article on the maniuplation of information by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war. An excerpt:
Powell cited U.S. intelligence supporting his claim of a reconstituted nuclear weapons program in Iraq, Jacques Baute listened intently. Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspections unit, had been pestering the U.S. and British governments for months to share their intelligence with his office. Despite repeated assurances of cooperation, TNR has learned that Baute's office received nothing until the day before Powell's presentation, when the U.S. mission in Vienna provided the IAEA with an oral briefing while Baute was en route to New York, leaving no printed material with the nuclear inspectors. As IAEA officials recount, an astonished Baute told his aides, "That won't do. I want the actual documentary evidence." He had to register his complaints through a United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) channel before receiving the documents the day Powell spoke. It was an incident that would characterize America's intelligence-sharing with the IAEA.After a few weeks of traveling back and forth between Baghdad and Vienna, Baute sat down with the dozen or so pages of U.S. intelligence on Saddam's supposed nuclear procurements--the aluminum tubes, the Niger uranium, and the magnets. In the course of a day, Baute determined, like the ambassador before him, that the Niger document was fraudulent. Though the "president" of Niger made reference to his powers under the constitution of 1965, Baute performed a quick Google search to learn that Niger's latest constitution was drafted in 1999. There were other obvious mistakes--improper letterhead, an obviously forged signature, a letter from a foreign minister who had not been in office for eleven years. Baute also made quick work of the aluminum tubes. He assembled a team of experts--two Americans, two Britons, and a German--with 120 years of collective experience with centrifuges. After reviewing tens of thousands of Iraqi transaction records and inspecting Iraqi front companies and military production facilities with the rest of the IAEA unit, they concluded, according to a senior IAEA official, that "all evidence points to that this is for the rockets"--the same conclusion reached by the State and Energy Departments. As for the magnets, the IAEA cross-referenced Iraq's declarations with intelligence from various member states and determined that nothing in Iraq's magnet procurements "pointed to centrifuge enrichment," in the words of an IAEA official with direct knowledge of the effort. Rather, the magnets were for projects as disparate as telephones and short-range missiles. Baute, who according to a senior IAEA official was in "almost daily" contact with the American diplomatic mission in Vienna, was surprised at the weakness of the U.S. evidence. In one instance, Baute contacted the mission after discovering the Niger document forgeries and asked, as this official described it, "Can your people help me understand if I'm wrong? I'm not ready to close the book on this file. If you've got any other evidence that might be authentic, I need to see it, and I'll follow up." Eventually, a response came: The Americans and the British were not disputing the IAEA's conclusions; no more evidence would be provided.
On March 7, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei delivered Baute's conclusions to the Security Council. But, although the United States conceded most of the IAEA's inconvenient judgments behind closed doors, Vice President Cheney publicly assaulted the credibility of the organization and its director-general. "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on March 16. "I think, if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past." Incredibly, Cheney added, "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Cheney was correct that the IAEA had failed to uncover Iraq's covert uranium-enrichment program prior to the Gulf war. But, before the war, the IAEA was not charged with playing the role of a nuclear Interpol. Rather, until the passage of Resolution 687 in 1991, the IAEA was merely supposed to review the disclosures of member states in the field of nuclear development to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By contrast, in the '90s, the IAEA mounted more than 1,000 inspections in Iraq, mostly without advance warning; sealed, expropriated, or destroyed tons of nuclear material; and destroyed thousands of square feet of nuclear facilities. In fact, its activities formed the baseline for virtually every intelligence assessment regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
Howard Dean, one of the Democratic candidates for President, has been running an ad in Iowa that includes him saying "...and that's why I approved this message." Apparently, some people have decided that the line sounds just a bit weird. Dean's blog takes a moment to explain why the line was included. Turns out there's a pretty good reason.
One provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is that television ads must include "a statement that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication... Such statement-- '(i) shall be conveyed by-- '(I) an unobscured, full-screen view of the candidate making the statement, or '(II) the candidate in voice-over, accompanied by a clearly identifiable photographic or similar image of the candidate ..."Personally, I kind of like the idea that the candidate must affirm that they have approved the ad as part of the ad. It's been too easy in the past for anyone to purchase air time and run an ad that may or may not have the approval of the candidate it is supposed to be on behalf of. Since it wasn't always clear if a candidate actually approved the ad, if the ad was a negative attack ad, or one that stretched the truth too far, or otherwise ended up causing problems for the candidate, the candidate could simply foreswear any knowledge of the ad and say it had been run without their approval. They can't do that anymore.
It may sound like a silly line at first, but it really goes a long ways to helping make candidates be accountable for the ways in which they are promoted by their supporters, and that's something we've needed for a while, now.
Update on the FCC's recent action to allow companies to own a larger concentration of stations.
From Bloomberg.com: U.S.
The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee approved a bill to roll back new Federal Communications Commission rules that loosen restrictions on ownership of newspapers and local television stations.We can hope that Tauzin won't be successful in killing this legislation. The FCC rule was wrong, and needs to be revoked.The bill, which now goes to the full Senate, would restore a 35 percent cap on the national audience that can be reached by a company's TV stations. The FCC, in a 3-2 vote along party lines, agreed June 2 to raise the cap to 45 percent on companies such as CBS owner Viacom Inc. The Senate panel also voted to restore a ban on newspaper publishers owning TV stations in the same market.
Analysts said the Senate committee's bill is likely to pass the full Senate, though House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin said today he will kill it. The FCC rules have been criticized by groups as divergent as the National Rifle Association and Consumers Union.
Thanks for Jamie for sending me a tip about this story - yet another example of how it can be dangerous to speak out against President Bush or his policies. According to an article in the Economist, Brett Bursey, a long time activist, had decided to join a crowd of people greeting the President at the Columbia, SC, airport. While the majority of the people gathered were there to show support for President Bush, Bursey brought a sign with him to express his opposition to Bush's policy in regards to Iraq. The sign said simply "No War for Oil". He was arrested by the South Carolina police for trespassing, but those charges were dropped. Soon after, however, he was charged under a federal statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas near the President. This rule, apparently, isn't invoked very often, but the Justice department has pressed for the prosecution of this case, in part, at least, to test out their ability to use it more often. It seems they want to spare President Bush the trauma of having to see or hear any indication that not everyone likes him.
The prosecutors say that Mr Bursey was not in a special “free-speech zone” that was set up for protesters half a mile from the hangar. The pro-Bush people did not need to be there because they were not protesting. Mr Bursey told the cops, defiantly, that he was under the impression that the whole of America was a free-speech zone.The prosecution is being brought specifically because Bursey was standing in the crowd to protest against President Bush. As noted above, none of the pro-Bush people were considered to be trespassing, and thus none were not arrested. In fact, one of the officials involved in his arrest told him "It's the content of your sign." He was also told that if he wanted to protest President Bush or his policies, he would have to go to the "Free Speech Zone" a half-mile down the road, out of Bush's sight or hearing. In essence, he could only say something in opposition to the President if he said it where the President wouldn't be subjected to it.Bill Nettles, Mr Bursey's lawyer, claims that the case is being driven not by the young Mr [Strom] Thurmond [Jr., the US attorney who brought the charges] but by higher-ups in Washington, who want a new way to stifle dissent. “This is the type of small-brained decision that could only have been made by bureaucrats inside the Beltway,” says the lanky Mr Nettles. Mr Thurmond's office declines to discuss the case. A spokesman says the office is aware of the letter from the 11 congressmen, but “unless we get a directive from Attorney-General Ashcroft's office [telling us to drop or settle the case], we shall proceed.”
And, if all of that wasn't bad enough, when Bursey requested a jury trial - so that his guilt or innocence could be determined by his peers - the judge presiding over the case refused his request, saying that petty offenses, such as this, are not covered by the right to a jury trial.
Eleven Congressmen have written to Attorney General Ashcroft about the situation, asking that the charges be dismissed.
In the letter to Ashcroft recently released, the members of Congress called the prosecution of Bursey for carrying his sign outside the designated free speech zone "a threat to the freedom of expression we should all be defending."It's worrisome enough that our President seems to think he should be insulated from hearing any opinions that might go against his policies or performance as President. It's also worrisome that the administration feels they should be able to shuffle protestors off into the absurdly named "Free Speech Zones", where their protests will not be seen or heard by the people they're aimed at. That Ashcroft and the US attorney's office would seek to prosecute a man for daring to try and communicate a negative opinion to the President is a violation of the basic principle of Free Speech - one of the founding values of this nation - and a travesty of justice."As we read the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is a 'free speech zone.' In the United States, free speech is the rule, not the exception, and citizens' rights to express it do not depend on their doing it in a way the President finds politically amenable ... We ask that you make it clear that we have no interest as a government in 'zoning' Constitutional freedoms, and that being politically annoying to the President of the United States is not a criminal offense. This prosecution smacks of the use of the Sedition Acts two hundred years ago to protect the President from political discomfort. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. We urge you to drop this prosecution based so clearly on the political views being expressed by the individual who is being prosecuted."
From the reports I've read, there was nothing in Mr. Bursey's appearance, demeanor or actions that would indicate he was any kind of a threat to the President. He was simply a man in a crowd with a sign saying "No War for Oil". He was singled out for arrest and prosecution on the grounds of trespassing - not because he was in an area no one was supposed to be in, but because he was in an area that no one WITH HIS OPINION was supposed to be. That is all that differentiated him from those around him, and it now may cost him $5,000 and six months in jail.
So much for speech being "free", eh?
In a story today on how the Republicans are basically dismissing questions on the missing WMD, Newt Gingrich equates questioning whether we were lied to or not to supporting Saddam Hussein.
"The literary class that dislikes Bush and dislikes American activism is thrilled, whether in Europe or in the U.S., to have this question to raise," he said. "But in the United States at least, given the mass graves, given the level of torture and brutality by the Baath Party regime, you're asking the American people to side with the apologists for replacing Saddam. Does even the most left-wing Democrat want to defend the proposition that the world would be better off with Saddam in power?"Well, of course not, but that isn't the issue here at all.
Even though I think that Iraq is better off with Saddam out of power, that doesn't mean I think that it was ok for the government to have misled us (if, in fact, that's what happened, as I suspect it is) into going to war. I could be completely gung-ho about the war, 100% behind the invasion and thing that it was the niftiest thing we've done in decades and still want to know if I was lied to about the reasons we went to war in the first place. I simply don't believe that the government should be able to get away with lying to the public in regards to our reasons for going to war.
The Republicans and other conservatives have been very successful in getting many Democrats and liberals to back off from some of these questions by trying to imply that questioning George Bush is the same as supporting Saddam Hussein. We can't let them continue to succeed with that rhetorical trick. The two can easily be mutually exclusive. It is quite possible to oppose both Saddam and Bush without it creating any crisis of conscience or moral paradox. Bush must be held accountable if he lied - EVEN IF you believe that the war as a whole was right, necessary and/or justified.
What the Republicans are really saying, in effect, is that if Bush did lie to the public, it was something he had to do as it was the only way to get people to support his war, which was, of course, the only way get rid of Saddam. Ergo, being against Bush lying means you're in favour of leaving Saddam in place.
Isn't that just a bit insulting? The Republicans don't think that we - or the rest of the world - are smart enough to recognize when a war is necessary if we're given the real reasons behind it. They think we have to be scared into submission. Why on earth should I trust a government that so clearly won't trust me?
They're also saying that the President should be able to lie - without any kind of consequences - on matters of the utmost importance, if he feels its the only way for him to get what he wants. Do we really want to set this as a prescedent? Give our leaders carte blance to lie to us "for our own good" whever they want? How will we ever know what to trust or believe again? How will the rest of the world know whether they can trust what we tell them the next time we ask for help? They could lie to us about anything, claim it was necessary if they're caught, and have an expectation that nothing will happen to them as a result.
If the public can't trust the government to provide us with even the most basic truth about what we, as a nation, are doing and why; and if the government is going to refust to trust the public with knowing what's going on in our country, the divide between the governors and the governed will grow ever wider, and our ability to function as a democracy will flounder.
Knowledge of what our government is doing and why is fundamental to being able to choose our leaders - how else do we know who to vote for? Lies, manipulation, distortion and dishonesty are not things we can afford to tolerate amonst our leaders. We need to remind them of that, and hold them accountable if they did use dishonest means of getting us into this war - regardless of whether we support the war or not. This isn't about whether Saddam should have stayed in power or not. It's about the integrity of the United States government, and the crediblity it has with the American citizens and with the rest of the world.
Salon has an interesting article up about the Bush administration's reluctance to allow any kind of an investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and how they distracted the media - and the world - from looking at it too closely when a slew of questions came up last summer.
Just over a year ago, the families' questions were at least being asked. During May 2002, controversy swirled when CBS News reported that five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush had been briefed about an active plot by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida operatives to seize civilian aircraft. The revelations stood in stark contrast to White House spin in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that nobody in the administration or the intelligence community had "specific information" about a possible hijacking plot.At the time, I recall that even in the media, there were some who questioned the timing of all the warnings, coming as they did while people were getting curious about what had happened and what had really been known prior to the attack. When none of the warned-about attacks happened, there was a growing sense of skepticism about the warnings and just how "real" they were. More of them (in particular, the suggestion that terrorists were going to scuba-dive ashore to attack us that way) started showing up in the late-night monologues, and I noticed on the mailing lists I frequented and the blogs I checked out regularly, calls for investigations and additional information were more frequent and angry.Into that combustible mix came revelations that FBI special agents in Phoenix and Minnesota had warned their superiors about suspected al-Qaida operatives training at U.S. flight schools. For the White House, the "what did Bush know and when did he know it" narrative was its first real political crisis after Sept. 11, the first time the press along with Democrats were asking pointed questions -- and gaining traction by the day. Even the New York Post, usually a reliable White House ally, ran a headline that declared "Bush Knew"; the conservative Weekly Standard warned that "the administration is now in danger of looking as if it has engaged in a cover-up."
But the White House, aided by global circumstances and a distractible news media, conspired to change the subject.
First, a succession of senior administration officials made dire warnings about the certainty of suicide bombers striking inside America. Then, on June 6, 2002, the administration abruptly reversed itself and announced it was backing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, as first proposed by Democrats. And the White House made the historic announcement the same day FBI agent Colleen Rowley testified before Congress about her famous Minneapolis memo, ensuring that the Department of Homeland Security was the next day's top headline.
Just when it seemed like maybe the issue was going to gain some traction, it becomes imperative that we challenge Iraq and begin the run up to that war - and the topic was changed. Of course, now that the war is generating questions all its own, I have to wonder what the next major distraction will be - what will turn people away from wondering where the weapons of mass destruction are so that they can focus on a new crisis?
Part of what's truly disgusting about all of this is that while he's ignored the pleas from victims' families to open an investigation into the events of and surrounding 9/11, Bush and his administration have used the 9/11 attack to justify eveything from cutting back on peoples' civil rights, to exanding the powers of the Justice department, to the war on Iraq itself. Dick Cheney even cited the need for the War on Terror™ as one of he reasons Congress should back off from doing an investigation into 9/11 when he spoke to Senator Tom Daschle in the wake of the attack, claiming it would "divert" needed resources away from their efforts to end terrorism. Yet, without an investigation into what allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, there's no way to know if any of these measures will actually have any kind of a positive effect.
To date, one investigation has been completed, but the results have not been released to the public - much to the disappointment of families who lost loved ones in the disaster.
Despite budget restraints and complaints from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that the White House had "slow-walked and stonewalled" the joint inquiry, the panel's 900-page report was completed late last year. Today it remains stuck in national security limbo as the joint inquiry staff negotiates with the White House and its intelligence agencies over what portions can and cannot be released in the public version of the report. The release date has already been pushed back several times as the declassification process drags on into its seventh month. Even the Republican chairman of the joint inquiry, Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, a former CIA operations officer, has expressed deep frustration at the pace of the process."It appears the joint intelligence committee did too good of a job," quips [Kristin] Breitweiser [widow of Ronald Breitweiser who was killed when flight 171 crashed into the first WTC tower]. Indeed, last fall the New York Times reported that "the findings of a joint committee have been far more damaging than most officials at either agency expected when the panel's inquiry began [in early 2002]." The report is expected to detail disturbing lapses in counterterrorism at the CIA and FBI, where warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks went unheeded. They're revelations that are sure to be uncomfortable for the administration.
Honestly, I don't care if the revelations are uncomfortable for the administration. They probably should be - especially given how hard the administration is trying to keep all this quiet - and they're going to some extraordinary lengths to do just that.
Raising concerns about the joint inquiry review process was the revelation that the administration wanted some information that had already been made public during open hearings to be reclassified in the joint inquiry report. Also alarming was the news from this spring when former Rep. and current 9/11 commissioner Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat, tried to read transcripts from the joint inquiry's closed-door hearings. Even though he had actually served on the joint inquiry a year earlier, Department of Justice attorneys refused to let him read the transcripts, insisting that the White House needed five days to decide whether it wanted to exert executive privilege to keep the information under wraps. The White House eventually relented.One thing that I think needs to be done is for Democrats - not just those running for President, but all Democrats - to start asking more questions about 9/11, the Iraqi War and what, if any, true relation exists between them. And we also need to start pushing for more answers. Calls for investigations, demands that what information we now have that can be given to the public (i.e. information that won't legitimately jeopardize national security) be released, and questions about how the steps we're taking are supposed to be helpful if (1) we don't know yet what went wrong and (2) they're not properly funded - as is the case with many Homeland Security measures - should all become part of the standard talking points for every Democrat - especially those on the campaign trail."It was upsetting to find out the White House was trying to block the independent commission's access to the joint inquiry information, when we all know the mandate that created the independent commission states clearly that the commission is to use the joint inquiry as a starting-off point," notes Breitweiser, who also voted for Bush in 2000. "So why would they be blocking access to that?"
It's important that in asking for investigations and answers that no one make outright accusations of any malfeasance as that will only make the Republicans and their supporters more defensive. But these are things we, as citizens, have a right to know and those who wish to be our elected advocates need to make it clear that they're going to fight for us on those points. Coming from a stand point of wanting to ensure that we're actually doing what we need to in order to protect this country and our way of life gives it both a solid justification as well as avoiding going too negative on the current administration, something that, as Brad reminded me yesterday, often can often turn people away.
If I sound like I'm angry about the administrations near complete inattention into finding out what happened and why, along with their attempts to prevent anyone else from finding out either, it's because I am. I'm expected to trust and be loyal to my government, but they make it very hard to do so with their ducking, dodging and dissembling on every issue before them. Three thousand people died on 9/11, and thousands more have died - and are still dying - in the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq. Wouldn't it make more sense to know if the deaths we're sending our soldiers, the soldiers of our allies, and the citizens of the countries we attack to will actually do anything to prevent further terrorist attacks?
IMDb is reporting that there are concerns that, by the time "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is ready to be filmed, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint will be too old for their roles.
Although analysts have suggested that the three young stars of the Harry Potter movies are quickly outgrowing their characters, the Reuter News Agency on Tuesday, citing an industry source familiar with the matter, reported that they will likely return for the fourth Potter film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, due to be released in November 2005. By that time, Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays Harry Potter, will be 16 years old. Reuters quoted Seth Siegel, founder of The Beanstalk licensing and marketing consultancy group, as warning that if the stars are not replaced by younger actors, "licensing will fade away." Wendi Green, an agent for child actors with Abrams Artists Agency, told the wire service, "If [they] are too old, kids can't relate to it."I suppose I can understand some of the concern - that kids might not relate to teen-aged performers - but I think those concerns are a bit unfounded. The thing is, each book in the Harry Potter series takes place in sequential school years.
In the first book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", Harry, Hermione and Ron were 11. "Goblet of Fire" is the 4th book - meaning that the characters at that point are 15 years old. In other words, the Harry Potter character in GOF is only one year younger than Dan Radcliffe, the actor playing him, will be in real life.
Kids who are reading the series have had no problem with adjusting to a 15-year-old Harry. Somehow I think they'll do OK with a 16-year-old playing him. And if the level of anticipation for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is any indication, kids are ok with him aging even more beyond that.
Plastic Bag.org has deigned to share with us the Ten Commandments of Weblogging. Very funny, and pretty dead on, too.
Damn. Makes me wish I was good a humour writing, you know?
This one just about killed me.
In order to promote a festival occuring next spring, the mayor of Cedar City, UT, decided to create an entertaining backstory about why the festival was occuring. The story he came up with was preposterous - a Viking-settled island broke free from it's moorings and was carried by a tsunami to America, where it landed in the middle of Utah, where the people living on the island were tricked into handing the land over to the United States. He then suggested that recently a treasure had been found, and that to avoid having to pay the decendents of the Vikings a lot of money for the land and treasure, the government was instead going to give them ownership of the town for 10 days each year, so they could celebrate their kingdom.
I don't even want to start to try and count all the implausibilities in that story (and if you go to the article and read the full thing, you'll find even more) - but, you guessed it, some people actually fell for it. Worse, they claimed to be decendents of the original Vikings and should thus be entitled to a share of the fortune that was "found".
How did they react when they were told the whole thing was a joke - a publicity stunt to get some attention for the upcoming festival? Well, they're Americans - how you YOU think they'd react? Yep, yep... they claimed it was a cover-up. Near as I can tell so far, they haven't gone so far as to actually file a suit in the matter, but if they don't correct the collective rectal-cranial inversion they seem to be suffering from, I'll be rather surprised if they don't.
So far, I haven't made a decision as to which of the Democrat candidates I'm going to support for the Presidency, but at the moment, Howard Dean is a strong contender. Yesterday, he issued a call for formal investigations into the questions surrounding the entire WMD issue - and why it is we haven't found any yet - using Bush's hilariously ironic comment about "revisionist historians" as a launching point.
"Yesterday, President Bush asserted that those who question the evidence he used to justify the pre-emptive war in Iraq are "revisionist historians." Yet it is President Bush who is rewriting history."To justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, the President claimed that the United States faced an imminent threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraqi regime had direct ties to Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, no reliable evidence has materialized to prove Iraqi support of Al Qaeda, and weapons of mass destruction have not been found.
"The American people shouldn't have to wait for the history books to be written to discover the truth. Did the President receive bad intelligence, or did his administration deliberately mislead Congress, the United Nations and the American people?
"An independent investigation must be held to determine what the President knew, and when he knew it. The American people deserve the truth."
I just received this message from PFAW - you might want to check it out:
Dear Friend,The time has arrived to focus on the Supreme Court - the final arbiter in matters of U.S. law.
With a retirement possible in a few weeks, now is the time to start organizing to get the word out to the press, to our Senators and to our friends and neighbors about what is at stake should the High Court tilt any further to the right.
President Bush said on the campaign trail that his favorite justices now on the Court are right-wingers Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Rest assured, we can take him at his word on this matter.
People For the American Way Foundation has set up www.SaveTheCourt.org to coordinate a get-the-word-out campaign. We want you - and everyone you know who cares about the environment, workers' rights, family planning rights, public education, civil rights and civil liberties - to join us.
We need a critical mass of patriotic Americans pounding away on what hangs in the balance should a Supreme Court Justice retire - if we are going to Save the Court.
Review our publication - Courting Disaster - to find out what another justice or two like Scalia and Thomas would mean to decades of progressive accomplishments.
See our flash movie highlighting the Right's anticipation of an extremist nominee.
Well, well.... I think I've just been given my first award - tongue-in-cheek though it may be. Jane, which looks to be one of the newest Salon Blogs, had this to say about my humble little site, and the sidebar that ate Cincinatti:
And the FLAIR award goes to Different StringsWhat can I say? I'm speechless :)It has been determined that the good folks at Different Strings have the most buttons and exceed the minimum FLAIR requirement. This search was done with the new Ping-DingV.2.4 software developed by Tim Duvall. Its in its early stages but loosely based on the concept of how long one waits for their broadband connection to load the page. Good work and congratulations.
If you were trying to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons that were banned by the US - and knew that he would need to have missles and rockets capable of carrying and deploying the biological, chemical and/or nuclear weapons you've repeatedly sworn you know he has, wouldn't you want to get a look at all of the documentation about every aspect of his missile programs? I know I would, but apparently, the Bush administration doesn't think it's terribly important.
The al-Fatah company, located in Baghdad, is the place where all of Saddam Hussein's rockets were designed, and according to the guy who runs the place, there's a lot of documentation available - including many documents the UN Inspectors wanted to see before the war - but not only has no one from the US weapons search teams come by, yet, there aren't any plans to check the place out, either.
Among the few things left behind, though, are what U.N. inspectors long believed existed but never obtained: design plans and test results for every missile system and warhead the Iraqis developed.If Bush is now going to claim that evidence of a WMD program is the same thing as finding WMDs, I would think he'd want us to get our hands on those documents, which should verify if Saddam had any missles or warheads capable of delivering chemical, nuclear or biological weapons to a target. I'd also think he'd want us to be able to see if the documents provided any evidence of missles that would exceed the limits established by the UN following the first Gulf War, or which otherwise violate any of the restrictions placed on him.Plans for rocket engines, guidance systems and even missile warheads are strewn across the dusty office floors and swirl in the parking lot outside. Some have been blown into nearby bushes. "They're scattered everywhere," al-Chalabi said, marveling at the mess.
American missile experts who have accompanied U.S. weapons teams in Iraq expressed astonishment this week when told that the design plans and engineers behind the Iraqi Scuds and other missile projects were available.
The experts, who couldn't be identified for security reasons, said the al-Fatah company wasn't on any target list they had seen.
U.N. inspectors were always suspicious of Iraq's aims in the missile field, so much so that they visited al-Fatah — located among large homes in Baghdad's Amariyah neighborhood — four times during the 3 1/2 months they were in Iraq before the war.In a way, I find myself wondering if the Bush administration doesn't want to look at these papers, because then they might have to admit that there's nothing there that would support their claims about Saddam's capabilities. As bad as it looks right now having to admit they can't find anything and don't know where it is - being able to say that they have no idea what happened to all of the stuff they "knew" Saddam had leaves open the possiblity that the weapons have been moved elsewhere, or transferred to the leaders of another country - such as Syria or Iran. If, however, they had to acknowledge that they had evidence showing that the Saddam's capability was less than what they claimed, it would actually be worse for them. The uncertainty - and the ability it gives them to "wonder" about who might have the weapons now - lets them keep their trump card, the one thing they were able to use to justify the Iraq war, and which they may think they could use again (if anyone is willing to believe them a 2nd time).The facility also was inspected in the 1990s, and the visits paid off. Buchanan said U.N. inspectors repeatedly caught the Iraqis violating sanctions over the years when it came to rocket development.
"There were several projects which the Iraqis did ultimately disclose in the 90s, which had been aimed at producing missiles with ranges up to 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles). Iraq always said those were only paper plans, but we had our doubts," Buchanan told The Associated Press.
Whatever plans the Iraqis did have could be found today scattered inside — and outside — the al-Fatah offices.
This same thinking might also explain why they didn't secure the suspected WMD sites immediatelly after taking control of Iraq, why they allowed the various nuclear sites to be looted and why they don't seem to be showing any signs of embarassment or shame at all the questions they are now facing. It would also explain the apparent contradiction between their need to rush into war - something so necessary that we couldn't give the UN inspections more time to work - and their claims now that Iraq is a large country and they need more time to try and find the weapons. It could even help eplain why they don't want any help from the UN inspectors, IAEA or anyone else.
The idea that the Bush administration may know that there aren't any WMD to be found and are now doing whatever they can to keep anyone else from being able to prove it (in order to maintain the "uncertainty" principle and milk it to their advantage) is something I don't want to think is true. It sounds far too 'conspiracy-theory'-ish to me, and I too 'out there' - but it does seem to be at least one possible explaination as to why the Bush administration is acting the way they are. The only other explaination I can come up with is sheer incompetence - which is a pretty strong contender, really. Does anyone else have any ideas to explain all of this? I'd seriously be interested in hearing them.
A quote from President Bush has been making the rounds of the blogs and columnists lately - his assertion that "I am the master of low expectations".
By this, Bush meant that he is very good at getting people to expect very little from him when it comes to various goals, missions and tasks he undertakes. Then, when he accomplishes more than people think he's going to be able to, he looks that much better by comparison.
I don't particularly consider this a trait one should be bragging about. It's the same tactic a pool shark uses to con his victims into thinking he's an "easy mark" to take on in a match, before he suddenly displays all of his skills and cleans the victim out. It's shrewd and slick, but also very underhanded and generally considered the mark of a disreputable character outside of politics.
This is one area, though, where some of the Democratic Presidential candidates may be able to challenge Bush some. If they can focus on his admission of basically duping people into expecting little of him so that if he fails, it's "well, we didn't expect much anyway, so it doesn't matter, really" - and if he succeeds, it's "wow! I didn't think he could pull that off! Maybe he's not quite as bad as I thought....", they can position themselves with the idea of letting people know that we can "expect more" of them. Point out that Bush wants people to underestimate him and to not expect much from him - and remind Americans that we should be able to expect a great deal of our President - that's why we're hiring him, isn't it?
Bob Harris at "This Modern World" has located a correction published by the Times, which attempts to explain the changes made in the story about the rebuilding of the WTC and why they're in such a rush to get the environmental studies done.
A Lexis search on the Times story headlined "Goal Is to Lay Cornerstone at Ground Zero During G.O.P. Convention" brings up not only the article -- with the headline intact -- but the following correction, appended at the end:Check out his site for some interesting questions he think the NYT editors should be asked about this incident.CORRECTION: An article yesterday about rebuilding at the World Trade Center site misstated the goal of development officials in setting an aggressive environmental review schedule. It is to start construction next summer, not to lay a cornerstone for the first tower during the Republican National Convention. (State officials had considered that at one point, but they recently decided not to do so, a spokeswoman for Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday.)
Hmm. So this horrifyingly shameless exploitation of 9/11 actuallly was "considered" at some point, albeit by unnamed "state officials," which conveniently gives the White House deniability.
[Earlier reports on this story, with links to scans and screenshots can be found here and here.]
Personally, I would love to know how the reporter initially got wind that anyone was even considering having the cornerstone laid during the GOP convention, and how it got into the story and past the editors without any kind of supporting quotes, paraphrases or other indications of a source for the claim.
From everything I've seen so far, the reaction to the idea of laying the cornerstone during the GOP convention has been very negative, and I'm sure the strong response is part of why the Times ended up having to alter the story. I have to say, though, it makes me wonder if whomever gave the tip to the reporter did so with the expectation that it be "floated as a trial balloon" in order to get an idea of the public's reaction to it.
It's not at all uncommon for politicians and others to give reporters a "head-up" on something of this nature - an idea that is under consideration, but which may be somewhat controversial. Usually, it's juicy enough for a reporter to want to include it in a story, but is given to them with the understanding that they won't publish anything to identify who the "tip" came from - often in the form of a supposed "leak". Then, if the reaction to the story is good, those who were considering the idea can feel safer to go ahead with the plan.
If the reaction is bad, however, as it was in this case, the person or group who was considering the plan can claim that they never really serious considered such a thing. Then they rail at the "unknown source" who leaked the story and at the paper for publishing unverified clap-trap, demand retractions and otherwise play at being outraged, thus distancing themselves from the idea in general.
In this particular case, state officials did note that they were considering having the cornerstone laid during the GOP convention, but had "recently" decided against it. This doesn't invalidate the idea that the information in the story might have been a trial balloon, however - it tends to reinforce it. While the idea is an outrageous example of how even something like the 9/11 tragedy can be exploited for politica gain, the reaction wasn't so over-the-top negative (especially among conservatives) that the state officials felt a need to distance themselves completely from it. They could acknowledge that it had been considered and dismissed without too much damage to themselves, and with no damage at all to President Bush or the Republican Party at all.
Of course, I'm aghast that they would even think about trying to do something like this - I think that the reconstruction of the World Trade Center should be handled with dignity and with the utmost respect for those who were killed at the site, and I absolutely abhor the use of the September 11th anniversary by the Republicans as part of Bush's re-election campaign. If they had gone ahead and done the cornerstone laying during the GOP convention... I don't know if I have the words for how much that would have bothered me. I'm just glad that there was enough of a negative reaction that, if they hadn't previously decided against doing so, they have now.
Remember "Airplane", "The Naked Gun" and "Hot Shots"? Well, if you're a connisiour of fine Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker products, and are as frustrated as the rest of us about the difficulty in finding WMD in Iraq, you need to give Billmon a visit over at his Whiskey Bar.
Here's a small taste:
Cut from black. We appear to be perched on the roof of a Humvee, speeding through the streets of Baghdad. A police siren whirls and blares on the roof in front of us. The Humvee drives up on the sidewalk to avoid an Abrams tank; Iraqis dive out of the way. It ploughs through a fruit stall and a newspaper stand, turns up the steps and through the courtyard of a mosque, roars down a narrow alley, tears through a group of Iraqi women, sending black chadors flying left and right, turns into the main corridor of a hospital, drives through an operating room, smashing the patient and the doctors to pulp, exits through the back door of the hospital, takes out a few more Iraqi pedestrians, then smashes head on into a livestock market, coming to a stop in a pile of dead and dying camels.And now I'm off to get some aspirin - my sides are hurting from laughing so much!Fade soundtrack
The driver emerges from the Humvee -- Lt. Frank Drebbin, LAPD. He's in plain clothes -- his usual cheap brown suit and white shirt, with collar unbuttoned and tie loosened. Drebbin stands for a second by his Humvee, looking at the camel carnage. He is immediately surrounded by a mob of angry, shouting camel drivers. Drebbin nods and smiles. Then, realizing something is amiss, he pulls a wad of Saddam-era banknotes out of his coat pocket and begins to throw them at the crowd. As a squad of U.S. MPs comes running, rifles at ready, Drebbin saunters away. Behind him, we hear warning shots being fired.
Drebbin (voice over): It was hotter than Hollywood on Gay Pride Day, and as smelly as Shaq's armpits in double overtime. But this wasn't LA. It was Baghdad -- a sweltering slum of a city filled with brutal thugs, corrupt bureaucrats and sleazy quick-buck artists. And the Iraqis were a nasty bunch, too. Like an POW in a British prison camp, I was gonna have to stay on my guard.
Drebbin walks down the street -- oblivious to everything around him. He passes an armored personnel carrier, just as a terrorist runs up and throws a grenade in it. The APC explodes a split second after Drebbin walks by. He passes a sentry post, just as a terrorist grabs an MP from behind and slits his throat. Drebbin doesn't notice. He walks between two groups of Iraqi bandits shooting it out with pistols, and doesn't notice, even as several of the bandits fall dead at his feet.
Drebbin: (voice over) It was a Saturday, and I should've been sitting in Dodger Stadium, watching the game and enjoying a tall one -- maybe drinking a beer, too. But I was on special assignment. My mission: To find Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction, before they found America. Another story from the files of (pause): WMD Squad!
I like having a digital camera around :)
More pics of my family. First, my kitty, Piper
In sharp contrast to Condoleeza Rice's statement that "We did not know at the time -- maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency -- but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery," Knight-Ridder newspapers are reporting that a senior CIA official has stated that the White House was made aware of the concerns - several months prior to the information being used in the State of the Union address.
A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn't confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."
Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam.
The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials.
The revelation of the CIA warning is the strongest evidence to date that pro-war administration officials manipulated, exaggerated or ignored intelligence information in their eagerness to make the case for invading Iraq.
An article in today's Observer says that, according to a British scientist who has actually examined the trailers found in Iraq, the trailers were not intended to be used to produce biological weapons, nor could they have been.
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.[...] a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'
Gene Healy, writing for Fox News, explains why whether or not we find WMD in Iraq, the larger issue is that it is now obvious that Saddam was never the immediate threat the administration claimed he was.
The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States.It had never occured to me before that the administration's concerns about Saddam giving al Qeada WMD could be defused by looking at his history with supporting terrorist acts in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but Healy makes an excellent point here. If Saddam was likely to supply terrorists with WMD, wouldn't he have supplied them to Palestinian terrorists by now? His support for them was well-known - something that simply cannot be said about his feelings towards Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda in general.The proposition that Saddam Hussein (search) was willing to hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists appears to have been based on sheer speculation, and implausible speculation at that. Despite over 20 years of supporting terror against Israel, Saddam never turned over chemical or biological weapons to Palestinian terror groups (search), reasoning, correctly, that such action would provoke massive retaliation. Still less was he likely to hand over such weapons to Al Qaeda, a group that has long opposed his "socialist infidel" rule and could not be trusted to keep the deal secret.
Moreover, Al Qaeda's behavior suggests that they never expected Saddam to give them chemical or biological weapons. Computer hard drives and paper documents seized in the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a top-level Al Qaeda operative, reveal that the terror group had extensive plans to produce chemical and biological agents on its own.
UPDATE: Discovered I hadn't included a link to the entire article - oops! I've now added that. Sorry!
I had posted yesterday about an article that appeared in the New York times, originally carrying the title "Goal is to lay cornerstone at Ground Zero during GOP convention", but then changed to "Officials plan speedy Ground Zero environmental review". I had also posted links to three different screenshots to try and help show that a change was made to the healines (links to the screenshots are in the initial post if you want to check them out.)
Bob Harris, posting at Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World" had also posted about it and asked if anyone had screenshots or scans that would help show what happened. Mike from Hoboken was able to get a scan of not only the headline itself from the print edition of the paper, but a scan that shows - clearly and readably - the entire text of the article, making it easy to compare the original print version to the altered internet version. Bob posted a link to Mike's scan at his Yahoo Briefcase, but I've had a great deal of difficulty with getting images at Yahoo to load reliably, so I've pulled a copy of it and posted it here to make it easier to access.
Much has been made, lately, of the Bush administration's selective release of information while trying to build its case to go to war. It turns out that - in all liklihood, prior to the start of the campaign to go to war - and definately before the war started - the administration had intelligence from one, and probably two, top al-Qaeda operatives saying that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam Hussein.
Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.
Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.
The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.
In an editorial in the NY Times today, Bill Keller writes about the selective use of intelligence in making the case for war.
What the Bush administration did was gild the lily — disseminating information that ranged from selective to preposterous. The president himself gave credence to the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, a story that (as Seymour Hersh's investigations leave little doubt) was based on transparently fraudulent information. Colin Powell in his February performance at the U.N. insisted that those famous aluminum tubes Iraq bought were intended for bomb-making, although the technical experts at the Department of Energy had made an awfully strong case that the tubes were for conventional rocket launchers. And as James Risen disclosed in The Times this week, two top Qaeda planners in custody told American interrogators — one of them well before the war was set in motion — that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam. That inconclusive but potent evidence was kept quiet in the administration's zeal to establish a meaningful Iraqi connection to the fanatical war on America.The motives for the dissembling varied. The hawks hyped the case (profusely) to prove we were justified in going to war, with or without allies. Mr. Powell hyped it (modestly) in the hope that the war, which he knew the president had already decided to wage, would not be a divisive, unilateral exercise. The president either believed what he wanted to believe or was given a stacked deck of information, and it's a close call which of those possibilities is scarier.
The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.Regardless of where one stands on the war itself, this is something that should be of grave concern to every American - and it is perhaps the most important reason we need to send a message to the government that we, the people, will not tolerate an administration that so carelessly spends the capital of America's crediblity, leaving us vulnerable to doubts and hesitation on the part of the rest of the world in the event we truly do face an imminent threat sometime in the future.
The "annoying white angry middle aged balding man" (his description, not mine!) has put together a really cool index to Salon Blogs of a sorts. The only catch is, rather than giving you the name of the blog, he gives you an image that represents it or its name. Its a lot of fun trying to figure out who's who, and he's done a great job of finding images that represent the various blogs well. Take a few minutes to check it out - you may even find some new blogs that'll be worth reading regularly!
Go, read this - and see if it doesn't make you want to go find a baseball game to sing at!
It pisses me off that my country, my flag and my National Anthem have been kidnapped by a gang of fascist wannabes who think it's their own private property. I've got news for you chicken hawks. I'm taking it back. I started tonight by singing the anthem at the Bells game. I know how to sing that sucker and, by God, I made it mine!
This is a story I've been hearing about for a while, but hadn't been able to track down an actual source for until now.
According to Business-Standard.com, the Republican party has hired HCL eServe, an Indian telemarketing firm, to do fundraising for Bush's presidential campaign, giving 75 jobs to people living in a different country, rather than hire actual Americans to do it for them.
HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing arm of the Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies, has bagged a project to undertake a fund-raising campaign for the US Republican Party over the telephone.This isn't a story that's been widely covered, however, despite the potential it carries for creating a great deal of outrage. I've only managed to find 4 other sources for it, two of which carry denials from the Republican National Committee that they've done any such thing.This is the first time such a project has been handed out to a company outside the US. The market research and public relations companies engaged by the party usually undertake such projects.
HCL eServe has put in place a team of 75 people to work on the project out of its call centres in Noida and Gurgaon. According to industry sources, the number of seats could be ramped up depending on the success of the campaign. These operators are required to call up people in the US seeking their support for President George W Bush and a donation for the Republican cause.
[...] According to the sources, the calling process involves high degree of automation in order to limit human intervention. “The process is designed in such a way as to limit human intervention. The company wants to complete the process using the integrated voice recording technology, which allows navigation using voice responses,” said the source.
The Republican contract comes on the heels of a successful anti-abortion campaign run by HCL eServe for a US politician.
The initial tip-off I got was in Newsweek's "Letters to the Editor" column a week or so ago, when a reader wrote in, responding to an article Newsweek had carried a week or two before that. The Newsweek article is available only if you pay for an archived copy (which I did, so I could read it for myself), and is focused more on the general phenomenon of companies hiring Indian IT firms to handle their telemarketing, customer service and "help desk" operations. It refers to the Republican Party's hiring of an Indian firm do to fund-raising for them only in a single line ["Indian citizens have even started handling phone-based fund-raising for the Republican Party."]
The story was also carried by Buzzflash with a link back to the Business Standard article. Personally, I don't find Buzzflash to always be the most reliable source, which is why you don't find them referenced very often in this blog. In this case, however, they seem to be relying entirely on the Business-Standard.com (also published on Rediff.com), and containes a later update referencing a UPI article in which the RNC denies that they are the ones who've hired HCL eServe to do telemarketing work for them.
The Republican National Committee, through spokesman Kevin Sheridan, completely denies the allegation, telling UPI, "Any report that the Republican National Committee has hired HCL eServe -- the firm mentioned in the original Business Standard article -- is a case of bad reporting, bad business practices or both. The RNC has no affiliation with HCL. Any inference to the contrary is flat out wrong. The RNC has informed both HCL and rediff.com of the inaccuracy of this report."Buzzflash, however, notes that neither the original Indian article, nor their story on the situation mention the RNC specifically, and the RNC denial does not rule out that a consulting firm or other political group working for or with them may have been responsible for giving HCL eServe the contract.
Lastly, the Washington Times also reported on the story, noting both the original story from the Business-Standard.com (published via Rediff.com) and the RNC's denial that they are the ones who have hired the firm.
However, Kevin Sheridan, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, tells Inside the Beltway that the national party has in no way, shape or form enlisted the Indian company to conduct fund raising in the name of Mr. Bush or any other nationally elected Republican in Washington.[Like Newsweek, this story is only available via an archival purchase, which I did, so I could read their story first-hand also.]"Who are these Republicans?" he asks. "They are saying they are fund raising for Republicans, but we (the RNC) don't know who these Republicans are. It's certainly not the Republican National Committee. And I will add that we don't appreciate the inference."
So, what's the deal here? The story itself referrs to the "Republican Party", which many will probably assume means the "Republican National Committee". The RNC, however, denies it. I've found no retraction, however, of the entire story, nor have I found any stories claiming to "debunk" the entire situation. So it appears that someone, representing a group of Republicans - though apparently not the RNC itself - has contracted with an Indian company to do telemarketing.
Whether it's the RNC itself or another group trying to raise money for Bush's campaign, however, the principle is still the same -- rather than hiring Americans to do work towards raising funds for Bush's re-election, these Republicans think it's in their best interest to hire people in another country to do the work for them. This, in spite of the poor economy - due largely to Republican economic policy - and the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who are in need of a job.
Yes, a lot of American firms are hiring people overseas to do basic phone work for them. As with other jobs that have been outsourced overseas, it's cheaper. I don't like it, but in a capitalistic system, it's bound to happen - companies will find the cheapest way they can to obtain labour so they can make the most money possible.
For a politically-oriented group, however, that is having people call American citizens to give them a pitch on donating money to a Presidential campaign, to hire overseas workers to make those calls just rubs me the wrong way. Even if it's not a group representing the RNC, it reflects the Republican attitude that making money is more important than employing Americans.
If you look over under the calendar, you'll see a big blue button that says "Boot Bush!" on it and asks you to make a donation to the DNC. Now, I'll be the first to admit that the DNC isn't always my favourite political organization, but their weaknesses aside, they are in the best position to work on raising money for a Democratic presidential campaign, and I believe that it is far more important to get Bush out of the White House now and then work on fixing the DNC, rather than the other way around (though I do understand the merits of that argument as well)
So, if you've ever thought about donating anything to help support this site, don't. Give it to the DNC instead. Newsweek notes that Bush's team is starting now to raise money for his re-election campaign, and they look to be trying to raise $200 million or more. Keep in mind, that amount of money will be effectively even more, compared to whatever the Democratic candidate can raise, since Bush won't have to spend any money on primary campaigns and caucuses. As the only Republican candidate (or the only one that actually matters, perhaps), the primaries and caucuses are his for the taking. Every dollar he raises can go straight to defeating whomever the Democrats nominate - and with nine in the running now, they'll have to spend a lot just fighting each other. In addition, the new campaign-finance reform rules work against the Democrats in some ways:
In 2000, the Bush campaign recruited a core team of “Pioneers”—premier fund-raisers who brought in $100,000 apiece by “bundling” $1,000 donations from rich friends and associates. With the new expanded limits, the Pioneers have been supplanted by the Rangers—each of whom has now committed to raking in $200,000. GOP veterans say they have a far bigger network of $2,000 donors. By pushing campaign-finance reform, the Democrats “totally screwed themselves,” gloats one Ranger.So, please help out as much as you can - whether you do it through different strings, go straight to the DNC or donate directly to the candidate of your choice, every little bit is going to help in this battle. There's a lot at stake, and we can't afford to sit it out.
First comment: Is everything going to be renamed with the word "freedom" in it now? Apparently, the new WTC is being referred to as the "Freedom Tower". I don't supposed I'd mind it so much if those who are running the country these days actually placed some sort of value on our freedom - aside from it being a commodity that can be exchanged for "security". We can't let people forget that it was George Bush who - when confronted with a satrical website about him - said "There ought to be limits to freedom". Thanks to him, John Ashcroft and the Republican dominated Congress, freedom is now a lot more limited than it used to be.
Now, onto the main point of this post. An article in the New York Daily News includes what many will see as a refutation of the NYT headline claiming that the cornerstone of the "Freedom Tower" would be laid during the GOP convention:
In another development yesterday, Pataki insisted he doesn't plan to lay the cornerstone for a 1,776-foot spire at Ground Zero during next year's Republican convention.Note that it only says that Governor Pataki has said he does not plan to lay the cornerstone during the GOP Convention. It leaves open the possiblity (though it can't be said at this point how likely it is) that someone other than Pataki may be the one laying the cornerstone.The comments came after a published report suggesting that rebuilding officials were pushing to break ground for the so-called Freedom Tower during the convention, which will be held in the city in August 2004.
Yes, that is betting nitpicky, but, sadly, just as we did with Clinton, we sometimes have to parse what is said very, very carefully to understand what also isn't being said, and avoid fill in the gaps with the kinds of assumptions you're expected to use.
This is one more story that will be interesting to watch. It may be that the reaction to the earlier headline was enough that any plans to lay the cornerstone during the GOP convention have now been scrapped. I hope that's the case, but we'll just have to wait and see, I guess.
Atrios at Eschaton posted the following entry earlier today:
I´ll have much more to say about this at a later date, but the page B3 headline in the New York Times (in the print edition, not online, according to reader de) which says "GOAL IS TO LAY CORNERSTONE AT GROUND ZERO DURING G.O.P. CONVENTION" makes me want to puke.In his comment section, a couple visitors noted:This is sick, and we have to do something about it.
-Atrios, 5:11 AM
I think the article you're referring to was online here, but it seems to have been stripped of its original references to the Republican convention.I was curious to see if anyone else was running the headline about the GOP, and ran a Google News search on it. Interestingly, the Google entry that links to the NYT story actually still showed the headline stating that the goal is to get the cornerstone for the new WTC project laid during the GOP connection, but when I clicked through on the link, I get the article with its current headlines stating that there are hopes for a speedy environmental approval for the project. I decided to take screenshots so you could see it for yourselves. On both pages, you will be able to see the URL, so you can verify that they match.Dan | 06.14.03 - 8:38 am
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Actually, it was - when I linked to it, the headline put in place was the "GOAL TO..." headline that specifically referenced the GOP convention. What bullshit.
jesse | 06.14.03 - 8:58 am
The first image is of the Google search results page [link opens in a new page]. The original headline of the story is displayed in red, and I have my mouse hovering over the text so that the URL it links to is shown in the status bar at the bottom of the image.
The second is of the NYT article as it stands right now. You can see the URL in the address bar, and can verify that it is the same as the one showing in the status bar from the first image.
[Note: in IE6, the images display so that they "fit into the window", rather than at the actual size of the image. If you hover your mouse over the image for a moment, in the lower right hand corner, you will get a button that has an orange square surrounded by blue arrows on it. Click on this button, and the image will expand to it's full dimensions and you'll be able to read everything, including the URLs, clearly]
I'm very curious about how and when that headline was changed, but in all honesty, while it may seem like that the main focus of this post, it's not. I can't say I'm surprised that this administration would try to pull a stunt like having the WTC rebuilding cornerstone laid during their convention - I just find myself more and more worried about exactly how low it is that they will go.
It's already been made clear that the Republicans are planning to milk 9/11 and what will be the 3rd anniversary of the attacks for all their worth during their campaign to get Bush re-elected in 2004. Hopefully, Democrats will be able to effectively point out how the Republicans have no shame whatsoever, and that they're willing to use the tragic deaths of 3,000 people for political purposes.
UPDATE: I've also located (thanks to Bob Harris at Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World) a Google cache of the index page for the New York Times "Regional News" page, showing the "GOP/cornerstone" headline. If for any reason that's not working, I have a screen capture you can view.
UPDATE #2: Bob Harris, posting at Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World" had also posted about it and asked if anyone had screenshots or scans that would help show what happened. Mike from Hoboken was able to get a scan of not only the headline itself from the print edition of the paper, but a scan that shows - clearly and readably - the entire text of the article, making it easy to compare the original print version to the altered internet version. Bob posted a link to Mike's scan at his Yahoo Briefcase, but I've had a great deal of difficulty with getting images at Yahoo to load reliably, so I've pulled a copy of it and posted it here to make it easier to access.
Ok, hubby just got a really nice new digital camera as a reward for doing a good job at work, so we took some pictures of our puppies (ok, they're dogs - I just call 'em puppies still because they're too cute to be called "dogs" *g*), and I thought I'd take a second to do a bit of showing off. :)
This one is Tasha - a nine-year-old Lab/Border collie mix
And this is Sabaka, an 8-year-old Lab/WhoKnowsWhat mix
Paul Krugman has an article today about Tom DeLay, and why moderates and liberals need to take a much stronger stand against him.
Most of us are familiar with the Texas redistricting/disappearing Democrats incident, in which DeLay led an effort by the Texas state legislatures Republican majority to redistrict the state for a second time this decade. (Typically, states only redistrict once per decade - shortly after the census - which Texas did in 2000.) When it became obvious to the Democrats that the only way to stop the redistricting was to prevent a vote from even being taken, they left the state until after the deadline for voting had come and gone. While they were gone, however, DeLay became involved in the search for them - and may even have tried to get the Department of Homeland Security (intended to fight terrorists - not Democrats) into the act.
This is just one of the more well-known of his escapades. More recently, it has come to light that he may have been involved in a "donations-for-legislation" scheme with Westar Energy. So far, Republicans have denied that there was any "quid pro quo" involved, but emails found at Westar show that specific donations were requested in exchange for "a seat at the table", and the legilsation they wanted was put into an energy bill.
DeLay also shows a great deal of arrogance, informing someone who complained that he was smoking on government property that he "is the federal government".
There are, of course, many more examples of his thoughtlessness, arrogance, willingness to abuse his position and power, among other questionable activities. Krugman, however, makes note that one of the gravest dangers from DeLay and his associates is their desire to establish as lose to a merging of church and state as possible.
Above all, expect to see the wall between church and state come tumbling down. Mr. DeLay has said that he went into politics to promote a "biblical worldview," and that he pursued President Clinton because he didn't share that view. Where would this worldview be put into effect? How about the schools: after the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay called a press conference in which he attributed the tragedy to the fact that students are taught the theory of evolution.Hopefully, sometime soon he will either cross too far over the line, or solid evidence that he already has will come to light, and his career - along with the threat he poses - will come to a swift end.
Well, after spending about 60 hours in no- or bad- connection hell, a dear friend of my ours has not only fixed our home network (we needed a router, not a hub), but has also got my computer connecting to the Internet again - and normal speed! If you can't see me jumping up and down with joy, don't worry... you can rest assured, I am.
At any rate, it's time to get back to some of the blogging. Representative Henry Waxman - who has a history of making excellent points in open letters - has written yet another, to Condoleeza Rice, asking why President Bush used forged evidence in presenting his case for war with Iraq.
He specifically addresses Rice's claims on the Sunday talk shows last weekend that the US had evidence other than the forged letter that it was relying on in making the claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Africa.
In addition to denying that senior officials were aware that the President was citing forged evidence, you also claimed (1) "there were also other sources that said that there were, the Iraqis were seeking yellowcake - uranium oxide - from Africa" and (2) "there were other attempts to get yellowcake from Africa."He concludes with several very specific questions regarding both the evidence and Rice's comments about the entire situation.This answer does not explain the President's statement in the State of the Union address. In his State of the Union address, the President referred specifically to the evidence from the British. He stated: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Presumably, the President would use the best available evidence in his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. It would make no sense for him to cite forged evidence obtained from the British if, in fact, the United States had other reliable evidence that he could have cited.
Moreover, contrary to your assertion, there does not appear to be any other specific and credible evidence that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from an African country. The Administration has not provided any such evidence to me or my staff despite our repeated requests. To the contrary, the State Department wrote me that the "other source" of this claim was another Western European ally. But as the State Department acknowledged in its letter, "the second Western European government had based its assessment on the evidence already available to the U.S. that was subsequently discredited."
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also found no other evidence indicating that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Niger. The evidence in U.S. possession that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Niger was transmitted to the IAEA. After reviewing all the evidence provided by the United States, the IAEA reported: "we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq." Ultimately, the IAEA concluded: "these specific allegations are unfounded."
My absence will likely be longer than I anticipated. My husband made his game goal last night, but we're also having problems with our Internet connection. Right now, service is only intermittent, and I don't know when or how often I'll be able to get it.
I am sorry for all the down time - hopefully we'll be able to get the problem with the connection solved soon.
Blogging will be slow this week. My husband and I have an online role playing game we both enjoy a great deal, and he is, right now, working on earning his last level. As would be expected, its one of the hardest ones to get, so I'm going to be helping him out until he gets it. In a few weeks, there will be more slow blogging when I get to go for my own "Level 50". While a game may not be as important as what's going on in the world, it's one of the things that helps me keep my sanity, and it makes my hubby happy. I figure that's worth something, eh?
I'll probably post if anything really major happens, and if not, I'll be back in a few days.
Take care!
Kriselda
Bob Harris, who has been posting over at Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World blog, has a nice overview and analysis of some of the information from the Vanity Fair article about Wolfowitz, Perle and Kristol. He makes particular note of the way some have described Bush as being someone who wants to be told what the problems are what needs to be done about it - as opposed to identifying problems for himself or thinking through his own ideas for solutions - which Harris notes makes him a very useful tool for a group of people who already have plans they want to see put into place.
He's done a very good job, though, with presenting the issues, and what he sees as the possible explainations for our inability to find the WMDs we were assured Iraq had.
The only quibble I have with his analysis is that he makes use of the two quotes from Paul Wolfowitz that have been shows as being taken out-of-context. By the time he gets to those, however, he's already made a good case to support his thoughts, and the Wolfowitz quotes are more of an "icing on the cake" than anything that holds up a fundamental part of his analysis. It's also important to note that he doesn't draw any firm concusions. He carefully leaves open the possiblity that we will find the WMD or the statements made by the administration will be borne out.
One section in particular, though, I found to be very interesting. It's where he discusses the ultimate ramifications if, in fact, we were misled into this war:
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."Given the way the Bush administration stuck by many of their claims, even after they'd been shown to be inaccurate (such as using the forged documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein tried to obtain nuclear materials from Niger even after being told by intelligence officers that they were unreliable, or repeatedly pointing to Saddams purchase of aluminium tubes as evidence of trying to restart a nuclear program even after they were told that the tubes were not suitable for that purpose), I think it might be possible for charges of that nature to be brought, and that there's a good liklihood that they'd stick. I can't say for sure since I'm no legal expert, but the longer this goes on, the better that chance gets. Admittedly, impeaching Bush would put us at risk of having Dick Cheney as President, which I simply cannot see as being a good thing, but it would sure make it harder for anyone associated with this administration to get elected in 2004, which, in my opinion, would be very good indeed.It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.
The evidence sometimes cited to support Saddam’s nuclear program was shaky, however. On the morning after Bush’s State of the Union address in January, Greg Thielmann, who had recently resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—whose duties included tracking Iraq’s WMD program—read the text in the newspaper. Bush had cited British intelligence reports that Saddam was trying to purchase “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”Thielmann was floored. “When I saw that, it really blew me away,” Thielmann told NEWSWEEK. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the purchases were implausible—and made that point clear to Powell’s office. As Thielmann read that the president had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, “Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?” It later turned out that the documents were a forgery, and a crude one at that, peddled to the Italians by an entrepreneurial African diplomat. The Niger minister of Foreign Affairs whose name was on the letterhead had been out of office for more than 10 years. The most cursory checks would have exposed the fraud.
The strongest evidence that Saddam was building a nuke was the fact that he was secretly importing aluminum tubes that could be used to help make enriched uranium. At least it seemed that way. In early September, just before Bush was scheduled to speak to the United Nations about the Iraqi threat, the story was leaked to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of The New York Times, which put it on page one. That same Sunday (Sept. 8), Cheney and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice went on the talk shows to confirm the story.
At the CIA, Tenet seems to have latched on to the tubes as a kind of smoking gun. He brought one of the tubes to a closed Senate hearing that same month. But from the beginning, other intelligence experts in the government had their doubts. After canvassing experts at the nation’s nuclear labs, the Department of Energy concluded that the tubes were the wrong specification to be used in a centrifuge, the equipment used to enrich uranium. The State Department’s INR concluded that the tubes were meant to be used for a multiple-rocket-launching system. (And Saddam was not secretly buying them; the purchase order was posted on the Internet.) In two reports to Powell, INR concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program at all. “These were not weaselly worded,” said Thielmann. “They were as definitive as these things go.” These dissents were duly recorded in a classified intelligence estimate. But they were largely dropped from the declassified version made available to the public. U.N. inspectors say they have found solid proof that Iraq bought the tubes to build small rockets, not nukes.]
Apparently, some of my fellow Kansans are a bit worried. It seems that ABC is planning a sitcom this fall called "Back to Kansas" and they're afraid the movie may make fun of the state.
Officials in Kansas are expressing concern that the planned ABC sitcom Back to Kansas will make the state and its citizens the "butt of some jokes" and otherwise bring them into disrepute.Of cource, they don't seem to take into consideration that Kansas officials have already managed to that all on their own, with such things as the brilliant decision a few years ago to take any questions about evolution off the state school exams (thus making it unlikely that teachers would bother teaching evolution, since they generally "teach to the test"), and laws that do thing like reduce the penalty for statuatory rape cases between teens who are fairly close in age - but only if they are of different genders. Homosexual teenage couples still face the full penalty for statuatory rape, even if they are only a year apart in age (with only one being over the legal age of consent).
Luckily, we seem to have one official in Kansas who might have a clue.
Kansas Travel and Tourism director Scott Allegrucci told today's (Friday) Kansas City Star that he has advised would-be protesters to hold off. "I suggest that any protest on the part of any entity in Kansas will simply confirm the stereotypes that some fear the show will focus on," he said. Moreover, he indicated, just having a TV show on the air with Kansas in its title could be valuable publicity. "This can only be good for Kansas -- even if the show is a dog."
In an Associated Press article published at CBSnews (among other places, I'm sure) on March 17th, 2003, there's a little noticed, but now potentially relevant tidbit:
Iraq also handed over videotapes of mobile biological weapons laboratories to inspectors. Iraq says the videos show the laboratories do not violate U.N. resolutions.I think it would be good at this point if whomever is currently in posession of those tapes could 1) confirm they exist, 2) confirm if they are the same mobile labs that Bush is now heralding as "proof" of a WMD program and 3) confirm if they did or did not violate UN resolutions.
If it turns out that they are the same mobile labs that we were given evidence of prior to the start of the war - and that they weren't considered violations of the UN resolutions at that point, then that would pretty much discredit Bush's more recent claims about them. Still, until more can be found out about these tapes and what's on them, it's impossible to say for sure on way or the other.
About the Senate bill I mentioned earlier, that would give low income families a child-care tax credit?Check out Senator Trent Lott's response to the bill as he voted for it.
Although almost every Senate Republican voted for the bill, some clearly were unhappy at having to do so under what they considered public pressure from liberal groups and Democrats. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi voted for the bill, but as he did so he stuck his tongue out, put his finger in his mouth and made a gagging sound, indicating his apparent distaste for the bill.Boy, Mississippi must be feeling really proud of their Good Ol' Boy right now.
There were news reports yesterday that the Senate was considering a way to help increse the tax "relief" for the families who make between $10,500 and $26,625 who were initially excluded from the increased earned income tax credit for having children. The plan would have given them access to an expansion in the child-care tax credit that can be paid as a cash refund, rather than just used to offset what taxes they have to pay.
While the initial tax package reportedly left 12 million low-income families out of the child tax credits, this plan would have given up to $400 per child to 6.5 million of those families.
Democrats seized on reports that the 10-year, $350 billion tax-cut package enacted last week deprives many lower-income people of some of its benefits - and provides nothing for others - to renew their attacks on Republicans for what they say is an unfair measure. This time, Democrats have a concrete example, made more politically potent because it involves children.The plan is not likely at this point, however, to get passed - because of one man - Tom DeLay. In one of the most callous statements I've heard from a politician in a while (and that's saying something), DeLay dismissed the idea outright."People can focus on it because it's one issue and it's so grossly unfair," Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, said of the decision not to extend the child tax credit to some lower-income people. Republicans "really poke working families in the eye with what they've done."
DeLay said he would not permit legislation making the working poor eligible for the expanded child-care tax credit to come to the House as a separate bill. The tax cut law increased the child-care tax credit to $1,000 from $600 per child.The SunSpot explains what the current tax bill offers and some of the plans that have been rushed into Congress to try and rectify some of the problems that have become apparent since the new bill was signed."They had their chance," DeLay said, referring to legislators who worked on the law. "There's a lot of other things that are more important than that. To me it's a little difficult to give tax relief to people who don't pay income taxes."
Senate action on the measure would be a follow-up to enactment last week of the $350 billion tax-cut and state aid package. That package included an increase, from $600 to $1,000, in the child tax credit, which benefits families with dependent children. The credit is not given to those who earn $110,000 or more a year.While it's good to see that some members of Congress are trying to fix the problems with the bill signed by President Bush, it would have been far better if they had actually managed to prevent the problems from being included in the first place.The increase in the child credit was originally scheduled for 2010; the new tax-cut law makes it immediate but sets an expiration date of next year. If Congress does not act to make the increase permanent, the credit would fall to $700 in 2005. But lawmakers are widely expected to make the increase permanent before then.
Also included in the tax-cut package was a provision to make the child tax credit refundable so that some lower-income families who do not earn enough to owe income tax could still receive it. But the provision to widen eligibility for the credit - added by Lincoln before the Finance Committee approved the measure last month - was dropped by House-Senate negotiators before its final passage.
The Lincoln-Snowe measure would restore it and would pay for the change by closing corporate tax loopholes.
Stinging Nettle has posted a copy of an e-mail s/he received from a friend working at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and who has seen some of our more seriously wounded soldiers from Iraq as they are brought in for treatment. The entire e-mail is very touching, and I recommend reading it. Here's an exceprt from the closing comments:
First, just because the coverage of the war is subsiding, don't forget these guys are out there risking their lives every day (whether you agree with the war or not, I guarantee you that these men and women are motivated by the true belief that they are fighting for the security and freedom of our country and for the Iraqi people). Second, next time you think you're having a bad day at work, or annoyed at something little, remember how good we all have it. And one of the reasons we have it so good is because there has always been (and hopefully always will be)courageous young men and women like Private L______ willing to die to protect us and our way of life.
Jost Marshall at Talking Points Memo has also been looking at the Wolfowitz quotes (in particular the ones in the Vanity Fair article) that have been called into question. In a couple different places yesterday and today, he's raised the possiblity that the DOD transcript of the telephone interview he gave to Sam Tanenhaus may not be complete. So far, he's not offering any details, but you might want to take a peek over there tomorrow to see if he's got anything of substance yet.
I've posted a lot over the last couple days about the questionable nature of some supposed quotes attributed to Paul Wolfowitz, the biggest one being the story published in the Guardian yesterday alleging Wolfowitz had confirmed that the war was fought because of oil.
It turns out, however, that the Wolfowitz story isn't the only one the Guardian had to issue a correction on this week. On May 31st, they had published a story that claimed Colin Powell and Jack Straw had expressed serious doubts about the WMD intelligence the US and UK were relying on to make their case for invading Iraq. The article said that these doubts had been expressed in a meeting between the two men at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, and that transcripts of the meeting were currently being circulated among NATO diplomats.
It is not being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction was fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to.A comment in the article, noting that the meeting had been described to them by "a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation", makes it appear that the Guardian printed this story without having actually seen copies of the transcripts themselves.
Well, today, this apology and correction was added to the page where the article is posted:
In our front page lead on May 31 headlined "Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims," we said that the foreign secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr Powell addressed the United Nations on February 5. Mr Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did.The apology and clarification leave a bit to be desired when it comes to explaining what, if anything, actually did happen. It says that, according to Straw, "no such meeting" occured, but it leaves open a number of questions.
The Straw/Powell article indicated that two of the most important diplomats in the UK and US had serious doubts about the information they were being asked to promote in their efforts to justify the war - which would go a long way to giving credibility to those who believe that the pre-war evidence that Saddam Hussein had WMD was either exaggerated significantly or an outright lie. The Wolfowitz story, on the other hand, supported the belief many hold that the US wanted this war to get its hands on Iraq's oil, and also gives legitimacy to the idea that Blair and Bush needed to exaggerate or fabricate the WMD evidence to ensure that the war would be able to go forward. Both stories also appeared just as the questions about the WMD evidence are picking up steam, in particular in the UK, where the Guardian is published.
I've never hidden my own disapproval of the war in Iraq, nor my belief that the threat was never as grave as Bush made it out to be. But stories like these only hurt when it comes to trying to make the case. Not only do they put erronious information into the data stream (which will be almost impossible to get back out - especially the Powell/Straw story, which will be extremely attractive to those who lean more toward the "conspiracy theory" end of the spectrum), but it also makes it more difficult for other, similar, stories to be taken at face value.
Most conservatives will end up remembering that "some" stories that allegedly showed the government was misleading us about reasons for the war and the threat of WMD, but not necessarily which two. It will then be just that much easier for them to dismiss similar ideas or stories, lumping it into the category of "those stories that were discredited". I hope that the editors of the Guardian will recognize how serious unreliability and inaccuracy can be in the media and get their house back in order as soon as possible.
I keep reading and hearing people say that it doesn't matter if we don't find any WMD in Iraq - or even why we can't - because Saddam was such a bad, bad man and getting rid of him was good. In other words, the ends justify the means.
The problem is, of course, if we decide that the ends justify our means, then we have to be willing to accept that others will likewise claim their own deeds are justified by the outcome. I don't think it's in our best interest to do that.
Just as an example, we know that our stationing troops in Saudi Arabia during and after the first Gulf War is part of what made Osama bin Laden and his al-Qeada members so angry at us to begin with. They wanted our Western butts out of their country and off of their Holy Lands. To achieve this goal, they used terrorism, killing thousands around the world, in hopes that they would push us to withdraw our troops. The longer we refused to budge, the angerier they became so that now, the issues are much larger than just that. But, it has still been a long term goal of theirs to get us out of Saudi Arabia, and every terrorist act they've committed has had, at it's core, that goal as part of it's justification.
Every terrorist act. Including the big one - September 11, 2001.
Following the 9/11 attacks, our government decided that they wanted to get Saddam out of office. In his interview with Vanity Fair, and in the DOD transcript of that interview, Paul Wolfowitz acknowledges that, at least in part, the stratigic considerations regarding Saudi Arabia and our troops being there were part of why we decided we needed to take Saddam out.
Once the war in Iraq was "concluded" (such as it is), we announced that we would be removing our troops from Saudi Arabia - helping Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda meet one of their primary goals.
Now, to them, getting us out of Saudi Arabia is a very, very good thing - just as to us, getting Saddam Hussein out of power is a very, very good thing. I am sure there are many Muslims around the world who are overjoyed that we are removing our troops, but I also have no doubt that a great number of them disagree with the tactics al-Qaeda used to achieve that goal. These people don't condone terrorism, they don't condone the 9/11 attacks, or the fomenting of hatred against the US that bin Laden has engaged in. Do we want to give them the message that the end result of finally getting us out of Saudi Arabia - remember, they think it's a very good thing - actually justifies all the lives that were taken in getting us to this point?
I know that I, personally, do not want to send that message. I don't believe that the ends do justify the means. Now I'm sure some of you will say that al-Qaeda's killing of innocent civilians in their terrorist attacks in no where near comperable to Bush or the PNAC crowd lying about WMD or any of the other deceptions they used to get us into the war. But it is also the war, itself, that so many supported based on the claims made by the government, that is part of those "means" that we used to topple Saddam Hussein.
When people say that it doesn't matter if we find WMD in Iraq because the war was justified for other reasons - in particular getting Saddam out of office - they're not trying to justify the end goal (the removal of Saddam), they're trying to justify the war - and are saying that regardless of why we fought the war, the end result of it makes all of the rest - including all the innocent Iraqi citizens we killed or wounded, all the soldiers that have died - and continue to die, even though the war is "over", all of the destruction, all of the looting, all of it - the whole big, ugly, ball of wax, is just hunky-dory because Saddam's gone.
The American people would not have supported the war had we not been told by our leaders that they knew, for a fact, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Saddam had lethal weapons of mass destruction that he could give to terrorists or use against us himself. If we had been told that we needed to depose him because he was an evil dictator who treated his people cruelly (the main reason we are being given now), there would not have been as much support for the war as there was, simply because that description fits too many other dictators, and we're not, as a nation, about to start taking all of them out. Even if we wanted to, we simply can't - we haven't the money or the manpower.
So, the government told us how dangerous the WMD Saddam had were, and we went to war. If that turns out to have been a lie, we can't sit back and just say "oh well, it's ok", because it's simply not. The ends don't justify the means. If we are to do good in this world, we have to do it the right way, or we lose all moral authority to take a stand against anyone else trying to achieve what many might consider a positive goal through negative means. It's bad enough that we've now legitimized pre-emptive wars. We don't need to open this Pandora's Box as well.
in reading the original Guardian article that had misrepresented what Wolfowitz had said Information Clearinghouse has a copy posted at their site.
Thanks to Kevin Murphy for alerting me to the correction that the Guardian has published on their main web page. Here's the text:
CorrectionI have to wonder, though, if they've noticed (or been alerted) yet to the fact that they had previously published a story with the correct quote? (Sorry, I just find that to be almost comical. Sure, I can understand well how something like that can happen - I'm sure I've probably done similar things myself, and this blog is nowhere near as complicated as a large-scale newspaper, but it still amuses me for some reason. Ah well. Some of us are just more easily amused than others, no?)
Paul Wolfowitz
A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.
No URL for this yet, but according to the MSNBC Breaking News e-mail, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd are resigning from the New York Times. More info when it becomes available.
UPDATE: The Times had posted a story about the resignations.
Over at Calpundit, Kevin Drum pointed out a strange quirk regarding the Guardian story yesterday that claimed Paul Wolfowitz had admitted the war with Iraq was fought because of the oil (which isn't really waht he said at all).
Apparently, on May 31st, the Guardian had run a story with the correct quote in it.
The United States hopes to end the nuclear standoff with North Korea by putting economic pressure on the impoverished nation, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Saturday.Then, 5 days later, they published the story headlined "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil", and presented the statement this way:North Korea would respond to economic pressure, unlike Iraq, where military action was necessary because the country's oil money was propping up the regime, Wolfowitz told delegates at the second annual Asia Security Conference in Singapore.
"The country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse,'' Wolfowitz said. "That I believe is a major point of leverage.''
"The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil,'' he said.
Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."On the surface, the two versions of the comment look very similar, but in the 5/31 story, the quote is presented as an explaination of why we're still looking for other solutions in North Korea when we dismissed the idea of other solutions for Iraq. In that context, the role of oil was not something we wanted to get from Iraq, but rather something that limited what options we had. Now, I'm not going to say whether this contention makes sense or not - but it's the contention that Wolfowitz was making.
Interestingly, I tried to go to the 6/4 article at the Guardian's website, because I wanted to check some of how the reporter lead up to the the quote itself in presenting it as though Wolfowitz ws claiming we fought the war to get the oil, and the article is no longer there. The page offers no explaination, nor does it even indicate that a story has been removed. It just presents you with a basic "page not available" message. I've been looking for any kind of a correction or other note explaining the missing article, but haven't found it yet. If I do, I'll make note of it here.
UPDATE (11:21 am CST) I found this note at News 24. It had been added to the story they had published recounting the Guardian's story from yesterday. According to this note, the Guardian will be commenting on the matter tomorrow:
Although The Guardian earlier reported that US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz had said that the Iraq war was all about oil, the newspaper has now removed the article from its web site, and will print a full correction in Friday's edition. According to the Guardian's ombudsman, the quote, "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil," was taken out of context, and misconstrued.
I know that we often joke in the blogosphere about how Republicans try to blame everything on Clinton, but apparently, Tom DeLay is seriously doing just that.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, said Bush had ample grounds to oust Saddam, beyond the alleged weapons program, and blamed any misinformation on "the devastation" of U.S. intelligence capabilities under former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.Of course, the story doesn't tell us if DeLay counseled the administration from trusting intelligence gathered by the "devestated" intelligence capabilities Clinton left behind.
Warblogging has an absolutely incredible piece on why he's angry at our government. It was originally posted about a month ago, but I just discovered it tonight, and I cannot recommend this piece highly enough. Below are a few excerpts, but you simply must read the whole thing. It'll remind you of what you're angry about, too - and that's a good thing, because we simply cannot afford to forget.
I can't imagine a country where the Director of Homeland Security (I'm sorry, but what kind of countries call themselves a "Homeland"? I remember the "Fatherland" and "Motherland"...) says that "Liberty is the most precious gift we offer to our citizens". Come on, Mr. Ridge, the government does not "give" us Liberty! We give ourselves Liberty! We hold these rights to be "self evident", Mr. Ridge! To say that you "give" us the right implies that you can also take it away! You are doing so, but I am here to tell you that I will not stand idly by as you do so![...]
I've been ranting for quite a while now. I'm angry. I'm very angry. Perhaps most of all I'm angry that President Bush plans to exploit the memory of September 11 by spending the month of September traveling between campaign events and memorial services for people who died on that fateful day. He's been exploiting that tragedy for all it's worth since it happened, and it doesn't just make me angry — it makes me cry.
I was in New York City when the World Trade Center was hit. I woke up to a friend telling me that one tower had collapsed, that the Pentagon was on fire and that there was a car bomb at the State Department. I woke up and smelled the stench of death. I inhaled people's ashes. I inhaled the ground up concrete and steel for weeks. I hacked up phlegm impregnated with the cremated remains of people I would never know for weeks upon weeks. I watched the second tower fall from a New York City roof. I spent weeks in Union Square mourning with my fellow New Yorkers. I spent months upon months upon months walking by photographs of the missing.
President Bush is exploiting our national grief. He is using our grief to oppress Americans in the worst way since Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act. He is using our grief to convince us to become "conquer monkeys" as Garry Trudaeu put it. Now he plans to exploit September 11 to get himself reelected. And I think it will work.
Earlier today, I posted an entry about an article in the Guardian that claimed Paul Wolfowitz was, in essence, saying that the war was about oil, and the potential implications that had, in particular, for Tony Blair. As part of that entry, I'd noted that I'd also run into some questions about another statement of Wolfowitz' that appeared to have been taken out of context. Reuters had published a story stating that Wolfowitz had said that being able to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia was an "unnoticed but huge" reason we attacked Iraq, but a review of the DOD transcript puts the comment in a slighly different light.
I had used the Reuters article as a basis for an even earlier post, which - after discovering the problems with their representation of the statement - I had added a couple of "update" notices to, to try and clarify the situation. In light of the problem with the Guardian's representation of Wolfowitz' statement about Iraq's oil, I've decided to post the information on the other statement here as well, just so it's all in one basic area of the blog.
Here is the original paragraph from the Reuters story:
Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been "almost unnoticed but huge" -- namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al Qaeda grievance.And here is the passage from the DOD transcript of Tannenhaus interview:
I think the two most important things next are the two most obvious. One is getting post-Saddam Iraq right. Getting it right may take years, but setting the conditions for getting it right in the next six months. The next six months are going to be very important.Initially, I had read this as Wolfowitz saying that, contrary to the Reuters implication that the removal of troops from Saudi Arabia was part of the justification for the war, Wolfowitz was actually saying that removing the troops was something that had come about as a result of the war. Because I know Spinsanity is a place a lot of people can go to check for problems like this, I sent them a note about what I'd found - or, rather, what I thought I'd found. I received a reply from Brent with Spinsanity shortly after I wrote him, pointing out that, while Reuters appears to have mischaracterized the importance of removing troops from Saudi Arabia as a "huge" part of why we went to war, a bit of the conversation that took place after an interruption shows that Tannenhaus went back to clarify what Wolfowitz was saying, and that it was, in fact, part of the pre-war justification, though how important it was isn't clear. Here's the message I got from Spinsanity in response to my letter.The other thing is trying to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I do think we have a better atmosphere for working on it now than we did before in all kinds of ways. Whether that's enough to make a difference is not certain, but I will be happy to go back and dig up the things I said a long time ago which is, while it undoubtedly was true that if we could make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue we would provide a better set of circumstances to deal with Saddam Hussein, but that it was equally true the other way around that if we could deal with Saddam Hussein it would provide a better set of circumstances for dealing with the Arab-Israeli issue. That you had to move on both of them as best you could when you could, but --
There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.
I don't want to speak in messianic terms. It's not going to change things overnight, but it's a huge improvement.
Thanks for passing this on. I've been following this debate and wanted to let you know that Tannenhaus did follow up on this pointand confirm that the situation in Saudi Arabia was part of the strategic equation going into the decision to go to war, rather than just a post facto benefit. See Josh Marshall's post making this point at talkingpointsmemo.com. It's farther down in the conversation due to an interruption. I do think the Reuters quote is probably unfair, though, in saying Wolfowitz was specifically calling it an "unnoticed but huge" reason to go to war. Here's the passage in question:In addition, the quote from the Tannenhaus interview that's generated the most interest also appears to have been presented somewhat out of context. According to the Vanity Fair article, Wolfowitz reportedly said "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.''Tannenhaus: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia --Wolfowitz: I was. It's one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don't understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.
The DOD transcript presents it a bit differently:
Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --Another interesting tidbit about the Tannenhaus interview was brought up by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. He noted that, to him, the most "eye-popping" part of the article was a section whereWolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.
Tanenhaus discusses the portion of the interview in which he and Wolfowitz discussed the possibility that Saddam may have played a role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. According to Tanenhaus' article, Wolfowitz is "confident" Saddam played some role in the 1993 incident and has "entertained" the theory that he played a role in the Oklahoma City bombing as well. In the interview, according to Tanenhaus, Wolfowitz declined comment on the 1995 bombing.Marshall then tells of how he went to the DOD transcript of the interview to read what Wolfowitz had actually said - but there were no references to either the 1993 or 1995 bombings anywhere in the transcript. He also notes that the Pentagon claims that the transcript is complete, while Vanity Fair maintains that the discussion did take place during the Tannenhaus interview.
It's certainly an interesting mess, and one I plan to keep watching to see what else comes out of it, if anything.
Here's the question Paul Wolfowitz was asked, and his response, containing his comment about Iraq's oil, as included in the DOD transcript of the Q&A session at the Asian Security Summit in Singapore this past week:
Q: What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission, whether or not that’s true, and that the lesson that people will have is that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to the region. In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the sake of the stability of the region. To other countries of the world this is a very mixed message to be sending out.In context, the meaning of the statement appears different than the way the Guardian portrayed the comment. I'll continue watching to see if anything more comes up about this.Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It’s is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.
Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
Thanks to Blob for the link to LGF, which is where I found the link to the DOD transcripts.
Spinsanity, a site that I've found is great for helping with clarifying the many distortions we're faced with, both from politicians and from the media covering them, has an entry about Bush's recent declaration that "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
In remarks to Polish television released on Friday, though, President Bush stated that the U.S. has found much more than these labs. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," he said, according to an Associated Press article. "''They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them."These mobile labs appear to be equipped in such a way that it's possible have been used to produce biological agents, but, as noted earlier, there are still many questions surrounding them and how feasible it would have been to use them for producing biological weapons. Among other issues, there was no trace of biological contamination found in either trailer, some experts question if it would have been possible for the trailers to maintain the kind of temperatures needed to grow biological agents, and there would have needed to be one, if not more, additional trailers that would have carried other equipment necessary to finish the process of making any biological agents useful as weapons.However, as the Washington Post piece states, "U.S. authorities have to date made no claim of a confirmed finding of an actual nuclear, biological or chemical weapon." The existence of the labs is an important but separate issue. In the midst of a debate about whether the U.S. government misled the public and other governments over its reasons for invading Iraq, the President is now making a patently false claim about evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Until it can be conclusively shown that these trailers were used for the production of biological agents, for anyone - especially the President - to claim that we have actually found weapons of mass destruction or biological laboratories is reckless at best. We have found laboratories that might be useable in biological weapons manufacturing. Maybe it could be said that we have found laboratories that were likely used in biological weapons manufacturing. But to say that we flat out have found WMD or biological laboratories is misleading at best.
As you likely know, on Monday, the FCC voted to loosen the regulations on media ownership, which will undoubtedly lead to even less diversity of opinion amongst news sources, and make it easier for media company owners - who often have close ties to conservative politicians and causes - to squash stories that they might consider outside their best interests or the interests of those whom they wish to see gain or remain in power.
The way that news coverage of the recent war in Iraq, and the lack of journalistic investigations and follow-up into such issues as Enron, the manufactured California energy crisis, Bush's military record, the many unanswered questions about how 9/11 happened, how things were handled as it was happening and why the administration is trying to hard to keep anyone from investigating it, and other such matters, clearly shows why diversity in media ownership is necessary.
The one bright spot in this whole mess right now is that Congress has the power to overturn this ruling, which, if allowed to stand, would only make the current situation stand. While the status quo is less than ideal, it is far better than what the future holds under the new regulations.
Common Cause has set up a page where you can enter your zip code and send messages to your Senators and Representative, encouraging them to support the repeal of the FCC ruling. I encourage everyone to take a minute to visit their page and send a fax. There are many in Congress who are opposed to this ruling, so the idea of getting it repealed is, at the least, a legitimate possibility.
Thanks!
Kriselda
It looks like there may be some progress coming out of President Bush's recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah of Jordan. If the leaders can stick to the statements they've made this week, and find a way to control individuals and groups who may hope to disrupt the process, it may be possible for there to be some movement towards peace. As with any task as difficult and fragile as this, any progress may be small - but any progress would be good.
As to the specific comments, Sharon has pledged to get rid of settlements and outposts that are currently illegally being set up and maintained in Palestinian areas. Abbas, for his part, has renounced the use of terrorism by Palestinians and says that the use of "violence against Israel by Palestinian security forces [is] inconsistent with Palestinians' Islamic faith and the establishment of an independent state they have long sought. In addition, each leader also accepted the principle that each nation - Israel and Palestine - have a right to exist.
Also important to the process, the spokesman for Hamas, Ismail Abu Shanab, appeared on Nightline this week and said that if Israel ends the occupation, "Palestinians are willing to live in peace and stop all kinds of violence".
All of this is, of course, very tentative still. It remains to be seen how effective Sharon is at removing the settlements and outposts from Palestinian territories, and how well Abbas can control both the Palestinian security forces and groups like Hamas. But having each leader recognize that both states have a right to exist, and agreeing to work on what have been some of the more difficult issues involved in the problem is a good start.
Paul Wolfowitz has been speaking rather plainly lately about the reasons for the Iraq war. In a interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair (a complete transcript of which is available at the DOD website), Wolfowitz noted that, while there were three main reasons for invading Iraq - WMD, support for terrorism and "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people", for "bureaucratic" reasons, they chose to focus on the WMD, as it was the only one of the three that everyone could agree on - presumably as being the best reason to justify the war.
Today's Guardian is now reporting that Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt are quoting Wolfowitz as saying that our reason for invading Iraq was the oil. According to the article, the comments were made at a security summet held in Singapore over the weekend.
Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."After having recently discovered that an earlier statement of his had been misrepresented by Reuters, I'm attempting to find confirmation of this latest pronouncement, but if this is, in fact, what he said, I suspect things are about to get a lot worse for both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
More on this later if and when I find out more.
I'm posting this here to help with Blogchalk indexing:
United States, Kansas, Shawnee, English, Kriselda, Female, 36-40, Rush (the band), prog rock in general, reading true crime stories, true crime documentaries, Law & Order obsessed, DAoC, Neverwinter Nights, Mah-jongg, Bookworm, Age of Mythology, The Sims, SimCity 4000. :)
The Liquid List has an excellent bit about the new tax cut that just passed, and includes a transcript from a press conference with Ari Fleischer, where he tries, essentially, to avoid admitting that, in order to get the dividend tax-cut for the rich, they left 12,000,000 kids whose families make between $10,500 and $26,625 out of luck when it comes to the additional $400 per child tax credit that the administration has been promoting as proof that "everyone" will benefit from this round of tax cuts.
Atrios makes an excellent point about the administration and the search for WMDs.
The only evidence we need to know that the administration is simply in CYA mode is the fact they don't seem very concerned about the "missing" WMD. If they really believed they existed, the hunt for them wouldn't be motivated by a desire to justify the war, it would be motivated by the very legitimate desire to make sure the deadly weapons were not in the hands of evil-doers.This is something that's been nagging at me quite a bit from the time we started "finding" WMDs that always turned out to be something different.
There are many things the administration is doing that indicate they're not terribly worried about finding the WMD very quickly. These include their speculation that maybe Saddam just destroyed them all before we got to him and their shifting focus to try and say that the war was justified because we've found equipment that might indicate that they possibly had a WMD program, rather than WMDs themselves. Other signals are their refusal to allow the UN inspection teams to help with trying to locate the weapons, their lack of concern about the looting - in particular the 7 nuclear plants that have been looted - their pulling the main inspection team out of Iraq ahead of schedule (though it will be replaced with a different team), and the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam's regime, they failed to assign any troops to guard the sites they thought were most likely to have hidden WMDs.
One thing I find particularly disturbing is that prior to the start of the war, when Hans Blix and his team were still trying to do inspections in Iraq while Saddam was in power, a story came out that the inspectors were finding the intelligence given to them by the US to be "garbage". Questions have been being raised lately about whether the failure to find any WMDs is due to the government intentionally misleading the public about the existance of WMDs in order to raise support for the war, or if it'd because the information gathered by our intelligence committee was flawed, and the government simply acted in good faith on bad data. Given the comments by the UN inspectors and the difficulty they had finding anything using the information we were giving them, it sounds as though we had reason back then - prior to any attacks - to question whether the intelligence we were getting was sound or not.
Combine that with the way the administration has been acting since the "end" of the war and their nonchalance about securing potential WMD sites, et. al., and there starts to be something of an admittedly circumstantial case to substantiate the charge that they did intentionally mislead us about Saddam having WMDs and what kind of threat they posed. It's not proof, but I think its something that needs to be looked into in greater depth - and, more importantly, something that needs to be kept in mind if the administration tries to make the intelligence commitee the fall guy for this debacle.
I remember talk a while back about Fox possibly having an "American Idol"-like competition for a potential Presidential candidate. The more I think about it, the more I have to wonder if that's not such a bad idea after all. I can't imagine that process could come up with anything worse that what we've got now... [Yes, we're having another "totally disgusted with the government" day]
I write to my Senators and Representative quite frequently. I figure since they're supposed to be working for me and on my behalf (not exclusively, I realize, but the concept's there), then they need to hear what it is I want from or expect of them.
I generally get the usual nice, semi-generic, form response that tells me in polite terms that either they agree with what I have to say or that they don't, but that they're glad (as always) to hear from me and to keep in touch. I can then rest assured that whichever memeber of their staff actually read my letter marked down a little tick-mark in the appropriate column so that my Senators and Representative will be made aware of my feelings as part of their regular summary of the mail.
Sometimes, though, the responses I get are so incredibly generic that they don't manage to communicate a thing to me about what these guys actually think. Probably the most egrarious examples of this are the letters I got back from my Republican Senators in response to my comments about Senator Rick Santorum and his statements about regulating sexual behaviours between consenting adults. The point I made in my letter focused less on his specific comments about homosexuals and more on the idea that there is no right to privacy and that states should be able to regulate sexual activity to protect families and basic "moral values". I figure it must have taken quite a while for someone to figure out how to write a response that would cover all of the various comments people would have to make about Senator Santorum, and still provide absolutely no information about where the Senators themselves stand on the issue, while being as inoffensive as possible about it.
That said, I present - for your amusement - the Great Neutered Letters, courtesy of Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS):
Roberts: Thank you for writing to share your thoughts about recent comments by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA). I appreciate hearing from you.I suppose I should be glad to know that Senator Brownback believes in human rights. I was a bit worried there, you know. I also love how his list of rights "retained" by homosexuals doesn't even come close to addressing the issue of whether consenting adults - of any sexual persuasion - have a fundamental right to privacy, and thus a basic right to do to each other in the privacy of their own homes whatever they want and agree to.The issue Senator Santorum commented on is one about which many individuals feel strongly. This is reflected in the fact that the Supreme Court is set to determine whether to uphold or overturn Texas law prohibiting consensual sex between individuals of the same sex. I have received comments from many Kansans, both in support and opposition to Senator Santorum's remarks. I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will rule on this issue soon.
I share your concern that basic moral values make up the foundation of our great nation and will continue working hard at every opportunity to see that Congress and the federal government assists -- not hinders -- our work toward that goal. Rest assured, I will keep your concerns in mind as Congress considers legislation affecing our nation's moral fabric.
Again, thank s for getting in touch with me. Please keep me updated on yoru views affectin both Kansas and the rest of the nation.
With ever best wish,
Sincerely,
Pat Roberts
Brownback: Thank you for contacting my office regarding recent statements by Senator Rick Santorum. I genuinely appreciate hearing the views of my fellow Kansans.I believe in human rights. I believe,like Jefferson, that we are all "endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights." These rights we possess by virtue of our humanity; our government recognizes and protects them because we are citizens. Homosexuals, of course, retail all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizenship including the freedoms of speech and religion, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures and the taking of their lives, liberty or property without due process of law. I have spoken with Senator Santorum, and will keep your thoughts in mind should this matter arise again.
Again, thank you for expressing your concerns. Please do not hesitate to contact my office again in the future, and in the meantime, I encourage you to visit my website at http://www.senate.gov/~brownback for additional information on other issues on which I am working.
Sincerely,
Sam Brownback
United States Senator
I'm also grateful that Senator Roberts was able to help educate me about the Supreme Court. I wasn't aware that if the Supreme Court is considering a case, it would be indicative of a lot of people having strong opinions about the matter. I thought it meant that there was a complicated legal issue involved that required the highest court in the land to determine how that issue should be handled in accordance with the Constitution. Silly me, huh? (Yes, yes, I do know that when the Supreme Court is considering a matter, more often than not a lot of people will have strong feelings about it - but the idea of saying the Supreme Court considering an issue is reflective of many people having strong opinions on it is, well, just too funny, really.)
These letters remind me of a scene from "All the President's Men", where Ben Bradlee is complaining that all these people the Washington Post has published stories about are issuing "non-denial denials" - statements meant to sound like they're denying the story without ever actually saying that theyre denying the story. These letters are "non-response responses" - intended to make it sound like the Senators are responding to my letter without actually saying anything. (Well, except that Senator Brownback believes in human rights. That's a big risk he's taking there, you know.)
I spent a bit of time this morning figuring out how to increase the text size of the main entries without making the sidebar any more unweildly than it already is. Let me know if the larger text is helpful!
To get it to work right, I had to make my blog roll a solid list rather than one broken down in groups of 5 - hopefully that won't make it any less useable - if it does, let me know and I'll see if I can't do a bit more tinkering.
I'll be posting stuff of actual substance a bit later today - thanks again for visiting!
That seems to be the current attitude of the Bush administration. If they can't show us any weapons, then maybe we'll back down if they can show that Iraq had a weapons program. Many conservatives will say that there's little difference between having weapons and having a weapons program, but the reality is that the difference is significant. Weapons can be fired and used to attack other countries. A weapons program cannot. It's the difference between an immenent danger and a potential danger down the road a bit.
Part of the reason for this shift in focus is that this past week, we managed to find two trailers that are set up as mobile chemical labs. Bush is claiming that these two trailers are proof that Iraq had a biological or chemical weapons program, and bases his claim on a CIA report on the trailers that was released last week. There are just a few problems with this.
The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"—none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found—or that they don't exist?
Another question is raised by the following passage in the May 29 New York Times story about the CIA report: "And the mobile factories were poorly designed. For instance, one official noted, Iraqi biologists running the plants would have had a hard time getting raw materials into the production gear and removing multiplied colonies of deadly germs." One wonders: How hard is "a hard time"? If a worker couldn't get raw materials in or the deadly germs out, then what kind of bio-production plant was this? Was it "poorly designed" or designed for some other purpose?
Granted, these trailers do appear to be equipment that was banned by the UN resolutions, but at this point, after all the assurances that Iraq did, indeed, have significant weapons of mass destruction (specifically, enough to make 38,000 liters of botulinium toxin, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agent) and, as a result, posed such an immenent threat to the US that we just had to go to war immediately, we deserve to be shown a great deal more than two trailers that may - or may not - have been used for bioweapons production as proof that the government wasn't lying to us just so they could get the war they so desparately wanted.
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