Hawks Tell Bush How to Win War on TerrorA Brazilian judge has announced that US citizens will be fingerprinted and photographed on entering the country.
Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva was reacting to US plans to do the same to Brazilians entering the United States.
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He made the order after a Brazilian government office filed a complaint in a federal court over the new US immigration measures.
From 5 January, travellers from all countries which need a visa to enter the US will undergo the same checks.
"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," Federal Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva said in the court order.
Tragedy overwhelms quake cityIt could be one of the worst natural disasters in history as the death toll rises in the Bam earthquake. Now the survivors face a desperate struggle for life in the ruins.
Bush Advisers, With Eye on Dean, Formulate '04 PlansSomething very unpleasant is being let loose in Iraq. Just this week, a company commander in the US 1st Infantry Division in the north of the country admitted that, in order to elicit information about the guerrillas who are killing American troops, it was necessary to "instill fear" in the local villagers. An Iraqi interpreter working for the Americans had just taken an old lady from her home to frighten her daughters and grand-daughters into believing that she was being arrested.
A battalion commander in the same area put the point even more baldly. "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," he said. He was speaking from a village that his men had surrounded with barbed wire, upon which was a sign, stating: "This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot."
Try to explain that this treatment - and these words - offend the very basic humanity of the people whom the Americans claimed they came to "liberate" and you are met in Baghdad with the same explanation: that a very small "remnant" of "diehards" - loyal to the now-captured Saddam Hussein, etc, etc - have to be separated from the civilians whom they are "intimidating".
To point out that the intimidation is largely coming from the American occupation force - to the horror of the British in southern Iraq who fear, understandably, that Iraqi revenge will be visited upon them as it was on the Italians and the Spanish - is useless.
Instead, we are told that American troops are winning those famous hearts and minds with the spirit of Christmas. There was a grim example of this - and the inherent racism that pervades even reporting of such events - on the Associated Press wire agency just this week.
Describing how an American soldier in a Santa Claus hat was giving out stuffed animals to children, reporter Jason Keyser wrote that one 11-year- old child "looked puzzled, then smiled" as the soldier gave him a small, stuffed goat. Then the report continued: "Others in the crowd of mostly Muslims grabbed greedily at the box," adding the soldier's remark that: "They don't know how to handle generosity."
I don't doubt the soldier's wish to do good. But what is one to make of the "mostly Muslims" who "grabbed greedily" at the gifts? Or the soldier's insensitive remarks about generosity? Iraqi newspapers have been front--paging a Christmas card produced by US troops in Baghdad: "1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Wishes you a very Merry Christmas!" it says.
But the illustration is of Saddam Hussein in his scruffy beard just after his capture, with a Santa hat superimposed on top of his head. Funny enough for us, no doubt - I can't personally think of a better fall-guy for St Nicholas - but a clear insult to Sunni Arabs who, however much they may loathe the beast of Baghdad, will see in this card a deliberate attempt to humiliate Muslim Iraqis. It is for Iraqis to demean their ex-president - not their American occupiers.
Bracing for the BlowWASHINGTON, Dec. 25 -- President Bush's campaign has settled on a plan to run against Howard Dean that would portray him as reckless, angry and pessimistic, while framing the 2004 election as a referendum on the direction of the nation more than on the president himself, Mr. Bush's aides say.
I.B.M. has sent a holiday chill through its American employees with its plans to ship thousands of high-paying white-collar jobs overseas to lower-paid foreign workers.
"People are upset and angry," said Arnie Marchetti, a 37-year-old computer technician at I.B.M.'s Southbury, Conn., office whose wife gave birth to their first child in August.
"I understand that this is a lightning rod issue in the industry," an I.B.M. spokesman told me this week. "It's a lightning rod issue to people in our company, I suppose. But I don't think anybody expects us to issue blanket statements to the work force about projections."
Referring to employees who may be affected by the plans, he said, "We deal with them as they need to know."
"Offshoring" and "outsourcing" are two of the favored euphemisms for shipping work overseas. I.B.M. prefers the term "global sourcing." Whatever you call it, the expansion of this practice from manufacturing to the higher-paying technical and white-collar levels is the latest big threat to employment in the U.S.
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I.B.M. officials are skittish to the point of paranoia on this matter, which has powerful social and political implications. Pulling the plug on factory workers is one thing. A frontal assault on the livelihood of solidly middle-class Americans -- some of whom may be required to train the foreign workers who will replace them -- is something else.
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The outsourcing of good jobs has been under way for years, and there is no dispute that the practice is speeding up. "Anything that is not nailed to the floor is being considered for outsourcing," said Thea Lee, the chief international economist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Most of the millions of white-collar workers who could be affected by this phenomenon over the next several years are clueless as to what they can do about it. They do not have organized representation in the workplace. And government policies overwhelmingly favor the corporations. Like the employees at I.B.M. whose holiday cheer has been dampened by uncertainty, these hard-working men and women and their families have little protection against the powerful forces of the global economy.
Durable goods orders plunge: November order for goods fall an unexpected 3.1% versus expectations for a 0.8% rise. Seeking a new emphasis, Dean touts his ChristianityEver since he identified the bizarre brain-destroying proteins that cause mad cow disease, Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, has worried about whether the meat supply in America is safe.
He spoke over the years of the need to increase testing and safety measures. Then in May, a case of mad cow disease appeared in Canada, and he quickly sought a meeting with Ann M. Veneman, the secretary of agriculture. He was rebuffed, he said in an interview yesterday, until he ran into Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush.
So six weeks ago, Dr. Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prions, entered Ms. Veneman's office with a message. "I went to tell her that what happened in Canada was going to happen in the United States," Dr. Prusiner said. "I told her it was just a matter of time."
The department had been willfully blind to the threat, he said. The only reason mad cow disease had not been found here, he said, is that the department's animal inspection agency was testing too few animals. Once more cows are tested, he added, "we'll be able to understand the magnitude of our problem."
This nation should immediately start testing every cow that shows signs of illness and eventually every single cow upon slaughter, he said he told Ms. Veneman. Japan has such a program and is finding the disease in young asymptomatic animals.
Fast, accurate and inexpensive tests are available, Dr. Prusiner said, including one that he has patented through his university.
Ms. Veneman's response (he said she did not share his sense of urgency) left him frustrated. That frustration soared this week after a cow in Washington State was tentatively found to have the disease. If the nation had increased testing and inspections, meat from that cow might never have entered the food chain, he said.
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"We want to keep prions out of the mouths of humans," Dr. Prusiner said. "We don't know what they might be doing to us."
His laboratory is working on promising treatments for the human form of mad cow disease but preventing its spread is just as important, he said. "Science is capable of finding out how serious the problem is," he said, "but only government can mandate the solutions."
1914 Christmas truce 'planned by thousands of German soldiers'On Christmas, Christians believe that their God came into the world as a human being-and more importantly, it seems, as a baby, a baby Christians call the Prince of Peace. And now, as then, humans seem to have lost sight of their humanity. Now, as then, some of us have come to believe that invasion and conquest, occupation and domination are what makes us human-or worse, more human than those whom we may have subjugated. In May, 1996, future U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright said on national television that the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions was worth the price. Christmas-and paleoanthropology-tell us that this was not a statement of strength, but a massive, even obscene defection from what it means to be human. "War," observes Christian leader John Paul II, "is always a defeat for humanity."
The Christmas truce of the Great War in 1914 was started by a "peace movement" of German soldiers who won over their trenchbound British foes by lobbing chocolate cake at them instead of hand grenades, a new book claims.
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"This is the friendly Hun from next door," wrote Markus Hesselmann in Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel newspaper. "It's about German front line soldiers not obeying orders and making peace by leaving their weapons behind."
Jürgs compares the actions of German soldiers in 1914 to those of the country's peace movement opposing the Iraq war. "There were not merely one or two incidents of peace on the Western Front in 1914," he writes. "In reality there was a spontaneous peace movement which ran for hundreds of kilometres and thousands took part," he adds.
His book reveals that German troops began preparing for the truce well in advance. Several days before Christmas, soldiers from a Saxon regiment lobbed a carefully packaged chocolate cake across no-man's land into the British trenches. A message was attached asking whether holding a one-hour ceasefire that evening might be possible, so that the troops could celebrate their captain's birthday.
According to Jürgs, the British stopped firing, stood on their trench parapets and applauded as a German band struck up a rendition of "Happy Birthday". Jürgs quotes from the diary of Kurt Zehmisch, a German lieutenant who describes how thousands of German Christmas trees delivered to the front line helped to bring about the ceasefire. "It was pure illumination - along the trench parapets there were Christmas trees lit up by burning candles," Zehmisch writes. "The British responded by shouting and clapping."
What followed was a bout of unprecedented fraternisation between enemy forces that has never been repeated on an equivalent scale: German Fritzes bearing candles, chunks of cake and cigars met British Tommies carrying cigarettes and Christmas pudding in no-man's land. The two sides exchanged presents, sang songs and played football, using tin cans for makeshift balls and spiked Pickelhaube helmets for goalposts.
Jürgs says the Germans were able to take the initiative because many had been in Britain as "guest workers" before the war and, unlike most of the British, had a command of the enemy's language.
The truce collapsed shortly after Christmas 1914 when news of the ceasefire reached the horrified high commands and strict military discipline was reinforced. Jürgs writes that in one area, Ploegsteert forest in Belgium, the ceasefire continued until the end of February 1915.
Moyers Profiles a Liberal Voice Rising from Evangelical PulpitJames Ridgeway: The Martial Plan Un-American RecoveryNEW YORK -- Bill Moyers begins his look at the charismatic leader of Manhattan's Riverside Church by setting up a straw Christian -- then knocking it down.
He opens with a montage of fundamentalist invective in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks: the Revs. Jerry Falwell ("the pagans, and the abortionists, and the gays and the lesbians" helped bring on the tragedy); Pat Robertson (Islam is "just not" a peaceful religion); and Jerry Vines ("all religions are not equally true").
But then "Now with Bill Moyers" -- which airs Friday night at 8 on KUED Channel 7 -- shifts to the awe-inspiring confines of Riverside Church, the soaring house of worship built overlooking the Hudson River by John D. Rockefeller Jr.
"Jesus revealed the capacity to affirm your own tradition, and at the same time, to reach out to those of other traditions," the Rev. James Forbes Jr. tells his congregation, five days after the attacks. "His first sermon said, 'Be careful living with nationalistic narrowness. Because that does not discern the broadness of the heart of God.' "
The point is that not all evangelical Christian voices are so angry, that a spiritual leader has arisen who speaks with a loving, liberal voice for all those devout Christians who are not represented by the Falwells and the Robertsons.
Appeal: A Christmas Tale, 2003 - A mother and son, the ravages of Aids and a continent's plight Mark Weisbrot: NAFTA has been a big flopSince July the average hourly wage increase for the 85 million Americans who work in non-supervisory jobs in offices and factories is a flat 3 cents. Wages are up just 2.1 percent since November 2002 -- the slowest wage growth we've experienced in 40 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute have been comparing recoveries of late, looking into the growth in corporate-sector income in each of the nine recoveries the United States has gone through since the end of World War II. In the preceding eight, the share of the corporate income growth going to profits averaged 26 percent, and never exceeded 32 percent. In the current recovery, however, profits come to 46 percent of the corporations' additional income.
Conversely, labor compensation averaged 61 percent of the total income growth in the preceding recoveries, and was never lower than 55 percent. In the Bush recovery, it's just 29 percent of the new income coming in to the corporations.
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There are only a couple of ways to explain how the capacity of U.S. workers to claim their accustomed share of the nation's income has so stunningly collapsed. Outsourcing is certainly a big part of the picture. As Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, has noted, private-sector hiring in the current recovery is roughly 7 million jobs shy of what would have been the norm in previous recoveries, and U.S. corporations, high-tech as well as low-tech, are busily hiring employees from lower-wage nations instead of from our own.
The jobless rate among U.S. software engineers, for instance, has doubled over the past three years. In Bangalore, India, where American companies are on a huge hiring spree for the kind of talent they used to scoop up in Silicon Valley, the starting annual salary for top electrical engineering graduates, says Business Week, is $10,000 -- compared with $80,000 here in the States. Tell that to a software writer in Palo Alto and she's not likely to hit up her boss for a raise.
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Indeed, the current recovery is not only the first to take place in an economy in which global wage rates are a factor, but the first since before the New Deal to take place in an economy in which the rate of private-sector unionization is in single digits -- just 8.5 percent of the workforce.
Bush Policy to Allow More Logging in Alaska Forest GOP Congress Scuttled Meat Protection MeasureThe fundamental measure by which economists evaluate the success or failure of economic policy is the growth of income per person. This ignores distribution; but from a purely economic point of view, if the economy grows, there is at least the possibility that everyone can improve their living standards.
By that measure, NAFTA is a terrible economic failure. From 1994 through 2003, the Mexican economy has grown by only 11 percent per person. This is less than one-fourth the rate of growth that Mexico experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the relevant economic comparison for anyone who wants to evaluate Mexico's experience with NAFTA.
From 1980 to the present, income per person in Mexico has grown by about 19 percent. This compares to 93 percent for the 1960-1979 (somewhat shorter) period. In other words, there is no economic evidence that the NAFTA model is a success.
These agreements have also lowered wages and salaries for the majority of U.S. employees, as even the research of pro-trade economists clearly demonstrates. After 40 consecutive months of manufacturing job losses, some Republican strategists are wondering aloud whether they want to try to squeeze this agreement through Congress in an election year.
USDA Refused to Release Mad Cow RecordsWASHINGTON - Legislation to keep meat from downed animals off American kitchen tables was scuttled - for the second time in as many years - as Congress labored unsuccessfully earlier this month to pass a catchall agency spending bill.
Agriculture officials also have insisted that the food supply is safe because the animal parts most at risk of carrying the disease, the brain and spinal column, had been removed. "Muscle cuts of meat have almost no risk," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.
Inspections for Mad Cow Lag Those Done AbroadWASHINGTON -- Although the United States Department of Agriculture insisted the U.S. beef supply is safe Tuesday after announcing the first documented case of mad cow disease in the United States, the agency for six months repeatedly refused to release its tests for mad cow to United Press International.
First Case of Mad Cow Disease in USIn discussing the case of mad cow disease apparently found in Washington State, Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said yesterday that her department tested 20,526 cattle for mad cow disease last year. But that is only a small percentage [0.0586 per cent] of the 35 million commercially slaughtered each year.
Court Suspends Bush Pollution RulesThe US government was yesterday scrambling to calm public fears over its food supply after America's first recorded case of mad cow disease was found in a sick animal in Washington state.
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The news hit an already nervous American public, entering the Christmas holiday under a high state of alert because of the risk of a new terrorist attack. Ms Veneman felt it necessary to stress there was no evidence of terrorism in the BSE incident.
However, her assurances that the outbreak would be contained were questioned by public health activist, John Stauber. He called them "extremely disingenuous", and pointed out Ms Veneman was a former lobbyist for the cattle industry. "I suggest this cow is the tip of an invisible iceberg," Mr Stauber, co-author of a book ( Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? ) about the threat of the disease, told CNN last night. "My presumption is mad cow disease is spread throughout North America at some level, but because our testing program is so inadequate we have not identified it."
Gadahafi as Courageous Statesman? Please Rumsfeld Backed Saddam Even After Chemical AttacksWASHINGTON - A federal court on Wednesday halted a Bush administration plan to allow power plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities to make upgrades to aging plants without installing costly new air pollution control equipment.
World Nuclear Powers"The U.S. follows a double standard that allows it to develop and threaten to use nuclear weapons while denying them to smaller countries," said Hussein Haniff, Malaysia's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "We do not know whether the nuclear nonproliferation treaty can survive with these U.S. policies."
Haniff heads a group of 13 countries that constitute a nonaligned bloc on the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors. The bloc is often at odds with the United States and last month opposed U.S. efforts to declare Iran in violation of the nonproliferation treaty.
[...] A senior Western diplomat called the prospect of mini-nukes "politically stupid" and said it would complicate U.S. security by weakening support for tougher nuclear controls.
Anger over the U.S. policy has risen steadily since the spring when the administration requested funding for research on mini-nukes, in effect seeking a reversal of a 1993 ban on research and development of low-yield atomic weapons. After much wrangling, Congress approved the bill last month, granting $7.5 million, half of what the administration had sought.
[...] Some experts said the research on mini-nukes violated U.S. legal obligations to disarm and blurred the line between conventional warfare and nuclear conflict.
"Preemptive strikes linked to the development of new nuclear weapons sends a threatening message to nonnuclear states," said Jean du Preez, a former South African diplomat who is an analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. "Even some nuclear states, including India and Pakistan, may decide, well, why not do the same."
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Washington has long refused to pressure Israel over its ample nuclear stockpile, a position many countries regard as a double standard when it comes to who can possess nuclear weapons -- the same concerns diplomats said have been reinforced by the mini-nukes prospect.
"Bush's posture makes the job of selling nonproliferation more difficult," said a senior Western diplomat in Vienna. "If nuclear weapons are necessary for the sole surviving superpower, what hope does Iran or any number of other countries have without them?"
Try Saddam, His AccomplicesThe United States has more than 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads; with about 1,670 tactical warheads and stocks, the arsenal numbers about 10,000-12,000.
Keeping Secrets: The Bush administration is doing the public's business out of the public eye. Here's how--and whyThe apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing warmaking and military power. Both sides are energized by versions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose.
For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky TerritoryAt 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2001, as a bone-chilling rain fell on Washington, George W. Bush took the oath of office as the nation's 43rd president. Later that afternoon, the business of governance officially began. Like other chief executives before him, Bush moved to unravel the efforts of his predecessor. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, directed federal agencies to freeze more than 300 pending regulations issued by the administration of President Bill Clinton. The regulations affected areas ranging from health and safety to the environment and industry. The delay, Card said, would "ensure that the president's appointees have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations." The process, as it turned out, expressly precluded input from average citizens. Inviting such comments, agency officials concluded, would be "contrary to the public interest."
US Democrats accuse Bush of allowing terror threatThe more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist "neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground."
And the more he dwelled on this, the more he began to believe that U.S. soldiers would wind up paying for the mistakes of Washington policymakers. And that took him back to that bloody day in the sodden Que Son mountains in Vietnam.
"Obviously there are differences" between Vietnam and Iraq, he says. "Every situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels the same chill. "It feels the same. I hear the same things -- about [administration charges about] not telling the good news, about cooking up a rationale for getting into the war." He sees both conflicts as beginning with deception by the U.S. government, drawing a parallel between how the Johnson administration handled the beginning of the Vietnam War and how the Bush administration touted the threat presented by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I think the American people were conned into this," he says. Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson administration claimed that U.S. Navy ships had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind."
Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands.
And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."
Fortune Magazine WINNERS AND LOSERS OF 2003: Worst Technology: Paperless VotingAs Americans digest the news that Al Qaeda is almost certainly planning a major attack on the US during the holiday period, the Democrat Opposition has been quick to criticise President George W Bush for allowing the terrorist network to remain a threat.
Remember all the chads and dimples that made voting for President so chaotic in Florida three years ago? In a well-meaning effort to fix the system before the 2004 elections, many communities--in Florida and in other states--have begun to install direct-recording electronic machines (DRE), which instantly record and tabulate votes; some even use fancy touch-screen technology similar to automated-teller machines in banks. Computer scientists are alarmed, however, by the potential to manipulate the new machines. Internal documents from Diebold Election Systems, which has sold more than 33,000 AccuVote DRE machines, acknowledge that there have been security flaws, although the company denies that the flaws could allow a hacker to cast multiple votes or alter the votes of others, as critics suggest. Diebold asserts that the problems have been or are being fixed, but it is waging a legal war to have the embarrassing documents removed from the Internet.
A Deficit of $100 Million Is Confronting the N.R.A. A Flawed Terrorist Yardstick: The Justice Dept. tally of more than 280 suspects detained for prosecution after Sept. 11 is inflated with dismissed and unrelated cases.Bashar Awis was dying in a hospital. Though there was no doubt that he only had a few hours left, none of his relatives were by his bed at Haemek Hospital in Afula.
Awis, a 29-year-old father of two from the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, was a prisoner at Megiddo Prison. Circumstances surrounding his death on December 8 remain unclear.
Revealed: who really found Saddam?PITTSBURGH -- In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ali Alubeidy was in the cross hairs of the Justice Department, singled out as a potential terrorist by no less than U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.
In fact, he was guilty -- of paying off a corrupt bureaucrat to get a commercial driver's license, including a permit to transport hazardous materials. His sentence: three years' probation.
BoE alerted to BCCI fraud risk in 1984 Saddam faces months of interrogation before trial Gadaffi may find that the goalposts have been moved The meeting that brought Libya in from the cold Libya spies' secret deal to reveal terrorists Secret files tell story of Iraq's 'disappeared' Observer International NewsIf the PUK themselves pulled off Saddam's capture, there would be much to gain from taking the $25m bounty and any political guarantees the Americans might reward them with to keep schtum. What's more, Jalal Talabani's links to Tehran have always worried Washington, and having his party grab the grand prize from beneath their noses would be awkward to say the least.
"It's mutually worth it to us and the Americans. We need assurances for the future and they need the kudos of getting Saddam," admitted a Kurdish source on condition of anonymity. It would be all to easy to dismiss the questions surrounding the PUK role as conspiracy theory. After all, almost every major event that affects the Arab world prompts tales that are quickly woven into intricate shapes and patterns, to demonstrate innocence, seek credit or apportion blame. Saddam's capture is no exception.
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In the end serious questions remain about the Kurdish role and whether at last Sunday's Baghdad press conference, Paul Bremer was telling the whole truth . Or is it a case of "ladies and gentlemen we got him," -- with a little more help from our Kurdish friends than might be politically expedient to admit?
Not neo-con, just plain greed: The U.S. campaign to have Iraq's debts forgiven shows how the Bush administration backs any market distortion that enriches its friends Benton man heading to Iraq as truck driver for HalliburtonDec. 20, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- Keeping the federal budget at or near balance over the next 50 years could require painful tax increases, spending cuts or both, the Congressional Budget Office says.
In a look at the government's long-term budget outlook, Congress' nonpartisan fiscal analyst offered possible combinations of tax and spending changes, all of which would leave lawmakers choosing among politically unpalatable options.
Saddam was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops"There is absolutely no money over here any more, and it is sad," Tulley said. "People are losing jobs here every day."
Tulley said he is willing to risk the dangers of Iraq for a year because as a truck driver for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, he can earn as much as $125,000.
LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.
Ashcroft OKs remapping plan: Partisan politics, foes sayWorld leaders should take stand in Saddam trial: lawyer Fight to the death: Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more. Rebuff for Bush on civil libertiesU.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on Friday cleared Texas to use a new Republican congressional redistricting plan for the 2004 elections -- a devastating blow to Democrats and minorities fighting the plan.
Anti-Bush Iraq Documentary Makes Circuit Power Outages Generating Anger in Iraq Democrats Press Rumsfeld for Halliburton Records Libya Gives Up Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Judge: I Saw Police Commit Felonies: A judge who said he witnessed some of the anti-free trade protests complains in open court about how police handled the demonstrations.In a critical decision, a San Francisco appeals court disputed the administration's claims to have "unchecked authority" in dealing with prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba outside the US criminal justice system.
The 2-1 decision came a few hours after a Manhattan appeals court ruled that accused "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla - a US citizen alleged to be an enemy combatant - be released from military custody within 30 days.
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In California, Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote that in such times judges must protect civil rights.
"Even in times of national emergency it is the obligation of the judicial branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the executive branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike," he wrote in the majority decision.
"The Government's position is inconsistent with fundamental tenets of American jurisprudence and raises most serious questions under international law," the judge said.
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In New York, the circuit judges ruled 2-1 that the Bush administration could not designate Mr Padilla - a former gang member who converted to Islam - as an enemy combatant without the approval of Congress.
"As this court sits only a short distance from where the World Trade Centre stood, we are as keenly aware as anyone of the threat al-Qa'ida poses to our country and of the responsibilities the President and law-enforcement officials bear for protecting the nation," the judges wrote.
"But presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum, and this case involves not whether those responsibilities should be aggressively pursued, but whether the President is obligated, in the circumstances presented here, to share them with Congress."
The Burden of Truth: Two former CIA analysts talk about the lies behind the Iraq war and the heavy weight of conscience.A judge presiding over the cases of free trade protesters said in court that he saw ''no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers'' during the November demonstrations, adding to a chorus of complaints about police conduct.
Judge Richard Margolius, 60, made the remarks in open court last week, saying he was taken aback by what he witnessed while attending the protests.
''Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes. And I have always supported the police during my entire career,'' he said, according to a court transcript. ``This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community.''
In the transcript, he also said he may have to remove himself from any additional cases involving arrests made during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit.
''I probably would have been arrested myself if it had not been for a police officer who recognized me,'' said the judge, who wears his hair in a graying ponytail.
A great biography waits to be written about Robert Strange McNamara and the central role he played in 20th-century America, both as an actor in its historic dramas and as a symbol of the shattering of its postwar illusions in the wake of Vietnam. Errol Morris' documentary film The Fog of War (released in theaters today) conveys a brilliant glimmer of where that biography might go.
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Then, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, came the war in Vietnam. At first McNamara tried to manage the war with his usual assurance. By 1967, he was worn out; defeat seemed certain; his methods, his basic assumptions about the workings of the world, had failed him. He resigned (or got fired--it was never quite clear), received an appointment as president of the World Bank, and over the next few decades emerged periodically to advance proposals for world disarmament.
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[...] in the film's most searing moment, he likens himself to a war criminal for the massive firebombings that he and Gen. Curtis LeMay planned during WWII; the raids over Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians in a single night.
U.S. Report Cites Abuse of 9/11 Detainees in N.Y.Now that the concept of "preventive war" has entered the vocabulary again in the context of the latest war in Iraq, it is interesting to note that it has been a recurring theme through the last century.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, preventive war was seriously discussed because of the advent of nuclear weapons. It was argued that because the United States had nuclear superiority, we would be well advised to fight the Soviets sooner rather than later, before they could match our nuclear arsenal.
One of the advocates of this policy was Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general under whom McNamara served during World War II. In 1957, LeMay was head of the Strategic Air Command. He was warned that few SAC bombers could survive a surprise Soviet attack, and the men who told him the news remember his response: "I'll knock [them out] before they get off the ground.... It's not national policy, but it's my policy."
And it was LeMay who essentially advocated preventive war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Everyone is familiar with the tape recordings Nixon made in the White House, but it's less well known that both Kennedy and Johnson selectively recorded phone conversations and Cabinet meetings. In one recording made during the missile crisis, LeMay (by then Air Force chief of staff) comes across as angry and bellicose. He tells Kennedy that what Kennedy is doing ? forgoing immediate military action in hopes of negotiating a settlement ? is worse than Munich; that is, worse than the way British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave in to Hitler and set up World War II. Essentially, LeMay calls Kennedy an appeaser, a weakling. And LeMay never backed down. In a story that McNamara tells, after the Cuban Missile Crisis is resolved, Kennedy compliments his generals on having "won" by keeping the nation out of war. LeMay blurts out, "Won, hell, we lost. We should go in and wipe them out today!"
Such stories are particularly instructive because of new information that has come to light in recent years. In 1962, the CIA told Kennedy and his advisors that there were no nuclear warheads in Cuba. It was wrong. In fact, there were 162 nuclear warheads on the island that could have been used against an American invasion force and the U.S. homeland.
LeMay's belief that it was important to strike then -- to fight a preventive war when the odds were supposedly with us -- would have in all likelihood led to disaster. It could have led to a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Someone recently said to me, "Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis was not that important." I replied, "It depends on how important you think Florida is."
So here we are, at the beginning of a new century, and preventive war has made a comeback. I look at it with a jaundiced eye. Haven't we been there before? Isn't "preventive war" an oxymoron? Shouldn't we have learned by now that war doesn't reduce hostility, anger and instability but instead creates more of the same? And we might ask ourselves: Do we want more of the same for this next century?
Paul Krugman: Telling It Right Helen Thomas: Saddam Should Face International Court FTAA Protests: Amnesty Says Miami Police May Have Broken UN Laws Fight to the Death: The Iraqis Who Hated Saddam Hate the Americans More 'Staggering': Medical Evacuations from Iraq Near 11,000WASHINGTON -- Federal prison officers in Brooklyn physically and verbally abused immigrants detained after the Sept. 11 attacks, slamming them against the wall and painfully twisting their arms and hands, the Department of Justice's inspector general reported Thursday.
Rumsfeld's '84 Visit was to Reassure Iraqis: Trip Followed Criticism Of Chemical Arms' Use Rights, Liberties Groups Hail Court Defeats for Bush Anti-Terror Measures Is the Search for WMDs Over? After Eight Months with No Discoveries, Mission Chief Quits Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back: Phantam Insurgents in FantasyvilleWASHINGTON -- The total number of wounded soldiers and medical evacuations from the war in Iraq is nearing 11,000, according to new Pentagon data provided in response to a request from United Press International.
Rumsfeld Visited Baghdad in 1984 to Reassure Iraqis, Documents Show: Trip Followed Criticism Of Chemical Arms' UseSchoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America's famous "insurgents". In Samarra--for which read Fantasyville--he was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city.
It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered Issam's back, speeding on through an outer wall. His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital yesterday in serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the Samarra emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages.
Israel will take unilateral steps to separate from the Palestinians unless there is progress on the roadmap peace plan, Ariel Sharon has warned.
These would include the dismantling of settler outposts and accelerating the building of the controversial security barrier in the West Bank, he said.
Heavy MetalWASHINGTON (December 18, 2003) - What happens when oil, gas, mining and nuclear lobbyists meet behind closed doors with high-level Energy Department officials to discuss the energy bill that stalled in Congress? That is what NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council) intends to find out. Today NRDC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records relating to efforts by Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow and other agency officials to coordinate a grassroots lobbying strategy with energy companies to secure passage of energy legislation. Such coordination may violate federal criminal law, according to NRDC.
Homeland InsecurityThe Environmental Protection Agency this week proposed two alternatives to Clinton-era plans to cut mercury emissions from coal-burning power-plants. The proposals are far less strict than the ones foreseen by the previous administration; they give companies the choice either to reduce emissions or use a 'cap-and-trade' plan to buy pollution credits from companies that have exceeded their reduction ratio. Monday's announcements are merely the latest element in a pattern of anti-environmental policies from the Bush administration.
White House Web Scrubbing: Offending Comments on Iraq Disappear From Site Report: Officers Abused Sept. 11 DetaineesEfforts by the U.S. government to create an effective, comprehensive strategy against terrorist attacks have lost momentum, while Americans, paradoxically, have become complacent about the terrorist threat. So says a federal report released this week.
Greg Joseph: What's Wrong With This Picture?Within the mainstream of American political discourse, it's perfectly acceptable to criticize pre-emption and unilateralism, but by silent agreement, the word "empire" is understood to be beyond the pale. It's one of those words, like "servant," that Americans refuse to utter because it's too difficult to reconcile with American ideals. The only people rude enough to use the word "empire" to describe the United States are foreigners, hard leftists, and Buchananite conservatives. Oh, and one more: Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney violated the Bush administration's policy of never saying the e-word in a Christmas card he and his wife sent out to various supporters and important Washingtonians. (Chatterbox did not receive one.) Along with their best wishes for this holiday season, the Cheneys included the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin:
"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
Franklin said this at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by way of suggesting that the proceedings begin each day with a prayer. It is a favorite touchstone for those, like Cheney, who believe that the separation of church and state has become overly fastidious. (These people seldom go on to mention that Franklin's suggestion was rejected by the other delegates.) For Cheney, though, it was a twofer, because it also allowed him to state (using the words of another) that America need not be ashamed of its empire. Although Chatterbox fears that Cheney's motive--in blazing past whatever warnings his aides likely extended about using the e-word--was fanaticism, he can't help but applaud Cheney's honesty. It's time for America's empire to come out of the closet.
Hot Spot in 2003? The Earth, U.N. SaysEven though one out of three adult Americans is a person of color, nine out of ten federal contributions -- nearly $2 billion in 2000 and 2002 -- came from individuals living in non-Hispanic white neighborhoods. Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg's neighborhood on New York's Upper East Side, where 40 percent of households have incomes of over $100,000 or more, led the nation with $28.4 million in federal contributions in 2000 and 2002. Although the local zip code has only 91,000 people of voting age, the amount of money contributed from there dwarfed contributions made by over 1200 zip codes nationwide containing over 20 million African, Latino and Asian Pacific American people of voting age.
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California supplied more individual campaign contributions to federal campaigns than any other state, giving $273 million in 2000 and 2002. But even though California is diverse, with nearly one out of two residents being a person of color, 85 percent of the campaign contributions come from predominately non-Hispanic White households from zip codes like 90210. In second-ranking New York, the story remains the same, with 94 percent of campaign cash coming from non-Hispanic white households even though only 71 percent of the population lives in these neighborhoods.
With Dallas and Houston leading the way, the President's home state of Texas ranks third, giving $152 million in individual contributions in 2000 and 2002. Texas, like California, is diverse with 56 percent of the population being non-Hispanic White. However, 77 percent of federal campaign contributions don't come from communities of color. Instead the power is concentrated in wealthy communities that barely 10 percent of the state's population calls home.
Dubious Link Between Atta and Saddam: A document tying the Iraqi leader with the 9/11 terrorist is probably fake. PLUS, how terror financiers manage to stay in business His Day in CourtGENEVA, Dec. 16 (AP) -- The year 2003, marked by a sweltering summer and drought across large swaths of the planet, was the third hottest in nearly 150 years, the United Nations weather agency said Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organization estimated the average surface temperature for the year to be 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the normal 25.2 degrees ? a number skewed toward the low side because it includes polar regions.
Losing Ground Death By a Thousand CutsPresident Bush wants the Iraqi people to know that the fate of Saddam Hussein is in their hands. Bush might think Saddam's crimes merit execution, but, not being an Iraqi citizen, he says, it's not for him to say.
Significant OtherAfter being deserted by industry, a Southern mill town now finds itself abandoned by government. Welcome to Henderson, North Carolina, where Bush economics is hitting home.
So This Is Liberation? Insurgents or Protesters? 18 Are Killed in Clashes with US TroopsAs America thrills, naturally enough, to the capture of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the man once considered public enemy number one by Washington, remains at large; and the undeniably good news from Iraq doesn't make bin Laden any less elusive, or dangerous. Whatever Saddam's sins -- and they are numberless -- OBL has, to say the least, the more direct tie to global terrorism. (Nobody doubts his link to 9/11.) "In terms of the war against terrorism, bin Laden would be the bigger catch," said Pentagon terrorism consultant, Dr. Ruth Lavin. "Outside of Iraq, Saddam's capture won't have much impact at all."
A disturbing new phenomenon in this environment of growing military violence has been the appearance of hooded and masked gunmen - working for the Americans - on road checkpoints north of Baghdad. Five of them now check cars on the Tigris river bridge outside Samarra, apparently fearing their identities will be discovered if their faces are not concealed. They wear militia uniforms and, although they say they are part of the new American-backed "Iraqi Civil Defence Corps", they have neither badges of rank nor unit markings. The same hooded men are now appearing on the streets of Baghdad.
Tanks roll into TikritVATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul took a swipe at the United States and its allies Tuesday for invading Iraq without U.N. approval, suggesting they had succumbed to the temptation to use the law of force instead of the force of law.
Bush is still in a real holeSome locals backed into shop doorways, many just stood and watched the parade by an occupying army whose temporary base is a sprawling complex of palaces Saddam built for himself and his family on the side of the Tigris river on the edge of town.
An hour later, a handful of military vehicles returned, one carrying the U.S.-backed regional governor Hussein al-Jaburi, while a recording of his voice boomed a warning to would-be Saddam loyalists.
"Any demonstration against the government or coalition forces will be fired upon," Jaburi's voice said, according to an army interpreter. "This is a fair warning."
Paul Krugman: Patriots and PoliticsThe US president is facing a financial nightmare of his own making, and needs all the good news he can get
Considering Computer VotingU.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.
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Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.
"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said.
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"That's news," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this."
Since the late 1990s, there have been several reports that Iraq was converting a fleet of Czechoslovakian jet fighters into UAVs, as well as testing smaller drones. And in a speech in Cincinnati last October, Bush mentioned the vehicles. "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," the president said.
Nelson, though, said the administration told senators Iraq had gone beyond exploring and developed the means of hitting the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction.
Bin Laden's Iraq PlansGaithersburg, Md.
HIGH-TECH voting is getting a low-tech backstop: paper. Most new voting machines are basically computers with touch screens instead of keyboards. Their makers promise that the new machines will simplify voting and forever end the prospect of pregnant and hanging chads. But as the market for computerized voting equipment has intensified, a band of critics has emerged, ranging from the analytical to the apoplectic.
Dec. 15 issue - During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, three senior Qaeda representatives allegedly held a secret meeting in Afghanistan with two top Taliban commanders.
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At that meeting, according to Taliban sources, Osama bin Laden's men officially broke some bad news to emissaries from Mullah Mohammed Omar, the elusive leader of Afghanistan's ousted fundamentalist regime. Their message: Al Qaeda would be diverting a large number of fighters from the anti-U.S. insurgency in Afghanistan to Iraq. Al Qaeda also planned to reduce by half its $3 million monthly contribution to Afghan jihadi outfits.
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Despite bin Laden's apparently fresh interest in Iraq, sources in the region say there remains scant evidence that he had links to Saddam before the war. And U.S. officials who have sought to establish those links suggest now that Al Qaeda doesn't have substantial resources to divert to Iraq. "There just doesn't seem to be evidence of that," says a U.S. intel official. Asked if Washington believes the Ramadan meeting took place, CIA spokesman William Harlow declined to comment.
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The Taliban sources paint a portrait of a Qaeda network that has found new ways to operate, despite a U.S. dragnet in Central and South Asia. U.S. officials adamantly deny they have skimped on resources--intelligence or military--in that region. But there is evidence that the diversion of U.S. attention to Iraq has given Al Qaeda some breathing room, and that U.S. dependence on Pakistani troops and Afghan warlords is proving inadequate, perhaps even counter-productive, against the terror network. Over the past year, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA and British intelligence have been at odds over how badly the Taliban and Al Qaeda were damaged in the region. "The British were more prone to say the Taliban and Al Qaeda were coming back," says a U.S. official who is privy to intel discussions, and who believes the Bush administration downplayed the threat in order to switch its focus to Iraq.
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The resurgent Taliban say they have been buoyed by an influx of hundreds of former Taliban fighters into their ranks over the past year. Many have rejoined because local warlords allied with U.S. forces and Karzai have persecuted them in their villages, both Taliban and U.S. intel sources say. "These repressive, pro-American warlords have been our best recruiting tool," says Rahman Hotaki, a former Transport Ministry official and now a Taliban operative in Waziristan. "Warlords are pushing people to leave the warmth of their blankets at home and join us in our caves."
For telling the truth Saddam's capture is major coup, may not end unrest Bush's Energy Policy Lives Where the Deer and the Antelope Play Car bomb at police station kills at least 17, police say Saboteurs, Looters and Old Equipment Work Against Efforts to Restart Iraqi Oil Fields Thurmond Paternity Surprises Few in S.C. Are the polls wrong about Kucinich? Kucinich moves to second place in innovative candidate website activity rankingThe Pentagon repeatedly warned contractor Halliburton-KBR that the food it served to US troops in Iraq was "dirty," as were as the kitchens it was served in, NBC News reported on Friday.
Halliburton-Kellogg Brown and Root's promises to improve "have not been followed through," according to a Pentagon report that warned "serious repercussions may result" if the contractor did not clean up.
The arrest is a boon for President Bush after a run of increasingly bloody attacks on U.S. troops and their allies that imperil his campaign for re-election next year. Saddam may also provide intelligence on alleged banned weapons. But no weapons of mass destruction were found in the hole he was hiding in.
On more than one occasion, seasoned British foreign correspondents -- very much the minority in the press corps - informed the British and American embassies in Baghdad of Saddam's use of chemical weapons. It was even discovered that some of Saddam's mustard gas was delivered by British-made artillery shells (although there is no suggestion of British involvement in modifying their use).
British and American diplomats refused to act on anything other than material evidence. They never sought such proof themselves, and knew full well that it was near impossible for we reporters to secure it. One journalist who tried, Farzad Bazoft of The Observer, was caught at Baghdad airport in 1989 with soil samples that would have provided crucial evidence. He was jailed, tortured, forced to sign a confession of being a spy, and executed on 15 March 1990.
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Now that Saddam is no longer the favoured 'son of a bitch' of Washington and London, the State Department and the Foreign Office make frequent reference to Halabja, trying to convince those of us who reported Saddam's atrocities long before them, of what a monster the man is. These are some of the same people who tried to discredit us when we first reported his atrocities two decades ago.
[...] what Bush encountered in the late twentieth century instead was a group of tame and timid press agents incapable, or unwilling for the most part, of doing even the most basic police reporting. Not to mention asking probing and intelligent questions about foreign policy, foreign countries, war and peace, etc., etc.
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I went to visit Citizens for a Free Kuwait, or what was left of it, a few months after the Gulf War ended when I was doing research on my book. I went to see a Mr. Ibrahim, who was the titular head of CFK. The first time I realized something fishy was going on when he pulled out a stack of atrocity photographs. I went through them and thought this looks pretty awful -- people with odd pieces of metal jammed into their bodies in various places.
It looked quite horrible, but the photographs were a little out of focus. I went through them a second time and I realized that they were mannequins. They had literally dressed up mannequins as torture victims!
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Now, the absolute piéce de resistance of this propaganda campaign, as you may have heard, was the baby-incubator atrocity. In August, the word started coming out of Kuwait from anonymous sources who were interviewed by reporters, who, as I said, did not do the most fundamental police reporting -- like asking for last names, addresses, ages, occupations, etc., etc., -- saying that Iraqi soldiers were pulling babies out of incubators and killing them that way in Kuwaiti hospitals.
Hill & Knowlton is very well connected on Capitol Hill and at the White House. The senior account people on the Kuwaiti account included Craig Fuller, Bush?s former chief of staff when Bush was Vice President, and various other mucky mucks who know how to make things happen on Capitol Hill. They set up a hearing with the Congressional Human Rights caucus, chaired by Tom Lantos, the Bay Area congressman, and John Edward Porter of Illinois, in which they were going to expose Iraqi atrocities for the benefit of the caucus and the American people.
Anyway, there was an incredible conflict of interest between the caucus and Hill & Knowlton, the most important aspect of which was that the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, which was a fund-raising arm of the caucus, had its offices, rent-free, in the Hill & Knowlton headquarters. The Hill & Knowlton executives were also representing as clients habitual human rights violators like Turkey, Indonesia and China. You might ask yourself why Lantos and Porter were allowing this arrangement. In any event, the star of the hearing was a young 15 year-old girl named Nayirah -- no last name, no address, no occupation -- who said that she had volunteered at Kuwaiti hospitals and had seen the babies pulled from incubators and left to die on the cold floor.
Tim Rutten: Regarding Media: Affluence remakes the newsroomAnyone who thinks the administration and its law enforcement chief, Attorney General John Ashcroft, aren't out to impede a free press need only hear how the federal government is treating foreign journalists coming to this country on assignment.
Without notification to foreign media outlets, the immigration and customs people are arresting, detaining, and deporting journalists arriving here without special visas. This is so even when they come from nations whose citizens can stay for up to 90 days without a visa if they are arriving as tourists or on business.
3 senators urge Rumsfeld to free or try terror detainees Report: Iraqi Agent Denies Meeting with 9 / 11 HijackerTo the extent any bias is generally operative in the news media today, it is the middle-class quietism that the majority of reporters and editors share with other Americans. They are the suburban voters who now cast the majority of ballots in our presidential elections -- mildly libertarian on social issues, mildly conservative on fiscal matters, preoccupied with issues of personal and financial security. They are suspicious of ideology with its sweaty urgency and wearying demands for consistency.
The clearest and most concise statement of how this state of affairs came to be can be found in a brief note retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker has written for the letters column of the New York Review of Books' current issue.
A reader's letter wondered whether a review Baker had written underestimated journalists' willingness to modify their opinions to please the media's corporate owners and, thereby, hold on to their jobs.
Baker responded that "something more fundamental than household economics may be reshaping journalistic attitudes toward public issues. Today's top-drawer Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative.
"Most probably passed childhood in economically sheltered times, came to adulthood in the years of plenty, went to good colleges where they developed conventionally progressive social consciences, and have now inherited the comforting benefits that 60 years of liberal government have created for the middle class.
"This is not a background likely to produce angry reporters and aggressive editors. If few made much fuss about President Bush's granting boons to those already rolling in money, their silence may not have been because they feared the vengeance of bosses, but only because the capacity for outrage had been bred out of them..."
These are not, in other words, ideologues afire with countercultural fervor but the sort of 401(k) voters who now make up America's electoral majority.
In a telephone conversation from his home in northern Virginia, Baker, 78, wryly mused that "generalizations about journalism do nothing but get you into trouble, and mine are drawn from observing the rather elite group of journalists with whom I'm familiar, particularly those who cover Washington. These are people who have been to rather good colleges, who come out of that secure, upper-middle-class culture that has flourished in the United States with the help of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the GI Bill of Rights. It's now easy in this country to become substantially educated and, therefore, well paid.
"I was a journalist for 50 years and hate to pronounce, but these are not adventuresome people. How could they be? Most have been to college and then have gone directly into journalism. What can you expect with that sort of background?"
What you get, in fact, is rather conventional careerism. In Washington, Baker said, that means journalists "who work hard; everybody in Washington works hard. But they lack empathy for the rest of the country. If you've never lacked health insurance -- and most reporters and editors never have -- you don't understand what it means for the 43 million Americans who are doing without it, any more than the Congress does."
In the New York Review, Baker wrote: "The accelerating collapse of the American health care system may illustrate how journalism's disconnection from the masses will produce an inert state. If every journalist in the District of Columbia had to have his health insurance canceled as a requirement for practicing journalism in Washington, quite a few might ... get to know what anger is, and discover that something is catastrophically wrong with the health care system."
For Baker, the general lack of empathy that precludes such anger is a far more powerful force in contemporary journalism than any covert political bias.
"It's like working at Wal-Mart," he said, "which I suppose is the survival form of poverty in today's economy. If you don't have to do it and nobody you know has to do it, you just don't think about it. Most people in journalism today don't anticipate ever being in a Wal-Mart as anything but a shopper."
It wasn't always so. Baker recalled that, as a young political reporter, he traveled around the country meeting other journalists. "The old-timers I met on those trips were an odd mixture. Many had only high school educations. One very good correspondent for the Scripps chain had spent the Depression pounding out tunes on a piano in a five-and-dime. They had a raffish but informative experience of the world that is very hard for journalists to acquire now.
"When I started out as a police reporter, I lived next door to a cop. Reporters don't come out of those neighborhoods nowadays. We've all moved uptown. Today, reporters join clubs. They play golf."
It's a long way from the 19th hole to the Revolution. Especially when what you've got on your mind is not politics -- left or right -- but where the Nasdaq closed and your carpool.
Judge Rips Lawyers in Detroit Terror CaseNEW YORK (Reuters) - A former Iraqi intelligence officer said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told U.S. officials no such meeting occurred, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
DETROIT (AP) -- A federal judge criticized government lawyers Friday for failing to turn over certain evidence to the defense in the nation's first post-Sept. 11 terrorism case, but said he needed more time to decide whether to throw out the convictions.
"Climate change is already having an impact on mankind, especially in developing countries," said chief Chinese delegate Liu Jiang, whose country was hit by catastrophic flooding this year.
"The effects of climate change are already evident," said Environment Minister Altero Matteoli of Italy, current chairman of the EU, which in 2003 suffered its hottest summer on record.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in an address read to the meeting, also suggested the first impacts of global warming could be felt today.
"The heightened frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and associated natural disasters that we have seen in recent years -- such as the serious droughts this summer in India and Europe, and the storms that devastated parts of North America -- is consistent with this conclusion," Annan said.
"There is growing concern that this trend is likely to continue," he said.
According to details from an annual estimate compiled by re-insurance giant Munich Re, natural disasters, most of them caused by extreme weather, cost the world more than US$60 billion this year, up from $55 billion last year.
Europe's heatwave was the biggest single item, at US$10 billion in agricultural losses alone, while flooding on China's Huai and Yangtze rivers cost US$8 billion.
The biggest single insured loss was in the US, where tornado damage in the Midwest cost insurers US$3 billion, according to the figures, released by the UN Environment Program.
"Climate change is not a prognosis, it is a reality that is and will increasingly bring human suffering and economic hardship," said program chief Klaus Toepfer.
Evidence that the uncontrol-led burning of fossil fuels is trapping solar heat, creating the "greenhouse" effect, has progressively strengthened over the past decade.
Jules Witcover: Derailing the debate Oil firm 'overcharged' US in Iraq US Evades Blame for Iraqi DeathsCouncil is considering trial of absent Hussein French, Germans, Russians Need Not Apply: More Headlines: Uncle Sam Gets a Bad Report Card; CSC Feels the Heat; E-Voting Firms Fight Back... Douglas Valentine: Preemptive Manhunting: The CIA's New Assassination Program Redistricting memo leaked on eve of trial: DeLay's intervention blasted Drilling Planned in Untapped Alaska Oil Reserve Senator blasts Guantanamo delays US Senior Officials Hold Consultations on Military Bases in Bulgaria It is one of mankind's final frontiers, a place of extreme cold and extraordinary beauty. But the North Pole's icecap is thawing fast. And many of us will live to see it disappear altogether Iran Authorizes Signing of Nuclear Protocol US Plans to Step Up Pressure on Syria Gwynne Dyer: New distribution of wealth Bush Seeks Help of Allies Barred From Iraq Deals 2 Time Magazine Journalists Hurt in Iraq The court case that could reshape US democracyCampaign money--not votes--is now the currency of our democracy, determining who is able to run a viable campaign for office, who usually wins, and who has the ear of elected officials. This study examines federal contribution data for the 2002 and 2000 election cycles by zip code, side-by-side with 2000 U.S. Census data on race and ethnicity. The unfortunate conclusion is that, in a political system in which you have to pay to play, people of color are largely excluded from the game. This report confirms similar patterns to those detailed in our 1998 Color of Money report, which examined federal campaign contributions made in the 1996 elections, contrasted with 1990 U.S. Census data.
Israel quietly helps U.S. in Iraq, aides sayIt bears the utterly uninformative title of Veith et al vs Jubelirer (docket number 02-1580). But the case, which the US Supreme Court heard yesterday, deals with the explosive political issue of gerrymandering - and its ruling next year could literally reshape America's democracy.
Iraq to Stop Counting Civilian Dead More Afghan children die in raids"In the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of 11 September and the war on international terrorism as a pretext," the first Muslim woman peace prize winner said.
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In her acceptance speech, the 56-year-old Nobel laureate highlighted the plight of prisoners detained at a US base in Guantanamo.
"They are without the benefit of the rights stipulated under the international Geneva conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the (United Nations) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."
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"Why is it that some decisions and resolutions of the UN Security Council are binding, while some other resolutions of the council have no binding force?" she asked, pointing to the different treatment of Israel and Iraq.
"Why is it that in the past 35 years, dozens of UN resolutions concerning the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the state of Israel have not been implemented properly," she continues.
"Yet, in the past 12 years, the state and people of Iraq... were subjected to attack, military assault, economic sanctions, and, ultimately, military occupation."
Trip to Guantanamo's Jails Richard Wolffe: Clear as Mud Brothels and bombs in Saudi Arabia U.S. shuts out France, Germany for Iraq work Wolfowitz may resign in FebruaryUS special forces teams are already behind the lines inside Syria attempting to kill foreign jihadists before they cross the border, and a group focused on the "neutralisation" of guerrilla leaders is being set up, according to sources familiar with the operations.
Israel Trains US Assassination Squads in IraqWord is that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz may bow out as soon as February. Replacement requirements: a strong manager, one who can repair relations with the military and could take over for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Several names have bubbled up, including Deputy White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a former Pentagon assistant, and NASA boss Sean O'Keefe, a former secretary of the Navy.
BAGHDAD, Dec. 7 -- A week after two of their colleagues were killed in an ambush, the remaining 60 South Korean contract engineers and technicians working for the U.S. government on a project north of the capital have decided to leave the country.
Q & A / RAY McGOVERN, former CIA analyst: 'We're trying to spread a little truth'"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," said Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co. "We have to compete for jobs."
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A Commerce Department report last month said increasing numbers of technology jobs are moving from the United States to Canada, India, Ireland, Israel, the Philippines and China -- and predicted that "many U.S. companies that are not already offshoring are planning to do so in the near future."
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"Americans who think that foreign workers are no match for U.S. workers in knowledge, skills and creativity are mistaken," the trade group's report said.
Even as technology companies lobby against limits on offshore employment, they are urging the Bush administration to approve new tax credits on research and development spending, spend more on university research on physical science and adjust tax depreciation schedules for technology purchases. They said they also want improvements in education, especially in elementary through high schools.
A vocal critic of technology companies moving jobs overseas, Marcus Courtney of Seattle, dismissed the latest report.
"This is not a recipe for job creation in this country," said Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. "This is a recipe for corporate greed. They're lining up at the public trough to slash their labor costs."
How King of New York took battle to the Great Polariser This gadfly's ghost won't remain stillRay McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven U.S. presidents and routinely presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House. Angered by what he deems the politicization of intelligence information, McGovern helped found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity earlier this year.
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Q: What role should U.S. citizens play?
A: It's really essential that Americans take an interest in learning about how this war began. That's really their citizenship duty; otherwise they may see their sons and daughters coming home in pine boxes.
How a Shady Iranian Deal Maker Kept the Pentagon's Ear Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns Coalition Strike in Afghanistan Kills 9 Children Dirty Bomb Warheads Disappear: Stocks of Soviet-Era Arms For Sale on Black Market A new era of nuclear weapons: Bush's buildup begins with little debate in CongressThe 50th anniversary of the founding of I.F. Stone's Weekly may have gone unmarked, but the man himself continues to stir passions right and left.
Paul Bedard: A first lady's mighty Midas touchReversing a decade of restraint in nuclear weapons policy, Congress agreed to provide more than $6 billion for research, expansion and upgrades in the country's nuclear capabilities. While Congress approved large sums to maintain the existing nuclear arsenal even during the Clinton years, this year's increases will finance multiyear programs to design a new generation of warheads as well as more sophisticated missiles, bombers and re-entry vehicles to deliver them.
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"It hasn't been perceived as such, but this is a nuclear revival," said Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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"There's no debate on this at all," said Andrew Lichterman, program director of the Oakland-based Western States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit group that favors arms reductions. "These programs are not being questioned in the political mainstream at all."
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A recent study entitled "Missiles of Empire: America's 21st Century Global Legions," by Lichterman of the Western States Legal Foundation highlights not only the administration's push for new kinds of warheads, but also the billions it is planning to spend on reducing the time it would take to launch a nuclear strike and on a new generation of missile re-entry vehicles, among other things. The re-entry vehicles would allow the military to steer warheads toward targets, even moving targets, entering the atmosphere from space.
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The Republican lawmakers conceded that their defiance had been more symbolic than substantive. Among other things, the administration succeeded in pushing through the repeal of the law banning the development of smaller, more usable low-yield warheads, and it got approval to begin research into advanced weapons concepts for the future. Congress also provided funding for study of a new "bunker-buster" warhead.
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A number of the new initiatives also bring the promise of increased spending in the future. For instance, Congress approved increasing the readiness of the Nevada Test Site, where weapons were tested underground until a ban was put in place in 1992. The NNSA has estimated it would cost as much as $83 million over three years to increase the level of readiness, and an additional $25 million to $30 million a year to sustain that level.
Congress also approved with virtually no debate $320 million for manufacturing new "pits," the plutonium cores of warheads, almost $90 million more than last year. More than $135 million was appropriated for a program to keep tritium, a radioactive gas used to boost the power of warheads, ready for weapons use and another $265 million for a broad campaign to refurbish the facilities used to produce and maintain the nuclear arsenal.
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But even inside the administration, questions have been raised about the rationale for the new nuclear posture. The Pentagon, notably, is not pushing for the new warheads. A classified study conducted this summer by the Defense Science Board, which was leaked last month, stated, "Current (Department of Defense) structure provides neither clear requirements nor persuasive rationale for changing the nuclear stockpile."
In just 15 events around the country, Bush has taken in $5.5 million. Need some perspective? "Mrs. Bush has raised as much as the vice president," brags an associate.
Richard Perle, a prominent Pentagon adviser, lobbied on behalf of Boeing's bid for a controversial $18bn government contract a year after the aerospace company made a $20m investment in the venture capital fund he runs.
Newly declassified documents show Secretary of State gave green light to junta, Contradict official line that Argentines "heard only what [they] wanted to hear."
While military dictatorship committed massive human rights abuses in 1976, Kissinger advised "If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better.
Hill & Knowlton executive Lauri Fitz-Pegado defends incubator storyIn April Bechtel was awarded a contract by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for the reconstruction of Iraq's primary and secondary schools, as part of a deal worth up to $1.03 billion to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.
The Anbariyn School is one of 1,500 schools being refurbished by Bechtel using American funds. Within the framework of its reconstruction program, Bechtel has subcontracted work to 65 Iraqi companies. The project is referred to on its Web site as "a truly humanitarian effort". "Of all the things we're doing here, this one really touches individuals - students, parents, teachers, and entire communities - in a very personal way," Thor Christiansen, manager of the Iraqi School Program, is quoted as saying. [Headmaster] Abdel-Razzaq, however, shakes his head in response. "If they had given the money to us directly," he explained, "we would have done a far better job."
At the start of the program Abdel-Razzaq received a visit from a representative of the Iraqi company, Adnan Mussawi, which Bechtel subcontracted to carry out the work. The headmaster was asked to sign a declaration that the work had been completed, which he refused to do until the work had actually been done. Twenty days later, the walls were painted, the rusty doors painted over, new electric cables laid, and some of the sanitary facilities replaced. However, the real problem with the toilets -- namely the sewage pipes -- were left untouched. So Abdel-Razzaq is sure that next winter once more, there will be a lake of sewage in the bathrooms.
Most of the cheap plastic cisterns are already broken. Even a broken banister that resulted in one child falling one floor down - was not considered to be part of Bechtel's renovation plan. So the director ordered to weld it again, paying the work out of his own pocket. The work on the school, according to Abdel-Razzaq, was completed without a single person from the Bechtel corporation appraising the work. "Why do we need Bechtel? They have done absolutely nothing," he said.
Indeed the facts have never come out, and I have been, unfortunately, along with Hill & Knowlton, Frank Mankiewicz, and others been the few people trying to indeed get the facts out when no one has really been interested in reporting the facts, but only their own story to promote books like his book, "Weapons of Mass Deception", Rick MacArthur's book, and movies etc. that are for profit-making at the expense of the truth.
Lauri Fitz-Pegado
Inquiry into how a US man died after a videoed police beating Russia pulls away from Kyoto pact Rum remark wins Rumsfeld an awardI live in a tiny, remote, impoverished, three block long town in the desert of northeastern New Mexico. Everyone in town - and the whole state - knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called for the closing of Los Alamos, and that as a priest, I have been preaching, like the Pope, against the bombing of Baghdad.
Last week, it was announced that the local National Guard unit for northeastern New Mexico, based in the nearby Armory, was being deployed to Iraq early next year. I was not surprised when yellow ribbons immediately sprang up after the press conference.
But I was surprised the following morning to hear 75 soldiers singing, shouting and screaming as they jogged down Main Street, passed our St. Joseph's church, back and forth around town for an hour. It was 6 a.m., and they woke me up with their war slogans, chants like "Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Swing your guns from left to right; we can kill those guys all night."
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Suddenly, at 7 a.m., the shouting got dramatically louder. I looked out the front window of the house where I live, next door to the church, and there they were--all 75 of them, standing yards away from my front door, in the street right in front of my house and our church, shouting and screaming to the top of their lungs, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Their commanders had planted them there and were egging them on.
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This, I think, is a new tactic. Over the years, I have been arrested some 75 times in demonstrations, been imprisoned for a "Plowshares" disarmament action, been bugged, tapped, and harassed, searched at airports, and monitored by police. But this time, the soldiers who will soon march through Baghdad and attack desert homes in Iraq, practiced on me. They confronted me personally, just as the death squad militaries did in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, which I witnessed there on several occasions.
I decided I had to do something. I put on my winter coat and walked out the front door right into the middle of the street. They stopped shouting and looked at me, so I said loudly, publicly for all to hear, "In the name of God, I order all of you to stop this nonsense, and not to go to Iraq. I want all of you to quit the military, disobey your orders to kill, and not to kill anyone. I do not want you to get killed. I want you to practice the love and nonviolence of Jesus. God does not bless war. God does not want you to kill so Bush and Cheney can get more oil. God does not support war. Stop all this and go home. God bless you."
Their jaws dropped, their eyeballs popped and they stood in shock and silence, looking steadily at me. Then they burst out laughing. Finally, the commander dismissed them and they left.
Later, military officials spread lies around town that I had disrupted their military exercises at the Armory, so they decided to come to my house and to the church in retaliation. Others appealed to the archbishop to have me kicked out of New Mexico for denouncing their warmaking. Then, a general called the mayor and asked him to mediate "negotiations" with me, saying he did not want the military "in confrontation" with the church. Really, the mayor told me, they fear that I will disrupt the gala send-off next month, just before Christmas, when the soldiers go to Iraq.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has won a "Foot in Mouth" award for one of his now legendary bizarre remarks.
"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns," he said.
The British Plain English Campaign annually hands out the prize for the most nonsensical remark made by a public figure.
There has been much talk recently of the "Wal-Martization" of America, a reference to the giant retailer's fervent attempts to keep its costs -- and therefore its prices -- at rock-bottom levels. But for years, even during the 1990s boom, much of Corporate America had already embraced Wal-Mart-like stratagems to control labor costs, such as hiring temps and part-timers, fighting unions, dismantling internal career ladders, and outsourcing to lower-paying contractors at home and abroad.
"President Bush's tax cuts increased the political power of the richest Americans," says Walter Williams, University of Washington professor emeritus of public affairs. "Their gains fueled the huge increase in campaign contributions and made big money the driving force in national politics."
Joel Friedman and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out: "The group with incomes over $1 million -- which consists of about 226,000 tax filers in 2003 -- would receive roughly as much in benefits as the 127 million tax filers with income below $140,000. Stated another way, the top 0.2 percent of tax filers would receive nearly as much from the tax cut as the bottom 95 percent of filers combined."
Strike up the band: Motherhood and apple pie served up amid the stench of burning humansThat half or more Americans think Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack -- perhaps the most media-covered event in our history -- stands as a horrific indictment of U.S. media today. Such levels of ignorance can't be found in other countries.
David R. Francis : Why America's debt is a risky foreign affair Show Me the Money: Patriot Act helps the Feds in cases with no tie to terror Molly Ivins: The Uncompassionate ConservativeStrike up the band and serve up more motherhood and apple pie amid the stench of burning humans in Iraq, the headless bodies, organs seeping from shredded torsos, the lifeless stares and limbless orphans, where reality plays itself out for a Texan vowing to "finish the job" he so valiantly initiated.
Those gung-ho, howling GIs needn't know the New York Times reported on Nov. 6 that back channel negotiations between the Americans and Saddam just prior to the invasion had offered the U.S. virtually everything it had demanded.
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"I love freedom of speech ..." assures Bush, and often.
That Bush-style freedom of speech sure comes in handy, because it'd be unAmerican to let the troops know National Security Adviser Condi Rice insisted to CNN in 2001 that "we are able to keep (Saddam's) arms from him."
But they've got it figured out now and if you disagree, you'll be set right by the new Bush campaign come-ons accusing opponents of "attacking the president for attacking terrorists."
That's right -- bogging down America's military to battle Iraqi guerrillas opposed to foreign occupation is integral in keeping safe America's shores from terrorism because ... it just is.
"There's no connection (to al-Qaida) months after we've gone through the documentation of Iraqi intelligence and yet we go to war with Iraq ... the mind boggles," ex-CIA Mideast agent Robert Baer told CBC's Fifth Estate.
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Last modified: Wed Feb 4 11:45:14 CST 2004