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Today's
Stories
February
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
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January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
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January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
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January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
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February
2, 2004
Playing with Numbers
Beware
the Phony Defense-Budget Prognosticators
By WINSLOW WHEELER
Today the Bush administration rolls out its fiscal
2005 defense budget. Many of the things journalists will write
about it will be confusing, if not misleading, and many of the
prognostications from Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the presidential
candidates will be quite phony.
The press will start out with a literal
confusion of numbers. A comparison across different newspaper
articles will reveal that they cannot agree on the levels for
the new budget, or even the old one. For fiscal year 2004, some
will say it was set at $380 billion; others that it was $400
billion, and still others $462 billion. They will all be correct:
The Defense Department spent $380 billion for peacetime operations;
adding Department of Energy and other non-Pentagon defense spending
brought it to $400 billion; and with Iraq and Afghanistan operations--that
is, to actually use our forces--it cost a grand total of $462
billion. However, almost none of the articles will explain these
differences.
The press will sow more chaos with what
articles will say is "real" (i.e. inflation neutral)
growth in the defense budget from 2004 to 2005. Few of those
calculations across papers will agree. Last year, The Washington
Post had it at 4.4 percent, The Wall Street Journal had it at
4.2 percent, Bloomberg news service had it at 3.8 percent, and
a well-distributed trade journal, Defense News, had it at 6.5
percent. This year, The Washington Post has already had it at
both 5.7% and 7.9%. Don't bother paying much attention.
First, we may not even know the size
of the old 2004 defense budget, which could see another supplemental;
and we certainly don't know the true size of the new 2005 budget.
Wary of revealing the cost of the fighting, occupation and reconstruction
in Iraq and Afghanistan (a number sure to be in the tens of billions),
the administration will delay and obfuscate the ultimate costs
until after the elections. Nor do we know what actual inflation
rates will be for 2005, or for that matter 2004. So we can't
calculate an inflation adjustment, either.
Moreover, even accurately calculated
"real growth" in defense spending is a bogus concept.
If we're not replacing ships and aircraft at the rate we are
retiring them, which is DoD's plan, will a defense budget that
increases by four, five or six percent in "real" dollars
but which shrinks the size of the force mean "real growth"
or "real shrinkage?"
"Real growth" gets even more
misleading on an issue like military readiness for combat. Some
will recall George W. Bush trashing Bill Clinton at the 2000
Republican Convention for having two Army divisions that were
"not ready for duty, sir," because they had not recovered
from their deployments to the Balkans. Back then, the prognosticators
decided Bush was wrong because the Army conveniently rated those
two divisions as "ready." But no one visited even one
of the two units, as I did in September 2000, to find enormous
readiness problems that Clinton's Pentagon overlooked. Today,
Bush has several Army divisions and Marine units that will surely
meet his own criteria for "not ready for duty, sir."
One wonders if the Bush Pentagon can deal with declining readiness
in a "real growth" budget any better than Clinton did.
Meanwhile, gaggles of big spender defense
budget swamis and some candidates for the presidency eager to
sell current defense spending as modest will claim the $420 billion
for peacetime DoD spending in 2005 comes to just 3.5 percent
of the Gross Domestic Product. That, they will point out, is
below the 6, 8, or 10 percent we spent during the Cold War, and
even below the puny 5.6 percent we spent in 1941, the year of
Pearl Harbor.
These arguments are specious in the extreme.
They assume there is a meaningful relationship between the size
of today's larger economy and the defense budget; that defense
is entitled to some particular "share" of the nation's
growing wealth no matter what the nature and size of the threat.
Moreover, in years when the economy is growing and the defense
budget is also rising, but at a lower rate, the GDP measure shows
"decline." And, if the economy is shrinking, and if
defense spending were to shrink, but less, this measure would
show "growth." If Bush is lucky, the economy will grow
faster in 2004 than the defense budget; this will bring the "good
news" that the percent of GDP for defense is falling.
These are just some of the tired and
empty arguments we will hear this week as newspapers, experts
and politicians chew over the defense budget. It has been this
way for years. Both sides of the political spectrum have been
using measures that sound like they mean something to create
a meaningless or false picture. Sadly, too many press articles
will only partially explain, or not at all.
Winslow T. Wheeler is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center
for Defense Information. After working for US Senators from
both parties and for the US General Accounting Office for 31
years, he is writing a book about Congress and defense policy,
"The Wastrels of Defense."
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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