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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


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

 

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

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

 

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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Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

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Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
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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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