Sick of Bush

President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Voters who haven't firmly committed to a presidential candidate are in a sour mood.

They tend to be more disapproving of President Bush, have a gloomier view of the economy and be more likely to think the country is headed down the wrong track. The mood of these persuadable voters prompted one veteran Republican strategist to warn the Bush campaign that dramatic steps are needed to prevent them from bolting to Democrat John Kerry.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11, and that by invading Iraq the administration has left us less safe as a nation. (Fortunately, opinion polls show that the majority of Americans have already come to these conclusions on their own. )

What the commissioners did clearly state was that Iraq had no collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda and no hand in 9/11. They also disclosed that Iran provided support to Al Qaeda, including to some 9/11 hijackers. These two facts may cause many people to conclude that the Bush administration focused on the wrong country. They would be right to think that.

Mr. Kerry seemed determined to tame, at least through the four days of the convention, the intense anti-Bush fervor in his party that has been a driving dynamic of this campaign. Mr. Kerry said that he did not want the convention to turn into a parade of attacks on the president, and that his campaign was seeking to minimize the anti-Bush oratory voiced by convention speakers.

The Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs and medical devices.
The administration contends that consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In court papers, the Justice Department acknowledges that this position reflects a "change in governmental policy," and it has persuaded some judges to accept its arguments, most recently scoring a victory in the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.
Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would "undermine public health" and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging "lay judges and juries to second-guess" experts at the F.D.A., the government said in siding with the maker of a heart pump sued by the widow of a Pennsylvania man. Moreover, it said, if such lawsuits succeed, some good products may be removed from the market, depriving patients of beneficial treatments.

The Bush administration is withholding information from U.N.-sanctioned auditors examining more than $1 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton and other companies in Iraq without competitive bidding, the head of an international auditing panel said Thursday.

Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, the chairman of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, said that the United States has repeatedly rebuffed his requests since March to turn over internal audits, including one that covered three contracts valued at $1.4 billion that were awarded to Halliburton, a Texas-based oil services firm. It has also failed to produce a list of other companies that have obtained contracts without having to compete.

The dispute comes as the board released an initial audit by the accounting firm KPMG Thursday that sharply criticized the U.S.-led coalition's management of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenue.

PRESIDENT George Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target.
Bush named Iran as part of the Axis of Evil along with North Korea and Iraq almost three years ago. A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership.

The official said: “If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran.”

Iran gave free passage to up to 10 of the September 11 hijackers just months before the 2001 attacks and offered to co-operate with al-Qa'eda against the US, an American report will say this week.

The all-party report by the 9/11 Commission, set up by Congress in 2002, will state that Iran, not Iraq, fostered relations with the al-Qa'eda network in the years leading up to the world's most devastating terrorist attack.

Congresswoman Corrine Brown (D-FL) represents 600,000 Americans in the Duval County/Jacksonville area.

During the 2000 election, 27,000 ballots went ptooey from faulty machines, just in Rep. Brown's district alone. The chicanery that followed is a part of the public record.

And you can guess the relative skin shades of the folks whose votes a) were not for the governor's brother, and b) didn't count.

Yesterday, the Congresswoman was censured by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Why? For speaking the obvious out loud, without fear or hesitation, that's why:

"I come from Florida, where you [the GOP leadership] and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it. No we're not going to get over it and we want verification from the world."
The backstory: about a dozen members of Congress, including several leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, recently called for UN observers to verify American elections, given the hanky-panky we all know is coming.

The ruling junta, displaying their usual integrity, promptly produced a bill forbidding any such thing, shouted the Congresswoman down when she wouldn't just Go Fuck Herself™, censured her, and then had her comments stricken from the Congressional Record.

Nice "democracy" we got here.

eyewitnesses are saying Iyad Allawi personally executed several prisoners in late June just before the Americans turned the country over to him. Of the eyewitnesses, he says:

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs. They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death" . . . Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib's office has issued a verbal denial.

Allawi was once a Baathist hit man in London who fell out with Saddam and then directed terrorist operations against Baghdad. Some reports suggest that one of his operations once resulted in the bombing of a schoolbus in which school children died.

The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison. "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

"The Americans have no neighbors and consequently they have no great wars, or financial crises, or inroads, or conquests to dread; they require neither great taxes, nor large armies, nor great generals; and they have nothing to fear from a scourge which is more formidable to republics than all these evils combined: namely, military glory. It is impossible to deny the inconceivable influence that military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation."

Citing intelligence that the Pentagon is the second most likely target for a terrorist attack in the capital region after the White House, military officials want to shut the day care building next to the Pentagon by the fall.

The Cheney discussion emanates from GOP concern that he is a drag on the ticket. Andrew Kohut, director of The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, said that the polling data he has studied indicate that the numbers for Cheney "are pretty negative to what it had been."

Some of that, he said, stems from a perception that Cheney has pulled Bush to the right, noting that the president's record is "very inconsistent with the way Bush conducted himself" during his six years as governor of Texas.

Cheney is popular with the GOP's conservative base. But he has served as a lightning rod for Democrats because of his ties to Halliburton, the Texas oil firm that received a no-bid government contract to help rebuild Iraqi oil fields, and his refusal to divulge the names of energy company executives he met with in piecing together the administration's energy policy.

He also notably hurled an epithet recently at Sen. Patrick Leahy, who he accused of questioning his integrity.

(1) Exactly what laws can Saddam be charged with violating? If we say "international law" then how can the U. S. continue to proclaim that such laws do not apply to U. S. citizens?

(2) Can we really prove Saddam's direct responsibility for any particular act of brutality? The Times piece suggests that is unnecessary because he will be held responsible as the senior official. If we buy this argument then how can the Abu Ghraib torture scandal be limited to "a few bad apples" and those in charge not be held accountable?

(3) If this is supposed to be a real impartial and fair trial, what sense does it make to place Salem Chalabi - nephew of convicted felon and accused Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi - to head the prosecution? Chalabi, a prosperous London attorney, was appointed by the U. S. to this position despite complaints from Iraqis that he is an outsider and that prosecuting Saddam should be handled by actual Iraqis.

(4) If the international (and Iraqi) community is to have any confidence that this is a real trial and not some piece of propaganda theater, why was Saddam's arraignment censored? Why was sound recording forbidden? Why were transcripts heavily edited?

(5) And the hardest question for Americans to answer - if Saddam is to be held accountable for all the terrible things that he has been charged with, aren't those who supported him and made his crimes possible equally guilty? In other words, will Donald Rumsfeld (among others) be placed in the dock to answer for providing Saddam with more military aid after he "gassed his own people"? Will the executives of companies that sold Saddam dual use and/or clearly military materials face charges? Will those who supported selling Saddam biological agents to be used in germ warfare face charges?

Commitment isn't easy for guys — we all know that — but the Bush administration is taking the traditional male ambivalence about marriage to giddy new heights. On the one hand, it wants to ban gays from marrying, through a constitutional amendment that the Senate will vote on this week. On the other hand, it's been avidly promoting marriage among poor women — the straight ones anyway.

Opponents of gay marriage claim that there is some consistency here, in that gay marriages must be stopped before they undermine the straight ones. How the married gays will go about wrecking heterosexual marriages is not entirely clear: by moving in next door, inviting themselves over and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating?

It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women's No. 1 problem, which is poverty — unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.'s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning — in the case of poverty-stricken women — blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.

The answer turns out to be approximately 2.3, which is, strangely enough, illegal.

(1) the Supreme Court bitch-slapped Dubya over his presumption that the executive could detain people indefinitely without charges, defense, or any due process, thus throwing the entire Gitmo operation into a tailspin and leaving our Gulag keepers scrambling for a new approach,

(2) it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney's personal physician - the one who had assured us of the Veep's health despite multiple heart attacks - was a drug addict and guilty of prescription fraud and has been removed from his job at George Washington University Hospital because of it,

(3) John McCain appears in a new series of pro-war adds for the Bush administration, proclaiming Bush's "moral clarity" (despite the underhanded and sleazy attacks McCain suffered during the Republican primary in 2000 at Bush's hands) and warning that if terrorists get their hands on those mythical "weapons of mass destruction" we will be fighting for our very survival,

(4) Kerry's choice for Vice President, John Edwards, is attacked by the Republicans for not having enough experience (six years in the U. S. Senate) - as opposed, for example, to George W. Bush whose sole experience in government was six years as governor of Texas, a job that by design requires little of those who hold it (at least Edwards was successful in his former chosen profession, unlike Bush who ran one failing business after another and was fired from the board of Caterair for failing to contribute anything of value),

(5) Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron and top Bush campaign contributer, finally does the perp-walk (well, the Bush Justice Dept finally had to do something - it is only four months until the election and they couldn't let Kenny-boy skip out on the public humiliation that many Americans were demanding - whether he will actually be punished for his massive fraud is another question),

(6) the useless figurehead Tom Ridge, director of the Dept of Homeland Security, popped up from his hiding place to warn America to expect a major terrorist attack aimed at disrupting the November elections, and while he could provide no details about when or where, he was absolutely confident that the plans were nearing completion and were being guided by Osama bin Laden or other top al Queda figures - based on what? - of course he couldn't say, but, you know, "trust us," even though this warning is not serious enough to raise the scary color of the day from yellow to orange,

(7) the Army revealed that the reason it couldn't provide Bush's pay records from his long ago days in the National Guard in order to resolve the issue of whether or not he really fulfilled his service obligation was because they had been "accidentally destroyed" while trying to preserve them; this idiotic excuse is very much like the variant heard last week in response to a freedom of information act request for a copy of a government database, which declared that any attempt to copy the data would result in damaging or destroying it,

(8) three U. S. citizens were arrested in Kabul, Afghanistan for running a private prison where they attempted to coerce information from suspected terrorists that they had "arrested" based on suspicion arrising from facial hair, clothing and general appearance,

(9) the State of Florida released its newest list of 48,000 suspected felons who are to be purged from voter rolls, causing some county election officials to refuse to cooperate because the list is so "flawed" - containing names of nonfelons as well as those that should be purged - just as the list used before the 2000 election to disenfranchise thousands of Florida Democrats - mostly black - most of whom were not felons but have not been reinstated - despite a court order - even to this day, (this slap at black voters was just amplified this week when Bush refused an invitation to speak to the National Convention of the NAACP - making him the only president in my lifetime to refuse this invitation),

(10) the New Republic reports that Pakistani officials have been pressured by high members of the Bush administration to either kill or capture HVTs (high value targets) - especially Osama bin Laden - soon, and preferably announce their death or capture during the first three days of the Democratic National Convention, thus clearly playing politics with the "war on terror,"

(11) and on Friday the much anticipated Senate report of pre Iraq war intelligence was released, with its not too surprising conclusion that the CIA had exaggerated the threat of Iraq's WMDs, that no meaningful link existed between al Queda and Saddam, and - to me not very persuasive - claim that the Bush administration was not at fault for pressuring the CIA to give it the intelligence it wanted.

In key areas, Iraq is worse off now than before the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, a new General Accounting Office report says.

Electricity, country-wide security and the legal/judicial system were among the key areas cited by the bi-partisan investigative arm of Congress.

The report concludes that Iraqis, overall, are worse off now than before the U.S. invasion.

Electricity in 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with an additional $10 billion about to be spent. Most of the money has been used to run Iraq's government ministries.

The court system overwhelmed, backlogged far more than before the war and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

The new Iraqi civil defense, police and security units are suffering from mass desertions, poor training and poor equipment while fraud and scandal are more prevalent than before the war.

The number of what U.S. officials deem "significant" insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

I am a native of this place. You might even call me an ethnic Washingtonian. For two centuries, this little colony of America has been denied the rights called for in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and more recently in the Charter of the United Nations.
At no time during this 200 years, however, has a single bomb been dropped on our behalf. In fact President Clinton and the Congress, now busy saving the Kosovars -- whether they survive to thank us or not -- conspired to remove what little self-government we had on the grounds of a budget deficit worth about the cost of four nights' Belgrade bombing runs. It was the greatest disenfranchisement of African-Americans since the end of post-reconstruction in the 19th century.

You will excuse me, therefore, if I am a bit skeptical about current professions of interest in democracy in distant places. As the Washington Star said many years ago, "What right have we to hurl denunciations and epithets at dictatorships and totalitarian states in other parts, when an almost perfect example of irresponsible forms of government is maintained by our national government in our own national capital?"
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By the count of author Bill Blum, since 1945 we have bombed China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
The most striking exception to the ubiquitous futility of these deadly adventures has been a single unqualified military triumph -- we brought Grenada to her knees.

At what point does the constant reiteration of failed and fatal policy become a war crime and reckless incompetence become grotesque cruelty and tactics of death become -- to use a term used casually these days -- genocide?

Well, consider this. The Holocaust resulted in some six million deaths. Now here are some other figures:

There were nearly two million killed during the Vietnam war, most by air attacks that dropped twice as many bombs as we did in all of World War II -- nearly one 500-pound bomb per person. One million civilians were killed by our strategic bombing in Japan even before we got to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than two million civilians were killed in our bombing runs over North Korea. And one million Iraqi have died as a result of our sanctions.

Add these up and you come to the same figure as the Holocaust. Which is shocking enough until you realize that together, the Holocaust and our bombing raids of the past fifty years represent less than ten percent of all the deaths by warfare in our century.

The American people are not comfortable dealing with words like "total failure" and "ruined credibility," but these are words that all of us are going to have to become accustomed to.

A process that began in September 2002 as a coordinated propaganda blitz to convince Americans they were on the verge of being gassed by an Osama-Saddam Axis of Doom, a process that was swathed in flags and a snarling, nationalistic patriotism, a process that has in the last 22 months delivered 855 dead American soldiers, thousands of gravely wounded American soldiers and over ten thousand dead Iraqi civilians to our collective doorstep, has now concluded with a farcical handover of 'sovereignty' in the dead of night.

One can almost imagine American proconsul Paul Bremer handing the keys to this rolling bomb over to former CIA pal and newly-minted Iraqi 'Prime Minister' Iyad Allawi with a snicker and a shrug. Thanks for the laughs, Iyad, but my helicopter is waiting on the roof.

Let's start with the basics. Conservatives turned a $127 billion budget surplus into record-shattering deficits with reckless tax cuts; in 2004 alone, the deficit is expected to reach $500 billion. Poverty is on the rise with more than 34 million Americans living below the poverty line, including 12 million children. As for the first job-loss recovery since the Great Depression, it's an "upside down recovery" according to the Center for American Progress, meaning that corporate profits have risen at the expense of wages and employment. At the same time the costs of housing, gas, and medical care have all surged by double digits, not to mention that 20 million working Americans have no health insurance. Conservatives' answer? Not surprisingly, Washington's one-trick ponies call for more tax cuts for the rich. More of the same failed conservative policies.
. . .
In 2005, states' deficits are expected to exceed $35 billion, in part the result of two decades of "devolution," forcing almost every state in the nation to make drastic cutbacks. Last January in Alabama, public schools ran out of money for textbooks, state troopers were cut back to a four-day work week, and plans were made to release 5,000 nonviolent felons from prison in the coming year. In Oregon, some schools shut their doors a month early, courthouses went to a four-day week, and thousands lost prescription drug coverage. Conservatives responded with multi-million dollar anti-tax campaigns against commonsense revenue reforms that could have saved these fundamental services. Just more of the same failed conservative policies.

If the '60s and '70s were the decades of failed liberal policies, then the '80s, '90s, and the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the era of failed conservative policies. What America is experiencing today is far more than policy failures under the leadership of George W. Bush. It is the impact of more than two decades of ascendant conservative ideology -- a legacy of extreme individualism, deregulation, and anti-tax zealotry. It is this wholesale failure of these conservative policies that has led to today's record deficits, state budget crises, collapsing public schools, cuts in funding for domestic security, a besieged environment, and crony capitalism.

It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony.

The surprise move will throw off all the major news organizations, which were planning intensive coverage of the ceremonies originally planned for Wednesday.

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That's what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let's see if they fall for it.

Awhile back I suggested that the emerging conventional wisdom about the Iraq War - that it's the Vietnam War on speed - needed to be revised. Iraq is actually Vietnam on crack: more dangerous, more psychotic, and turning into a basket case even faster than your average crystal meth addict.

And that was before we learned about Abu Ghrab.

For security reasons, there are no security reports

"The brazenness and frequency of all kinds of insurgent assaults, from car bombings to mortar attacks and rocket fire to the roadside bombs hidden under trash, in goat carcasses, in date palm logs, inside barrels or under asphalt, have made one more and more likely to actually witness rather than just hear about an act of mayhem ... I have covered conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Somalia, Chechnya and Kosovo and, during last year's invasion of Iraq, the fighting in Kurdistan, as well as coup and civil strife in Panama and Haiti, and riots in Miami. Each one presented its own menu of bullets, bombings, anarchy, anger and vulnerable situations... But rarely have I been in a place where danger arrives from so many directions as in Iraq."

This Bush order applies to the Afghanistan Taliban, and to alleged al-Qaida members in Iraq and worldwide; it says they don't have rights, but doesn't say that they should be tortured; rather it says they should be treated 'humanely' and that they should be given Geneva-like privileges when not too inconvenient to do so.

The order accepts the Royalist theory of Presidential power, but says it declines to apply it: "I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time."

President Bush said Tuesday that he had never sanctioned any torture techniques, as the White House sought to defuse questions about the interrogation of military prisoners.

"Look, let me make very clear the position of my government and our country," Bush said in the Oval Office.

"We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being."
. . .
"Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment," Bush wrote in the memo dated February 7, 2002. "Our nation has been and will continue to be a strong supporter of Geneva and its principles."

Al-Qaida militants disguised in police uniforms and cars provided by sympathizers in the Saudi security forces set up a fake checkpoint to snare the American engineer they later beheaded, according to an account of the operation posted on an Islamic extremist Web site Sunday.

The account of Paul M. Johnson Jr's abduction highlighted fears that some diplomats and Westerners in the kingom have expressed, that militants have infiltrated Saudi security forces, a possibility Saudi officials have denied.

In a separate article on the Web site, the leader of the al-Qaida cell behind the abduction justified the targeting of Johnson, pointing to his work on Apache attack helicopters for Lockheed Martin.

The Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera broadcast a videotape Sunday night of a man identified as a South Korean hostage whose captors threatened to behead him unless his government quits the U.S.-led coalition occupying Iraq.

But even the harshest critics concede that the nation's spiritual leader rallied in the days thereafter. His bullhorn performance on the rubble of the World Trade Center is considered a bravura moment. He made compelling appearances at the National Cathedral, before Congress, and in a news conference in the East Room of the White House. When professional baseball resumed play, he courageously walked to the mound in a crowded stadium and threw out the first pitch.

For most of 2002, President George W. Bush argued that a commission formed to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.
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Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.
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Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months, the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House itself.

"This was not an attack on the people of Fallujah, but against a known safe house," . . . "It is standard operating procedure to conduct a detailed collateral damage estimate prior to approval of this type of mission. The collateral damage estimate was within permissible limits, and this operation was within standing rules of engagement."

In a bloody surprise attack, the U.S. military launched precision weapons into a poor residential neighborhood of Fallujah on Saturday to destroy what officers described as a safe house used by fighters loyal to Abu Musab Zarqawi and perhaps, at times, by the fugitive terrorist leader himself.

Residents said about 20 people were killed, including women and children, despite a cease-fire with U.S. occupation forces that has brought relative peace for the last six weeks to the rebellious city 35 miles west of Baghdad. Images from the site of the blast showed two collapsed houses, with people in white robes picking through the rubble looking for buried victims and lost property.

"This leads to nothing but more confrontation with the enemy," Abdullah Janabi, head of Fallujah's Mujaheddin Council, declared in an interview with the al-Jazeera satellite television network.

These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...

The Bush administration's foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere has been a "disaster," and President Bush should not be re-elected, a group of former diplomats and military leaders say in a newly released statement.

The group, called Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, held a news conference Wednesday to explain why its members feel "the need for a major change in the direction of our foreign policy," and underscore that they believe their concerns are bipartisan.

A statement from the group notes its more than two dozen members include Democrats and Republicans who have "served every president since Harry S. Truman."

They contend Bush's foreign policy has failed at "preserving national security and providing world leadership."

Members expressing their opposition in the statement are former senior diplomatic, national security and military officials.

In opening remarks, spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley said international respect for the United States is now "crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the realities of the world around it."

Oakley was an assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research in the Clinton administration.

Charles Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the Bush administration has yet to articulate how it plans to depart from Iraq, and said the situation is "complicated by insults to our allies, the indifference to the views of partners in the region, and the general disdain for the United Nations and international organizations that the administration still finds difficult to conceal."

Freeman, a career diplomat, served both Republican and Democratic administrations.

At a Wednesday news conference, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher rejected the notion the United States has acted without consulting its allies.

"It's not true. We went to the United Nations on Iraq. We went to the United Nations on terrorism and 9/11. We've had four unanimous U.N. resolutions since the end of the war," he responded.

Although the group expressed alarm about the sidetracked Middle East "road map to peace" between Palestinians and Israelis, it was the U.S. handling of Iraq that helped crystallize the group's concern.

Retired Gen. Tony McPeak, a former U.S. Air Force chief of staff who had endorsed the Bush 2000 campaign, Wednesday said of Bush's Iraq policy, "Because of the Pollyannish assumptions that were made by the administration in going in there that ... bouquets would be thrown at us and so forth, we were totally unprepared for the post-combat occupation. And so you see here, unfolding in front of us, a terrible disaster."

McPeak headed the Air Force during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The group acknowledged it takes a partisan stand in opposing Bush, but, as member William Harrop put it, "When there is one prominent rival to President Bush in this election, obviously we think Senator Kerry should be elected, but we are not here to speak for him. We are here to say there must be a change."

LAST WEEK, the nation looked to the past with the death of President Ronald Reagan.

This week, the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, suspended out of respect to the deceased 40th president, start fresh.

In that spirit, this newspaper, the first in the nation, endorses John Kerry for president. Unlike the current White House occupant, Kerry can lead America to a brighter, better future. He has shown the personal courage, compassion, intellect and skill to lead this country in a time of war abroad and economic troubles at home. He is a serious man for a serious time.

Act now.

The commonwealth - indeed the nation - cannot afford another four years of George Bush.

A key investigator in the espionage case against a Syrian-American translator at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo has been charged with raping and sodomizing children, officials said on Tuesday.
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Military officials later gave reporters a list of charges against Palmosina which include rape of a person under the age of 12 in Japan in 1998 and 2000 and sodomy with a child under the age of 12 in Vacaville, California.

WASHINGTON, June 14 - As Republicans try to cloak President Bush in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, their biggest obstacle may be Mr. Reagan's own family.

Even before Mr. Reagan died, Nancy Reagan and her daughter, Patti Davis, made their opposition to Mr. Bush's policy on stem-cell research well known. But on Friday, at the culmination of an emotional week of mourning for the former president, his son Ron Reagan delivered a eulogy that castigated politicians who use religion "to gain political advantage," a comment that was being interpreted in Washington as a not-so-subtle slap at Mr. Bush.

The remark has provoked intense debate among Republicans about precisely what the younger Mr. Reagan meant. Some saw the reference to religion as a message to the administration on stem-cell research. Others saw it as a possible critique of the war in Iraq. Still others insist there was no deeper message at all.

But a friend of the Reagan family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Reagan, who did not return a call seeking comment on Monday, was deeply uncomfortable with the way the Bush administration intertwined religion and politics and felt compelled to say so at the burial of his father, a ceremony watched by millions.

"I think he was making a more profound statement about style," this friend said, "and the danger of religion in politics."

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

"All the detainees will be transferred to the Iraqi authorities, and the transporting operation will be done within the two coming weeks," Allawi said on the Arabic-language network. "Saddam and the others will be delivered to the Iraqis."

He said the former Iraqi president would stand trial "as soon as possible," but gave no specific timetable. The detainees and "Saddam as well will be handed to the Iraqi government, and you can consider this as an official confirmation," he said.

U.S. officials have said they plan to continue to hold up to 5,000 prisoners deemed a threat to U.S.-led forces even after administrative powers are handed over at the end of this month.

According to freelance journalist Wayne Madsden, "George W Bush's blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs and his constant references to 'evil doers,' in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations--the anti-Christ."

Madsen, a Washington-based writer and columnist, who often writes for Counterpunch, says that people close to the pope claim that amid these concerns, the pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II has always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament.

Before he became pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, "We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel."

The pope worked tirelessly to convince leaders of nations on the UN Security Council to oppose Bush's war resolution on Iraq. Vatican sources claim they had not seen the pope more animated and determined since he fell ill to Parkinson's Disease. In the end, the pope did convince the leaders of Mexico, Chile, Cameroon and Guinea to oppose the U.S. resolution.

The Iraq issue today may never have arisen if it were not for the support former U.S. president Ronald Reagan gave Saddam Hussein.

Reagan died Saturday June 5 in his Los Angeles home.

Reagan's two terms as President correspond roughly to the Iran-Iraq war, the longest conventional war of the 20th century.

Bush's false sense of omnipotence, instilled within him during childhood and emboldened by his deep investment in fundamentalist religion

The president's history of untreated alcohol abuse, and the questions it raises about denial, impairment, and the enabling streak in our culture

The growing anecdotal evidence that Bush may suffer from dyslexia, ADHD, and other thought disorders

His comfort living outside the law, defying international law in his presidency as boldly as he once defied DUI statutes and military reporting requirements

His love-hate relationship with his father, and how it triggered a complex and dangerous mix of feelings including yearning, rivalry, anger, and sadism

Bush's rigid and simplistic thought patterns, paranoia, and megalomania -- and how they have driven him to invent adversaries so that he can destroy them.

The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia confirmed that a man shot dead on Saturday in a drive-by shooting in Riyadh was a U.S. citizen.

This is the third confirmed shooting death of an Westerner this week in Riyadh: An American was killed Tuesday and a cameraman for the British TV network BBC was killed Sunday.

An Iraqi deputy foreign minister was gunned down in an ambush Saturday morning in front of his home in Baghdad, witnesses and government sources said.

Bassam Salih Kubba, 60, had worked in the Foreign Ministry for more than 30 years, holding important posts under the previous regime. He was one of four deputy foreign ministers and the ministry's most-senior career diplomat.

Since that time, however, the Army has announced that it is investigating the deaths of 127 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, and evidence compiled by military and congressional investigators indicates that top civilian and military leaders dispensed contradictory advice on how far to push the bounds of laws against torture and whether certain detainees were covered by international treaties.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, can you talk about this, the people that are now running the administration are some of the very people who ran the Reagan administration more than 20 years ago?


NOAM CHOMSKY: That's quite true. The Reagan administration is either the same people or their immediate mentors for the most part. I think one can say that the current administration is a selection of the more extremist and arrogant and violent and dangerous elements of the Reagan administration. So on things like - I mean, that is true on domestic and international policy they are, both in the Reagan years and now, they are committed to dismantling the components of the government that serve the general population -- social security, public schools and so on and so forth, but in a more extreme fashion now. Partly because they think they have achieved a sort of higher stage from which to launch the attack, and internationally it's pretty obvious. In fact, many of the older Reaganites and Bush, number one people have been concerned, even appalled by the extremism of the current administration in the international domain. That's why there was unprecedented elite criticism of the national security strategy and the implementation in Iraq - narrow criticism, but significant.

As the nation prepares to bury former President Ronald Reagan, Republican insiders fight among themselves over plans by the political team of President George W. Bush to use images of and speeches by Reagan in new television ads aimed at jump-starting a faltering campaign.

“They’re disgusting,” says one long-time Republican who participated in a focus group to preview the new television ads. “They dishonor the memory of Ronald Reagan and if President Bush allows these ads on the air I, for one, will not vote for him in November.”

The ads, ordered up by Bush political advisor Karl Rove immediately after Reagan’s death last Saturday, use images of Reagan and excerpts from his speeches in what one angry GOP conservative describes as a “callous attempt to tie George W. Bush to the legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

What struck me about the reports today and yesterday on memos from the Justice Department and the Defense Department arguing that U.S. prohibitions on torture might not apply to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq or Guantanamo was not so much their moral implications -- I'm beyond the capacity for shock -- but their glib, loose, bull-session tone. The memo from the Office of Legal Counsel is not available, and if Ashcroft has his way, it won't be, but based on the quotes in the Times and the Post, it just doesn't sound remotely like an actual legal argument, much less "a scholarly effort to define the perimeters of the law." It seems to be just a series of assertions, such as, "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable."
. . .
The lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel and the White House councile's office are the best the Federalist Society has to offer. They've gone to the best law schools, clerked for Thomas or Scalia -- they can be expected to put together an argument that, even if wrong, at least appears to be grounded in a well-researched analysis of the law and precedents. Instead, these memos read like, at best, a bunch of drunk right-wing freshmen arguing about what they think the law should be.

(1) arming both sides in the Iran/Iraq war that killed over a million people,
(2) supporting - through totally illegal means and against the wishes of congress - the Contras and their related death squads and paramilitary forces that killed tens of thousands of peasants, priests, academics, labor organizers, and anyone else who dared to work for social justice in the poor countries of Central America, and
(3) arming and training the Islamic militants of the Mujahadeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and later metamorphosed into the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is formally investigating allegations that a Halliburton Co. subsidiary was involved in paying $180 million in bribes to get a natural gas project contract in Nigeria. Vice President Dick Cheney was head of the oil services conglomerate at the time.

Halliburton on Friday announced that the SEC has started a formal probe. The SEC's informal investigation of the contract was disclosed in February.

The SEC isn't alone in examining the contract, in which Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, is a 25 percent owner. Nigeria in February ordered an investigation, and a French magistrate has been probing the payments for months.

Brawling and gunfire involving a militia loyal to a radical cleric flared Friday in the south-central Iraqi city of Najaf and a Baghdad neighborhood.

Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr and members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq scuffled at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, leading to casualties and the cancellation of Friday prayers.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday that the errors were partly the result of new procedures for collecting data. "I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can," Mr. Powell said said.

"Errors crept in that, frankly, we did not catch here," he said of the report, which showed a decline in the number of attacks worldwide in 2003.

"When we are sure we have the new facts, the right facts, we will prepare an appropriate analysis and give you our assessment at that moment,"

The Manchester Evening News said yesterday it received a record number of hits after reporting on its Web site that Morrissey, 45, had interrupted a Dublin concert Saturday with news of former president Reagan's death, adding that he wished Bush had died instead.

MANCHESTER music legend Morrissey sparked controversy when he announced Ronald Reagan's death live on stage during a concert - and then declared he wished it was George Bush who had died instead.

Thousands of fans at Dublin Castle, in Ireland, cheered when the ex-Smiths frontman made the announcement that the former American president, who had battled with Alzheimer's Disease, had passed away.

And an even bigger cheer followed when Morrissey - who is no stranger to controversy - then said he wished it had been the current President, George W Bush, who had died.

The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.

When the most recent "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued April 29, senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world.

"Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.

But on Tuesday, State Department officials said they underreported the number of terrorist attacks in the tally for 2003, and added that they expected to release an updated version soon.

Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

Spare me the heapings of praise for Ronald Reagan.

He was one of the worst presidents we've ever had.

In fact, he should have been impeached for the Iran-Contra scandal, and he might have been had Congress and the media just done their jobs. Reagan misappropriated funds, and then he lied about it. He traded with Iran, an enemy of the United States, and he lied about that, too.

But Congress went weak in the knees when Ollie North showed up strutting in his uniform.

And the media fell down, too. Katherine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, said the country couldn't handle another impeachment crisis, and so the Post downplayed it.

Let's be clear on Reagan's record.

Reagan was responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras as he waged illegal wars and funded brutal militaries. The truth commission of El Salvador investigated the murders of 75,000 people during the civil war in the 1980s, and it found that the Salvadoran military, or death squads connected to the military, had committed the bulk of those crimes. At the time, Bush was lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Salvadoran government, and his CIA was working with the death squads.

Reagan was responsible, as Christopher Hitchens has noted, for approving Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 18,000 civilians.

Reagan was responsible for his own unilateral invasion of that huge threat to the United States called Grenada. (Oh, the great liberator!)

Reagan was responsible for inciting a racist backlash. He kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in--of all places--Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney were murdered in 1964. Reagan also fueled racism with his stories about "welfare queens" and his defense of the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Reagan was responsible for attacking women's rights, as he tried to legitimate the backlash against feminism. He appointed the far right justice Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court, and he loaded the lower court benches with anti-choice ideologues.

Reagan was responsible for a woeful response to the AIDS epidemic, which needlessly jeopardized the lives of millions of people. He also consorted with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who called AIDS divine revenge on homosexuals.

Reagan was responsible for shredding the social contract between labor and management, and he declared open season on trade unions when he fired the air traffic controllers.

Reagan was responsible for flattening out the progressive income tax and for giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations. His economic policies, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research has noted, dramatically redistributed income--to the rich.

Reagan was responsible for hooking millions of people overseas on tobacco, as he turned the Commerce Department into the advance team for Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

Reagan ("We begin bombing in five minutes") was responsible for the multi-billion dollar boondoggle that goes by the name of missile defense.

Reagan was responsible for launching an assault on our environment (remember James Watt!) that is now reaching its apotheosis under George W.

In a way, Reagan was W's father. The macho swagger, the studied anti-intellectualism, the infatuation with military spending, and the overriding concern for corporations and the rich--all these Bush has inherited from Reagan.

And while Reagan consulted Nancy's astrologer for advice, Bush does him one better by consulting the Lord Himself.

The only difference is that Reagan knew how to read his lines.

For those who argued that Bush's reckless use of military violence was defensible to protect human rights comes a rebuke in Amnesty International's cover letter to its 2004 annual report: "The global security agenda promulgated by the U.S. administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Sacrificing human rights in the name of security at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using preemptive military force where and when it chooses have neither increased security nor ensured liberty."

A noted fantasist, Reagan is perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper's delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.
. . .
Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America's sense of reality—a paltry target, all in all, given our predilections. It only took an actor: the real successor to John Wilkes Booth. In our bones, we had always been this sort of bullshit-craving country anyhow, founded on abstractions. . .it was Reagan, whose most profound Freudian slip was the immortal "Facts are stupid things," who beguiled us into living in the theme park full-time.

It's been pointed out to me (tip of the hat to Bernard H.) that the team of lawyers who wrote the Pentagon's treatise on presidential torture powers was led by this woman:

U.S. Air Force's General Counsel, Mary L. Walker, discusses what it takes to leave a legacy of significance
Ms. Walker, it turns out, is a long-time Republican political appointee first brought to Washington during the Reagan administration to help oversee the looting of America's natural resources, um, that is, I mean, to serve as principal deputy in the environmental division at Ed Meese's Justice Department.

It also appears that Ms. Walker is a devout Christian - much like her fellow Reagan alum and environmental despoiler, Interior Secretary James "I don't know how many generations we've got until the Lord returns" Watt. And she's the co-founder of a San Diego group called Professional Women's Fellowship, an offshoot of the Campus Crusade for Christ "dedicated to helping professionals find balance, focus and direction in life."

God knows, we all need balance, focus and direction in our lives - and I'd be the last person to criticize Ms. Walker for looking for it in Jesus. As a devoted follower of John Lennon (bigger than Christ, but we won't dwell on that) I'm a firm believer in whatever gets you through the night. It's all right. It's all right.

But knowing what we now know about the subject matter of the Pentagon report, and the legal theories expounded therein, I do have to wonder how seriously Ms. Walker takes her Golden Rule.

At the very least, the report lends a curious overtone to some of the comments in this interview with Walker, which was published on the PWF web site:

Walker: "I wanted to be involved in policy development at the highest level, and lawyers in our society are often involved in shaping policy."
The report: After defining torture and other prohibited acts, the memo presents "legal doctrines ... that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful."

Walker: "I can't divorce faith from success because God is the foundation for my life."

The report: "Good faith may be a complete defense" to a torture charge."

Walker: "My relationship with God and with others in the community of faith has been central in my life."

The report: "The infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture." It "must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure."

Walker:"It helped to find someone who could mentor me and help me see my faith as relevant to the challenges of life and work."

The report:For involuntarily administered drugs or other psychological methods [to be considered torture], the "acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him."

Walker: "When God is the center of your life and everything you do revolves around His plans for you and the world, then that is when life really gets exciting."

The report:The executive branch [has] "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

Walker: It's a travesty to be in a place of strategic importance to the world as a business or political leader and not allow God to accomplish the truly significant through you.

The report: To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

And of course, I saved the best for last:

Walker: "Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, 'I'm not going to do this because I don't think it's the right thing to do.' "

The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders "may be inferred to be lawful" and are "disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate."

And so there you have it: Mary L. Walker - Christian, Republican, Patriot, Torture Attorney.

I know my personal military hero, Gen. J.C. Christian, Patriot, is already married. But if he ever feels like emulating the prophets of old and taking unto him a concubine, as Abraham knew Hagar, I think this just might be the girl for him.

Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan’s, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms), Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence) when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
. . .
“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”

But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement, James Watt.

Getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals, tax credits for segregated schools, disinformation campaigns, Β?homeless by choice,Β? Manuel Noriega, falling wages, the HUD scandal, air raids on Libya, Β?constructive engagementΒ? with apartheid South Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers, attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada, assassination manuals, NancyΒ?s astrologer.

Drug tests, lie detector tests, Fawn Hall, female appointees (8 percent), mining harbors, the S&L; scandal, 239 dead U.S. troops in Beirut, Al Haig Β?in control,Β? silence on AIDS, food-stamp reductions, Debategate, White House shredding, Jonas Savimbi, tax cuts for the rich, Β?mistakes were made.Β?

Michael DeaverΒ?s conviction for influence peddling, Lyn NofzigerΒ?s conviction for influence peddling, Caspar WeinbergerΒ?s five-count indictment, Ed Meese ("You donΒ?t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime"), Donald Regan (women donΒ?t Β?understand throw-weights"), education cuts, massacres in El Salvador.
Β?The bombing begins in five minutes,Β? $640 Pentagon toilet seats, African- American judicial appointees (1.9 percent), ReaderΒ?s Digest, C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon (more than eighty civilians killed), 200 officials accused of wrongdoing, William Casey, Iran/contra.

Β?Facts are stupid things,Β? three-by-five cards, the MX missile, Bitburg, S.D.I., Robert Bork, naps, Teflon.

' Dr. Pauline H. Baker, author of the report, describes a failed state syndrome as a condition in which a number of trends reinforce each other to produce spiraling conflict that the country has little or no independent capacity to stop. The report concludes that, a year after the invasion, Iraq is as shattered as it was the day that Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the main difference being that organized militias and terrorist groups have gained a foothold they did not have before.

"We have to get the facts straight before we can get the policy straight," said Dr. Baker. "Currently, there are three major fictions that are being used to describe the transition in Iraq. The first is analytical - that Iraq could become a failed state, when, in fact, it already has failed. The second is legal - that the occupation will end on June 30, when, in fact, the occupation will end when foreign troops are withdrawn and capable Iraqi security forces take over. And the third is political - that after June 30, the sovereign government of Iraq and the people will be allied with the United States. In fact, the interim government will not have full sovereignty and the people are increasingly fearful and resentful of the U.S. presence."

We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point.

We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense.

Condoleeza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately.

George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday promised Congress a full investigation into allegations that an Iraqi politician supported by the Pentagon told Iran the United States had broken the code it used for secret communications, and U.S. officials said the revelation destroyed an important source of intelligence.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed and two others were injured in separate engagements in Iraq, the military said today. Two of the soldiers were killed Sunday near the Shiite holy city of Kufa, where insurgents loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have clashed with U.S. troops.

One soldier died when attackers ambushed a patrol while the other was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his tank.

Meanwhile, one soldier died and two others were injured Sunday when they hit a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the military reported. The injured soldiers were evacuated to a combat hospital.

All of the casualties were from the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division.

The new totalitarians speak the language of "democracy," liberality, and modernity: they pose as the champions of Western civilization against an encroaching barbarism, and claim that their goal is to "liberate" the earth, starting with the Middle East. It's a bald-faced lie. The neoconservative agenda is topped, as always, by the glory and utter necessity of perpetual war: that is their number one principle. But they cannot hope to prevail if they are faced with the prospect of rising criticism on the home front: that is the "lesson" they learned from Vietnam. The war, they maintain to this day, was winnable: we were defeated by the antiwar movement, they claim, by Jane Fonda and not Ho Chi Minh. This time, however, the neocons are determined that the pattern won't be repeated – and they are seeking to grasp the legal "tools" to nip it in the bud. They can spy on us, they can leak whatever information they discern, and they can do it all in the dark, "legally" – insofar as the concept of legality applies to such a system.

Neocon godfather Irving Kristol long ago formulated an argument in favor of government censorship, and I expect this to be dusted off and recycled any day now. The entire neocon movement is motivated by the police agent mentality, exemplified by such groups as Daniel Pipes's "Campus Watch," which compiles lists of insufficiently pro-Israel academics, and Horowitz's own soon-to-be-unveiled website, followthenetwork.org – which doesn't seem to be up and running quite yet in spite of all the multi-millions poured into his coffers by neocon-controlled "philanthropies."

Luckily for us these would-be world-conquering commissars are totally incompetent. The Justice Department has had a string of embarrassing "mistakes," including the wrongful prosecution of Captain James Yee, yet another Muslim convert in the military, recently exonerated of all charges of "espionage," and the persecution and pursuit of Steven Hatfill, named as a "person of interest" in the anthrax case, who has been smeared but never charged. Now we have the Mayfield case, another instance in which Ashcroft's Raiders came on like the Gestapo but wound up looking more like the Keystone Kops.

The Bush administration has "openly eroded human rights" to win the war on terrorism and sparked a backlash that has made the world more dangerous, Amnesty International charged yesterday.

"As a strategy, the war on terror is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle," Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, asserted in releasing the human rights group's annual report. She condemned militants unequivocally but said governments are "losing their moral compass."

"Sacrificing human rights in the name of security at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad, and using preemptive military force where and when it chooses have neither increased security nor ensured liberty," Kahn said of the United States.

It is clear we are at a crossroads in Iraq. Naysayers are claiming the situation there is chaotic and confusing. Nonsense. It is not confusing. It is quite simple.

Allow me to explain.

With only a few days left, the U.N.-led hunt for candidates to fill the 30 posts in a new interim Iraqi government heated up Wednesday, but a nuclear scientist who had been jailed by Saddam Hussein took himself out of the competition for the top job of prime minister.

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib?

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.
. . .
It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

My 12 year old daughter just asked, and I quote, " How does someone who can barely read and says stupid stuff that makes no sense get elected daddy?" :-D
Abby Normal

In a speech outlining the future for Iraq, President Bush warned Americans there would be "difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic."

The general who was in charge of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq said Sunday that repeated visits to the Abu Ghraib prison by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez — and his initial response to the misconduct there — raise questions about whether Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, knew more about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners than he has acknowledged.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who as commander of the 800th Military Brigade oversaw 16 prisons in Iraqi before she returned to the USA last spring, was admonished by Sanchez in January for what he called her leadership failures. The seven Army reservists linked to the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib from October to December were part of a military police unit that was among those under Karpinski's command.

But Karpinski, who says she relinquished control of the prison to military intelligence officers in November and is being made scapegoat in the abuse scandal, said Sunday that she questions how Sanchez handled the matter in the days after she learned of the misconduct:

• She says Sanchez did not contact her immediately after he was shown photographs of the abused prisoners Jan. 13. Instead, Karpinski says, she learned of the photos in an e-mail Jan. 16 from a military investigator who was looking into the matter. "If Gen. Sanchez was always thinking that I was at fault here (and) my leadership abilities failed, why didn't he summon me the minute he saw the photographs?" she asked. "Doesn't that make you scratch your head? I don't want to make it appear that I'm accusing Sanchez of anything, but he never called me."

• Karpinski says that in late January, after the abuse investigation became known among top-ranking military officials in Iraq, she told Sanchez that she wanted to go on Arab TV to assure the Iraqis that the abuses had not been sanctioned. "He said, 'Absolutely not. We are handling this,' " says Karpinski, who speaks Arabic. "When I left the headquarters after that meeting ... I left there feeling like, 'Holy mackerel. What is going on here?'

"That's one of the most troubling aspects of this for me ... how much he knew and when he knew it," she says.

Sanchez could not be reached for comment Sunday.

MOBILE phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

President Bush is hearing increasingly bleak warnings that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is heading for failure — from Republican and Democratic members of Congress, current and former officials and even some military officers still on active duty.

Weeks of military and political setbacks have produced a striking change of mood in the capital about the prospects for success in Iraq, where U.S. and allied forces are struggling to establish security to allow a new Iraqi "caretaker government" to begin work June 30.

A series of Senate hearings last week showcased the growing fears of many foreign policy experts — a mood some described as "panic."

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure," retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We are looking into the abyss. We cannot start soon enough to begin the turnaround."

"If the current situation persists, we will continue fighting one form of Iraqi insurgency after another — with too little legitimacy, too little will and too few resources," warned Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. "There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw: Quagmire."

Hoar and Diamond's assessments were grimmer than most. But the two men were far from alone.

The British government is unhappy with ``heavy-handed'' U.S. policy in Iraq, the London-based Sunday Times reported, citing a leaked Foreign Office memo.

Pictures of U.S. troops torturing Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail have ``sapped the moral authority of the coalition, and lost us much public support inside Iraq,'' said the memo, titled ``Iraq: The Medium Term'' and dated May 19, according to the newspaper.

U.S. military tactics in Fallujah and Najaf some weeks ago fueled Sunni and Shi'ite opposition to the coalition, the memo said, according to the newspaper. The memo is intended for senior ministers, the Sunday Times said. ``We should not underestimate the present difficulties,'' it warns, said the Times.

About 130 U.S. troops have crossed from Afghanistan into Pakistan looking for Taliban or al Qaeda fighters, Pakistani intelligence sources and local authorities said Sunday, in what is believed to be the fifth such operation in two weeks.

The Americans crossed into the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan on Saturday after exchanging "hard words" with Pakistani border scouts, intelligence sources said. Local officials said the U.S. convoy included 14 vehicles and an estimated 130 troops.

It was the second time in less than a week that U.S. troops crossed the border without Pakistani permission. Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri on Friday called the incursions "totally unacceptable" and said they would only encourage critics of Pakistan's cooperation with the United States.

Three other incursions were reported the previous week, and Pakistan has officially protested two of the violations.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Saturday that if the reports are true, "it would be unhelpful."

British and American troops are to be granted immunity from prosecution in Iraq after the crucial 30 June handover, undermining claims that the new Iraqi government will have 'full sovereignty' over the state.

Despite widespread ill-feeling about the abuse of prisoners by American forces and allegations of mistreatment by British troops, coalition forces will be protected from any legal action.

Tony Blair tells us that we should do everything we can to support America. And I agree. I think we should repudiate those who inflict harm on Americans, we should shun those who bring America itself into disrepute and we should denounce those who threaten the freedom and democracy that are synonymous with being American.

That is why Tony's recent announcement that he wishes to stand shoulder to shoulder with George Bush is so puzzling. It's difficult to think of anyone who has inflicted more harm on Americans than their current president. Since he assumed the title of most powerful man in the world, 4 million Americans have lost their health insurance and 2 million jobs have disappeared. According to a CNN report, "half of all Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck - effectively one paycheck away from poverty". And Mr Bush's latest budget proposes to withdraw support of all kinds for working families earning less than $35,000 a year. At the same time the national debt has rocketed to more than $26,000 for every family.
. . .
As for the freedom of which Americans have always been so justly proud, has any president ever done more to undermine it? The American Civil Liberties Union tells us that the patriot act alone, which was rushed through Congress in the name of the "war on terror", puts at risk the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth and 14th amendments.

Thousands of men, mostly Arabs or south Asians, have now been secretly imprisoned in America without charge, and the government has refused to publish their names or whereabouts. They have been "disappeared". Don't cry for me, Argentina. In fact, the more I think about it, America hardly seems like America any more.

If Tony Blair really were concerned about helping Americans, he would surely be helping them to reclaim their country and institutions from this catastrophic presidency.

Eric Idle presents... The FCC Song.
"Here’s a little song I wrote the other day while I was out duck hunting with a judge… It’s a new song, it’s dedicated to the FCC and if they broadcast it, it will cost a quarter of a million dollars."

President Bush fell off his bicycle Saturday while riding on his ranch, according to White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Bush, who was accompanied on his bike ride by his doctor, Richard Tubb, a military agent and a member of the Secret Service, fell about 16 miles into a 17-mile ride.

Bush suffered minor abrasions to his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees, but was able to ride back home, Duffy said.

Tubb treated the president at the scene. Bush was wearing a helmet and a mouth guard when he fell, Duffy said.

Reporters were told not to be surprised if the president is bandaged next time he appears in public.

U.S. director Michael Moore's controversial anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the Palme d'Or best film award at the Cannes film festival

The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.

An administration official confirmed that "highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel."

The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.

You wonder whether, when Bush gave the order to get Muqtada "dead or alive", initially to the Spanish and then to the US military, whether he even knew that a majority of the population in Bahrain, where the US has a major naval base, is Shiite or that they would mind if the US army demolished much of the Mukhayyam Mosque in Karbala trying to get at Muqtada's militiamen.

In all probability? No.

Could these dmonstrations in Bahrain be significant? Yes. Bahrain has a Sunni monarchy. Lately it has taken baby steps toward democracy and more open elections, but these did not benefit the Shiites because they wanted even more open elections, and boycotted them. Therefore, the Sunni fundamentalists largely won the seats (and the Sunni fundamentalists don't even represent most Bahraini Sunnis much less the Shiites). So the situation there is potentially volatile. The US is doing nothing to make it less so, and everything to exacerbate it.

The other shoe? Will the Shiites of al-Hasa in Eastern Arabia, where the oil is and where there are 90,000 Americans at Dhahran, be the next to riot?

It is most unwise for the US miitary to fight in downtown Najaf and Karbala near the shrines. I say it again.

Pentagon's Explanations Add to Confusion

Saving General Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals preaching that the US was in a holy war as a "Christian nation" battling "Satan", the furore was quickly calmed.
Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, explained that Boykin was exercising his rights as a citizen: "We're a free people." President Bush declared that Boykin "doesn't reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration". Bush's commission on public diplomacy had reported that in nine Muslim countries, just 12% believed that "Americans respect Arab/Islamic values". The Pentagon announced that its inspector general would investigate Boykin, though he has yet to report.

Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, he was at the heart of a secret operation to "Gitmoize" (Guantαnamo is known in the US as Gitmo) the Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantαnamo, where he met Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison system there, on Rumsfeld's orders.

Boykin was recommended to his position by his record in the elite Delta forces: he was a commander in the failed effort to rescue US hostages in Iran, had tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, had advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists at Waco, Texas, and had lost 18 men in Somalia trying to capture a warlord in the notorious Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993.

Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered his spiritual crisis. "There is no God," he said. "If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers." But he was thunderstruck by the insight that his battle with the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and the false one. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

In dawn raids today, American troops surrounded Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters and home in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his aides, and seized documents. Only five months ago, Chalabi was a guest of honor sitting right behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union. What brought about this astonishing fall from grace of the man who helped provide the faked intelligence that justified last year's war?

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers--and there's never any way to sort them out.

is not a popular thing to say, but the fact is that we are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The terrorist attacks on September 11 claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for us as the victims of an atrocity. Then the President declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Since then, the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks on September 11. This fact is not recognized at home because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world does not draw the same distinction and world opinion has turned against us. So, a tremendous gap in perceptions has opened up between us and the rest of the world. The majority of the American public does not realize that we have turned from victims into perpetrators. That is why those gruesome pictures were so shocking. Even today, most people don't recognize their full import.

Bush's approach has provoked perhaps the fiercest and most alarming anti-American backlash in history. To take but one example, a March poll conducted by the Pew Center found that the percentage of people in Muslim countries who think suicide bombings are justified has grown by roughly 40 percent since the American occupation of Iraq. Even the most Western-friendly, pro-democratic media outlets in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon now openly question whether the Americans are anti-Islamic crusaders bent on assisting the Israeli occupiers of Palestine.

The political split in the US over outsourcing notwithstanding, till very recently the fund-raising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party was done partly out of India. And this was handled by two call centres located in our own friendly neighbourhood in Noida and Gurgaon.

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.

The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure.

U.S. ground forces and aircraft attacked a village in Iraq's western desert before dawn Wednesday, striking what Iraqi witnesses said was a wedding celebration but U.S. officials called a way station for foreign infiltrators. More than 40 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed, according to witnesses, Iraqi police officers and provincial health officials.

Video footage from the scene showed fresh graves and the corpses of several children. A man in a red-and-white head scarf told the Associated Press Television Network: "The planes came in and shot the whole family. They kept shooting until the morning, until they destroyed all the houses. They didn't leave anything."

The images of civilian casualties, broadcast widely on Arab television, are likely to further inflame anti-American sentiment in Iraq at a time when U.S. forces are confronting armed resistance on multiple fronts.

U.S. military personnel and Iraqi police have raided the compound of the Iraqi National Congress and the nearby home of Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi's nephew, Salim Chalabi, said the forces entered his uncle's home, put a gun to Chalabi's head and threatened him.

CNN staff on the scene saw a group of Iraqi civilians inside the compound under guard by Iraqi police and U.S. military.

In addition, an SUV was backed into the garage of the compound with people dressed in civilian clothes carrying out files from inside the headquarters.

MIAMI - A U.S. judge on Wednesday acquitted environmental protection group Greenpeace on charges it conspired to break the law by sending activists aboard a freighter carrying illegally felled mahogany two years ago.

The politically charged case dusted off a law not used since 1890 to bring the first criminal prosecution by U.S. authorities of an advocacy group for civil disobedience.

U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan granted a Greenpeace motion to dismiss the charges after the prosecution rested on the third day of trial, ruling federal prosecutors had failed to prove their case, a Greenpeace lawyer said.

"We're elated. This is a real victory for America's tradition of free speech," said John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace U.S. "But our liberties are still in jeopardy, of course. The Bush administration is intent on stifling free speech."

By JOE MILICIA

Associated Press


CANTON, Ohio - Bruce Andrews stood at the gate of a Timken Co. plant, blasting company management for deciding to close it and vowing to vote for Democrat John Kerry in November.

The 31-year employee, who wore a Bush button declaring, "Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot," probably made up his mind on the presidential election long ago.

But Timken's announcement Friday that it will close three of its bearings plants could influence some undecided northeast Ohioans to vote against Bush, who last year promoted his tax-cut plan at the steel company.

The plant closings affect 1,300 employees. As Canton's biggest taxpayer, city officials say the closings will devastate their income taxes and hurt their ability to provide services.

"It's certainly not good news for Bush. There's no way to sugarcoat it," said John Green, a political analyst at the University of Akron. "It probably helps Kerry in the sense that economic woes help the out party."

Bush campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said the president will continue to point out that the economy is showing strength and growing stronger.

"The clear choice the people of Stark County are going to face is do we continue with the president's program, or do they want to choose John Kerry's plan for more taxes and more regulation," Madden said.

The Timken closings are just the latest in a northeast Ohio area hit hard by the loss of manufacturing and other jobs.

While the northeast Ohio cities of Akron, Cleveland and Youngstown overwhelmingly voted against Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign, he beat Al Gore in Stark County, Timken's home, by less than 2 percentage points.

Stark County is a bellwether county in a bellwether state, having voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1960 with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Only two presidential candidates have won without carrying Ohio since 1892.

William Binning, a political science professor at Youngstown State University and former Republican campaign consultant, said Bush needs to break even or win in Stark County. He said the loss of solid-paying jobs in the area will be a factor in November.

"This isn't the kind of thing people forget about. This is devastating to the families involved," Binning said.

Binning and Green said Bush's relationship with Timken chairman W.R. Timken Jr., a major donor and fund-raiser for the Republican Party, is less problematic.

"Most voters won't know it. Political activists will draw those kind of connections," Green said. "That motivates them to work harder and that could be an additional problem for Bush."

In Bush's April 2003 visit to Timken, he told workers, "There's too much economic uncertainty today" and said that his tax-cut package would improve matters.

Jeff Seemann, who protested the war in Iraq during Bush's visit and is now running for Congress against Republican incumbent Ralph Regula, said Bush's promises didn't help Timken workers.

"His economic policies are doing for the country exactly what's happening here at Timken," Seemann said.

Timken said it was closing its three Canton bearings plants because production has declined 27 percent over the last five years.

The United Steelworkers of America on Monday accused the company of failing to negotiate to make the plants more competitive.

"This company needs to explain to its workforce and the Canton community why it wants to destroy the lives of 1,300 loyal families when it knows that making these facilities more cost-competitive is very doable," Dave McCall, a Steelworkers district director, said in a statement.

Timken spokesman Jason Saragian said the company spent more than eight months meeting with the union about the lack of competitiveness at the plants.

As for the plant closings' potential effect on the presidential race, Saragin said: "From our perspective, this is a business issue not a political issue."

"The United States is strongly committed -- and I am strongly committed -- to the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state," . . . "Israel is a democracy and a friend and has every right to defend itself from terror."

Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren't going to stand for it. "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!" one can imagine them shouting in their morning meetings. Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

What is Bush to do? There's not much he can do. Many, including loyal Republicans worried about the election, are urging him to fire Rumsfeld. But that move probably wouldn't stop the investigations. In fact, the confirmation hearings for Rummy's replacement would serve as yet another forum for all the questions—about Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, and military policy generally—that the administration is trying to stave off. More than that, Bush has said repeatedly that he won't get rid of Rumsfeld. If he did, especially if he did so under political pressure, he would undermine his most appealing campaign slogan—that he stays the course, doesn't buckle, says what he means and does what he says.

If lesser officials are sacrificed—Cambone, Feith, and so forth—there is no guarantee that they will go gently, especially if they face possible criminal charges. The same, by the way, is true of Rumsfeld himself, a savvy survivor who can be expected to take some interesting memos with him—for possible widespread circulation—if he were forced to leave the building.

Much is at stake here—budgets, bailiwicks, careers, reputations, re-elections, to say nothing of national security and the future of Iraq. Get ready for a bumpy ride.

Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration's Iraq policies yesterday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon's number two official in personal and bitter terms.

After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, "What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process -- legal process."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."

She quoted to him from his previous testimony from the run-up to the war, in which he asserted that the Iraqi people would see the United States as their liberator, that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction and that the estimate of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq was "outlandish."

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

-------------------------

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

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My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

A Senate hearing into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was told on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an evangelical Christian under review for saying his God was superior to that of the Muslims, briefed a top Pentagon civilian official last summer on recommendations on ways military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners.

Critics have suggested those recommendations amounted to a senior-level go-ahead for the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners, possibly to "soften up" detainees before interrogation -- a charge the Pentagon denies.

Congressional aides and Arab-American and Muslim groups said any involvement by Boykin could spark new concern among Arabs and Muslims overseas the U.S. war on terrorism is in fact a war on Islam.

"I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We'll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go."

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

One of the most telling details about the Army's treatment of its prisoners in Iraq was mentioned almost in passing in the lead story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which described the Red Cross's repeated complaints to top U.S. military and civilian officials:

In May [2003], the Red Cross said it sent a memo describing more than 200 allegations of mistreatment during capture and interrogation of prisoners. The memo was given to Rear Adm. James Robb at coalition headquarters in Quatar, the report says. In response, non-Iraqi detainees were no longer forced to wear wristbands with the notation "terrorist," the report says. (emphasis added)

For Rumsfeld and the other architects of the war, labeling all foreign (i.e. non-Iraqi Arab) fighters as Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists has been both an article of faith and a tool for maintaining the propaganda fiction that the various resistance groups have no indigenous support inside Iraq. So the wristbands aren't much of a surprise. But the tendency to conflate anyone who opposes the coalition in Iraq with the fanatics who flew the airplanes into the World Trade Center actually goes much deeper, and dates to very beginning of the war.

Now Bush is battling a declining job approval rating at home and damage to America's credibility around the globe as the United States gets ready to hand over partial sovereignty to Iraqis at the end of June.

The president tried to head off calls from top Democrats for Rumsfeld's resignation, telling him: "You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror. You are doing a superb job."

Freudian slip?
CNN is carrying Wolfowitz's speech live. He just said, "Our prayers are with him, and with all of our people currently serving in Iran and Afghanistan and in other remote locations around the world."

Iran?

(No, I didn't mishear. Things like this are why I broke down and joined the cult of Tivo.)

According to President Jr. his standard for behavior is "What would Jesus do?" Interesting. Apparently Jesus would bluster, cut taxes and then declare war. Of course, Jesus did take up the whip & drive the money changers from the temple. Unfortunately, in Bush's case the money changers are his close advisers, family and friends.

On other questions of WWJD:

1. Would he prefer airstrikes or groundtroops?
2. How much 'collateral damage' would Jesus accept?
3. Would Jesus think we needed to give millions of dollars in tax 'relief' to the rich rather than the poor?
4. Would Jesus seek to have himself exempted from the jurisdiction of the World Court?
5. If those who take the sword shall perish by the sword, would Jesus be the leading arms supplier of the world?

How much money has been made by Bush family and friends from his decisions relating to the "Global War on Terror?"

In the popular political imagination we're familiar with the neocons as conniving militarists, masters of intrigue and cabals, graspers for the oil supplies of the world, and all the rest. But here we have them in what I suspect is the truest light: as college kid rubes who head out for a weekend in Vegas, get scammed out of their money by a two-bit hustler on the first night and then get played for fools by a couple hookers who leave them naked and handcuffed to their hotel beds.

Over the past year there have been an unusually high number of suicides among U.S. troops in Iraq, and hundreds of soldiers experiencing psychological problems have been evacuated from the country. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent announcement authorizing the extension - by at least three months - of the tours of duty of some 20,000 soldiers set to return home, and the possibility of intensified urban warfare may add to the stress suffered by soldiers serving in Iraq.

In response, the U.S. has increased the use of combat stress control teams, established a toll-free crisis hotline for service members having problems dealing with stress, and set up recuperation centers where soldiers can chill out for a few days before returning to the front lines. Questions about whether these actions are too little too late, and how the soldiers will be treated when they return home remain to be answered.

Twenty-four soldiers - 20 army personnel, two Marines and two sailors - have taken their lives during the past year in Iraq and Kuwait. In addition, there have been seven suicides among "newly States-sided troops," including two soldiers who killed themselves while patients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Toronto Star recently reported.

The suicide rate for army troops in Iraq has been 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers, compared to the overall Army rate of 11.9 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2002. According to StrategyPage.com, this rate is higher than the rate for all branches of the military during the Vietnam War, which was 15.6, and higher than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War which had a 3.6 rate for all branches.

A HOODED Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers before being thrown from a moving truck and left to die.

The prisoner, aged 18-20, begged for mercy as he was battered with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth.

After an EIGHT-HOUR ordeal, he was left barely conscious and close to death. Bleeding and vomiting and with a broken jaw and missing teeth, he was driven from a Basra camp and hurled off the truck. No one knows if he lived or died.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine said a leaked Pentagon report by Major-General Antonio Taguba, completed in February, found that between October and December last year there were numerous cases of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners at the prison.

Among the alleged abuses were: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Six reservist military police, including several women, have been charged and face court-martial. But Hersh also reported some of the accused soldiers claimed they had been urged to act by military intelligence interrogators.

The Taguba report said army intelligence officers, CIA agents and private contractors "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses".

Macedonian police acknowledged on Friday that the killing of seven alleged Pakistani terrorists two years ago was staged to win US support and that the victims were innocent illegal immigrants.

Police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska told reporters that six people, including three former police commanders, two special police officers and a businessman, have been charged by police with murder.

If convicted, they could be sentenced from 10 years to life in prison.

"That was an act of a sick mind," Konteska said after a two-year investigation. "They ... ordered the brutal murder of the seven Pakistani men."

She described a meticulous plan to promote Macedonia as a player in the fight against global terrorism that involved smuggling the Pakistanis into Macedonia from Bulgaria, housing them, and then coldly gunning them down.

The killings, she added, were part of an attempt to "present themselves as participants in the war against terrorism and demonstrate Macedonia's commitment to the (US-led) war on terror."

U.S. troops and their Afghan security force allies mistakenly clashed in Afghanistan's eastern Paktia province, killing three Afghans and wounding two, a provincial security official said Sunday.

It was unclear who fired the first shot or what triggered the fighting late Saturday in the district of Sahak, where U.S. forces were hunting for Islamic militants, said Ayoob Gul Samarkhail, Paktia province security commander.

"Three Afghan security men were killed," he said. "We're looking into what happened." U.S. military officials were not immediately available to comment.

THE United States' policy on Iraq was in disarray last night, as the Pentagon admitted it was unaware of a breakthrough agreement to end the siege of Fallujah announced by its troops on the ground.

While a new poll showed a majority of Iraqis want US and British troops to leave in the next few months, an American marine commander revealed that his troops were preparing to withdraw from the outskirts of Fallujah, a major U-turn in US policy.

Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne said a newly created Iraqi force of 1,100 soldiers, called the Fallujah Protective Army and led by a former general from Saddam Hussein?s army, would take over security in the besieged city.

It was a deal few of his superiors seemed aware of.

They died for a pipe dream, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as a fantastic notion or a vain hope. "Pipe dream" originally referred to the fantasies induced by smoking a pipe of opium. The folks who led us into this hideous madness in Iraq, against the wishes of most of the world, sure seem to have been smoking something.

The numbers are negative for the US, and are much more negative than previous such polls. Moreover, the polling ended by April 2, just before the Shiite uprising and the worst of the Fallujah fighting, so that it is highly likely that the present attitudes of the Iraqi public toward the US are much more negative.

Amazingly, 57% of Iraqis say that US troops should leave Iraq immediately. If one subtracted the Kurds, a much higher percentage of Arabic speaking Iraqis say this. And, they say it with their eyes open. About 57% also admit that life would get harder (i.e. there would be a lot of instability) if the US suddenly withdrew. They want the US gone anyway, and will take their chances.

The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.

"It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the case.

"He is not testifying, he is talking to them," the adviser said. "A transcript implies testimony. This would open a Pandora's box of all sorts of precedent-setting and legal issues. We were reluctant for the president to do this, anyway."

Legal scholars said the lack of an official transcript would give the White House some deniability and make it more difficult to use the president's words as evidence in a future suit against the government.

But I think, at times when it seems especially hard, we need to remember what is at stake and the reason we went into Iraq in the first place, and those reasons have not changed. Saddam Hussein was a threat to the peace and stability of the world. He was a terrible tyrant, one of the worst in the history of the world, and he was fomenting terror by paying families of suicide bombers.
. . .
But at some point, we have to remember the objective, and the objective is that those who are trying to foment terror, who are killing American soldiers or who are killing innocent Iraqis, will be brought to justice.

-- we know we have people who hate America, and al Qaeda hates America.

And it's not because we went into Iraq. It's because they hate the things we stand for. They hate freedom; they hate liberty; they hate tolerance; they hate religious freedom; they hate those who respect the rights of individuals.

And so we know al Qaeda hates us and wants to go after us. And we have -- it's our obligation to do everything in our power to prevent the nightmare scenario that those terrorists who want to attack us would be able to do so with any kind of weapons or information they might be able to gain from Iraq.

In remarks that could influence the U.S. presidential race, a top Vatican cardinal said Friday that a Roman Catholic politician who unambiguously supports abortion rights should be denied Holy Communion at Mass.

Cardinal Francis Arinze spoke amid a debate over whether Democrat John Kerry should be denied communion, which Catholics believe is the body of Christ, because he supports abortion rights.

But this is not just a throw-away point. Does Bush deviate from the teachings of the United Methodist Church? Yes he does, on some crucial political issues. Has he been reprimanded by leaders in his denomination? Yes, particularly on the issue of war in Iraq. And if you want to make this a question of who's the better Christian, then it's fair to ask why President Bush doesn't go to church. You heard me - the man worships at Camp David and every so often wanders across Lafayette Park (although the park is pretty much impassable now what with all of the security construction going on) to attend services at St. John's Episcopal Church. But the man who has staked his domestic policy on the power of civil society and of good Christian individuals to change lives isn't an active member of a congregation - the very kind of organization in which he claims to have so much faith.

No child left behind which cripples an already suffering public educational system,

Clear Sky's Initiative which allows increased levels of pollution in the air,

Healthy Forests which opens public lands oldest forests to private logging operations,

Jobs and Growth Plan which shifts the tax burden from wealthier to poorer taxpayers without providing either jobs or growth, and

The Global War on Terror where very expensive military operations are used to attack countries that we don't like while doing nothing to eliminate terror (indeed, while increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks against us).

"There's not an American ... that doesn't understand what we are engaged in today and what the prospects are for the future," Senator Chuck Hagel told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on post-occupation Iraq.

"Why shouldn't we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?" Hagel said, arguing that restoring compulsory military service would force "our citizens to understand the intensity and depth of challenges we face."

President Bush named John Negroponte, the United States' top diplomat at the United Nations, as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq on Monday and asserted that Iraq "will be free and democratic and peaceful."

Bush announced the nomination in an Oval Office ceremony.

At the United Nations, Negroponte, 64, was instrumental in winning unanimous approval of a Security Council resolution that demanded Saddam Hussein comply with U.N. mandates to disarm.

While the resolution helped the Bush administration make its case for invading Iraq, the Security Council eventually refused to endorse the overthrow of Saddam, opting instead to extend U.N. weapons searches.

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras, where he helped prosecute the contra war against [the Sandanista government of] Nicaragua [democratically elected in 1984] and helped strengthen the military dictatorship in Honduras. Under the helm of General Gustavo Alvarez Martνnez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Ronald Reagan administration and was disappearing dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion. Negroponte's predecessor, Ambassador Jack Binns, had repeatedly warned Washington to take a stand to stop the killings. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua. President Reagan responded by removing Binns and putting in Negroponte, who, writes Eric Alterman in an MSNBC.com piece, 'turned a deliberate blind eye to a murderous pattern of political killings.'

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned.

"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"

At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past week.

The rest of the world is affected seriously by the U.S. fiscal deficit," IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan told reporters in a briefing on the new report.

The IMF's forecast that the U.S. budget deficit will be a significant drag on growth reflected what will occur if there is no improvement in the deficit, which the Bush administration projects will hit $521 billion this year, a record in dollar terms, and show little improvement in coming years.

Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency reported after reviewing satellite images and equipment that has turned up in European scrapyards.
. . .
The United Sattes has virtually cut off information-sharing with the IAEA since invading Iraq in March 2002 on the premise that the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons have been found, and arms control officials now worry the war and its chaotic aftermath may have increased chances that terrorists could get their hands on materials used for unconventional weapons or that civilians may be unknowingly exposed to radioactive materials.

The United States yesterday ordered the evacuation of most U.S. diplomats and all U.S. family dependents from Saudi Arabia, and "strongly urged" all American citizens to leave because of "credible and specific" intelligence about terrorist attacks planned against U.S. and other Western targets, the State Department announced.

On April 21 1961, President Kennedy held a press conference to answer questions on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles that he had approved. "There's an old saying," he said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."
On Wednesday, President Bush held only his third press conference and was asked three times whether he accepted responsibility for failing to act on warning before September 11. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't [sic] yet," he said. "I just haven't - you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick - as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
. . .
At his press conference, Bush was a confusion of absolute confidence and panic. He jumbled facts and conflated threats, redoubling the vehemence of his incoherence at every mildly sceptical question. He attempted to create a false political dichotomy between "retreat" and his own vague and evolving position on Iraq, which now appears to follow senator John Kerry's, of granting more authority to the UN and bringing in Nato.

The ultimate revelation was Bush's vision of a divinely inspired apocalyptic struggle in which he is the leader of a crusade bringing the Lord's "gift." "I also have this belief, strong belief that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." But religious war is not part of official US military doctrine.

During last night's prime time press conference, President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings"1. But just minutes later at the same press conference the president proved he was not telling the truth.

Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings2.

His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack"3 after receiving intelligence warnings4.

At the press conference, Bush also claimed to have no "inkling whatsoever"5 about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post today reports that newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive one intelligence briefing about an imminent Al Qaeda attack, but "a stream" of repeated warnings6. In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil."

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy . . . this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

There are three categories of civilians in an occupied country: patriots, collaborators and opportunists. In the calculus of hearts and minds, anything short of 100 percent popularity qualifies as total failure. It's an impossible standard, which is why no nation has ever successfully invaded and occupied another in the 20th century. Even if a majority like living under foreign control, a dubious assumption at best, an occupation is nonetheless doomed. As long as one percent of the population spends its evenings blowing up enemy convoys, fence sitters will be scared to collaborate. In Iraq, that one percent--or five, or whatever--shows no sign of letting up.

In the April 2004 #2 issue of the INTERNATIONAL FORECASTER financial newsletter out this weekend, editor Bob Chapman writes that it is finally becoming painfully obvious that oil producers are artificially increasing the price of oil to offset the cost of the depreciating dollar.

"We are sure others that sell into the dollar market are doing the same thing. As we have said before, private investors have all but fled the dollar denominated Treasury market and other central banks have been buying over 80% of US issues."

Due to horrendous debt, obvious systemic weaknesses are now visible and those risks have caused global investors to have less confidence in the American economy then they once did. As you are well aware, were it not for the Asian countries, particularly Japan and China, the dollar would have fully corrected long ago.

The US economy is very unstable and fraught with risk and this is causing other nations to question US economic leadership.

The powers in the US, since 1989, have avoided a full recession by simply printing money, using credit and amassing huge debt. That is not responsible stewardship.
The US is on a course of economic decline because elitists and politicians, with the assistance of Wall Street, have refused to face economic reality. Furthermore, there is no end in sight to this financial profligacy. This situation is compounded by a foreign policy of preventative invasions, which is little more than a cover-up of economic problems.

We predicted this course of action four years ago based on the historical perspective that every government in financial and economic trouble had done so since the beginning of recorded history.

The economic base of America has been on the course of destruction from the period beginning almost 100 years ago. It has been one financial and economic failure after another, always followed by war.

a : supreme power especially over a body politic b : freedom from external control : AUTONOMY c : controlling influence.

The United States has secretly flown Saddam Hussein out of Iraq and imprisoned him under high security at a vast American air base in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

SUNNI and Shi'ite residents of two Baghdad suburbs, once fierce enemies, said overnight they had put their differences aside to unite in their fight to oust the US occupying force from Iraq.

"All of Iraq is behind Moqtada al-Sadr, we are but one body, one people," declared Sheikh Raed al-Kazami, in charge of the radical Shi'ite cleric's offices at a mosque in the Shi'ite neighbourhood of Kazimiya, west of the Iraqi capital.
He spoke following three days of fierce clashes between militiamen loyal to Sadr that left at least 57 people dead and 236 wounded.

WASHINGTON - A decision by the Pentagon to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq is a reversal of its plan to steadily reduce the U.S. force level there.

Since the war began a year ago, senior military leaders have given frequent assurances to troops and their families that Iraq duty would be no longer than a year.

Now, those assurances have met the reality of Iraq, where military leaders are planning for the possibility that anti-U.S. violence will spread. U.S. troops are stretched thin around the world, and the Pentagon has few options to increase the force in Iraq if necessary.

On Monday, a senior official with U.S. Central Command said that the return home of about 24,000 U.S. troops who were scheduled to leave in the next few weeks would be delayed as their replacements arrive. Central Command's responsibility includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the 24,000 remaining and others who have arrived as intended replacements, there are 134,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

If you want a single example that captures why so many people no longer believe in the good intentions of the Bush administration, look at the case of mercury pollution.

Mercury can damage the nervous system, especially in fetuses and infants — which is why the Food and Drug Administration warns pregnant women and nursing mothers against consuming types of fish, like albacore tuna, that often contain high mercury levels. About 8 percent of American women have more mercury in their bloodstreams than the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.
. . .
Mercury is just a particularly vivid example of what's going on in environmental protection, and public policy in general. As a devastating article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine documented, the administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act has gone beyond the polluters' wildest dreams.

And the corruption of the policy process — in which political appointees come in with a predetermined agenda, and technical experts who might present information their superiors don't want to hear are muzzled — has infected every area I know anything about, from tax cuts to matters of war and peace.

It's almost nine months since someone at the White House broke the law by telling columnist Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. This was retaliation for Wilson's revelation that Iraq's supposed purchase of uranium from Niger was already known to be a fraud when President Bush included it in his January 2003 State of the Union.

For a long time after going to war (ostensibly) to find and destroy Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," we were told the reason WMDs eluded discovery is that Iraq is so big: "WMDs could be hidden anywhere in a country as vast as California." But how big is the White House? Why can't the culprit of the vindictive and criminal leak of a CIA agent's identity be found? Is someone in the White House keeping secrets from the boss? What does the president know? Is the guilty party too high up? Isn't there anyone down the line willing to fall on his sword?

The reasonable answer is that the Wilson episode just happens to be the way this White House deals with critics, something now proven too often to escape notice. The messenger of bad news for the White House is personally attacked and punished. Each charge is treated in isolation from similar, corroborative revelations from independent sources. Then the formula is to allow the particular story to fade from public view.

The latest case in point is Richard Clarke. All the fury against Clarke blows a screen of smoke over truths that would seem almost impossible to hide: that the war in Iraq was an obsession that had nothing to do with a threat from WMDs or combating al Qaeda; that it expanded terrorism and heightened worldwide antagonism and distrust of the United States.

The Bush people want desperately to avoid public focus on the central part of Clarke's charge, that the war and occupation of Iraq have made us and the world far less safe. They hope that they can separate the Clarke story from the whole story -- that by going one-on-one to nullify Clarke, no one will notice the long line of corroborative insider witnesses preceding him: Scott Ritter, Joseph Wilson, Paul O'Neill and David Kay, as well as Hans Blix.

But the line of damning evidence is even longer than the line of witnesses, from the disastrous news and mounting casualties in Iraq and from the dangerous repercussions elsewhere. It might be worth reminding the non- inquisitive media that the scoundrel who broke the law to get Wilson's wife is still in hiding in the White House. He or she or they should be easier to find than Iraq's WMDs.

The eruption of bloody clashes between Iraqi Shi’ites and Coalition forces, combined with a threat from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to assassinate the head of Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hizbullah movement, raise the frightening prospect that the U.S. could soon face a powerful new enemy, with potentially disastrous consequences in Iraq and beyond.

The Shi’ites, after all, invented both modern Islamist suicide terrorism and the guerrilla tactics being used with such effectiveness against American forces in Iraq. But until now, they have sat out both the post-Saddam Iraqi insurgency and the terror war against the U.S., which have been spearheaded by members of the dominant Sunni school of Islam.

With this weekend’s events, all that could change.

BAGHDAD -- I heard the sound of freedom yesterday in Baghdad's Firdos Square, the famous plaza where the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled one year ago. It sounds like machine-gun fire.

On Sunday, Iraqi soldiers, trained and controlled by coalition forces, opened fire on demonstrators here, forcing the emergency evacuation of the nearby Sheraton and Palestine hotels. As demonstrators returned to their homes in the poor neighborhood of Sadr City, the U.S. army followed with tanks and helicopters. As night fell, there were unconfirmed reports of dozens of casualties. In Najaf, the day was equally bloody: 19 demonstrators dead, more than 150 injured.

But make no mistake: This is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the U.S. occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shiites who support Muqtada al-Sadr.

Mr. al-Sadr is the younger, more radical rival of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, portrayed by his adoring supporters as a kind of cross between Ayatollah Khomaini and Che Guevara. He blames the U.S. for attacks on civilians, compares U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer to Saddam Hussein, aligns himself with Hamas and Hezbollah and has called for a jihad against the controversial interim constitution. His Iraq might look a lot like Iran.

WASHINGTON - While President Bush and his security advisers obsessed over Russia, China, Iraq and missile defense before 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconspirators were just as stuck in the Cold War over at the Pentagon. Al-Qaida hardly registered on their radar screen, either.

We know this because the 9/11 Commission just told us, although few in the media have seized on it.

Turn to page 11 of the panel's report on "The Military," released March 23. There you'll find this little gem, which further confirms White House terror czar Richard Clarke's claim that Bush made fighting al-Qaida a low priority:

"Lower-level officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told us that they thought the new team was focused on other issues, and was not especially interested in their counterterrorism agenda."

What other issues? "Working with the Russians on agreements to dissolve the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and preparing a new nuclear arms control pact," the report said.

Counterterrorism policy, meanwhile, was on the slow track, even though al-Qaida had hit the USS Cole just months earlier. In fact, there wasn't even anyone formulating it before 9/11. The guy in charge left with the Clinton administration, and Rumsfeld didn't bother to replace him.

Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.

"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."

A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.

In comedy, as in politics, timing is everything. You have to wonder just what George W. Bush was thinking on the night of Wednesday, March 24, when he decided to do stand-up at the end of the most gripping day of 9/11 television since 9/11 itself.

That afternoon had brought Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission, a classic piece of Washington committee-room theater. Mr. Clarke's mea culpa Β"Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you" is likely to join our history's greatest-hits video reel, alongside Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency, sir?," Howard Baker's "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" and Clarence Thomas's "high-tech lynching." That evening, Tom Brokaw, generally the least contentious (and most watched) of the three network anchors, took the startling step of giving Condoleezza Rice the first hard slap of her heretofore charmed life in the public eye: "Dr. Rice, with all due respect, I think a lot of people are watching this tonight, saying: `Well, she can appear on television, write commentary, but she won't appear before the commission under oath. It just doesn't seem to make sense.' " As indeed it did not, to anyone.

Was this the best night for the president to do a comedy routine touching on his administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Maybe you had to be in the hall; an annual black-tie dinner for broadcast journalists in Washington; as I was not. But as Howard Dean learned in Iowa, it's only how you come across on TV that matters in America, not what it feels like in the moment. On TV, Mr. Bush's jocular slide show, in which he is seen searching for Saddam's arsenal in the Oval Office, proved an unwanted bookend to Mr. Clarke's opening act. A nation of viewers that had watched a public servant mourn the unnecessary loss of American life on 9/11 now saw the president make light of the rationale that necessitated the sacrifice of an additional 500-plus Americans (so far) in the war fought in 9/11's name.

There will be many more such whipsaw days of television to come. This drama has legs.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed and at least 10 wounded in an ambush in a Baghdad neighborhood Sunday, a senior coalition official told CNN.

The killings in the Shiite majority Sadr City came on a day that saw deadly clashes between protesters and coalition forces in the holy city of Najaf, fighting in Baghdad and a car bombing in Kirkuk.

Iraq was wracked today by its most violent civil disturbances since the occupation started, with a coordinated Shiite uprising spreading across the country, from the slums of Baghdad to several cities in the south.

By day's end, witnesses said Shiite militiamen controlled the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, with armed men loyal to a radical cleric occupying the town's police stations and checkpoints. More than eight people were killed by Spanish forces in a similar uprising in the neighboring town of Najaf.

In Baghdad, American tanks battled militiamen loyal to Moqtada Al Sadr, the radical cleric who has denounced the occupation and has an army of thousands of young followers.

At nightfall today, the Sadr City neighborhood shook with explosions and tank and machine gun fire. Black smoke choked the sky. The streets were lined with armed militiamen, dressed in all black. American tanks surrounded the area. Attack helicopters thundered overhead.

"The occupation is over!" people on the streets yelled. "We are now controlled by Sadr. The Americans should stay out."

President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.
According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy.

As she traverses the world, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, evokes a different kind of laughter - the snortling and snickering that comes when a third-rate, irredeemably conventional intellect pretends to elucidate important global complexities to an audience made up of people more intelligent, more experienced, and much better informed than she is.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says it's baffling and embarrassing that President Bush is appearing before the Sept. 11 commission with Vice President Dick Cheney at his side instead of by himself.
"I think it speaks to the lack of confidence that the administration has in the president going forth alone, period," Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday. "It's embarrassing to the president of the United States that they won't let him go in without holding the hand of the vice president of the United States."

"I think it reinforces the idea that the president cannot go it alone," she said. "The president should stand tall, walk in the room himself and answer the questions."

For years, we’ve said that the press corps works from “scripts.” There has never been a better time to nail down this seminal concept.

We refer to this week’s most widely-typed tale—the script about Condi Rice and al Qaeda. In his book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke makes a naughty suggestion. He describes the briefing given to Rice in January 2001. “As I briefed Rice on al Qaeda,” he writes, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.” Result? A string of scribes have stood in line to insist that Clarke’s impression was wrong. Their evidence? An October 2000 radio interview in which Rice mentioned Osama bin Laden, but didn’t use the term “al Qaeda.” For the record, Clarke says it wasn’t just Condi. “Most senior officials in the administration did not know the term when we briefed them,” he writes in his book.

Did Condi know the term “al Qaeda?” Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t have a clue. But this utterly trivial topic has produced the press corps’ script-of-the-week. Eager scribes have stood in line to recite the refutation-of-Clarke. To see Lisa Myers recite the script, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/31/04.

But what exactly is a “script?” Rice-knew-al-Qaeda helps explain it. Let’s nail three crucial points:

A script can be totally trivial: Clarke’s book concerns matters of life and death—the sorts of things your “press corps” avoids. Your press corps adores the Totally Trivial, and Rice-knew-al-Qaeda clearly qualifies. Clarke devotes one sentence to the matter. Absolutely nothing turns on it. Despite that, a long string of “journalists” have flogged the topic. Pointlessness can’t stop a script.

A script can be totally wrong: Plainly, Rice’s interview doesn’t show that she knew the term “al Qaeda.” A schoolchild could see that quite well. Despite this, a string of scribes have stood in line to pretend that the interview does show such knowledge. As far as we know, no one has yet turned up a case in which Rice did use the term “al Qaeda.” But so what? The Washington press corps’ greatest scripts are almost always factually bogus! The concept of accuracy is no longer part of your press corps’ dysfunctional culture.

Everybody has to say it: A script can be trivial—and a script can be wrong. But everybody has to recite it! In the case of Rice-knew-al-Qaeda, the script began with hapless Sean Hannity, a pundit for whom no claim is too stupid. But Hannity was only the first of many to voice this inaccurate script. Comically, Myers included the script in a “Truth Squad” segment. Evan Thomas put the script right at the top of his Newsweek report. Michiko Kakutani repeated the tale in a New York Times book review. What’s the sign that everyone said it? Bill Kristol even voiced the script, on last weekend’s Fox News Sunday. Kristol always thinks for himself. Just how vital was this script? Even Kristol was willing to mouth it.

The topic was trivial. The claim was wrong. Despite that, everyone lined up to say it! The script expressed Conventional Wisdom—Darling Condi can’t be wrong. The press reached this judgment a long time ago, and they have no current plan to rethink it. So this week, they insulted your intelligence, again and again, reciting a tale that is patently bogus. We’ve tried to tell you, for many years, about your press corps’ blatant dysfunction. This week, they had a better idea. They decided to show you themselves.

"This is now a nonfunctioning institution," . . . "The White House and the Republican leadership refuse to permit the Senate to vote on basic issues like the minimum wage, overtime pay and unemployment insurance. But we are strongly committed to bringing those issues back time and time and time again."

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Thursday that it was pressing the White House to explain why the Bush administration had blocked thousands of pages of classified foreign policy and counterterrorism documents from former President Bill Clinton's White House files from being turned over to the panel's investigators.

The White House confirmed on Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Mr. Clinton's files that had been gathered by the National Archives over the last two years in response to requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the attacks.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," while others were withheld because they were "highly sensitive" and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways. "We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job," Mr. McClellan said.

The commission and the White House were reacting to public complaints from former aides to Mr. Clinton, who said they had been surprised to learn in recent months that three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of files the former president was ready to offer the commission had been withheld by the Bush administration. The former aides said the files contained highly classified documents about the Clinton administration's efforts against Al Qaeda.

The commission said it was awaiting a full answer from the White House on why any documents were withheld.

WASHINGTON - Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to allow President Bush's chief health-policy adviser, Douglas Badger, to testify Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee about early administration estimates that the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit would be far more costly than many lawmakers believed when they voted for it.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the decision not to let Badger testify was justified by the longstanding principle that exempts assistants to the president from testifying before Congress.

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.

The text also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.

Some Fallujah residents today vowed to repel U.S. forces if they raid the city.

"We will not let any foreigner enter Fallujah," said Sameer Sami, 40. "Yesterday's attack is proof of how much we hate the Americans."

Another resident, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, 30, said: "We wish that they (U.S. forces) would try to enter Fallujah so we'd let hell break lose."

In the first year of war in Iraq, the military has made 18,004 medical evacuations during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon's top health official told Congress Tuesday.

The new data, through March 13, is nearly two-thirds higher than the 11,200 evacuations through Feb. 5 cited just last month to Congress by the same official, William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.

Soldiers described being deployed to war with serious medical conditions and then getting poor and erratic health care upon return -- including months-long waits for doctors, surgeries or treatments. United Press International first reported that problem last October. . . The soldiers also described widespread concern about being put out of the military without fair compensation for wounds and illnesses they received during service.

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in a time of great crisis, maintain their neutrality."

-Dante, as cited by Richard Clarke in his high school yearbook.

The Environmental Protection Agency is failing to act against widespread violations of the Clean Water Act by plants and factories across the country, the U.S. Public Research Interest Group said yesterday based on a study it conducted.

More than 60 percent of all major facilities in the United States, or 3,700 out of 6,184, exceeded their Clean Water Act permit limits on discharges into waterways at least once between January 1, 2002, and June 30, 2003, according to the report. The facilities include manufacturing and electronic plants, as well as wastewater treatment and sewage plants.

"The numbers point out that enforcement is not a priority for this administration, and clearly little to nothing is being done to deter polluters from breaking the law," said Richard Caplan, the environmental advocate who authored the report for PIRG, a consumer advocacy group.

In one of the bloodiest days in weeks for the U.S. military, five troops died when a bomb exploded under their military vehicle west of Baghdad on Wednesday. At least four foreign nationals, including one American, were killed in a separate attack and some of the bodies were burned, beaten and hanged from a bridge.

— President Bush campaigned in Wisconsin on Tuesday, saying he was optimistic about the economy and urging Americans to have faith in their ability to compete with the rest of the world rather than taking refuge behind what he called "economic isolationism."

$1 billion increase already built into the legislation was sufficient. "The idea that there isn't enough money out there for day care is a ruse," Santorum said. "What this is about is a social policy that people should be more and more dependent upon government."

A bomb attack on the Australian high commission in Kuala Lumpur yesterday has raised concerns that anti-Western terrorism may have arrived in Malaysia - a country largely immune from the violent unrest that has spread across South-East Asia over the past few years.

We have it on semi-reliable authority that the Bush administration's next attempt to discount Richard Clarke's credibility will consist of alleging that he's a big gay. We have a little trouble figuring out how being gay makes you unable to assess threats to a country's national security -- after all, we trust them to tell us what to wear. Still, it is a great strategy.

That is, as long as you don't believe there any other homosexuals on the Bush national security team.

In a sweeping assessment, the report identifies weaknesses in "almost every aspect of U.S. biopreparedness and response." But perhaps equally significant is the two-year battle over the Pentagon's refusal to release the study. That struggle highlights the growing tension between public access to information and the government's refusal to divulge anything it says terrorists could use to attack Americans.

The Senate's top cop investigated Republican hacking of Democratic accounts and theft of thousands of documents. After finding probable cause for wrongdoing, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended the Justice Department undertake its own criminal probe.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are both investigating intelligence lapses heading up to the Iraq War.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating Bush's pre-war lies about Iraq's WMDs and ties to al Qaida.

Rove, Cheney's entire political team and others are being investigated by a Justice Department special prosecutor for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent (Plame) to discredit her husband -- a critic of the administration's trumped up charges that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Niger.

Can anyone forget the 9-11 commission?

HHS Inspector General Dara Corrigan is investigating administration lies about the true cost of the Medicare bill. Remember, not only did the Bush Administration undercount the costs (from $395 billion to $521 billion), but then threatened an auditor with his job if he revealed the true numbers.

The General Accounting Office is investigating the fake "news reports" the White House created to promote the Medicare law's new prescription drug coverage provisions.

And being the gift that keeps on giving, the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee and the Justice Department are both (and seperately) investigating bribery allegations as the administration and its congressional allies twisted arms to get the necessary votes in the House to pass the Medicare bill.

Tom DeLay is under criminal investigation on whether his Texas political action committee (Texans for a Republican Majority) improperly financed the GOP's takeover of the Texas legislature. DeLay has already signaled he may be forced to step down from his leadership post (even if just temporarily) if indicted.

Connecticut Governor John Rowland is being investigated by federal prosecutors for a shockingly brazen level of corruption. Even the state's GOP establishment has abandoned the governor, and impeachment proceedings are likely unless he resigns his post.

"I am . . . troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their . . . service as a government insider with access to our nation?s most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001."

The jury verdict was hailed by the Bush administration as a major victory in the nation's war on terror. One other defendant was convicted of document fraud; a fourth was acquitted.
But an array of problems now threaten to unravel those verdicts. Among them:

· An ongoing court-ordered review has found the government withheld more than 100 documents from the defense, including CIA intelligence reports. Also withheld was an interview with a man who claimed the prosecution's star witness admitted lying to investigators.
· The government's key witness, Youssef Hmimssa, is a serial con man who was wanted for crimes in Europe and had lied to U.S. authorities before. During 20 hours of interrogating Hmimssa about terrorism--often without his attorney present--FBI agents took few notes.
· Before the trial began, the government deported at least two witnesses who challenged the prosecution's case.
· In at least one file prosecutors handed over to defense lawyers, a page with information critical to the defense was missing, defense lawyers say.
· Violations of a court gag order by Ashcroft and government leaks raise concerns about whether the defendants got a fair trial.

The summit meeting of Arab leaders billed as the first serious effort to make a collective commitment to democratic reforms ended Saturday before it began, with the host nation, Tunisia, insisting that it be postponed indefinitely.

In a statement, the Tunisian government said it felt that the commitment of Arab states toward reforms — from human rights to a greater role for women — was insufficient for the 22 foreign ministers gathered here to hammer out an agreement on common goals that the heads of state would endorse.

The first laws giving gay people the right to 'marry' are to be unveiled this week in one of the most significant changes to Britain's social make-up since the passing of equal opportunities legislation in the 1960s.

JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true?
RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it.

JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue?

RC: Its not true.

An American soldier died in a bomb blast north of Baghdad today amid warnings that attacks will increase with fewer than 100 days left before the coalition hands over sovereignty.

President George Bush sparked a political firestorm yesterday after making what many judged a tasteless and ill-judged joke about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Pre-9/11 Intelligence

CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]
CLAIM: In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the Administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]
FACT: According to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]
CLAIM: "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high we were at battle stations." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'" Meanwhile, the Bush Administration decided to terminate "a highly classified program to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04; Newsweek, 3/21/04]
CLAIM: "The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"]
CLAIM: "Our [pre-9/11 NSPD] plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: 9/11 Commissioner Gorelick: "There is nothing in the NSPD that came out that we could find that had an invasion plan, a military plan." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: "Right." Gorelick: "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" Armitage: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11." [Source: 9/11 Commission testimony, 3/24/04]
Condi Rice on Pre-9/11 Counterterrorism Funding

CLAIM: "The president increased counterterrorism funding several-fold" before 9/11. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/24/04
FACT: According to internal government documents, the first full Bush budget for FY2003 "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the Administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism." [Source: New York Times, 2/28/04; Newsweek, 5/27/02]
Richard Clarke's Concerns

CLAIM: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11. [Source: CBS 60 Minutes, 3/24/04; White House Press Release, 3/21/04
CLAIM: "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "On January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice." ? 9/11 Commission staff report, 3/24/04
Response to 9/11

CLAIM: "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11." ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04]
9/11 and Iraq Invasion Plans

CLAIM: "Not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side." ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." [Source: Washington Post, 1/12/03. CBS News, 9/4/02]
Iraq and WMD

CLAIM: "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/18/04
FACT: The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04]
9/11-al Qaeda-Iraq Link

CLAIM: "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." ? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "we don't know" if there is a connection. [Source: BBC, 9/14/03]

The US Department of Defense planned inadequately for the initial stages of postwar Iraq reconstruction and "cut corners" in awarding and monitoring contracts using taxpayers' money, according to a Pentagon report.

The Pentagon last year awarded 24 contracts to companies to provide consulting and media support to the US occupying authorities in Baghdad. But the department's inspector-general was asked to review the $122m of contracts after military auditors found "irregularities".

"The Department of Defense did not plan for the acquisition support that the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance required to perform its mission," the report said. "As a result, supplies and service were quickly acquired and contracting rules were either circumvented or liberally interpreted."

The Bush administration has been plagued by criticism of its handling of post-war Iraq reconstruction with allegations of cronyism and incompetence in the awarding of contracts. The inspector-general has separately launched a criminal investigation into charges that Halliburton, the oil services company formerly run by Vice-president Dick Cheney, overcharged the US government for fuel imports.

The White House may have sent a phalanx of top officials to Capitol Hill this week to be grilled by the Sept. 11 panel, but the one official who did not appear publicly has turned out to be the official the panel wanted most: Condoleezza Rice.
As she prepares to leave her job at the end of the year, Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser, now finds herself at the center of a political storm, furiously defending both the White House and her own reputation.

Randall Robinson, who accompanied Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on his historic return trip back to the Caribbean, reveals that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice is telling the Jamaican government if Aristide is not immediately expelled from the country and anything happens to American forces in Haiti, consequences would be exacted against Jamaica in full force by the U.S.

As we all know, Condi Rice has refused to appear before the September 11 Commission. But what if she had decided to appear? What would her opening statement have looked like? Let's write some testimony for her!

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has begun quiet discussions with a handful of colleagues about the possibility that he will have to step down from his leadership post temporarily if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating alleged campaign finance abuses.

...Republican Conference rules state that a member of the elected leadership who has been indicted on a felony carrying a penalty of at least two years in prison must temporarily step down from the post.

Of course, the Selective Service System doesn't call it a "draft." In their lexicon of acronyms it's a "Registrant Integrated Processing System": RIPS, for short. The acronym's horrible irony ? Rest In Peace, anyone? ? seems to have been lost on the bureaucrats.

The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq warned on Monday that the United States is in "grave danger" of destroying its credibility at home and abroad if it does not own up to its mistakes in Iraq.

"The cost of our mistakes ... with regard to the explanation of why we went to war in Iraq are far greater than Iraq itself," David Kay said in a speech at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

"We are in grave danger of having destroyed our credibility internationally and domestically with regard to warning about future events," he said. "The answer is to admit you were wrong, and what I find most disturbing around Washington ... is the belief ... you can never admit you're wrong."

The comments by Kay came as the White House sought to fend off accusations from its former anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, who said President Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and focused on Iraq rather than the Islamic militant group afterward.

At yesterday's Capitol Hill ceremony honoring civil rights icon Dorothy Height, the comedian was supposed to be seated next to President Bush's national security adviser - whose role in the run-up to 9/11 and its aftermath has come under intense scrutiny and heavy fire.

But according to Republican sources, shortly before the proceedings commenced in the Capitol Rotunda - where Bush presented the 92-year-old Height with the Congressional Gold Medal - Cosby's assistant informed an event organizer that Cosby would prefer to sit elsewhere.

The request was accommodated, I'm told.

John F. Lehman, the former secretary of the Navy, probably wishes he didn't ask Richard Clarke about Iraq today. By doing so, he not only helped Clarke emerge as a new folk hero. Lehman also increased the chances that historians will view Clarke's devastating critique of Bush's terrorism and Iraq agenda as the beginning of the end of the Bush administration.

The forum for all this was Richard Clarke's testimony in front of the bipartisan commission investigating terrorism and September 11. Clarke, of course, is the giant-killer and tell-all author whose recent release, Against All Enemies, blew the roof off of President Bush's claim to be a war president.

Until Lehman's question, Clarke hadn't mentioned Iraq, though he'd quietly and effectively ripped President Bush to shreds for his failure to take terrorism seriously. "The Bush administration considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue," said Clarke. "George Tenet [the CIA director] and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency. I don't think it was ever treated that way."

So Lehman, acting like a hatchet man for the White House, which has launched an all-out assault on Clarke, took him on?but on Iraq. In all your 15 hours of classified testimony to the commission before today, he asked, why didn't you say that you felt the president was so wrong about Iraq and the link to terrorism? Clarke was ready. "No one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," said Clarke, matter-of-factly. "By invading Iraq, the president has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Somewhere, there is someone who may believe that killing an old man in a wheelchair will make Israel safer. The reality is that by killing Ahmed Yassin, Israel will strengthen Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian national movement and the PLO.

The Medicare system's financial condition has deteriorated sharply during the past year, according to a government forecast that says the program has been weakened by the new Medicare law that Republicans had said would solidify its future.

What a blast we're having in Iraq. And no wonder. Our main man there, Ahmed Chalabi, is less trusted by Iraqis than even Saddam Hussein. A comprehensive new poll of Iraqis (which somehow didn't make big news over here) reveals that Iraqis don't really have a favorite "national leader." Big surprise. But when they were asked, "Which one do you not trust at all?" the leader of the pack was Chalabi, the U.S. stooge who helped propagandize us into invading his ex-country. Chalabi garnered 10.3 percent of the disgust. A distant second was Saddam, with 3.3 percent. Not too good for a tyrant, Saddam. Let's pick up the pace. Oh, I forgot. We captured you and then sent a nattily dressed Chalabi into your cell to grill you when what you really needed was a shave and a shower. If Chalabi has any good qualities, they're harder to find than a WMD. In answer to the question "Which national leader in Iraq, if any do you trust the most?" Saddam fared better than Chalabi again, 3.3 percent to 0.2 percent. (None and Not Sure got nearly 60 percent, and Ibrahim Jaaferi was the leading human with 7.7.)

Republicans have demanded he name names of leaders supposedly supporting him, chastised him for taking politics beyond the water's edge and pointed out that overseas cheering sections don't make a whiff of difference in a U.S. presidential campaign.

But the central point that Kerry made and probably wishes he didn't has stood largely unchallenged: that opposition to Bush is widespread in foreign capitals and a variety of politicians are privately - in a few bold cases, publicly - rooting for the president to lose.

Political consultants and analysts said Clarke's allegation that Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11 attacks and was obsessed by a desire to invade Iraq were especially damaging because they confirmed other previous revelations from policy insiders.

"Each of these revelations adds to the others so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the message gets reinforced with voters," said Richard Rosecrance, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Before Clarke, there was former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who asserted in a book published in January that Bush began laying the groundwork for an attack on Iraq from the moment he took office.

Then came the bombshell from former weapons inspector David Kay that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Bush launched the war to find and destroy probably did not exist.

We have watched the painful struggle in Haiti over the past 10 years, as Jean-Bertrand Aristide squandered his opportunity to build a foundation for progress. Democracy means more than elections. It means respecting the rule of law and supporting a vibrant, robust civil society. Aristide destroyed these principles in Haiti and replaced them with corruption and violence. Groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus, who claim to support democracy yet focus on Aristide's election, exacerbate his betrayal of the Haitian people.

With one exception - the actual military "victory," which looks increasingly Pyrrhic - President Bush's Iraqi adventure has been marked by repeated failures. Scant signs of weapons of mass destruction have been found, and, according to David Kay, America's chief arms inspector, the stockpiles either never existed or were destroyed years ago. So Bush simply ignored the data, gathered by Hans Blix's UN inspectors, and the evidence on which he based his case for war seems to have been largely fabricated.

Worse still, it is now clear that Bush never had a plan for when the war ended. Instead of moving towards peace and democracy, the situation in Iraq remains so dangerous that Paul Bremer, the American occupation leader, is using instability as his rationale for avoiding democratic elections this year.

Of course, America tried to keep real order in some places, revealing a lot about what it truly valued in Iraq. When Baghdad fell, the oil ministry was quickly protected, while museums and hospitals were allowed to be looted.

If there was not outright corruption in the $7 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton, whose former chairman was Vice President Dick Cheney, there was undoubtedly a strong whiff of crony capitalism. Halliburton and its subsidiaries have been ensnared in charges of war profiteering ever since, and have had to pay back millions of dollars to the US government.

Now, everyone agrees, the most important task - beyond creating a democratic state and restoring security - is reconstructing the economy. Blinded by ideology, however, the Bush administration seems determined to continue its record of dismal failures by ignoring past experience.

Jay Garner, the US general abruptly dismissed as Iraq's first occupation administrator after a month in the job, says he fell out with the Bush circle because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed program of privatization.

On the news talk shows this morning and in speeches throughout the day, the Bush administration tries to justify the war with Iraq by calling Saddam Hussein “the most dangerous man in the world.”

But the most dangerous man in the world is not sitting in a jail cell somewhere in Iraq,

He is not hiding out in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

Not really. The most dangerous man in the world may well be working out of an oval-shaped office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

Today, in a world of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and states that sponsor the former and pursue the latter, defending freedom means we must confront dangers before it is too late. In Iraq, for 12 years, through 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions, the world gave Saddam Hussein every opportunity to avoid war. He was being held to a simple standard: live up to your agreement at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war; disarm and prove you have done so. Instead of disarming — as Kazakhstan, South Africa and Ukraine did, and as Libya is doing today — Saddam Hussein chose deception and defiance.

Repeatedly, he rejected those resolutions and he systematically deceived United Nations inspectors about his weapons and his intent. The world knew his record: he used chemical weapons against Iran and his own citizens; he invaded Iran and Kuwait; he launched ballistic missiles at Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and his troops repeatedly fired on American and British aircraft patrolling the no-flight zones.

Hundreds of District children younger than 6 who were tested in recent weeks had blood lead levels at least 47 percent higher than the national average for their age group and health officials should develop more systematic testing to find out why, an expert on lead poisoning said yesterday.

Two-faced, weasel-eyed, snake-tongued, pea-brained, chicken-shit, self-centered, mendacious asshole...swear to Elvis, I do NOT understand what almost half my fellow countrymen see in this..."man". This loathesome puppet. This strutting fool. This puffed-up poppin jay. This disgusting pimple orbiting the asshole of existence. How can anyone, in good conscience and entrusted with the leadership of his fellows, get up in front of those same fellows and lie with such impunity? And then how can that same craven wastrel send kids - KIDS - and men with families to fight and kill and die in a muddled mess of a country for...a lie?

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, encountering the other side of a tempestuous debate in the United States, sought to assure Indians on Tuesday that the Bush administration would not try to halt the outsourcing of high-technology jobs to their country.

What's happening in Syria has all the hallmarks of a classic, 1950s-era, Cold War-style CIA coup d'etat scheme.

First, on March 7 a gaggle of demonstrators—no more than 20 to 30, according to The New York Times on March 8—was squelched by Syrian police, who arrested not only the demonstrators but swooped up a "junior diplomat from the American Embassy," says the Times. "The United States government protested the detention of the American diplomat to the Syrian government, a spokesman for the embassy told The Associated Press." Now the question is: what was a "junior diplomat" from the United States doing there in the first place. Could he have been from the CIA? (Syria is wondering the same thing.)

Second, the Bush administration is going to announce sanctions against Syria this week, thanks to a law passed by Congress demanding them.

In a talk to a crowd of 1,200 people on Monday night at New York University, Mr. Blix said he did not share the Bush administrations' view that the war had made the world a safer place.

"Sorry to say it doesn't look that way," he said. "If the aim was to send a signal to terrorists that we are determined to take you on, that has not succeeded. In Iraq, it has bred a lot of terrorism and a lot of hatred to the Western world."

President Bush returned to Pennsylvania on Monday to promote efforts to increase the number of Americans who own their homes. He paid a call to the new house of a woman with six children who cleared up her credit enough to sign a mortgage for the first time last year, but the subtext of his visit was to lavish attention on a state he is working hard to carry in the November elections.
. . .
.Repeating a format he has used often since January to talk up his economic policies, he staged a "conversation" with a small group of people who support his views on housing -- or are success stories themselves.

Increasing the proportion of Americans who can buy a house has been a prong of Bush's agenda of "compassionate conservatism" since his 2000 campaign.

Consumer debt is hitting record levels. The federal budget deficit is yawning ever larger. The trade gap? Don't even ask.

Many mainstream economists are worried about these trends, but Alan Greenspan, arguably the most powerful and influential economist in the land, is not as concerned.

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality. The truth is that Mr. Bush, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of an unrelated war, has shown consistent reluctance to focus on the terrorists who actually attacked America, or their backers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

This reluctance dates back to Mr. Bush's first months in office. Why, after all, has his inner circle tried so hard to prevent a serious investigation of what happened on 9/11? There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

Bush wants to claim that with the new Constitution passed, power will be turned over to Iraqis after June of this year.

It's a lie.

The new government under the new constitution will be barred from overturning any laws that the US has imposed on the country since the Occupation.

When I asked him in an interview Thursday if he was sending a message to Kerry, Frank said, "It's a message for all Democrats. What I'm saying is we're in a situation now where we need the government, and where is it? We've cut taxes, we've criticized bureaucracy, we've almost condemned the public sector. I'm saying it's time to talk positively about government and use it to do what the private economy is no longer doing."

Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't had the time to study both economics and history:

1. There is no such thing as a "free market."

2. The "middle class" is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering).

The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System in the Twelfth Century. It's widely believed by those in power, those who challenge it are branded heretics and ridiculed, and it is wrong.

In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." Markets are the creation of government.

The war on terrorism and in Iraq has distracted much of the world's attention from the pressing issue of how globalization should be managed so that it benefits everyone. A new report, issued by the International Labor Organization's commission on the social dimensions of globalization, reminds us how far the Bush administration is out of line with the global consensus. The ILO is a tripartite Organization's with representatives of Labor, government and business. The commission, chaired by the presidents of Finland and Tanzania, has 24 members (of whom I was one) drawn from different nationalities, interest groups and intellectual persuasions, including members as diverse as the head of Toshiba and the leader of the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations. Yet this very heterogeneous group was able to crystallize the emerging consensus, that globalization - despite its positive potential - has not only failed to live up to that potential, but has actually contributed to social distress.

The fault lies with how globalization has been managed - partly by countries but, most importantly, by the international community, including institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization's and the IMF, which are responsible for establishing the "rules of the game". The commission even reached consensus on a number of concrete measures to help put a "human face" on globalization, or at least mitigate some of its worst effects.

The gap between the emerging consensus on globalization, which this report reflects, and the Bush administration's international economic policies, helps explain the widespread hostility towards America's government.

The Environmental Protection Agency incorrectly claimed to have met its goals of ensuring that at least 91 percent of the nation's drinking water was meeting federal health-based standards from 1999 to 2002, the agency's inspector general says.
"The agency reported meeting its annual performance goal for drinking water quality even though it concurrently reported that the data used to draw those conclusions were flawed and incomplete," the EPA IG's office said in a report this week. "EPA's own analysis, supported by our review, indicated the correct number was unknown but less than what was reported."

Pentagon auditors found a Halliburton Co. subsidiary gave faulty cost estimates on a $2.7 billion contract to serve American troops in Iraq and Kuwait, and company officials acknowledged making mistakes, Defense Department documents show.

Living proof that the Democrats haven't gotten any smarter since the last time they ran a candidate for president. Much huffing (and a huffy Democrat is a terrifying sight) over the fact that George W. Bush used images of 9-11 and of the firefighters at Ground Zero to tout his candidacy in his first campaign ad. How crass, said the D's. Exploiting a national tragedy for political purposes – oh, how tacky.

Dammit, the problem is not that the ad is in bad taste, the problem is that Bush screwed the firefighters in a famous case of his favorite bait-and-switch tactic, and now he has the chutzpah to exploit them anyway and that, my friends, is gall. Bait, switch and then claim credit anyway.

For those of you who have forgotten what happened (apparently including the entire Bush campaign): Shortly after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush promised a $3.5 billion aid package to provide equipment and training in dealing with such attacks to local police and fire departments. For over 18 months, no money appeared, and when money finally did appear, it was nowhere near the promised levels (hey, he had to cut those taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans).

Furthermore, the New York City firefighters who worked Ground Zero were specifically screwed. They were promised $90 million to monitor the long-term health effects of breathing in all that ash for months while they cleaned up. The money was to have been included in the overall post 9-11 aid package for New York City, but it got shifted to another bill that Bush rejected the following August. About half the workers screened before the money ran out suffered from respiratory problems.

Republicans in Congress twice voted down first-responder money. New York's congressional delegation, led by Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, put up a huge battle before the long-promised $90 million was finally pried out of a reluctant Congress and White House, but the responder money is still not fully funded to this good day.

The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.

When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.

Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, one of the 13 Republicans, said she was "very upset" when she learned of the higher estimate.

"I think a lot of people probably would have reconsidered (voting for the bill) because we said that $400 billion was our top of the line," Myrick said.

Living proof that the Democrats haven't gotten any smarter since the last time they ran a candidate for president. Much huffing (and a huffy Democrat is a terrifying sight) over the fact that George W. Bush used images of 9-11 and of the firefighters at Ground Zero to tout his candidacy in his first campaign ad. How crass, said the D's. Exploiting a national tragedy for political purposes – oh, how tacky.

Dammit, the problem is not that the ad is in bad taste, the problem is that Bush screwed the firefighters in a famous case of his favorite bait-and-switch tactic, and now he has the chutzpah to exploit them anyway and that, my friends, is gall. Bait, switch and then claim credit anyway.

For those of you who have forgotten what happened (apparently including the entire Bush campaign): Shortly after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush promised a $3.5 billion aid package to provide equipment and training in dealing with such attacks to local police and fire departments. For over 18 months, no money appeared, and when money finally did appear, it was nowhere near the promised levels (hey, he had to cut those taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans).

Furthermore, the New York City firefighters who worked Ground Zero were specifically screwed. They were promised $90 million to monitor the long-term health effects of breathing in all that ash for months while they cleaned up. The money was to have been included in the overall post 9-11 aid package for New York City, but it got shifted to another bill that Bush rejected the following August. About half the workers screened before the money ran out suffered from respiratory problems.

Republicans in Congress twice voted down first-responder money. New York's congressional delegation, led by Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, put up a huge battle before the long-promised $90 million was finally pried out of a reluctant Congress and White House, but the responder money is still not fully funded to this good day.

Despite disingenuous statements put out by the White House ("There's more assistance going to state and local officials than ever before"), Bush is still behind on his initial commitment. You do not have to be an ace Washington reporter to figure this out. Ask your local fire department.

You can see that this is already shaping up as a campaign where the media observe Kerry under a microscope (has he switched to earth-tones yet?) and neglect to point out the obvious facts about Bush's record. Kerry, say the Republicans solemnly, is given to flip-flopping. Kerry is?

Let's just start counting off the top of our heads: George W. Bush was opposed to a commission to investigate how and why 9-11 occurred, but then he changed his mind and backed it. (Political pressure.) He was certainly opposed to a commission to investigate the intelligence failures on Iraq, but then he changed his mind and backed it. (Political pressure.) He now brags, "I went to the U.N. (before invading Iraq)"? Who recalls why he changed his mind about doing that? He originally said he not only did not need to consult the United Nations, he said he did not even have to consult the U.S. Congress.

Anyone remember how Bush, the corporate ethicist of Harken Energy, opposed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill? Sarbanes-Oxley was a mildly reformist piece of legislation deemed slightly necessary in the wake of the staggering accounting scandals that caused the collapse of Enron, Tyco and WorldCom. There seemed to be a new record-bankruptcy every week, but our president didn't think we needed any new laws to prevent such things, my no. When did he change his mind and decide to sign it? After it passed the House of Representatives with one vote against it.

Remember when we weren't gong to negotiate with North Korea? Then we weren't gong to negotiate with North Korea again, but we would "talk" to North Korea, but only in multilateral "talking," until Bush changed his mind yet again and now we're in multilateral negotiations.

Remember when the United Nations was "unnecessary" and "irrelevant," and boy was Bush ever ready to tell them to go jump in the lake? We now think the United Nations is so useful and necessary, we call on it not just for Iraq, but Haiti and other trouble spots, as well.

Remember when we didn't need any civilian or international advice about how to pacify and reconstruct Iraq, our military could do it just fine, thank you?

Remember when "nation-building" was a dirty word?

Boy, that John Kerry, he just flip-flops all the time, doesn't he?

Molly Ivins is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Remember the elementary school lesson "How a Bill Becomes a Law"? Well, George W. Bush and Republican Leadership in Congress redefined lawmaking when they forced their Medicare law through Congress. And a brief look at the gnarled twists and turns taken as this bill became law should make any student of American democracy shudder.

desperately hoped that early reports of the Saudi role had been exaggerated -- after all, al-Qaida terrorist operatives were known to use false passports. But at 10 P.M. on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, about 36 hours after the attack, a high-ranking CIA official -- according to Newsweek, it was probably CIA director George Tenet -- phoned Bandar at his home and gave him the bad news: Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Afterward, Bandar said, "I felt as if the Twin Towers had just fallen on my head."

Six months after promising to create an office to help the nation's struggling manufacturers, President Bush settled on someone to head it, but the nomination was being reconsidered last night after Democrats revealed that his candidate had opened a factory in China.

The Bush campaign is demanding an apology from Sen. John Kerry after the presumptive Democratic nominee called his Republican opponents the "most crooked ... lying group of people I've ever seen."

A Kerry spokesman later said the senator wasn't referring to the president but to those behind what he characterized as a GOP attack "machine."

America's trade deficit mushroomed to an all-time high of $43.1 billion in January as sales of foreign-made goods hovered near record levels.

The trade gap reported by the Commerce Department on Wednesday was 0.9 percent larger than the $42.7 billion deficit registered in December.

January's trade deficit swelled as the value of imported goods and services eclipsed the value of U.S. exports.
. . .
The United States' trade deficit with oil-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, grew to $4.7 billion in January, the highest level since April 2003. The average price per barrel of imported crude oil in January, meanwhile, climbed to $28.55, the highest since March 2003.

The trade deficit is important because it means the rest of world holds IOUs from the United States, usually in the form of government securities.

In other words, instead of Americans saving in U.S. markets, foreigners are, and interest payments and principle on government debt are flowing outside the country.

Since the market for government bonds affects the interest rate, foreign countries could trigger a market crisis in the United States if they suddenly try to unload their U.S. securities. A sudden sell-off of Treasury bills would pressure interest rates to rise dramatically, slowing economic growth.

Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.

Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.

Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.

Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.

Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.

Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.

Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.

Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.

Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.

Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.

Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.

Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will

Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.

Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote

Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.

Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett accused the Bush administration Saturday of pursuing tax cuts that favor large corporations and wealthy individuals.

"If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning," Buffett said in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual report.

Except for 1983, the percentage of federal tax receipts from corporate income taxes last year was the lowest since data was first published in 1934, Buffett said.

Although the insurgency has cooled, with suicide attacks against civilians now eclipsing armed clashes with American troops, American forces are still conducting daily raids, bursting into homes and sweeping up families. More than 10,000 men and boys are in custody. According to a detainee database maintained by the military, the oldest prisoner is 75, the youngest 11.

The severity of lead contamination in the District's water reveals serious weaknesses in the federal testing program and raises the prospect that other cities may have similar, undiscovered problems, according to federal officials, scientists and engineers.

"The deed is done. Haiti has been raped. The act was sanctioned by the United States, Canada and France." - Editorial, Jamaica Observer

colon Powell is "the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime." - transferals founder Randall Robinson

all the people that supported [Aristide] will be dead in three months.' - Haiti government attorney Ira Kurzban

The new order congeals like blood on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Haiti's dance of death begins anew, a convergence of low-life assassins, high-living compradors, preening French imperialists and global American pirates - an unspeakable bacchanal.

Momentum is building for the Global Day of Action against War and Occupation on March 20, 2004—the one-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On that day people all around the globe will take to the streets to say YES to peace and NO to pre-emptive war and occupation. In communities large and small around the United States and across the globe, we will call for an end to the occupation of Iraq and Bush's militaristic foreign policies.

Halliburton, a high-powered company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney, is under fire. Company employees allegedly overcharged the military for gasoline brought in to Iraq from Kuwait, accepted $6.3 million in kickbacks for steering subcontracts in Iraq to a Kuwaiti firm and stiffed the government for meals not served to soldiers. The company has received billions in Pentagon contracts to handle non-combat tasks, like laundry, meals and base-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, say analysts.

The Defense Department and State Department opened probes of Halliburton in late February. . . According to Hartung's analysis, Halliburton's prime contracts with the Pentagon jumped almost 700 percent, from $483 million in fiscal year 2002 to $3.9 billion in fiscal year 2003. That does not include a $1.2 billion contract to rebuild oil infrastructure in southern Iraq, approved amid concern about wrongdoing. The Pentagon awarded $209 billion in prime contracts in FY 2003, with the overall defense budget soaring to $400 billion a year and climbing, said Hartung.

Iraq is unraveling too fast for the Bush administration to have any hope of salvaging the U.S. position there. Here's my suggestion for U.S. policy: announce a firm date for the pullout of all U.S. forces from Iraq, say, by the end of 2004; state clearly that the U.S. does not want any bases or forward positions in Iraq after that; send Colin Powell to the U.N. to start negotiating the U.S. surrender, asking for a U.N. resolution for an international peacekeeping force led by Arab forces in Iraq; give full authority to Lakhdar Brahimi, the capable U.N. official who has reluctantly taken on the Iraq portfolio, to design both the transitional authority and to organize the elections; and then fire the neoconservatives who got us into this mess.

The U.S. can't prevent the disintegration of Iraq now. Maybe?just maybe?the U.N. can.

The EPA's preferred method of disposal of sewage sludge in the United States is land application. To get the public to accept this has required a concerted effort from government and the sludge-industry to make the public think that sludge is "organic," "nutrient-rich," and otherwise "beneficial." Calling sludge "compost" is the agency's latest trick. The proposal here to "compost" sludge is based on the dependable presence of human feces in sludge. Human feces do indeed consist largely of organic matter. But sludge consists only partly of human feces.

It is the purpose of wastewater treatment to extract from sewage-and to concentrate in sludge-all the pollutants in wastewater. The intended product of wastewater treatment is clean water. Sludge is the inevitable byproduct that, by definition and intention, consists of every waste material a given wastewater treatment plant is capable of removing, or is incidentally removed, from the sewage in the process of treating the wastewater. This means that, besides human urine and feces, tens of thousands of chemicals-organic and inorganic, teratogenic and carcinogenic, toxic and estrogen mimicking-will be present in the sludge.

The idea, therefore, of "treating" sludge so that it can become "compost," a "soil amendment," a "fertilizer"-is disingenuous. Once mixed together, the potential value of each and all of the materials concentrated in the sludge is lost. No "treatment" of sludge can "purify" the human excrement: once mixed with poisons, it too becomes a poison.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion (82 billion pounds) a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Centre attack annually.

"There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said in the report.

"The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe -- or it can avert it."

The report comes as a growing number of policy experts warn that the environment is emerging as the security threat of the 21st century, eclipsing terrorism.

Scientists expect global warming to trigger increasingly frequent and violent storms, heat waves, flooding, tornadoes, and cyclones while other areas slip into cold or drought.

"Sea levels will continue to rise, glaciers retreat and snow cover decline," the insurer wrote.

The United States is seeking to make more American farmers and industries exempt from an international ban on methyl bromide, a popular pesticide that damages Earth's protective ozone layer, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The White House's policy on research with human embryonic stem cells has been put under new pressure by the dismissal of a leading biologist from the President's Council on Bioethics last week and by the development, announced today, of new stem cell lines by a Harvard researcher.

The Agriculture Department tested fewer than 21,000 cows last year — compared with millions in Europe — but Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman has repeatedly said that amount is enough to assure that the country's beef is safe because it focuses on downers, which were more likely to be diseased. If the disease was found in a walking cow, the premise behind the testing system would be undermined.

March 4, 2004—On Tuesday, February 10, the White House released copies of George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard "retirement points" and payroll records from the years 1992 and 1993. During the daily press briefing that day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asserted no less than 12 times that the documents that were released showed that "the president [sic] fulfilled his duties.".

This is simply false. The criteria McClellan used had nothing to do with "fulfillment" of Bush's duty. And the documents demonstrate that Bush failed to do his duty under the laws and regulations of the United State and its Air Force during the last third of his six-year term.

The documents also demonstrate that, even under McClellan's incorrect criteria, Bush failed to do his duty during his last full year of service.

At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism." Recently, President Bush's Federal Appeals Court Nominee, California's Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown, repeated the same broadside at her Senate hearing. She knew that her pronouncement would please President Bush and Karl Rove and their Senators. President Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are leading a radical revolution of destroying all the democratic political, social, judiciary, and economic institutions that both Democrats and moderate Republicans had built together since Roosevelt's New Deal.

One year after its founding, the US Department of Homeland Security has just begun to grapple with one of its most challenging problems: defining what "homeland security" should mean to Americans decades hence.
. . .
But it's a Washington truism that huge security holes remain. Few shipping containers entering the country are inspected, for instance. National biodefense plans may be woefully incomplete. Overall, say some experts, the department lacks a vision. It's a question of time, as much as effort. DHS, as the department is called, needs to methodically

study threats, rank possible responses, and allocate limited funds accordingly, over time - as the Pentagon does for its operations. "Everyone knows the Department of Homeland Security was created out of 9/11, but we're not quite sure what it will look like 20 or 30 years from now," says Juliette Kayyem, a domestic preparedness expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Was it the flavor of the week, or will it have a cohesive strategy.

Chalabi is the Iraqi exile who now brags that his years of lobbying and coaxing American officialdom into war against Iraq have paid off.

He achieved his goal of dethroning Saddam Hussein by feeding the Bush administration his smarmy "intelligence" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. His neo-conservative friends here, mostly in the Pentagon, eagerly lapped up his blathering because they were looking for an excuse to attack Iraq. Chalabi, who can claim parenthood of the U.S.-led invasion, headed the Iraqi National Congress, which was formed in exile and nurtured with U.S. financial aid.

Last week, he gave an interview to London's Daily Telegraph that added to the embarrassment of the Bush administration. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been uncovered, he declared, is of no importance.

Come to think about it, that's just what the administration is saying while keeping up the pretext that it is still scouring Iraq for those doomsday weapons. That is the same arsenal that just a year ago posed such a danger to the United States that President Bush said he was required to order an attack.

"As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful," Chalabi told the newspaper. "That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Suspected insurgents killed scores of people Tuesday in well-organized, simultaneous attacks in Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala on the holiest Shiite Muslim day of the year, U.S.-led coalition officials said.

Iraqi authorities swiftly blamed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is suspected of calling for attacks on Shiites to promote the fight against the U.S.-led coalition.

It was the deadliest day in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003.

At least 100 people were killed in Karbala with about 300 wounded, a doctor at a hospital told CNN.

The amount of beef potentially contaminated by the nation's first mad-cow case was nearly four times higher than the federal government initially reported, The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said.

When the USDA launched the recall of affected meat Dec. 23, officials put the total at 10,400 pounds, or 5.2 tons, a figure they repeated for nearly two months. But the actual amount was 38,000 pounds, or 19 tons, the agency now acknowledges.

Caracas, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called United States President George Bush an "asshole" on Sunday for meddling, and vowed never to quit office like his Haitian counterpart as troops battled with opposition protesters demanding a recall referendum against him.

Chavez, who often says the US is backing opposition efforts to topple his leftist government, accused Bush of heeding advice from "imperialist" aides to support a brief 2002 coup against him.

"He was an asshole to believe them," Chavez roared at a huge rally of supporters in Caracas.

President Hugo Chavez railed against the Bush administration on Sunday in a speech before tens of thousands of supporters, accusing it of meddling in Venezuelan affairs and supporting antigovernment forces trying to remove him from office.

Mr. Chavez, whose language has become increasingly hostile in the face of American support for a recall referendum, warned that if the Bush administration carried out what he called American aggressions, "the people of the United States should know that they will not get another drop of oil from Venezuela." The American energy market is heavily reliant on Venezuela, one of the top four providers of petroleum to the United States.
. . .
The government here has been incensed since it was recently disclosed that Sumate, an opposition group that helped plan the recall effort, received $53,000 from the United States government. The money came from the National Endowment for Democracy, which had funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups opposed to Mr. Chavez.

Iraq's Governing Council has agreed on an interim constitution and is expected to sign the document after the end of the Shiite feast Ashoura on Wednesday.

Haiti's beleaguered President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned and flew into exile Sunday. Gunfire crackled throughout the capital as it fell into chaos, and the United States said international peace keepers, including Americans, would be deployed soon.

Much of the current debate over same-sex marriage reflects a relatively new tradition of fear and hatred of homosexuals in American culture. The concept of homosexuality only appeared in European medical literature in the late 1860s and reached the United States by 1892, but it was the sodomy trial of British poet Oscar Wilde in 1895 that introduced the concept to popular culture. . .

Rather than treat gay people as social outcasts, many cultures integrated men and women with transsexual natures into their societies. When French Jesuit missionaries found men among the Iroquois who dressed and acted as women, they called them berdache, incorrectly equating them with male prostitutes.
Many scholars now prefer the term "two-spirit." American Indian languages had a variety of terms -- winkte (Lakota), nadleeh (Navajo), hemanah (Cheyenne), kwid-(Tewa), tainna wa'ippe (Shoshone), dubuds (Paiute) and lhamana (Zuni) to identify "a person who has both male and female spirits within," notes Lakota scholar Beatrice Medicine.
Anthropologists such as Elsie Parsons long ago observed that two-spirited men often married other men. Even earlier, William Clark told the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals that Hidatsa boys who showed "girlish inclinations" were raised as women and married men.

A Senate measure to extend federal unemployment benefits failed by two votes Thursday despite the election year support of 12 Republicans from states hit hard by layoffs.

Democrats tried to attach the amendment to a gun liability bill, but it failed 58-39 in the GOP-controlled Senate. The margin was two votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a procedural objection.

The measure would have extended the emergency benefits program for six months, providing 13 weeks of extra unemployment benefits to people who exhaust their state benefits Β— usually after 26 weeks.

Sen. Don Nickles said jobless workers have more incentive to find a job when the extra unemployment benefits stop. "The more you pay people not to work, the less inclined they are to work," he said.

Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry accused President Bush's administration Thursday of fomenting conflict in Haiti out of ideological opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Kerry called on Bush to name Florida Sen. Bob Graham, one-time rival for the Democratic nomination, to be a special envoy to the Caribbean nation to negotiate a peaceful resolution between Aristide and the rebels threatening to oust him from power.

Debating his Democratic rivals Thursday night in Los Angeles, Kerry accused the White House of withholding aid to Haiti until the opposition reached a power-sharing agreement with Aristide -- an approach that he said ensured the rebels would keep fighting.

In approving the resolution, Dallas joins three states and 225 local governments that have taken stands against the Patriot Act.

The mounting evidence from the invasion of Iraq establishes what many Americans may not want to face: that the highest leaders of our land violated many international agreements relating to the rules of war. Unless we address the war crimes of the Bush administration—and the prima facie evidence is overwhelming—we betray our conscience, our country, and our own faith in democracy.

The United States is bound by customary law and international laws of war: the Hague Conventions of 1889 and 1907, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Nuremberg Conventions adopted by the United Nations, December 11, 1945—all of which set limits beyond which, by common consent, decent peoples will not go. Under the Constitution, all treaties are part of the supreme law of the land. Humanitarian law rests on a simple principle: that human rights are measured by one yardstick. Without that principle, all jurisprudence descends into mere piety and power. Nor do violations of the laws of war by one belligerent vindicate the war crimes of another.

Of all the violations of the laws of war by the highest officials of our country, none is more alarming or portentous than the widespread, premeditated use of depleted uranium in Iraq.

President Bush said today he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, declaring that such a measure was the only way to protect the status of marriage between man and woman, which he called "the most fundamental institution of civilization."

"The voice of the people must be heard," Mr. Bush said.

President Bush (news - web sites) wants quick election-year enactment of a constitutional amendment prohibiting gays from marrying each other, but Republicans in Congress are not rushing to heed his call.

After Bush's announcement Tuesday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said it would take time to gauge the level of support in Congress for a constitutional amendment. He suggested the difficulty of passing one may cause lawmakers to take a different approach to preserving marriage as a solely man-woman union.

"We don't want to do this in haste," DeLay said.

President Bush last week caused a stir when he declined to endorse a projection, made by his own Council of Economic Advisers, that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year. But that forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years.
Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for fiscal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit for this year is on course to be $521 billion.

These are not isolated cases. Over three years, the administration has repeatedly and significantly overstated the government's fiscal health and the number of jobs the economy would create, but economists and politicians disagree about why [...]

Bush has since said that his optimism about budget deficits was based on the assumption that the economy would not hit a "trifecta" of trouble: recession, national emergency and war. But in February 2002 -- after the recession was declared, the terrorist attacks had occurred and war had begun in Afghanistan -- the administration continued to have upbeat predictions. Although it forecast a $106 billion deficit in 2002, it saw the deficit shrinking to $80 billion in 2003, $14 billion in 2004, and becoming a surplus of $61 billion in 2005. Those figures, too, quickly became seen as overly optimistic, as tax receipts continued to come in lower than expected. A year later, in 2003, the administration predicted a deficit of $304 billion for 2003 and $307 billion for 2004. In reality, the 2003 deficit was $375 billion, and the White House now expects a deficit of $521 billion for 2004.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he appreciated Bush's "moral leadership" on the issue, but expressed caution about moving too quickly toward a constitutional solution, and never directly supported one. "This is so important we're not going to take a knee-jerk reaction to this," Delay said. "We are going to look at our options and we are going to be deliberative about what solutions we may suggest."

George Bush set the US on the path to war in Iraq with a formal order signed in February 2002, more than a year before the invasion, according to a book published yesterday.

The revelation casts doubt on the public insistence by US and British officials throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken to go to war, pending negotiations at the United Nations.

A BRITISH Sunday newspaper is claiming Osama bin Laden has been found and is surrounded by US special forces in an area of land bordering north-west Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Sunday Express, known for its sometimes colourful scoops, claims the al-Qaeda leader has been "sighted" for the first time since 2001 and is being monitored by satellite.

The paper claims he is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta. The region is said to be peopled with bin Laden supporters and the terrorist leader is estimated to also have 50 of his fanatical bodyguards with him.

The claim is attributed to "a well-placed intelligence source" in Washington, who is quoted as saying: "He (bin Laden) is boxed in."

The paper says the hostile terrain makes an all-out conventional military assault impossible. The plan to capture him would depend on a "grab-him-and-go" style operation.

"US helicopters already sited on the Afghanistan border will swoop in to extricate him," the newspaper says. It claims bin Laden and his men "sleep in caves or out in the open. The area is swept by fierce snow storms howling down from the 10,000ft-high mountain peaks. Donkeys are the only transport."

The special forces are "absolutely confident" there is no escape for bin Laden, and are awaiting the order to go in and get him.

"The timing of that order will ultimately depend on President Bush," the paper says. "Capturing bin Laden will certainly be a huge help for him as he gets ready for the election."

George W. Bush is different, very different. Other presidents have misled, deceived, even lied. When Ike was asked his worst mistake, he candidly said, "The lie we told [about the U-2]." LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin were examples of both deception and self-deception.


The problem today is not simply that "Bush is a liar." While only he knows whether he's intentionally saying untrue things, it is a provable fact that he says untrue things, again and again, on issues large and small, day in and day out. The problem is not "16 words" in last year's State of the Union but 160,000 words on stem cells, global warming, the "death tax," the Iraq-9/11 connection and the Saddam-al Qaeda connection, the rise of deficits, cuts to Americorps, the air in downtown Manhattan after 9/11. On and on. It is beyond controversy that W "has such a high regard for the truth," as Lincoln said of a rival, "that he uses it sparingly."

Why this penchant for falsehoods?

In more ways than one. I could surely be wrong, lord knows, but I don't think Nader will be much of an issue, in terms of the actual vote. I know there's a poll that says he'd get 4% if the election were held tomorrow, but that's nonsense. He didn't even pull 3% in 2000, and that was before--everything.

But here's the thing: I think the damage he will do is in re-igniting the liberal/left Civil War of 2000. To expand on something I wrote a few days ago: Nader's critique is, essentially, that there is a cancer on the body politic--and he's right about that. The problem in the year 2004 is that the body politic is also suffering from multiple wounds and blunt force trauma, we're in the emergency room and it's a damn mess and there's blood everywhere and the doctors are working furiously but it's anybody's guess how things are gonna turn out. We are in triage, and we have to deal with the immediate problems, or the long-term ones won't matter anyway.

More than a year after President Bush revamped his economic team, none of the current players has emerged as a leading spokesman on the economy and conservatives are fretting over a series of election-year gaffes.

The lack of a clear economic voice was underscored last week when officials were forced to back off a jobs forecast unveiled in the Feb. 9 Economic Report of the President.

The forecast called for average job growth of more than 300,000 jobs a month this year -- a figure that exceeds most private forecasts and prompted a slew of Democratic criticism.

Treasury Secretary John Snow, touring the hard-hit Pacific Northwest, was the first to pull away from the figures. White House spokesman Scott McClellan followed suit.

That forced Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Gregory Mankiw, lead author of the report, to row back, even though he had defended the numbers in a Capitol Hill hearing.

Mankiw was already in hot water for remarks that seemed to show approval of the outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas -- a sensitive issue at a time when the factory sector is hemorrhaging jobs.

The controversies had many conservatives cringing over what they saw as public-relations missteps with the economic report, a collaboration of officials from across the economic team.

The Rev Jerry Falwell announced Wednesday that he is putting aside everything to devote his time to passage of a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

"I am dedicating my talents, time and energies over the next few years to the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which will protect the traditional family from its enemies who wish to legalize same-sex marriage and other diverse "family" forms," Falwell said.

With the markets soaring, the Bush recovery is being called a jobless recovery. Not so. We are creating millions of jobs overseas -- even as we are destroying manufacturing jobs at a rate of 77,000 per month in the United States.

Consider: Last year, we bought $958 billion worth of foreign-manufactured goods and our trade deficit in manufactures alone was more than $400 billion, more than $1 billion a day. Millions of foreign workers now labor in plants that manufacture for America, doing jobs that used to be done by American workers.

Not so long ago, Detroit was the auto capital of the world and the United States was the first nation in the production of TVs.

We don't make TVs anymore. Our trade deficits in cars, trucks, TVs, VCRs, automatic data processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking.

After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is . . . soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.

Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. defense Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons. . . Perle, the former chairman of — and current member of — the defense Policy Board, a senior level advisory panel to Rumsfeld, was an advocate for overthrowing Saddam, asserting in the months leading up to the war that the Iraqi dictator's weapons stockpiles posed a grave threat to the United States.

In the lead-up to the war, Perle regularly warned about Saddam's reputed arsenal and the danger that would follow if the United Nations failed to get the Iraqi dictator to disarm.

Mayor Daley said Wednesday he would have "no problem" with County Clerk David Orr issuing marriage licenses to gay couples -- and Orr said he's open to a San Francisco-style protest if a consensus can be built.

"They're your doctors, your lawyers, your journalists, your politicians," the mayor said. "They're someone's son or daughter. They're someone's mother or father. . . . I've seen people of the same sex adopt children, have families. [They're] great parents.

"Some people have a difference of opinion -- that only a man and a woman can get married. But in the long run, we have to understand what they're saying. They love each other just as much as anyone else.''

A devout Catholic, Daley scoffed at the suggestion that gay marriage would somehow undermine the institution of marriage between a man and a woman.

"Marriage has been undermined by divorce, so don't tell me about marriage. You're not going to lecture me about marriage. People should look at their own life and look in their own mirror. Marriage has been undermined for a number of years if you look at the facts and figures on it. Don't blame the gay and lesbian, transgender and transsexual community. Please don't blame them for it," he said.

Daley said he has no control over marriage licenses in Cook County. But if Orr wants to take that bold step, the mayor has no problem with it.

Orr said he was "game to looking at options" provided a consensus could be built.

"I'm fed up with people being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. We can't even pass a law that eliminates discrimination against gay couples.

"The first Iraq war produced four classes of casualties--killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991 some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. . . . In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent."

Needless to say, this is not a topic the mainstream media wants to discuss. Especially in an environment when military benefits are being cut.

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

Halliburton Co. has hired Bush family lawyer James Doty to investigate allegedly corrupt payments made in Nigeria at a time when Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of the company, the Corporate Crime Reporter has learned.

Doty is lead partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Baker Botts. Halliburton announced earlier this month that it had hired an outside law firm to conduct an internal investigation into the brewing scandal, but the company refused to name the law firm or the lawyer conducting the inquiry.

That might be because of the law firm’s and the lawyer’s close ties to the Bush family and administration.

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow distanced himself on Tuesday from the Bush administration's official prediction that the nation would add 2.6 million jobs by the end of this year.

That prediction, which is far more optimistic than that of many private sector forecasters, was part of the annual economic report released last week by the White House Council of Economic Advisers and was immediately echoed by Mr. Bush himself.

But on a tour through Washington and Oregon to promote the president's economic agenda, Mr. Snow and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans both declined to endorse the White House prediction and cautioned that it was based on economic assumptions that have an inherent margin of error.

"The potential for a civil war is already in place," said Stansfield of Exeter University. "It does not need al-Qaida to encourage it."

The Kurds, believed to form 15-20 percent of the population, remain fixated on a single goal -- preserving and expanding the self rule they have enjoyed in their northern regions since 1991.

Kurds are locked in a power struggle with Sunni Arabs over the limits of federalism in the new Iraq. Kurdish claims to Kirkuk have served to unite the oil-rich city's Arab and ethnic Turkish residents against them and have raised alarm bells here and in neighboring countries over the possible dismemberment of Iraq.

Worsening tensions come at a time of increased suicide attacks against Iraqis who cooperate with the U.S.-led coalition. Such attacks cast doubt on U.S. claims that Iraqi security forces can maintain order after the handover of sovereignty this summer.

Those doubts have encouraged key Iraqi groups to resist coalition demands to disband armed militias such as the Kurdish peshmergas, who fought with U.S. troops against Saddam's military last year, and the Shitte Badr Brigade.

Moderate Islamic writer Fahmi Howeidi has warned the power transfer could provide the catalyst for civil war.

"The possibility of a civil war breaking out cannot be ruled out if the withdrawal goes ahead against this backdrop of a huge void in central authority," he wrote in a recent article published in the London-based, pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat.

This was the first federal election of the 2004 cycle. Kerr based her campaign almost exclusively on her strong support for the Bush agenda. And the AP is now reporting that Chandler has beaten Kerr decisively. That marks the first time since 1991 that a Democrat has won a Republican seat in a special election.

A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington.
. . .
The suit is the latest twist in the Bush administration's first major post-Sept. 11 terrorism prosecution, which is now in danger of unraveling over allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Convertino came under internal investigation last fall after providing information to a Senate committee about his concerns about the war on terror. His testimony came just months after he helped convict some members of an alleged terrorism cell in Detroit.

The government now admits it failed to turn over evidence during the trial that might have assisted the defense, including an allegation from an imprisoned drug gang leader who claimed the government's key witness made up his story.

The top U.S. administrator in Iraq suggested Monday he would block any interim constitution that would make Islam the chief source of law, as some members of the Iraqi Governing Council have sought.

L. Paul Bremer said the current draft of the constitution would make Islam the state religion of Iraq and "a source of inspiration for the law" - as opposed to the main source.

Rigged an election in conspiracy with brother Jeb in Florida to take office.

Appoints administration made up of former executives and government officials who helped Saddam develop WMD, were involved in illegal arms sales, traded with the enemy in violation of U.S. law, and whose companies now profit from war.

Stonewalled GAO and Congress request for documents relating to Enron influence of Federal Energy Policy.

Representing party of smaller government and less Federal spending, creates largest bureaucracy in U.S. history and signs largest entitlement spending program in U.S. history.

Although recovering now, presided over a 30% loss in Dow Jones Industrial Average, nearly a 50% loss in NASDAQ, and a 33% loss in S&P; 500, wiping out trillions in wealth. Despite a recent extended bull market, the markets have yet to recover back to where they were the day Bush took office.

Presided over an increase in consumer debt to all time record high of over $2 trillion and an increase in personal bankruptcy filings to an all time high of 1.6 million households in 2003.

Despite taking over after the longest and largest economic expansion in U.S. history, presided over the loss of more than three million jobs, with the highest unemployment in a decade and nearly nine million people out of work.

Presided over the largest trade deficit in U.S. history, a record $489.4 billion in 2003, while the value of the dollar has reached an all time low against the Euro and the Yen.

Presides over illegal arrest and detention and physical abuse of criminal suspects, who are held in secret without benefit of counsel without any charges.

Signs "Patriot Act" that limits civil liberties and violates the Bill of Rights contained within the Constitution he took an oath to protect and defend.

Despite inheriting an $80 billion surplus from the Clinton administration, turns it into a $2 trillion deficit with tax cuts, war, and out of control spending.

Bush tax cuts could pay for hiring all nine million people out of work and pay them $40K for two years instead of benefiting wealthy.

Gutted clean air regulations, allowing utilities and factories to continue polluting the atmosphere, calling it "Clear Skies".

Rolls back environmental reviews and opens national forests up to the logging industry, calling it "Healthy Forests".

Rolled back wetlands protection, reducing or eliminating regulations prohibiting pollution of wetlands, calls it "Clean Water Act".

Rolled back wilderness protections, opening up wilderness areas to logging, mining, other development.

Promotes school vouchers to take taxpayer money away from public education and give it to wealthy families to send their kids to private and mostly religious schools.

Adopts the Project for a New American Century's strategy paper on Rebuilding America's Defenses as the official U.S. National Security policy, a policy that calls for imperialist expansion in the middle east and hopes for a national catastrophe "on the scale of Pearl Harbor" to awaken the public to the dangers posed by not adopting this policy. Hires most of its authors to run the Pentagon and develop defense policy.

Worst terrorist attack in history, and the worst attack on U.S. soil occurred on current administration's watch, and Bush undermines efforts to investigate mounting evidence of numerous warnings that could have prevented it.

Made speeches and signed laws promising more funding for shipping container inspections at U.S. ports to look for nukes and other WMD, then eliminated funding from budget.

Allowed North Korean sale of Scud missiles to Yemen.

Made deal with Iranian terrorist organization.

Conducted preemptive unprovoked military invasion of sovereign state resulting in hundreds of military casualties and thousands of civilian deaths, deceived Congress and UN Security Council using "sexed-up" intelligence to justify.

Claims two trailers used to make hydrogen for balloons, a vial of botox in some guy's refrigerator, and some junk buried in some guy's rose garden are "proof" of Iraqi WMD "programs", or as they are later termed in his State of the Union, "weapons of mass destruction related program activities".

When U.S. weapons inspectors cannot find 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, tens of thousands of chem/bio warheads, and an advanced nuclear weapons program in Iraq and say that in fact they probably never existed despite Bush telling Congress and the American people they posed a "grave danger" and Rumsfeld saying "we know where they are" and Powell showing the U.N. pictures of them, Bush says "What's the difference?" and blames it on faulty intelligence.


Proposes sweeping cuts in veteran's benefits, instructs Veteran's Administration to deceive veterans with regard to benefits available.

Dressed in fighter pilot costume and flew military jet to aircraft carrier for stunt landing and political fundraising/campaign event despite having ticket pulled and being grounded for failing to take required physical and drug test and being curiously absent from his post during Vietnam conflict .

Declares victory in Iraq, yet soldiers die in Iraq every day, half the country has no electricity or water, attempts to install democracy failing miserably, WMD cannot be found, neither can Osama.

Has destroyed American respect and credibility around the world. Unable to get assistance from France, Germany, or India to provide troops for additional security and peacekeeping in Iraq.

Administration under investigation for illegally leaking the name of a covert CIA agent in retaliation for her husband exposing lies about Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The CIA demanded an investigation after Bush's denials.


Proposes development of tactical nuclear weapons in violation of 1992 Senate ban which Bush worked to repeal.

Begins privatization of Medicare disguised as prescription drug benefit.

Tax cuts would fund health insurance for all 43 million uninsured Americans, including nearly ten million uninsured children.

Pushes legislation to eliminate overtime pay for up to eight million American working people.

Pushes legislation to limit medical malpractice claims to $250K, even if an incompetent doctor kills your wife or cuts off your legs instead of removing your appendix.

Installs new Senate majority leader with ties to health care industry to shepherd through legislation benefiting corporate insurance and pharmaceutical pals.

Pushes legislation to limit bankruptcy protections for consumers targeted by predatory lenders, but proposes no reforms for rogue corporations such as Enron that blow off creditors, employees, and investors at pennies on the dollar.

According to a biographer, believes that he was selected by God to lead America and had preachers come to the Governor's mansion in Texas to "lay hands" on him and pray for his future during his campaign.

Appoints as U.S. Attorney General a fundamentalist Christian who believes he receives divine guidance directly from God and anoints himself with Crisco and who was defeated by a dead man in his failed U.S. Senate election campaign.

Pushes legislation to fund faith based social programs, Congress rejects it, Bush issues executive order to allow Federally Funded local and state programs to hire or fire based on religion or ideology and to promote religion as part of delivering services.

Declines invitation to NAACP convention, but addresses Southern Baptist Convention by satellite, calling them faithful servants and praying for them, while they adopt a policy that "homosexuals can find freedom from this sinful, destructive lifestyle" by accepting Jesus as their savior.


Comments on Supreme Court homosexual rights decision, declares "marriage should be between a man and a woman", proposes constitutional amendment in State of the Union address.

Sends letter to Supreme Court urging them to strike down Affirmative Action programs, celebrates Strom Thurmond's "remarkable life" and says he was a friend.

Despite being at war around the world and under constant threat of terrorist attack at home, Bush has spent 27% of his presidency on vacation, taking more vacation days in his first three years than Clinton took in seven years.

Plans on spending $200 million plus to get re-elected against challengers the GOP says are unelectable.

Rather than only asking how a young George W. got out of the National Guard, we ought to ask how he got in when 350 American men were dying each week in Vietnam and 100,000 were on National Guard waiting lists across the country. For years the talk in Austin political circles had Bush using his father’s stroke as a Republican congressman from Houston to secure one of two or three rare open billets in an Air National Guard Unit — after scoring in the 25th percentile on the standard test given to flight-program candidates.

Bush's AFOQT record shows that the "Pilot Aptitude" score was blacked out and the value "25" entered and initialed by "RJD". One possible meaning is that a value lower than "25" was blacked out and replaced with the value "25".

Is "25" the lowest score for anyone to be admitted to flight training?

Senior U.S. defense officials have told The New York Times that they are planning to keep many of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees there for many years, maybe "indefinitely," which presumably means for life.

The Bush administration quietly shelved a proposal to ban a gasoline additive that contaminates drinking water in many communities, helping an industry that has donated more than $1 million to Republicans.
The Environmental Protection Agency's decision had its origin in the early days of President Bush's tenure when his administration decided not to move ahead with a Clinton-era regulatory effort to ban the clean-air additive MTBE.

The proposed regulation said the environmental harm of the additive leaching into ground water overshadowed its beneficial effects to the air.

The Bush administration decided to leave the issue to Congress, where it has bogged down over a proposal to shield the industry from some lawsuits. That initiative is being led by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

Americans have not yet understood that Bush is spending their children's money, and haven't yet felt the catastrophic fall in the dollar's value. What they do know is that they are paying less tax and that they can borrow cheaply. To hell with talk of inflation. That's a European thing, ain't it?

All this - liberal outrage, swing voters, gun clubs, the economy even - counts for nothing in the face of the country's Number One Foe - Osama bin Laden.

In a very real sense, he is Bush's greatest electoral asset. If he is captured or killed in the next nine months, Bush is probably a shoo-in. If he remains at large, Bush doesn't really need to present a case other than the one he made on Meet the Press last Sunday, when he said: 'I'm a war President. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.'

The rather chilling thing is to consider how bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants view the election. Would they rather have a President Kerry or Edwards, who would make overtures to Islam, embrace the UN and heed world opinion, or would they prefer four more years of a man who had done so much to isolate America from the rest of the world?

Osama needs George, and to a degree George needs the mystical fear that Osama evokes. And it is this fear that will see this second-rate, isolationist, spendthrift President re-elected to the White House.

With full exposure of the weapons of mass destruction sham, the official Washington excuse for the Iraq war has changed: now the spin is that Saddam was a bad guy, and terrorism in Iraq (which did not exist in the first place) must be fought. The ever-elusive bin Laden remains the main justification for the Bush administration.

Yet what is qualified as "terrorism" in Iraq is being conducted by a cluster of the so-called "unaligned mujahideen", with only marginal input from al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The American non-governmental organization Iraq Body Count, in a still partial investigation that has not covered the whole country, has stated that there have been more than 10,000 civilian deaths in the Iraq war. As the number of seriously wounded in such wars is usually four times bigger than the number of fatal casualties, there may be 40,000 injured civilians. Russian observers estimate Iraqi military losses at 30,000 deaths and 120,000 seriously wounded. This means that many Iraqis now know that in the name of their "liberation", the Americans have killed or maimed 200,000 people. When something like this happens, you don't need any help from al-Qaeda to fuel your anger.

While it's generally acknowledged that political Islam retains its vibrancy, some observers contended that Arab nationalism was already on life support, and now identify April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, as the official time of death. The veracity of their post mortem matters, because American soldiers now occupy a historical center of Arab aspirations. And the aspirations of the Arabs have been embodied largely by Arab nationalism - the political ideology that privileges the unity of Arabic-speaking peoples and which coalesced into "the Arab awakening" after World War I.

As the United States attempts to impose democracy US-style in Iraq and beyond in the Middle East, it may find that indigenous ideologies, like Arab nationalism, are more resilient than it had expected.

CBS said on Friday that it had stopped running a television advertisement for the new Medicare prescription drug law while Congress investigates its accuracy.

The 30-second advertisement, prepared by the Bush administration, assures Medicare beneficiaries that the program is not changing in any way except to provide "more benefits." Democratic members of Congress and some liberal advocacy groups say the advertisement amounts to a taxpayer-subsidized political commercial for the administration.

President Bush's call for a crackdown on nuclear proliferation is the right message from a flawed messenger. The first step for the president in achieving his goals is conducting a fundamental reassessment of his own excessively confrontational foreign policy.
The speech Bush delivered Wednesday at Washington's National Defense University was welcome but years late. The threat of nuclear proliferation has grown more dire since he took office, and much of the problem can be traced to the leader of the world's premier nuclear power.

The Air Force has spent $32 billion on its new F-22 supersonic stealth fighter. Twenty aircraft have come off the production line and hundreds more are planned.

But rigorous, independent field testing -- to find out if the F-22 actually works -- hasn't yet begun.

Guerrillas shouting 'God is great' launched a bold daylight assault on an Iraqi police station and security compound west of Baghdad on Saturday, freeing prisoners and sparking a gunbattle that killed 20 people and wounded 30, police and hospital officials said.

The same security compound was attacked two days earlier by gunmen just as the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, was visiting the site in Fallujah. Abizaid escaped that attack unharmed.

Insurgents here staged simultaneous morning assaults on three police stations, a civil defense base and the mayor's office Saturday in what one Iraqi military leader called a "well-coordinated and well-financed attack."

Iraq's civilian security forces have suffered a week of devastating attacks with a deadly gun battle outside a police station in Falluja following bomb blasts outside police and army recruiting centres.
. . .
More than 300 officers have been killed since the new police force was established after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

There have also been incidents where US soldiers have shot and killed police officers, in cases of apparent mistaken identity.

A San Francisco judge Friday refused to stop the city's unprecedented gay marriage spree, prompting elated officials to declare they will keep City Hall open through the three-day weekend so more same-sex couples can tie the knot.

Most Americans yet believe President Bush did the right thing in ridding Iraq and the world of Saddam Hussein. Yet, how we were persuaded to go to war raises grave questions about the character and competence of those who led us into it.

As we now know, Iraq had no tie to Osama, no role in 9-11, no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction, no plans to attack us. Its people did not threaten us and did not want war with us.

History will record this as Bush's War. And he seems content with that judgment. But the price of victory has been the lost trust of many of his countrymen and of much of the world. The credibility of yet another administration has been compromised. Was it worth it?

And if it was not the weapons, what was the real reason America went to war on Iraq?

As the grand jury exploring the leak of Valerie Plame's identity edges ever closer to Cheney's office, the voices wondering whether Dick will be out of work come November grow louder. The fact that 3 of the 5 suspects in the case are either past or present employees of the VP isn't helping to boost his flagging popularity in White House polls which, according to the Guardian U.K., suggest that Cheney as a running mate might make for a losing ticket. Terry McAuliffe, head of the DNC, wrote in a not too subtle statement: "we hope that President Bush will keep his word and hold accountable those responsible for the White House leak - no matter how high their post."

The Guardian report goes on to cite the litany of Cheney woes including a parallel grand jury looking into the purchase of uranium in Niger, and the possibility of Halliburton bribes during Mr.Cheney's tenure as CEO. He, of course, still receives 'deferred compensation' from Halliburton. But that's just a tax write-off.

BAD TIMES....It's been a rough few weeks for President Bush, hasn't it? Let us count the ways.
David Kay says "We were all wrong." The administration's near panic to pull out of Iraq has become almost palpable. The State of the Union speech was met with a combination of yawns and derision. (Steroids?) The 2005 budget was immediately mocked as a new low point in numerical mendacity and/or self-delusion. Democrats are regrettably poised to nominate someone other than Howard Dean. Job growth is sluggish to nonexistent. Indictments at very high levels seem imminent in the Valerie Plame case. The State and Defense departments are close to open warfare. Approval ratings are in free fall.

And to top it all off, we have the National Guard media frenzy, surely a shock to a bunch of political pros who figured that stonewalling had worked just fine in 1994 and 2000 and would work just fine again. When it didn't, they inexplicably decided that releasing a bunch of pay records would shut everyone up and were shocked yet again when it didn't. Then, in an example of self-imposed Chinese water torture unparalleled in modern politics they decided to release a single presidential dental record while admitting that they also had a big pile of other medical records but weren't going to release any of them. Yet.

It almost makes you feel sorry for them, doesn't it? Almost.

To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures.

By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.

It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.

The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office.

Hatfield quotes "a high-ranking advisor to Bush" who confirmed that Bush was arrested for cocaine possession in Houston in 1972, and had the record expunged by a judge who was "a fellow Republican and elected official" who helped Bush get off "with a little community service at a minority youth center instead of having to pick cotton on a Texas prison farm."

Hatfield quotes a former Yale classmate who told him: "George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972, but due to his father's connections, the entire record was expunged by a state judge whom the older Bush helped get elected. It was one of those 'behind closed doors in the judges' chambers' kind of thing between the old man and one of his Texas cronies who owed him a favor ... There's only a handful of us that know the truth."

Another source named only as "a longtime Bush friend" described the situation this way: "Say you get a D in algebra ... and now you're going to be required to repeat the class the following year, but your teacher says if you promise to be tutored during the summer by a friend of hers who's good in math, she'll change the D to a C. You spend a few hours a week during the summer vacation learning all about arithmetical operations and relationships, and then the teacher issues you a new report card, replacing the old one on file in the principal's office ... Something akin to that scenario is what happened with Bush in 1972."

Hatfield also says that when he asked Scott McClellan to comment on the allegation of a former Yale classmate of Bush's that the presidential hopeful was arrested for cocaine possession in 1972 and had his record expunged in exchange for community service at Project P.U.L.L., the Bush campaign spokesman said, sotto voce, "Oh, shit," followed by, "No comment."

McClellan denies that the exchange ever occurred.

George W. Bush left his Texas Air National Guard assignment and moved to Alabama in 1972 even though the Air Force denied his request for a transfer, according to his military records.

In fact, Bush did not even ask for an official transfer until nine days after he moved to Alabama in May 1972.

The Air Force quickly rejected Bush's request, saying the fighter pilot was "ineligible" to move to the Alabama unit Bush wanted - a squadron of postal handlers.

Nevertheless, Bush stayed in Alabama until his Texas commanders finally gave him written authorization five months later to train there.

This whole story of Bush's National Guard Service or lack of same is very interesting and does seem to have the President (and his credibility) on the run. But I am afraid that both Russert and Moore are missing the important question. The question is not "Where was George?" as Sen. Edward Kennedy so famously asked. Unfortunately the President and minions have that one covered. You have to admit that a charge of desertion is not going to stick to someone who got an honorable discharge. Trying to piece together the part time service of a Guardsman is probably difficult at best.

But there is a question that is unanswered and frankly more important. Perhaps we can get Ted to ask "Why didn't George fly again?" The fact of the matter is no matter how many hours George put in after 1972 none of them were as a pilot. Apparently he refused to take his flight physical. He has come up with some Bushwa about his personal physician being in Houston while he was in Georgia, yadda, yadda, yadda, but he didn't get a physical when he got back to Texas either. Apparently he never did.

Retired National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett said Tuesday that in 1997, then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, told the National Guard chief to get the Bush file and make certain "there's not anything there that will embarrass the governor."

Col. Burkett said that a few days later at Camp Mabry in Austin, he saw Mr. Bush's file and documents from it discarded in a trash can. He said he recognized the documents as retirement point summaries and pay forms.

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.

Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. The nation obviously needs a leader who is always alert to the threat of terrorism from abroad. But it cannot afford to have one who responds to the trauma of 9/11 by overreacting to the possibility of danger. In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Saturday offered an impassioned defense of the American-led war against Iraq to some of Europe's fiercest critics of the conflict.

Mr. Rumsfeld placed the blame for the war squarely on Saddam Hussein for his "deception and defiance," and refusal to abandon his illegal weapons program, as Libya did recently.

"It was his choice," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a speech here to 250 government ministers, lawmakers and national security experts from 30 countries, most of them in Europe. "If the Iraqi regime had taken the same steps Libya is now taking, there would have been no war."

Some European participants said they were stunned by what they called Mr. Rumsfeld's arrogance, especially in light of the apparent intelligence failures in Iraq. "His view is, `We're right, they're wrong, and we'll continue to be right,' " said Christoph Bertram, director of the German Institute for International Politics and Security in Berlin. "It was a performance of `We know better.' "

KABUL (Reuters) - Opium output has hit a record high in Afghanistan in 2003, with another increase expected this year in the war-torn country that does not have any other real exports, a conference has been told.

Two years after the ruling Taliban were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition, opium production has skyrocketed as farmers in lawless provinces crank up output, threatening efforts to strengthen the government and establish a proper economy.

President Pervez Musharraf has pledged that the disgraced founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program can keep the vast wealth he accumulated selling bomb-making technology to rogue states around the world.
. . .
"He can keep his money," Musharraf said, adding there had been good reason not to investigate the origin of Khan's suspicious wealth before 1998, when Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. "We wanted the bomb in the national interest, and so you have to ask yourself whether you act against the person who enabled you to get the bomb."

Michael Graham: President Bush looks like he's afraid of Tim Russert. He's stammering and unsteady. For the first time, I've felt a twinge of fear myself about the November election.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Not to pile on here, but I think lots of eyebrows legitimately raise re: the March 2005 commission deadline. I'm not sure he sufficiently answered that?

Kathryn Jean Lopez: A pundit-type just said to me: "If he loses this year, this will be the day he lost it."

Rod Dreher: I'm afraid I have to side with Michael on the Bush interview. I kept wincing as the president bobbled his answers....He had better get his act together....

John Derbyshire: Just got through watching the President on Meet the Press. I thought it was a pretty dismal performance. I'll be voting for GWB in November, but let's face it, the Great Communicator he ain't. The tongue-tied blather was coming thick and fast. At times, he looked like Al Sharpton on the Federal Reserve.

Russert: "Why didn't you establish the intelligence commission earlier?"
GWB: "Blather blather blather. No answer."

Russert: "Will you yourself testify before the commission?"
GWB: "Blather blather blather. No answer."

Statement of John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

"President Bush wouldn't have agreed to an hour long network interview without a good reason and today he had one: in the span of a week he's faced the dual challenges of a loss of credibility on the war in Iraq and his management of the economy.

"His statement this morning that he would cut the deficit in half is simply laughable. Analyses by independent organizations like Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for Economic Development, and Decision Economics all project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, even assuming a return to strong growth."

"The President's statement that there is 'good momentum' on the job creation front is dishonest: while we are averaging 72,000 new private sector jobs created per month, at that pace, it would not be until May 2007 that this President would have created his first net job. President Bush is well on his way to having the worst job creation record since the Great Depression. His bragging today only served to reinforce his lack of credibility on managing the nation's economy.

"And what the President referred to as a "word contest" regarding the threat from Iraq is, in fact, his attempt to change the rationale for going to war and rewrite the history of what has occurred. His argument today that Iraq had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and pass them into the hands of shadowy terrorist networks is inconsistent with the intelligence provided to him.

President Bush sought to restore his credibility today and he clearly failed to do so."

President Bush's February 8 campaign stop on Meet the Press failed to answer the questions the American people deserve to hear about his failed policies. Instead, Bush took the opportunity to spin the facts and continue misleading the American people.

I bested 16 other contenders in winning the nomination, with primary election victories in 11 states, including New York and California. Critics overlook the shooting of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, who otherwise would have run as an independent, taking perhaps 20 million votes from Nixon. The formula for Nixon's landslide victory was the Wallace vote added to the Nixon vote. Critics also overlook my opponent's unprecedented campaign spending. Most of his negative television ads were designed to paint me as an extreme radical uninterested in the defense of the country. This even though I was a decorated combat bomber pilot in World War II, while Nixon was stationed far from battle.

France and Germany, firm allies in opposing the US-led war on Iraq, put a damper this weekend on US hopes of pressing NATO to boost its roles there and in Afghanistan.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer voiced his scepticism on Iraq, urging the alliance to think very hard before agreeing to an expanded role.

A FOREIGN POLICY TEST....David Kay is off the reservation again. Apparently he's not very impressed with the Bush administration's reaction to the pardon of Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's nuclear-proliferator-in-chief:

"I can't think of any[one] who deserves less to be pardoned than A.Q. Khan...," said David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq.

In reality, according a "senior administration official," our subdued reaction to Khan's pardon is merely a measure of the nuanced and thoughtful approach to foreign policy that George Bush favors: "It's just another case where you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," he said, apparently while keeping a straight face.

The whole article is worth reading, because beyond the snark it lays bare the divide between the "moral clarity" crowd and the foreign policy realists. The plain fact is that Pakistan is an enormously difficult country to deal with, and it really does require some nuance and subtlety.

But it's a problem for the Andrew Sullivans and Glenn Reynolds of the world, who insist that good is good and evil is evil and anyone with any moral sense — like, say, George Bush — should refuse to compromise with evil. But here we have an Islamic country whose public is violently anti-U.S.; that has developed and tested nuclear weapons; that has traded nuclear technology with Iran, Libya, and North Korea; and that apparently continued to do so until only a few months ago. Surely if any country should be deemed a member of the Axis of Evil, it is Pakistan.

And yet, Pakistan has been an ally off and on for years. They were instrumental in helping our covert war against the Soviets in the 80s and have been helpful in our war against the Taliban since 9/11. Keeping them helpful is surely a strong imperative.

But if you truly believe that it's the compromises of the past that have brought on the problems of today, if you truly believe that the only answer to 9/11 is to stop compromising with terrorist supporters, and if you truly believe that military force is the appropriate weapon for this fight — then you should be appalled by the Bush administration's coddling of Pakistan.

If you aren't, then you're a foreign policy realist. It's a pretty simple test.

Ya know, anyone who buys those rumors that Cheney might be dropped from the "Bush ticket" and replaced with Giuliani or Powell is forgetting one basic fact: Cheney IS the president. Junior is just a bumbling, dry drunk cowboy prop.

Remember it was Cheney who was in charge of finding the vice-president and decided to appoint himself to the position. Talk about a warning shot across the bow of Democracy. Who'd have known Halliburton's CEO was going to storm the ship and rape the country?

It’s like Super Sunday two weeks in a row! This time, minus the break-away costumes! This weekend, Tim Russert sits with George Bush on Meet the Press. But we’re forced to pose two incomparable questions: Which Tim Russert will appear for the session? And will he fight against Bush’s three dodges?

Tim meets The Dub at an interesting juncture. In recent weeks, many in Russert’s media cohort have begun to show signs of flipping on Bush. Most strikingly, Don Imus has been savaging Bush every morning, criticizing his “missing year” in the Guard and accusing Bush of misleading America about the threat from pre-war Iraq. On Tuesday morning, Imus even hectored John McCain about Bush’s alleged misconduct, to the point where the affable solon seemed to feel that he had to push back against Don.

So which Tim Russert will do Meet the Press? The hectoring, “prosecutorial” bulldog whom pundits cheered for his attacks on Al Gore? (links below) Or the sleepy, somnolent friend-to-mankind who slept through a pair of Meet the Press sessions with Candidate Bush four years back?

Dear Tim Russert:

Will you be asking the President if it was appropriate for him to land on the carrier in a flight suit after he was grounded in 1972 for failing to show for his physical? Will you ask him if the mission is really accomplished?

Will you be asking the President about the famous "torn document" which supposedly shows his guard duty, yet has no name or date (just a W). If this document is a fake, it could lead to a great story.

Will you ask the President if he has asked for the person that leaked Valerie Plame's name to come forward and resign? Has he instructed his people to sign the waiver?

Will you ask him why he has not cooperated fully with the 9/11 commission and why they can't even have their own notes? Why was Condi Rice not put under oath and why is all of her testimony secret?

Will you ask the President why he has held so few press conferences in this time of war and shouldn't he keep us more informed with more of them?

Will you ask what he said that the average tax cut was $1000, yet the average worker making less than $80,000 only got about $250. Isn't this misleading the public?

Will you be asking the president about his faulty statements that his budget will cut the defecit in half over 5 years. Please play back the statements regarding the deficit from the previous years which have turned out to be far from reality.

Will you ask the President how he could take off the month before 9/11 when there was increased chatter and the AG Ashcroft had taken the step of not flying commercial that summer? Will you ask the President if he feels it is appropriate for the VP to invite Justice Scalia as his guest to go duck hunting when the Energy case is pending. Is it a conflict of interest?

Will you be asking the President about his brother's paternity problem and how he feels about his brother having sex with Asian prostitutes?

Will you ask the President if perhaps he owes an apology to Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, since they were right about Iraq.

Will you ask him why he appointed Iran/Contra convicted felons John Poindexter, Otto Reich, etc., to Administration Posts?

Will you ask him about his "ranch" which was miraculously built just in time for his presidential run. Is it nothing more than a set for photo-ops which link him to Reagan?

And finally, Ask him if he is he really afraid of horses?

I hear George W. Bush's hand-picked whitewashing of the Iraq intel failures will be co-chaired by Laurence Silberman.

Described simply as a retired federal judge by most news reports, Silberman was until recently one of the three judges of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which oversees sensitive domestic surveillance issues and approves of wiretaps of suspected terrorists. After 9/11, this became the judicial body which would uphold John Ashcroft's agenda in the Patriot Act and (in the words of the ACLU -- read down in the collection of articles) "rubber-stamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants."

In other words, Silberman hardly seems disinterested, and more like a full-fledged member of Team Death Star.

Silberman is also one of the two judges who threw out Oliver North's Iran-Contra conviction. Later, he served as a "mentor" to American Spectator writer David Brock during the years of constant character assassination against Bill Clinton.

Yeah. We're reeeeeaaally gonna get an objective report, free of any political agenda.

Paul Krugman reminded us recently that months after September 11 (and a year after the departure of the dastardly Clenis), the Bush administration's revenue projections, which incorporate assumptions about economic growth, had us with a $14 billion dollar deficit for this year, which I believe is a bit below the actual number.

Last June, long after September 11 and the departure of the dastardly Clenis, the administration predicted that, following their tax cuts, the economy would gain an average of 305,000 jobs per month beginning in July. Since July, the economy has gained a grand total of 296,000, which means we're still 1,846,000 behind their prediction.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday he does not regret having referred to France and Germany as "old Europe," a comment in 2003 that many Europeans took as an insult.

"I'm too old to have regrets," Rumsfeld said in an interview with several European journalists shortly before the start of a NATO (news - web sites) defense ministers meeting. "No, I don't regret it."

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The Democratic presidential contest went national yesterday, and what was true in Iowa and New Hampshire proved true coast to coast: Voters in these elections are deeply dissatisfied with President Bush (news - web sites), and defeating him in November is their prime issue, according to exit polls.

AFTER AN excruciating delay, chickens are finally coming home to roost for George W. Bush. For over a year, critics have been pointing to the president's systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers. But the charge hasn't really stuck, until very lately. .

By law, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is required "to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States." Given her record, American workers might want to make a symbolic citizens' arrest of the secretary for breaking the law.

At the moment, Chao's prime offense is promotion of changes in overtime pay rules. They would deprive an estimated 8 million workers - such as secretaries, sales representatives, and medical or legal workers - of their right to time-and-a-half premium pay when they work more than 40 hours a week. Last month, Chao testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that only 644,000 workers would lose that protection. But Economic Policy Institute economist Jared Bernstein explained how the Labor Department ignored large groups of affected workers to come up with its inaccurate, low-ball number.
. . .
The law was originally intended to exempt a small number of executive, administrative and highly educated professional employees from the requirement that their employers pay a premium for overtime.

But Chao's Labor Department vastly expanded the definition of what counts as professional training. Now the training that veterans received in the military could be used as an excuse to deny them overtime pay for such jobs as engineer, accountant or medical technologist.

Margaret D. Tutwiler, in her first public appearance as the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy, acknowledged Wednesday that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such an extent that "it will take us many years of hard, focused work" to restore it.

Rumsfeld offered several examples of what he called "alternative views" about why no weapons have been discovered in Iraq, starting with the possibility that banned arms never existed.

"I suppose that's possible, but not likely," he said.

Other possibilities cited by Rumsfeld:

• Weapons may have been transferred to a third country before U.S. troops arrived in March.

• Weapons may have been dispersed throughout Iraq and hidden.

• Weapons existed but were destroyed by the Iraqis before the war started.

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.

Over the past month, there’s been a subtle but unmistakable shift in the public perceptions of President Bush. And not one for the better.
. . .
What has helped turn the tide is a string of crass and clumsy political gambits ranging from the president’s immigration proposal to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t plan for a trip to Mars and the new brouhaha over budgetary shenanigans with the prescription drug plan.

What did these three political plays have in common?

Not one of them was well thought-out on its own terms, and none had much to do with the president’s political agenda.

The clearest example was the plan to send men to Mars. This wasn’t a real policy proposal.

The whole thing was never even meant to happen. It was supposed to be a campaign sound bite to give a running start to the State of the Union roll-out and a bullet point for the president’s onward-and-upward-with-optimism reelection theme.

Had this been a serious proposal, it would have required a vast national effort costing, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet when it didn’t strike a chord with voters or the Sunday shows, it got tossed aside without a second thought.
It wasn’t a policy proposal. It was a political ploy.

And the White House cut it loose so unceremoniously that that unlovely reality was impossible to miss.

Dubya got into the guard by using his daddy’s influence to move to the front of a long line. Getting into the guard kept him out of harm’s way in Vietnam but it did not instill him with any sense of responsibility.

So the man who kissed off his military obligations 32 years ago and let others fight and die in his place later became President of the United States and ordered still others to fight and die.

Which is a disgrace for those young men and women who have died in Iraq.

It’s one thing to fight and die for your country. It’s something else to do it for a deserter.

If we're serious about confronting threats to our way of life, we don't have to hunt them in the caves of eastern Afghanistan. We can find a serious threat in the West Wing of the White House as the Bush administration charts its fiscal policy.

A Democrat until he switched parties in 1995, Tauzin was widely expected to succeed Jack Valenti as president of the Motion Picture Association of America but turned down the job -- and its more than $1 million salary -- late last month.

Soon after, he received a larger offer to head the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade group that represents drug giants such as Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co., though no contract has been offered, sources said.

Tauzin was one of the principal authors of the Medicare prescription drug bill, which included several provisions expected to vastly expand the market for prescription drugs among the elderly. In addition to adding hundreds of billions of dollars for drug benefits, the law bars the federal government from directly bargaining down the price of drugs, a provision PhRMA pressed for.

He recused himself from participating in health care issues before his committee last week and is expected to take the PhRMA offer and leave the House before his term expires. Public Citizen, a public interest group, has called for an ethics investigation of Tauzin.

Substantial funding is also going to help women's groups throughout the country, including the center in Hillah. There are now 10 women's centers throughout the country and eight more are in the works. And with U.S. support, Iraqi women are being trained for the first time to serve as police officers, prison guards and security officers.

During my five weeks "in country" this fall, I witnessed a social, political and humanitarian disaster consume Iraqi women. Frightened by rampant crime, bullied by religious fundamentalism, pressured by increasing tribalism, they are losing their rights and freedoms before the eyes of the world. It's an unnerving spectacle, like watching people fall prey to a police state-but in Iraq's case, the despotism consists not of storm troopers and fuehrers, but customs, traditions and beliefs that command the hearts and minds of millions of people, including their victims.

Let's be clear-- Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but it is quite conceivable, given the equality for women under the old civil code, that women will be worse off now than under Hussein.

When U.S. troops entered Baghdad, members of the Iraqi Women's League, a pro-democracy group suppressed under Saddam Hussein, cheered.

But these days, when members gather in their shabby office, the talk is of an unexpected consequence of the dictator's overthrow: a decision by the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council to replace the country's civic family laws with Islamic Sharia.

"We had a war with a tyrant regime, but now we have another kind of war," said Aida Ayeedi, a teacher at the College of Agriculture in Baghdad. "This war is with those religious men who think that women are just instruments to bear children and create the next generation."

Pushed through with little discussion primarily by the Shiite Muslim members of the council, the measure would put women's fates out of the hands of judges and into those of clerics, most likely chosen by their husbands, who might have little commitment to protecting their rights. For many women, that would roll back what they had under Hussein, who granted them a measure of personal if not political freedom - albeit one spiked by a constant fear for their families.

The U.S. military had said it killed five militants during a January 17 raid against suspected Taliban leaders in southern Uruzgan province and insisted it fired only on armed men.

But Karzai said an Interior Ministry investigation into the attack, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest of the capital, Kabul, established that 10 civilians had died.

At the time of the raid, local officials had maintained that 11 civilians were killed: four men, four children and three women.

President Bush plans to scale back requests for money to fight AIDS and poverty in the third world, putting off for several years the fulfillment of his pledges to eventually spend more than $20 billion on these programs.

Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle, a strong advocate of war against Iraq, spoke last weekend at a charity event that U.S. officials say may have had ties to an alleged terrorist group seeking to topple the Iranian government and backed by Saddam Hussein.
. . .
Perle, in an interview, said he was unaware of any involvement by the terrorist group, known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and believed he was assisting the victims of the Bam earthquake when he delivered the paid speech.

"All of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross," Perle said. Informed that the Red Cross had announced before the event it would refuse any monies because of the event's "political nature," Perle said: "I was unaware of that." Perle declined to say how much he received.

Howard Dean said Wednesday night that he had been thinking about restructuring his campaign "for some time" and that after consecutive losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, he needed "a leaner and meaner organization" to prepare for a nomination fight that had become "a war of attrition."

Neel might well be a fine person, a good CEO, a believer (on his own time) in the values of the Democratic Party. But he was a bigtime player in the very game that Dean claims he wants to destroy. Dean's choice of Neel suggests Dean is clueless or disingenuous. Does he not know what it means to head the U.S. Telecom Association? Does he not understand that it is wrong--or, at the least, ill-considered--to place a lobbyist at the front of a charge on Washington? Was he not worried that this action would cause his opponents, the media and--most importantly--his devoted supporters to question his sincerity and his judgment?
. . .
Dean has signaled that he is not fully committed to his core message--unless he wants to argue that it takes a thief to catch a thief. But does he really believe it takes a corporate lobbyist to "take back America" from the corporate lobbyists? Let him explain that in one of the e-mails he regularly sends his thousands of followers. They trusted Dean, and there is nothing wrong with hope. But as Dean fans deal with the disappointment of New Hampshire, he has delivered them more bad news to process. Looking at the Neel move--a scream of a different sort--it would not be unreasonable for any Deaniac who embraced this campaign as a reform movement to say, Stick a fork in it; it's done.

While American politics has always centered on the 5-10% of voters who were indecisive or indifferent, the power of this strange bloc - a kind of aristocracy of the apathetic - has gained new importance as reality in politics is increasingly replaced by media-generated myth.

This election has much more in common with 'American Idol' than it does with its electoral predecessors, a point dramatically illustrated by the number of voters who think it's their responsibility to find an electable candidate rather than one with whom they actually agree. This is a deadly trap, ultimately fatal to what remains of democracy, because it reduces the citizen to the status of a sitcom producer rather than an active political participant. If we are all trying to guess what each other thinks, we will all drown in our suppositions about each other.

How important this is can be shown by the exit polls from New Hampshire and Iowa. In each case, eliminating all voters who made up their minds in the last week - the least involved, the least thoughtful, and the least committed to anything - produces strikingly different results.

Yesterday in Columbus, Georgia, Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was sentenced to three months in federal prison for enacting her habit of bearing witness against US military violence, this time by crossing onto the property of Ft. Benning military base in November of 2003, as a form of protest against the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHISC).

The Department of Defence continues to hold hundreds of foreign nationals without charge or trial in the US Naval Base in Guantαnamo Bay in Cuba. Many have been held there for more than a year in conditions the totality of which may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. None was granted prisoner of war status or brought before a competent tribunal to determine this status as required by the Geneva Conventions. None has had access to any court or to legal counsel. Visits by family members have not been granted, thereby drawing relatives into the distress of this indefinite and unchallengeable detention regime. On 3 July 2003, it was announced that President Bush had named six detainees under the Military Order he signed in November 2001, making them eligible for trial by military commission. Any such trial would contravene international fair trial norms, and any executions carried out after such trials would violate minimum international safeguards applying to capital cases.

Detainees have been held incommunicado in US bases in Afghanistan. Allegations of ill-treatment have emerged. Others have been held in incommunicado US custody in undisclosed locations elsewhere in the world, and the US has also instigated or involved itself in "irregular renditions", US parlance for informal transfers of detainees between the USA and other countries which bypass extradition or other human rights protections. Two US nationals have been held incommunicado for more than a year in military custody without charge or trial in the USA, having been designated as "enemy combatants" by the executive. A third man, a Qatari national, was recently removed from the criminal justice system by presidential order just before his trial. Such resort to executive power threatens to undermine not only international law but also the US criminal justice system itself.

Former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told members of the Senate Wednesday that the failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq exposed weaknesses in America's intelligence-gathering apparatus.

Jan. 27, 2004 | Mr. Bush's fantasy planet
The president was fantasizing again this afternoon about the circumstances that led to war -- and if his remarks at his press conference with the Polish president are to be taken seriously, he also seems badly confused about his Iraqi timeline. This was Bush's first attempt to answer the damning findings of David Kay, departing director of the Iraq Survey Group. It didn't go well, although almost everyone in the White House press corps pretended not to notice.

So removed from reality is the president that it seems worthwhile to unpack two exchanges with reporters who asked about Kay's admission that he expects no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq.
. . .
what is most notable in Bush's answer is that he again said Saddam "did not let us in." This is the second time he has made this weird statement, as if Hans Blix and UNMOVIC had never existed, nor conducted the most intrusive weapons inspections ever done in Iraq. (The first time was last July, when Bush said, in the presence of an astonished Kofi Annan: "And we gave [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in.")

How dare the press mock Howard Dean when they listen respectfully to this arrant lunacy?

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Five attacks claimed the lives of 13 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including six U.S. soldiers, two CNN employees, four Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi civilian, according to police and military sources.

It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals.

AMERICA UNBOUND
The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy.
By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay.
246 pp. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. $22.95.

THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.
By Chalmers Johnson.
389 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25.

THE BUBBLE OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY
Correcting the Misuse of American Power.
By George Soros.
207 pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $22.

BUSH IN BABYLON
The Recolonisation of Iraq.
By Tariq Ali.
Illustrated. 214 pp. New York: Verso. $20.

SUPERPOWER SYNDROME
America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World.
By Robert Jay Lifton.
211 pp. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books. Paper, $12.95.

CRISIS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA
How to Deal With a Nuclear North Korea.
By Michael O'Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki.
230 pp. New York: A Brookings Institution Book/ McGraw-Hill. $19.95.

AFTER THE EMPIRE
The Breakdown of the American Order.
By Emmanuel Todd. Translated by C. Jon Delogu. Foreword by Michael Lind.
233 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $29.95

The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees," Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, told reporters at the Pentagon in a satellite video news conference from his headquarters in the city of Tikrit.

Bomb attacks in central Iraqi towns killed five American soldiers and four Iraqis on Saturday, a day after two U.N. security experts arrived in the capital to study the possible return of the world body's international staff.

The Mars probe Spirit stopped returning science or telemetry data this week in what NASA called a "serious" breakdown.

"We have a very serious anomaly on the vehicle," said Pete Theisinger, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
The news came as NASA prepared for the arrival on Mars this weekend of the second exploration rover, Opportunity.
. . .
U.S. President George Bush last week announced a new space initiative aiming to set up a manned base on the moon from about 2015 and which would eventually send human missions to Mars and beyond.

He proposed expansion of abstinence education to prevent STDs and teen pregnancy. Hey, here's a news flash. The kids receptive to this message aren't getting any anyway.

Costello questioned the award of billions of dollars of contracts to Cheney's former corporation Haliburton to extinguish fires and rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure after the war.

"Can you imagine what the Republicans would be doing to a Democratic president who was a CEO of a company that now has gotten billions of dollars worth of contracts -- no-bid contracts -- without competition?" Costello, D-Belleville, was quoted as saying.

"There would be hearings day after day. And my prediction to you is that you will see in this session of Congress ..., there will not only be hearings, but I think there ought to be impeachment hearings."

The General Accounting Agency sued Cheney after he refused to release documents about who and when he met with before formulating the country's energy policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided to hear Cheney's appeal.

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that Cheney spent last week duck hunting in Louisiana with one of the Supreme Court Justices who may decide the case -- U.S. Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia.

"The United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins . . ."

In their never-ending war on actual science, the 1600 Crew has decreed that Hubble Must Die. It doesn't matter that the Hubble, after getting off to a rocky start with a bad mirror, has been one of the most successful and visible accomplishments, of NASA and our space program, the Hubble is no longer going to be supported.
. . .
The unwritten sub-text here is that the Hubble Space Telescope helps to prove, by its very unbiased observations, that the Universe is more that 4000 years old, or what ever crack-pot literal interpretation that the bible slaps on it. Anti-scientists, coupled with their co-conspirators the dogmatic religious right have no desire to have real science being done anywhere. From potentially life-saving stem cell research to that creationist horseshit that they are trying to force into textbooks and classrooms, they want nothing more that a return to a rerun of the Dark Ages. Scary isn't it? I hope I'm not right.

Oh, and that whole manned space flight thing, the 1600 Crew ought to just write the check to the Aerospace contractors now, and quit acting like they want to accomplish something besides enriching campaign donors. For a billion dollars in that industry you get two computers, a server and a copy of some CAD program with a consultant to run it. A year from now, they fire the consultant, sell the computer equipment, take a tax write off and head to Barbados for the winter to count earnings. Jeebus.

The sorrows of empire are the inescapable consequences of the national policies American elites chose after September 11, 2001. Militarism and imperialism always bring with them sorrows. The ubiquitous symbol of the Christian religion, the cross, is perhaps the world's most famous reminder of the sorrows that accompanied the Roman Empire--it represents the most atrocious death the Roman proconsuls could devise in order to keep subordinate peoples in line. From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was "Let them hate us so long as they fear us."

Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal "executive branch" of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. All I have space for here is to touch briefly on three of these: endless war, the loss of Constitutional liberties, and financial ruin.

In a 40-minute address that was also broadcast to the nation, General Musharraf said the country was threatened by a "negative image" because it is seen as promoting an Islamic insurgency in Kashmir, the Indian state that is a main source of contention between Pakistan and India; failing to crack down on Taliban supporters along the Afghan border; spreading nuclear weapons technology to other countries; and being an "intolerant society."

The general called that image inaccurate and said a vast majority of Pakistanis were "moderates who totally reject extremism." He urged Pakistanis to "wage a `jihad' against extremism."

Tariq Rehman, a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, said General Musharraf was trying to signal that he was committed to reform.

"He wants the United States to know `I will stick to this,' " Professor Rehman said. "He is giving a message both to India and the U.S."

His pronouncement on who may write a new constitution (only Iraqis elected by Iraqis) forced Washington to upend its timetable for granting the country its independence. Last week, the ayatollah rejected the American proposal for choosing an interim legislature through caucuses, immobilizing the transition. His backers took to the streets to support him.

The ayatollah's influence recalls that of another once-reclusive Shiite cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who 25 years ago took the helm of the Iranian revolution and created an Islamic republic implacably hostile to the United States.

Of the many issues competing for attention in this new and defining year, one is of a unique order of magnitude: President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq. The facts demonstrate how dishonest that decision was.
. . .
Hussein's brutal regime was not an adequate justification for war, and the administration did not seriously try to make it one until long after the war began and all the false justifications began to fall apart. There was no imminent threat. Hussein had no nuclear weapons, no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons, no connection to Sept. 11 and no plausible link to al Qaeda. We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence.

Vast resources have been spent on the war that should have been spent on priorities at home. Our forces are stretched thin. Precious lives have been lost. The war has made America more hated in the world and made the war on terrorism harder to win. As Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in announcing the latest higher alert: "Al Qaeda's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland is perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th."

Suicide Bomber Kills 20 in Iraq

Researchers at the multinational European Institute for Ruminant Research in La Vache, Switzerland have published their first detailed analysis of the global reach of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. Their findings show that the disease is much more prevalent than previously believed and that its human counterpart, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or vCJD, has been manifest in Europe and the United States for many years.

The multidisciplinary research team, comprised of microbovine pathologists, quantum epidemiologists and beefy political scientists from many nations of the European Union, is led by its lead researchers and spokespersons, Dr. Peter Wahnsinn and Dr. Maria Bevelechι.

“These are very startling findings,” Dr. Wahnsinn announced at a hastily convened press conference at the EIRR laboratory in suburban La Vache, Switzerland. “But we can no longer hide ourselves from the obvious truth. Human variant mad cow disease is not only here and widespread, but it has been raging through the human population for many years now. There are probably reporters among those of you at this very news conference who are already infected and showing subtle, early symptoms of the illness.”

The U.S. government yesterday awarded a Halliburton subsidiary, under fire for how much it paid to import fuel into Iraq, a competitively bid contract worth as much as $1.2 billion to continue repairs to the country's oil facilities.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave KBR one of two contracts that replace a no-bid contract it was awarded last March. A joint venture between Pasadena-based Parsons Corp and its former division, Parsons Energy and Chemicals Group Inc., won the second contract, worth up to $800 million.

The announcement came in the week Pentagon auditors asked the Defense Department inspector general to investigate a deal between KBR and a Kuwaiti fuel supplier to import gasoline into Iraq as part of the first contract.

A draft audit report last month found that KBR may have overcharged the government $61 million for fuel from Kuwait.

A team of IRS examiners will move into the global headquarters of the Nature Conservancy in Arlington to begin auditing the charity, the world's largest environmental organization.

A letter sent to the Conservancy by the Internal Revenue Service last month indicates that the audit will be of uncommon scope for a charity, tax specialists said. The memorandum proposes a preliminary meeting between four IRS examiners and the Conservancy's chief financial officer to discuss logistics, communications, telephone access, equipment and accommodations. The IRS will examine 2002 tax returns, the letter said.

"It is unusual," said former IRS commissioner Donald C. Alexander, now a private tax lawyer. "This is an extraordinary case. . . . It is an indication of a pretty strong audit."

''The president's recess appointment of this anti-civil rights judge the day after laying a wreath on the grave of Martin Luther King is an insult to Dr. King, an insult to every African American, and an insult to all Americans who share Dr. King's great goals,'' said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). ''It serves only to emphasize again this administration's shameful opposition to civil rights.''

I think Dean has the best chance of any of the candidates in this race to beat George W. Bush. . .
Howard Dean . . . is the strongest candidate against Bush that the Democrats have. The complaints against him are overdrawn and easily outweighed by his strengths.

Start with the complaints. The first is that he is too left-wing to win. Dean owes his colleagues in the primary race a big debt of gratitude on that one. When Gephardt attacked him for a Medicare position taken in the mid-1990s, it reinforced the fact that Dean is a fiscal conservative - well within the mainstream of the successful Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. If Dean were a real left-winger, he would have called for a national health insurance plan (like Gephardt and Kucinich). Instead he has a much more realistic plan to take care of the uninsured - and has a Vermont record on it to boot.

If Dean were a real left-winger, he'd call for cutting defense spending and immediately removing our troops from Iraq - as Kucinich has. But Dean understands that the fight against terror requires new, albeit somewhat different, military spending than the current Bush plans and that we can't fight terror by allowing Iraq to turn into another Afghanistan.

The second complaint involves Dean's personality. The argument is that he is too combative. This always struck me as odd. How can Democrats object to a combative person running against an incumbent president who tells the world: "Bring 'em on!" Do they think they can beat Bush with a wimp? With some guy who says, "On the one hand this, and on the other hand that?" I, for one, relish the sight of Howard Dean - his wrestler's neck bulging - taking on the president after Bush tries to tell us that record deficits don't matter, that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center or that a time of constant terror alerts is a safer world. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, in endorsing Dean, called him the Harry Truman of the 21st century. Truman was a feisty little plain-speaking man - and a great president.

But the most compelling reason to support Dean is that only he can change the nature of the political game. No Democrat will win unless he can make the country see through Bush, and Dean has been so good at this that by last fall all the other candidates were mimicking his outrage.

Furthermore, if Democrats play old-fashioned politics, they lose, plain and simple. George W. Bush is the incumbent; he has the Executive Branch, Republicans control Congress, and this White House has shown an uncanny ability to bamboozle and intimidate the national press corps. The Republicans own the "Establishment," and they will use it to raise $170 million or more to destroy the Democratic candidate.

Dean has built a primary campaign that makes the Establishment pretty much irrelevant. The only way a Democrat wins in November is to keep it that way. By the end of last year Dean probably had at least 300,000 individual contributors. If Dean wins some early contests and locks up the nomination by mid-March, each of these people will have a great story to tell to 10 new contributors. How much could Dean raise from these 1.5 to 3 million people (you do the math; the numbers of potential donors are huge) in the months before the Democratic convention?

They simply switched which item each button votes for, so all the votes for the "wrong" answer end up being for the one they want. How, er, responsible of our elected representatives.

1. This is NOT Bush's idea. It is something his staff thought might make him look visionary. You know as well as I do that he has no clue about space.

2. The fact that he is investing only an additional billion dollars in the NASA budget to fund the initial planning for such a program is also an indication of lack of seriousness. This is all window dressing for his campaign. Any serious development and funding would take place long after he is out of office, so he can say pretty much anything he wants at this stage with no consequences.

3. The most serious reservation we should have about this results from many recent conservative sources that want to militarize and commericalize space. Extending terrestrial conflicts and competition to the moon and beyond, while the stuff of science fiction action plots, is probably not the best way to approach the exploration of outerspace.

4. Finally, the thing that should be sounding alarm bells all around is the Bushes refusal to even estimate a cost of this enterprise, just as they refused to give any kind of estimate of the cost of Iraq - until it was too late.

Here's the story: Congress mandates that HHS produce an annual report on healthcare disparities related to race and poverty. The most recent version was released a month ago, but it turns out that the final version released by the political troops was dramatically different from the initial draft written by HHS scientists. Upon learning of this, Bush heckler-in chief Henry Waxman commissioned a report comparing the scientists' draft with the final draft.

Things move quicker in Iraq—"Vietnam on crack," as one columnist has described it. With breathtaking speed, the liberators have been tarred as home-invading thugs.

In one mid-December briefing, the Coalition Provisional Authority boasted that 24 hours of raids on 1,620 suspected rebel hideouts yielded 107 arrests—a success rate, 7 percent, of the sort that once turned South Vietnamese peasants into Vietcong insurgents.

The insurgent war of attrition against American soldiers has gotten very desperate, very fast, the latest sign being a number of downed helicopters; eyewitnesses say Thursday's crash south of Fallujah, killing nine, was the result of a missile strike—as was the crash in November that killed 16. A mortar strike on a base Wednesday killed one and wounded 30. The American death toll in Iraq approaches 500; the number of medical evacuations, as of mid December, is 10,854, most not reflected on the Pentagon's website.

Once again a war has gone wrong, and the denouement still must be leveraged for maximum political advantage—or at least to minimum disadvantage. A scary story must be capped off with a happy ending. And for that reason, the Bush administration must make sure certain things are forgotten: namely, the aims it said we were going to war for in the first place. George Bush must keep on moving the goal line, as he has ever since this war's beginning.

Why are we in Iraq? The notion of an imminent threat from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction washed out with the tide. We hear less, too, about making Americans safer from terrorism; the threat level as of this writing has only lately been lowered from orange, a degree of warning that, the Department of Homeland Security informs us, calls for "taking additional precautions at public events and possibly considering alternative venues or even cancellation." (Have fun at the Super Bowl.) And no one in power wants to talk about all the Middle Eastern nations that would start democratizing just as soon as Iraq's newly liberated people showed them the way.

For many years now, the Republican right has engaged in a politics of cultural bullying that is the direct descendent of the southern segregationists. It is based on anathematizing a minority in order to solidify its own political base around false assumptions of purity and superiority. It is an illusion that deceives much of its own constituency into thinking that ultimately minor cultural differences are more important than such issues as economics, healthcare or public education. Thus it is not only mean, it is masochistic. One minority ends up being hurt by another that is being conned and hurt in other ways.

The illusion works best in a politics in which a large portion of the public is politically inert. That way you don't have to convince a majority, you need only mobilize your own minority. It is a vile sort of politics that deliberately fosters hate and anger and is as alien from the American ideal as one can find. It is, in fact, far closer to the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban than to anything in our own best traditions.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

Political guru Karl Rove claims that the job of journalists is "not necessarily to report the news. It's to get a headline or get a story that will make people pay attention to their magazine, newspaper or television more."

And Chief of Staff Andy Card scoffs: "[The media] don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election."

Card argues that it's not the responsibility of top White House policymakers to provide reporters with facts.

"It's not our job to be sources. The taxpayers don't pay us to leak!" Card tells Auletta. "Our job is not to make your job easy."

Predictably, the reporters who cover Bush aren't happy. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank complains: "My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach ...to engage us as little as possible." And the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller grouses: "Too often they treat us with contempt."

Le Figaro, one of France's biggest (and most conservative) newspapers, reports "an investigative judge is looking into allegations of corruption during construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria by Halliburton and" a French oil company. According to a gas and oil trade publication (picked up by the international AP newswire on October 11, 2003) the judge is "looking into who may have benefited from nearly $200 million in potentially illegal commissions allegedly handed out from 1990 to 2002." In May, Halliburton admitted that, under Cheney's stewardship, it paid "$2.4 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to get favorable tax treatment." Halliburton now says it is cooperating with a simultaneous review by the Security and Exchange Commission.

The London Financial Times reports the investigation specifically focuses on the criminal charges of "misuse of corporate funds" and "corruption of foreign public agents." The Sydney Australia Morning Herald reports the investigative judge is specifically targeting Cheney for his "alleged complicity in the abuse of corporate assets."

O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."

O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

White House officials braced yesterday for a forthcoming book in which former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill lavishes criticism on the Bush administration.

The book, "The Price of Loyalty," chronicles O'Neill's tenure at Treasury and conveys his impression of President Bush as a man uninterested in government policy, who tuned out detailed discussion of the economy and whose decisions were driven primarily by partisan politics.

It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naοvely, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic.

With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund.

Prepared by a team of I.M.F. economists, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration's tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits pose "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.

The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years — "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.

Unelectable, My Ass!

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet
January 7, 2004

I swear, if I hear one more Democratic honcho say that Howard Dean is not electable, I'm going to do something crazy (maybe that's what happened to Britney in Vegas this weekend).

The contention is nothing short of idiotic.

Consider the source. The folks besmirching the good doctor's Election Day viability are the very people who have driven the Democratic Party into irrelevance; who spearheaded the party's resounding 2002 mid-term defeats; and who kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts and an unprecedented deficit.

Dean is electable precisely because he's making a decisive break with the spinelessness and pussyfooting that have become the hallmark of the Democratic Party.

So, please, no more hand-wringing about Dean being "another Dukakis." And no more weepy flashbacks about having had your heart broken by George McGovern, whose 1972 annihilation haunts the 2004 Democratic primaries like a political Jacob Marley, shaking his chains and warning of the Ghosts of Landslides Past.

"We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary - and not a moment longer."

"The Universal Life Church believes in that which is right."

when the Democratic National Committee decided to send a mailing to its workers some years back, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had come to care only about its donors.

We have lost much of what was gained in the past because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel and rock groups in Hungary. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.

Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

Singer-songwriter Ray Davies of the Kinks was shot in the leg while chasing thieves who snatched a purse from a woman he was with, police said Monday. He was not seriously injured.

Police said Davies, 59, and the woman were walking along the Quarter's Burgundy Street around 8:30 p.m. Sunday when the theft and shooting happened.

Howard Dean, who stunned the Democratic establishment last month when he won the backing of former Vice President Al Gore, will pick up another key endorsement Tuesday from former Sen. Bill Bradley, sources close to the Dean campaign said.

Three top enforcement officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have resigned or retired in the last two weeks, including two lawyers who were architects of the agency's litigation strategy against coal-burning power plants.

The timing of the departures and comments by at least one of the officials who is leaving suggest that some have left out of frustration with the Bush administration's policy toward enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

"The rug was pulled out from under us," said Rich Biondi, who is retiring as associate director of the air enforcement division of the agency. "You look around and say, `What contribution can I continue to make here?' and it was limited."

In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors — Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics — argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column. The United States, they point out, is currently running very large budget and trade deficits. Official projections that this deficit will decline over time aren't based on "credible assumptions." Realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers.
. . .
"Substantial ongoing deficits," they warn, "may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits." In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.
. . .
The point made by Mr. Rubin now, and by Mr. Mankiw when he was a free agent, is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn't a birthright. Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity — in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to rein in deficits, paying a political cost if necessary. And in the past that belief has been justified. Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when the budget deficit soared.

The White House has retreated from its doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive military action and is returning to traditional diplomacy in an effort to repackage George Bush as a president for peace.
Signs of the new strategy that have emerged in the past few weeks include:

· North Korea, where authorities yesterday agreed to allow US inspectors to visit its nuclear complex next week.

· Iran, where the US proposed, through UN channels, sending a high-level humanitarian mission after last week's earthquake - although Tehran last night asked for any visit to be delayed.

· Libya, where the US welcomed Muammar Gadafy's surprise decision to give up weapons of mass destruction.

· Iraq, where the Bush administration is pressing for greater involvement from the international community.

· Palestine, where US peace envoy John Wolf may be sent to try to restart talks.

•“Having been here and seeing the care that these troops get is comforting for me and Laura. We are -- should and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm's way.”-- Walter Reed Army Hospital, 1/17/03 (That same day the Bush Administration cut off access to its health care system from approximately 164,000 veterans.)

• “We're dealing with first-time responders to make sure they've got what's needed to be able to respond.“-- 3/27/02 (Bush said he was proposing $3.5 billion in “new” money for first responders, but he actually tried to rob more than $1 billion from existing grants to local police/fire departments to fund his proposal. In August 2002, Bush rejected another $150 million for grants to state and local first responders.)

• “We're working hard to make sure your job is easier, that the port is safer. The Customs Service is working with overseas ports and shippers to improve its knowledge of container shipments, assessing risk so that we have a better feel of who we ought to look at, what we ought to worry about.”-- 6/24/02 (Bush’s 2003 and 2004 budgets provide nothing for port security grants. In August, he vetoed all $39 million for the Container Security Initiative that he specifically touted.)

• “A secure and efficient border is key to our economic security.”-- 9/9/02 (Bush promised more INS/Border Patrol staff and facilities, but provided no funding. He vetoed $6.25 million for promised pay upgrades for Border Patrol agents, and his 2004 Budget slashes “Border and Transportation Security” by $284 million.)

• “We've got to do more to protect worker pensions.”-- 8/7/02 (The Bush Administration proposed new rules so employers could resume converting traditional pension plans to new ‘cash balance’ plans that can lower benefits of long-serving workers.) “Companies favor these plans because they can slash a worker's pension benefit by 20 to 50 percent in one fell swoop.”-- Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-VT.)

• “A reformed and strengthened Medicare system, plus a healthy dosage of Medicare spending in the budget, will make us say firmly, we fulfilled our promise to the seniors of America.”-- 1/29/03 (Bush’s 2004 budget proposes 85% less than what would be needed to meet his goal, and would leave 67% of the total $400 billion pledge to be spent after 2008.)

• “I want to thank the Boys & Girls Clubs across the country…The Boys & Girls Club have got a grand history of helping children understand the future is bright for them, as well as any other child in America.”-- 1/30/03 (Bush’s 2002 budget proposed eliminating all federal funding for the Boys and Girls Club of America.)

• “Clear Skies legislation, when passed by Congress, will significantly reduce smog and mercury emissions, as well as stop acid rain. It will put more money directly into programs to reduce pollution, so as to meet firm national air-quality goals. ...”-- Earth Day speech, 4/22/02 (Actually, the Clear Skies law delays required pollution emission cuts by as much as 10 years, weakens the states' power to address interstate pollution problems, and allows outdated industrial facilities to avoid costly pollution-control upgrades.)