| |
 |
|
(JavaScript Error)
|
| Archives |
|
|
|
|
Subscribe
|
| Now you
can subscribe to this blog and receive new blogs direct to
your email! |
|
RSS/XML Syndication
| |
|
|
|
|
Video: Alternative
Views
|
|
Censured Casualties
features rare footage
of war crimes against the Iraqi people suffered during
and after the Gulf War. The footage is from former Attorney
General Ramsey
Clark in his attempt to document the injustice
of United States military actions in the region.
|
|
|
Video: Alternative
Views
|
|
Another Unknown
War
features a film on the
struggle of the indigenous people of West Papua to remain
sovereign in the face of an Indonesian invasion backed
by world capital. Footage of Noam
Chomsky on Western involvments in the region and
the relation to East Timor.
|
|
|
Doug's New Books & Related
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
TV/Radio
|
|
|
| |
 |
| |
|
|
|
Friday, May 31, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
journalists
James Baker deserves much more media focus as this commentary suggests
journalists
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thursday, May 30, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
President Formally Seeks a Halt to Crusader Artillery System
President Formally Seeks a Halt to Crusader Artillery System
The Crusader story is extremely interesting and it appears to me that the Bush administration pulled off a scam for the Bush family Carlyle Funds that so far has alluded attention. To everyone’s surprise, Donald Rumfeld initially supported the oversized and outdated Crusader artillery canon that critics claimed was overpriced and more appropriate to earlier models of war. Bush himself had criticized the system during the 2000 election and Rumsfeld had earlier also opposed the Crusader. With Rumsfeld’s seeming support, the Carlyle group put out an IPO (i.e. initial stock offering) of the company that made the Crusader that soared in value. They then dumped big chunks of the stock and lo and behold! Rumsfeld was now against the system in a fierce fight with Pentagon army bureaucrats who wanted it, including the highly disgraced Secretary of the Army Thomas White whose Enron sins were creating a fire-storm of criticism. Bush jumped in and declared himself against the Crusader, no doubt thinking that he could claim he was both for a high-tech military and was not a shill for family interests, although his Carlyle group associates had already pocketed their profits from the scam!
|
|
|
The New Republic Online: Memogate
Is the CIA or FBI responsible for 911 intelligence failures?
Answer, its all of them...
below, NR goes after CIA
The New Republic Online: Memogate
|
|
|
Halliburton Says S.E.C. Is Investigating Its Accounting
Potentially explosive! Last week I posted a NYT story that indicated that Halliburton had cooked the books when Cheney was CEO and the story is now breaking that Halliburton is under investigation. Most mainstream accounts fail to note that Cheney received a $33 million severance pay when he left Halliburton to run with Bush and then has repaid the payoff with a variety of federal favors for Halliburton. Cheney is crude con big-time and its to be hoped that this story will lead to his undoing...
Halliburton Says S.E.C. Is Investigating Its Accounting
|
|
|
Alternewswire
click away on good alternative news webwire...
Alternewswire
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The New Yorker: Fact
Seymour Hersh, top investigative report, on why government didn't know it was coming...
The New Yorker: Fact
|
|
Monday, May 27, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
Enron, the S&L Scandal, and the Bush Gang
The Enron collapse is a major political and economic scandal, one of the defining events of the epoch. In fact, it is amazing that George W. Bush has been caught up in three defining spectacles of the Third Millennium, events that are among the most stunning in U.S. history and that happened within a single year: the stealing of a presidential election in Grand Theft 2000, September 11 and subsequent Terror War, and the collapse of Enron and uncovering of its scandalous history. The Enron scandals are especially important since they reveal the complete failure and catastrophic effects of Bushonomics, the amazingly scandalous history of Bush and his partners in corruption and crime, and the systemic failures of a system that would allow Enron and Bush and his cronies to flourish, loot the system in startling ways, and assume the very pinnacle of economic and political power.
It is clear that the Enron scandals reveal the utter unworkability and dangerous consequences of the Reagan-Bush conservative pro-market economic policy that deregulates the economy, allows a Wild West capitalism to flourish, and that eliminates regulation, law, and accountability in the economic realm, while placing the state in the service of the most corrupt and greedy corporations. As Governor of Texas and President of the United States, George W. Bush and his associates had done everything possible to deregulate oil and energy corporations and to provide windfall tax benefits and other financial favors to his corporate and wealthy supporters. Hence, Enron, for instance, not only did not have to pay taxes, but also got back millions in rebates. Laws and regulations governing banking and accountability of corporations were thrown out the window and the way was open for Enron and Wild West capital to loot the system and undermine the economy with substantial payoffs to the Bush administration and other politicians to look the other way and aid and abet the corporate theft.
A similar looting of the system had taken place earlier and the same cast of characters had been involved in a previous scandal: I am referring to the Savings and Loan scam of the 1980s Reagan and Bush administrations where banking, savings and loan, and other financial institutions had been deregulated and multitudes of corporate crooks stepped in and robbed the financial system, costing taxpayers, according to some estimates, over $500 billion (Lewis 1990) to over $1 3 trillion (Day 1993). In a way, this systematic corporate crime bonanza was bigger than the Enron robbery and the perpetrators largely got away with it. The S&L thievery surely should have alerted government and corporate officials that deregulation and laissez-faire policy is extremely dangerous and opens the doors to large-scale corruption and crime.
The S&L scandal should have also alerted politicians, the media, and the public to the sort of scam and corruption that the Bush family has engaged in for generations. Architects of the S&L deregulation policy included former Vice-President George H. W. Bush and James Baker who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury Secretary, among other offices in an astounding career that has so far escaped wide-spread public scrutiny. A book by former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton (1992), however, documents how friends and family members of the Bush and Baker family, as well as the Mafia and CIA, took over S&L institutions, looted them, and left the public with the bill.
The slime, scandal, and crimes of the S&L looting and Enron debacle are in some ways similar. After Bush family deregulation carried out by the father and son, the scammers of the S&Ls and Enron crooks went on an orgy of corruption, taking out funds from the S&Ls, for example, and investing them in a variety of schemes and scams that enabled the S&L managers, such as Neil Bush, to skim off big bucks for themselves and their cronies. Enron, as we are now seeing, set up dummy businesses for their con operations, to hide money, to avoid taxes, to use the firms to hide debt, and to inflate the value of their stock prices. As the scandal unfolds, no doubt other inventive business maneuvers will come to light.
Both the S&L institutions and Enron threw money at politicians as they scammed the system, making sure that they had political friends in high places. The corporate players in the respective crimes spent money outrageously to buy friends and supporters, ranging from lavish entertainment, often including prostitutes, booze, and drugs, to purchases of a wide range of goods and services that bought good-will and kept money flowing (many Enron creditors, as were shown nightly on television for some weeks, were left with outstanding bills for products and services rendered, that could bankrupt many small businesses). And Enron even bought journalists and intellectuals, paying them outrageously high fees to speak or consult with the corporation.
Not only does the Enron debacle show that the kind of Wild West capitalism that George W. Bush and his cronies advocate does not work, but it also reveals the appalling connections and histories of the Bush family, especially if seen in connection with the S&L scandal. Enron-Bush connections are multiple, beginning with a history of favors to the Texas-based energy corporation from successive Bush administrations, in George H. W. Bush’s presidency, in George W. Bush’s two terms as governor of Texas, and in his short but eventful term as President. While in Texas, Bush pushed through the Enron agenda by creating the most deregulatory environment imaginable, where the energy companies had almost no state regulation or requirements, to the detriment of the state’s environment, economy, and eventually to the people of Texas who had to pay for the Bush-Enron excesses –- indeed, given the collapse of Enron stock and the large number of investors who lost billions, the entire country had to pay for Bushonomics and the shenanigans of his supporters, friends, and cronies.
The epic story of Dick Cheney, oil, and Enron is similarly mind-boggling. Cheney admittedly met with Enron executives six times while developing energy, tax, and economic policy. Moreover, there are allegations that Cheney replaced the head of the energy department regulation, FERC, Curtis Hubert with Patrick H. Wood, a crony of George W. Bush’s from Texas who was previously had of the Texas Public Utilities Commission and who would be more pliable to Enron’s demands. For months now, there have been demands that Cheney hand over notes and documents pertaining to his Enron meetings, but so far he has stone-walled these requests, opening the way to potential Senate Hearings or Trials that will perhaps provide a media spectacle equivalent to Watergate, or maybe even better.
The entire Bush administration is, in fact, saturated with oil and energy connections and ties to Enron. Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Commerce Secretary and former Bush campaign manager Don Evans, Bush administration economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay, and many others in the Bush administration come straight from the oil and energy industries. Moreover, Cheney, Evans, Lindsay and others have close Enron connections and were engaged in conversations with Lay and other top Enron officials during its collapse. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, has had to recuse himself from the Enron investigations because of campaign contributions from Enron and close connections with the corporation, as have other top Justice Department officials. Texas Senator Phil Gramm helped write the rules that deregulated energy production and enabled Enron to create its off-shore entities, avoiding public scrutiny and tax liabilities, Gramm’s wife Wendy had served on Enron’s corporate board, and both Gramms received bundles from Enron (perhaps leading Phil Gramm to decide not to run for re-election, knowing that he’d excessively scammed the tainted Enron money box).
Bush’s top policy advisor, Karl Rove, always on the take and on the make, had major stock investments in Enron, which he was forced to sell when reports leaked out that Rove owned large blocks of stock in Enron, Dell computers, tobacco firms, and other corporations which had pending government business and demands. Rove reportedly sold the stock but continued to provide lavish favors to those who contributed to Bush campaigns. It was also leaked to the press on January 26 that Rove had recommended to Enron Christian fundamentalist leader Ralph Reed, who was employed for years with the corporation. Rove wanted Reed’s support, which he got, for Bush’s run for the presidency in the year 2000, but did not want Reed directly on Bush’s staff as the plan was to package Bush as a moderate “compassionate conservative,” and not a hardright Christian fundamentalist a la Reed.
Top Enron lobbyists had close connections with the Bush administration and the Army Secretary, Thomas E. White, who Bush appointed to bring corporate management skills to the military, came from Enron. White is a typical representative of the “revolving door” from the public to the private sector and back, and a posterboy for Bush-Enron connections. While Army Secretary, White had been pushing privatizing energy production for military bases, a move that would immensely benefit Enron. He also held onto his Enron stocks, although he was supposed to divest, and was getting caught up in a web of scandal that would probably force his resignation.
And so the Bush administration is caught up from head to toe in an economic scandal that could be bigger than Teapot Dome in the 1920s and a political scandal larger than Watergate. The Bush administration strategy has been to claim that Enron is an economic affair and not a political one, but in terms of policies and players the economic and political overlap with Bush administration policies and personnel front and center. While millions of people will be seriously harmed by the Enron/Bush scandals, and perhaps the economy will be weakened, one gazes in amazement at the scale of the corruption and crime. The Enron-Bush scandals bog the imagination in immensity and scale and no doubt we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. It will be interesting to see if, once again, George W. Bush will escape the taint of scandal and political destruction. Or will the Bushgate flood open in a spectacle that will keep the public entertained and the media chattering class, lawyers, and judges busy for years to come?
|
|
|
Bush not getting enough sleep, gets crabby and mean according to AP
washingtonpost.com
Travel, Late Night Take Toll on Bush
By Ron Fournier
AP White House Correspondent
Sunday, May 26, 2002; 6:21 PM
PARIS –– Maybe it was the late night out. Maybe the long flights.
Whatever the cause, it was a tired President Bush who stood at a news conference podium Sunday alongside the much more animated – and talkative – French President Jacques Chirac.
Bush responded testily to a question about anti-American sentiment and was a bit crabby around his staff.
No wonder.
Bush, who likes to go to bed about 9:30 p.m., was up past midnight Saturday night on a cruise with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia. Then it was up in the morning for visits to a church and synagogue before flying to Paris – his fourth city and third country in five days.
So when a reporter posed a three-part question, Bush answered one part and forgot the rest.
"I'm jet-lagged," he said.
Reminded of the other two questions, Bush offered another explanation for the memory lapse.
"That's what happens when you're over 55," he said.
He turns 56 in July.
–––
It wasn't exactly what an overtired president needed at the moment.
Chirac opened the news conference with an 11-minute statement – an eternity by U.S. presidential news conference standards. He reviewed, one by one, the points they had discussed privately. There was terrorism, Russia, NATO, the U.S. farm b
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sunday, May 26, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday, May 25, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Independent Argument
Bush held in well-deserved contempt by intelligent critics
Independent Argument
|
|
|
Stock Adviser Knew About 9/11 Attacks, U.S. Suggests
What is this about?! There were reports right after 911 that there were a lot of suspicious stock purchases and selling before and up to 9/11 that led to suspicions that the terrorists were playing the market.... then reports that German bank with CIA connections had done some funny trading... then story disappeared from mainstream... and now this.... inquiring minds want to know...
Stock Adviser Knew About 9/11 Attacks, U.S. Suggests
|
|
Friday, May 24, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
Bush Administration and FBI/CIA Responsibility for September 11 Terror Attacks
Different pundits and critics blame different fractions of the U.S. government for failing to prevent the September 11 attack, with some going after the FBI, others the CIA, and others either the Clinton or Bush administration -– or a combination thereof. Republicans and rightwingers continue to blame the Clinton administration, while serious questions are now being raised concerning Bush administration policy failures that made possible the September 11 terror attacks. I would argue that the collective failure is that of both the Bush administration as a whole and the national security apparatus, in particular the FBI and CIA. The Bush administration is responsible for failing to organize an anti-terrorist task force to coordinate information and action, cutting back on efforts that the Clinton administration had made in this direction, and ignoring government reports that highlighted the need to organize the government to better deal with terrorism, while failing to respond to a large number of specific warnings about impending al Qaeda attacks from a wealth of sources.
Of course, failures of specific intelligence agencies are also in question, as well as the issue of coordinating information between the CIA, FBI, and other agencies. In particular, as Congress began hearings into FBI failures in May 2002 after revelations of the failure of the agency to respond to the Phoenix Arizona FBI memos concerning potential Osama bin Laden al Qaeda terrorists taking flight lessons and the arrest in Minnesota of a potential hijacker, Zacarias Moussaouri, who had alleged al Qaeda connections, shocking revelations of FBI bureaucratic inertia and failure to respond to local intelligence reports, to coordinate information with the CIA, and in general to provide adequate analysis and actions, were being aired in the media. For instance, a FBI operative in the Minnesota office sent Congress a 13-page letter to the Congressional committee that is investigating the government’s lack of preparedness for the September 11 attacks, which documented frustration with the FBI bureaucracy’s inability to respond to serious concerns about an imminent terrorist attack and to get the agency to investigate potential al Qaeda terrorists more seriously.
Indeed, reading media reports or testimony of FBI and CIA bureaucracy inability to properly interpret intelligence reports from the field concerning dangers of a pending al Qaeda terrorist attack, the lack of information sharing between the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, and the Bush administration disinterest in addressing these problems pre-September 11 is shocking. It is clear that the FBI, CIA, and U.S. government is mired in bureaucracy and that the national security apparatus needs to be completely reorganized. Obviously, there should be blue-ribbon investigations of exactly what went wrong and why. But it is the responsibility of the sitting political administration to protect the country and in the case of September 11 the Bush administration failed in multiple ways.
[the recent news stories that prompted this commentary are posted in the following]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Student Tied to Terror Suspect Gave F.B.I. Disturbing Portrait
An accompanying NYT disturbing story that raises questions concerning FBI incompetency in detailing with terrorist threats. Just yesterday, I saw an eye-opening 1987 British Granada TV documentary "The Sword of Islam" that -- almost 15 years ago -- documented the growing radical Islamic movement, hatred of the West, and embrace of terrorism. People within US government agencies should have known of this growing threat and dealt with it, it is stunning how the FBI and US government agencies ignored the threat. Equally disturbing are reports of Bush administration shutting down efforts by the Clinton administration to address the terrorist threats; I comment in my next posting on the issue of responsibility.
Student Tied to Terror Suspect Gave F.B.I. Disturbing Portrait
|
|
|
Agent Complaints Lead F.B.I. Director to Ask for Inquiry
This story contains explosive revelations of utter FBI incompetency in dealing with impending threats of possible al Qaeda attacks; an agent from the Minneapolis FBI office details problems so severe that there should be serious consideration of reorganizing the FBI and perhaps shutting it down and reorganizing it from bottom up as the WTO recently decided to do.
Agent Complaints Lead F.B.I. Director to Ask for Inquiry
|
|
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
The Globe and Mail: Search
Bush administration admits that latest terror warnings are motivated by need to fend off political criticism!!
The Globe and Mail: Search
|
|
|
Collective Responsibility of the Bush Administration for the September 11 Terror Attacks
In mid-May 2002, a political hullabaloo erupted when CBS News broadcast a report on May 15 that the CIA briefed George W. Bush about bin Laden network plans to hijack airplanes on August 6, when he was vacationing at his ranch in Texas. There was immediately an explosion of controversy, raising questions, for the first time in a public debate, about what the Bush administration knew about possible terrorist attacks pre-September 11 and what they had done to prevent them. Also, during May 2002, a Phoenix Arizona FBI memo from summer 2001 was released that warned of the dangers of Middle Eastern men going to flight school in order to gain the skills necessary to hijack planes, and of the dangers of the al Qaeda network carrying out such hijackings. Moreover, the arrest of Zacarias Moussaouri, the alleged 20th al Qaeda hijacker, in Minnesota in late August 2001, who had also been taking flying lessons and acting suspiciously, should have raised warning signals.
Over the summer of 2001, there had been reports that there were dangers of an airplane terrorist attack on the G8 economic summit in Genoa that George W. Bush attended. There were purportedly so many intelligence reports circulating in summer 2001 of the dangers of imminent terrorist attacks on the U.S. that a government official Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, warned FBI, aviation, INS, and other crucial government agencies to be on the highest alert and not to take vacations during a six week period over the summer. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, was ordered to take government jets instead of commercial airlines and the FAA passed down several alerts to the commercial airlines.
It was also well-known in certain circles that in 1994 the French had foiled a terrorist airplane attack on the Eiffel Tower, while in 1995 arrests were made of terrorists who allegedly planned to use an airplane to attack the CIA headquarters. Philippine police subsequently warned the U.S. that Ramzi Yousef, who had helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had schemes to hijack and blow up a dozen U.S. airliners and was contemplating taking over and crashing a plane into the CIA headquarters himself.
Furthermore, there had been a whole series of U.S. government reports on the dangers of terrorism and need for a coordinated response. A 1996 report by the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, headed by Al Gore, developed a report that was never acted on (see http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/212fin~1.html). A 1999 National Intelligence Council report on Terrorism specifically warned that bin Laden’s al Qaeda network might undertake suicide hijackings against U.S. targets; the report noted that members of the al Qaeda network had threatened to do this before and that the U.S. should be alert to such attacks (see “1999 Report Warned of Suicide Hijack,” Associated Press, May 17, 2001). Perhaps most significant, blue ribbon commision reports by former U.S. Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rudman, and by the Bremer National Commission, highlighted the dangers of a domestic terrorist attack against the U.S. and the need to develop appropriate protective measures. The Hart-Rudman report recommended consolidating U.S. intelligence on terrorism and organizing federal responses to prevent and fight domestic terrorist attacks on the U.S. ( On the Hart-Rudman report, see http://www.nssg.gov/News/news.htm; for the Bremer National Commission on Terrorism report, see http://w3.access.gpo.gov/nct/).
Not only did the Bush administration fail to act on warnings of imminent terrorist attacks and the need to provide systematic government responses to coordinate information and attempt to prevent and aggressively fight terrorism, but, shamefully, the Bush administration halted a series of attempts to fight the bin Laden network that had been begun by the Clinton administration. Earlier, a wave of revelations came out, ignored completely in the U.S. media, concerning how high-ranking officials in the Bush administration had completely neglected threats of terrorist attacks by the bin Laden network and even curtailed efforts to shut-down the terrorist organization that had been initiated by the Clinton administration. An explosive book published in France in mid-November, Bin Laden, la verite interdite (2001), by Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, claimed that under the influence of oil companies, the Bush administration initially blocked ongoing U.S. government investigations of terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban over oil rights and pipeline deals and handing over bin Laden. This evidently led to the resignation of a FBI deputy director, John O’Neill, who was one of the sources of the story. Brisard and Guillaume contend that the Bush administration had been a major supporter of the Taliban until the September 11 events and had blocked investigations of the bin Laden terror network. Pursuing these leads, the British Independent reported on October 30: "Secret satellite phone calls between the State Department and Mullah Mohammed Omar and the presentation of an Afghan carpet to President George Bush were just part of the diplomatic contacts between Washington and the Taliban that continued until just days before the attacks of 11 September." Furthermore, Greg Palast had published an FBI memo that confirmed that the FBI was given orders to lay off the bin Laden family during the early months of George W. Bush’s rule [See Greg Palast, “FBI and U.S. Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked bin Laden Probes Before September 11.” The Guardian (Nov. 7, 2001). Palast’s article is collected on his home page that has a lot of other interesting reports on Bush administration activities; see www.gregpalast.com.]
The U.S. media completely ignored these and other reports concerning how the Bush administration had shut down or undermined operations against the bin Laden network begun by the Clinton administration. An explosive article by Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff on “What Went Wrong” published in the May 28 Newsweek, however, contained a series of revelations of how the Bush administration had missed signals of an impending attack and systematically weakened U.S. defenses against terrorism and the bin Laden network. According to the Newsweek story, the Clinton administration national security advisor Sandy Berger had become “’totally preoccupied’ with fears of a domestic terror attack and tried to warn Bush’s new national security advisor Condoleezza Rice of the dangers of a bin Laden attack.” But while Rice ordered a security review “the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like National Missile Defense (NMD) and Iraq.”
Moreover, Newsweek claimed that John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, was eager to set a new rightwing law and order agenda and was not focused on the dangers of terrorism, while other Bush administration high officials also had their ideological agendas to pursue at the expense of protecting the country against terror attacks. Ashcroft reportedly shut down wiretaps of al Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 bombing of African embassies and cut $58 million from a FBI request for an increase in its anti-terrorism budget (while at the same time switching from commercial to government jets for his own personal flight). On September 10, when Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to the White House, it covered 68 programs, none of them related to counter-terrorism. Nor was counter-terrorism in a memorandum he sent to his heads of departments stating his seven priorities and he turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorists. In the Newsweek summary:
It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.
As these revelations unfolded, Democrats and others called for blue-ribbon commissions to study intelligence failures that made possible the September 11 terrorist attacks. Republicans, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, predictably attacked the patriotism of anyone who ascribed blame to U.S. policy concerning the September 11 attacks. Moreover, according to Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, Cheney had repeatedly urged him not to hold hearings on U.S. intelligence and policy failures that led to the September 11 attacks. Bush administration spokespeople attacked as well California Senator Dianne Feinstein who retorted in a memo:
I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.
In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month [i.e. July 2001] to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.
Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait. (www.senate.gov/~feinstein/Releases02/attacks.htm).
This is highly shocking and calls attention to the role of Vice President Dick Cheney in failing to produce an adequate response to the dangers of terrorism. A year previous, in May 2001, the Bush administration announced that “Vice-President Dick Cheney is point man for administration… on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.”
[See CBS News, “New Terror Task Force. Cheney To Lead at Terrorist Threats to U.S.,” May 8, 2001. A June 30, 2001 CNN report headlined “Cheney is point man for administration,” noting that he would be in charge of task forces on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.” We know in retrospect, however, that Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism, and there should be an inquiry into what he did and did not do as head of the Bush administration anti-terrorism task force. A www.disasterrelief.org Web-site on May 11 also posted a report that states that: “Bush asked Vice President Dick Cheney to lead the task force, which will explore how attacks against U.S. citizens or personnel at home and overseas may be detected and stopped.” To prevent future terror attacks on the U.S., it would thus be highly important to see exactly what Cheney did or did not do and address the problems revealed.]
On a May 19, 2002 Meet the Press, Cheney acknowledged that he had been appointed head of a Bush administration task force on terrorism before September 11, and claimed that he had some meetings on the topic. Yet Cheney and others in the Bush administration seemed to disregard several major reports that cited the dangers of terrorist attacks, including congressional reports by former Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rudman in early 2001 that had called for a centralization of information on terrorism, but it appeared that the Bush administration failed to act on these reports. Obviously, Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism and should thus be held in part responsible for Bush administration failure to deal with pre-September 11 terrorist threats.
Crucially, plans to use airplanes as vehicles of terrorist attack should have been familiar to the intelligence agencies and to Cheney and the Bush administration. Furthermore, there were many other reports circulating from foreign and domestic intelligence services that the U.S. had reason to fear terrorist attacks from the bin Laden network just previous to the September 11 terror attacks.
[The Frankfurter Allgemine Zeitung reported on September 14 that German intelligence sources gathered warnings from the Ecelon spy system that Middle Eastern terrorists were “planning to hijack icommercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture” and passed the warnings to the U.S. government. On Israeli intelligence warning the U.S. of terrorist networks sneaking into the U.S. for attacks, see “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20, 2001. Carolyn Kay has assembled scores of warnings from Russian, Israeli, German, U.S. and other intelligence sources warning that a major domestic terrorist attack was about to unfold against the U.S., but Cheney, the Bush administration and the National (In)security Apparatus failed to respond or prepare for the impending attacks (see http://makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html). See also Russ Kirk, “September 11, 2001: No Surprise” for an analysis of a myriad of sources signalling the September 11 terror attacks (www.loompanics.com/Articles/September 11.html.]
Consequently, serious questions should be raised to the Bush administration, and to the head of their anti-terrorism Task Force Dick Cheney concerning what they knew and did not know, and what they did and did not do in response to the reports from domestic and foreign intelligence concerning the likelihood of al Qaeda airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the U.S. As head of the Bush administration task force on terrorism, Dick Cheney should be held especially accountable, but so far the media and Democrats have not raised this issue and Cheney himself is aggressively attacking anyone who raises such issues as an unpatriotic enemy of state. Obviously, there was no apparent coordination of information in the Bush administration and if Cheney was head of the task force that was supposed to deal with terrorism, it is disgraceful that he did not establish a group to centralize information.
It therefore appears as I write in May 2002 that top officials of the Bush administration did little or nothing to protect the U.S. against terror attacks in the homeland. When confronted with reports that Bush had been advised of impending terror attacks and had not acted on them, Bush was highly indignant, attacked those who criticized him for “second guessing” and engaging in partisan politics, and shrilly retorted that had he known exactly what was to happen, he would have prevented it. In fact, Bush was on an unprecedentedly long one-month summer vacation at his ranch in Crawford when he was briefed and no one could expect the highly unqualified president-select to “put together the dots” and see the need to organize the country against domestic terrorist attacks. But his administration as a whole is responsible for neglecting a wide series of warnings and engaged in a series of actions that made the attacks more likely, as I argue above.
Thus different pundits and critics blame different fractions of the U.S. government for failing to prevent the September 11 attack, with some going after the FBI, others the CIA, and others either the Clinton or Bush administration.
[William Safire blames head of the CIA George Tenet (“The Williams Memo,” New York Times, May 20m 2002, while Robert Novak and others attack the FBI.] Republicans and rightwingers continue to blame the Clinton administration, while serious questions are now being raised concerning Bush administration policy failures that made possible the September 11 terror attacks.
I would argue that the collective failure is that of the Bush administration as a whole, for failing to organize an anti-terrorist task force to coordinate information and action, cutting back on efforts that the Clinton administration had made in this direction, and ignoring government reports that highlighted the need to organize the government to better deal with terrorism, while failing to respond to a large number of specific warnings about impending al Qaeda attacks from a wealth of sources. Of course, failures of coordinating the FBI and CIA are also responsible and there should be blue-ribbon investigations of exactly what went wrong and why. But it is the responsibility of the sitting political administration to protect the country and in the case of September 11 the Bush administration failed in multiple ways.
|
|
|
OpinionJournal - Featured Article
Fukujama attacks libertarians and cloning in WSJ articles and the libertarians go bonkers attacking him and defending cloning.
OpinionJournal - Featured Article
BUT it's possible to be for therepeutic cloning and against reproductive cloning; Fukujama wrongly claims that libertarians and leftists are both pro-cloning tout court; see, by contrast, the differentiated position
at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/biotechdem.htm
|
|
|
Under Cheney, Halliburton Altered Policy on Accounting
This is one of the first critiques I've seen of Cheney's business practices with Halliburton. As Halliburton CEO he garnered scores of government contracts with his defense industry connections, was paid off $33 million in severance pay when he went to work with Bush administration, and has continued to get contracts with Halliburton for construction of US military bases around Afghanistan and other government contracts. There has been some talk in the business press, however, that Halliburton could go the way of Enron because of a lot of lawsuits pending for shoddy asbestos construction and dicey accounting practices that the Times article below discusses.Dresser industry which the story below discusses regarding Halliburton takeover has long been associated with Bush family with allegations of CIA connections as well. If this story develops it will be big...
Under Cheney, Halliburton Altered Policy on Accounting
|
|
|
Britains preparing to leave Pakistan as threat of war with india increase
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,720101,00.html
One of the results of US Afgha/Pakistan policy is growing hatred of Westerners. There have been growing attacks on Westerners in Pakistan so as war tensions emerge with India, it is becoming increasing dangerous; another result of failed Bush administration policies
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Florida lawsuits
Its interesting that the Bush justice department is suing three states for electoral irregularities, of course Florida, but also Tennessee and Missouri. I just participated in a documentary over the weekend on the election theft that will hopefully bring the issue back to public attention; see
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/05/22/election/print.html
|
|
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
|
Lawmakers question Afghan plan
First serious debate in Congress and media over Bush's Afghan policy; see my earlier postings for critique of his policies
Lawmakers question Afghan plan
|
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, May 20, 2002
|
Bush administration Responsibility for the September 11 Terrorism Attacks
In mid-May 2002, a political hullabaloo erupted when CBS News leaked a report on May 15 that the CIA briefed George W. Bush about bin Laden network plans to hijack airplanes on August 6, when he was vacationing in his ranch in Texas. There was immediately an explosion of controversy, raising questions, for the first time in a public debate, what the Bush administration knew about possible terrorist attacks pre-September 11 and what they had done to prevent them. Also, during May 2002, a Phoenix Arizona FBI memo from summer 2001 was released that warned of the dangers of Middle Eastern men going to flight school and gaining skills to hijack planes, and the dangers of the al Qaeda network carrying out such hijackings. Moreover, the arrest of Zacarias Moussaouri, the alleged 20th al Qaeda hijacker, in Minnesota in late August 2001, who had been taking flying lessons and acting suspiciously, should have raised warning signals.
Over the summer of 2001, there had been reports that there were dangers of an airplane terrorist attack on the G8 economic summit in Genoa that George W. Bush attended. There were reportedly so many intelligence reports circulating in summer 2001 of the dangers of imminent terrorist attacks on the U.S. that a government official Richard Clarke, charged with coordinating anti-terrorist responses, warned FBI, aviation, INS, and other crucial government agencies to be on the highest alert and not to take vacations during a six week period over the summer. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, was ordered to take government jets instead of commercial airlines and the FAA passed down several alerts to the commercial airlines.
It was also well-known in certain circles that in 1994 the French had foiled a terrorist airplane attack on the Eiffel Tower, while in 1995 arrests were made of terrorists who allegedly planned to use an airplane to attack the CIA headquarters. Philippine police subsequently warned the U.S. that Ramzi Yousef, who had helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had schemes to hijack and blow up a dozen U.S. airliners and was contemplating taking over and crashing a plane into the CIA headquarters himself.
Furthermore, there had been a whole series of U.S. government reports on the dangers of terrorism and need for a coordinated response. A 1996 report of a White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security headed by Al Gore developed a report that was never acted on (see http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/212fin~1.html). A 1999 National Intelligence Council report on Terrorism specifically warned that bin Laden’s al Qaeda network might undertake suicide hijackings against U.S. targets; the report noted that members of the al Qaeda network had threatened to do this before and that the U.S. should be alert to such attacks (see “1999 Report Warned of Suicide Hijack,” Associated Press, May 17, 2001). And reports by former U.S. Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rodman, and by the Bremer National Commission, recommended consolidating U.S. intelligence on terrorism and organizing federal responses to prevent and fight domestic terrorist attacks on the U.S. ( On the Hart-Rudman report, see http://www.nssg.gov/News/news.htm; for the Bremer National Commission on Terrorism report, see http://w3.access.gpo.gov/nct/).
Not only did the Bush administration fail to act on warnings of imminent terrorist attacks and the need to provide systematic government responses to coordinate information and attempt to prevent and aggressively fight terrorism, but, shamefully, the Bush administration halted a series of attempts to fight the bin Laden network that had been begun by the Clinton administration. Earlier, a wave of revelations came out, ignored completely in the U.S. media, concerning how high-ranking officials in the Bush administration had completely neglected threats of terrorist attacks by the bin Laden network and even curtailed efforts to shut-down the terrorist organization that had been initiated by the Clinton administration. An explosive book published in France in mid-November, Bin Laden, la verite interdite (2001), by Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, claimed that under the influence of oil companies, the Bush administration initially blocked ongoing U.S. government investigations of terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban over oil rights and pipeline deals and handing over bin Laden. This evidently led to the resignation of a FBI deputy director, John O’Neill, who was one of the sources of the story. Brisard and Guillaume contend that the Bush administration had been a major supporter of the Taliban until the September 11 events and had blocked investigations of the bin Laden terror network. Pursuing these leads, the British Independent reported on October 30: "Secret satellite phone calls between the State Department and Mullah Mohammed Omar and the presentation of an Afghan carpet to President George Bush were just part of the diplomatic contacts between Washington and the Taliban that continued until just days before the attacks of 11 September." Furthermore, Greg Palast had published an FBI memo that confirmed that the FBI was given orders to lay off the bin Laden family during the early months of George W. Bush’s rule [See Greg Palast, “FBI and U.S. Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked bin Laden Probes Before September 11.” The Guardian (Nov. 7, 2001). Palast’s article is collected on his home page that has a lot of other interesting reports on Bush administration activities; see www.gregpalast.com.]
The U.S. media completely ignored these and other reports concerning how the Bush administration had shut down or undermined operations against the bin Laden network begun by the Clinton administration. An explosive article by Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff on “What Went Wrong” published in the May 28 Newsweek, however, contained a series of revelations of how the Bush administration had missed signals of an impending attack and systematically weakened U.S. defenses against terrorism and the bin Laden network. According to the Newsweek story, the Clinton administration national security advisor Sandy Berger had become “’totally preoccupied’ with fears of a domestic terror attack and tried to warn Bush’s new national security advisor Condoleezza Rice of the dangers of a bin Laden attack.” But while Rice ordered a security review “the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like National Missile Defense (NMD) and Iraq.”
Moreover, Newsweek claimed that John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, was eager to set a new rightwing law and order agenda and was not focused on the dangers of terrorism, while other Bush administration high officials also had their ideological agendas to pursue at the expense of protecting the country against terror attacks. In the Newsweek summary:
It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.
As these revelations unfolded, Democrats and others called for blue-ribbon commissions to study intelligence failures that made possible the September 11 terrorist attacks. Republicans, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, predictably attacked the patriotism of anyone who ascribed blame to U.S. policy concerning the September 11 attacks and according to Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, Cheney had repeatedly urged him not to hold hearings on U.S. intelligence and policy failures that led to the September 11 attacks. Bush administration spokespeople attacked as well California Senator Dianne Feinstein who retorted in a memo:
I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.
In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month [i.e. July 2001] to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.
Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait. (www.senate.gov/~feinstein/Releases02/attacks.htm).
This is highly shocking and calls attention to the role of Vice President Dick Cheney in failing to produce an adequate response to the dangers of terrorism. A year previous, in May 2001, the Bush administration announced that “Vice-President Dick Cheney is point man for administration… on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.”
[See CBS News, “New Terror Task Force. Cheney To Lead at Terrorist Threats to U.S.,” May 8, 2001. A June 30, 2001 CNN report headlined “Cheney is point man for administration” noting that Cheney would be in charge of task forces on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.” We know that Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism, and there should be an inquiry into what he did and did not do as head of the Bush administration anti-terrorism task force. A www.disasterrelief.org Web-site on May 11 also posted a report that states that: “Bush asked Vice President Dick Cheney to lead the task force, which will explore how attacks against U.S. citizens or personnel at home and overseas may be detected and stopped.” To prevent future terror attacks on the U.S., it would thus be highly important to see exactly what Cheney did or did not do and address the problems revealed.]
On a May 19, 2002 Meet the Press Cheney acknowledged that he had been appointed head of a Bush administration task force on terrorism before September 11, and claimed that he had some meetings on the topic. Yet Cheney and others in the Bush administration seemed to disregard several major reports that cited the dangers of terrorist attacks, including congressional reports by former Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rudman in early 2001 that had called for a centralization of information on terrorism, but it appeared that the Bush administration failed to act on these reports. Obviously, Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism and should thus be held in part responsible for Bush administration failure to deal with pre-September 11 terrorist threats.
Thus, plans to use airplanes as vehicles of terrorist attack should have been familiar to the intelligence agencies and to Cheney and the Bush administration. Furthermore, there were many other reports circulating from foreign and domestic intelligence services that the U.S. had reason to fear terrorist attacks from the bin Laden network just previous to the September 11 terror attacks.
[ On Israeli intelligence warning the U.S. of terrorist networks sneaking into the U.S. for attacks, see “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20, 2001. Carolyn Kay has assembled scores of warnings from Russian, Israeli, German, U.S. and other intelligence sources warning that a major domestic terrorist attack was about to unfold against the U.S., but Cheney, the Bush administration and the National (In)security Apparatus failed to respond or prepare for the impending attacks (see http://makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html).]
Consequently, serious questions should be raised to the Bush administration and to the head of their anti-terrorism Task Force Dick Cheney concerning what they knew and did not know, and what they did and did not do in response to the reports from domestic and foreign intelligence concerning the likelihood of al Qaeda airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the U.S. As head of the Bush administration task force on terrorism, Dick Cheney should be held especially accountable, but so far the media and Democrats have not raised this issue and Cheney himself is aggressively attacking anyone who raises such issues as an unpatriotic enemy of state. Obviously, there was no apparent coordination of information in the Bush administration and if Cheney was head of the task force that was supposed to deal with terrorism, it is disgraceful that he did not establish a group to centralize information.
It therefore appears as I write in May 2002 that top officials of the Bush administration did little or nothing to protect the U.S. against terror attacks in the homeland. Domestically, since September 11, the Bush administration’s actions against terrorists in the U.S. have also been strikingly inept. While terrorist cells have been broken up all over the world, so far the Bush administration has not arrested one alleged member of the al Qaeda network post-September 11. Nor have they caught the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks, although evidence exists that members of the national security state itself may have produced the high-grade military anthrax used in the attacks on the media and government. The Bush administration has repeatedly made warnings of imminent terror attacks, keeping the country jittery and justifying their unjustifiable foreign and domestic policies, but they have done little to make the country safer and have instead exploited the crisis to push through their hardright agenda.
|
|
Saturday, May 18, 2002
|
More on Cheney and Bush Administration responsibility to investigate September 11 Terror Attacks
In June 2001 it was announced that “Vice-President Dick Cheney is point man for administration… on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism.” Cheney was thus head of a Bush administration task force on terrorism before September 11, but seemed to disregard several major reports that cited the dangers of terrorist attacks, including congressional reports by former Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rudiman in early 2001 that had called for a centralization of information on terrorism, but it appeared the Bush administration failed to act on these reports (see CBS News, “New Terror Task Force. Cheney To Lead at Terrorist Threats to U.S.,” May 8, 2001, and a June 30, 2001 CNN report). Obviously, Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism and should thus be held responsible for Bush administration failure to deal with pre-September 11 terrorist threats.
In mid-May 2002, a firestorm of controversy erupted when CBS News leaked a report that the CIA briefed George W. Bush about bin Laden network plans to hijack airplanes on August 6, when he was vacationing in his ranch in Texas. There was immediately an explosion of controversy, raising questions, for the first time in a public debate, what the Bush administration knew about possible terrorist attacks pre-September 11 and what they had done to prevent them. Yet in the heated discussion of who was responsible in the Bush administration for overlooking threats of terrorist attacks so far no one has pinned the blame on the man who is in fact most responsible for Bush administration negliance vis-ŕ-vis terrorist threats, Vice-President Dick Cheney. Republicans, led by Cheney, predictably attacked the patriotism of anyone who ascribed blame to U.S. policy concerning the September 11 attacks and according to Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschel, Cheney had repeatedly urged him not to hold hearings on U.S. intelligence and policy failures that led to the September 11 attacks. Bush administration spokespeople attacked as well California Senator Dianne Feinstein who retorted in a memo:
"I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.
"In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month [i.e. July 2001] to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.
"Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait."
Also, during May 2002, a Phoenix Arizona FBI memo from summer 2001 was released that warned of the dangers of Middle Eastern men going to flight school and gaining skills to hijack planes, and the interest in the al Qaeda network of such hijackings. Moreover, the arrest of Zacarias Moussaouri, the alleged 20th al Qaeda hijacker, in Minnesota in late August 2001, who had been taking flying lessons and acting suspiciously should have raised warning signals. Over the summer, there were reports that there were dangers of an airplane terrorist attack on the G8 economic summit in Genoa that George W. Bush attended. Moreover, in 1994 the French had foiled a terrorist airplane attack on the Eiffel Tower, while in 1995 arrests were made of terrorists who allegedly planned to use an airplane to attack the CIA headquarters.
Thus, plans to use airplanes as vehicles of terrorist attack should have been familiar to the intelligence agencies and to Cheney and the Bush administration. Furthermore, there were many other reports circulating from foreign and domestic intelligence services that the U.S. had reason to fear terrorist attacks from the bin Laden network just previous to the September 11 terror attacks. On Israeli intelligence warning the U.S. of terrorist networks sneaking into the U.S. for attacks, see “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20, 2001. Carolyn Kay has assembled scores of warnings from Russian, Israeli, German, U.S. and other intelligence sources warning that a major domestic terrorist attack was about to unfold against the U.S., but Cheney, the Bush administration and the National (In)security Apparatus failed to respond or prepare for the impending attacks (see http://makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html).
Thus serious questions should have been raised to the Bush administration and to head of their anti-terrorism Task Force Dick Cheney concerning what they knew and did not know, and what they did and did not do in response to the reports from domestic and foreign intelligence concerning the likliehood of al Qaeda airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the U.S. As head of the Bush administration task force on terrorism, Dick Cheney should be held especially accountable but so far the media and Democrats have not raised this issue and Cheney himself is aggressively attacking anyone who raises such issues as an enemy. Obviously, there was no apparent coordination of information in the Bush administration and if Cheney was head of the task force that was supposed to deal with terrorism, it is disgraceful that he did not establish a group to centralize information. Thus, there are serious questions and issues for Mr. Cheney and the Bush administration. Who in the media and political establishment will raise these concerns? It is indeed interesting that Cheney himself allegedly pleaded several times with Tom Daschel not to launch an investigation in U.S. intelligence failures prior to September 11. Yet if we are to understand how September 11 could have taken place and if we are to properly deal with the intelligence and political failures that made such attacks possible an independent investigation is necessary.
As it now stands, it appears that top officials of the Bush administration seemingly did little or nothing to protect the U.S. against the Al Qaeda terror attacks. Domestically, since September 11, the Bush administration’s actions against terrorists in the U.S. have also been strikingly inept. While terrorist cells have been broken up all over the world, so far the Bush administration has not arrested one alleged member of the al Qaeda network post-September 11. Nor have they caught the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks, although evidence exists that members of the national security state itself may have produced the high-grade military anthrax used in the attacks on the media and government. The Bush administration has repeatedly made warnings of imminent terror attacks, keeping the country jittery and justifying their unjustifiable foreign and domestic policies, but they have done little to make the country safer and have instead exploited the crisis to push through their hardright agenda.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Check this out: Senator Dianne Feinstein raised concerns about al Qaeda attack to Cheney and his spokesperson said he get back to her in six months! Criminal negliance from the man in charge of anti-terrorism task force, he's done nothing and should be held responsible
|
|
|
Cheney 'deeply' Disturbed by Democratic Criticism of White House - from Tampa Bay Online
Cheney's "deeply disturbed" by Democrats criticism of Bush in regard to the decision not to release or act on intelligence information that Al Qaeda were planning to hijick airlines. Well, we should all be deeply disturbed that Cheney, in charge of an anti-terrorism task force did nothing in the face of MANY reports of impending terror attack from many sources!
Cheney 'deeply' Disturbed by Democratic Criticism of White House - from Tampa Bay Online
|
|
Friday, May 17, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
Cheney's the Man
In the discussion of who was responsible in the Bush administration for overlooking threats of terrorist attacks after the revelation that the CIA briefed George W. Bush about bin Laden network plans to hijack airplanes in August 2001, so far no one has pinned the blame on the man who is in fact most responsible for Bush administration negliance vis-ŕ-vis terrorist threats, Vice-President Dick Cheney. In Summer 2001 it was announced that “Cheney is point man for administration… on three major issues: energy, Global warming, and domestic terrorism” (see CBS News, “New Terror Task Force. Cheney To Lead at Terrorist Threats to U.S.,” May 8, 2001, and a June 30, 2001 CNN report). Obviously, Cheney concentrated on energy issues, to the detriment of paying attention to terrorism and should thus be held responsible for Bush administration failure to deal with pre-September 11 terrorist threats. In addition to the Phoenix Arizona FBI memo that warned of the dangers of Middle Eastern men going to flight school and gaining skills to hijack planes, and the arrest of the alleged 20th al Qaeda hijacker in Minnesota just previous to the September 11 terror attacks, there were many other warnings from U.S. and foreign intelligence concerning the dangers of al Qaeda attacks. On Israeli intelligence warning the U.S. of terrorist networks sneaking into the U.S. for attacks, see “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20, 2001. Carolyn Kay has assembled scores of warnings from Russian, Israeli, German, U.S. and other intelligence sources warning that a major domestic terrorist attack was about to unfold against the U.S., but Cheney, the Bush administration and the National (In)security Apparatus failed to respond or prepare for the impending attacks (see http://makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html).
Thus serious questions arise to Dick Cheney concerning what he did and did not do as head of a task force on terrorism. Obviously, there was no apparent coordination of information in the Bush administration and if Cheney was head of the task force that was supposed to deal with terrorism, it is disgraceful that he did not establish a group to centralize information. There had been several congressional reports over the years that had called for a centralization of information on terrorism, including a report by former Senators Gary Hart and Howard Rudiman in early 2001, but the Bush administration failed to act on this. Serious questions and issues for Mr. Cheney. Who will go after him? It is indeed interesting that Cheney himself allegedly pleaded several times with Tom Daschel not to launch an investigation in U.S. intelligence failures prior to September 11. Such an inquiry would no doubt point a finger at Cheney himself, or should if the Democrats are intelligent and have cahones.
|
|
Thursday, May 16, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
An Orwellian Future?
The consequences of the Bush administration failed Terror War policies and domestic policy outrages are frightening. The Bush Reich seems to be erecting an Orwellian totalitarian state apparatus and plunging the world into ongoing war that will generate a totalitarian police-state both domestically and abroad. In his prophetic novel 1984, George Orwell engaged a grim condition of total warfare in which his fictional state Oceania ruled its fearful and intimidated citizens through war, police state terror, total surveillance, and the suppression of civil liberties. This total warfare kept Oceania’s citizens in a perpetual situation of mobilization and submission. Further, the Orwellian state controlled language, thought, and behavior through total domination of the media, and was thereby able to change the very meaning of language (“war is peace”) and to constantly re-write history itself.
Orwell’s futuristic novel was, of course, an attack on the Soviet Union and therefore a favorite of conservatives over the years, but it uncannily describes the horrors and dangers of the regime of George W. Bush. Orwell’s totalitarian state had a two-way television screen that monitored its citizens’ behavior and a system of spies and informers that would report on politically incorrect thought and activity. Bush’s police state has new laws that enable the state to monitor the communications of e-mail, wireless, telephones, and other media, while enabling the state to arrest citizens without warrants, to hold them indefinitely, to monitor their conversations, and to submit them to military tribunals, all of which would be governed by the dictates of the Supreme Leader (in this case, a dangerously demagogic figure-head, ruled by rightwing extremists).
With their Orwellian-sounding Office of Homeland Security, proposed Office of Strategic Information, Shadow Government, and “USA Patriot Act,” the Bush administration has in place the institutions and apparatus of a totalitarian government. Since Election 2000, the Bush clique has practiced a form of Orwellian “Bushspeak” that endlessly repeats the Big Lie of the moment. Bush and his propaganda ministry engage in daily propagandistic and instrumentalist spin to push its policies and slime their opponents, while showing no regard whatsoever for the canons of truth and justice that conservatives have traditionally defended.
To keep the public in a state of fear, Bush and his administration have repeatedly evoked the specter of renewed terrorist attacks and have promised an all-out war against an “axis of evil.” This threatening “axis,” to be defined periodically by the Bush administration, allegedly possesses “instruments of mass destruction” that could be used against the U.S. Almost without exception, the mainstream media have been a propaganda conduit for the Bush administration Terror War and have helped generate fear and even mass hysteria. The media has thus largely failed to advance an understanding of the serious threats to the U.S. and to debate the range of possible responses and their respective merits and possible consequences.
The Bush administration Terror War raises the specter that Orwell's 1984 might provide the template of the new millennium, as the world is plunged into endless wars, as freedom and democracy are being snuffed out in the name of freedom, as language loses meaning, and as history is constantly revised (as Bush and his scribes rewrote his own personal history). There is thus the danger that Orwell’s dark grim dystopia may replace the (ideological) utopia of the information society, the new economy, and a prosperous and democratic globalization that had been the dominant ideology and vision of the past decade. Questions arise: Will the Bush administration Terror War lead the world to apocalypse and ruin through constant war and the erection of totalitarian police states over the façade of fragile democracy? Or can more multilateral and global solutions be found to the dangers of terrorism that will strengthen democracy and increase the chances for peace and security?
There is indeed a danger that Terror War will be a force of historical regression, and the motor of destruction of the global economy, liberal polity, and democracy itself, all to be replaced by an aggressive militarism and totalitarian police state. It could well be that Orwell will be the prophet of a coming New Barbarism with endless war, state repression, and enforced control of thought and discourse, and that George W. Bush and his minions are the architects of an Orwellian future.
It could also be the case, however, that the Taliban, bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Bush administration represent obsolete and reactionary forces that will be swept away by the inexorable forces of globalization and liberal democracy. These opposing sides in the current Terror War could be perceived as representing complementary poles of an atavistic and premodern version of Islam and nihilistic terrorism confronted by reactionary rightwing conservatism and militarism. In this scenario, both poles can be perceived as disruptive and regressive forces in a global world that need to be overcome to create genuine historical progress. If this is the case, Terror War would be a momentary interlude in which two obsolete historical forces battle it out, ultimately to be replaced by more sane and democratic globalizing forces.
This is, of course, an optimistic scenario and probably, for the foreseeable future, progressive forces will be locked-into intense battles against the opposing forces of Islamic terrorism and rightwing militarism. Yet if democracy and the human species are to survive, global movements against militarism and for social justice, ecology, and peace must emerge to combat and replace the atavistic forces of the present. As a new millennium unfolds, the human race has regressed into a New Barbarism unforeseeable prior to September 11. If civilization is to survive, individuals must perceive its enemies and organize to fight for a better future.
Consequently, I argue that Bush administration militarism is not the way to fight global terrorism, but is rather the road to an Orwellian future in which democracy and freedom will be in dire peril and the future of the human species will be in question. These are frightening times and it is essential that all citizens become informed about the fateful conflicts of the present, gain clear understanding of what is at stake, and realize that they must oppose both global terrorism and Bushian militarism.
September 11, the subsequent Terror War, the Enron scandals that emerged during these events and the ongoing misadventures of the Bush administration constitute what I am calling “the New Barbarism.” It was barbaric that civilized countries tolerated the Taliban and allowed the bin Laden al Qaeda network to develop, while the Bush Terror War unleashed new forces of barbarism now evident in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the world. The term “New Barbarism” denotes frightening historical regression in an era of highly uncivilized and violent behavior. While one would hope that the New Millennium would signal a chance for progress and historical optimism, instead the human species is moving into a historical situation where the universal values of the Enlightenment, the institutions of democracy, the global economy, and the earth and human species itself are faced with challenges of survival.
As a response to the September 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration has responded with an intensified militarism that threatens to generate an era of Terror War, a new arms race, accelerated military violence, U.S. support of authoritarian regimes, an assault on human rights, constant threats to democracy, and destabilizing of the global economy. The New Barbarism also describes Bush administration practices of providing political favors to its largest corporate and other supporters, unleashing unrestrained Wild West capitalism, exemplified in the Enron scandals, and a form of cronyism whereby Bush administration family and friends are provided with government favors, while social welfare programs, environmental legislation, and protection of rights and freedoms are curtailed.
The corporate media, especially television, is part and parcel of the New Barbarism, spewing forth almost unopposed propaganda for the Bush administration, fanning war fever and terrorist hysteria, while cutting back on vigorous political debate and varied sources of information and promoting ideologically conservative talk shows and mindless entertainment. I have been closely tracking the media and the crisis of democracy for over a decade now (see Kellner 1990, 1992, 1995, and 2001) and the current crisis marks the low point of media performance that has promoted war fever, hysteria, and Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda rather than reasoned debate, serious discussion, exposure of the dangers and failures of Bush administration responses to terrorism, and the exploration of more creative alternatives.
In view of the enormity of the events of September 11, and their frightening aftermath and consequences, it is now appropriate to reflect on what happened, why it happened, and what lessons we can learn as we seek to apply such insights to the crisis that we now find ourselves in. It’s a time for honing our wits, not losing our wits. A time for intelligence, not knee-jerk reaction, a time for thought and not for hysteria. It’s a time for reflection, figuring out what went wrong, and for informed and intelligent action that will get at the source of our problems. It’s also a time for stocktaking, taking stock individually and collectively of our views of the world, and our everyday behavior. A situation of crisis provides an opportunity for positive change and reconstruction, as well as barbaric regression. Thus, now is the time for reflection on such things as democracy, globalization, and the flaws, limitations, and fallacies in our thought and action, as well as problems with our institutions and leadership.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
|
CBSNews.com: Print This Story
What did they know and when did they know it? and why didn't they do anything about it?
CBSNews.com: Print This Story
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Failures of Bush administration Afghanistan Policy
In 1989-1990, the first Bush administration pulled out of Afghanistan after the U.S. had supported Islamic forces against the Soviet forces of occupation, thereby helping to create the vacuum and chaos that produced later terrorism. There are increased worries and signs that the U.S. is currently not adequately involved in securing and rebuilding Afghanistan and that once again it will be a harbor of terror that will threaten U.S. and other lives and interests. The current Bush administration seems to have no end strategy for their intervention in Afghanistan and no vision for the region beyond securing the interests of the oil companies to which they are allied and getting military contracts for their supporters.
The primarily military and unilateral strategy of the Bush administration in their Terror War constitutes the major Achilles Heel of its policy, and failure to engage a multilateral approach to global terrorism. The unilateral military policy produces an excessive militarizing and inadequate criminalizing of the problem and is increasingly isolating the U.S. from potential allies in a global war against terrorism. Moreover, the Bush administration unilateral campaign is more than likely to position the U.S. and its citizens as the targets of future terror attacks. Increasingly, the U.S. unilateral policy is being resisted in much of the world, and the Bush administration is encountering increasing hostility from allies and enemies alike, especially since Bush’s “axis of evil” speech and the intensification of the Israel and Palestine conflict with the Bush administration failure to successfully mediate it.
By contrast, a multilateral campaign would make it clear that in the war against terror it is the combined forces of civilization that are allied against Islamic terrorism. Such a campaign would rely on global forces in the political, judicial, economic and military front, rather than privileging the militarist solution of war. Indeed, since December 2001, the Bush administration has expanded the front of the Terror War, sending U.S. troops to the Philippines, Pakistan, and a whole ring of Central Asian countries, while threatening military action in Somalia, Indonesia, Yemen, and the infamous “axis of evil” Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, that was expanded in May 2002 to include Syria, Libya, and Cuba. George W. Bush has declared that unrelenting war against terrorism is the major focus of his administration and the Pentagon has discussed developing small nuclear weapons to be used against terrorist forces, as well as other high-tech weapons and ruthless bombing.
In addition, the Bush administration manipulated the September 11 terror attacks to push through a hardright domestic agenda that constitutes a clear and present danger to U.S. democracy. As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush consistently performed favors for his largest contributors, like the Enron Corporation and oil and energy companies, and as President he has done the same (Kellner 2001). Since September 11, the Bush administration has exploited the fear of terrorism to push through further bailouts of corporations that contributed to his campaign, and the center of its economic program has been to create tax breaks for the most wealthy, while cutting back on liberal social programs and environmental legislation, and carrying out the most rightwing law and order domestic policy in U.S. history.
On the foreign policy front, the Bush administration made use of the September 11 tragedy to renounce arms treaties it had already opposed and thus jettisoned the idea of arms control on a global scale. It also used the September 11 attacks to legitimate an increased military budget and series of military interventions, to test and build new nuclear weapons, to threaten countries like Iraq and Iran with military attacks, and to abandon multilateralism for an unilateralist “American First” approach to foreign affairs. The likely result is that in a global world the U.S. will become increasingly isolated and will continue to be the major source of international anger and terror attacks.
Not only is the Bush administration foreign policy dangerous and reckless, but they have demonstrated stunning incompetence on the domestic front in the war against terror. As I attempt to document, previous Bush administration policies made the September 11 terror attacks likely, as there were many reports that the U.S. ignored warnings of imminent terrorist attacks by airplane hijackers. Vice-President Dick Cheney was head of a Bush administration taskforce on terrorism before September 11 and supposedly disregarded five major reports that cited the dangers of terrorist attacks. Thus, top officials of the Bush administration seemingly did little or nothing to protect the U.S. against such attacks.
Domestically, since September 11, the Bush administration’s actions against terrorists in the U.S. have been strikingly inept. While terrorist cells have been broken up all over the world, so far the Bush administration has not arrested one alleged member of the al Qaeda network post-September 11. Nor have they caught the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks, although evidence exists that members of the national security state itself may have produced the high-grade military anthrax used in the attacks on the media and government. The Bush administration has repeatedly made warnings of imminent terror attacks, keeping the country jittery and justifying their unjustifiable foreign and domestic policies, but they have done little to make the country safer and have instead exploited the crisis to push through their hardright agenda.
In one of the most stunning economic reversals in U.S. history, the Bush administration economic policy gave away record budget surpluses in taxes to the rich and returned to the dangerous budget deficits of the first Reagan and Bush administrations. During the Reagan presidency, the national deficit was doubled to two trillion dollars while in the four years of Bush I, the deficit doubled again, flipping the U.S. from the position of the first major creditor nation to the number one debtor nation. George W. Bush is well on the way to matching his father’s disastrous economic performance as he piles up record deficits, gives away record tax cuts to the rich, and provides corporate favors to his allies in the business and military-industrial complex.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Media Whores Online
Bush administration at war with itself; good extracts from site that daily attacks the media whores, check it out;
Media Whores Online
|
|
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
|
Failed Bush Administration Policy in the Afghanistan War
Although Bush and his administration have been widely praised for their handling of the war against terrorism, I will forcefully argue quite the opposite. In my view, the Bush administration and Pentagon policies in the Afghanistan war were poorly conceived, badly executed, and are likely to sow the seeds of future blowback and reprisal. While the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the destruction of the al Qaeda infrastructure were clearly justifiable and a salutory blow against global terrorism, the Bush administration and Pentagon campaign in Afghanistan was fundamentally misconceived and in many ways unsuccessful.
In my view, terrorism is a global problem that requires a global solution, while the Bush administration’s largely unilateral and military solution is politically flawed and has arguably blocked more intelligent and potentially successful efforts against terror networks. A global war against global terror networks will require multilateral and coordinated efforts across many fronts, financial, legal-judiciary, political, and military. On the financial front, the Bush administration has failed to adequately coordinate global efforts to fight terror networks and domestically there is criticism that fights between the Treasury Department, Commerce Department, and Justice Department have hampered coordination even in the United States. The Bush administration had systematically pursued a deregulatory policy toward financial markets and has not been able to successfully regulate the flow of funds supporting either the terror networks or the other global criminals and corporate allies of the Bush administration that prefer to secure and launder their funds in off-shore banks.
On the legal and judicial front, the Bush administration has also failed to construct a lasting and active global alliance against terror. Whereas many foreign countries have arrested and broken up terror networks in countries like Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Singapore, so far the U.S. Justice Department has failed to break up any cells or arrest anyone with clear links to al Qaeda or any other global terror network. Moreover, on the legal and political front, the U.S. has alienated itself from most of its allies in the war against terror by its arrest of suspects that have then been held in detention camps without legal rights and facing military tribunals and death penalties. In particular, the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has generated worldwide controversy and driven many European allies to question cooperation with the U.S. because of the detention conditions of suspects, the proposed military trials, and threatened death penalty.
The Bush administration has failed to adequately criminalize bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, prefering a largely military solution, and thus has not been able to develop a global political and judicial network to shut down the terrorists. Morever, the Bush doctrine that maintains “you are with us or against us” and that constantly expands its “axis of evil” has positioned the U.S. as a strictly unilateralist state and has undermined coordination against terrorism. In particular, threatening war against Iraq has alienated the U.S. from both its European and moderate Arab allies and Bush administration escalating threats against other countries is isolating the U.S. and making multilateral coalitions against terrorism extremely difficult.
There is also a sense that the U.S. is losing the war for the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims because of its bellicose nationalism, militarism, support of Israel, and failure to improve relations with Muslim nations. As I will show in my analysis of the Afghanistan war, the excessive bombing of civilians, the lack of a decent U.S. humanitarian program or plan to rebuild Afghanistan, and the unsuccessful propaganda efforts have perhaps produced more enemies rather than friends in the Arab and Muslim world and increased the potential for the rise of future terrorist Islamist cadres against the U.S.
This situation is especially aggravated as hostilities have exploded between the Israelis and Palestinians in 2002. In much of the Arab world, the U.S. is seen as the major support for Israel and the inability of the Bush administration to mediate growing conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, the long Bush administration neglect of the problem, and the failure of the Bush administration to moderate the aggressive Israeli responses to suicide bombings and terror acts against Israel in Spring 2002 have created more hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world and a growing tendency to equate Israelis and Americans, Jews and Christians, as the main enemy of Islam.
Thus, the propaganda and ideological goals of the campaign to create better images of the U.S. in the eyes of the Arab, Islamic, and global world have failed miserably as the result of the botched military campaign, an inept ideological strategy, and the complete failure to engage in a fruitful dialogue with Arabs and Muslims. Part of the goals and justification for the Afghanistan war was to not only eliminate al Qaeda terrorist forces, but to forge more creative relationships with Arab and Islamic countries. A successful campaign, then, would communicate the message that the U.S. respects the Islamic world, wants to carry out more productive activities with it, and desires dialogue, peace, and better relations. But this project has largely failed, in part, because of the violent and destructive military campaign, as well as the failure to begin the reconstruction of Afghanistan earlier and to more seriously address its problems. In addition, the propaganda efforts undertaken by the Bush administration were extremely crude and mostly backfired, losing more hearts and minds than were gained, as I will document in the chapters that follow (see Chapters x and x). Later historians of the Afghanistan war and its propaganda campaign, I would submit, will find Bush administration policy in the propaganda war embarassingly inept and unsuccessful, pointing to another abject failure in its handling of the Terror War.
From a strictly military standpoint, I would argue that major military and political goals for the Afghanistan war were not achieved and that the deeply flawed campaign will be costly and consequential in its later effects. In particular, the Afghanistan campaign is at best a partial success because of a failure to capture, or destroy, key al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and cadres. This was largly due to a refusal to effectively use ground troops to deal with the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and their major fighting forces. The Afghanistan campaign, like the Gulf War, Kosovo War, and other U.S. military interventions in the past decade, relied largely on bombing at a distance and the refusal to use U.S. ground troops, following the “zero casuality tolerance” program of the past years. The result was that in the decisive battles of Kandahar and Tora Bora, significant numbers of al Qaeda and Taliban forces escaped, including their leadership and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself.
Moreover, the military component of the Afghanistan campaign was excessively privileged to the deteriment of dealing with humanitarian problems in Afghanistan and helping to reconstruct the country. For months, the U.S. refused to allow humanitarian aid groups in the country, opposed British and European Union (EU) proposals and efforts to solve the human crisis and to begin the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Instead, the Bush administration insisted through the last months of 2001 after the fall of the Taliban and into 2002 that its military forces must finish its mission of destroying the al Qaeda and Taliban and that “humanitarian” efforts must be considered a distraction. Since the fall of Kandahar in December, however, U.S. military efforts have been highly problematic due to an unfortunate reliance on local intelligence and Afghan forces who used the U.S. to gain revenge against old opponents. This “proxy war” has resulted in a long string of U.S. military actions against civilians with a large number of civilian deaths, ambushes of American troops, and the continued escape of key terrorist forces who are the intended targets of the Bush Terror War.
Clearly, what is needed is a global and multilateral mission in Afghanistan that combines military, police, humanitarian, and recontruction efforts. The U.S. has said it will train an Afghanistanian army, but not use U.S. forces for police or security action. In fact, given the chaos in Afghanistan, it is unwise to separate military and police forces. Thus, a multilateral force should at once undertake police, military, and humanitarian efforts. Likewise, the global and multilateral forces should train an Afghanistan military as they police and patrol the country, fight remnants of al Qaeda and Taliban, and rebuild the country. The Bush administration policy, by contrast, has not adequately dealt with humanitarian, security, or the socio-political needs of the country, rather focusing primarily on the military situation.
|
|
|
Bush Aims for $30 Million Fund-Raising Record
Here's the key to Bush administration politics and practices: raise record amount of money to buy elections; shamelessly pay off biggest contributers; raise more money for the next election. The challenge: break the cycle!
Bush Aims for $30 Million Fund-Raising Record
|
|
|
washingtonpost.com: Who's Pulling the Foreign Policy Strings?
This slightly satirical article provides interesting slant on major policy divide in Bush administration between globalists that want to carry out a globalist agenda (as did arguably Reagan/Bush I/Clinton and the hegemons who are American Firstists, unilateralists, and "realists" who are primarily focused on pursuing US interests and world hegemony
washingtonpost.com: Who's Pulling the Foreign Policy Strings?
|
|
Monday, May 13, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Enron Pipeline Leaves Scar on South America
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37365-2002May5.html
Of Enron Corp.'s many political maneuvers in Washington before its fall into bankruptcy, winning the promise of federal financing for a 390-mile pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil through the Chiquitano Dry Tropical Forest may have the most enduring consequences.
With that pledge of $200 million in U.S. financing, Enron built the natural-gas pipeline directly through South America's largest remaining
undeveloped swath of dry tropical forest, a region rich with endangered wildlife and plants.
The pipeline, completed late last year, and its service roads have opened the forest to the kind of damage environmental groups had predicted: Poachers travel service roads to log old-growth trees. Hunters prey on wild game and cattle graze illegally. An abandoned gold mine reopened and its workers camp along the pipeline right-of-way.
Perhaps most stunning, however, to many federal employees who reviewed the project, was how Enron persuaded a U.S. agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., to support the pipeline, even though the agency was charged with protecting sensitive forests such as the Chiquitano.
"It shouldn't have been done," said Mike Colby, a former Treasury Department senior environmental adviser and now a corporate consultant.
"The forest had already been declared by the World Bank . . . one of the two most valuable forests in Latin America. And OPIC chose to ignore that. They were so driven to reach these unsupportable conclusions because they wanted to finance the project at all costs."
[...]
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 6, 2002; Page A01
|
|
Wednesday, May 08, 2002
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, May 07, 2002
|
|
|
|
Monday, May 06, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sunday, May 05, 2002
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Friday, May 03, 2002
|
Army Chief Job May Be in Jeopardy
Ah ha! It looks like it is Thomas White, completely in bed with Bush crooks and Enron, who was behind the Crusader Crusade!
Army Chief Job May Be in Jeopardy
|
|
|
Salon.com Politics | Army, Pentagon battle over weapons
This battle over the Crusader missile system is highly interesting. As I've mentioned before, George W. Bush himself opposed the building of the missile system during the campaign and it has been highly criticized by Defense analysts. The Bush/Baker et al Carlyle Group, however, bought the company that produces the Crusader and it was suddenly returned to life. Now, ever, it is threatened! There are definitely contradictions and conflicts within the Bush administration that are highly interesting!
Salon.com Politics | Army, Pentagon battle over weapons
|
|
|
washingtonpost.com: The Crawford Quid Pro Quo
Interesting that critiques of the Bush administration aired by moderate Middle East press have been overlooked in US media; see below
washingtonpost.com: The Crawford Quid Pro Quo
|
|
|
U.S. Expected to Disengage From World Court
Here's a striking example of Bush administration unilateralism and willingness to position the US as a rogue state. Whereas clearly more international law and world justice is needed in an age of globalization and terrorism, the Bush administration renounces the institution of a world court! Perhaps because key members of the Bush administration and family might find themselves positioned as violators of international law!
U.S. Expected to Disengage From World Court
|
|
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
|
The Village Voice: Nation: The Carlyle Connection by Geoffrey Gray
ABC had a great story Monday April 22 on the Crusader with major military experts saying that it was a clunker, a bad investment for a high tech army. It also quotes presidential candidate George W. Bush attacking the Crusader; well, it turns out that Bush's father, James Baker and the other honchos of the Carylyle Group bought the company that makes Crusaders and suddenly Young Bush is for Daddy's toy, making potentially millions for the Carlyle Group; these people are incredibly corrupt; good story on it here;dk
The Village Voice: Nation: The Carlyle Connection by Geoffrey Gray
|
|
