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Video: Alternative
Views
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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.
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Video: Alternative
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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.
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Doug's New Books & Related
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TV/Radio
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Sunday, June 30, 2002
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Some Bush Stories From Last Week
From the Weekly Washington News Service Scripps-Howard News Service round-up:
The Bush administration has unveiled a new strategy for dealing with endangered species - turn 'em into dog food. Greenland has sought and received administration permission, through an international agreement on commercial fishing, to "harvest" the endangered North Atlantic salmon in U.S. waters even though the fish are "not needed for subsistence" and are largely expected "to be used as dog food," according to the World Wildlife Fund. "This decision to risk extinction of the few remaining wild salmon in Maine to feed dogs in Greenland is inexplicable," huffed the fund.
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Give President Bush credit for one educational accomplishment. He's got Americans scurrying for their dictionaries. They're looking up such Bushisms as "exemplarary," "analyzation" and "resignate."
"These stumbles are good for the dictionary business. They create interest in the language," said John Morse, publisher of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. "Not because these words will ever become part of our language, but because they prompt people to ask the question: 'Could that be right?'"
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Look for the "dirty bomb" scare to revitalize the United States' own "orphan nukes" program. The Department of Energy has had a recovery project on the books for more than three years. The plan calls for collecting and storing the highly radioactive material stored at more than 5,000 sites around the country. But the budget for the project has been dwindling. This all leaves critics wondering why domestic materials are less a priority than abandoned Russian nukes, when the home-grown stuff wouldn't have to be smuggled in.
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Bush has been promoting fitness and nutrition, but that message doesn't seem to fly on Air Force One. On the same day Bush was touting health, the presidential jet served up corned beef sandwiches, steak fries and strawberry cheesecake for lunch. While the press feasted on fatty foods, a spokesman said Bush was having egg salad on toast.
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Saturday, June 29, 2002
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Friday, June 28, 2002
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Australia
I'm about to take off for a couple of weeks in Australia lecturing, sightseeing (my first trip there) and International Sociology Association conference. I'll be offline until mid-July but hope that Richard Kahn can post some articles. For good news updates, you can go to buzzflash.com and bushwatch.com. cheers, dk
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Economic crisis?
Samuel Day Fassbinder said: A lot of this \"the stock market\'s down\" stuff reminds me of the economic discussion of Robert Brenner and Harry Shutt. Shutt\'s idea, at least, is that the present-day global economy is characterized by redundant capital, labor, and production, and that what keeps the whole thing afloat today is a US-led propaganda machine broadcasting the \"Washington line,\" a punitive global banking system that keeps nations chained to their IMF loan debts, a US economy kept fortified by protectionism, cheap consumer goods from abroad, corporate welfare to keep Wall Street afloat, and an ever-upward-spiraling national debt for which nobody has the ganas to demand repayment. Meanwhile the rest of the world languishes under IMF debt, stagnant economies, low wages. Eventually, predicts Shutt, the whole thing will collapse, and we can expect some version of post-capitalist social democracy, or dictatorship. Brenner is more cautious, makes no predictions. The question is, of course, when is it going to happen? The stock market decline has really been small potatoes so far.
DK responds: I posted a doom and gloom analysis a couple of days ago that forecasts stock market collapse but as Samuel says so far the decline is relatively benign given all the poor economic indicators, the scandals, the decline of foreign investor confidence, and so on. One wonders, however, how secure the market and global economy really is and one can imagine that if the big kaboom comes the bushies won't have a good response or a rational "plan." In early 1970s when there was a big economic downturn, Nixon adopted rather Keynesian policies to jumpstart the economy but its hard to see Bush doing this, so far his "economics" have been largely plots to rip off tax money for the rich and handouts to his major corporate contributers.
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The Consortium
Excellent article by investigative reporter Sam Parry that Bush DID try to save Enron...
The Consortium
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Thursday, June 27, 2002
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cyberwar
sassafrass said: Given that Wired has already mapped out The Great Cyberwar of 2002, why assume no hacker would ever investigate whether or not it could work?
DK responds: Thanks to sassafrass for posting Wired's extensive article on cyberwar; I posted a WP article below that indicates new fears of terrorist cyberwar; these fears have been around for some time and many are surprised that AQ hasn't been more aggressive in cyberspace all fears are there that they will be
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Wednesday, June 26, 2002
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iWon - News
Leahy argues Bush seeks department "below the law"
iWon - News
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US Bear Market Commentary
very frightening summaries of stock market crashes are circulating on the Net, I have no way of evaluating these reports, but its Heads Up and Watch Out time!
US Bear Market Commentary
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Tuesday, June 25, 2002
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"Embarrassment of Riches" by Bruce Reed A review of Kevin Phillips's Weath and Democracy
If Karl Marx had wanted to lay the groundwork for class uprising, he could hardly have done a better job than George W. Bush. First, take power in a disputed election, then move quickly to give the very rich a big tax cut. Raid the Social Security Trust Fund so multimillionaires can keep their trust funds. Look the other way while Enron executives make a bundle driving their company into the ground while swindling workers out of their jobs and pensioBut a funny thing happened on the way to the class war: The rich won, and the rest of the country hardly noticed. If the masses are about to storm the gates, they forgot to tell their representatives in Congress. This month, the Senate will decide whether to make permanent the repeal of the estate tax, and Republicans are just a few votes short. The man for our times is Gatsby, not Marx. In the words of that great compassionate conservative, the Duchess of Windsor, "You can never be too rich or too thin."ns.
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DYNASTIES! (1)
corruption of US democracy by Bush and other dynasties; an excellent political commentary by honorable (one of the few) republicans Kevin Phillips
DYNASTIES! (1)
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Monday, June 24, 2002
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Redflagsweekly.com
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg on what FBI knows about anthrax attacks Redflagsweekly.com
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more conspiracies and Bush administration accountability
Samuel Day Fassbinder said: Thanks for responding, Douglas. Just to pursue Michael Ruppert\'s line of reasoning some more -- there\'s a reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration not only did nothing to stop the hijackers, but got in the way of those who _were_ trying to stop the hijackers, by (for instance) keeping the FBI from investigating the bin Laden family. What evidence do we have?
DK answers: go to my full analysis of 911 on my home page; here is an excerpt that responds to Samuel's question=
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 undertaken by the Clinton administration. Just after the September 11 attacks, a wave of revelations came out, ignored completely in the U.S. media, concerning how high-ranking officials in the Bush administration had 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 a 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.
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 initiated 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 [i.e. National Missile Defense]) and Iraq.”
Moreover, Newsweek reported 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. According to Newsweek, in a meeting with FBI chief Louis Freeh, he rebuffed Freeh’s warnings to take terrorism serious and turned down a 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 and policy 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 the U.S. government 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.
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.” 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. Thus, there should have been attempts to coordinate intelligence, warnings to the airlines industry regarding potential hijacking, and security alerts to the public to be on the lookout for potential terrorist attacks.
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 summer 2002 that top officials of the Bush administration did little or nothing to protect the U.S. against domestic terror attacks. When confronted with reports that Bush had been advised of impending terror attacks and had not acted on them, Bush was highly indignant, attacking those who criticized him for “second guessing” and engaging in partisan politics. He shrilly retorted that had he known exactly what was to happen, he would have prevented it. This was not, of course, the issue, but rather that of the failure of the Bush administration to take seriously the threats of terrorism and to develop an anti-terror policy. In fact, Bush was on an unprecedentedly long one-month summer vacation at his ranch in Crawford when he was briefed on the dangers of impending al Qaeda attacks, and no one could expect the highly unqualified president-select to “connect 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 -– 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 also 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 were also in question, as well as the issue of coordinating information between the CIA, FBI, and other agencies. Responding to what now appears as the greatest U.S. intelligence fiasco in history, 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. The result of investigating these intelligence failures was 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. Serious debates over the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence failures were being aired in the media and it appeared that the Bush administration was content to take the heat for the failures that had helped facilitate the September 11 terror attacks.
One shocking revelation disclosed that Coleen Rowley, 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. Rowley’s memo 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. Published in the May 21, 2002 issue of Time magazine, the memo provide a sharp critique of FBI bureaucratic inertia and incompetence.
Indeed, it is highly shocking to read media reports, or Congressional testimony, of FBI and CIA bureaucratic 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. 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.
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Sunday, June 23, 2002
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Saturday, June 22, 2002
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