There are only 38 days to go until the national
referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCE and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE _resident.
Over one thousand US soldiers have died in a foolish,
ill-planned and unnecessary war in Iraq, the Bush
national insecurity team is GUILTY of pre-9/11
negligence and post-9/11 incompetence, the US federal
budget surplus has been squandered on TWO foolish,
ill-timed and unnecessary tax cuts skewed toward the
wealthiest few, the Bush vodoo economics team has
plunged us into hundreds of billions of dollars in
federal deficit and a multi-trillion dollar nationa
debt, forget about asking your fellow citizens if they
are safer or better off than they were four years ago
(of course, the answer is no), instead, ask them can
we afford four more years --strategically militarily
economically environmentally constitutionally?
The US regimestream news media, at least until this
point, has, in large part, been a full partner along
with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary
formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are five very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media,
particularly the major network and cable news
organizations, does not want to inform you about this
presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you...
Lois Romano, Washington Post: "The invasion of Iraq
was a profound diversion from the battle against our
greatest enemy -- al Qaeda," Kerry said. "The
president's misjudgment, miscalculation and
mismanagement . . . all make the war on terror harder
to win. George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority.
I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority."
Kerry's comments at Temple, reinforced later at a
rally of 20,000 at the University of Pennsylvania,
included a six-point plan that campaign officials said
is designed to contrast his proposals with those of
the president's and to demonstrate that foreign policy
is a strength of Kerry's.
The Democratic nominee promised to destroy terrorist
networks by going after their arms and financing; to
revamp and enhance the intelligence apparatus to
ferret them out; to build up an overstretched military
by 40,000 troops; to support Middle Eastern
democracies; and to increase funding for homeland
security and for more intense cargo inspections at
ports and other points of entry.
"The Bush administration is spending more in Iraq in
four days than they've spent protecting our ports for
all of the last three years," Kerry charged.
Kerry assailed Bush for alienating longtime U.S.
allies, pledging as he has before to rebuild global
relationships. "I have news for President Bush: Just
because you can't do something doesn't mean it can't
be done," Kerry said. "It can be. My friends, it's not
George Bush's style that keeps our allies from
helping. It's his judgment."
Michael Ishikoff, Mark Hosenball, Newsweek: In its
rush to air its now discredited story about President
George W. Bush's National Guard service, CBS bumped
another sensitive piece slated for the same "60
Minutes" broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the
U.S. government was snookered by forged documents
purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium
from Niger...
A team of "60 Minutes" correspondents and consulting
reporters spent more than six months investigating the
Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell
Newsweek. The group landed the first ever on-camera
interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian
journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as
well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a
mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to
European intelligence agencies.
Although the edited piece never ended up identifying
Martino by name, the story, narrated by "60 Minutes"
correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about
how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent
documents and why administration officials chose to
include a 16-word reference to the questionable
uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003 State of the
Union speech.
But just hours before the piece was set to air on the
evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the
CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being
scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational
story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a
direct order to take a flight physical while serving
in the National Guard more than 30 years ago...
"This is like living in a Kafka novel," said Joshua
Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing
writer and a Web blogger who had been collaborating
with "60 Minutes" producers on the uranium story.
"Here we had a very important, well-reported story
about forged documents that helped lead the country to
war. And then it gets bumped by another story that
relied on forged documents."
Hank Kalet, Dispatches, South Brunswick Post: She
never expected to be speaking at Rutgers and elsewhere
about her views, never expected to find herself being
forcibly removed from a Republican Party political
rally in Hamilton after shouting a question at first
lady Laura Bush.
And she certainly never expected the kind of
insensitive treatment she received from the crowd.
But, then again, she never expected her son to die
in a dubious foreign war.
Yes. I said dubious. The war in Iraq was a war of
choice, not a war of necessity, a war sold to the
American public with a mixture of bad intelligence and
bad faith. And 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands
of Iraqis have paid the ultimate price.
Ms. Niederer's 24-year-old son Army 1st Lt. Seth
Dvorin, a graduate of South Brunswick High School, was
among those killed. Lt. Dvorin was serving in Iraq
with the 10th Mountain Division, Battery B, 3rd
Battalion, 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment when a
makeshift bomb exploded as he was conducting a
counter-explosive mission, Army officials said after
his death in February.
Ms. Niederer, who now lives in Hopewell, believes
her son did not have to die, that he and the
1,030-plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq
since the war began a year and a half ago were victims
of bad faith on the part of the Bush administration.
She has become active in the anti-war group Military
Families Speak Out and has made numerous speeches
around the area — including at Rutgers, her son's alma
mater — criticizing President George W. Bush and the
war in Iraq.
www.mediamatters.org: While the media has focused in
recent months on issues such as whether Senator John
Kerry took fire while saving the life of a fellow
swift boat crew member more than 30 years ago and
whether President George W. Bush's commanding officer
wrote memos bearing his name, an issue of at least
equal importance -- whether the Bush administration
lied to the 9-11 Commission and to the American people
about the events of September 11 -- has been almost
completely ignored. *
In fact, were reporters to devote anything approaching
the time and energy consumed by the disputed CBS memos
to the 9-11 Commission's conclusions, they would find
strong evidence that the administration has misled the
country regarding one of the most catastrophic days in
our country's history. In a review of the 9-11
Commission report in The New York Review of Books,
regular contributor Elizabeth Drew noted several
examples of Bush administration distortions and
apparent lies, of which the report provides strong
evidence. Following are two of the most flagrant.
Bush administration officials said no one could
predict terrorists would use airplanes as missiles
As Slate.com has reported, several prominent Bush
administration officials have asserted that there was
no way the government could have known that terrorists
would attempt to hijack airplanes and crash them into
buildings, as they did at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In May 2002,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "I
don't think anyone could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center"; then-White House Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer echoed Rice's remarks: "Never did we
imagine what would take place on September 11 where
people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."
In her testimony before the 9-11 Commission, though,
Rice retreated from her remarks, stating, "I probably
should have said, 'I could not have imagined'" such an
occurrence, but she only conceded that she couldn't
promise that there "might not have been a report here
or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
USA Today reported a similar remark by President Bush
on April 18: "Nobody in our government, at least, and
I don't think the prior government, could envision
flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive
scale." CNN noted on March 24 that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Commission: "I knew
of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading
up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack
commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into
the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers."
However, as the 9-11 Commission report documented,
such a "possibility was imaginable, and imagined,"
citing an August 1999 Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) Civil Aviation Security intelligence office
report that warned on the potential of a "suicide
hijacking operation," and that the North American
Aerospace Defense Command had "developed exercises to
counter such a threat." The commission reported that
an August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,"
which was received by Bush, stated that although the
FBI had "not been able to corroborate" a 1998 report
that Osama bin Laden was seeking to "hijack a US
aircraft," "FBI information since that time
indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York."
Just weeks before 9-11, the Commission report also
noted, the Central Intelligence Agency warned British
and French officials of "'subjects involved in
suspicious 747 flight training' that described [Al
Qaeda operative Zacarias] Moussaoui as a possible
'suicide hijacker.'" And the week before the terrorist
attacks, a Minneapolis FBI agent told the FAA that
Moussaoui was "an Islamic extremist preparing for some
future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist
goals" related to flight training he had received. The
commission also documented that on August 23, 2001,
then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet
"was briefed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing
titled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.'"
Reuters: Some of Antarctica's glaciers are melting
faster than snow can replace them, enough to raise sea
levels measurably, scientists reported on Friday.
Measurements of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen
Sea, on the Pacific Ocean side of Antarctica, show
they are melting much faster than in recent years and
could break up.
And they contain more ice than was previously
estimated, meaning they could raise sea level by more
than predicted, the international team of researchers
writes in the journal Science.
"The ... Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to
raise sea level by 1.3 meters (4 feet)," the
researchers wrote in their report.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092504I.shtml
The Story that Didn't Run
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Wednesday 22 September 2004
Here's the piece that '60 Minutes' killed for its
report on the Bush Guard documents.
In its rush to air its now discredited story about
President George W. Bush's National Guard service, CBS
bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same "60
Minutes" broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the
U.S. government was snookered by forged documents
purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium
from Niger.
The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an
ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus
documents involving Bush's National Guard service. One
unexpected consequence of the network's decision was
to wipe out a chance-at least for the moment-for
greater public scrutiny of a more consequential
forgery that played a role in building the Bush
administration's case to invade Iraq.
A team of "60 Minutes" correspondents and
consulting reporters spent more than six months
investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS
sources tell Newsweek. The group landed the first ever
on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian
journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as
well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a
mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to
European intelligence agencies.
Although the edited piece never ended up
identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by
"60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough
questions about how the White House came to embrace
the fraudulent documents and why administration
officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the
questionable uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003
State of the Union speech.
But just hours before the piece was set to air on
the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on
the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being
scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational
story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a
direct order to take a flight physical while serving
in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.
The story has since created a journalistic and
political firestorm, resulting in a colossal
embarrassment for CBS. This week, the network
concluded that its principle source for the documents,
a disgruntled former Guard official and Democratic
partisan named Bill Burkett, had lied about where he
got the material. CBS anchor Dan Rather publicly
apologized for broadcasting the faulty report. Today,
CBS named a two-person team comprised of former U.S.
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated
Press chief Louis Boccardi to investigate the
network's handling of the story. .
"This is like living in a Kafka novel," said
Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly
contributing writer and a Web blogger who had been
collaborating with "60 Minutes" producers on the
uranium story. "Here we had a very important,
well-reported story about forged documents that helped
lead the country to war. And then it gets bumped by
another story that relied on forged documents."
Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the
network's key sources, fear that the Niger uranium
story may never run, at least not any time soon, on
the grounds that the network can now not credibly air
a report questioning how the Bush administration could
have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network
would "be a laughingstock," said one source intimately
familiar with the story.
Although acknowledging that it was "frustrating"
to have his story bounced, David Gelber, the lead CBS
producer on the Niger piece, said he has been told the
segment will still air some time soon, perhaps as
early as next week. "Obviously, everybody at CBS is
holding their breath these days. I'm assuming the
story is going to run until I'm told differently."
The delay of the CBS report comes at a time when
there have been significant new developments in the
case-although virtually none of them have been
reported in the United States. According to Italian
and British press reports, Martino-the Rome middleman
at the center of the case-was questioned last week by
an Italian investigating magistrate for two hours
about the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of
the documents. Martino could not be reached for
comment, but his lawyer is reportedly planning a press
conference in the next few days.
Burba, the Italian journalist, confirmed to
Newsweek this week that Martino is the previously
mysterious "Mr. X" who contacted her with the
potentially explosive documents in early October
2002-just as Congress was debating whether to
authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq. The
documents, consisting of telexes, letters and
contracts, purported to show that Iraq had negotiated
an agreement to purchase 500 tons of "yellowcake
uranium from Niger, material that could be used to
make a nuclear bomb. (A U.S. intelligence official
told Newsweek that Martino is in fact believed to have
been the distributor of the documents.)
Burba-under instructions from her editor at
Panarama, a newsmagazine owned by Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi-then provided the documents
to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in an effort to
authenticate them. The embassy soon passed the
material on to Washington where some Bush
administration officials viewed it as hard evidence to
support its case that Saddam Hussein's regime was
actively engaged in a program to assemble nuclear
weapons.
But the Niger component of the White House case
for war quickly imploded. Asked for evidence to
support President Bush's contention in his State of
the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa, the administration turned over the Niger
documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Within two hours, using the Google search engine, IAEA
officials in Vienna determined the documents to be a
crude forgery. At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller,
vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger
documents in an effort to determine if the United
States government had been duped by a deliberate
"disinformation" campaign organized by a foreign
intelligence agency or others with a political agenda
relating to Iraq.
So far, the bureau appears to have made little
progress in unraveling the case. "The senator is
frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,"
said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Senator
Rockefeller, who was recently briefed on the status of
the FBI probe.
One striking aspect of the FBI's investigation is
that, at least as of this week, Martino has told
associates he has never even been interviewed by the
bureau-despite the fact that he was publicly
identified by the Financial Times of London as the
source of the documents more than six weeks ago and
was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be
interviewed for the "60 Minutes" report.
A U.S. law-enforcement official said the FBI is
seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received
permission to do so from the Italian government. The
official declined to comment on other aspects of the
investigation.
The case has taken on additional intrigue because
of mounting indications that Martino has longstanding
relationships with European intelligence agencies.
Martino recently told the Sunday Times of London that
he had previously worked for SISMI, the Italian
military-intelligence agency, a potentially noteworthy
part of his resume given that the conservative Italian
government of Berlasconi was a strong supporter of the
Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. A French
government official told Newsweek that Martino also
had a relationship with French intelligence agencies.
But the French official rejected suggestions from U.S.
and British officials that French intelligence may
have played a role in creating the documents in order
to embarrass Bush and British Prime Minister Tony
Blair. The French never disseminated the documents
because they could not establish their authenticity,
the French official said.
Martino has told Burba and others that he obtained
the phony documents from an Italian woman who worked
in the Niger Embassy in Rome. He was in turn put in
touch with the woman by yet another middleman who,
according to Burba's account, had directed Martino to
provide the documents to "the Egyptians." Some press
reports have suggested the still unidentified
middleman who put Martino in touch with his Niger
Embassy source was in fact a SISMI officer himself.
Burba, who has twice been interviewed by the FBI
but never gave up Martino's name, said she had been
cooperating with the CBS team on the story in hopes of
getting to the bottom of the matter. But now, with the
"60 Minutes" broadcast postponed, she is no longer
confident that can ever happen. Meanwhile, she said
she is fed up with Martino who has "lied" to her and
provided contradictory accounts to other journalists.
"I'm disappointed," she told Newsweek. "In this
story, you don't know who's lying and who's telling
the truth. The sources have been both discredited and
discredited themselves."
-------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48716-2004Sep24.html?referrer=email
washingtonpost.com
Kerry Blasts Iraq 'Diversion'
Challenger Says War Has Hurt the Fight Against Al
Qaeda
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 25, 2004; Page A01
PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 24 -- John F. Kerry detailed his
plan for combating terrorism Friday and insisted that
the nation is no safer after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks because President Bush took his "eye off the
ball."
In a harsh assessment of his rival's policies, Kerry
told an audience at Temple University that Iraq has
become a haven for terrorists, and he drew a sharp
distinction between the war on terrorism and the war
in Iraq to differentiate his policies from those of
the president.
"The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from
the battle against our greatest enemy -- al Qaeda,"
Kerry said. "The president's misjudgment,
miscalculation and mismanagement . . . all make the
war on terror harder to win. George Bush made Saddam
Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin
Laden the priority."
Kerry's comments at Temple, reinforced later at a
rally of 20,000 at the University of Pennsylvania,
included a six-point plan that campaign officials said
is designed to contrast his proposals with those of
the president's and to demonstrate that foreign policy
is a strength of Kerry's.
The Democratic nominee promised to destroy terrorist
networks by going after their arms and financing; to
revamp and enhance the intelligence apparatus to
ferret them out; to build up an overstretched military
by 40,000 troops; to support Middle Eastern
democracies; and to increase funding for homeland
security and for more intense cargo inspections at
ports and other points of entry.
"The Bush administration is spending more in Iraq in
four days than they've spent protecting our ports for
all of the last three years," Kerry charged.
Kerry assailed Bush for alienating longtime U.S.
allies, pledging as he has before to rebuild global
relationships. "I have news for President Bush: Just
because you can't do something doesn't mean it can't
be done," Kerry said. "It can be. My friends, it's not
George Bush's style that keeps our allies from
helping. It's his judgment."
Before Kerry even finished his speech Friday morning,
the Bush-Cheney campaign sent out e-mails accusing him
of both copying Bush's policies and of distorting his
record.
"John Kerry's repackaged proposals embrace initiatives
that the President is already implementing, even as he
cynically attacks the President," campaign spokesman
Steve Schmidt said in a statement. "John Kerry called
Saddam Hussein a 'terrorist' before, but now he is
taking the opposite position and claiming that the
removal of Saddam Hussein has left the world 'less
secure.' "
Vice President Cheney weighed in from Lafayette, La.,
telling supporters: "John Kerry is trying to tear down
and trash all the good that has been accomplished."
Kerry's comments came at the end of a week when his
campaign switched its strategy of focusing heavily on
domestic issues and aggressively attacked Bush's Iraq
policies, portraying them as arrogant, misplaced and
extremist.
"Drawing these sharp contrasts with Bush on Iraq is
very important, because this is a fundamentally
important issue," senior adviser Mike McCurry said.
"It is the heart of the question about George Bush: Is
he capable of seeing mistakes and fixing them so we
can get them right?" Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.
(D-Del.), who accompanied Kerry on Friday, told
reporters that Kerry felt "liberated" to make the case
against Bush on foreign policy.
Kerry's campaign Friday unveiled a second ad on Iraq
in two days, this one turning Bush's words on him. The
30-second spot, to air during Sunday talk shows, shows
Bush during a Rose Garden news conference saying, "I
saw a poll that said the 'right-track, wrong-track' in
Iraq was better than here in America."
"The right track?" the narrator asks. "Americans are
being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded. Over a
thousand American soldiers have died. And George Bush
has no plan to get us out of Iraq."
Although Kerry had previously made many of the points
in Friday's speech, it was the first time he presented
an anti-terrorism plan in such a comprehensive way.
Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior national security
analyst at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who said he is not endorsing either
candidate's approach, said Kerry's speech amounted to
"a wish list of any measure that anybody has proposed
without seeing whether they are cost-effective."
He gave Kerry credit for addressing the growing Muslim
resentment of the United States and the need for debt
relief in Middle East countries. But he said the Bush
administration has already been undertaking many of
Kerry's proposals, such as expanding the CIA's
clandestine service and the military's Special Forces
units.
"I have the impression," Cordesman said, "that
somebody assembled all the possibilities that would
have a rhetoric impact and crammed them into a
speech."
One area in which Kerry worked to set himself apart
from Bush was on Saudi Arabia, saying the
administration has not held it accountable for
financing al Qaeda terrorism.
"As president, I will do what President Bush has not:
I will hold the Saudis accountable. Since 9/11, there
have been no public prosecutions in Saudi Arabia, and
few elsewhere, of terrorist financiers," Kerry said.
Bush and others in the administration say that they
have put significant pressure on the Saudis, and that
the Saudis have become more aggressive in arresting al
Qaeda members living in the country and in closing
down religious-based contributions to the organization
and its affiliates.
Kerry also said that at U.S. ports, he would increase
the budgets for "the most promising cargo inspection
programs" by 600 percent. A spokesman said Kerry was
referring to two widely applauded programs run by the
Department of Homeland Security to increase
surveillance of incoming containers in foreign ports
such as Hong Kong, and to work with U.S. importers to
tighten their security. Both programs have been
severely understaffed, experts said.
Stephen E. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard official and
author of a homeland security book called "America the
Vulnerable," said Kerry's proposal makes sense because
it would result in tighter security without delaying
the flow of goods: "I applaud any effort to bolster
the resources going to these two important programs."
Staff writers Dana Priest and John Mintz in Washington
contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=12988666&BRD=1091&PAG=461&dept_id=
DISPATCHES: Unlikely activist takes on war in Iraq
By: Hank Kalet , Managing Editor 09/23/2004
DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet: Mother of soldier killed in
Iraq speaks out against President Bush and dubious
war.
Sue Niederer never expected to find herself on the
nightly news.
She never expected to be speaking at Rutgers and
elsewhere about her views, never expected to find
herself being forcibly removed from a Republican Party
political rally in Hamilton after shouting a question
at first lady Laura Bush.
And she certainly never expected the kind of
insensitive treatment she received from the crowd.
But, then again, she never expected her son to die
in a dubious foreign war.
Yes. I said dubious. The war in Iraq was a war of
choice, not a war of necessity, a war sold to the
American public with a mixture of bad intelligence and
bad faith. And 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands
of Iraqis have paid the ultimate price.
Ms. Niederer's 24-year-old son Army 1st Lt. Seth
Dvorin, a graduate of South Brunswick High School, was
among those killed. Lt. Dvorin was serving in Iraq
with the 10th Mountain Division, Battery B, 3rd
Battalion, 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment when a
makeshift bomb exploded as he was conducting a
counter-explosive mission, Army officials said after
his death in February.
Ms. Niederer, who now lives in Hopewell, believes
her son did not have to die, that he and the
1,030-plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq
since the war began a year and a half ago were victims
of bad faith on the part of the Bush administration.
She has become active in the anti-war group Military
Families Speak Out and has made numerous speeches
around the area — including at Rutgers, her son's alma
mater — criticizing President George W. Bush and the
war in Iraq.
Reading the letters on the Military Families Speak
Out Web site (www.mfso.org) is a painful experience.
They tell of dislocation and alienation, of extreme
worry verging on terror, of not being able to watch
the news or read the newspaper because each time they
hear of an American casualty they fear it will be a
son, a daughter, a cousin, a husband, wife, brother or
sister. The letters are bitter and angry and demand
the president be brought to account.
Ms. Niederer joined Military Families Speak Out as
a way of connecting with others who are feeling the
same things she has been feeling, and to speak out
against the war.
"I don't have any vendetta," she said by phone on
Tuesday night. "I just want these kids back."
Ms. Niederer sees her activism as a mission, as a
way of carrying out her son's commitment to the men
with whom he served.
"It was my son's last words before he went back to
Iraq," she said. "I asked him if he wanted to go back
to Iraq and he said he didn't. He said he thought it
was useless. We weren't going to win a war on
terrorism or war on religion. It was just a guerilla
war."
So she asked him why he felt he had to go.
"He said he had 18 men under him and he must bring
them home safely," she said.
Of those original 18 soldiers, three have died and
two were badly wounded.
"I'm just carrying out his wishes and his memory by
trying to bring the men home safely and alive," she
said. "It was his wish."
That sense of mission brought her to Hamilton on
Sept. 16, where Mrs. Bush was speaking at a rally and
fund-raiser on behalf of the president's re-election
campaign.
According to reports from several news
organizations, Ms. Niederer sat silently at the speech
until Mrs. Bush began talking of the troops abroad.
That's when she stood up and confronted the first
lady. She was wearing a T-shirt with her son's photo
and the words "President Bush, you killed my son"
across the front.
She came with a simple question: "When are yours
going to serve?" referring to the Bush twins. She got
no answer.
That should not be surprising, since the American
public has yet to get a straight answer from the
president or his minions as to why we are fighting and
why our young men are dying half way around the globe.
Each rationale has melted under real scrutiny, only to
be replaced with another. The elusive weapons of mass
destruction gave way to fictional links to al-Qaida,
which in turn gave way to the noble-sounding goal of
liberating the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. Now the
Iraqis are fighting to liberate themselves from us and
our soldiers are dying with increasing frequency.
According to CNN.com, 58 Americans have died so far
this month and 181 have died since Iraqis were handed
back autonomy.
"It has ... become increasingly clear that
America's military presence continues to serve as a
catalyst and rallying cry for a growing number of
disaffected Iraqi citizens," The Nation wrote in a
recent editorial.
And yet the president continues to view this crisis
with rose-colored glasses, extolling a growing
democracy that just does not seem to exist, continues
to blame outside influences for what nearly every
observer inside Iraq agrees is a homegrown resistance.
It is time that someone in authority admitted that
this war has been a terrible, deadly mistake and made
real plans to bring our troops home so other mothers
do not have to feel the pain that Sue Niederer has
felt.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick
Post and The Cranbury Press. E-mail him by clicking
here.
©PACKETONLINE News Classifieds Entertainment Business
- Princeton and Central New Jersey 2004
http://mediamatters.org/items/200409240007
Media looked past 9-11 Commission documentation of
Bush administration fabrications
While the media has focused in recent months on issues
such as whether Senator John Kerry took fire while
saving the life of a fellow swift boat crew member
more than 30 years ago and whether President George W.
Bush's commanding officer wrote memos bearing his
name, an issue of at least equal importance -- whether
the Bush administration lied to the 9-11 Commission
and to the American people about the events of
September 11 -- has been almost completely ignored. *
In fact, were reporters to devote anything approaching
the time and energy consumed by the disputed CBS memos
to the 9-11 Commission's conclusions, they would find
strong evidence that the administration has misled the
country regarding one of the most catastrophic days in
our country's history. In a review of the 9-11
Commission report in The New York Review of Books,
regular contributor Elizabeth Drew noted several
examples of Bush administration distortions and
apparent lies, of which the report provides strong
evidence. Following are two of the most flagrant.
Bush administration officials said no one could
predict terrorists would use airplanes as missiles
As Slate.com has reported, several prominent Bush
administration officials have asserted that there was
no way the government could have known that terrorists
would attempt to hijack airplanes and crash them into
buildings, as they did at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In May 2002,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "I
don't think anyone could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center"; then-White House Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer echoed Rice's remarks: "Never did we
imagine what would take place on September 11 where
people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."
In her testimony before the 9-11 Commission, though,
Rice retreated from her remarks, stating, "I probably
should have said, 'I could not have imagined'" such an
occurrence, but she only conceded that she couldn't
promise that there "might not have been a report here
or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
USA Today reported a similar remark by President Bush
on April 18: "Nobody in our government, at least, and
I don't think the prior government, could envision
flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive
scale." CNN noted on March 24 that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Commission: "I knew
of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading
up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack
commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into
the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers."
However, as the 9-11 Commission report documented,
such a "possibility was imaginable, and imagined,"
citing an August 1999 Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) Civil Aviation Security intelligence office
report that warned on the potential of a "suicide
hijacking operation," and that the North American
Aerospace Defense Command had "developed exercises to
counter such a threat." The commission reported that
an August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,"
which was received by Bush, stated that although the
FBI had "not been able to corroborate" a 1998 report
that Osama bin Laden was seeking to "hijack a US
aircraft," "FBI information since that time
indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York."
Just weeks before 9-11, the Commission report also
noted, the Central Intelligence Agency warned British
and French officials of "'subjects involved in
suspicious 747 flight training' that described [Al
Qaeda operative Zacarias] Moussaoui as a possible
'suicide hijacker.'" And the week before the terrorist
attacks, a Minneapolis FBI agent told the FAA that
Moussaoui was "an Islamic extremist preparing for some
future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist
goals" related to flight training he had received. The
commission also documented that on August 23, 2001,
then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet
"was briefed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing
titled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.'"
The Bush administration's claims of ignorance are cast
into even greater doubt by a report that a
hypothetical event resembling the actual events of
September 11 was the subject of a military training
exercise less than a year before 9-11. As United Press
International documented, on October 24, 2000, the
Pentagon ran a "mass casualty exercise, which
simulated crisis response in a scenario where a
hijacked aircraft crashed into the Pentagon."
Cheney and Bush claimed Cheney received Bush's
approval to shoot down hijacked planes on 9-11
Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
have maintained, and testified to the 9-11 Commission,
that the order to shoot down airplanes hijacked by Al
Qaeda on the morning of September 11 was authorized by
the president himself. But the commission's report
indicated that the commission found no evidence to
support such a claim based on the review of an array
of documentary sources from that day.
The report noted Bush and Cheney's account of the
events in question: Cheney "stated that he called the
President to discuss the rules of engagement" for
shooting down the hijacked airplanes if they would not
divert their path on the morning of September 11,
Cheney "said the President signed off on that
concept," and "[t]he President said he remembered such
a conversation."
But the commission found "no documentary evidence for
this call." The report includes a caveat that "the
relevant sources are incomplete," but does not say
specifically what information the commission lacked.
The commission cited the following sources in reaching
its conclusion that there was no evidence for Bush and
Cheney's claim: "(1) phone logs of the White House
switchboard; (2) notes of Lewis Libby [Cheney's chief
of staff], Mrs. [Lynne] Cheney, and Ari Fleischer; (3)
the tape (and then transcript) of the air threat
conference call; and (4) Secret Service and White
House Situation Room logs, as well as four separate
White House Military Office logs (the PEOC Watch Log,
the PEOC Shelter Log, the Communications Log, and the
9-11 Log)."
The report then noted that after Cheney twice ordered
the "authorization to engage," he called President
Bush to obtain authorization at the behest of White
House deputy chief of staff Joshua Bolten. According
to the report, Bolten wanted Cheney to "confirm the
engage order" and "make sure the President was told"
Cheney had executed it, and Bolten "said he had not
heard any prior discussion on the subject with the
President." The hijacked planes crashed before the
authorization order was put into effect.
Drew, in her New York Review of Books review, noted
that in response to the commission's suggestion that
Cheney made the order without Bush's authorization,
"the White House reacted in a lengthy letter to the
commission ... propos[ing] substitute language that
portrayed the President's performance that morning in
a more positive light." And, she wrote that Cheney
"made a vehement phone call to the chairman, Thomas
Kean, and vice-chairman, Lee Hamilton, protesting the
staff report's implication that he had taken charge
and ordered the planes shot down." Despite the
protests by the White House, Drew noted, the
commission's report maintained an account of the
events that suggests Cheney, not Bush, made the order.
* An MMFA LexisNexis database search on September 24
of the "All News" directory for media coverage --
after the 9-11 Commission report's July 22 release --
of Bush administration assertions that were
contradicted by the evidence amassed in the report
produced minimal results. Relevant results were
defined as articles that note the inconsistencies
between the Bush administration accounts and the 9-11
Commission report findings:
A search for "rice and predict! and airplane and slam
and world trade center and date is after July 20,
2004" produced six relevant results.
A search for "Fleischer and imagine and airplanes as
missiles and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.
A search for "rice and I could not have imagined and
date is after July 20, 2004" produced zero relevant
results.
A search for "Bush and envision flying airplanes into
buildings and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.
A search for "9/11 Commission and imaginable and
imagined and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.
A search for "cheney and (shoot /20 plane or airplane)
or (rules of engagement) or (9/11 commission and
documentary evidence and call) and date is after july
20, 2004" produced two relevant results.
— A.S. & M.K.
Posted to the web on Friday September 24, 2004 at 3:09
PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
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http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/09/24/environment.glaciers.reut/index.html
Report: Antarctica glaciers are thinning
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Some of Antarctica's glaciers
are melting faster than snow can replace them, enough
to raise sea levels measurably, scientists reported on
Friday.
Measurements of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen
Sea, on the Pacific Ocean side of Antarctica, show
they are melting much faster than in recent years and
could break up.
And they contain more ice than was previously
estimated, meaning they could raise sea level by more
than predicted, the international team of researchers
writes in the journal Science.
"The ... Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to
raise sea level by 1.3 meters (4 feet)," the
researchers wrote in their report.
"Our measurements show them collectively to be 60
percent out of balance, sufficient to raise sea level
by 0.24 mm (nearly 0.01 inch) per year," they added.
And as the surrounding ice shelves melt -- which they
are doing -- this process will speed up, the
researchers said.
"The ice shelves act like a cork and slow down the
flow of the glacier," said Bob Thomas of the NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility
in Virginia.
Theirs is the second report this week to warn of
rapidly melting glaciers in Antarctica.
On Tuesday a team at NASA and the University of
Colorado reported that the 2002 breakup of the Larsen
B ice shelf on the other side of the continent had
accelerated the breakup of glaciers into the Weddell
Sea.
Many teams of researchers are keeping a close eye on
parts of Antarctica that are steadily melting.
Large ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula
disintegrated in 1995 and 2002 as a result of climate
warming. But these floating ice shelves did not affect
sea level as they melted.
Glaciers, however, are another story. They rest on
land and when they slide off into the water they
instantly affect sea level.
"The rates of glacier change remain relatively small
at present," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who worked on
Friday's study.
"But the potential exists for these glaciers to
increase global sea level by more than one meter (3
feet). The time scale over which this will take place
depends on how much faster the glaciers can flow,
which we do not know at present."
The measurements also show the glaciers are thicker
than once believed. This means more melting and more
rapid melting, Thomas said.
"Our measurements show an increase in glacier thinning
rates that affects not only the mouth of the glacier,
but also 60 miles (100 km) to 190 miles (300 km)
inland," Thomas said in a statement.
The researchers from NASA, the Centro de Estudios
Cientificos in Chile, the University of Kansas and
Ohio State University wrote their estimates based on
satellite data and measurements from a Chilean P-3
aircraft equipped with NASA sensors.
Experts say that overall sea levels around the world
are going up by about 1.8 mm or 0.07 inch a year.
About half of this comes from melting ice in glaciers.
The melting into the Amundsen sea is now more than the
previous amount from all of Antarctica and more than
the estimated contribution from Greenland, the
researchers said.
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