Liberation News Service

Three times while he was there, he says, Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer, sent "patches" — updates in the programming — to be installed on the machines. Later, he says, he heard of a fourth.

What were the patches for? And were they applied? And where? By whom? A real newspaper would demand answers. The NYTwits would have 20 years ago...Lo and behold, the NYTwits have run an article on the suspicions that swirl around the "defeat" of Max Cleland (D-GA), the "victory" of Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and the Diebolic scheme itself. Today is Feb. 29th. Yes, it's Leap Year. It only happens every few years. The problem is that we cannot wait until the next Leap Year for some serious investigative reporting. In 2000, NYTwits failed their responsibility to the Truth and to the US electorate, and they continue to be complicit despite sanctimonious editorials and occassional pieces crafted to give them cover ("Oh, we looked at that...") For the facts, go to www.blackboxvoting.com...That's what Paul Krugman had to do. He knew better than to rely on the NYTwit news room. Paper of record? No, Paper of Revision.

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/opinion/29SUN3.html?ex=1079061909&ei=1&en=e3a4b546a5d97be1

MAKING VOTES COUNT: EDITORIAL OBSERVER
The Results Are in and the Winner Is . . . or Maybe
Not
By ADAM COHEN

Published: February 29, 2004

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga.

Rob Behler isn't saying Max Cleland's Senate seat was
stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, but he
insists it could have been. Mr. Behler, who helped
prepare Georgia's machines for the 2002 election, says
secret computer codes were installed late in the
process. Votes "could have been manipulated," he says,
and the election thrown to the Republican, Saxby
Chambliss.

Charlie Matulka, who lost to Senator Chuck Hagel of
Nebraska the same year, does not trust the results in
his election. Most of the votes were cast on paper
ballots that were scanned into computerized
vote-counting machines, which happen to have been
manufactured by a company Mr. Hagel used to run. Mr.
Matulka, suspicious of Senator Hagel's ties to the
voting machine company, demanded a hand recount of the
paper ballots. Nebraska law did not allow it, he was
informed. "This is the stealing of our democracy," he
says.

Defeated candidates who think they were robbed are
nothing new in American politics. But modern
technology is creating a whole new generation of
conspiracy theories — easy to imagine and, unless
we're careful, impossible to disprove. The nation is
rushing to adopt electronic voting, but there is a
disturbing amount of evidence that, at least in its
current form, it is overly vulnerable to electoral
mischief.

Among the growing ranks of electronic-voting skeptics,
Mr. Cleland's loss in 2002 and Mr. Hagel's wins in
1996 and 2002 have taken on mythic status. There is no
evidence the wrong man is in the Senate today. The
problem is, there is no way to prove the right man was
elected, either.

Mr. Cleland's loss was, some say, a surprise. He was
said to be leading in the polls before Election Day,
but ended up losing decisively. Many political
observers attribute his loss to President Bush's
strong support for Mr. Chambliss, and attack ads
picturing Senator Cleland with Osama bin Laden. But
others are suspicious of the new voting machines in
Georgia.

In the summer of 2002, Mr. Behler was in a Georgia
warehouse, helping prepare thousands of machines for
the coming election. He says there were constant
problems with the hardware and software, and growing
pressure as the election drew near.

Three times while he was there, he says, Diebold, the
voting machine manufacturer, sent "patches" — updates
in the programming — to be installed on the machines.
Later, he says, he heard of a fourth. Bev Harris, an
electronic-voting critic who runs
www.blackboxvoting.org and is a controversial figure
in the elections world, says there were eight. Diebold
and Georgia insist there was only one patch, which
Diebold says was added "prior to the election, but not
last minute."

The Georgia machines do not produce a paper record
voters can inspect to ensure a vote was correctly
cast. But Georgia says they go through three testing
levels, including an outside body that certifies the
software. When patches are added late, however, there
may not be time for certifying them. Georgia officials
concede the one patch they admit to was given only a
partial examination by an outside certifying body.

Ms. Harris argues the patches could have turned
Cleland votes into Chambliss votes. "You can put in
dynamic files that self-destruct after the election,"
she says. "There would be no evidence."

A final piece of the conspiracy theory is that
Diebold's chief executive is an active Republican
fund-raiser. It was probably inevitable that given all
the elements — late changes, an end run around the
vetting process, a manufacturer with political ties,
and a surprising outcome — there would be suspicions
about the results.

Some of the same factors were present in Nebraska. In
his primary race in 1996, Mr. Hagel, who had lived in
Virginia for 20 years, beat the state attorney general
by nearly two to one. In the general election, he
defeated the governor, who had been elected two years
earlier in a landslide. In 2002, against Mr. Matulka,
he won more than 80 percent of the vote.

What gets conspiracy theorists excited is not just Mr.
Hagel's prodigious wins, but his job before jumping
into the 1996 race: heading American Information
Systems, the manufacturer of the machines that count
85 percent of Nebraska's votes. There is a much
simpler explanation than electronic sabotage. Mr.
Hagel's campaign in 1996 was widely regarded as
stronger than his rivals' campaigns. His next
opponent, Mr. Matulka, an unemployed construction
worker, was a weak candidate. But when critics like
Ms. Harris argue these machines could have been
programmed to miscount, the state should be able to
come back with irrefutable evidence they were not.

A healthy democracy must avoid even the appearance of
corruption. The Georgia and Nebraska elections fail
this test. Once voting software is certified, it
should not be changed — not eight times, not once. A
backup voting method should be available, so if
electronic machines fail or are compromised shortly
before an election, they can be dropped.

Votes must be counted by people universally perceived
as impartial. States should not buy machines from
companies that have ties to political parties, and
recent company executives should not be running for
elections on those machines.

And every voter should see a paper receipt. This
"voter-verified paper trail" should be retained, and
made available for recounts — a low-tech check on the
reliability of electronic voting. Most Americans would
not do business with a bank that refused to provide
written statements or A.T.M. receipts. We should be no
less demanding at the polls.

After all, as Tom Stoppard has observed, "It's not the
voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

Bush bio on Web inflates Guard service

The Emperor has no uniform...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/02/28/bush_bio_on_web_inflates_guard_service/

Bush bio on Web inflates Guard service
By Walter V. Robinson, Globe Staff, 2/28/2004

Questions remain about President Bush's long-ago
service in the Texas Air National Guard. But the basic
outline of his Guard service is not in dispute: After
a year in flight school, Bush spent five months
learning how to fly an F-102 fighter-interceptor and
then 22 months as a part-time pilot. He stopped flying
in April 1972 -- 30 months before his formal
commitment would normally have ended.

Nonetheless, the biography of Bush on the US State
Department's website credits him with almost six years
in the F-102's cockpit -- two years on active duty
flying the plane and nearly four more years of
part-time service as an F-102 pilot. The websites of
at least five American embassies -- those in Germany,
Italy, Pakistan, Vietnam, and South Korea -- use the
identical language, even though Bush spent barely two
years flying the airplane.

After the 2000 election, when evidence of Bush's
abbreviated flying career and his propensity to miss
required drills became public, the presidential
biography written for the White House website made no
mention of the period of Bush's service, only that he
served as an F-102 pilot.

But the State Department biography of Bush, which has
been on its website since 2001, makes the president
out to be more of a frequent flyer than the
embellished account in Bush's 1999 autobiography, "A
Charge To Keep." In that book, Bush said he flew with
his unit for "the next several years" after his five
months of training on the F-102 concluded in June
1970.

The errant biography on the State Department website
was called to the Globe's attention yesterday by Hugh
E. Scott, a retired Continental Airlines captain and
former Air Force pilot from Newbury Park, Calif.

The State Department site --
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/

pubs/presbush/bio -- says that before Bush graduated
from Yale in 1968, "he went to the offices of the
Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base
outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One
motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his
father had done during World War II." It continues:
"George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and
spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter
interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was
on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to
help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on
round-the-clock alert."

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director,
asked yesterday about that language, said: "It does
not reflect the facts of his service. It will be
corrected."

Globe correspondent Bill Dedman contributed to this
report.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

U.S., Pakistan Deny Bin Laden Was Captured

Perhaps the most incredible element in this story is
that because the Bush cabal has no credibility at
all on anything related to the so-called "war on
terror," the Iranian radio's Pashtun language service
is probably a more reliable source than a
"spokesperson" from the White House or the Pentagon.
Of course, this story is quite plausible. As you know
from the LNS, Saddam Hussein's capture by US soldiers
was staged, as was Jessica Lynch's rescue....The
bounce from the "capture" of Saddam was not impressive
and the uptick in approval rating it gave the
_resident has been lost in the weeks since then. Of
course, Osama's "capture" will have more of an impact,
because a significant number of Americans have already
figured out that Saddam really had nothing at all to
do with 9/11 and was not an imminent threat to this
country or even to its interests in the region...Yes,
expect the "capture" of Bin Laden, but do not expect a
trial under international law. Too many embarrassing
questions could be raised...If it comes out that they
have held him for awhile, they will simply say they
were trying to get information on terror cells and
planned attacks out of him before it became common
knowledge. The problem with that otherwise sensible
response, of course, is as I said the Bush cabal has
NO CREDIBILITY...Yes, expect the "capture" of Osama --
especially now that Wesley Clark (D-NATO) publicly
spoke of how it should have happened already and how
it should be done...BUT do not be surprised if it is
only a corpse (the LNS still does not believe they
wanted Saddam *alive*), or even if he is NEVER
found...Remember, these men would have planted WMDs in
Iraq, if they felt they could get away with it or even
find anyone in the US military or intelligence
communities willing to fo their dirty work for
them...No, their position is weaking. It is getting
more and more difficult to stage such events, and the
desired effects (i.e. better poll numbers) are also
getting increasingly difficult to generate...But
somehow they have to change the subject, somehow they
have to take the edge off the story of their
stonewalling of the 9/11 commission and the 9/11
families demanding real answers to real questions. But
there will still be 500+ US soldiers (and counting)
dead in the _resident's foolish military adventure in
Iraq, there will still be a $500+ billion federal
deficit, there are still millions of jobs
gone, our geopolitical alliances will still be in
shambles, the struggle against the very real national and global security issues of Global Warming and AIDS in Africa will still be languishing leaderless, many very distrubing questions about the Plame affair, the Gun affair, the Kelly affair, the ramp up to the war in Iraq and of course 9/11 itself will still be left to answer, the Middle East peace process will still have been hopelessly trashed, and there will still be a $7 trillion national debt...What will the "US mainstream news media" do? What will the US
electorate do?

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=2&u=/ap/20040228/ap_on_re_mi_ea/bin_laden

U.S., Pakistan Deny Bin Laden Was Captured
1 hour, 53 minutes ago

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran - Pentagon (news - web sites) and
Pakistani officials on Saturday denied an Iranian
state radio report that Osama bin Laden (news - web
sites) was captured in Pakistan's border region with
Afghanistan (news - web sites) "a long time ago."

The claim came as Pakistan's army hunted terror
suspects in a remote tribal region along the border,
believed to be a possible hiding place for the
al-Qaida's leader.

The director of Iran radio's Pashtun language service,
Asheq Hossein, said the report was based on two
sources — one of whom later told The Associated Press
he was misquoted.

The report said bin Laden had been in custody for a
period of time, but that President Bush (news - web
sites) was withholding any announcement until closer
to November elections.

"Osama bin Laden has been arrested a long time ago,
but Bush is intending to use it for propaganda
maneuvering in the presidential election," the radio
report said.

Pakistani officials have denied knowing bin Laden's
exact whereabouts, although there have been reports
that military forces believe they know his general
location and had him encircled.

The state radio report, quoting an unidentified
source, said U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld's visit to the region this week was in
connection with bin Laden's arrest.

Larry Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman who
traveled with Rumsfeld this week to Afghanistan,
denied the report. "I don't have any reason to think
it's true," he said Saturday.

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the U.S.
military in Afghanistan, also said he had no
information to suggest bin Laden had been caught.

"Things are going well, and we believe we will
eventually catch all the leaders of al-Qaida, but I
know nothing of that report," he said.

Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed
called the report "baseless." "We have neither
arrested Osama nor have we any information about him,"
he told AP.

Pakistani Army spokesman Gen. Shaukat Sultan also said
the report was not true. "That information is wrong,"
he said.

Speaking to AP in Tehran, the radio director
identified one of the sources for the report as Shamim
Shahed, whom was identified as editor of the
English-language Pakistani newspaper The Nation.
Hossein said Shahed told him Friday night that bin
Laden was arrested "a long time ago."

But Shahed, who is The Nation's Peshawar bureau chief
and not its editor, denied telling Iranian radio that
bin Laden had been captured.

"I never said this," Shahed said in a telephone
interview with AP's Islamabad bureau. "But I have for
the last year been saying that he is not far away. He
is within their (the Americans') reach, and they can
declare him arrested any time."

"I have been misquoted. On this matter, we never
talked, the last two months. I'm angry, because
they've misquoted me," Shahed said in a separate
interview with AP Radio.

Hossein said he had a second source for the report but
declined to identify him other than as "a man with
close links to intelligence services and Afghan tribal
leaders."

The report was carried by Iran radio's external
Pashtun service, which is designed for listeners in
Afghanistan and Pakistan where the language is widely
spoken.

Iran state radio's main news channel — the
Farsi-language service for Iranian listeners — did not
carry the bin Laden report, nor did Iran state
television.

The Iranian news agency IRNA was first to report the
capture of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news -
web sites). IRNA also carried the state radio report
about bin Laden's capture and said it had contacted a
radio announcer at the Pashtun service who confirmed
the news.

For the first time since annual threat assessment briefings by the heads of key intelligence agencies began a decade ago, the director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was disinvited.

Read Ray McGovern and you will understand how
disgraceful the complicity of the propapunditgandists really is and how insidious their spin and misdirection really is...Worse yet, their sins of omission...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10027

No Skunks Allowed

Ray McGovern chaired National Intelligence Estimates
during his 27-year career and had high respect for the
expertise and dedication of INR analysts. Ray is
co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity, which includes alumni from CIA, INR, and other
intelligence agencies. He is now co-director of the
Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach
ministry in Washington, DC.

It was a quite a show at the Senate Intelligence
Committee's worldwide threat assessment briefing on
Tuesday, Feb. 24. Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts,
R-Kan., outdid himself as damage control officer for
fallout from failed intelligence.

Sen. Roberts captured the spirit when he told
reporters that, although "everybody would have some
second thoughts" about the reasons for the war, he
believes that Saddam Hussein posed a threat "in some
ways more dangerous [than weapons of mass
destruction]," because his leadership had deteriorated
(sic). Small wonder that Roberts took pains to ensure
there would be none who might snicker at the formal
briefing.

The casting was a dead giveaway. For the first time
since annual threat assessment briefings by the heads
of key intelligence agencies began a decade ago, the
director of the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) was disinvited.

Roberts and his Republican colleagues decided to
preclude the possibility that some recalcitrant
senator might ask why INR was able to get it right on
Iraq when everyone else was wrong. Recall that the CIA
and other intelligence agencies signed on to the worst
National Intelligence Estimate in 40 years—the one
issued in October 2002 with the loaded title "Iraq's
Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction."
(The only near rival in infamy is the NIE of September
1962, which said that the Soviet Union would not risk
trying to put missiles in Cuba. The missiles were
already en route.)

Punished For Honesty

INR has been forced to sit with its face to the wall
ever since it resisted White House pressure to cook
intelligence to the recipe of high policy. CIA
Director George Tenet and other malleable intelligence
managers acquiesced in that pressure and became
accomplices in the Bush administration's successful
effort in the fall of 2002 to deceive Congress into
forfeiting to the president its constitutional
prerogative to declare war.

INR was the skunk at that picnic. It dissented loudly
from some of the most important key judgments of the
NIE of October 2002. For example, the canard about
Iraq seeking uranium from Niger—impossible on its face
and based on a forgery—found its way into the
estimate, but INR's footnote dismissed the story as
"highly dubious."

This was no small matter. As Rep. Henry Waxman,
D-Calif., noted in an irate letter to the president on
March 17, 2002, the Iraq/Niger canard had been "a
central part of the U.S. case against Iraq" —a key
piece of "evidence" used to sway Congress to give its
approval for war.

INR analysts also debunked the fable about aluminum
tubes for uranium enrichment for Iraq. Although the
tubes had been advertised by National Security Adviser
Condolleeza Rice as useful only in a nuclear
application, State Department intelligence analysts
joined counterparts in the Department of Energy and
U.N. specialists in pointing out, correctly, that the
tubes were for conventional artillery.

Most obstreperous of all, on the highly neuralgic
nuclear issue, INR was unwilling to predict when
Iraq's "nuclear weapons program" was likely to yield a
nuclear device. Why? It saw no compelling evidence
that Vice President Dick Cheney was correct in
claiming that the previous nuclear weapons program had
been "reconstituted."

And if that were not enough, State Department
intelligence committed several sins not directly
connected with the NIE. INR's most experienced Middle
East specialists prepared a study exposing as a
chimera the notion that democracy could be brought to
the area at the point of a gun. INR also provided
invaluable support to the interagency team that worked
so hard to prepare sensibly for post-war Iraq. Its
analysis and recommendations were trashed by Pentagon
neophytes who knew the invasion would be a
"cakewalk"—and by Vice President Dick Cheney, who knew
that our troops would be seen as liberators.

Who Needs Context?

A bad lot, those State Department intelligence types!
Always trying to "put things in context;" unable to
see the overriding need to "get with the program."

Last year, INR's director, Carl Ford, harped on the
need for putting the country's best analysts to work
providing policymakers with the context in which
threats arise. Ford has retired, but the current
acting director, Thomas Fingar, is cut of the same
cloth—the kind of straight shooter likely to say
things that would embarrass the CIA, the
administration and maybe even the committee itself.

Who needs context? Better to let them talk about how
many terrorists they can kill than the conditions that
breed terrorism. Let them continue to use the paradigm
of combating malaria: Surely it's easier to try to
shoot down the mosquitoes as they leave the swamp than
to drain the swamp.

And tell Tenet, too, to lay off this context business.
The administration is still smarting from that
memorandum he sent up two years ago warning that "the
underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist."
That CIA report cited a Gallup poll of almost 10,000
Muslims in nine countries in which respondents
described the United States as "ruthless, aggressive,
conceited, arrogant, easily provoked and biased."

Rubbish! They just hate our democracy.

When senators ask—as they undoubtedly will—if the
United States is safer now than after the 9/11
attacks, we want to have folks who know the correct
answer. Tenet, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Defense
Intelligence Agency Director Lowell Jacoby know it has
to be "yes." As for the State Department, although
Secretary Colin Powell has now been brought into line,
you can never be sure his intelligence specialists
will see the light and "get with the program."

Better to keep them away.

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Published: Feb 26 2004

'Britain and US shared transcripts after bugging Blix's mobile phone'

Still nothing on the US air waves...Still nothing on
the front pages of the big city US newspapers...It is
a major scandal story all over the world...Your
country is in dire straits...They can ignore if they
dare, but the LNS promises you, the woods are coming
to the castle walls...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=495963

'Britain and US shared transcripts after bugging Blix's mobile phone'
By Kim Sengupta and Kathy Marks in Sydney
28 February 2004

The controversy over alleged British and American
"dirty tricks" at the United Nations deepened
yesterday with claims that two chiefs of Iraq arms
inspection missions had been victims of spying.

Hans Blix and Richard Butler were said to have been
subjected to routine bugging while they led teams
searching for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of
mass destruction.

In an interview published today, Dr Blix said he
suspected his UN office and New York home had been
bugged by the United States in the run-up to war. He
said bugging was to be expected between enemies, but
"here it is between people who co-operate and it is an
unpleasant feeling".

The new charges came within 24 hours of the former
cabinet minister Clare Short stating British
intelligence had taped the telephone calls of the UN
secretary general, Kofi Annan.

As demands grew at home and abroad for Tony Blair to
confirm or deny Ms Short's allegations, the British
ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones-Parry, telephoned Mr
Annan on Thursday evening. The UN said Mr
Jones-Parry's call has not shed any fresh light on the
matter. Edward Mortimer, Mr Annan's director of
communications, said: "There was a telephone call
which was apologetic in tone but did not really amount
to an admission of substance. Basically, the answer we
got was the same as the Prime Minister gave at his
press conference [on Thursday]. We are not complete
innocents, we do realise these things happen but it
was rather a shock to hear that the British government
had been spying on the secretary general."

Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats,
said Mr Blair should make a statement to MPs on the
affair.He will table a Commons motion next week
demanding to know if there was an "eavesdropping
operation", and if so, how extensive it was. Mr
Kennedy said: "We need to know whether British
intelligence took part in spying on the United Nations
secretary general. This is a serious allegation, made
by a member of Mr Blair's Cabinet, which cannot go
unanswered. The United Kingdom was one of the founding
members of the UN ... the suggestion that our security
services were involved in some kind of illegal
operation damages our national standing."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mr Annan's predecessor as
secretary general, said: "This is a violation of the
United Nations charter. It complicates the work of the
secretary general, of the diplomats, because they need
a minimum of secrecy to reach a solution." Mr Butler,
who led the UN disarmament team in Iraq in the 1990s,
Unscom, said he was "well aware" that he was being
bugged. But he said spying on the UN was illegal and
harmed the peace-making process. "What if Kofi Annan
had been bringing people together last February in a
genuine attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, and
the people bugging him did not want that to happen,
what do you think they would do with that
information?" he said.

The alleged bugging of Dr Blix, in charge of the last
UN mission before the war, seen as the last chance to
avoid war, is being viewed in diplomatic circles as
part of a concerted effort to sabotage attempts at a
peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis. Dr Blix, who
retired in June, is highly critical of George Bush and
Tony Blair for the claims they made about Iraq's
supposed weapons of mass destruction. Washington and
London, he said, had aborted the search for weapons to
pave the way for an invasion.

In an interview that appears in The Guardian today, he
said he had expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but
the possibility that he was spied on by someone "on
the same side" was "disgusting". Dr Blix said his
suspicions were aroused by repeated trouble with his
telephone at his New York home. His fears worsened
when a member of the US administration showed him
photographs that could only have come from the UN
weapons office. He met John Wolf, the US assistant
secretary of state for non-proliferation, two weeks
before war started and was shown two pictures of Iraqi
weapons. "He should not have had them. I asked him how
he got them and he would not tell me and I said I
resented that," he said.

Dr Blix said it was unlikely one of his staff had
handed over the pictures and thought it might be that
spies broke into a secure fax. In his reports to the
UN, Dr Blix, and his fellow inspection team leader, Dr
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, had asked for more time to
investigate Iraq's arsenal, a plea rejected by
Washington and London.

The claims of espionage against Dr Blix emerged in the
Australian media, sourced to a member of the country's
intelligence service. Yesterday a senior UN source
confirmed to The Independent that the Iraq mission,
Unmovic, were convinced they were victims of spying
operations. Reports say Dr Blix's mobile telephone was
monitored every time he went to Iraq, and the
transcripts shared between the US, Britain and their
allies, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Yesterday, a UN official said: "While in the Canal
Hotel in Baghdad [the Unmovic headquarters at the
time], we never used to talk about anything sensitive
in our rooms because we thought the Iraqis might be
bugging us. We used to go outside to the garden.

"It is one of the ironies of life that back in New
York we would sometimes take similar measures, discuss
things we thought should be confidential, out of the
office, in public places, sometimes the sidewalk.

"The only saving grace is that neither Dr Blix or
anyone else among us would speak about sensitive
matters on mobile telephones, so they would not have
heard anything earth-shattering just by that. But I
suspect there were other, more widespread
interceptions. There were plenty of attempts to
undermine us."

Dr Blix's predecessor, Mr Butler, now the governor of
Tasmania, said he was shown transcripts of bugged
conversations. "Those who did it would come to me and
show me the recordings that they made on others. 'To
try to help me to do my job in disarming Iraq', they
would say. 'We're just here to help you'," Mr Butler
said. But the former UN chief inspector maintained
that it was not only Britain which was spying. He
said: "I was utterly confident that in my attempts to
have private conversations, trying to solve the
problem of disarmament of Iraq, I was being listened
to by the Americans, British, the French and the
Russians. They also had people on my staff reporting
what I was trying to do privately. Do you think that
was paranoia? Absolutely not. There was abundant
evidence that we were being constantly monitored."

Mr Butler said that he too had to hold sensitive
conversations in the noisy cafeteria in the basement
of the UN building in New York or in Central Park.

"We were brought to a situation where it was plain
silly to think we could have any serious conversation
in our office. No one was being paranoid, everyone had
a black sense of humour about it.

"I would take a walk with the person in the park and
speak in a low voice and keep moving so we could avoid
directional microphones and maybe just have a private
conversation."

Mr Boutros-Ghali also described the vulnerability of
the organisation to espionage. "From the first day I
entered my office they said, 'Beware, your office is
bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a
tradition that the member states who have the
technical capacity to bug will do it without any
hesitation.' That would involve members of the
Security Council," he said. "The perception is that
you must know in advance that your office, your
residence, your car, your phone is bugged."

The targets

Richard Butler Former UN chief weapons inspector/p>

He said he was "well aware" that he was being bugged
at the UN. "How did I know? Because those who did it
would come to me and show me the recordings that they
had made on others to help me do my job disarming
Iraq." He asked: "What if Kofi Annan had been bringing
people together last February in a genuine attempt to
prevent the invasion of Iraq, and the people bugging
him did not want that to happen, what do you think
they would do with that information?"

Boutros Boutros-Ghali Former UN secretary general

He said he was warned that he was likely to be bugged
as soon as he started the job. "From the first day I
entered my office, they said: 'Beware; your office is
bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a
tradition that the member states who have the
technical capacity to bug will do it without any
hesitation.' That would involve members of the
Security Council. The perception is that you must know
in advance that your office, your residence, your car,
your phone is bugged."
28 February 2004 10:07

Search this site:

Printable Story

British intelligence gave Blair 'snippets of Chirac's private conversations'

The _resident and the
shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair...There is
no where for them to go politically...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=495996&host=3&dir=62

British intelligence gave Blair 'snippets of Chirac's private conversations'
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
28 February 2004

Tony Blair will be challenged next week over
allegations that he received British intelligence
reports about the private conversations of Jacques
Chirac in the approach to the Iraq war.

Labour MPs will press the Prime Minister about a claim
in a new biography which says he received "snippets of
the French President's private conversations" when
France and Britain were in dispute over the prospect
of military action. Mr Blair accused President Chirac
of scuppering a second United Nations resolution
authorising a war.

Philip Stephens, a political columnist at The
Financial Times, says in his book: "Blair came to
believe, partly on the basis of reports from British
intelligence, that the dispute over Iraq was, in fact,
a proxy for a much more serious contest.

"Chirac, these reports said, had decided that Blair
had usurped his own position as the natural leader of
Europe. It was time for the French President to
reassert himself and clip the wings of perfidious
Albion. In other words, this feud was personal as well
as political."

The claim has added to the controversy over Clare
Short's allegation on Thursday that British
intelligence spied on Kofi Annan, the United Nations
secretary general. If the claim is true, it suggests
the British operation went beyond the UN headquarters
in New York.

John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and
Harlington, said: "It would cause me and large numbers
of Labour MPs immense anxiety if the Government has
authorised this kind of spying operation against the
French President."

He added: "We need clarity from the Prime Minister. We
need to know the extent of these operations, so we can
ask on what grounds they were conducted and whether
they were appropriate.

"It does demonstrate the level of obsession, or almost
panic, to ensure the UN adopted a second resolution to
justify the case for war." Mr McDonnell and fellow
members of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs
will table written Commons questions to the Prime
Minister next week on the spying allegations.

They have put down a Commons motion urging him to make
a statement about the scale of the "eavesdropping
operation" and to clarify whether it included Mr
Annan, permanent members of the UN Security Council,
other countries, organisations opposed to the war and
MPs.

In his book, Tony Blair - The Making of a World
Leader, published in America last month, Mr Stephens
says the Prime Minister believed President Chirac was
"out to get him".

The French government is not planning any diplomatic
protest over the allegation. French sources have
denied the French President was motivated by a desire
to stop the Prime Minister becoming the leading figure
in the European Union. They insist he was anxious to
prevent a premature war.

There is little sign that other parties will let the
matter drop. Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish
National Party at Westminster, said: "Last year Tony
Blair was lying, this year he's spying. Just when you
thought Tony Blair couldn't sink any lower, he manages
to plumb new depths of conduct. He has lost his moral
compass."

Mr Salmond said the Crown Prosecution Service should
be investigating Ms Short's allegation of illegal
spying operations and uncovering who approved them.

Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

2+2=4

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 by the
Free Press, Columbus, Ohiio
Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
by Bob Fitrakis

The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent
state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus
offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called “Golden
Finger,” the safe route through the majority black
inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP
station, just east of downtown, is the place where
affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up,
get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of
cash visit BP’s Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM
machine which provides a paper receipt of the
transaction to all customers upon request.

Many of Taft’s and President George W. Bush’s major
donors, like Diebold’s current CEO Walden “Wally”
O’Dell, reside in Columbus’ northwest suburb Upper
Arlington. O’Dell is on record stating that he is
“committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the President” this year. On September 26, 2003, he
hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush’s
re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to
the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O’Dell’s
fundraising letter urged those attending to “Donate or
raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party.”

According to the Columbus Dispatch: “Last year, O’Dell
and his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two
liquor options that made their portion of Tremont Road
wet.

On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly
passed measures that allowed fundraising parties to
offer more than beer, even though his
10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a permit is
required because alcohol is included in the price of
fundraising tickets. O’Dell is also allowed to serve
“beer, wine and mixed drinks” at Sunday fundraisers.

O’Dell’s fund-raising letter followed on the heels of
a visit to President Bush’s Crawford Texas ranch by
“Pioneers and Rangers,” the designation for people who
had raised $100,000 or more for Bush’s re-election.

If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract
to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for
much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will
provide a paper receipt of the vote.

Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its
primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines.
Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every
other machine the company makes provides a paper trail
to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the
voting machines lack this essential function.

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate
Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting
machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit
trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any
attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to
“derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career
is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist
in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform,
became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and
now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the
Governor’s mansion.

Voter fraud

A joint study by the California and Massachusetts
Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election
determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were
not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty
equipment. The federal government’s solution to the
problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
of 2002.

One of the law’s stated goals was “Replacement of
punch card and lever voting machines.” The new voting
machines would be high-tech touch screen computers,
but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if
there’s been a computer glitch? How can the results be
trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual
votes match the computer’s tally?

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot
Tampering in the 21st Century, argues that without a
paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter
fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines
in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris,
Johns Hopkins University professors and others great
concern.

Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security
Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s
electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.”
The researchers concluded that vote totals could be
altered at the voting machines and by remote access.
Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report,
claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false
conclusions.”

Perhaps to settle the issue, someone illegally hacked
into the Diebold Election Systems website in March
2003 and stole internal documents from the company and
posted them online. Diebold went to court to stop,
according to court records, the “wholesale
reproduction” of some 13,000 pages of company
material.

The Associated Press reported in November 2003 that:
“Computer programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least
20 universities, including the University of
California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology received cease and desist letters” from
Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College students
launched an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign
to keep the hacked documents permanently posted on the
Internet.

Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the
mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al
Gore as winner of Florida after someone “subtracted
16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined
way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush.”
Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from
Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold,
reads: “I need some answers! Our department is being
audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone
to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave
Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.”
Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot
Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for
Diebold Election Systems, documents “unauthorized”
replacement votes in Volusia County.

Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news
report and noted, “According to CBS documents, the
erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly
responsible to calling the election for Bush.” The
first person to call the election for Bush was Fox
election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of
conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush
and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Incestuous relationships

Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an
explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for
clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by
only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems &
Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined
count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic
votes.

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich
founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers
Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right
Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68%
ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald.
After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused
Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to
American Information Systems (AIS). California
newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s
ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and
Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, “. . .
primarily funded by evangelical Christians –
particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine –
the [Discovery] institute’s $1-million annual program
has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and
more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and
postdoctoral research.” The chief philanthropists of
the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist
science and education in California, are Howard and
Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F.
Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive
far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization
that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major
General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal
notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard
Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune,
is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press.
But, English papers like The Independent are a bit
more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

“On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife
and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of
dollars over several decades to political projects
both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation
think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan
presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into
President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and the
suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster),”
wrote The Independent last November.

The Sunday Mail described an individual as, “. . . a
fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S.
multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his
fortune to promote so-called traditional family values
. . . by waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson
has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his
right-wing Christian agenda.

Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon
Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction
movement. The movement’s philosophy advocates, among
other things, “mandating the death penalty for
homosexuals and drunkards.”

The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American
Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the
World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck
Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the
Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed
between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy
Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased
Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based
election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S.
One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the
right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the
original money for the Council on National Policy.

In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican
Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly
well in an election where the votes were verified by
the company he served as chairman and maintained a
financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002
elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of
his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of
services, confidentiality agreements between the State
of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of
the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was
described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska
newspaper.

Hagel’s official biography states, “Prior to his
election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the
private sector as the President of McCarthy and
Company, an investment banking firm based in Omaha,
Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of
American Information Systems.” During the first Bush
presidency, Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief
Operating Officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of
Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS,
before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold
Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top
executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold’s original
electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers
Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure
in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic
voting in the United States.

Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the
potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The
voters of that state were reassured when the state
hired SAIC to monitor Diebold’s system. SAIC’s former
CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as a military
aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and former
Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with
George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group.
Robert Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of
the Bush family, also served on the SAIC Board.

Diebold’s track record

Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and
historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson,
writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether
or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed by
electronic voting machines supplied by
Republican-affiliated companies.” The scoop
investigation concluded that: “The state where the
biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state
that ran its election with the most electronic voting
machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in
Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed
patches on its machine before the state’s 2002
gubernatorial election that were never certified by
independent testing authorities or cleared with
Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in
Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County
each received exactly the same number of votes –
18,181.

Following the 2003 California election, an audit of
the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems
voting machines installed uncertified software in all
17 counties using its equipment.

Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that
one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the
Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control
countries by manipulating the election process. “CIA
apologists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these
things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re
giving politicians some money so he’ll throw his party
in this direction or that one, or make false speeches
on your behalf, or something like that. It may be
non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in
other country’s affairs, raising the question of
whether or not we’re going to have a world in which
laws, rules of behavior are respected,” Stockwell
wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush
administration supported computer manipulation in both
Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’
attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of
the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were
members of the Council on National Policy.

The perfect solution

Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for
Senate Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the “voter
verified paper audit trail.” Proponents of a paper
trail were emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and
CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated a voting
machine at a vendor’s fair in Columbus that provides
two separate voting receipts.

The first paper receipt displays the voter’s touch
screen selection under plexiglass that falls into a
lockbox after the voter approves. Also, the TruVote
system provides the voter with a receipt that includes
a unique voter ID and pin number which can be used to
call in to a voter audit internet connection to make
sure the vote cast was actually counted.

Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee,
stated, “I’ve not seen anything that compares to the
Gibbs’ TruVote validation system. . . .” The Assistant
Secretary of State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr.,
claimed Gibbs had come up with the “perfect solution.”

Still, there remains opposition from Ohio Secretary of
State Blackwell. His spokesperson Carlo LoParo
recently pointed out that federal mandates under HAVA
do not require a paper trail: “. . . if Congress
changes the federal law to require it [a paper trail],
we’ll certainly make that a requirement of our
efforts.” LoParo went on to accuse advocates of a
paper trail of attempting to “derail” voting reform.

U.S. Representative Rush Holt introduced HR 2239, The
Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of
2003, that would require electronic voting machines to
produce a paper trail so that voters may verify that
their screen touches match their actual vote. Election
officials would also have a paper trail for recounts.

As Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt
electronic voting machines without a paper trail,
Athan Gibbs wonders, “Why would you buy a voting
machine from a company like Diebold which provides a
paper trail for every single machine it makes except
its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to
verify its numbers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’”
Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you
believe, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy
is too important to leave up to the votes of the
people.

Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press ,
a political science professor, and author of numerous
articles and books.

© 1970-2004 The Columbus Free Press

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"Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did."

If his performance in 2000, and some of his recent liasons (i.e. Grover Norquist and Fred Newman), are any indication, the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader is going to attempt to sow great mischief and spread much disinformation about Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) in the struggle ahead -- with the indulgence of the "US mainstream news media" and mysterious infusions of Bush cabal cash and undercover brown shirts (disguised as conservatives and independents "drawn" to Nader's crusade)...It is imperative that you understand who JFK is and what he has done and stood for in his distinguished (and unique) career in the US Senate. If you have read the LNS for more than the last few weeks, you know that we were quite disappointed in him, indeed we had pretty much written him off...But he showed in Iowa and New Hampshire that he had either woken up or he was simply keeping his powder dry last year...Read this piece by The Nation's David Corn...You will need it when the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader makes his play for moral authority in this race...It is not only JFK's heroic service in uniform that makes him UNIQUELY qualified for the political wet-work ahead...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040315&s=corn

What's Right With Kerry
by DAVID CORN

[from the March 15, 2004 issue]

In the heat of battle, with his campaign crumbling,
Howard Dean lashed out at John Kerry. First, he called
the leader in the Democratic presidential race a
"Republican." Then he said, "When Senator Kerry's
record is examined by the public at a more leisurely
time...he's going to turn out to be just like George
Bush."

Just like George Bush? It is true that Kerry, another
Yalie and Skull and Bones alum, has voted in favor of
NAFTA and other corporate-friendly trade pacts, that
he once raised questions about affirmative action
(while still supporting it), that he has, like almost
every Democratic senator, accepted contributions from
special-interest lobbyists (while being one of the few
to eschew political action committee donations), that
he voted to grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq.
But this hardly makes him Bush lite. There is, as
evidence, his nineteen-year Senate record, during
which he has voted consistently in favor of abortion
rights and environmental policies, opposed Bush's tax
cuts for the wealthy, led the effort against drilling
in the Alaskan wilderness, pushed for higher fuel
economy standards, advocated boosting the minimum wage
and pressed for global warming remedies. But what
distinguishes Kerry's career are key moments when he
displayed guts and took tough actions that few
colleagues would imitate. One rap on Kerry is that he
is overly cautious and conventional. He's no firebrand
on the stump, nor does he come across as the most
passionate and exciting force for change. But his
history in Washington includes episodes in which he
demonstrated a willingness to confront hard issues, to
challenge power, to pursue values rather than
political advantage, to take risks for the public
interest.

Kerry arrived in the Senate in 1985. This Vietnam War
hero turned antiwar leader had been lieutenant
governor of Massachusetts. But he entered the body
more as the prosecutor he had been in the late 1970s
after graduating from Boston College law school. In
early 1986 Kerry's office was contacted by a Vietnam
vet who alleged that the support network for the
CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras (who were fighting
against the socialist Sandinistas in power) was linked
to drug traffickers. Kerry doubted that the Reagan
Administration, obsessed with supporting the contras,
would investigate such charges. He pushed for a Senate
inquiry and a year later, as chairman of a Foreign
Relations subcommittee, obtained approval to conduct a
probe.

It was not an easy ride. Reagan Justice Department
officials sought to discredit and stymie his
investigation. Republicans dismissed it. One
anti-Kerry effort used falsified affidavits to make it
seem his staff had bribed witnesses. The Democratic
staff of the Senate Iran/contra committee--which
showed little interest in the contra drug
connection--often refused to cooperate. "They were
fighting us tooth and nail," recalls Jack Blum, one of
Kerry's investigators. "We had the White House and the
CIA against us on one side and our colleagues in the
Senate on the other. But Kerry told us, 'Keep going.'
He didn't let this stuff faze him."

Kerry's inquiry widened to look at Cuba, Haiti, the
Bahamas, Honduras and Panama. In 1989 he released a
report that slammed the Reagan Administration for
neglecting or undermining anti-drug efforts in order
to pursue other foreign policy objectives. It noted
that the government in the 1970s and '80s had "turned
a blind eye" to the corruption and drug dealing of
Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had done
various favors for Washington (including assisting the
contras). The report concluded that "individuals who
provided support for the contras were involved in drug
trafficking...and elements of the contras themselves
knowingly received financial and material assistance
from drug traffickers." And, it added, US government
agencies--meaning the CIA and the State
Department--had known this.

This was a rather explosive finding, but the Kerry
report did not provoke much uproar in the media, and
the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill did little
to support Kerry and keep the matter alive. His
critics derided him as a conspiracy buff. Yet a decade
later the CIA inspector general released a pair of
reports that acknowledged that the agency had worked
with suspected drug smugglers to support the contras.
Kerry had been right.

After the contra investigation, Kerry next turned to a
far more sensitive target: a bank connected to a
prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. During their
investigation of Noriega, Kerry's staff discovered
that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had
facilitated Noriega's drug trafficking and money
laundering. This led to an inquiry into BCCI, a
worldwide but murky institution more or less
controlled by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. BCCI was
a massive criminal enterprise, although this was not
yet publicly known. It had engaged in rampant fraud
and money laundering (to help out, among others, drug
dealers, terrorists and arms traffickers) around the
world. Its tentacles ran everywhere. Its political
connections reached around the globe. Jimmy Carter and
Henry Kissinger both became involved in the scandal.
When banking regulators finally shut down BCCI in
1991, an estimated 250,000 creditors and depositors
from forty countries were out billions of dollars.

One key issue was whether BCCI had secretly and
illegally acquired control of First American bank in
Washington, DC. The top officials of First American
were Clark Clifford, a longtime Democratic graybeard
and a party fundraiser, and Robert Altman, his
protégé. Democratic senators grumbled about Kerry's
crusade, which put Clifford in the cross-hairs. "This
really pissed people off," Blum says. BCCI hired from
both Democratic and Republican quarters an army of
lawyers, PR specialists and lobbyists (including
former members of Congress) to thwart the
investigation. The Justice Department of the first
Bush Administration did not respond to information on
BCCI uncovered by Kerry's staff. So Blum took the
material to New York District Attorney Robert
Morgenthau, who then commenced an investigation of
BCCI that led to indictments. And Kerry again found
himself tussling with the CIA, for the agency had been
using the services of BCCI even after it had learned
that the bank was crooked and in league with
terrorists (including Abu Nidal).

In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the
BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury,
US Customs, the Federal Reserve, Clifford and Altman
(for participating in "some of BCCI's deceptions"),
high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The
report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was "a
fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it
continued to use both BCCI and First American...for
CIA operations." The report was, in a sense, an
indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since,
there's been nothing like it. Senator Hank Brown, the
ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, noted,
"John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult
investigation. Because many important members of his
own party were involved in this scandal, it was a
distasteful subject for other committee and
subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not.
John Kerry did."

While Kerry was in the middle of the BCCI muck, Senate
majority leader George Mitchell asked him to assume
another difficult task: investigate the
unaccounted-for Vietnam POWs and MIAs. For years
so-called POW advocates, like billionaire Ross Perot,
had claimed American GIs were still being held in
Vietnam, and the highly charged POW/MIA issue was the
main roadblock to normalizing relations. Working
closely with Senator John McCain, a Republican who had
been a POW, Kerry got the Pentagon to declassify 1
million pages of records. His committee chased after
rumors of American soldiers being held. He took
fourteen trips to Vietnam. This was a hard mission:
How could his committee say there were absolutely no
POWs still captive in Vietnam? Yet anything less could
keep the POW controversy alive.

On one trip to Hanoi, as Douglas Brinkley notes in
Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Kerry
insisted that he be allowed to inspect the catacombs
beneath Ho Chi Minh's tomb, where, according to a
persistent rumor, the remaining POWs were being held.
Permission was granted, and with conservative
Republican Bob Smith by his side, he inspected the
tunnels and found no signs of POWs. In January 1993
Kerry's POW/MIA committee released a 1,223-page report
concluding that there was "no compelling evidence that
proves any American remains alive in captivity in
Southeast Asia." Some POW die-hards howled.
(Journalist Sydney Schanberg has accused Kerry of
covering up and destroying evidence that POWs were
left behind.) But the report mostly settled the issue.
President Bill Clinton was able to drop the Vietnam
trade embargo and normalize relations.

Investigations were not the only notable moments in
Kerry's Senate career. On September 10, 1996, as he
was in a tight re-election contest against William
Weld, the popular Republican governor of
Massachusetts, Kerry voted against the Defense of
Marriage Act, which would deny federal benefits to
same-sex couples and permit states to not recognize
same-sex marriages conducted in other states. He was
one of only fourteen senators to oppose the measure.
Several leading Senate liberals--including Paul
Wellstone, Tom Harkin and Pat Leahy--had voted for it.
But on the floor of the Senate that day, Kerry, who
noted that he did not support same-sex marriage, said,
"I am going to vote against this bill...because I
believe that this debate is fundamentally ugly, and it
is fundamentally political." He refused to pretend
that the bill was not a wedge-issue trap devised by
conservative Republicans. The legislation, he charged,
was "meant to divide Americans," and he argued
fiercely that it was unconstitutional. "If this were
truly a defense of marriage act," he said, "it would
expand the learning experience for would-be husbands
and wives. It would provide for counseling for all
troubled marriages, not just for those who can afford
it. It would provide treatment on demand for those
with alcohol and substance abuse.... It would
guarantee daycare for every family that struggles and
needs it."

The following year, a re-elected Kerry was in another
lonely position as one of only five original sponsors
of the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, to provide
for full public financing of Congressional elections.
The measure would remove practically all
special-interest money from House and Senate
campaigns. (Kerry's colleagues were Wellstone, Leahy,
John Glenn and Joe Biden--all Democrats.) "Kerry was
totally into it," says Ellen Miller, former executive
director of Public Campaign, a reform group pressing
for the legislation. "He believes in this stuff."

In introducing the legislation, Kerry said on the
Senate floor, "Special interest money is moving and
dictating and governing the agenda of American
politics.... If we want to regain the respect and
confidence of the American people, and if we want to
reconnect to them and reconnect them to our democracy,
we have to get the special interest money out of
politics." He was also a backer of the better-known
McCain-Feingold legislation, a more modest and (some
might say) problematic approach to campaign reform.
But over the years he's pointed to the Clean Money,
Clean Elections Act as the real reform. "It is a tough
position in Congress to be for dramatic change in
financing elections," says Miller. "It's gutsy to go
out and say, 'Let's provide a financially leveled
playing field so there is more competition for
incumbents.' Kerry and Wellstone were the leaders and
took a giant step. It was remarkable."

After two decades in the Senate, Kerry has a long
record that can be picked apart by competitors within
his own party as well as in the GOP. And though he has
been re-elected three times, he has not developed the
best political skills. He has not shed a manner too
easily criticized as aloof or patrician. He has had
brushes with smarmy campaign financing. But there have
been times he has shown courage, devotion to justice
and commitment to honesty, open government and
principle-over-politics. There are few senators of
whom that can be said. A full assessment of the man
ought to take these portions of his public service
into account.

Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases: Kansas visit in 2001 came within weeks of the Supreme Court hearing arguments

"Truth shall rise again!"
Al Gore, Tennessee, February 2004

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0227-03.htm

Published on Friday, February 27, 2004 by the Los
Angeles Times
Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases: Kansas visit in 2001 came within weeks of the Supreme Court hearing arguments.

by Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was
the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and
went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the
school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases
in which the dean was a lead attorney.

The cases involved issues of public policy important
to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the
November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor
and the recently retired state Senate president, who
flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state
plane.

Two weeks before the trip, University of Kansas School
of Law Dean Stephen R. McAllister, along with the
state's attorney general, had appeared before the
Supreme Court to defend a Kansas law to confine sex
offenders after they complete their prison terms.

Two weeks after the trip, the dean was before the high
court to lead the state's defense of a Kansas prison
program for treating sex criminals.

Scalia was hosted by McAllister, who also served as
Kansas state solicitor, when he visited the law school
to speak to students. At Scalia's request, McAllister
arranged for the justice to go pheasant hunting after
the law school event. And the dean enlisted then-Gov.
Bill Graves and former state Senate President Dick
Bond, both Republicans, to go as well.

During the weekend of hunting in north-central Kansas,
Graves and Bond said in separate interviews recently,
they did not talk about the cases with Scalia, nor did
they view the trip as a way to win his favor.

Scalia later sided with Kansas in both cases.

In a written statement, Scalia said: "I do not think
that spending time at a law school in which the
counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably
cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could
spending time with the governor of a state that had
matters before the court."

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that
Scalia had been a guest of Vice President Dick Cheney
on Air Force Two when they went duck hunting in
southern Louisiana. That trip came shortly after the
high court had agreed to hear Cheney's appeal seeking
to keep secret his national energy policy task force.

The details of the Louisiana hunting trip, coupled
with the visit to Kansas, provide a rare look at a
Supreme Court justice who has socialized with
government officials at times when legal matters
important to them were before the high court.

Federal law says that "any justice or judge shall
disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his
impartiality might be questioned." By tradition and
court policy, justices are free to determine for
themselves what constitutes a conflict.

Specialists in legal ethics differed on whether the
Kansas trip presented a conflict of interest for
Scalia.

"When a case is on the docket before a judge, the
coziness of meeting privately with a lawyer is
questionable," said Chicago lawyer Robert P. Cummins,
who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. "It
would seem the better part of judgment to avoid those
situations."

Added Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at
Hofstra University: "A reasonable person might
question this, and that's the problem." He said Scalia
"should have rescheduled the trip until after" the
cases were over.

Other experts noted, however, that no one who met
Scalia in Kansas was a named litigant in the two
cases, in contrast to the trip with Cheney, who is the
appealing party in the upcoming energy task force
case.

"I'm not troubled by this because of the law school
setting," said Stephen Gillers, a New York University
law professor. He said he saw no problems with the
hunting trip. "The dean was an advocate, not the
litigant."

Scalia said that if Supreme Court justices were
prohibited from taking such a trip, then they "would
be permanently barred from social contact with all
governors, since at any given point in time virtually
all states have matters pending before us."

Since the two sex-offender cases in 2001, the state of
Kansas has not had any matters argued before the high
court.

Scalia said he accepted an invitation to the law
school "sometime before October 2000."

"I had worked for a couple of years on getting him to
come here. And he asked whether there was any good
hunting," McAllister said. "He said he had hunted
turkey and deer, but not pheasant, so that was
appealing."

In the spring of 2001, the high court voted to hear
both Kansas cases, and they were set for argument that
fall. McAllister said he called to alert Scalia that
he would be arguing the two Kansas cases before the
court at about the same time as the justice's
scheduled trip.

McAllister said Scalia responded that he would come as
scheduled, and that he would not accept a speaking fee
and would pay for his own hunting.

On Oct. 30, 2001, two weeks before the trip,
McAllister and state Atty. Gen. Carla Stovall appeared
before Scalia and the other Supreme Court justices in
the case of Kansas vs. Crane.

The case tested whether the state could continue to
hold sex offenders after they had completed their
prison terms. The two Kansas attorneys argued that
inmates likely to be a danger should be kept in
custody.

Scalia arrived in Kansas on Nov. 15, 2001. He
addressed a class and spoke to law students, and
attended a reception with local judges and lawyers.

"We kept him busy," the dean said. "And the students
really loved it. It's also a good change from
Washington for the justices."

The University of Kansas, a state school, paid for
Scalia's flight, meals and lodging, according to
Scalia's financial disclosure statement.

The next day, the dean dropped the justice off at the
airport in Lawrence, Kan., where he met the governor
and the former state Senate leader.

Bond, a 14-year state senator who retired at the end
of 2000 as president of the Kansas Senate, said he
spoke with McAllister before Scalia came to Kansas.
"He was bringing out Scalia and he said Scalia really
wanted to go pheasant hunting," Bond recalled.

"He said he [McAllister] couldn't go because he was
going to have a case before the court and it would be
inappropriate. He said he had no problem with bringing
him in and having him speak to students, but that he
could not go out and socialize with him."

Bond spoke to Graves. The former governor, in a
separate interview, said he was honored to have the
chance to go hunting with a Supreme Court justice.

Graves said he and Bond decided to take Scalia to the
Ringneck Ranch near Beloit, Kan., which was owned by
Keith Houghton, a friend of the governor.

Graves said they flew from Lawrence on the governor's
official plane, which he described as a King air prop,
and returned on the same plane after hunting. Scalia
reimbursed the state $121.87 for the round trip.

"The controlled shooting part of the trip was good,"
Graves said. "They plant birds, and that gives you a
better attempt to get some birds."

Added Bond of Scalia, "We stayed the night and had a
delightful time. He was just charming to be around."

Bond said that because the trip was two months after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Scalia had told them
in advance that he did not think it wise to fly from
Washington with his own firearm. So, Bond said, "I
loaned Scalia a gun. I have plenty."

Graves and Bond said the two court cases never came up
during the trip. "There was no conversation along
those lines," Graves said.

Added Bond, "The cases were never discussed or
mentioned. Zero."

However, both officials said the legal matters were
critically important to the state, or they would not
have expended the money and effort to take them to the
Supreme Court.

The two also said they did not see a conflict in
socializing with the justice while the legal matters
were pending.

"It's kind of a stretch to tie that together," Graves
said.

When the trip was winding down, Bond recalled, "Graves
and I told him we would like him to be our guest and
pay his way, and he said no."

Houghton, the ranch owner, said Scalia wrote a
personal check for "several hundred dollars" to cover
his hunting, meals and lodging at the camp. "Once he
realized that we were a commercial institution, he
made a point that he had to pay for this," Houghton
said.

To commemorate the trip, Houghton said, they took
several photographs of the justice — including one
that now hangs in a large frame at the camp.

After Scalia returned to Lawrence, McAllister said,
the dean and others associated with the law school
took the justice to dinner.

Two weeks after hosting Scalia, the law school dean
was back in Washington to argue on behalf of Kansas in
a case called McKune vs. Lile. That case tested
whether Kansas could force sex offenders to confess
all their past sex crimes as part of prison treatment.

Robert Lile, an inmate, argued that the state policy
would force him to incriminate himself. A federal
district court and appeals court agreed, and Kansas
was asking the high court to overturn those rulings.

During the oral argument, Scalia questioned whether
the inmate had a constitutional basis for his
complaint. "Your client had been deprived of no
liberty to which he was entitled, not a single liberty
to which he was entitled," he told Lile's lawyer,
Matthew J. Wiltanger.

The Supreme Court sided with Kansas in both cases,
with Scalia voting on McAllister's side each time.

In January 2002, the high court said in a 7-2 ruling
in Kansas vs. Crane that state officials could hold
sex criminals beyond their prison terms if they prove
the convicts had a "serious difficulty" in controlling
their behavior.

Scalia dissented, but not because he opposed the
Kansas law. The court, he said, should have given the
state even greater freedom to hold sex offenders. The
ruling "snatches back from the state of Kansas a
victory so recently awarded," he wrote, referring to a
Supreme Court decision allowing the state to hold
certain inmates indefinitely.

In the second Kansas case, the court in a 5-4 ruling
said state prison authorities could compel inmates to
confess to past crimes as part of a treatment program,
and they could take away privileges from those who
refused.

The lawyers who lost the two Kansas cases said that
while they were curious about the law school visit and
the hunting trip, they never expected to win Scalia's
vote in the first place.

"I trust that Justice Scalia would have stepped aside
had his ability to rule been compromised by his
hunting trip in the state," Wiltanger said.

Back in Kansas, Bond and Graves said Scalia had earned
their respect as a marksman. At one point in the
field, the hunters were surprised by a quail, and
Scalia shot the bird in midflight.

"He came back with a bag full of birds," McAllister
said, "cleaned and packed in ice, ready to take back
on the plane to Washington."

*

Justice Scalia's Statement

The following statement was issued by Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia in response to a Los Angeles
Times inquiry about his 2001 trip to Kansas:

I was not the guest of Stephen McAllister, but of the
University of Kansas Law School. The invitation, in
fact, had come not from Stephen McAllister but from
his predecessor as dean of the law school, Michael
Hoeflich. That invitation was issued in December of
1999 and accepted (by phone) some time before October
of 2000 — long before the October and November, 2001,
cases you refer to were on our docket. My travel
expenses to Lawrence were reimbursed by the University
of Kansas, not by the state. I flew with the governor
and others on the governor's plane from Lawrence to
Beloit and back, and promptly reimbursed the state of
Kansas for the cost.

I do not think that spending time at a law school in
which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could
reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor
could spending time with the governor of a state that
had matters before the court. Indeed, if the latter
were so, Supreme Court justices would be permanently
barred from social contact with all governors, since
at any given point in time virtually all states have
matters pending before us, either in accepted cases or
in petitions for certiorari [or requests for the court
to hear a case].

© Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

###

Gun was ready to expose full extent of concern throughout government departments

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1157538,00.html

Whitehall united in doubt on war

Gun was ready to expose full extent of concern throughout government departments

Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday February 27, 2004
The Guardian

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, agreed that
secrets charges against the former GCHQ employee
Katharine Gun should be dropped after the defence made
clear that potentially hugely damaging evidence about
the legality of invading Iraq would be disclosed in
court, the Guardian has learned.

Serious doubts about the legality of the invasion were
expressed in the run-up to war by senior lawyers
throughout Whitehall, including the Foreign Office and
the Ministry of Defence.

The doubts were expressed by the entire FO legal
establishment, and not only Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the
former deputy head of the FO's legal team who has said
publicly that she resigned last year because she was
unhappy with Lord Goldsmith's legal advice.

The FO argued, partly on the basis of intelligence,
that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein did not
warrant a pre-emptive strike. It also questioned Lord
Goldsmith's interpretation of international law and
the standing of past UN security council resolutions.

Fresh evidence about the FO's doubts were sent by Ms
Gun's defence lawyers to the prosecution on the day it
decided to abandon the case against Ms Gun.

The Guardian also understands that earlier legal
advice from Lord Goldsmith was not nearly as certain
as his final view presented to the cabinet just before
the Commons was asked to vote in favour of the war on
March 17 last year.

Whitehall officials outside Downing Street were aware
that the attorney general's earlier legal advice was
much less sure. This was likely to be disclosed had Ms
Gun's trial gone ahead, providing valuable ammunition
for the anti-war movement.

Lord Boyce, chief of the defence staff at the time,
also made it clear that there were doubts about the
legality of the war among senior military commanders
but they had come round only on the basis of Lord
Goldsmith's final legal opinion, a point echoed last
night by Clare Short, the former international
development secretary.

Lord Goldsmith and the Crown Prosecution Service
insisted yesterday that the Gun case had been dropped
simply because of a lack of evidence. They also
insisted that their decision had nothing to do with
"any advice given by the attorney general to
government in connection with the legality of the Iraq
war".

Independent lawyers said yesterday this was strictly
true in a narrow legalistic sense. Ms Gun's defence
that she had acted out of "necessity" had to do with
her belief that she had leaked the information,
published by the Observer, to prevent death and
serious injury, not because she was opposed to the
war.

It was the first time government lawyers had to face
such a defence in what was previously regarded as an
impregnable Official Secrets Act, imposing an absolute
blanket ban on intelligence officers releasing any
information about their work. The chink in the armour
was made by Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice, in an
appeal court decision allowing for a "defence of
necessity" in limited circumstances.

But lawyers familiar with the case say it was
inevitable she would want to use the potentially
damning evidence that top Whitehall lawyers harboured
serious doubts about the war. This, they said, had
been made clear to the prosecution months ago.

What the prosecution appeared not to be aware of until
the day it decided to drop the case was new evidence
presented by the defence about the nature and extent
of the doubts across Whitehall over the legality of
the war.

The prosecution was also unaware until then that the
defence demanded more documents spelling out just how
the attorney general had come to reach his pro-war
view.

UN Spying and Evasions of American Journalism

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the US Mainstream
News Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0226-13.htm

Published on Thursday, February 26, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
UN Spying and Evasions of American Journalism
by Norman Solomon

Tony Blair and George W. Bush want the issue of spying
at the United Nations to go away. That's one of the
reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of
whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday. But within
24 hours, the scandal of U.N. spying exploded further
when one of Blair's former cabinet ministers said that
British spies closely monitored conversations of U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan during the lead-up to the
invasion of Iraq last year.

The new allegations, which have the ring of truth, are
now coming from ex-secretary of international
development Clare Short. "I have seen transcripts of
Kofi Annan's conversations," she said in an interview
with BBC Radio. "In fact I have had conversations with
Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there
will be a transcript of this and people will see what
he and I are saying.'" Short added that British
intelligence had been explicitly directed to spy on
Annan and other top U.N. officials.

Few can doubt that some major British news outlets
will thoroughly dig below the surface of Short's
charges. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the
journalistic evasion on the subject of U.N. spying has
been so extreme that we can have no confidence in the
mainstream media's inclination to adequately cover
this new bombshell.

For 51 weeks -- from the day that the Observer
newspaper in London broke the news about spying at the
United Nations until the moment that British
prosecutors dropped charges against Gun on Wednesday
-- major news outlets in the United States almost
completely ignored the story.

The Observer's expose, under the headline "Revealed:
U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War," came 18
days before the invasion of Iraq began. By unveiling a
top secret U.S. National Security Agency memo, the
newspaper provided key information when it counted
most: before the war started.

That NSA memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen
delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security
Council, noting a focus on "the whole gamut of
information that could give U.S. policy-makers an edge
in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals" --
support for war on Iraq. The memo said that the agency
had started a "surge" of spying on U.N. diplomats,
including wiretaps of home and office telephones along
with reading of e-mails.

Three days after the story came out, I asked for an
assessment from the man who gave the Pentagon Papers
to journalists in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg responded:
"This leak is more timely and potentially more
important than the Pentagon Papers. ... Truth-telling
like this can stop a war."

But even though -- or perhaps especially because --
the memo was from the U.S. government and showed that
Washington was spying on U.N. diplomats, the big
American media showed scant interest. The coverage was
either shoddy or non-existent.

A year ago, at the brink of war, the New York Times
did not cover the U.N. spying revelation. Nearly 96
hours after the Observer had reported it, I called
Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why
not. "We would normally expect to do our own
intelligence reporting," Smale replied. She added that
"we could get no confirmation or comment." In other
words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm
or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to
report on it.

The Washington Post didn't do much better. It printed
a 514-word article on a back page with the headline
"Spying Report No Shock to U.N." Meanwhile, the Los
Angeles Times published a longer piece emphasizing
from the outset that U.S. spy activities at the United
Nations are "long-standing." For good measure, the
piece reported "some experts suspected that it could
be a forgery" -- and "several former top intelligence
officials said they were skeptical of the memo's
authenticity."

Within days, any doubt about the memo's "authenticity"
was gone. The British media reported that the U.K.
government had arrested an unnamed female employee at
a British intelligence agency in connection with the
leak.

By then, however, the spotty coverage in the
mainstream U.S. press had disappeared. In fact --
except for a high-quality detailed news story by a
pair of Baltimore Sun reporters that appeared in that
newspaper on March 4 -- there isn't an example of
mainstream U.S. news reporting on the story last year
that's worthy of any pride.

In mid-November, for the first time, Katharine Gun's
name became public when the British press reported
that she'd been formally charged with violating the
draconian Official Secrets Act. Appearing briefly at
court proceedings, she was a beacon of moral clarity.
Disclosure of the NSA memo, Gun said, was "necessary
to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi
civilians and British soldiers would be killed or
maimed." And: "I have only ever followed my
conscience."

A search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database
finds that for nearly three months after Katharine
Gun's name first appeared in the British media, U.S.
news stories mentioning her scarcely existed. When
Gun's name did appear in U.S. dailies it was almost
always on an opinion page. News sections were
oblivious: Again with the notable exception of the
Baltimore Sun (which ran an in-depth news article
about Gun and Ellsberg on Feb. 1), mainstream U.S.
news departments proceeded as though Katharine Gun
were a non-person. She only became "newsworthy" after
charges were dropped.

"Mr. Blair's spokesmen were conspicuously silent on
Wednesday, apparently hopeful that the case would
disappear from the public agenda," the New York Times
reported in Thursday's paper. But the case had never
been on the public agenda as far as the Times news
department was concerned.

(Background about the Gun case has been posted at
www.accuracy.org/gun, a web page of the Institute for
Public Accuracy, where my colleagues and I have worked
to make information available about the U.N. spying
story.)

Overall, the matter of Washington's spying at the
United Nations has been off the American media map
until February. Whether the major U.S. news outlets
will do a better job on the subject this spring
remains to be seen. But it would be a mistake to
assume that they will.

Although the prosecution of Gun has ended, the issue
of U.N. spying has not. At stake is the integrity of a
world body that should not tolerate intrusive abuses
by the government of its host country.

We can assume that Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a former
Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, did not
speak lightly when he made a strong statement that
appeared in an Associated Press dispatch from Mexico
City on Feb. 12: "They are violating the U.N.
headquarters covenant." He was referring to officials
of the U.S. government.

That statement now resonates more loudly than ever.
With British and American intelligence agencies
working closely together, both have been locked in a
shamefully duplicitous embrace. In the interests of
war, their nefarious activities served as direct
counterpoints to the deceptions coming from 10 Downing
Street and the White House. In the interests of
journalism, reporters should now pursue truth wherever
it might lead.

Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the
News Media Didn't Tell You."

###

According to data compiled for Media for Democracy by monitoring firm Media Tenor, between October 2003 and February 2004, ABC, NBC and CBS nightly news programs broadcast only four stories on e-voting machines.

It's the Media, Stupid.

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Eleciton,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert147.shtml

Lifting the Curtain on E-Voting

By Mark Lewellen-Biddle and Danielle Taylor
MediaChannel.org

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, February 26, 2004 -- It
happened in 2000. It could happen in 2004. When it
comes to flawed election procedures, why does the
media wait to the last second to tell the tale?

This year, tens of millions of American voters are
projected to use electronic voting systems to cast
their vote for president. Many of these machines will
get their first test on March 2, Super Tuesday, when
voters head to the polls in ten states. If more
counties proceed with installing these new machines,
sidestepping any legal challenges along the way, the
repercussions for American democracy could be as
far-reaching as any hanging chad.

Election Data Systems, a Washington, D.C.-based
consulting firm that specializes in analysis of
election results, estimates that 50 million Americans
will use electronic ballots when they vote for a
president on November 2. Judging from mainstream
media's ongoing snub of this important story, few
voters will learn about the systems' inherent problems
before they're face to face with the new machines on
Election Day.

States that plan or have already implemented the
heaviest switchover to e-voting machines include
California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois and
Ohio. Voters in California, Georgia and Ohio will use
these systems for the first time during the Super
Tuesday vote. Most are critical electoral battleground
states that promise to host some of the most vitriolic
campaigns of the post-nomination season.

Watching the Watchdogs

"Journalists are the watchdogs of democracy," said
Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, a
Florida-based school of journalism. McBride is
confident that as the 2004 presidential election
approaches media coverage related to e-voting will
increase.

But since election reporting began last fall, network
news coverage of the switch has been little more than
a blip. According to data compiled for Media for
Democracy by monitoring firm Media Tenor, between
October 2003 and February 2004, ABC, NBC and CBS
nightly news programs broadcast only four stories on
e-voting machines. Half of the four reports were
compiled by CBS. NBC opted for a story that filtered
the issue through that of the California recall vote.
A search for e-voting news stories on CNN.com and
FoxNews.com yields an even smaller assortment: a total
of three reports between September 2003 and February
20, 2004, all on CNN.

Is this just more evidence of network news' obsession
with campaign spectacle and "horse race" over voter
issues and substance? Maybe, but the issues here could
have particularly far-reaching consequences.

The push to shift the American electoral process from
paper to PCs began shortly after the Florida fiasco
that stalled the selection of a president for several
weeks following the November 2000 vote. With little
substantial debate, in October 2002 President Bush
signed the Help America Vote Act, a $3.9 billion
program to help all 50 states purchase electronic
voting machines and related software in time for the
first federal election scheduled after January 1,
2006.

Television's hold on news consumers gives the
networks' dismissal of this story a particularly
virulent spin. According to a recent survey by the Pew
Center for the People and the Press, the Big Three of
television news remain the medium of choice for 35
percent of news-seeking Americans; while cable TV
commands an even bigger share, at 38 percent.

Instead, concerned voters have only two options for
coverage of the myriad issues that surround electronic
voting machines: newspapers and the Web, media that
account for 31 percent and 26 percent, respectively,
of Americans' preferred sources for news.

Picking up Some of the News Slack

This trend provides the lone sliver of good news in
the story of mainstream broadcast media's failure to
cover e-voting. Though print media's ability to lure
fresh readers remains at an all-time low, the Internet
has already demonstrated its power over the next
generation of US news consumers . . . and voters.
According to the Pew survey, 20 percent of Americans
between the ages of 18 and 29 now get their campaign
news from online sources.

An overview published in the online news magazine
Salon provided one striking contrast between the
abilities of the Web and TV to fulfill the media's
public service mission. With the help of technical
expert Jim March, Salon contributor Farhad Manjoo
demonstrated how a moderately knowledgeable techie
could hack into Diebold machines and tamper with
election results. "If you've got a copy of Access and
can get physical access to the county machine -- or,
some activists say, if you discover the county's
number and call into the machine over a phone line --
the vote is yours to steal," Manjoo wrote.

While traditional broadcast media have taken a pass on
such revealing coverage of e-voting problems, other
non-traditional news sources -- including weblogs,
Internet 'zines and online news groups -- have been
abuzz with these concerns about the machines
shortcomings.

Though such publications only command two percent of
the news public's attention, their penetrating glance
at the ramifications of e-voting should serve as a
model for network news outlets who find it a challenge
to produce a small handful of reports in a six-month
period.

A Glitch-Riddled Record

Yet while Web and newspaper e-voting coverage has not
been insignificant, it has largely failed to consider
electronic voting as a threat to democracy, given the
already checkered history of the new machines -- which
includes reports of political favoritism by the
executives at Diebold Election Systems and Election
Systems & Software, the two primary manufacturers of
these machines, and several independent technical
tests that revealed serious flaws to machine software.

Granted, civics rarely ranks as a headline-grabbing
topic. But this is a story whose legs are growing
longer by the minute. Handing over control of
America's electoral system to a handful of
corporations constitutes the privatization of
America's most public endeavor.

The four largest manufacturers of voting machines and
related software all have close ties with America's
defense industries, creating potential conflicts of
interest. The manufacturers are also associated with
the Election Systems Task Force -- a body comprised of
defense contractors and procurement agencies such as
Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman and Electronic Data
Systems, Corp. -- which has hired the services of the
Information Technology Association of America, a
powerful lobbying firm that, in a February edition of
USA Today, dismissed e-voting security concerns as
"based on conjecture rather than fact."

Even so, the Pentagon, earlier this month decided that
security concerns warrant cancellation of an Internet
voting project that would have allowed U.S. personnel
based overseas to vote online.

Questionable practices have already been brought to
light for the US's second-largest manufacturer of
e-voting machines, but it wasn't a journalist who made
the call. Beverly Harris was a publicist who decided
to do her own investigation of e-voting machines in
2002 and soon found that Diebold Corporation, a major
GOP donor, had failed to meet voting security
standards.

Memos leaked from Diebold indicated that executives
and staff were fully cognizant of flaws in their
software, gaping security holes, and the installation
of uncertified software in previously "certified"
machines.

This surely gives the public, not to mention members
of Congress, reason to question the blanket assurances
of manufacturers regarding the integrity of their
systems. The continuing critiques of the e-voting
technology have already sparked a wide-ranging public
debate. Oregon refuses to allow electronic voting and
a number of states, including California, New
Hampshire, Maine and Nevada are now investigating
paper trails. When Internet voting was proposed last
year, seven of the nine presidential candidates
challenged the notion, citing security issues as the
problem. But still, television remains silent.

Lifting the Curtain on e-Voting

Substantial debate on e-voting's effects on the
democratic process is still required, and the
broadcast media, in keeping with their Federal
Communications Commission license obligations, has a
duty to provide it.

Without adequate news coverage of these issues,
America cannot in good faith rush to embrace e-voting
technology as the panacea for an ailing electoral
process. As Anthony Stevens, Assistant Secretary of
State for New Hampshire recently commented in The
Detroit News, "the cost of restoring legitimacy is far
greater than the cost of maintaining it."

-- This article is one in Media for Democracy's
ongoing series of investigative reports on mainstream
media's coverage of the 2004 presidential elections.
For more information on joining MediaChannel's
citizens-powered initiative, visit Media for Democracy
2004.

© MediaChannel.org, 2004. All rights reserved.

= = = = = = =
ACT NOW: Tell the networks to focus on the problems
of e-voting.
= = = = = = =
JOIN: MediaChannel's citizens media movement to hold
big media's election coverage to a higher standard.
= = = = = = =
SUPPORT: MediaChannel's 2004 campaign by donating to
MediaChannel.org
= = = = = = =
RETURN: To MediaChannel's Homepage

Clark stumps for Kerry in Georgia

Two more US soldiers died in Iraq today. For what? The Emperor has no uniform...Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Gen. Wesley Clark (D-NATO) should run together. It underscores the Myth, i.e., a "band of brothers" chasing the chickenhawks from the White House, and it will help the Math, i.e. Clark can seal the deal with Republicans and Independents in the Southwest and elsewhere in the Expanded Confederacy. But that's not all... Here, once again, is the LNS list of seven damn good reasons for a Kerry-Clark ticket: 1) Clark, with his credentials as a decorated Vietnam combatant and the Supreme NATO Commander, reinforces Kerry's military record -- two war heroes running against two chickhawks, 2) Clark will sway Republicans and Independents, 3) Clark will sway Southerners, 4) Clark is not a Washington, D.C. politician, he is not a politician at all, he has not fed at that lobbyists' trough, 5)Clark has been an outspoken critic and *expert witness* on the fabrications and miscalculations leading to the war in Iraq, 6) Clark has been an outspoken critic and *expert witness* on the pre-9/11 failure, the post-9/11 coverup and the bungling of the "war on terrorism," 7) Clark provides protection for Kerry, if something happened to Kerry, Clark would carry the mantle and stick it where the sun has not shone for a long time...

Elliot Minor, Associated Press: "You can't help where
you're born," Clark said during a telephone conference
from Columbus Wednesday morning, prior to stops in
Macon and Albany. "It's what you make of your life and
how you give to others. If you look at what John Kerry
has done in his life, he's always been dedicated to
public service and he's been someone has the courage
to take a stand. "Southerners admire courage," Clark
said. "John Kerry has shown that courage. He's shown
he will take a stand even if it's unpopular."

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/8038102.htm

Posted on Wed, Feb. 25, 2004

Clark stumps for Kerry in Georgia

ELLIOTT MINOR
Associated Press

ALBANY, Ga. - Former Democratic presidential candidate
Wesley Clark spent Wednesday campaigning around the
state for current Democratic front-runner John Kerry.

Clark, who was born in Chicago but grew up in
Arkansas, said he decided to support Kerry, rather
than South Carolina native John Edwards, because the
Massachusetts senator has the best qualifications.

"You can't help where you're born," Clark said during
a telephone conference from Columbus Wednesday
morning, prior to stops in Macon and Albany. "It's
what you make of your life and how you give to others.
If you look at what John Kerry has done in his life,
he's always been dedicated to public service and he's
been someone has the courage to take a stand.

"Southerners admire courage," Clark said. "John Kerry
has shown that courage. He's shown he will take a
stand even if it's unpopular."

Clark, a retired four-star general, dropped out of the
race for the White House last month, after
disappointing third-place finishes in Tennessee and
Virginia. He was unable to command significant support
as a first-time presidential candidate, winning just
one state - Oklahoma - in 14 contests.

About 100 people, including about a half-dozen graying
Vietnam veterans, gathered in the auditorium of Albany
Technical College to hear Clark speak.

Clark said because of President Bush, the United
States is no longer the most admired country in the
world. He said the nation went to war without the
support of allies and rather than get their support,
turned them away. He also said 3 million jobs had been
lost under Bush.

He said Bush also did not have a plan to protect
Americans from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

"He didn't do his duty as commander in chief," Clark
said. "There wasn't a reason to go to war against
Saddam Hussein."

The audience applauded and cheered during his attack
on Bush, and afterwards veterans rushed up to shake
Clark's hand.

Several people said they weren't bothered that Kerry
didn't come in person.

Foley Harper of Ocilla said, "You have to have
somebody with courage and intellectual curiosity. "You
won't have that with George Bush."

With 10 states, including Georgia, holding primaries
on "Super Tuesday" next week, the political pace has
picked up in the state. Kerry campaigned in Atlanta
recently and his Democratic opponent, North Carolina
Sen. John Edwards, made stops in Albany and Columbus
Monday.

In a new American Research Group poll, Kerry led
Edwards 45 percent to 37 percent among Georgia voters.

Clark's visit came as Kerry began running a television
advertisement featuring former Georgia Sen. Max
Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran ousted by
Republican Saxby Chambliss.

"John Kerry is the one man I would put my trust in to
make this country safe," Cleland said in Kerry
campaign ads that began airing around the state. "He's
been tested on the battlefield. He's been tested in
the United States Senate. Now he's ready to be
president of the United States."

Kerry has expressed concern about the loss of jobs
since Bush took office, and he's promised to make
affordable health care and education a high priority,
if elected.

ON THE NET

© 2004 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights
Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com

British agents spied on the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraqi war, the former International Development Secretary Clare Short claimed today.

It is a major news story...all over the
world...except, of course, here where the Stepfordized
"US mainstream news media" keeps everyone distracted
from the ugly truth...Clare Short had her name
scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes when she
resigned in protest of the capitulation of the
shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0226-01.htm

Published on Thursday, February 26, 2004 by the
lndependent/UK
UK Spies Bugged UN Chief, Claims Short
by John Deane

British agents spied on the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraqi war, the former International Development Secretary Clare Short claimed today.

Ms Short - who quit the Cabinet in protest against the
war - made the claim while being interviewed on BBC
Radio 4's Today program about the implications of the
collapse of the case against GCHQ whistleblower
Katharine Gun.

Asked whether British agencies had been involved in
spying activities against Mr Annan, Ms Short said: "I
know, I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's
conversations. Indeed, I have had conversations with
Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there
will be a transcript of this and people will see what
he and I are saying'."

A file photograph shows then International Development
Secretary Clare Short (L) being greeted by UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations in
New York on March 19, 2003. Short said on Thursday
that Britain conducted spying operations on United
Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the run-up to
last year's war on Iraq. REUTERS/Ray Stubblebine-Files

Ms Short was asked whether she believed that British
spies had been instructed to carry out operations
within the United Nations on people such as Kofi
Annan.

She replied: "Yes, absolutely."

Ms Short was asked whether she knew about such
operations when she was in Government.

She said: "Absolutely, I read some of the transcripts
of the accounts of his conversations."

Asked whether she believed that was legal, she said:
"I don't know, I presume so. It is odd, but I don't
know about the legalities."

Asked about the Gun case, Ms Short said on the Today
program: "This centers on the Attorney General's (Lord
Goldsmith) advice that war was legal under resolution
1441, which was published, but was very very odd.

"The more I think about it, the more fishy I think it
was. It came very, very late. He came to the Cabinet
the day Robin Cook resigned, sat in Robin's seat, two
sides of A4, no discussion permitted.

"We know already that the Foreign Office legal
advisers had disagreed and one of them had said there
was no authority for war."

Ms Short went on: "My own suspicion is that the
Attorney General has stopped this prosecution because
part of her (Mrs Gun's) defense was to question the
legality and that would have brought his advice into
the public domain again and there was something fishy
about the way in which he said war was legal."

She added: "The major issue here is the legal
authority and whether the Attorney General had to be
persuaded at the last minute, against the advice of
one of the Foreign Office legal advisers who then
resigned, that he could give legal authority for war
and whether there had to be an exaggeration of the
threat of the use of chemical and biological weapons
to persuade him that there was legal authority.

"I think the good old British democracy should keep
scrutinizing and pressing to get the truth out.

"The tragedy is that Iraq is a disastrous mess. Ten
thousand Iraqis have died, American troops are dying,
some of our troops have died, the Middle East is more
angry than ever.

"I'm afraid that the sort of deceit on the route to
war was linked to the lack of preparation for
afterwards and the chaos and suffering that continues,
so it won't go away, will it?"

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

###

Dallas council votes for resolution denouncing federal Patriot Act

"There is something happening here, but you don't know
what it is, do you, Mr. Rove?"

Bill Miller, Star-Telegram: After a round of
impassioned debate, a resolution denouncing the USA
Patriot Act was approved Wednesday in a 9-6 vote of
the Dallas City Council. In approving the resolution,
Dallas joins three states and 225 local governments
that have taken stands against the Patriot Act.

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/8045589.htm

Posted on Thu, Feb. 26, 2004

Dallas council votes for resolution denouncing federal Patriot Act

By Bill Miller
Star-Telegram Dallas Bureau

DALLAS - After a round of impassioned debate, a
resolution denouncing the USA Patriot Act was approved
Wednesday in a 9-6 vote of the Dallas City Council. In
approving the resolution, Dallas joins three states
and 225 local governments that have taken stands
against the Patriot Act.

The measure states that city officials will uphold
citizens' constitutional rights and monitor the
implementation of the act.

It does not, however, have authority over the federal
legislation.

The Patriot Act, passed soon after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, must be reauthorized periodically
by Congress.

It expands law-enforcement officers' surveillance and
investigative powers, allowing them to, for example,
examine library patrons' records.

It has been criticized by some civil-rights
organizations, including the Bill of Rights Defense
Committee, which was represented at the council
meeting by dozens of people dressed in blue shirts and
waving small American flags.

Fourteen people were allowed to speak on the issue,
but only Ray Trap spoke in favor of the Patriot Act.

He said its critics represented a narrow
special-interest group that was trying to assail
President Bush during an election year.

"There is no obvious evidence that this [resolution]
reflects the will of the people," he said.

Councilman James Fantroy responded by being the first
of several council members and speakers who linked the
resolution to the civil rights movement.

"I remember when the majority was for slavery," he
said. "So the majority is not always right. I don't
have anything against President Bush; I have a
disagreement with the Patriot Act."

Mayor Laura Miller and council members Lois Finkelman,
Veletta Forsythe Lill and Gary Griffith noted that
while they are no less concerned about civil
liberties, the City Council has no authority over the
actions of Congress and should focus on municipal
issues.

Councilman Bill Blaydes supported the act in an
emotional recounting of how poor intelligence
capabilities kept U.S. officials from detecting the
Sept. 11 threat and from finding weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.

His voice quavered while declaring support of
relatives in the military and their fellow troops.

"They are red, yellow, black and white," Blaydes said.
"They are facing an enemy that is killing our soldiers
at random, without respect to race, creed or color."

Councilman Mitchell Rasansky, who later voted against
the resolution, rose and placed his hands on Blaydes'
shoulders.

"This," said Blaydes, crying, "is not a
social-conscience issue."

Councilman John Loza, a leading proponent of the
resolution thanked Blaydes for his heartfelt comments.

He added, however, that the resolution was aimed at
respecting the rights of others by protecting their
civil liberties.

"As far as I'm concerned, there is no more important
issue to come before this horseshoe," Loza said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLINE: Dallas City Hall, www.dallascityhall.com
Bill Miller, (972) 263-4448 wmiller@star-telegram.com

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

© 2004 Star Telegram and wire service sources. All
Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com

'Doonesbury' offers $10,000 for proof Bush served

The Emperor has no uniform...

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/25/elec04.bush.doonesbury.reut/index.html

'Doonesbury' offers $10,000 for proof Bush served
Wednesday, February 25, 2004 Posted: 5:59 PM EST (2259
GMT)

Bush during his time in the Texas Air National Guard

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The frequently irreverent
"Doonesbury" comic strip is offering $10,000 to anyone
who can show that President Bush served in the Alabama
Air National Guard. "That's right -- we're offering
$10,000 cash to anyone who can prove George W. Bush
fulfilled his Guard duty in Alabama," Wednesday's
strip said. "So if you served with Mr. Bush -- even if
only in the officers' club -- we want to hear from you
right now!"

Readers are referred to the Web site doonesbury.com,
where a Witness Registration Form asks for online
testimony. The site says the prize money is being
underwritten by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau.
"Thanks to Bush's massive tax cuts for people who
don't need them, GBT is flush."

The hitch is the winner will not actually receive the
reward. Instead the Web site says the cash will be
donated in the winner's name to the United Service
Organization (USO), which entertains American troops.

The strip first offered the reward on Monday and
already there are hundreds of responses, according to
David Stanford, duty officer at the online Doonesbury
Town Hall.

"We're only in day three and have already received
witness forms from over 600 contestants, with more
streaming in every hour," Stanford said in an e-mail
response to questions.

"We'll be carefully processing all of them, but what's
immediately striking is that so many who've plunged
into the depths of their 1972 memories have surfaced
with accounts that involve automobiles, alcohol,
aliens, secret ops and Elvis," Stanford said.

The White House had no comment on the contest, but
Christine Iverson of the Republican National Committee
said laughingly, "It sounds like a stunt worthy of a
comic strip."

Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe
has accused Bush of being absent without leave from
his Guard service from May 1972 to May 1973.

I was pretty horrified and I felt that the British intelligence services were being asked to do something that would undermine the whole UN democratic processes.

Lord Hutton failed to do justice to the death of Dr. Kelly, BUT Britain smoking Gun is just too hot to handle...Further evidence that the tide has turned against the Bush cabal and its vassals...Of course, there are other indications...For example, the _resident reduced in stature to debating "gay marriage" with the Mayor of San Francisco, while the war hero Sen. John F. Kerry barnstorms across the country, speaking out on national security and economic security...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0225-02.htm

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 by the BBC
GCHQ Translator Cleared Over Leak


LONDON - A GCHQ translator sacked for revealing a
secret e-mail has been cleared of a charge under the
Official Secrets Act.

Katharine Gun, 29, from Cheltenham, claimed the e-mail
was from US spies asking British officers to tap
phones of nations voting on war against Iraq.

She walked free on Wednesday when the prosecution
offered no evidence.

Mrs Gun had always said she had acted in an effort to
prevent the war, and outside court said: "I have no
regrets and I would do it again."

The leaking of the e-mail to the Observer newspaper
generated a row and saw Mrs Gun's case become a cause
celebre in the US, with civil rights activist Jesse
Jackson and actor Sean Penn lending their support.

Human rights group Liberty, which supported Mrs Gun
throughout her trial, said it was possible the
prosecution's decision followed political
intervention.

There has been speculation the government was worried
about the disclosure of secret documents during the
trial, particularly the advice by Attorney General
Lord Goldsmith about the legality of war.

Under the Official Secrets Act, the attorney general
has the final decision on whether or not to prosecute.

But the attorney general's office told the BBC the
decision to drop the charge had nothing to do with
Lord Goldsmith's advice.

Mrs Gun, who was sacked from GCHQ in June and charged
on 13 November, thanked her family and friends for
helping her through the case.

She told a news conference: "Obviously I'm not prone
to leak secrets left, right and center... but this
needed to get out, the public deserved to know what
was going on at the time. I was pretty horrified and I
felt that the British intelligence services were being
asked to do something that would undermine the whole
UN democratic processes."

Mrs Gun revealed she was strongly anti-war but said
she had not been looking for a piece of information to
leak and embarrass the government.

"I'm just baffled in the 21st century we as human
beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a
means to resolve issues."

The memo, leaked to a newspaper, from January last
year reportedly said the National Security Agency had
begun a "surge" in eavesdropping on UN Security
Council countries crucial to the vote on a second
resolution for action in Iraq.

Officials from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria,
Guinea and Pakistan all had their phones tapped in
what the Observer described as a "dirty tricks"
operation.

'Political charges'

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said managers
within the intelligence service might now be thinking
about talking to members of staff about their concerns
to prevent future whistleblowing.

Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, said the decision to
charge her in the first place had been political.

She said: "One wonders whether disclosure in this
criminal trial might have been a little too
embarrassing."

The Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman Sir
Menzies Campbell said: "It is possible the attorney
general's legal advice might have been published at
last. This is a government retreat.''

Mrs Gun pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, after which
the prosecution announced it would not be going ahead
with its case.

Mark Ellison, for the prosecution, said: "There is no
longer sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of
conviction.

"It would not be appropriate to go into the reasons
for this decision."

No explanation

The judge, the Recorder of London Michael Hyam,
recorded a formal verdict of not guilty.

The defense inquired why it took until Wednesday for
the case to be dropped, but the prosecution offered no
explanation.

They also want to know why news of the charges being
dropped was apparently leaked to the Guardian
newspaper last week.

All that is needed for a successful prosecution under
the Official Secrets Act is for the prosecution to
demonstrate the accused is covered by it, which Mrs
Gun was, and they have revealed information covered by
it, which she also admitted.

Her solicitor James Welch described the prosecution's
excuse as "rather lame".

Former spy David Shayler, jailed for revealing
secrets, said a blanket of secrecy was used to protect
intelligence matters that did not affect national
security.

"If the intelligence services are going to do things
that are illegal they have to expect people to
whistleblow."

© Copyright 2004 BBC

###

While the Pentagon is sounding the alarm on an environmental Armageddon, the president is covering his eyes, crossing his fingers, and whistling about the "national importance" of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Yes, the 2004 election is evolving beautifully into a
national referendum on whether or not the _resident
has the CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and COMPETENCE to come
to grips with the SECURITY challenge that confronts
us: NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY and
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY...

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-13.htm

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 by Arianna
Huffington
The Pentagon Sounds The Alarm On Global Warming; Why Isn't President Bush Listening?
by Arianna Huffington

If he's smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee
may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with
which to pummel President Bush - and cripple Karl
Rove's attempts to position his man as America's go-to
guy on national security.

The weapon in question is a new report on the grave
and gathering threat posed by global climate change -
and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the
Bush administration's obstinately ignorant approach to
global warming.

And the thing that makes the report so frightening -
and the prospective bludgeon so crushing - is that it
wasn't authored by some crunchy granola think tank or
a band of tree-hugging EarthFirsters, but by the U.S.
Department of Defense.

That's right, the Pentagon - Rummy's playpen. In fact,
the report, which was slipped to the press earlier
this month after being kept under wraps by the White
House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew
Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed "Yoda" for
his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon's secretive
Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered
national security assessments to every president since
Richard Nixon.

And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a
far greater danger than even the scourge of
international terrorism.

Dryly entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and
Its Implications for United States National Security,"
the report reads like the plot summary of the upcoming
Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, "The Day After Tomorrow,"
in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge
of anarchy and annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to
the Pentagon study, the question is not if abrupt
climate change will happen, but when. It could be,
according to the report's authors, as soon as the next
three years, with the most devastating fallout
potentially occurring between 2010 and 2020.

At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of
a new ice age in which mega-droughts devastate the
world's food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury
worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are
forced to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots
and wars for survival become commonplace.

I believe that would qualify as a Red Alert in Tom
Ridge's color-coded book.

But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address
- or even acknowledge - this looming peril. Instead,
the oiligarchs in the administration continue to
fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely
ignoring scientific evidence and international
consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very
idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It's a
stance that has warmed the hearts - globally, no doubt
- of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and
energy industry, making them feel very generous
indeed.

As last week's release of a scathing letter signed by
60 prominent scientists - including 20 Nobel laureates
and former science advisers to both Republican and
Democratic administrations - makes clear, the Bush
administration has made an art out of ignoring
science. Particularly when it comes to the issue of
global warming.

Who can forget the president's famous CO2 flip-flop,
or the way the White House tried to force so many
changes to a section of an EPA report dealing with
climate change that Christie Todd Whitman finally
threw up her hands and decided to eliminate the
section on global warming altogether?

But blinding the voters with pseudo-science may no
longer be an option now that the Pentagon report
threatens to put the issue front and center - and
reframe it as a key component of our national security
debate.

This is particularly good news for John Kerry, should
he prevail, given his long history of leading the
charge in the Senate to cut down on greenhouse gases
by raising fuel efficiency standards for cars and
trucks. The president, of course, has done just the
opposite, giving Kyoto the kiss-off, and pushing
through unconscionable loopholes that reward
gas-guzzling monster SUVs and allow carmakers to
effectively reduce fuel economy for millions of the
vehicles they sell.

One of the defining traits of leadership is the
ability to see not just the crisis right in front of
you, but the one lurking around the next corner.
Bush's steadfast refusal to act upon the potential
desolation that awaits us if we do nothing to confront
global warming makes him a major national security
liability.

Everyone in the Bush administration acted shocked and
surprised when 9/11 happened - even though there had
been red flags aplenty warning of al-Qaida's evil
intentions. Well, let there be no surprise this time.
We have all been warned.

While the Pentagon is sounding the alarm on an
environmental Armageddon, the president is covering
his eyes, crossing his fingers, and whistling about
the "national importance" of a constitutional
amendment banning gay marriage. The Democratic nominee
needs to remind the White House - and the American
people: It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

© 2004 Arianna Huffington

###

...deliberately annihilated the career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to any other insider who might come forward with data damaging to the administration officials. As the old saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred

500+ dead US soldiers, $500+ billion in federal budget
deficit. The Emperor has no uniform...The children of
America are being born into deeper debt and greater
danger than they would have been born into if a McCain
or a Gore had been in the White House for these last
four critical years...So much damage has been done to
our institutions, to our position in the world, to our
resources, and even in unthinkable ways to our power
itself...The Bush cabal have misused and abused the US
military and the US intelligence community. It is a
disgrace. Numerous, brave individuals who serve the US
Constitution have come forth...There are many more
Daniel Ellsbergs out there...They have a big problem
though...Can the "US mainstream news media" be counted
on to protect them? If your career, and perhaps your
life depended upon the NYTwits or the WASHPs printing
your story, getting it right AND not backing down when
the screws are tightened, AND then more importantly,
on AnythingButSee, SeeBS or SeeNotNews giving the
story any real play, would you come forward? If the
Democrats controlled Congress, or Sen. Tom Duck-It
(D-SD)was more than half the leader he was before the
Anthrax letters, maybe. But now? However, each news
cycle, as the _resident's poll numbers continue to
drop, as his credibility gap widens and deepens, as
the economy continues to go one step forward two steps
back, as we sink deeper into the quagmire in Iraq, as
more of our soldiers blood is shed and our nations
treasure is squandered, it becomes less and less
dangerous for the Joe Wilsons, Karen Kwiatowskis, Rand
Beers, Katherine Guns, Paul O'Neills, etc. They will
be coming out of the shadows in the next few months.
They better...There will be no hope for their sleep
patterns or their consciences or the Constitution they
serve if the Bush cabal gets another four years.

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/022404A.shtml

A NOC at Bush's Door

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 24 February 2004

Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC.

NOC is a designation within the Central Intelligence
Agency which means "non-official cover." It denotes an
agent working under such deep cover that said agent
cannot be officially associated with the American
intelligence community in any way, shape or form. In
order to keep covered, a NOC will work for the CIA out
of a front company, which provides the illusion that
the agent is just an ordinary accountant, lawyer or
businessperson.

Between the CIA and the agent, a process is created
to construct an identity which obscures completely the
reality of the agent's true employment. The training
of these NOC agents, along with the creation of the
cover stories which are known as "legends" within the
agency, requires millions of dollars and delicate
work. It is, quite literally, a life and death issue.
Little or no protection is given to an exposed NOC
agent by the American government, an arrangement that
is understood by all parties involved. A blown NOC can
wind up dead very easily. Because of this, the cadre
of NOC agents is small and elite.

Valerie Plame was a NOC working out of a front
company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates. To any
and all uninformed observers, she was an energy
analyst who spent a good deal of time working
overseas. In fact, she ran a covert international
network dedicated to tracking any person, group or
nation that would put weapons of mass destruction into
the hands of terrorists.

That is, until the Bush administration got in the
way.

The same administration, which invaded Iraq after
bullyragging the American people with dire predictions
of biological and chemical weapons flooding out of
that nation and into the hands of al Qaeda, reached
out and crushed the career of an undercover agent
working to keep that exact nightmare scenario from
unfolding.

The end of Valerie Plame's career came about a week
after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, took to
the pages of the New York Times with an editorial that
badly embarrassed George W. Bush. Bush, you will
recall, stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address
that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to develop
nuclear bombs. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger the
previous February to determine if that charge, which
had been floating around at the time, was valid. He
returned after completing his investigation to inform
the State Department, the National Security Council,
the CIA and the office of Vice President Cheney that
the uranium claims were bogus. It was later revealed
that the claims were based on crudely forged documents
out of Italy.

This didn't stop Bush from using the fraudulent data
to terrify the American people into supporting his
Iraq invasion during his 2003 Address. Ambassador
Wilson replied with a July 6, 2003 editorial which
categorically humiliated the administration for
allowing this claim to appear in the speech.
"America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of
its information," wrote Wilson. "For this reason,
questioning the selective use of intelligence to
justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor
'revisionist history,' as Mr. Bush has suggested. The
act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken
when there is a grave threat to our national security.
More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives
in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their
sacrifice came for the right reasons."

For the record, the number of dead American soldiers
in Iraq is now 547. Many thousands more have been
grievously wounded. There is no accurate accounting of
the number of civilians killed in Iraq, but all
estimates run into the tens of thousands. No anthrax,
botulinum toxin, sarin gas, mustard gas, VX gas or
uranium has been found there.

A week after the Wilson editorial was published,
some six journalists along with columnist Robert Novak
received telephone calls from two Bush administration
officials. The sum and substance of the calls: To
inform the journalists that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's
wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

It is an open question as to the ultimate purpose
behind these calls. One school of thought says the
calls were meant to smear Wilson by claiming he only
got the Niger assignment because his wife was an
agent, thus tagging him with nepotism and undermining
his criticisms of the administration. The other school
of thought, espoused by Wilson himself, says these
administration officials deliberately annihilated the
career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to
any other insider who might come forward with data
damaging to the administration officials. As the old
saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred.

In the end, the result was the same. Valerie Plame's
career with the CIA is over. Her network, the one that
was working to keep weapons of mass destruction out of
the hands of terrorists, is destroyed. The members of
that network are now in mortal peril. The front
company Plame worked through, Brewster-Jennings, was
exposed as well, destroying the networks of any and
all agents besides Plame working from that cover. The
American intelligence community is disgusted and
furious.

Larry Johnson, former CIA and State Department
official who was a classmate of Plame's in the CIA's
training program at the Farm, said when the CIA's
internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end of
the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people
potentially may have lost their lives."

"This is not just another leak," said former CIA
officer Jim Marcinkowski, who also did CIA training
with Plame. "This is an unprecedented exposing of an
agent's identity. There's only one entity in the world
that can identify you. That's the U.S. government.
When the U.S. government does it, that's it."

A February 5 report by UPI titled 'Cheney's Staff
Focus of Probe' begins as follows: "Federal
law-enforcement officials said that they have
developed hard evidence of possible criminal
misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick
Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a
CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation,
which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a
Justice Department official said. According to these
sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff,
Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees.
'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,'
one federal law-enforcement officer said."

Lewis Libby is one of the most important people on
Cheney's staff. Along with John Hannah, who served as
one of Cheney's Middle East Policy advisors, Libby was
deeply involved in the activities of Rumsfeld's
hand-picked Pentagon group, the Office of Special
Plans. This group was put together specifically to
re-engineer data regarding the threat posed by Iraq so
as to manufacture justification for a decision to make
war that had already been made. On several occasions,
Libby visited CIA headquarters at the behest of Cheney
to browbeat CIA analysts into "toughening up" their
assessments of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Given all the work Libby and Hannah put in to make
sure Bush got his Iraq war, it is no wonder they were
less than thrilled with what Ambassador Wilson had to
say.

Did these men out a CIA agent and destroy a network
that tracked weapons of mass destruction? We may soon
know. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused
himself from the investigation. A bulldog of a U.S.
Attorney named Patrick Fitzgerald is special
prosecutor investigating the matter. Several members
of the Bush administration have been dragged before a
Grand Jury, including White House spokesman Scott
McClellan, McClennan deputy Claire Buchan, former
press aide Adam Levine, Republican consultant Mary
Matalin, who served as a counselor to Vice President
Dick Cheney, White House communications director Dan
Bartlett, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
and Cheney aide Cathie Martin.

According to a Newsday report from February 22
titled 'Panel Questions White House Aides,' during the
grand jury sessions, "Press aides were confronted with
internal White House documents, mainly e-mails and
telephone logs, between White House aides and
reporters and questioned about conversations with
reporters. The logs indicate that several White House
officials talked to Novak shortly before the
appearance of his July 14 column. According to the New
York Times, the set of documents that prosecutors
repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White
House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and national security
adviser."

Further reports indicate the journalists who were
called may be questioned. Fitzgerald's first act as
special prosecutor was to ask White House staffers to
sign a waiver which allows those journalists to speak
without violating confidentiality. This would
determine, immediately, which administration official
violated national security, destroyed a WMD network,
and endangered the life of an agent. George W. Bush
has promised to cooperate with Fitzgerald's
investigation, but as of this date, those waivers have
not been signed.

Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC. She
was keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the
hands of terrorists. What was the Bush administration
doing?

---------

William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for truthout. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

-------

Bush Plays Bait-and-Switch With 9/11 Panel

"Out, out, damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpcoc193677317feb19,0,5083103.column

Bush Plays Bait-and-Switch With 9/11 Panel
Marie Cocco

February 19, 2004

Let us finally put to rest a widely circulated and
grossly inaccurate story that's been making the
rounds: Rumors of President George W. Bush's
cooperation with the panel probing the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are unsubstantiated.

Unlike those Internet rumors that pop to electronic
life and die quickly without fingerprints, this one is
traceable directly to the con artist-in-chief. The
world thinks Bush is cooperating with the 9/11
commission because he says he is.

"We have given extraordinary cooperation" the
president told NBC's Tim Russert in his Sunday Meet
the Press chat. "I want the truth to be known."

The truth?

"I've experienced two political bait-and-switches
since I've been on the commission," said Bob Kerrey,
the former Nebraska senator and current president of
the New School University in New York. And that's only
about a month. "The bait-and-switch in politics is a
technique that is intentionally designed to lead the
public (to believe) that you're going to do something
that you're not going to do."

The latest subterfuge involves the president's
agreement to be interviewed by the 9/11 commission, as
its chairmen, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and
former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, requested.
The White House announced with some fanfare that well,
certainly, the president would oblige. Then the
backtrack began.

Administration officials said any interview would be
done in private. What's more, the president would not
submit to questions from the full bipartisan panel,
only from selected commissioners. Which ones? Only his
damage-controllers know for sure.

Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman, refused to
answer "yes" or "no" when asked to state whether the
president wants to limit the commissioners who would
be allowed to question him. "Those details are being
worked out," she said.

Ah, the details.

Negotiated "details" have constricted the commission's
access to the president's daily brief - a digest of
intelligence for the commander-in-chief. Previous
probes of 9/11 already have revealed that, in the
months before the terrorists struck, the intelligence
community screamed loudly about a planned attack meant
to inflict mass casualties. Bush bragged in his NBC
interview about giving the commission access to these
briefings.

In fact, the full commission hasn't seen them.

The White House negotiated a convoluted agreement
under which a handful of panel representatives were
allowed to see the briefs and take notes. Then it
tried to block these few from sharing their notes with
other panelists. Finally - after the commission
contemplated a subpoena of its own members' notes - a
17-page summary of the briefings, edited by the White
House, went to all commissioners.

The summary, according to two commission sources,
raises more questions for Condoleezza Rice, the
president's national security adviser. Still more
could be put to former Federal Aviation Administration
chief Jane Garvey and to Sandy Berger, national
security adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

"When somebody stands up and says 'well, there's
nothing in those PDBs,' that's not true," Kerrey said.
Well, that's just about what Rice said publicly when
the existence of a key briefing from Aug. 6, 2001,
came to light.

Never mind. The public won't hear from Rice because
her interview with the commission was private. And the
panel is running out of time to complete work before
its May deadline.

In one of those heralded announcements of cooperation,
the White House has said it's willing to give the
panel two months more. Curiously, neither the House
nor the Senate - both controlled by the president's
party and heretofore happy to oblige Bush - has rushed
to take the action needed to extend the panel's life.

Does the president understand the dimension of failure
that 9/11 represents? It shook his presidency and
changed its course. He has led the nation to two wars
to avenge the attacks and, he says, prevent another.

Still he obstructs the full and fair accounting that
the people are due. This must be counted as another
failure of 9/11. It is an indignity to history that
is, somehow, imposed without shame.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Newsweek: Where's The Army's Suicide Report?

UPI(2/19/04)reports that up to 10% of US soldiers
evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan (approximately
1,000)for treatment at Landstuhl Regional Medical
Center in Germany had "psychiatric or behavioral
health issues." And Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong
Delta) has written a personal letter to the _resident,
raising the gutter politics issue of chickenhawks
sliming true patriots and challenging him to a debate
on Vietnam and Iraq. But the airwaves were filled all
weekend with "gay marriages" and the-shell-of-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader...Well, of course...the Emperor has no uniform...

T. Trent Gegax, Newsweek: Military members and their
families are asking the same question: Where is the
Army’s so-called suicide report? It’s the work of the
12-member Mental Health Advisory Team, commissioned by
the top generals in charge of the Iraq war after a
string of battlefield suicides. It was initially due
out last Thanksgiving. Then it was supposed to be
released in early February. Now, there’s talk that
it’s been shelved indefinitely.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/022304A.shtml

Where's The Army's Suicide Report?
By T. Trent Gegax
Newsweek

Saturday 21 February 2004

Waiting For Answers, Is the Army sandbagging its anticipated 'suicide report'?

Military members and their families are asking the same question: Where is the Army’s so-called suicide report? It’s the work of the 12-member Mental Health Advisory Team, commissioned by the top generals in charge of the Iraq war after a string of battlefield suicides. It was initially due out last Thanksgiving.
Then it was supposed to be released in early February. Now, there’s talk that it’s been shelved indefinitely.

Is the Army deliberately sitting on the report?
Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just focusing on other
priorities in rebuilding Iraq and preparing to hand
back sovereignty to its citizens. No one would argue
these aren’t massive missions. And, to be sure, the
vast majority of soldiers, even those exposed to the
most grotesque and horrific combat trauma, may
experience only mild post-traumatic stress disorder
that requires minor counseling before they bounce
back. But evidence suggests that a wave of
combat-fatigued soldiers—as many as 20 percent of the
130,000 troops in the field—not seen since the
aftermath of the Vietnam War is about to come crashing
onto American shores.

Late last year, publicity about the spate of
suicides among U.S. troops in Iraq prompted Gen. John
Abizaid and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top
commanders in Iraq, to look for causes. But the report
has been complete for months. Yet the colonel in
charge of the study can’t convince either general to
allow him to brief them on the findings, which,
Pentagon sources told NEWSWEEK recently, are not
exactly earth-shattering. It says a total of 19
soldiers serving in the Iraq campaign committed
suicide in 2003, a number that officials acknowledge
is “above average.” What’s more interesting is what
the study ignores. NEWSWEEK has learned that it did
not touch on the issue of Lariam, the anti-malaria
drug that causes psychotic episodes in a small
percentage of people who take it. It had been cited as
a potential cause of three prominent murder-suicides
at Ft. Bragg, N.C., where soldiers returned from
combat in Afghanistan and killed their wives. The Army
issued a report dismissing Lariam, but the
investigation was cursory and less than conclusive,
according to a senior officer at the Army Medical
Command in San Antonio, Tex.

Another problem: According to Army sources in Iraq
and in the United States, the report’s findings
underplay the state of mind of soldiers in Iraq. In a
development common to the U.S. armed forces, the
colonel in charge of the research team was told what
he wanted to hear by savvy officers, according to a
source close to the investigation. A few members of
combat stress teams have soft-pedaled the extent of
the problem, according to soldiers in Iraq. “The
colonel was schmoozed by the officers reporting to
him,” says NEWSWEEK’s source. Official Army
spokespeople did not return calls for comment.

This could develop into a problem for the Army. For
one, it could present the Army with a public relations
problem down the road, if not around the next bend.
Many of the soldiers serving in Iraq have begun
rotating home after 12 to 24-month tours of duty. It’s
unclear what kind of psychological fallout there’ll be
from a war that still divides the U.S. public.
“There’s very good likelihood of a lot more PTSD,”
than the military saw after the 1991 Gulf War, says
Dr. Brett Litz, associate director of the National
Center for PTSD. The reasons are apparent. The Iraq
occupation is an extended guerrilla war, without a
front or rear. Countless civilians have been killed
and maimed. “There’s a larger sense of horror from the
use of overwhelming force and seeing civilians
suffer,” Litz says. “That can leave an enduring mark
on men and women.” Add to that the mission’s large
number of citizen-soldiers in the Army Reserve and
National Guard, who are returning to curious
communities who can’t relate to their experiences.

Ultimately, the Army’s crew of mental health
professionals may be too small. It has about 110
psychiatrists, 130 social workers and 120
psychologists for its approximately 500,000
active-duty soldiers. “That’s pretty bare bones,” said
Col. Rene Robichaux, the former chief of the
Department of Social Work at Brook Army Medical Center
in San Antonio, Tex., who retired Jan. 1. And what
about the soldiers’ families back home in garrison?
“We don’t have enough psychiatry resources for family
members either,” Robichaux said. That could be a
problem for stressed-out husbands and wives who return
to the arms, and frayed nerves, of their loved ones
after a year away from home.

WAR STORIES MAIL CALL

Last week Martha Brant questioned whether military
families—and soldiers— had changed their minds about
the Iraq war because WMD has yet to be found. The
majority of letters we received still supported the
war. A sampling:

Name: Patty Presley
Hometown: Red Bud
I don't agree with the story of Suarez speaking out
against the war and the President because of his son's
death. My son has only been in Iraq for about 3 weeks.
I asked him before he left if he believed in what he
was doing and if he stood behind the President. He
said yes I do, if we don't stop people like Saddam we
will have more terrorist acts in the United States. I
feel sorry for Mr. Suarez and I hope I never have to
experience what he has, but I must say that I believe
in my son and I will stand behind him. Everyone must
remember how we gained the freedom that we have and
the Soldiers that have died all over the world giving
us that freedom. Weapons of mass destruction were
probably there and moved to another country before we
even got there, or may even still be there, but just
not found yet. I am sure the people of Iraq that have
been tortured find our presence a blessing.

Name: Dolores Gorton
Hometown: Viola, AR 72583
I agree 500% with this article! I opposed the war in
Iraq; and it breaks my heart to hear almost daily of
our military men and women getting killed and wounded;
often with limbs blown off—for what: so Bush and his
cronies can get oil and become richer at the expense
of American lives and families! My son is going to
Iraq this summer and I pray daily for his safety and
the safety of all military personnel!!! As Americans,
we have to protest and fight this injustice of using
National Guards for combat! We have to continue to
protest and demonstrate against the War in Iraq
because public opinion is the major force that put an
end to the Vietnam War. The War in Iraq is another
Vietnam because America did not know the history, the
language, the culture, or the ethnicity of the people
in Iraq!!!

Name: Bob Hughes
Hometown: Grass Valley, CA
We mourn the loss of any American who has given the
ultimate sacrifice for our great nation but the cause
is just regardless of whether we have found WMDs. My
son is just finishing a year in Iraq with the 2-70 AR
and while he had close calls he is returning. I am
proud of him and his service but had he made the
ultimate sacrifice it too would have been for a just
cause. In times of grief it is easy to point fingers
or lay blame but the truth of the matter is if our
brave soldiers don't take care of business elsewhere
in the world the war will come to us here and it's
safe to assume that those who oppose war will cower in
the face of the enemy and desire to hand this country
over to those who hate who we are and what we have.
Regardless the rest of us will continue to stand up,
to go ourselves or send our sons and daughters to
protect their right to oppose the protection of our
nation and it's citizens from the tyrants and
terrorists who grow in numbers everyday.

The Junk Science of George W. Bush by ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The Bush cabal's effort to lie, buy and bully their
way into a second term has officially begun...It began
on NotBeSeen's Meat The Press, not two weeks ago when
the _resident sunk like a stone, despite Tim Russert's
indulgence, but yesterday with the politically
delusional shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader,
announcing his candidacy...whether consciously or
unconsciously, he is a pawn in Rove's hand...But we
must seize it as an opportunity, and make the best of
it...This struggle is not only a referendum on the
_resident's CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and COMPETENCY, it
is also a decision on who can deliver better SECURITY
for the children: NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY
and ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY. And the choice will be
between the _resident, who has a dubious military
record, and has led us into a quagmire in Iraq and a
$7 trillion debt at home, and Sen. John F. Kerry, who
has a heroic military record, and has a distinguished
record in the US Senate, which includes in-depth
knowledg of and feirce advocacy for what NATIONAL SECURITY, ECONOMIC SECURITY and ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY really mean...That's the truth, and as Al Gore bellowed in Tennessee a few weeks ago, "TRUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN!"

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&c=1&s=kennedy

The Junk Science of George W. Bush by ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

[from the March 8, 2004 issue]

As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned
that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many
decades their proofs that the earth revolved around
the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist,
Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime
of sound science. With the encouragement of our
professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity
of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust
for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert
the church's most central purpose--the search for
existential truths.

Today, flat-earthers within the Bush
Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have
produced assorted hired guns and conservative think
tanks to further their goals--are engaged in a
campaign to suppress science that is arguably
unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition.
Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they
simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White
House is purging, censoring and blacklisting
scientists and engineers whose work threatens the
profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters
or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their
radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme
is this campaign that more than sixty scientists,
including Nobel laureates and medical experts,
released a statement on February 18 that accuses the
Bush Administration of deliberately distorting
scientific fact "for partisan political ends."

I've had my own experiences with Torquemada's modern
successors, both personal and related to my work as an
environmental lawyer and advocate working for the
Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper
Alliance.

At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on
September 11, 2001, I had just opened an office at 115
Broadway, cater-corner from the World Trade Center and
within the official security zone to which access was,
afterward, restricted for several months. Upon
returning to the office in October my partner, Kevin
Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a
headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours
after he left the building. Despite the Environmental
Protection Agency's claims that air quality was safe,
Kevin refused to return and we closed the office. Many
workers did not have that option; their employers
relied on the EPA's nine press releases between
September and December of 2001 reassuring the public
about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have
since learned that the government was lying to us. An
Inspector General's report released last August
revealed that the EPA's data did not support those
assurances and that its press releases were being
drafted or doctored by White House officials intent on
reopening Wall Street.

On September 13, just two days after the terror
attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the
area was "very low" or entirely absent. On September
18 the agency said the air was "safe to breathe." In
fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by
the EPA before September 18 showed presence of
asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among
outside studies, one performed by scientists at the
University of California, Davis, found particulates at
levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar
tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai
School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue
workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear,
nose and throat problems in the months following the
attack and that about half still had persistent lung
and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later.

Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the
reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews
to wear respirators but recalls seeing many rescue and
construction workers laboring unprotected--no doubt
relying on the government's assurances. "The
frustrating thing is that everyone just counts on the
EPA to be the watchdog of public health," he says.
"When that role is compromised, people can get hurt."

I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally
respected microbiologist with the Agriculture
Department's research service, who accepted my
invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of
more than 1,000 family farm advocates and
environmental and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa.
In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had
identified bacteria that can make people sick--and
that are resistant to antibiotics--in the air
surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies
proved that billions of these "superbugs" were
traveling across property lines daily, endangering the
health of neighbors and their herds. I was shocked
when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the
conference under orders from the Agriculture
Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax
trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from
the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that
his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the
hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study
and that he had been forced to cancel more than a
dozen public appearances at local planning boards and
county health commissions seeking information about
health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my
conference, Zahn resigned from the government in
disgust.

Ignoring Bad News

The Bush Administration's first instinct when it comes
to science has been to suppress, discredit or alter
facts it doesn't like. Probably the best-known case is
global warming. Over the past two years the
Administration has done this to a dozen major
government studies on global warming, as well as to a
report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, in its own efforts to stall action to control
industrial emissions. The list also includes major
long-term studies by the federal government's National
Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and
by scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and a 2002
collaborative report by scientists at all three of
those agencies.

The Administration has taken special pains to shield
Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton,
which is part of an industry that has contributed $58
million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the
leading practitioner of a process used in extracting
oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which
benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA
scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it
could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of
federal drinking water standards. A week after
reporting their findings to Congressional staff
members, however, they revised the data to indicate
that benzene levels would not exceed government
standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman,
EPA officials said the change was made based on
"industry feedback."

As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's
largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine
months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on
children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in
February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The
bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated
with enough mercury to cause neurological damage,
permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other
diseases in their unborn children.

The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary
Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry
on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that
the caribou would not be affected, because they calve
outside the area targeted for drilling. She later
explained that she somehow substituted "outside" for
"inside." She also substituted findings from a study
financed by an oil company for some of the ones that
the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In
another case, according to the Wall Street Journal,
Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove
pressed for changes that would allow diversion of
substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to
benefit local supporters and agribusiness
contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were
killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists
altered their findings on the amount of water the
salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the
largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike
Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who
drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the
current plan coho salmon are probably headed for
extinction. According to Kelly, "The morale is very
low among scientists here. We are under pressure to
get the right results. This Administration is putting
the species at risk for political gain. And not just
in the Klamath."

Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park
Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of
scientific information is now standard procedure at
Interior. "It's hard to decide what is more
demoralizing about the Administration's politicization
of the scientific process," he said, "its disdain for
professional scientists working for our government or
its willingness to deceive the American public."

Getting the Right Answer

But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky
business; the Bush Administration has found it easier
at times simply to arrange to get the results it
wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the
EPA's regional office overseeing the western
Everglades to accept a study financed predominantly by
developers, which concludes that wetlands discharge
more pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer
review or public comment. With its approval, the EPA
is giving developers credit for improving water
quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf
courses and other developments.

The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and
Restoration Committee, which was formed primarily by
local developers and chaired by Rick Barber, the
consultant for a golf course development for which the
EPA had denied a permit because it would pollute
surrounding waters and destroy wetlands. The study
contradicts everything known about wetlands
functioning, including a determination by more than
twenty-five scientists and managers at the Tampa Bay
Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not
generate nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist
and water-quality specialist working for the EPA
office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers
massaged the data to support their theory by
evaluating samples collected near roads and bridges,
where developments discharge pollutants. "It was like
the politics trumped the science," he told us.

In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private
deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over
federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures.
Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in
America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had
been identified as a potential carcinogen associated
with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers
at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US
Geological Survey regularly finds alarming
concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across
the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the
University of California, Berkeley, found that
Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government's "safe" 3
parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities
in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this
year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri
found reproductive consequences in humans associated
with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm
communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa
scientists are finding similar results in a current
study.

The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening
findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as
the European Union has, but by taking the studies away
from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move,
giving the chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based
Syngenta, control over federal research. In an
interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a
spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the
advantages of having the company monitor its own
product. "This is one way we can ensure it's not
presenting any risk to the environment."

In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy,
the Bush Administration now plans to systematically
turn government science over to private industry by
contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant
consultants already in the habit of massaging data to
support corporate profits. The National Park Service
is preparing a first phase of contracting reviews,
involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists,
archeologists and environmental specialists. Later
phases may entail replacement of 11,000 employees,
more than two-thirds of the service's permanent work
force.

At least federal employees enjoy civil service and
whistleblower protection intended to allow them to
operate professionally and independently. Private
contractors don't enjoy the same level of protection.
"You can shop for the right contractor to give you the
kind of result you want," says Frank Buono, a retired
Park Service veteran who now serves on the board of a
nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.

As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger

Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush
Administration's wishes, but a few have tried to stand
up for sound science. The results are predictable.
When a team of government biologists indicated that
the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the
Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the
Missouri River, the group was quickly replaced by an
industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected--and
fortunate--development, the new panel ultimately
declined to adopt the White House's pro-barge-industry
position and upheld the decision to manage the river
to protect imperiled species.) Similarly, last April
the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel that had
spent nearly twenty-one months developing rules for
stringent regulation of industrial emissions of
mercury [see Alterman and Green, page 14].

Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack
Spadaro, members of a team of federal geodesic
engineers selected to investigate the collapse of
barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky
containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining.
The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in
American history and, according to the EPA, the
greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of
the Eastern United States. Black lava-like toxic
sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and
sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and
poisoned the drinking water in seventeen communities.
Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one died, but
hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with
contaminated water.

The investigation had broad implications for the
viability of mountaintop mining, which involves
literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to
the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal
barons because it practically dispenses with the need
for human labor and thus increases industry profits.
Spadaro, the nation's leading expert on slurry spills,
recalls, "We were geotechnical engineers determined to
find the truth. We simply wanted to get to the heart
of the matter--find out what happened and why, and to
prevent it from happening again. But all that was
thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees
who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs."

The Bush Administration appointees all had coal
industry pedigrees. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (the
wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate's
biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave
Lauriski, a former executive with Energy West Mining,
as the new director of the Mine Safety and Health
Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His
deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax
Mining alumnus. His other deputy assistant, John
Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal.

Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on
the day Bush was inaugurated in 2001. All eight
members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a
whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the
others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In
April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed
a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor
Department. Last June 4 he was placed on
administrative leave--a prelude to getting fired.

Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of
"abusing his authority" for allowing a handicapped
instructor to have free room and board at a training
academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his
superiors. An internal report vindicated Spadaro's
criticisms of the investigation, but the
Administration is still going after his job. "I've
been regulating mining since 1966," Spadaro told me.
"This is the most lawless administration I've
encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners
or the people in mining communities. They are without
scruples."

Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths
about a changing world. At their best, scientists are
moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth.
Over the past two decades industry and conservative
think tanks have invested millions of dollars to
corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco,
pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and
global warming. In their attempt to undermine the
credible basis for public action (by positing that all
opinions are politically driven and therefore any one
is as true as any other), they also undermine belief
in the integrity of the scientific process.

Now Congress and this White House have used federal
power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the
Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets
and politicized science within the federal agencies.
The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward
moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the
trend toward scientific relativism. The very
ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now
institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning
culture of America's federal agencies.

The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted
the institutional culture of government agencies
charged with scientific research that it could take a
generation for them to recover their integrity even if
Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University
scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a
rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and
in a search for the truth, this White House is an
absolute disaster."

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widesprea

This struggle is the most important political,
economic and ENVIRONMENTAL struggle of our
lifetimes...

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in
a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars
and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and
obtained by The Observer, warns that major European
cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is
plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear
conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting
will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could
bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries
develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure
dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat
to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism,
say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of
life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again,
warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush
administration, which has repeatedly denied that
climate change even exists. Experts said that they
will also make unsettling reading for a President who
has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon
defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held
considerable sway on US military thinking over the
past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping
recent review aimed at transforming the American
military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific
debate to a US national security concern', say the
authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former
head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug
Randall of the California-based Global Business
Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is
'plausible and would challenge United States national
security in ways that should be considered
immediately', they conclude. As early as next year
widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will
create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy
fire from a large body of respected scientists who
claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its
policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not
like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that
suppression of the report for four months was a
further example of the White House trying to bury the
threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their
verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to
accept climate change as a real and happening
phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United
States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the
rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the
White House to voice their fears over global warming,
part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat
the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer
that American officials appeared extremely sensitive
about the issue when faced with complaints that
America's public stance appeared increasingly out of
touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to
complain about some of the comments attributed to
Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief
scientific adviser, after he branded the President's
position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House
talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief
environmental adviser to the German government and
head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists
at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He
said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove
the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept
climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the
Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to
liken the threat of climate change to that of
terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that
sort of message, then this is an important document
indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and
former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could
no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to
blow off this sort of document. Its hugely
embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest
priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no
wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is
conservative. If climate change is a threat to
national security and the economy, then he has to act.
There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to
listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added
Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a
hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a
Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary
when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this
issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet
is carrying a higher population than it can sustain.
By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy
supply will become increasingly harder to overcome,
plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200
years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop
failure, famine, disease and mass migration of
populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential
ramifications of rapid climate change would create
global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It
is a national security threat that is unique because
there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no
control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to
prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly
where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow
and we would not know for another five years,' he
said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate
change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting
the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said,
that they may prove vital in the US elections.
Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept
climate change as a real problem. Scientists
disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to
make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his
campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings
will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon
legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to
weighing risks to national security called the Office
of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders
who respect his vast experience, he is credited with
being behind the Department of Defence's push on
ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political
interference, said that the suppression of the report
was a further instance of the White House trying to
bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another
example of why this government should stop burying its
head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to
high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in
understanding why climate change was received
sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration
is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful
of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

9/11 Families’ Action Alert: Tell Congress to Extend 9/11 Commission’s Deadline

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=63&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

9/11 Families’ Action Alert: Tell Congress to Extend 9/11 Commission’s Deadline
Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 12:55 PM
Posted by: khence February 19, 2004

Two weeks ago, thanks to public pressure from 9/11
families, the White House reversed course and issued a
public statement agreeing to a two-month extension to
the 9/11 Commission’s deadline for issuing its final
report. Unfortunately, this statement appears to be a
publicity stunt, because in the past two weeks there
has been no evidence that the White House has done
anything to make this promise a reality. The White
House’s allies in Congress, including Speaker of the
House J. Dennis Hastert, continue to oppose any
extension. If an extension of at least two months
isn’t enacted by Congress, the Commission will not be
able to finish its work. The Commission will have to
cancel important hearings and interviews and will not
have time to analyze critical documents. The result
will be an incomplete report that is likely to leave
answerable questions unanswered and fail to provide a
full list of recommendations for preventing future
attacks.

We need your help to convince Congress to pass
legislation giving the Commission an extension.

You can do two things:

1) Send a fax to Scott Palmer, Rep. Hastert’s Chief of
Staff, at fax number 202-225-0697, and tell him you
want Rep. Hastert to support an extension of the
Commission’s deadline. If you don’t have access to a
fax machine, you can call Mr. Palmer at 202-225-0600
or
202-225-2976.

2) Contact your own representative and senators urging
them to support the bills that would grant the
Commission an extension: H.R. 3771 in the House and S.
2040 in the Senate. You can contact your
representative by going to the Web site
http://www.house.gov/writerep. You can e-mail your
senators by going to http://www.senate.gov, choosing
your state from the pull down menu, and clicking on
the Web forms of the two senators.

This matter requires urgent attention, because the
Commission must know soon whether it will receive an
extension if it is to plan effectively for its last
few months of work.
Please act now and distribute widely.

Kerry Sends Letter Challenging President to Debate on War

Yes, Dante had vision. In his Inferno, the lowest rung in the pit of Hell (a frozen lake at the core of Dis) was reserved for the greatest of the sinners -- the traitors...Well, now the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair has another Discontent beside him, the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader...SeeNotNews made the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader's announcement on NotBeSeen's Meat the Press its lead story this morning. Indeed, they served up his juiciest quotes, including: "The liberal Intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests." Of course, Tim Russert allowed the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader to utter this demagogic and deceitful statement without challenging it with the simple fact that belies it...If the Democratic Party were indeed a captive of corporate interests why are the campaigns of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) barely solvent while the _resident, who has the 500+ dead US soldiers and a $500+ billion budget deficit on his hands, has collected $150 billion so far for his own war chest? Oh, yes, and of course, the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader came on strongly in favor of "gay marriage," Rove's choice for the crown jewel issue of this presidential campaign...It is all too clear, painfully, pitifully clear...There is hope. Terry McCauliffe, DNC chairmain, was on SeeBS Fork The Nation, pressing the attack on the _resident's shameful record both in the White House AND in the Alabama National Guard...MEANWHILE, JFK has given us another powerful sign that he is not going blink or turn the other cheek...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0221d.html

John Kerry Addresses Bush/Cheney Campaign Attacks
Kerry Sends Letter Challenging President to Debate on War

February 21, 2004

For Immediate Release
Atlanta, GA –

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry gave the
following statement regarding President Bush’s attacks
on Kerry’s service to the country upon his arrival in
Atlanta, Georgia today. John Kerry also released a
letter challenging the President to a debate on the
Vietnam era and the impact of their experiences on
their approaches to presidential leadership. In the
letter, John Kerry says, “This is not a debate to be
distorted through your $100 million dollar campaign
fund. This is a debate that should be conducted face
to face.”

John Kerry said:
“As they did with John McCain in South Carolina in
2000 and as they did with Senator Max Cleland, they
have again questioned my commitment to the defense of
our country. I'm not going to stand by and let the
likes of Saxby Chambliss and the Republican Party
question my commitment to keeping our nation strong -
I've voted for some of the largest defense and
intelligence budgets in our history.

“I'd like to know what it is Republicans who didn't
serve in Vietnam have against those of us who did.
I'm tired of Republicans trying to divert attention
from the real issues -- here in Georgia you've lost
70.000 jobs, you've got 1.3 million Georgians without
health insurance -- and that's what this race should
be about. These are the real issues they should be
willing to talk about instead of engaging in the
politics of fear and questioning our commitment to
fighting for the country we fought for in uniform.

“One way or another we're going to have a debate about
the future not the past. We’re not going to let them
make this about a war 34 years ago, when we need to
talk about the war today.

“Republicans like to question the patriotism of
Democrats who question the direction of our nation.
They put Max Cleland in an ad with Osama bin Laden to
question his commitment to the defense of our country.
This President came to Georgia to campaign for Saxby
Chambliss and didn't say a word about it. Now his
surrogates are at it again. Well, I don't think that
politics of fear has any place in our country, and I'm
still waiting for the Republicans to tell me what more
Max Cleland has to leave on the battlefield of Vietnam
to prove his commitment to our country.”

Letter to President Bush:

February 21, 2004

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500

Dear President Bush,
Over the last week, you and your campaign have
initiated a widespread attack on my service in
Vietnam, my decision to speak out to end that war, and
my commitment to the defense of this nation. Just
today, Saxby Chambliss-- a man elected to the US
Senate on the back of one of the most despicable
campaigns ever conducted against Max Cleland, a true
American Hero-- was carrying this attack for you.

As you well know, Vietnam was a very difficult and
painful period in our nation's history, and the
struggle for our veterans continues. So, it has been
hard to believe that you would choose to re-open these
wounds for your personal political gain. But, that is
what you have chosen to do.

I am fighting to become the presidential nominee of
the Democratic Party. Even before Democrats make
their choice, you’ve launched a campaign of attacks
against me. I am determined to run a campaign on the
great challenges facing this country-- from creating
jobs, to solving our health care crisis to getting our
nation's ballooning deficit under control. But I will
not sit back and allow my patriotism to be challenged.

America deserves a better debate. If you want to
debate the Vietnam era, and the impact of our
experiences on our approaches to presidential
leadership, I am prepared to do so.

This is not a debate to be distorted through your $100
million dollar campaign fund. This is a debate that
should be conducted face to face.

Mr. President, I hope you will conduct a campaign
worthy of this nation’s future.

Sincerely,

John Kerry

That there was no NIE before that decision speaks volumes. Clearly, those around the president who were bent on war with Iraq did not want an honest assessment of the dubious "threat" it posed.

2+2=4

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9991

Case Closed

Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA,
is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership
School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of
Washington, DC.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice
to deceive. But when we’ve practiced for a while, we
markedly improve our style.

A time-honored aphorism. And the second-sentence
Karl-Rove-corollary has been applied with consummate
skill—until now. The web is unraveling.

Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay cut the main
strand last month, making it clear that the president
and his advisors were wrong to claim that war was
necessary to "disarm" Saddam Hussein of "weapons of
mass destruction." There were none.

Kay’s refreshing honesty threw a wrench in the works
of the White House PR machine, which remains in a
state of disrepair. The commission that President Bush
handpicked this month to investigate the performance
of his own administration and to report after the
November election was widely seen as disingenuous.

Perhaps the most telling sign of disarray in the White
House was the president’s decision, in effect, to do
it to himself. Against the better judgment of his
advisors, he insisted on submitting to an unscripted
interview Sunday on Meet The Press. His nervous,
defensive performance proved them right and hastened
the unraveling.

The most eerie coincidence was the decision to have
CIA Director George Tenet go to Georgetown University
on Feb. 5 to give an apologia-without-apology for the
intelligence underpinning for the war on Iraq. It was
the first anniversary of Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s masterful but—we now know—spurious U.N.
performance six weeks before the war. Tenet’s rhetoric
rivaled Powell’s in what Socrates called "making the
worse cause appear the better."

Like Vice President Dick Cheney last July, Tenet set
out to defend the indefensible—the National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that got it so wrong about
"weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. I remember
thinking last summer, Why would Cheney choose to cite
conclusions that had already been thrown into great
doubt? Listening to Tenet do the same thing six months
later—and after Kay’s findings—added to my puzzlement.

Their focus on last fall’s NIE, "Iraq’s Continuing
Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction" (the very
title got it wrong) seemed at first self-defeating.
Then I realized that this focus serves to obscure the
fact that the decision for war predated the estimate
by several months. That decision was made, at the
latest, by spring 2002.

That there was no NIE before that decision speaks
volumes. Clearly, those around the president who were
bent on war with Iraq did not want an honest
assessment of the dubious "threat" it posed. Indeed,
honest intelligence had already infected both Powell
and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the
point that they had declared publicly in 2001 that
Iraq had been contained and that it posed no threat to
its neighbors, much less to the United States.

Sadly, given the well-known proclivities of Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Tenet shied away
from serving up an estimate that conveyed how little
the intelligence community knew about any residual
threat from Iraq.

Tenet managed to keep his head down until September
2002, when the White House asked Congress to give its
blessing to war on Iraq. The Senate Intelligence
Committee woke up to the bizarre fact that no NIE had
been prepared and formally asked Tenet to produce one.

By then, however, Cheney, in a major speech on Aug.
26, had set the terms of reference. Clearly, Tenet was
instructed to provide an estimate with retroactive
support for Cheney’s alarming claims regarding Iraq’s
"weapons of mass destruction."

Tenet picked his most trusted—and malleable—aide,
Robert Walpole, to chair an NIE that left honest
intelligence analysts holding their noses. That NIE
became the centerpiece of an incredibly cynical
campaign playing on the trauma of 9/11 to deceive our
elected representatives into forfeiting to the
president their constitutional prerogative to declare
war.

One is left wondering: How did they think they could
get away with it?

The answer is embarrassingly simple. Don’t you
remember? It was to be a cakewalk. The vice president
and others assured us that U.S. troops would be
welcomed as liberators. They would be met with cut
flowers, not roadside bombs. The "evil dictator" would
be gone. And then who would care if it were eventually
discovered that the case for war was manufactured out
of whole cloth?

Yes, I think this is what they really believed. And
they were not about to listen to cautions that
undercut their "faith-based intelligence."

Now, bogged down in the sands of Iraq with over 500
troops already killed, the White House is without a
clue as to what to do next.

Perhaps worst of all, since the president has condoned
big-time politicization of the intelligence community,
he now has nowhere to turn for an objective assessment
of the challenges ahead.

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Published: Feb 19 2004

Ralph Nada has not lost his mind, he has lost his soul

Ralph Nada will announce his candidacy on NotBe Seen's Meat the Press with Tim Russert on Sunday morning. How poignant, how perfectly placed. Of course, it is only the first of many opportunities that he will be gifted by the "US mainstream news media." Look, it's simple, really -- Ralph Nada has not lost his mind, he has lost his soul. But that's a problem for his family and friends. Our problem is the damage that will be done by the "vast reich-wing conspiracy," using the shell of his life as a vessel, with the complicity of the "US mainstream news media." What will he say? Oh, he will attack Kerry on the war resolution, and although Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) was wrong, Nada will not be right and it does not matter now anyway, he will attack Kerry on "special interests," carrying forward the deceits already concocted by the RNC and, sadly, perpetated by Howard Dean. He will attempt to put a different spin on his statement that there was no difference between voting Bush and Gore. He will continue to deny his responsibility by saying Gore ran an inept campaign. None of it matters. Here is what matters...There is no justification whatsoever for what Nada is doing. There should be no mercy shown Nada, no respect, no quarter...Michael Moore and Al Franken need to shadow Nada and isolate him, trailing him through progressive venue in this country, BUT most importantly, the Al ("Truth shall rise again) Gore that arrived in Tennessee two weeks ago must take him on directly in Internet attack ads...And here is what Moore, Franken and Gore should say...A) Ralph Nada, who campaigned in Fraudida in the final days of the race, got 100,000 votes in that state. In the official count, which is erroneous, Gore "lost" by a few hundred votes. Indeed, despite the tens of thousands of votes that were "discarded" state-wide, with even only half of those who voted for Nada, Al Gore would have overcome the fix in Fraudida. Likewise, in New Hampshire, Nada's vote was significantly greater than Bush's margin of victory. If either state had gone the other way, Gore's ascendancy would not have been vulnerable to the post-election fiasco and the judicially engineered coup it led to. Not to mention the time and resources that Gore had to draw away from Tennessee, Missouri, etc. and dedicate to counteract Nada in states like Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon, which should have been solidly blue. B) Nada insisted, demagogicaly, that there was no difference between voting for Bush or voting for Gore. Well, all you have to do is search on "Nada" in the LNS database and you will find many painfully compelling reasons aggregated there, BUT here are the top nine: 1) We would not be in the Iraq quagmire with 500+ dead US soldiers today if Gore was President, 2) We would not have a $500+ billion federal budget deficit and a $7 trillion national debt today if Gore was President, 3)We would not have withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords and instead the US would be leading a world-wide effort to deal with the challenges of Global Warming, 4) Pickering and Pryor would not be powerful Federal judges, 5) the Environmental Protection Agency would not have been subverted to provide cover for corporate polluters if Al Gore was President, 6) our international relationships, along with our prestige and influence, particularly, within the Western Alliance, the G-8 and the UN Security Council would not have savaged if Al Gore was President, 7) the Israeli/Palestinian peace process would not have been utterly destroyed, 8) there would be millions of less jobless Americans, because we would have had an economic downturn NOT a recession (do not ignore, as the propapunditgandists do, the economic impact of the phoney "energy crisis" in California, perpetrated by Bush cabal cronies and permitted by Bush-controlled FERC) and 9) yes, my friends, 9/11 might not have happened...Tragically, of course, this list contains only some of the dread highlights of the indictment against Nada and anyone niave enough to fall for this ultimate dirty trick...

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

Bush Installs Judge, Bypassing Senate
Fri Feb 20, 6:29 PM ET Add Politics - AP to My Yahoo!

By JEFFREY MCMURRAY, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Bypassing angry Senate Democrats, President Bush (news - web sites) installed Alabama Attorney General William Pryor as a U.S. appeals court judge on Friday in his second "recess appointment" of a controversial nominee in five weeks. Pryor's federal appointment has been vigorously opposed by Democratic senators who have objected to his past comments and writings on abortion and homosexuality. Bush praised Pryor as a "leading American lawyer" and said he had been pushed past the Senate's normal confirmation process because of "unprecedented obstructionist tactics" against Pryor and five other nominees.

The president said of the Democratic blockers: "Their tactics are inconsistent with the Senate's constitutional responsibility and are hurting our judicial system."

Pryor was immediately sworn in in Alabama by another 11th Circuit judge.

The Constitution gives the president authority to install nominees in office when Congress is not in session. Both houses were out this week for the Presidents Day holiday. But the appointments are good only until the end of the next session of Congress, in this case the end of 2005.

Last month, Bush used a similar appointment to promote Mississippi federal judge Charles Pickering to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites).

Bush said Pryor's "impressive record demonstrates his devotion to the rule of law and to treating all people equally under the law."

However, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee (news - web sites), said none of Bush's nominees is more controversial than Pryor.

"Actions like this show the American people that this White House will stop at nothing to try to turn the independent federal judiciary into an arm of the Republican Party," Leahy said.

Democratic presidential contender John Edwards (news - web sites) said Pryor "has a long record of vigorous efforts to deny Americans' basic rights under our laws."

"This is one more example of why we need a new president," said Edwards, D-N.C., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the appointment was "a constitutional response to an unconstitutional filibuster."

"I've always heard that when you have nothing else to say, you call people names," Cornyn said. "That's apparently what Democrats are now resorting to, just name calling. Bill Pryor is a very qualified, highly professional nominee who has a proven track record of enforcing the law, rather than his own personal agenda."

Bush picked Pryor last April for a seat on the 11th Circuit that covers Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Abortion rights advocates immediately mounted a campaign against the nominee, citing his criticism of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade (news - web sites) decision that said women had a constitutional right to terminate pregnancy.

Pryor also came under fire for filing a Supreme Court brief in a Texas sodomy case comparing homosexual acts to "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia."

Republicans have been unsuccessful in five attempts, the last one in November, at breaking through the parliamentary blockade that Democrats erected against Pryor's nomination.

Pryor, 41, is a founder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which raises money for GOP attorneys general.

Besides Pickering and Pryor, Democrats also have used filibusters to block Bush's appeals court nominations of Judge Priscilla Owen, Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada and judges Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown. Estrada withdrew his nomination in September.

While Pryor didn't speak to reporters Friday, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a close friend and Pryor's predecessor as Alabama's attorney general, said he had talked to him on the phone and found him to be "very comfortable with the situation."

Many Alabama Republicans remain angry at Pryor for leading the charge to oust the state's chief justice, Roy Moore, for refusing to abide by federal court orders requiring him to move a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse.

Supporters hope almost two years on the federal appeals court will prove to Democrats that Pryor, as they say he showed in the Ten Commandments case, is willing to look at more than one side of an issue.

___

Associated Press reporter Phillip Rawls in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this story.

Matt Drudge loses advertiser in wake of Kerry blunder!

The capitulation, complicity and cowardice of the "US
mainstream news media" during the rise of the "vast
reich-wing conspiracy" is easily understood. The goal
of corporate media monopolies is to make money -- not
to pursue excellence in the profession of journalism, or
keep "freedom of the press" alive for the health of
our republic -- the sponsors (who pay freight on the
air waves) don't want any trouble...Ah, but those
sponsors can be pressured too...Here is a weapon that must be weilded...especially in this struggle for the
Presidency in 2004...(P.S. If you want to know more
about Dredge then wants you to know, read David
Brock's brave, explosive Blinded By The Right.)

Break the Bush Cabal Stanglehold on the "US News
Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.drudge.com/2004/20040219.htm

XXXX DRUDGE RETORT XXXX 14:26:29 EST FEB 19 2004
XXXX

Matt Drudge loses advertiser in wake of Kerry blunder!

**DRUDGE RETORT EXCLUSIVE**

Sound the siren: Matt Drudge has lost a long-time
advertiser in the wake of last week's groundless
report alleging that Sen. John Kerry had an
extramarital affair with a 27-year-old woman.

AT&T Wireless has pulled all advertising from the
Drudge Report in response to a complaint about its
sponsorship of the site.

"We care about the places our on-line ads appear, and
that site doesn't reflect the values of AT&T
Wireless," e-mailed Jeremy Pemble, the company's vice
president of public relations.

Matt Drudge earns $1.2 million a year from advertising
and his weekly radio show, selling a single banner ad
for $4,400 a day, according to a September 2003 story
in the Miami Herald.

The loss of an advertiser comes during a week in which
Drudge has taken numerous hits for spreading the Kerry
rumor while making no claim it was true -- passing it
along simply because news organizations were
supposedly looking into it.

As Drudge wrote: "Intrigue surrounds a woman who
recently fled the country, reportedly at the prodding
of Kerry, the Drudge Report has learned."

In spite of the lack of a single on-the-record source
willing to back up the claim, the story spread within
hours from Drudge to conservative talk radio shows and
the British tabloid press. As it began appearing in
the mainstream U.S. media, Kerry and the woman, former
AP reporter Alexandra Polier, both denied the
allegation.

Polier's full statement to the press: "For the last
several days I have seen Internet and tabloid rumors
relating to me and Senator John Kerry. Because these
stories were false, I assumed the media would ignore
them. It seems that efforts to peddle these lies
continue, so I feel compelled to address them. I have
never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the
rumors in the press are completely false. Whoever is
spreading these rumors and allegations does not know
me, but should know the pain they have caused me and
my family. I am in Kenya with my fiance visiting his
family, and we ask that the press respect our privacy
and leave all of us alone."

Kathleen Parker, Dan Kennedy, and other professional
journalists blasted Drudge for spreading the story.
"Drudge is even more unreliable and wrong than he used
to be (and he was pretty bad to begin with),"
Michelangelo Signorile wrote in the New York Press.

AT&T Wireless cancelled its Drudge Report ads after
receiving a complaint Monday by Robert Caraway, who
described himself as a Kerry supporter.

"I find your support of Matt Drudge both distasteful
and alienating," e-mailed Caraway. "By advertising on
his site, you are condoning his current smear campaign
against a very popular presidential hopeful."

Though Matt Drudge is widely credited with being right
on Newsweek's Monica Lewinsky story, the self-styled
Walter Winchell has made several infamous blunders
over the years:

Reporting in January 1999 that a 13-year-old boy who
"looks exactly like the President" was the secret love
child of Bill Clinton and a prostitute. DNA tests
proved it was a hoax.
Reporting in August 1997 that Sidney Blumenthal had
been in court on charges of domestic violence. He
retracted the story a day later.
Making up a source in a May 2001 story, claiming that
Drudge Report webmaster Andrew Breitbart was a
professor with the Cashmere Institute of Media
Studies, a fictitious organization.
Note: This story has been edited to reflect a comment
e-mailed to the Drudge Retort by Jeremy Pemble after
its original publication: "We did pull advertising
from this site -- because it should not have been
placed on the site in the first place ... independent
of any recent articles that may have appeared on that
site."

© DRUDGE RETORT 2004

one Republican gadfly noted that they defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale in that race, adding: "We had to kill off Wellstone to get it." He was referring to the death in a plane crash of Sen. Paul Wellstone and his family before the election...

A very important piece from the Salt Lake City Tribune, especially on the day that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) had to request US Secret Service protection...This story is a painful reminder of the ugliness and the ignorance that we will confront in the coming battle...Yes, the "vast reich-wing conspiracy" is real and dangerous (for the corroborative evidence just get a hold of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Lyons/Conason's Hunting of The President and David Brock's insider eyewitness testimony in Blinded By The Right)

Confront the "Vast Reich-Wing Conspiracy," Show Up for
Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/feb/02202004/utah/140572.asp
Rolly and Wells: Rally has odd sense of humor

Rolly & Wells
Tribune Columnists

Paul Rolly and JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells
Salt Lake Tribune Columnists

During a Feb. 5 meet-the-candidate night for the
newly formed College Republicans U. chapter -- not to
be confused with the older and more established
College Republicans -- representatives for several
candidates revved up the jovial crowd with such
statements as "We need to put an end to the liberal
Matheson era" and support "the Democrat killers."
As the audience giggled off and on, Mike Clement,
representing congressional candidate Tim Bridgewater,
spoke excitedly about Republican successes when
College Republicans work hard, citing the victory of
Norm Coleman in the 2002 U.S. Senate race in
Minnesota.
As Clement bantered with the audience, one
Republican gadfly noted that they defeated former Vice
President Walter Mondale in that race, adding: "We had
to kill off Wellstone to get it." He was referring to
the death in a plane crash of Sen. Paul Wellstone and
his family before the election.
An audio tape captures laughter. But both Clement
and Danielle Fowles, acting chairwoman of the club,
said they did not hear that comment and believe the
laughter was just a continuation of the ongoing
banter.

Me, Me, Me, Me: Salt Lake County has produced 750
pamphlets at a taxpayer cost of $1,650, each
containing 12 loose bookmark-size pages with
information about all the good things the county is
doing for you.
Not only is Mayor Nancy Workman's likeness smiling
glowingly from the pamphlets' front page, but her name
is mentioned no less than 18 times.
Must be an election year.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertisement

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

Speak no evil: Fliers placed on cars parked around
the Capitol on Monday urged the defeat of Senate Bill
175, which would overhaul an initiative passed in 2000
and once again allow police agencies to benefit from
property seized in drug cases.
As soon as they were placed on the cars, a man
walked along the street taking them off. When
confronted by a free-speech advocate jogging by, the
man noted that placing fliers on cars is a violation
of a Salt Lake City ordinance -- although the City
Attorney's Office says that might be repealed on First
Amendment grounds.

It's all relative: When the Capitol was evacuated
after a bomb threat Wednesday, Senate President Al
Mansell complained during a radio interview that it
caused legislators to waste valuable time.
Would that compare to the first five weeks of the
session, dominated by debate about getting out of the
United Nations, the varying degrees of rape and a
special Utah definition of marriage?
-----
Paul Rolly and JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells welcome e-mail
at rolly_wells@sltrib.com.

as attachmentinline text

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

You have not heard Karen Kwiatowski's name much on AnythingButSee, SeeBS, NotBeSeen, SeeNotNews or Faux News -- although she should be a household name by now...And why not? Because she is one of the most beautifully dangerous people in America. She is a patriot, and a warrior, a woman of principle, and yes, a true conservative. She has told the truth about the frabrication and distortion that Bush cabal ordered up to justify (howeverr flimsily) its foolish military adventure in Iraq...Her name, of course, is on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...She has been interviewed DemocracyNow! and written her story for the American Conservative. BUT if there were a truly free
press in America (i.e. free of corporatist influenc), her face would be on the cover of TIME, her story would be on the NYTwits front page AND she would be a guest on Larry King Lying...Share herstory with others...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php

Soldier for the Truth
Exposing Bush’s talking-points war
by Marc Cooper

Busting the liars:
Karen Kwiatkowski
(Photo by Jack Gould)

After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as
a regional analyst was coming to an end when — in the
months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she
was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.

With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and
zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit,
she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to
a post as a political/military desk officer at the
Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia
(NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading,
or being spread as she would later argue, through the
halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her
arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and
re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of
Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help
the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project
of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary
Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for
what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a
hijacking of the Pentagon.”

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found
herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush
administration, including her superiors in the
Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal
dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and
relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on
active duty, took the unusual step of penning an
anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was
posted on the Internet by former Colonel David
Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her
20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded
the only way she could viably resist what she now
terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the
neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by
retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

She left the military last March, the same week that
troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her
real name on her Web reports and began accepting
speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the
truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly
Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA
and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the
group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice
President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an
intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq
desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region.
It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill
Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk
was there. We shared the same space, and we were all
part of the same general group. At that time it was
expanding. Contractors and employees were coming
though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.

In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new
spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that
this was now to be known as the Office of Special
Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue
with those who say they were doing intelligence. They
would say they were developing policy for the Office
of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

But developing policy is not the same as developing
propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And
actually, that’s more what they really did. They
pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty
sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed
throughout government, to the Congress, and even
internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case
of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United
States.

You retired when the war broke out and have been
speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing
critical reports anonymously while still in uniform
and while still on active service. Why did you take
that rather unusual step?

Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me
as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I
was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the
way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign
policy and a military policy — an invasion of a
sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned
occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in
opposition to that, and I was not alone.

So I started writing what I considered to be funny,
short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed
them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the
Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them
under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I
wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I
retired.

There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon
analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to
this work. What provoked you to become first a covert
and later a public dissident?

Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be
honesty in government. Working 20 years in the
military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less
than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree
that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

This was creatively produced propaganda spread not
only through the Pentagon, but across a network of
policymakers — the State Department, with John Bolton;
the Vice President’s Office, the very close
relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not
normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then
there was the National Security Council, with certain
people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby,
the vice president’s chief of staff; a network of
think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the
American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security
Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles
Krauthammer — was very reliable. So there was just not
a process inside the Pentagon that should have
developed good honest policy, but it was instead
pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a
coordinated manner, across media and parts of the
government, with their neoconservative compadres.

How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline:
We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to
eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have
bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I
joined them, in May of 2002.

You heard this in staff meetings?

The discussions were ones of this sort of
inevitability. The concerns were only that some
policymakers still had to get onboard with this
agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong — but
that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers.
Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of
frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things
about him in the office. They got very angry with him
when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and
forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the
combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks’
predecessor — a very well-qualified guy who knows the
Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out,
a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as
President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the
things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard
Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were
very anti-anybody who might provide information that
affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.

How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be
direct, were you told by your superiors what you could
say and not say? What could and could not be
discussed? Or were opinions they didn’t like just
ignored?

I can give you one clear example where we were told to
follow the party line, where I was told directly. I
worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember
in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of
times before it went through. It was a background
paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years
to try and regain the respect of the international
community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I
quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back
and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the
quotes from intelligence so they could present their
case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat
to its neighbors and that Libya was still a
belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my
reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made,
they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know
what the report ended up looking like, because I
imagine more changes were made.

On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit
their paradigm that we have all these enemies.

One person you’ve written about is Abe Shulsky. You
describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one
who played a key role in the official spin that led to
war.

Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans.
He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May
2002. He comes from an academic background; he’s
definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo
Strauss from the University of Chicago — so he has
that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final
proving authority on all the talking points that were
generated from the Office of Special Plans and that
were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to
staff officers. And it appears to me they were also
distributed to the Vice President’s Office and to the
presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology
that was in our talking points consists of the same
things I heard the president say.

So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the
disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the
propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him
manipulate the information?

We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was
the approving authority. I can give you one example of
how the talking points were altered. We were
instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of
Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would
not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any
papers that we prepared for our superiors except as
instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it
would provide to us an electronic document of talking
points on these issues. So I got to see how they
evolved.

It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a
result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence,
or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they
evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or
altered based on what was being reported on the front
pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

Can you be specific?

One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It
was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11
between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s
intelligence force. We had had this in our talking
points from September through mid-November. And then
it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone.
That was because the media reported that the FBI had
stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t
happen.

Let’s clarify this. Talking points are generally used
to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a
politician who had to go and deal with the press. So
are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided
you a schematic, an outline of the way major points
should be addressed in any report or analysis that you
developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?

That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the
content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .

They were political . . .

They were political, politically manipulated. They did
have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they
were created to propagandize. So we inside the
Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration
officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being
propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.

In the 10 months you worked in that office in the
run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The
public, at least, was being told at the time that
there was a serious assessment going on regarding the
level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of
WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at
the Pentagon?

No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam
Hussein needed to go.

You believe that decision was made by the time you got
there, almost a year before the war?

That decision was made by the time I got there. So
there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations
Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and
so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of
information and creating a propaganda storyline, which
is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice
President Cheney tell the American people in the fall
of 2002.

The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt
them because they are blatantly false and not based on
any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s
Office were critical in this propaganda effort — to
convince Americans that there was some just
requirement for pre-emptive war.

What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?

The neoconservatives needed to do more than just
topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a
government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted
permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons
why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of
course, were presented to the American people or to
Congress.

So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to
whether or not there really were weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq?

It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many
years of both high-level surveillance and other types
of shared intelligence, not to mention the information
from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from
the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush
said he didn’t know.

The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these
things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a
billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for
these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find
anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.

So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of
these WMD, then what exactly drove the
neoconservatives to war?

The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a
global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And
there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed
to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and
occupy Iraq.

One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment
were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many
companies around the world were preparing to do
business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of
sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing
northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very
unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to
gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq.
And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon,
Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no
financial benefit.

The second reason has to do with our military-basing
posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied
with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the
restrictions on our basing. And also there was
dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we
were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond
Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been
searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the
energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in
Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold
that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein
was not about to invite us in.

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam
Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the
dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long
before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for
euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t
very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the
sales from the country with the second largest oil
reserves on the planet would have been moving to the
euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we
are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still
popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If
oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro,
that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in
confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the
first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003]
switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

At the time you left the military, a year ago, just
how great was the influence of this neoconservative
faction on Pentagon policy?

When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in
complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was
some debate at the State Department.

Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a
Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter
disappointment when Secretary of State Powell — in
your words — eventually “capitulated.”

He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide
presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It
meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it
or not.

You gave your life to the military, you voted
Republican for many years, you say you served in the
Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it
feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old
bosses?

Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s
what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times.
You know, I spent 20 years working for something that
— at least under this administration — turned out to
be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these
people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We
swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear
an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have
no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was
misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a
subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war
based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not
what this country stands for.

What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have
a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and
correct the problem.

Maimed in Iraq, then mistreated, neglected, and hidden in America.

You have not see this story, or these facts, about the
US soldiers wounded and maimed for life, lead the news on
AnythingButSee, SeeBS, NotBeSeen, SeeNotNews or Faux
News...which is a shame and a disgrace perhaps even
greater than what has befallen these soldiers and
why...because without a "US mainstream news media"
willing to speak truth to power, i.e. provide the
electorate with the information it needs to choose its
leaders, there is no real freedom here to protect...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=654

Maimed in Iraq, then mistreated, neglected, and hidden in America.
By Frederick Sweet

Combat veterans wounded in Iraq were left waiting
weeks and even months for proper medical attention at
military bases. According to an officer, their living
conditions were so unacceptable for injured soldiers
he said they "were being treated like dogs." Then the
Pentagon underreported the number wounded.

The Bush administration, referring to veterans of the
war in Iraq, told a House panel that they would avoid
last year's "mistakes" of leaving sick and injured
troops at U.S. bases to wait for months to be properly
treated by doctors. Adding insult to injury, Army
Surgeon General Lt. Gen. James B. Peake told the House
panel that he "was not aware" that last fall soldiers
were waiting for medical care at U.S. bases and under
substandard living conditions.

Wounded "treated like dogs"

Mark Benjamin’s investigative report on Oct. 20, 2003
for UPI, revealed that many wounded veterans from Iraq
had to wait "weeks and months at places such as the
Fort Stewart military base in Georgia, for proper
medical help." They had been kept in living conditions
that are "unacceptable for sick and injured soldiers."
One officer characterized conditions for the wounded
by saying, "They're being treated like dogs."

In January, 2004 Benjamin reported that the largest
American troop rotation is now underway. Daniel
Denning, assistant secretary of the Army, testified to
the House Total Force Subcommittee, "We recognize that
last fall, we temporarily lost sight of the situation.
It is likely that during this period of force
rotations, patient loads at some installations may
exceed local capacity. The Army has developed a series
of options to handle this surge."

Subcommittee chairman John McHugh, R-N.Y. said, "In
October of last year a series of articles revealed
that many mobilized Reserve and National Guard
soldiers in a medical holdover status felt the Army
was not treating them as equals to their active
component counterparts. The articles described
substandard living conditions at two Army posts in
particular -- Fort Stewart, Ga., and Fort Knox, Ky.
Many of the ill and injured soldiers interviewed at
these posts reported having to wait for long periods
of time -- sometimes weeks or months -- before
receiving the medical care they needed."

More than 1,000 National Guard and Army Reserve
soldiers at Fort Stewart and Fort Knox, including
hundreds who had served in Iraq, had waited weeks or
months in "medical hold" to be seen by doctors. At
Fort Stewart in Georgia, they waited in hot concrete
barracks with no air-conditioning or running water.

Sgt. Craig Allen LaChance, a soldier who was on
medical hold at Fort Stewart, told the panel that it
"took months to get appointments" with specialists
while sick and injured soldiers waited in what he said
were substandard barracks. "We lived in deplorable
conditions," LaChance said. "We were made to feel like
we had failed the Army."

Col. Keith Armstrong, garrison commander at Fort Knox,
told the congressional committee "we were stretched
pretty thin" last fall. Fort Stewart Garrison
Commander Col. John M. Kidd said, "We recognized that
we had some difficulty here. We recognized that we had
a problem with medical hold." Both commanders said
they had asked for help from the Army and both
described it as slow in coming.

How many wounded?

Combat deaths were accurately reported, but according
to an article in July, 2003 by Editor & Publisher
Online and later in October by National Public Radio,
the numbers of wounded, in and out of battle, were
being underreported. The news media had accepted that
the military high command kept the number of wounded
from the American public. "There could be some
inattention to [the number of injured troops],"
answered Philip Bennett, assistant managing editor of
the foreign desk at the Washington Post when
questioned by E & P Online.

As American casualties increased during the summer of
2003, US military officials suppressed discussion of
the total number wounded. Only by July 10, 2003,
nearly four months after the invasion of Iraq had been
launched, did CNN report that for "the first time
since the start of the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials
have released the number of US troops wounded from the
beginning of the war through Wednesday [July 9,
2003]."

However, Seth Porges wrote in Editor & Publisher
(10/23/03) that coverage of injured and wounded U.S.
soldiers gets very little media attention. "For
months, the press has barely mentioned non-fatal
casualties or the severity of their wounds," writes
Porges. "Few newspapers routinely report injuries in
Iraq, beyond references to specific incidents. Since
the war began in March, 1,927 soldiers have been
wounded in Iraq, many quite severely."

But newspapers neglected to report or keep a tally on
the wounded, as an informal survey of some top papers
has shown. This comes on the heels of reports that
attacks on American troops in Iraq had increased in
recent weeks from an average of 15 to 20 attacks per
day to about 20 to 25 attacks a day, with a peak at
about 35 attacks in one day, according to the
commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez.

Julian Borger, writing in the British Guardian last
August, cited the comments of Lieut. Col. Allen
DeLane, in charge of airlifting injured GIs into
Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.
According to Bolger, DeLane, who had already seen
thousands of wounded flown in, told National Public
Radio, in regard to the sharp increase in the number
of US wounded last autumn, "the official number of
combat wounded alone averaged nearly 100 a week
between mid-September and mid-November
(lunaville.org)." This made the resistance of the
military to giving out accurate figures increasingly
suspicious.

As the US media began to request injury figures, the
Pentagon put up as much resistance as it could. In
September, 2003, the Washington Post noted, "Although
Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded,
it releases the number only when asked" making the
combat injuries of US troops in Iraq one of the untold
stories in the war.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the ranking Democrat on
the Senate Intelligence Committee, had complained in
September 2003 that he was unable to find out how many
US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq because the
administration refused to release this information.

Higher Survival Rates

Because of the higher survival rate of injured
soldiers compared with previous wars, information
about the seriously wounded is essential to any
accurate assessment of the success of the war in Iraq.

But Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote in the October 13 New
Republic: "Pentagon officials have rebuked public
affairs officers who release casualty figures, and,
until recently, US Central Command did not regularly
publicize the injured total either."

Kaplan’s report cited the condition of many injured
soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, pointing
out that modern medicine and rapid response techniques
allow many wounded soldiers to survive injuries that
would otherwise have killed them in previous wars.
Kevlar body armor also reduced deaths. Still, many of
these wounded soldiers are left with debilitating
injury or loss of limbs.

Kaplan wrote: "The near-invisibility of the wounded
has several sources. The media has always treated
combat deaths as the most reliable measure of
battlefield progress, while for its part the
administration has been reluctant to divulge the full
number of wounded."

Last December, Congressman Gene Taylor
(Dem.-Mississippi) complained that the Pentagon
deliberately undercounted combat casualties. He cited
the case of five members in the Mississippi National
Guard who had been wounded in a booby-trap bomb
explosion. Incredibly, their injuries were listed by
the military as "non combat." The truth emerged only
because Taylor spoke face to face with the most
seriously injured of the five at Walter Reed Army
Medical Center in Washington DC. Taylor sent a memo to
the other members of Congress to "ask if anyone has
had a similar incident."

On October 3rd UPI reported that 4,000 soldiers had
been medically evacuated from Iraq for non-combat
reasons. As for the tally of total deaths in Iraq,
most of the media continue to cite only those killed
in hostile action. The administration’s numbers game
of "combat" and "non combat" injuries, however, is far
from the whole story. That still leaves out the
thousands who have become physically or mentally ill
in Iraq not resulting from bombs and bullets.
Estimates of the real number of US servicemen and
women evacuated for medical reasons from Iraq by the
end of 2003 vary widely.

Last January 7, National Public Radio’s Daniel
Zwerdling reported on the difficulties in finding out
the truth about US casualties in Iraq. He said few
Americans are aware of the surprisingly large number
of US wounded in Iraq. Questioning several dozen
people on the street about the total number of
American soldiers who had died in Iraq, he had found
that most could answer correctly. But when the NPR
reporter asked about the number of US military
personnel that had been wounded, no one came close to
the actual figure. The answers ranged from a few
hundred to a thousand.

The actual estimates are between 11,000 and 22,000 for
the number of US soldiers, sailors and Marines
medically evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003
because of battlefield wounds, illness or other
battlefield reasons.

Trying to get more accurate casualty figures,
Zwerdling said he contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel
(Rep.-Nebraska), a Vietnam veteran and former deputy
administrator of the Veterans Administration. Hagel
had tried to obtain the "total number of American
battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq" from
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The senator had
also tried to find out: "What is the official Pentagon
definition of wounded in action? What is the procedure
for releasing this information in a timely way to the
public and the criteria for awarding a Purple Heart
[awarded to those wounded in combat or posthumously to
the next of kin of those killed or those who die of
wounds received in action]?"

Hagel had been seeking an accurate, updated count on
the number of Purple Hearts and the dates they were
awarded to US military personnel in Iraq. That number
is significant because it is an official record of the
total number of battlefield casualties. After six
weeks, the reply Hagel received was, "the Department
of Defense does not have the requested information."

Stars and Stripes (November 5, 2003 European edition)
noted that the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany
had "treated more than 7,000 injured and ill service
members from Iraq." But at the same time, the military
had recorded some 2,000 combat casualties. This
discrepancy is 3.5-times (350%) between the number of
wounded in combat listed by the military and the
number of service personnel medically evacuated from
Iraq for treatment in Germany!

The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge US air
base at Ramstein Germany, reported on January 23, 2004
that the total US medical evacuations from Iraq to
Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of
hostile and "non-hostile" wounded listed by the Army
at that point was approximately 2,750. The under
reporting of wounded continues.

Figures don’t lie, but . . .

Clearly, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld don’t really care
about the US servicemen and women casualties from
their war on Iraq. They rarely acknowledge it
publicly.

But why did the Bush administration knock itself out
to conceal the number of combat veterans injured in
Iraq? Answer: To avoid the appearance of a Vietnam
quagmire. The seemingly low, "acceptable" number for
American loss of life in Iraq looks much better than
Vietnam, but the injury figures are much worse. That’s
why.

The Bush administration claims an overwhelmingly
popular support for its war on Iraq. But the political
and media establishment can see that the public’s
opposition to the war is constantly growing. Like the
sensation caused by recent revelations of Bush being
AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972-73
during the Vietnam war, the tide of public opinion
would further turn if the true picture entered the
public mind of the war’s real effects on American
troops. But how can the "success" of Bush's war be
measured?

Comparing the war in Iraq with that in Vietnam, the
total number of combat troops in Vietnam was 550,000.
As many as 155,000 of them were wounded while 10.7%
were killed during 10 years. In Iraq, so far, the
total number of combat troops total 150,000 and
between 11,000 and 22,000 of them have been wounded
during nine months. Thus 28.2% of combat troops were
wounded in Vietnam while in Iraq "only" 0.3% died in
combat, so far, and as many as 14.7% had been wounded
in combat.

At first glance, Bush's war in Iraq seems to be much
more "successful" than the war in Vietnam --
especially when the number of wounded are eliminated
from the equation. The proportion of combat troops
killed in Vietnam appears to be 35-times more than in
Iraq. By contrast, the proportion of Vietnam wounded
is only two-times that sustained in Iraq. That's
getting pretty close.

A fairer comparison of casualties in the Vietnam war,
lasting ten long years, and Iraq, now less than one
year old, should include how long each of the two wars
has lasted. While the war in Vietnam has been over for
more than three decades, American soldiers in Iraq are
still being killed and wounded on a daily basis. The
casualty figures in Iraq are still rising -- and
there's no end in sight.

Clearly, if Bush's war continues for another two to
five years, according to most estimates, the casualty
figures from the Vietnam debacle could make it look
even more "successful" than Bush's war!

With the specter of the Vietnam quagmire hanging over
them, Bush and Rumsfeld can only talk about a
"successful" war by emphasizing the relatively low
number of Americans killed in Iraq, and hiding the
extraordinarily high number of wounded. But for those
who had sacrificed their lives and limbs to
preemptively protect the U.S. against Saddam Hussein’s
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Bush’s war
has been a complete failure.

(Wednesday, February 18, 2004)

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology
in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your
comments to Fred@interventionmag.com

A Tale of Two Interviews...

Is the Bush cabal's fix on the "US mainstream news
media" is slipping? Is the vise which holds it in lock
step cracking? Perhaps. Consider this Tale of Two
Interviews...Last night, on SeeNotNews (CNN) InSnide
Politics, Judy Wouldn't interviewed Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Mekong Delta) and Gwen Ifill of Pretty Bland Stuff Noose Hour also did an interview with JFK. SeeNotNews' Wouldn't attempted a typical hatchet job, similar to the one used successfully to distort and demean Al Gore in 2000. It is not working on JFK. Wouldn't asked a dozen or so questions. None of them concerned Iraq, the Economy, the Environment, 9/11 or the _resident's CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY or COMPETENCY. All of them were framed to distort and demean JFK's motivation and personal agenda. Her sole sources were
the RNC, Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), the LA Times and the Washington Post. (In one remarkable and pathetic moment, she actually said,"Why do you think thoughtful news organizations like The Washington Post are taking up this much space..." She even challenged JFK on his Senate testimony during the Vietnam war, asking him whether or not he was accusing US troops of war crimes? Ugly. (Of course, she did not ask his opinion of the _resident's recently released "service records" or any of the DISTURBING questions that his file, incredibly, does not answer.) BUT, BUT, BUT more importantly, JFK responded with direct, blunt, POWERful answers. Indeed, he interrupted her several times. No, we do not need a pretty boy who cannot deliver his own state in November. JFK is ready for combat. And, no, JFK does not need a pretty boy who cannot deliver his own state to run with him in November. Ideally, JFK needs someone who can underscore the Myth and help with the Math. As noted before, the LNS proposes Kerry-Clark. In previous LNS, we have posted our "seven damn good reasons." But the short-hand version is Wesley Clark (D-NATO) is a distinguished military man too, i.e. he underscores the living, inspiring Myth, and Clark can probably also deliver his home state of Arkansas, a red state in 2000, as well as perhaps help put some Western and Southwestern states in play, i.e. help with the Electoral College Math. The other names on the LNS short list are...1) Sen. Mary Landreiux (D-LA). She is our *dark horse* choice. Think about it. She wouldn't help with the Myth, BUT the ticket could use some cajun spice. She could deliver her red state in November, and she could perhaps put one or two or even three other Southeastern states in play. And, of course, she would CERTAINLY bring women and even more Catholics to the voting booth. 2) former Sen. Carol Mosely Braun (D-IL) just because a) JFK and Moseley Braun actually enjoy each other's company, and b) too many addicts of so-called "conventional wisdom" do not understand the depth and the breadth of the outrage about what happened in Fraudida. It may be time for an African American woman. It would require courage, but that courage would be rewarded in unexpected ways. 3) Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) because a) there is real need for a National Unity ticket for this national state of emergeny, 2) the LNS still believes, despite some inexplicable pandering in recent months, that McCain is really a patriot and really a man of principles, 3) we know he really is a friend of John Kerry's, and 4) no one could want to end the _resident's political career more than McCain. Of course, there also may be a Democratic governor somewhere in the Expanded Confederacy that could wage economic battle, deliver his own state and put some other red states in play...But Edwards? Well, the comfort-zone that the "US mainstream news media" feels with Edwards makes us very uncomfortable. Does Rove really fear him? We wonder. Is Edwards really resonating with Republicans and Independents? We wonder. Our guess is that some of the "support" may be soft or even chimerical. Wisconsin may be (and often has been) an anomaly. We'll learn more over the next two weeks. We'll know on Super Tuesday. Maybe Edwards will prove himself to be more that he appears from here. But it ain't going to be the trade issue (which isn't really his) or the fact that he's a coal miner's son (as John Kerry observed, what does that say about FDR or John F. Kennedy?) that make Edwards the nominee or the Vice-Presidential candidate. You gotta show us something more...For now, Kerry is, as his campaign ads promise, the Real Deal...Do not be conditioned by the propapunditgandists, game it out. As Dunston Woods, LNS foreign correspondent syas, "He who lives by the media, dies by the media." As Dunston Woods also says, "the media giveth, and the media taketh away." Stay focused. It is you who will make the difference in November. The Democratic nominee has to be a the forefront of a national electoral Uprising. It is coming. It must be given a voice, it must be given voices...Those voices have to understood blood and toil from inside out...But I digress, I promised you A Tale of Two Interviews...
Here is the Gwen Ifill interview in full. Who best served the interest of the US electorate and contributed to the qaulity of the public debate on the issues in this presidential campaign? Which one acted like a hack? Which one fulfilled her role as a broadcast journalist? Judy Wouldn't or Gwen Ifill? Decide for yourself.

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june04/kerry_2-19.html
GWEN IFILL: Senator Kerry, welcome.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Glad to be with you. Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: How does an endorsement like today's help
you?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, you have to build momentum. You
have to build energy in a campaign. You have to
translate any endorsement into grassroots support and
votes. I've never taken endorsements as a
free-standing means to election. I take it as a
building block to the grassroots effort. And when I've
had endorsements, I translate them into grassroots.
When I haven't had them, I go around it and do the
grassroots anyway.

The influence of endorsements
GWEN IFILL: You know, early in this campaign, Howard
Dean was the one who got all of the union
endorsements, and it didn't seem to help him. How
would it make a difference?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, he had a couple of them. He
didn't have all of them at all. Dick Gephardt had most
of them, actually, and there are a lot of workers. But
look, I've never relied exclusively on endorsements,
and that's what I... you know, when I ran for the
United States Senate in 1984, I don't think I was
endorsed by anybody, which is why I've always known
the lesson, and that is to go out and talk to real
people and to fight for every single vote.

But a campaign is a process of building support, and I
am building that support around the real choices
Americans face about their lives. Health care needs
are driving people crazy. I mean, people can't afford
it; employers can't afford it. Businesses are feeling
the pressure.I think we can do a better job of
reducing the burden of health care costs in America.
That's what I'm building this campaign on.

Schools...kids are being left behind every single day.
Teachers are paying out of their own pocket to put
materials in front of children in America's schools,
while Washington is busy giving tax cuts to the
wealthiest people in our country. It doesn't make
sense. That's the campaign that I'm building, a
campaign that's based on common sense, decency,
fairness, and what I think are mainstream American
values.

GWEN IFILL: Since New Hampshire, just in the past
couple of months, you have won 15 of the 17 primaries
you've entered. So where do you go now?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, I still have to win the
nomination. I mean, this is an ongoing fight and I
take nothing for granted. Every single day, I'm
campaigning hard. I'm...just came from Ohio yesterday.
I went straight there from Wisconsin. I'll be in
Georgia on the weekend. And there are 11 states, and
three of them actually up next Tuesday. So I'm
continuing to campaign as hard as I can everywhere,
and that's what I will do from now through, hopefully,
winning the nomination and then on towards November
election.

GWEN IFILL: Have you been at all surprised by the
force of the momentum involved in your campaign?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: I think, Gwen, the honest answer is
that I'm pleasantly, you know, surprised and pleased
by it. But I can't tell you that the strategy didn't
say, "you've got to go into Iowa, you've got to do
well in Iowa, come out in New Hampshire and build
momentum." And that's why I worked hard at Iowa:
Because I understood that out of that kind of effort
comes the building block, and so I think we had a good
strategy.

Shaping a message on the go?
GWEN IFILL: You've never done this before. As you
continue on this campaign, do you find that your
message... that you're honing your message as you go
along and it's striking different chords with
different audiences?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: You know, that's up to people to
decide. I'm really talking about the same thing that I
started talking about the day I announced on Tim
Russert that I was going to run for president…that I
was going to open an exploratory committee. And I said
then, the issue for America is security: job security,
wage security, income security, retirement security,
health security, education, and of course physical,
national security. That's exactly what it is today.

We can do a better job of putting America to work. We
can do a better job of being fiscally responsible and
balancing our budget. We can do a better job of
helping our kids to really open the doors of
opportunity. I know we can have health care in America
that reduces costs and becomes affordable and
accessible to Americans.

This administration has no real plans to deal with any
of America's real issues, and so I'm just going to
talk the truth. I'm talking common sense, mainstream
American values. I think I won in Tennessee and
Virginia because the people in the South care about
the same things as people in the rest of the country:
Their kids, their jobs, their health care, drinking
clean water, breathing clean air, and being safer in
the world. And we can do a better job on everything.

GWEN IFILL: Among the candidates in this race,
including the president, there has been much
discussion about special interests, who is most
beholden to special interests. You obviously have a
career in the Senate. The "Los Angeles Times" has a
story today detailing letters that you wrote on behalf
of a constituent. How do you, knowing the history that
you have in the Senate, the letters you've written,
the lobbying maybe -- to use the word in a little "l"
sense -- that you've done, how do you begin to brush
off those accusations, if you can?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Because my record is really so clear,
and it will be as we go forward here. Where George
Bush embraces the oil industry and does whatever they
want, I stood up and led the fight to stop the
drilling of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Where George
Bush has given the oil industry enormous tax breaks
for drilling, I would be pushing harder for renewable
and alternative energy, and I've stood up to them.
I've stood up and fought for better auto emissions
control. I stood up against the effort of Newt
Gingrich to undo the Clean Air and Clean Water Act.
I've fought for children. I've fought for education
funding. I fight for veterans. So you measure the
fights. I've helped people create jobs. You bet I
have. That's my job as a senator from Massachusetts.
And some of them support me. You bet they do.

But I've also been one of the most outspoken,
strongest advocates of campaign finance reform in the
United States Congress. I'm the only United States
Senator who has been elected four times, voluntarily
refusing in any of my races to ever take one dime of
Political Action Committee money. So in the total of
my life, Gwen, of all my races, perhaps about 1
percent of the money that I have raised has come from
anybody who's ever lobbied for anything. I'm proud of
that record. Paul Wellstone and I wrote the most
far-reaching campaign finance reform bill in the
Senate. And when I'm president, we're going to get the
big money out of American politics.

Competing with a fellow senator
GWEN IFILL: The other night in a debate in Wisconsin,
your major remaining competitor, John Edwards, said,
"Not so fast, Senator Kerry. I just heard you talking
about all of the ways you're going to take on
President Bush." Do you feel after the results in
Wisconsin that you have to in some way take on Senator
Edwards?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: No, not at all. In fact, in the next
breath after he said that, Senator Edwards said, "And
when I'm president," and then the audience laughed.
You know, we're all going to talk about what we want
to do as president. I have great respect for John
Edwards. He's done a superb job. He's a great
competitor, and he's still competing. And I take
nothing for granted, as I've said.

You know, one of the reasons I think I've won 15 out
of 17 primaries and caucuses is I've been fighting
everywhere in this country. Unlike some candidates,
I'm not cherry-picking a state here or there.

GWEN IFILL: You think Senator Edwards did?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: No, I've just said "unlike some in
the race," and you can figure out who they are. I'm
running all over the country, and that's what I intend
to continue to do.

GWEN IFILL: Do you think that you could use the
endorsement of Howard Dean to get to some of those
independent voters that Senator Edwards was able to
attract in Wisconsin?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, yeah, but I've also attracted
those independent voters in Tennessee, in Virginia, in
Iowa, in New Hampshire -- and Republican voters, may I
add. So I'm reaching across the lines in every state.
And I think that, yes, with respect to Howard Dean, I
think anybody would be...would welcome his involvement
and endorsement. And I would love to sit down with
Howard somewhere in the next days, but I think he
deserves a little space. I think he deserves not to
have people sort of just beating down his door. I
respect incredibly what he achieved in this race.

GWEN IFILL: When you sit down with him, will you ask
for his personal endorsement?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Absolutely. I'll ask for it before I
sit down with him. I'll ask for it now. Howard, I hope
you'll endorse me. But I think that he accomplished a
lot, and he energized our party. He energized people
who aren't part of our party. He gave a sort of focus
to this race that I think all of us are grateful for,
and I think Democrats owe him a great deal. And he's
obviously extremely creative in the kind of campaign
that he ran. I have great admiration for it, and I've
told him that.

GWEN IFILL: The New York Times editorial page today
said "the one thing that Democratic voters know for
sure is they will have to choose between two Johns who
are members of the United States Senate for the
nomination." How do you tell those Democratic voters
in these remaining states that you should be the John
they choose?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Number one: I can beat George Bush,
and every evidence shows that. Number two: I am the
most experienced candidate in this field, ready to be
president. I have 35 years of proven experience and
accomplishment in fighting for the progressive agenda
of our country and of the Democratic Party. I have
fought standing up against Richard Nixon and his war
in Vietnam, fought against Ronald Reagan's illegal war
in central America, helped to lead the fight to hold
General Noriega accountable for putting drugs in the
veins of our children and involving himself with the
CIA.

I've led environmental fights in the United States
senate. I have led the fight to put 100,000 cops on
the streets of America. I've led the fight in 1985
with Fritz Hollings and others to reduce the deficit.
I think I've shown a record of what I'm prepared to
fight for, and I've also shown that I'll walk a
different path in trying to distance myself from the
money in American politics.

And I have 35 years experience in foreign policy,
national security, and military affairs. We're at war.
This is a dangerous time, and the world is looking to
us for leadership. I think George Bush has proven it's
not a time for on-the-job training in the White House,
and I think we want somebody who has a proven, steady
hand at the helm of state, who's prepared to make
America safer and live up to our values and our goals
and aspirations in the world.

I've done that in many different ways: 20 years on the
Foreign Relations Committee, as a former chairman of
the Narcotics Terrorism Committee. I think I've been a
leader on those issues, and I think America wants real
leadership.

GWEN IFILL: Senator Kerry, thank you very much.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Kerry & the 'Special Interest' Hit Piece

Stay on message, and protect the Messenger...Yes,
sadly, here we go again..WAR is PEACE, HATE is LOVE,
LIES are TRUTH...An honorable man is running against
an unseemly character, so paint the honorable man as
unseemly, an honest man is running against a liar, so
paint the honest man as a liar, a free man is running
against a special interest panderer, so paint the free
man as a panderer...When the propapunditgandists
challenge Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) on "gay
marriage," he should turn and say, "Look, I am here to
talk about the 540 (and counting) US soldiers killed
in Iraq, I am here to talk about the $500 billion +
budget deficit that the Bush administration has
presented us with. If you want to talk about "gay
marriage," talk to some mayor, talk to some governor.
I am here to talk about National Security and Economic
Security. I can understand why the President would
want to spend his remaining time in office talking
about "gay marriage, but I am here to talk about the
squandering of our soldiers blood and our nation's
treasure."
When the propapunditgandists raise the phoney issue of
"special interest," JFK should turn to them and say,
"Look, Bush will outspend me by hundreds of millions
of dollars in this campaign, and he has raised it
because he has given over whole Departments and
Agencies of our government over to special interests."
When the propapunditgandists challenge JFK's personal
integrity, he should turn to them and say, "Look, you
didn't have to dig out my dental records to try to
find out where I was or what I was doing when my
country needed me..."
Remember, stay on message, and protect the Messenger.
Here is some ammunition from the Parrys, their
"www.consortiumnnes.com" is one of the best of
the Information Rebellion sites...

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/021904.html

consortiumnews.com

Kerry & the 'Special Interest' Hit Piece

By Sam Parry
February 19, 2004

One of the new rules of modern campaign coverage is to
tailor a script to each candidate and to squeeze
developments into that script whatever the facts
really are. In 2000, George W. Bush was the blunt
straight-shooter and Al Gore was the delusional liar,
even if journalists had to change Gore’s words (as
with the Love Canal case, “invented the Internet,”
etc.) and downplay examples of Bush deceptions.

A new case in point for Campaign 2004 is the portrayal
of Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts as a captive of
Washington “special interests.” This theme has been
gaining momentum even though Kerry ranks as a leader
in the Senate in supporting environmental causes and
is best known for his investigations into foreign
policy scandals, such as drug trafficking by
CIA-backed Nicaraguan “contra” rebels, not for pushing
through corporate-favored legislation. So what gives?
Is this a fair charge against the Democratic
front-runner or is it another case of the news media
crafting a misleading theme?

Post Article
“The Kerry as captive” theme crystallized with a
breathless Washington Post page-one article on Jan.
31, which reported that, in the last 15 years, Kerry
had received more campaign contributions from "paid
lobbyists" than any other senator, a total of $638,358
since 1989.

The article, written by Jim VandeHei and entitled
“Kerry Leads in Lobby Money: Anti-Special-Interest
Campaign Contrasts With Funding,” cited figures from
the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit that
collects and refines data that candidates file with
the Federal Election Commission.

The Post report was quickly cited by Kerry’s
Democratic rivals and became grist for a new
anti-Kerry commercial by the Republican National
Committee. It was reprised as a top story on NBC’s
evening news on the eve of the Wisconsin primary.

But what has received almost no attention is how
misleading the key elements of the story are.

The Post article, for instance, doesn’t identify the
lobbyists. The Center for Responsive Politics, which
was cited in the Post story, acknowledges that its
data doesn’t distinguish who the lobbyists are, what
they lobby for or even whether they directly lobbied
Kerry on any specific policy issues.

This lack of clarity means that some of these
lobbyists may be registered to lobby Congress on
public-interest issues, such as the environment,
abortion rights or other legislation that most
Americans would tend to categorize as public-interest
advocacy, not “special interest” influence peddling.

Another potential hole in the data is that there are
thousands of Americans who are or at some time were
registered as lobbyists, but who no longer lobby on
issues before Congress. Such people could be retired
or may have changed careers and moved out of
Washington but they may still make political
contributions.

Towering Totals

A larger fundamental flaw in the Post article is that
by concentrating only on lobbyists, the Post’s tally
leaves out most donations from contributors that fit
the common definition of “special interests” in the
minds of most people. Employees of Halliburton or
Enron, for instance, would not be included in the
Post’s narrow definition.

Corporate executives, who often bundle tens of
thousands of dollars for a single campaign, were
excluded from the Post’s tabulation because they are
listed on FEC forms as executives, not lobbyists. So,
perversely, the definition of “special interests” used
by the Post in its piece would include an
environmental lobbyist who opposes oil drilling in the
Arctic wilderness and a lobbyist from a pro-choice
group, while leaving out someone like Enron’s Ken Lay.

To put this omission into perspective, George Bush’s
lifetime campaign contributions from Enron -- $736,800
-- eclipses by nearly $100,000 Kerry’s donations from
all lobbyists over these 15 years.

Also not counted in the Post’s tabulation are
donations from political action committees, which pull
together donations from executives of a single company
or from an entire industry and then funnel them to
politicians. Kerry is among the members of Congress
who has refused to accept PAC donations even while
many senators raised tens of thousands of dollars from
PACs.

Though the Post leaves out various sources of bundled
industry money, those donations actually tower over
the sums contributed by “lobbyists.” During the
15-year period, for instance, lobbyists contributed a
total of $76 million to political candidates, less
than one-quarter what many individual industries
donated, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics.

By comparison, donors from the agribusiness sector
contributed $311 million during this period; donors
from the health-care sector poured in $460 million;
the communications-and-electronics industry chipped in
almost $470 million; and, the finance/insurance/real
estate sector donated more than $1.2 billion, 16 times
more than “lobbyists.”

Another way to put the Post’s numbers into context is
to compare the total contributions for this year’s
presidential campaigns to the amounts donated by
“lobbyists.” Through the end of January, George Bush
had raised a total of $131.8 million for his 2004
campaign, but only $842,262 of this came from
lobbyists. Out of $28.2 million that John Kerry has
raised for his presidential campaign, only $234,920
came from lobbyists. In both cases, lobbyist
contributions add up to less than one percent of the
total money raised.

The Post further prejudiced the case against Kerry by
tallying donations made during a 15-year period that
effectively excluded from the top recipient rankings
senators who left office during that time or who came
to the Senate more recently. Only 33 senators – out of
100 – have served for all of those 15 years.

During these years, Kerry has had to face reelection
four times and has had to raise money in each cycle to
compete in a state that ranks as the 13th largest in
the country by population and boasts one of the most
expensive media markets. This helps explain why
Kerry’s cumulative totals over this 15-year period put
him near the top of the lobbyist money even though he
led this category of donations in only one two-year
election cycle, his first reelection campaign in 1990.

In Kerry’s last reelection cycle in 2002, he ranked
sixth among senators in accepting donations from
lobbyists. Kerry trailed other Democrats, such as
Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Max Baucus of
Montana and Tom Harkin of Iowa – each of whom comes
from a much smaller state.

In addition, Kerry was only $200 ahead of #7 on the
list, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. Harkin and Durbin
are notable on this list because they are widely
regarded as two of the most liberal U.S. senators,
suggesting again that lobbyist contributions represent
a mix of interests, both from industry "special
interests" and from public-interest groups.

Similarly, other liberal Democratic senators – such as
Hillary Clinton of New York, Patrick Leahy of Vermont,
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of
California – have appeared near the top of
lobbyist-contributions lists in various election
cycles.

Ignored, too, is Kerry’s record of supporting many
campaign finance reform measures, including serving as
a cosponsor of the “Clean Money, Clean Elections” bill
for voluntary public financing of federal campaigns,
which was introduced by the late Sen. Paul Wellstone
of Minnesota.

Finally, and most misleadingly, Kerry appears at the
top of the Senate list only because the Center for
Responsive Politics added the $226,450 in lobbyist
contributions raised in his presidential campaign to
the totals from his four Senate races. Only a handful
of sitting senators have run for president, and only
Bob Dole, in his 1996 campaign, raised significant
lobbyist money during those campaigns.

Given the need to raise money for four statewide races
in a relatively large state and his current national
campaign against George Bush, it would be more
surprising if Kerry weren't at or at least near the
top of cumulative fundraising lists for lobbyists than
the fact that he is near the top.

RNC Ad
Despite the inaccurate impression left by the Post’s
figures, the article has become a major factor in
“defining” Kerry. The RNC posted an Internet
advertisement denouncing Kerry as “unprincipled,” a
hypocrite who decries special interests on the
campaign trail while taking “more special-interest
money than any other senator.”

As noted above, the RNC’s charge is not exactly true –
money from lobbyists is only a small subset of
“special-interest money” and may not even represent
“special interests” as most Americans understand the
term. But, thanks largely to the Post’s hit piece, the
RNC ad has garnered a lot of play and has contributed
to the emerging conventional theme of Kerry as
beholden to “special interests.”

In a Feb. 15 column, Post reporter Dana Milbank noted
this RNC’s ad and said its contents, including the
line about Kerry taking “more special-interest money
than any other senator,” present the facts
“accurately.” Milbank added that the RNC’s ad “fairly
questions whether Kerry is disingenuous to accept
money from those he would vanquish.”

While reciting this emerging storyline about Kerry,
Milbank noted that Bush and the Republicans have their
own hypocrisy issue on the question of campaign cash
from lobbyists. “The president raised $842,262 from
lobbyists in the current election cycle – almost four
times the $226,450 Kerry raised,” Milbank wrote. “And
if you take away the funds Kerry collected for the
presidential campaign, he is no longer the Senate’s
top recipient of special-interest funds.”

The original Post story omitted this last fact, a
remarkable oversight considering the thrust of the
piece.

Media Distortion?
The bigger question may be whether the U.S. news media
is again going off on a tangent in which it
misrepresents a narrow body of “facts” and then
extrapolates broad conclusions that “define” a
candidate.

In 2000, Gore was pummeled by repetitious reporting
about his supposed lies and exaggerations – a press
“theme” that survived detailed stories on this and
other Web sites explaining how it was the press, often
following the lead of the RNC, that had actually
engaged in the lies and exaggerations.

Without those erroneous stories in newspapers,
including the New York Times and the Washington Post,
it is very likely that Gore would have become
president of the United States. [For details on the
inaccurate press coverage, see Consortiumnews.com’s
“Al Gore vs. the Media” and “Protecting Bush-Cheney.”]

Now, in 2004, the national press corps is busily
“defining” Kerry as a hypocrite who can’t be trusted.
This judgment is based largely on a semantic blurring
of the word “lobbyist” into the totality of “special
interests.” The press corps seems to have blinded
itself to the obvious point that donations from
“lobbyists” represent only a tiny fraction of
industry-related money. Ironically, as in 2000, this
kind of press coverage could again end up installing
in the White House a candidate who represents the
opposite of what the news media pretends that it cares
about.

No, none of these candidates are the one you’ve been waiting for...You are the one you’ve been waiting for. You drive the agenda. You make or break this political season. You are the hero. You’ve been here the whole time.

Three more US soldiers have died in the _resident's
foolish military adventure. For what? Yes, a neo-con
wet dream. But for something more...Their tragic
deaths bear witness to the _resident's utter lack of
CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY or COMPETENCE...in a way that
is too poignant and too immediate for most red-blooded
Americans to deny...here the incomparable William
Rivers Pitts bears witness (again and again!) that, as
the LNS has promised you all along, you are not
alone...Even the "US mainstream news media" polls are
showing the _resident's numbers in a nosedive. He
always was very unpopular, the change in the "US
mainstream news media" polls indicates that his base
itself is deteriorating and his unpopularity can no
longer be hidden...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/021904A.shtml

The One You’ve Been Waiting For
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 19 February 2004

“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,
victory however long and hard the road may be; for
without victory there is no survival.” - Winston
Churchill
We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Nicole Frye and Bryan Spry are dead because of
George W. Bush. Both died in Iraq. Both were 19 years
old. William Ramirez was also 19 years old, as was
Holly McGeogh. Luis Moreno and Nathan Nakis, Jeffrey
Braun and Jason Wright, Joey Whitener and Steven
Acosta and Rachel Bosveld, all were 19 years old when
they died in Iraq. Ryan Thomas and Michael Mihalakis
were 18 when they died in Iraq. They join the 544
American soldiers who have been killed there in less
than a year.

They were lied to, as were we all, and now they
are forever young in death. The lie they, and we, were
fed still sits on the White House website. You can
find the lie if you go to www.WhiteHouse.gov and do a
search for the page titled ‘Disarm Saddam Hussein.’
The page is still there, in all its dishonest glory,
even today. The page will tell you that Iraq possesses
26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum
toxin, and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve
agent. 500 tons, for those without calculators, equals
1,000,000 pounds.

Hide that.

This White House page likewise claims Iraq is in
possession of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering
the 64,000 liters of anthrax and botulinum toxin no
one can find, along with the 1,000,000 pounds of
sarin, mustard and VX gas no one can find. Better
still, the page claims a connection between Saddam
Hussein and al Qaeda that never existed and cannot be
proven.

Best of all, the page claims that Iraq was seeking
uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons
program. This was the lie that Bush used in his State
of the Union address, to the humiliation of us all.
This was the lie that motivated Ambassador Joseph
Wilson to speak out on the pages of the New York
Times. This was the lie that motivated White House
staffers to take revenge against Wilson by exposing
his CIA wife, Valerie Plame, thus sparking a federal
investigation. This was the lie that might bring down
the administration. It is still on the White House
website.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

The American people continue to be kept almost
completely in the dark regarding the events of
September 11. Very nearly a thousand days have passed
since the attacks, and yet the best we have to work
with is “Evildoers who hate our freedom.” The best we
have to work with is an unnecessary invasion of Iraq
as a substitute for actual answers and actions. Had
the Bush administration been given what it wanted, the
best we would have had to work with was master
secret-keeper Henry Kissinger chairing a hand-picked
investigation committee that would have come armed
with pens, paper and buckets of whitewash.

The families of the September 11 dead have
published some questions they would like to see George
W. Bush answer publicly. Among them are:

Beginning with the transition period between the
Clinton administration and your own, and ending on
9/11/01, specifically what information (either verbal
or written) about terrorists, possible attacks and
targets, did you receive from any source? This would
include briefings or communications from out-going
Clinton officials, CIA, FBI, NSA, DoD and other
intelligence agencies, foreign intelligence,
governments, dignitaries or envoys, National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and/or Richard Clarke,
former counterterrorism czar.

Specifically, what did you learn from the August 6,
2001, PDB about the terrorist threat that was facing
our nation? Did you request any follow-up action to
take place? Did you request any further report be
developed and/or prepared?

As Commander-in-Chief, from May 1, 2001 until
September 11, 2001, did you receive any information
from any intelligence agency official or agent that
UBL was planning to attack this nation on its own soil
using airplanes as weapons, targeting New York City
landmarks during the week of September 11, 2001 or on
the actual day of September 11, 2001?

Please explain why no one in any level of our
government has yet been held accountable for the
countless failures leading up to and on 9/11?

Do you continue to maintain that Saddam Hussein was
linked to al Qaeda? What proof do you have of any
connection between al-Qaeda and the Hussein regime?

No one on the entire earth has more moral
authority on this issue than the wives, husbands,
brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of the men and
women who were killed that day. To ignore their demand
for answers is to slap them across the face. To ignore
their demand is to kill their loved ones all over
again. These questions must be answered in the broad
light of day.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Since George W. Bush came to Washington DC, some
2.2 million jobs have evaporated. Last year, the
administration promised to create 1.7 million new
jobs, a promise that went laughably unfulfilled. Just
last week, the administration promised to create
either 2.6 million new jobs or 3.8 million new jobs,
depending upon which administration official you chose
to listen to.

These White House predictions are so off-the-scale
ludicrous that the administration officials charged
with shepherding the economy have refused to have
anything to do with them. Both Treasury Secretary John
Snow and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans have put as
much distance as political physics will allow between
themselves and these predictions. "Macroeconomic
models are based on a lot of assumptions," said
Secretary Snow, who further stated that such things
are, "not without a range of error."

Indeed. The "range of error" may well be found in
the fact that this administration has promised
millions of new jobs while simultaneously – and by
‘simultaneously’ I mean within the pages of the same
economic report – claiming that the outsourcing of
millions of American jobs to foreign countries is a
good thing for the economy and the American people.
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich asked a pointed
question about this which has gone unanswered: In
which country will these jobs be created?" They won’t
be created in America, for Americans.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Seldom in the history of American politics has the
Democratic Party fielded a more competent, patriotic,
excellent group of candidates for the office of the
Presidency than that which has been in the running to
date. A case can be made, however, that each has
bruises on their records as progressives; from voting
for the Iraq War Resolution to voting for the PATRIOT
Act to espousing right-leaning economic principles to
questionable allegiance to a woman’s right to choose,
each and every candidate has failed the purity test
somewhere along the line.

Yet held against the appalling record compiled by
the Bush administration to date, of which the issues
raised above comprise only a damnable fraction, the
truth is as self-evident as the shining sun at
noontime. Each and every one of the Democratic
candidates represent a quantum leap forward for
America, should any of them attain that high office.
Each and every one of them can be pressured, cajoled,
even attacked by the progressive community to act in a
manner required by the people. No amount of pressure
from the progressive community has moved the Bush
administration one inch away from its extremist agenda
to date, and no amount of pressure will move them
should Bush win the 2004 election.

Is John Kerry the one you’ve been waiting for? Is
John Edwards? Howard Dean? Dennis Kucinich? Al
Sharpton? Were any of the candidates who have dropped
out the one you’ve been waiting for? The answer to
those questions will vary from person to person. At
the end of the day, however, the final answer is no.

No, none of these candidates are the one you’ve
been waiting for. The one you’ve been waiting for has
always been here. The one you’ve been waiting for
pressured these candidates to fight the onslaught of
the Bush administration. The one you’ve been waiting
for took to the streets before the Iraq invasion,
worked for the campaign which most inspired, agitated
against the PATRIOT Act, spoke to friend and neighbor
and family about what has gone wrong...This final
truth is self-evident. You are the one you’ve been
waiting for. You drive the agenda. You make or break
this political season. You are the hero. You’ve been
here the whole time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for truthout. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
-------

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ILLEGAL FLORIDA VOTE PURGE ...THREE YEARS AFTER KILLING STORY

Perhaps you wonder why the LNS is so hard on the
NYTwits (i.e. the New York Times)? Perhaps you wonder
why the LNS refers to it as the "Newspaper of
Revision"? Our contempt for the NYTwits began in the
struggle for Fraudida and its aftermath. There are
numerous, painful instances in which the NYTwits went
out of their way to twist facts, lose facts, miscount,
even contradict themselves within their own stories,
and in all ways spin away Al Gore's clear victory (no,
the margin wasn't within a few hundred votes), here is
JUST ONE of them...Now as the Bush cabal grips on
power weakens, the NYTwits write an editorial on a
constitutional crime that they refused to acknowledge
while they sat staring at the evidence...It's the
Media, Stupid...

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.gregpalast.com/

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS ILLEGAL FLORIDA VOTE PURGE ...THREE YEARS AFTER KILLING STORY
MediaChannel.org
Monday, February 16, 2004
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version

The New York Times has uncovered Katherine Harris'
wipe out of thousands of voters ... only three years
after killing the story exposed by the BBC TV and the
Guardian. Here, 'News Dissector' Schechter, formerly
of ABC's 20/20, asks how the Times could editorialize
on a story they never ran in the first place. And note
the Times still can't bring itself to say that the
color of illegally purged voters is ... Black.

by Danny Schechter

The New York Times lead editorial Sunday was about
"How America Doesn’t Vote." It featured proposals for
many reforms to guarantee Americans the right to vote
and to have that vote counted. Its lead paragraph has
as its second sentence:

”In 2000, the American public saw in Katherine
Harris’s massive purge eligible voters in Florida, how
easy it is for registered voters to lose their rights
by bureaucratic fiat.” The editorial goes on to quote
the US Civil Rights commission’s findings documenting
how people falsely designated as felons were struck
from the polls.”

When I read this, I called investigative journalist
Greg Palast to read it to him. Greg appeared in
Counting on Democracy, a film I directed on the voting
debacle in Florida. He was the first top journalist to
report on the voter fraud, but not in the United
States, oh no, but on the BBC in England.

“What? “ he shouted at me on the phone.” You must be
kidding.” He couldn’t believe it because the New York
Times refused to carry the story at the time when it
might have done some good. It didn’t even report on
the Civil Rights Commission’s findings it references
in the editorial, only on Republican OBJECTIONS to
those findings. You would think that the “MASSIVE
PURGE” they cite in 2004 might have been news fit to
print back in 2000. The Washington Post carried Greg’s
article on the subject but not until June 2001. The
NATION ran it and followups earlier. CBS News wouldn’t
run it, Greg was told by a staffer, because Harris
office denied it. Huh?

The whole sorid story of big media response to his
findings appears in Palast’s book “The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy” and was carried first on Mediachannel.

This is so strange. Remember the heavily hyped media
“review” of the balloting? The New York Times was one
of the key newspapers in the consortium. The findings
were delayed and delayed, and then reported in such a
confusing manner that you would need an MIT degree in
linguistics to puzzle out what it was saying. An
airplane crash that day knocked it out of the news.

Later, the New York Times’ own investigative reporter
who supervised the media review told me on camera—and
it is in the film—that Al Gore won.

Does any of this make sense? A top reporter
challenging the main frame of the story as published,
and an editorial three plus years later citing, as
alarming and as fact, a “Massive” purge that it never
reported or explained. One more thing, Greg noted they
are still not making clear that most of those who were
purged were black.

And, natch, likely Gore voters. Surprise. Surprise.

Reprinted with permission from MediaChannel.org. To
see the BBC-TV report on the purge of Black voters, go
to www.GregPalast.com. Go to the left column on the
home page to link marked "BBC TV Theft of the
Presidency." Subscribe to Palast's writings at
www.GregPalast.com.

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists said..

2 X 2 = 4...

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/science/18CND-RESE.html

February 18, 2004
Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts
By JAMES GLANZ

The Bush administration has deliberately and
systematically distorted scientific fact in the
service of policy goals on the environment, health,
biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and
abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists,
including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement
issued today.

The sweeping charges were later discussed in a
conference call with some of the scientists that was
organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an
independent organization that focuses on technical
issues and has often taken stands at odds with
administration policy. The organization also issued a
37-page report today that it said detailed the
accusations.

Together, the two documents accuse the administration
of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its
own scientists, stacking advisory committees with
unqualified political appointees, disbanding
government panels that provide unwanted advice, and
refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise
in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in
such practices, but not so systematically nor on so
wide a front," the statement from the scientists said,
adding that they believed the administration had
"misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the
public about the implications of its policies."

A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today
he had not seen the text of the scientists'
accusations. "But I can assure you that this is an
administration that makes decisions based on the best
available science," he said.

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics
at Cornell University who signed the statement and
spoke in the conference call, said the administration
had "engaged in practices that are in conflict with
the spirit of science and the scientific method." Dr.
Gottfried asserted that what he called "the cavalier
attitude toward science" could place at risk the basis
for the nation's long-term prosperity, health and
military prowess.

The scientists denied that they had political motives
in releasing the documents as the 2004 presidential
race began to take shape, with Howard Dean dropping
out a day after Senator John Kerry narrowly defeated
Senator John Edwards on the Wisconsin Democratic
primary. The organization's report, Dr. Gottfried
said, had taken a year to prepare — much longer than
originally planned — and had been released as soon as
it was ready.

"I don't see it as a partisan issue at all," said
Russell Train, who served as administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents
Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, and who spoke in
the conference call in support of the statement. "If
it becomes that way I think it's because the White
House chooses to make it a partisan issue," Mr. Train
said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to
Top

Why Kerry should sue the Sun: Some of the British media are too happy doing Drudge's dirty work

It's the Media, Stupid.

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the Corporatist
News Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1151093,00.html

Why Kerry should sue the Sun: Some of the British media are too happy doing Drudge's dirty work

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 19, 2004
The Guardian

One question remains unanswered about the politically
inspired lie that Senator John Kerry had had an affair
with an "intern". Which interested source planted it
with the rightwing internet hooligan Matt Drudge and
with the conservative British newspapers that put it
into wide public play? Its timing was fortuitous.
Immediately after George Bush went into a tailspin,
falling behind the Democratic presidential
frontrunner, John Kerry, in the polls, Kerry became
the subject of smears filled with remembrance of
things past.
First, a phoney composite photograph was circulated of
Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam
war rally. Unfortunately, not only did Fonda denounce
the ploy as a "dirty trick", but so did Republican
senator John McCain, heroic Vietnam prisoner of war,
Bush's rival for the nomination in 2000 and a close
friend of Kerry's. The attempt to revive the dread of
the Nixon era failed, and the scarlet letter of the
Clinton years was unfurled. The Drudge Report,
claiming 15 million readers, alleged that a young
"intern" had a "mystery relationship" with Kerry and
that several major US news organisations were already
investigating. But none published a word, though
political society in Washington and New York was
instantly consumed with gossip.

On February 13, on the eve of Valentine's Day, Rupert
Murdoch's Sun newspaper screeched, "New JFK rocked by
sex scandal", naming the woman as Alexandra Polier and
quoting her father as calling Kerry "a sleazeball". On
February 15, the Tory papers, the Mail and the
Telegraph, quoted her "friend": "This is not going to
go away. What actually happened is much nastier than
what is being reported." Murdoch's Sunday Times
repeated the "sleazeball" quote and winked knowingly:
"It is a tale of two Americas, as the Democrats might
say."

Back in the US, frustrated rightwing media tried to
force the issue, using the authority of the British
imprimatur. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-show
host, broadcasting on more than 600 radio stations,
boomed: "It's all over the UK press! It's front page!"
He suggested that President Clinton was the source of
the story in order to bump off Kerry and help Senator
Hillary Clinton become president. The neoconservative
former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in National
Review: "Isn't it curious how after a story like this
breaks there turn out to be dozens of people who were
in on the secret?" On CNN, the Sunday Times columnist
and Drudge pal Andrew Sullivan held forth: "Can you
anymore not talk about something that's on the front
page of the Times of London, front page of the Drudge
Report, on everybody's minds? There comes a point at
which the media has to acknowledge people are
talking."

On February 16, Polier spoke for herself, declaring
the story "completely false" and explaining her motive
in stepping forward. "Because these stories were
false, I assumed the media would ignore them. It seems
that efforts to peddle these lies continue, so I feel
compelled to address them." It turned out she was not
even an intern. Her father said that the notorious
"sleazeball" quote attributed to him had been
fabricated. Drudge, ever gallant, blamed the story on
the young woman's imagined seductive behaviour:
"Polier's flippant remarks and flirtatious manner,
according to friends, fuelled the intrigue."

The defamation, the media amplification through the
conservative network, the British blowback was all
well-rehearsed. Drudge initially gained his celebrity
by libelling me on the day I began work in the Clinton
White House in August 1997, reporting as fact that I
was hiding police records of domestic violence. Within
hours, conservative media were spreading the story
like wildfire. Drudge admitted that Republican
operatives had given him the story and that he had
been used. It is his usual method.

"Screw journalism! The whole thing's a fraud anyway,"
Drudge once proclaimed. Though he calls himself an
"information anarchist", he is anything but
independent. He is a reliable submissive to his
partisan "sources". One independent study of his
"exclusive" stories determined that only one-third
were true. His latest "intern" revelation is the sound
of his master's voice at the beginning of a campaign
Republicans fear losing.

In the US, there is virtually no legal protection for
a public figure, especially a political one, from
defamation. Libel laws are de facto defunct. Public
opinion is inevitably swayed by this tainting, all
journalism has fallen under suspicion and truth cannot
easily be distinguished from malicious fiction. Only
if Kerry (or Polier) were to sue the Sun under British
libel law, for example, would this transatlantic
corruption of the press be truly engaged. Then a
British court would begin to set important rules in
American politics.

· Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to
President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

The federal prosecutor who won convictions in the government's first and only terrorism trial after the Sept. 11 attacks has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft accusing the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement"

No, it wasn't your imagination...Yes, a US District
Attorney is suing John Ashcroft for "gross
mismanagement" in the counter-terrorism struggle...But
what is even more incredible (although, sadly, not
inexplicable)is that there is no sign of this story on
the front page of the NYTwits or on SeeNotNews
(CNN)...Your country is in peril...The "US mainstream
news media" is cowardly at a time when the electorate
needs it the most...Can you imagine what the din in
the "US mainstream news media" would have been like if
a US District Attorney had sued Janet Reno for "gross
mismanagement"?

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0218-03.htm

Published on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 by
Knight-Ridder
Suit Against Ashcroft Claims Department has Bungled War on Terror
by Shannon McCaffrey

WASHINGTON - The federal prosecutor who won convictions in the government's first and only terrorism trial after the Sept. 11 attacks has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft accusing the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" in the war on terrorism.

The highly unusual complaint was filed in U.S.
District Court in Washington by Richard Convertino,
the lead prosecutor in the conviction of three members
of an alleged terrorism sleeper cell in Detroit.

Convertino is facing an internal Justice Department
investigation for failing to turn over a document to
the defense until long after the trial had ended.

Convertino claims the Justice Department is
retaliating against him because he has attacked its
efforts in the war on terrorism and cooperated with
the Senate Finance Committee, led by Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, a vocal critic of the department.

In his lawsuit, Convertino said the Justice Department
has exaggerated its success in fighting terrorism. He
said heavy-handed officials at Justice Department
headquarters in Washington have hindered prosecutors
in the field.

In the case he handled in Detroit, which Ashcroft has
frequently praised as a success in the war on
terrorism, Convertino said the government failed to
provide the needed federal law enforcement manpower to
help review documents, interview witnesses and prepare
for trial.

Convertino claims he worked the case for months with
the help of only one FBI special agent.

Convertino said he repeatedly asked for additional
help.

In the suit, Convertino alleges there was a "lack of
support and cooperation, lack of effective assistance,
lack of resources and intradepartmental infighting" in
terrorism cases. "These concerns directly related to
the ability of the United States to effectively
utilize the criminal justice system as a component in
the `war on terrorism,' " the lawsuit said.

The suit alleges that a senior official in the Justice
Department's terrorism and violent crimes section told
Convertino that positive news reports concerning the
department's success against terrorism efforts were
overblown.

"The press gives us more credit than we deserve," the
lawsuit quotes the official as telling Convertino.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said Tuesday
the case was being reviewed but wouldn't comment
further.

Convertino's allegations come as the high-profile case
in Detroit appears to be in danger of unraveling.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen said Tuesday that he
was seriously considering granting a new trial for the
three men convicted.

Even before Tuesday's disclosures, the case was in
jeopardy over allegations against Convertino.

A letter from a jailhouse inmate alleged that the
government's star witness, Youssef Hmimssa, had lied.
That letter was turned over to defense lawyers only
last year, well after the trial had concluded in June.

Convertino's lawyer maintained the letter - penned by
a Detroit drug dealer - wouldn't have affected the
trial's outcome.

In his suit, Convertino alleges that his superiors in
Detroit and Washington retaliated against him after he
testified before the Senate Finance Committee. He had
been subpoenaed to appear. Convertino and his boss,
Keith Corbett, were removed from the Detroit case in
September after Convertino appeared before Grassley's
committee.

The Justice Department also launched an investigation
against him after that testimony. The details of that
probe were leaked to the media, which Convertino
claims violated his constitutional rights under the
First Amendment and the Privacy Act. The prosecutor
also said in the lawsuit that Justice Department
officials tried to discredit him by leaking the name
of one of his confidential informants.

That leak put the informant at risk, forcing him to
flee the United States.

The leak "interfered with the ability of the United
States to obtain information from the (confidential
informant) about current and future terrorist
activities" the suit said.

Convertino, 42, a federal prosecutor since 1990, is
being represented by the Washington-based National
Whistleblower Center, which has represented numerous
FBI agents with grievances against the Justice
Department.

Convertino's lawyer, Stephen Kohn, on Tuesday accused
Justice Department officials of engaging in
"constitutional vandalism."

Recently, Convertino was reassigned to the Senate
Caucus on International Narcotics Control in
Washington, a standing committee chaired by Grassley.

In the Detroit case, Convertino won convictions in
June against two men for document fraud and conspiracy
to provide material support for terrorism. One other
was found guilty of document fraud but acquitted of
terror charges. The fourth defendant was acquitted on
all counts.

© 2004 Knight-Ridder

###

Without giving any scientific justification, the EPA changed data on the environmental impact of "hydraulic fracturing" -- an oil and gas practice pioneered by Halliburton.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) continues to deliver on his
oath to his constituents, to the country and to the US
Consitution...

Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience/example_oil_and_gas.htm

Research on Oil and Gas Practices

Without giving any scientific justification, the EPA changed data on the environmental impact of "hydraulic fracturing" -- an oil and gas practice pioneered by Halliburton.

The Bush Administration has changed scientific data or
suppressed scientific information to favor an oil and
gas practice called “hydraulic fracturing.” The
leading provider of hydraulic fracturing is the energy
company Halliburton, previously led by Vice President
Cheney. According to the company’s web site,
“Halliburton pioneered fracturing . . . and has
consistently led in the technology.”[1]

In carrying out hydraulic fracturing, companies
sometimes inject fracturing fluids containing benzene
and other carcinogenic and toxic chemicals into
geologic formations containing underground sources of
drinking water.[2] In the fall of 2002, EPA officials
briefed congressional staff on an August 2002 draft
agency study on this issue. The data in the study
indicated that hydraulic fracturing could lead to
benzene in underground sources of drinking water at
levels above federal drinking water standards.[3]

After congressional staff raised concerns about these
about these environmental impacts, EPA changed the
data. One week after discussing these results with
congressional staff, EPA officials produced revised
data indicating that benzene levels would not exceed
government standards.[4] EPA gave no scientific
justification for the change, explaining that it was
“based on feedback” from an industry source.[5]

The White House also deleted a discussion of
environmental concerns associated with hydraulic
fracturing, including the potential for water
contamination, from the final White House National
Energy Policy. This deletion occurred after such
discussion had been included in a draft produced by
the Department of Energy.[6]

[1] Halliburton, Fracturing (online at
http://www.halliburton.com/oil_gas/sd0922.jsp).

[2] EPA, DRAFT Evaluation of Impacts to Underground
Sources of Drinking Water by Hydraulic Fracturing of
Coalbed Methane Reservoirs, 5–14 (Aug. 2002) (EPA
816-D-01-006).

[3] Id.

[4] EPA, Calculations for Estimating Fracture Zone
Concentrations for Three Scenarios (Sept. 18, 2002),
cited in Letter from Rep. Henry A. Waxman to EPA
Secretary Christine Todd Whitman (Oct. 8, 2002)
(online at
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs/pdf_inves/pdf_enviro_epa_
hydraulic_oct_8_let.pdf).

[5] Letter from Rep. Henry A. Waxman to EPA Secretary
Christine Todd Whitman (Oct. 8, 2002) (online at
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs/pdf_inves/pdf_enviro_epa_
hydraulic_oct_8_let.pdf).

[6] Bush’s Energy Plan Bares Industry Clout, Los
Angeles Times (Aug. 26, 2001).

Halliburton calls in Bush lawyer

James Baker, fixer of Fraudida and one of the stewards
of the Saudi connection, is now going to work with
Halliburton on the Nigerian gas plant construction
scandal involving then CE0, now VICE _resident Dick
Cheney...The French investigation is another story
that the "US mainstream news media" is desperate to
avoid...But, inexorably, the Dunston woods are
creeping to the castle walls...

Cleanse the White House of Bush Cabal Cronyism, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid74437?source=

This is LONDON
17/02/04 - Business section

Halliburton calls in Bush lawyer
Richard Thomson, Evening Standard

HALLIBURTON, US Vice President Dick Cheney's old
company, battling against perceptions that it is too
close to the White House, has hired a law firm
previously used by the Bush family to conduct an
investigation into allegations of illegal payments on
Cheney's watch.

Halliburton has appointed Baker Botts to conduct the
investigation into $180m (£95m) in illegal payments
between 1995 and 2002 in connection with the
construction of a $4.9bn gas plant in Nigeria. Cheney
was Halliburton's chief executive at the time.

The Baker of the law firm's name is James Baker,
former-Secretary of State under George Bush Senior.
The firm's lawyer, James Doty, also acted for George W
Bush when he bought a stake in the Texas Rangers
basketball team in the 1980s.

Despite the apparently cosy relationship, however,
there are signs that relations between Halliburton and
the Pentagon may be deteriorating rapidly.

The company has announced that it is suspending a
further $140m in billing to the US military pending
corruption investigations. The suspension by
Halliburton follows an earlier delay involving $35m of
charges.

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

Find this story at
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid74437?version=1
©2004 Associated New Media

Flynt claimed that Bush arranged for the procedure in the early '70s. "I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt said. "I've tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I tracked down the Bush people who arranged for the abortion," Flynt said.

Ed Gillespie (Dizzy, forgive us), RNC chairman,
accused the Democratics of engaging in "gutter
politics" by raising the _resident's dubious record of
service in the Alabama National Guard...Well, Mr.
Gillespie (again, Dizzy, we're sorry) the _resident's
National Guard service is just the beginning of this
revitalized examination of his CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY
and COMPETENCE to hold the highest office in the
land...The LNS suggests someone start printing up
bumper stickers reading "Bush is Pro-Choice" and
distribute them throughout the Expanded Confederacy...

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/165111p-144622c.html

Activist rocker Moby raised Republican hackles last
week when he advised President Bush's enemies to
engage in political mischief.
Moby told my fellow gossips Rush & Molloy: "For
example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and
say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you
know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an
abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion."

Now the incorrigible Larry Flynt says he plans to
market a Bush abortion story as genuine - in a book to
be published this summer by Kensington Press.

"This story has got to come out," the wheelchair-bound
Hustler magazine honcho told the Daily News' Corky
Siemaszko. "There's a lot of hypocrisy in the White
House about this whole abortion issue."

Flynt claimed that Bush arranged for the procedure in
the early '70s.

"I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt said.
"I've tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I
tracked down the Bush people who arranged for the
abortion," Flynt said. "I got the story nailed."

Flynt wouldn't disclose whether he plans to name the
woman.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie -
who in a speech last week accused "Kerry campaign
supporters," not just Moby, of hatching the Internet
chat room scheme - was unavailable for comment on
Flynt's charges.

But RNC spokesman Yier Shi told me: "The Democrats
will do anything in this election, judging by their
campaign tactics, to smear without any evidence or
background. This is just another one of those cases."

Prosecutor in terror case controversy sues Ashcroft

Another name for the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...Assistant US Attorney Richard Convertino...Don't you think this story is at least as worthy as the "US mainstream news media" weeklong preoccupation with "Gay Marriage" and Nascar?...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-17-ashcroft-sued_x.htm

Prosecutor in terror case controversy sues Ashcroft

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington.

Justice officials said Tuesday they had not seen the suit and had no comment.

The suit is the latest twist in the Bush administration's first major post-Sept. 11 terrorism prosecution, which is now in danger of unraveling over allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Convertino came under internal investigation last fall after providing information to a Senate committee about his concerns about the war on terror. His testimony came just months after he helped convict some members of an alleged terrorism cell in Detroit.

The government now admits it failed to turn over evidence during the trial that might have assisted the defense, including an allegation from an imprisoned drug gang leader who claimed the government's key witness made up his story.

Convertino is seeking damages under the First Amendment and Privacy Act, alleging he has been subjected to an internal investigation as retaliation for his cooperation with the Senate and that information from the internal probe was wrongly leaked to news media.

The lawsuit states Convertino first complained to his superiors more than a year ago about Justice's interference in the Detroit terrorism trial, saying Washington supervisors "had continuously placed perception over reality to the serious detriment of the war on terror."

The lawsuit includes excerpts of an e-mail from another prosecutor in the case that Convertino says "identified some of the gross mismanagement which was negatively impacting the ability of the United States to obtain convictions in a major terrorist case."

The e-mail from the other prosecutor shows he complained at the time that efforts by Justice's terrorism unit in Washington to "insinuate themselves into this trial are, nothing more than a self-serving effort to justify the existence" of the unit.

"They have rendered no assistance and, are in my judgment, adversely impacting on both trial prep and trial strategy," the e-mail cited in the lawsuit states.

Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.

The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and "interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities," the suit alleges.

The prosecutor is being represented by the National Whistleblower Center, which has represented FBI agents and other whistleblowers in recent cases involving terrorism. Its chief lawyer successfully helped Linda Tripp win damages under the Privacy Act for the leak of information from her Pentagon personnel file after the Monica Lewinsky affair.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-17-ashcroft-sued_x.htm

9/11 Family Steering Committee: Questions for Bush

Will the three blind mice (i.e. the White House
"correspondents" for AnythingButSee, SeeBS and
NotBeSeen) ask these questions? Doubtful. Will any one
of the Sunday morning propapunditgandists on Week In
Revision, Fork the Nation, Meat the Press or Capital
Game ask these questions? Doubtful. Will anyone at all
in the "US mainstream news media" challenge the Bush
cabal with these questions? Doubtful. Will the 9/11
commission representatives (the whole commission will
not be allowed to interview the _resident) ask these
questions? Maybe some, certainly not all. Of course,
it will not be under oath, and there will be no
follow-up. But you can ask these questions, you can
share them with others...And, hopefully, if the
Commission delivers its report without answers that
satisfy these brave families, I hope Sen. John Kerry
(D-Mekong Delta) or his running mate raises them in
national televised debate...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=61&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

9/11 Family Steering Committee: Questions for Bush

Tuesday, February 17, 2004 - 11:52 AM
Posted by: khence The Family Steering Committee
Statement and Questions Regarding the 9/11 Commission
Interview with President Bush

February 16, 2004

The Family Steering Committee believes that President
Bush should provide sworn public testimony to the full
ten-member panel of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Collectively, the Commissioners are responsible for
fulfilling the Congressional mandate. Therefore, each
Commissioner must have full access to the testimony of
all individuals and the critical information that will
enable informed decisions and recommendations. Before
an audience of the American people, the Commission
must ask President Bush in sworn testimony, the
following questions:

1. As Commander-in-Chief on the morning of 9/11, why
didn't you return immediately to Washington, D.C. or
the National Military Command Center once you became
aware that America was under attack? At specifically
what time did you become aware that America was under
attack? Who informed you of this fact?

2. On the morning of 9/11, who was in charge of our
country while you were away from the National Military
Command Center? Were you informed or consulted about
all decisions made in your absence?

3. What defensive action did you personally order to
protect our nation during the crisis on September
11th? What time were these orders given, and to whom?
What orders were carried out? What was the result of
such orders? Were any such orders not carried out?

4. In your opinion, why was our nation so utterly
unprepared for an attack on our own soil?

5. U.S. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, the Director of
the White House Situation Room, informed you of the
first airliner hitting Tower One of the World Trade
Center before you entered the Emma E. Booker
Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Please explain
the reason why you decided to continue with the
scheduled classroom visit, fifteen
minutes after learning the first hijacked airliner had
hit the World Trade Center.

6. Is it normal procedure for the Director of the
White House Situation Room to travel with you? If so,
please cite any prior examples of when this occurred.
If not normal procedure, please explain the
circumstances that led to the Director of the White
House Situation Room being asked to accompany you to
Florida during the week of September 11th.

7. What plan of action caused you to remain seated
after Andrew Card informed you that a second airliner
had hit the second tower of the World Trade Center and
America was clearly under attack? Approximately how
long did you remain in the classroom after Card's
message?

8. At what time were you made aware that other planes
were hijacked in addition to Flight 11 and Flight 175?
Who notified you? What was your course of action as
Commander-in-Chief of the United States?

9. Beginning with the transition period between the
Clinton administration and your own, and ending on
9/11/01, specifically what information (either verbal
or written) about terrorists, possible attacks and
targets, did you receive from any source?

This would include briefings or communications from:

* Out-going Clinton officials
* CIA, FBI, NSA, DoD and other intelligence agencies
* Foreign intelligence, governments, dignitaries or
envoys
* National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
* Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar

10. Specifically, what did you learn from the August
6, 2001, PDB about the terrorist threat that was
facing our nation? Did you request any follow-up
action to take place? Did you request any further
report be developed and/or prepared?

11. As Commander-in-Chief, from May 1, 2001 until
September 11, 2001, did you receive any information
from any intelligence agency official or agent that
UBL was planning to attack this nation on its own soil
using airplanes as weapons, targeting New York City
landmarks during the week of September 11, 2001 or on
the actual day of September 11, 2001?

12. What defensive measures did you take in response
to pre-9/11 warnings from eleven nations about a
terrorist attack, many of which cited an attack in the
continental United States? Did you prepare any
directives in response to these actions? If so, with
what results?

13. As Commander-in-Chief from May 1, 2001 until
September 11, 2001, did you or any agent of the United
States government carry out any negotiations or talks
with UBL, an agent of UBL, or al-Qaeda? During that
same period, did you or any agent of the United States
government carry out any negotiations or talks with
any foreign government, its agents, or officials
regarding UBL? If so, what resulted?

14. Your schedule for September 11, 2001 was in the
public domain since September 7, 2001. The Emma E.
Booker School is only five miles from the Bradenton
Airport, so you, and therefore the children in the
classroom, might have been a target for the terrorists
on 9/11. What was the intention of the Secret Service
in allowing you to remain in the Emma E. Booker
Elementary School, even though they were aware America
was under attack?

15. Please explain why you remained at the Sarasota,
Florida, Elementary School for a press conference
after you had finished listening to the children read,
when as a terrorist target, your presence potentially
jeopardized the lives of the children?

16. What was the purpose of the several stops of Air
Force One on September 11th? Was Air Force One at any
time during the day of September 11th a target of the
terrorists? Was Air Force One's code ever breached on
September 11th?

17. Was there a reason for Air Force One lifting off
without a military escort, even after ample time had
elapsed to allow military jets to arrive?

18. What prompted your refusal to release the
information regarding foreign sponsorship of the
terrorists, as illustrated in the inaccessible 28
redacted pages in the Joint Intelligence Committee
Inquiry Report? What actions have you personally taken
since 9/11 to thwart foreign sponsorship of terrorism?

19. Who approved the flight of the bin Laden family
out of the United States when all commercial flights
were grounded, when there was time for only minimal
questioning by the FBI, and especially, when two of
those same individuals had links to WAMY, a charity
suspected of funding terrorism? Why were bin Laden
family members granted that special privilege � a
privilege not available to American families whose
loved ones were killed on 9/11?

20. Please explain why no one in any level of our
government has yet been held accountable for the
countless failures leading up to and on 9/11?

21. Please comment on the fact that UBL's profile on
the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives poster does not
include the 9/11 attacks. To your knowledge, when was
the last time any agent of our government had contact
with UBL? If prior to 9/11, specifically what was the
date of that contact and what was the context of said
meeting.

22. Do you continue to maintain that Saddam Hussein
was linked to al Qaeda? What proof do you have of any
connection between al-Qaeda and the Hussein regime?

23. Which individuals, governments, agencies,
institutions, or groups may have benefited from the
attacks of 9/11? Please state specifically how you
think they have benefited.

The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent
Commission
http://www.911independentcommission.org/
A date for the Commission's so-called 'interview' with
Bush has not yet been set though there is word it may
be in April.

For more on the infamous August 6th Presidential Daily
Briefing warning of a U.S. domestic attack from
Al-Qeada and the possibility of their hijacking see
the article by John W. Dean at:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030729.html

Other key background resources can be found at
cooperativeresearch.org:
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/bushon911.html

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/wot/sept11/whatwasthegovernmentdoingon911.html

Not only had the paper not sent a white American, it had sent no one...I had ended up paying a Pakistani lawyer a very large sum to represent Danny, and the Journal eventually reimbursed me a small fraction of his fees.

It will probably be a very long before another
investigative reporter working for the Wall Street
Journal sacrifices his life on the trail of the truth.
Danny Pearl was probably the first and the last. Of
course, since the Chickenhawk Coup of 2000, the
violent deaths of *un-embedded* news media
professionals in the zone of hate (i.e. Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, etc.) have increased
disturbingly, but none of these many tragic stories is
more poignant or mythic than that of Danny Pearl's
kidnapping and brutal execution or his widow's
courageous quest for higher truth and simple
justice...It is regretable although predictable that
the Dow Jones Corporation either does not understand
or more likely does not care. Or is it something else?
Does the Dow Jones Corporation see the world in
general and events in the Zone of Hate very
differently than Danny Pearl did or Mariane or any of
us do..No more chilling message to world-class
investigative reporters probing into the murky world
of Al-Qaeda, the Saudi Kingdom, General
IShotTheSheriff's Pakistan and those blacked out 27
pages...It's the Media, Stupid...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=492014

My fight for Danny's memory
Daniel Pearl was murdered in 2002 while reporting for
the Wall Street Journal in Pakistan. For his wife,
Mariane Pearl, the lonely battle for justice continues
17 February 2004

I made a friend in Pakistan. I nicknamed him "Captain"
because of his authority; I couldn't tell if it came
naturally to him or was the result of decades spent in
the Pakistani army. But when my husband, Danny Pearl,
was kidnapped in Karachi two years ago, Captain became
the second most important man in my life. He told me:
"I will bring your Danny home." It took another four
weeks for us to find out what had happened to my
husband.

During this time, Captain got to know Danny. He met
me, he met Danny's friends, his bosses, his writing.
He saw Danny's mandolin lying there, in the house that
had become the headquarters of our search. Captain
even saw Danny's unmatched socks. "Danny," Captain
concluded, "is the best of America."

After the first three sleepless nights following
Danny's kidnapping, there was no sense of time in our
house and only one reality. Captain's only aim was to
save Danny, because I was there, because I was
pregnant, because Danny was innocent, because Captain
was a Muslim and a patriot who felt deeply ashamed by
those who kept him in captivity. When it was learned
that Danny was dead, it was Captain who had to tell
me. Because he said so, I knew it was true, the same
way I knew what he said next to be true. It was
another pledge: "I will pursue those who did this and
bring them to justice, even if it is going to take a
lifetime. My lifetime."

I only wish others who promised their resolve at that
time - including Danny's employers at the Wall Street
Journal - had kept their word, too.

On the first anniversary of Danny's kidnapping, 23
January 2003, Captain and I sat on the top floor of
the World Financial Centre, right across from Ground
Zero. I took him with me to meet Danny's bosses at the
Wall Street Journal. Captain was the behind-the-scenes
man, the one who had donated his time and his efforts.
The hero.

We wanted to know why the Journal had not sent anyone
to court to represent Danny as the Pakistani
authorities began prosecutions for his kidnapping and
murder. One of those on trial included Omar Said
Sheikh, who had confessed to masterminding the
operation. It was Omar who had lured Danny into a
trap, pretending he was the disciple of a source Danny
was trying to interview. Ever since I had left
Pakistan the year before I had been trying to persuade
the Journal to send someone. "We were advised not to
send a white American to a Pakistani court," Journal
chiefs told us.

Not only had the paper not sent a white American, it
had sent no one. The trial was held in a tiny,
windowless "court" in the prison where the men were
being held. Transparency sounded like wishful
thinking. I had ended up paying a Pakistani lawyer a
very large sum to represent Danny, and the Journal
eventually reimbursed me a small fraction of his fees.

Eventually, the Journal promised to do what Captain
suggested: put pressure on President Musharraf to make
sure the judicial process would continue. In July 2002
Omar was sentenced to death, and the other three men
were given life sentences. The paper's bosses promised
they would find and pay a lawyer in Pakistan to
represent Danny in subsequent trials.

Omar's appeal has since been delayed nine times,
mostly for the simple reason that his lawyer doesn't
show up in court. It's all far from over. Even behind
bars, his influence is thought to remain great. Some
reports have suggested that he helped orchestrate the
recent assassination attempts on President Musharraf.
There have also been reports in the Pakistani press
that one Sardar Naeemullah Shahani, the Punjab sports
and culture minister who was kidnapped in January,
would be offered to the government in exchange for
Omar Sheikh and the three others, although government
officials have denied this.

Far-fetched, you say? Not for Omar, who was freed from
an Indian court in 1999, where he was serving time for
a failed kidnapping plot, in exchange for the safe
release of passengers aboard a hijacked Indian
Airlines flight. It's also important to understand
that the forces within the Pakistani government that
have so destabilised the Musharraf regime - the
intelligence agency (ISI) and the military - are those
to whom Omar had at least passing ties before his
arrest.

This powerful conflict within the Pakistan government
could be seen in Musharraf's handling of the
government's corrupt nuclear program. Just three weeks
ago, after it was revealed that Pakistan had given
nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea - a
story that Danny had been pursuing - Musharraf called
the scientists involved "enemies of the state". But
then, last Wednesday, Musharraf seemed to cave,
pardoning Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's
nuclear programme who had taken responsibility for the
leaked information. By doing so, Musharraf avoided a
battle with government hard-liners, who deified Khan
for turning Pakistan into a nuclear power. It
illustrates how rough the justice in this part of the
world can be, and why it helps to have as many
witnesses as possible.

In addition to Omar's appeals, the trial of the four
men who held Danny captive is yet to take place. All
four are Pakistanis - the last one, Naeem Boukhari,
was finally captured after a bounty of 1 million
Pakistani rupees ($17,450) was placed on his head.
Their trials are to follow the Pakistan Supreme
Court's decision on Omar's appeal case. The Wall
Street Journal's interest in proceedings has seemed to
wane. It remained remarkably dedicated until we found
out for sure, nearly a month after his kidnapping,
that Danny had died. The Journal set up a financial
trust for our son Adam and me, to which hundreds of
people have contributed thousands of dollars.
Afterwards, at the Journal, I could tell his
co-workers really liked Danny. I could tell everyone
was traumatised by what had happened to him, just four
months after the September 11 events had sent them
running for their lives from their own offices. I
could tell a lot of things, but still not why Danny
died and who killed him.

In May 2002, a lawyer for Dow Jones (the parent
company of the Wall Street Journal) levelled with me.
It was during Omar's trial, and as I tried to follow
its proceedings I persisted in asking what the Journal
was doing. They did not hire a lawyer in Pakistan and
there was no transparency in any of the proceedings.

"It is your case, not ours," the lawyer eventually
told me. I hung up. The moment that followed, when I
looked at myself, too pregnant to go to Pakistan and
represent Danny on my own, was one of the loneliest
I've ever had. Months later, I wrote the Journal a
letter.

"I am very well aware of the difficulties posed by the
trial and investigation, as I have been facing them
alone for the past ten months. But the murder of Danny
was like a hijacked plane sent to explode in the heart
of your company. I simply cannot understand how you
can turn your back and fail to seek the truth...my
determination to pursue these two goals reflects my
own loyalty to the values I shared with Danny. My
loyalty is stronger than the obstacles I have and will
encounter."

I asked to meet them again, preferably without a
company lawyer present, which led to my visit with
Captain a year ago. Since then, not much has changed.
I still rely on Yahoo for my updates about the case.
>From the Journal, all I've heard is the sound I've
learned to dread the most: silence.
17 February 2004 07:01

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Investigating the Investigation

Just as Mariane Pearl has been BETRAYED by the Wall
Street Journal, Kristin Breitweiser, Ellen Mariani and
the other widows and widowers of 9/11 have been
BETRAYED by the _resident and the VICE _resident, BUT
perhaps even more unforgivably they have been BETRAYED
by the "US mainstream news media" which docily reports
that the White House is concerned that the 9/11
commission's conclusions must be used for partisan
politics BUT refuses to connect the dots between the
stonewalling in the days and weeks immediately after
9/11 and the stonewalling in recent weeks for the US
public and then call it for what it is -- a brutal,
naked political cover-up to protect the incompetence
(at best) of the _resident and his national security
team prior to 9/11...

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat (Bush)

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17816

Investigating the Investigation

By Morton Mintz, AlterNet
February 10, 2004

Editorial writers have rightly slammed the White House for stonewalling two key requests by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. One was for essential information on the lead-up to 9-11. The other was for an extension of the May 27 deadline for completing its investigation.

It was the tough criticism that forced the
administration, on Feb. 4, to grant a face-saving but
insufficient two-month extension. Two related points
need to be made about the stonewalling. The first is
that it was entirely predictable, because the
administration had tried to prevent any investigation
by anybody. The second is that leading newspapers blew
the opportunity to report that the administration had
done this, thus leaving their readers and those of the
hundreds of papers that subscribe to their news
services in the dark about this important development.
Yet the story was literally staring out at them from
the tube.

On Meet the Press on Sept. 19, 2002, Moderator Tim
Russert asked Dick Cheney about a charge made by
then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle "that you
called him several times and urged him not to
investigate the events of Sept. 11."

"Tom's wrong," the vice president said. "I think in
this case – well, let's say a misinterpretation. What
I did do was work, at the direction of the president,
with the leadership of the Intelligence committees to
say, 'We prefer to work with the Intelligence
committees.'"

The following Sunday, the senator was Russert's guest.
After playing a tape of Cheney's statement, Russert
asked Daschle, "Did the vice president call you and
urge you not to investigate the events of Sept. 11?"
Daschle flatly contradicted Cheney: "Yes, he did, Tim,
on Jan. 24, and then on Jan. 28 the president himself
at one of our breakfast meetings repeated the
request."

Russert persisted: "It wasn't, 'Let's not have a
national commission, but let's have the Intelligence
committees look into this,' it was 'No investigation
by anyone, period'?"

"That's correct," Daschle said. "[T]hat request was
made" by Cheney not only on Jan. 24 and by Mr. Bush
four days later, but "on other dates following" as
well.

By repeatedly specifying the dates of attempts by the
vice president and the president to prevent an
investigation, Daschle knocked down the improbable if
not ridiculous claim that he had several times gotten
"wrong" or misinterpreted Cheney's calls and the
president's face-to-face request at a breakfast. Thus
did Daschle implicitly challenge the truthfulness of
the vice president about investigating the events
culminating in the catastrophic terrorist attack on
the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

This was highly newsworthy – how could it not be? The
next morning, however, leading national newspapers –
including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los
Angeles Times and USA Today – printed not a word about
it. It was another big press pass to George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney.

Morton Mintz was a long-time Washington Post reporter
and is a former chair of the Fund for Investigative
Journalism.

The True Story of Max Cleland's Vietnam Injuries

Three more US soldiers died in Iraq over night. For
what? Litte more than a neo-con wet dream...The Bush
cabal has ordered that there be no published photos of
the flag draped caskets, and the "US mainstream news
media" has not gone to court to challenge
them...Meanwhile, Ann Coulter still .has a syndicated
radio show. Ann Coulter still has a syndicated column.
The White House has not denounced her deceitful
sliming of Max Cleland (D-GA), the RNC's Ed Gillespie
(forgive us, Dizzy) has not denounced it...No one has
gone to the floor of the US Senate to call for her
firing...No major city newspaper editorial board has
pilloried her and her keepers...What a disgrace!

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/02/con04074.html

February 17, 2004 CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES

The True Story of Max Cleland's Vietnam Injuries

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Christopher Crallé

I wrote last night in response to the column by Ann
Coulter. My father, who has close personal ties with
Max, has responded to me and I forward his reply.

What follows is the true account of Max Cleland's
injury in Vietnam.

---------

Thank you Chris. I did not have the links to this, but
Max called me about it in case I needed to tell the
real truth should someone want to know. This Ann
Coulter has written real slime. Only in America. Our
service men and women fight and die to defend your
right to a free press. The press needs to be aware of
their responsibility to use this democratic tool in a
responsibility way.

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

The 2nd of the 12th Cavalry was engaged in a combat
operation at the time of this incident. Max Cleland
was with the Battalion Forward Command Post in heavy
combat involving the attack of the 1st Cavalry
Division up the valley to relieve the Marines who were
besieged and surrounded at the Khe Shan Firebase. The
whole surrounding area was an active combat zone (some
might call the entire country of Vietnam a combat
zone). (Is Iraq a combat zone?) Max, the Battalion
Signal Officer, was engaged in a combat mission I
personally ordered to increase the effectiveness of
communications between the battalion combat forward
and rear support elements: e.g. Erect a radio relay
antenna on a mountain top. By the way, at one point
the battalion rear elements came under enemy artillery
fire so everyone was in harms way.

As they were getting off the helicopter, Max saw the
grenade on the ground and he instinctively went for
it. Soldiers in combat don't leave grenades lying
around on the ground. Later, in the hospital, he said
he thought it was his own but I doubt the concept of
"ownership" went through his mind in the split seconds
involved in reaching for the grenade. Nearly two
decades later another soldier came forward and
admitted it was actually his grenade. Does ownership
of the grenade really matter? It does not.

Maury Cralle'
Battalion Executive Officer
2d/12th Cavalry Battalion
1st Air Cavalry Division
During the assault on Khe Shan

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

Love Dad

------

My outrage over this incident has not abated.

Christopher Crallé

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

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inaccuracies when they are brought to our attention.

Cleland Responds to Coulter Attack

When Janet Jackson exposed one of her pastied breasts on network TV, Calm 'Em Powell's bratty son, Micheal launched an FCC investigation. When Ann Coulter, who is one of network TV's most prominent propapunditgandists and has her own nationally syndicated radio show, wrote: “If Cleland had dropped a grenade on himself at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator in the first place. Maybe he’d be the best pharmacist in Atlanta..." NOTHING, no outcry, no reprimand, no loss of access, NOTHING. (Similar to the double-standard for Kenny Boy Lay and Martha Stewart, eh?) Yes, Coulter has made cruel remarks before, hateful and lying remarks, indeed even genocidal remarks. But for this one she should lose her syndicated column, her syndicated radio show and her access to the propapunditgandist forums on network TV. For this remark, certainly the sponsors of her radio show should be pressured by the public into withdrawing....The _resident LIED and rushed to send US soldiers, even National Guardsmen, into a foolish military adventure. His own "record" of "service" in Alabama during the Vietnam war is full of very disturbing holes. US blood and treasure is being dissipated while Al Qaeda grows stronger, fueled both by the US's distraction and by the incredible boost in recruitment that the _resident's neo-con wet dream has wrought. And it is in this surreal atmosphere that Coulter attacks Cleland, lying about how he lost his limbs, denigrating his sacrifice, AND her remarks goes unretracted and unpunished. That's how far the "US mainstream news media" has fallen: "WAR is PEACE, HATE is LOVE, LIES are TRUTH." It is an Orwellian nightmare. Yes, Coulter's hit piece on Cleland was disgusting, but it was also a lie (he didn't "drop" a grenade, he picked one up that someone else had dropped)...Of course, Coulter's disgusting, deceitful column was syndicated nationally and, of course, she can elaborate on it and spin it any way she wants on her nationally syndicated radio show. Here is Max Cleland's dignified response, broadcast on -- local TV in Atlanta, Georgia. What a disgrace for this country! Where is John McCain (R-AZ)? Where is Chuck Hagel (R-NE)? Where is Richard Shelby (R-AL)? All Republicans, all men who served with honor and distinction in Vietnam. [For insight into Coulter's role in the "vast reich-wing conspiracy," just read David Brock's explosive Blinded By The Right.] But yes, a day of reckoning is coming: Election Day, November 2004. And in spite of the triple lock (#1 overwhelming advantage in campaign dollars, #2 the complicity of the "US mainstream news media," #3 black box voting), Coulter and her ilk will be consigned to irrelevancy by the forward momentum of events beyond their distortion. Unless, of course, as Tommy Franks said, with a nod and a wink, in a Cigar Afficiando interview, we have another 9/11 and marshal law is declared...Coulter's attack on Cleland shows what US soldiers really are to the _resident who sent them to war unnecessarily and to Coulter and his other running dogs in the "US mainstream news media" -- cannon fodder, nothing more. "Do as your told, slog off to war, bleed and die, but DON'T challenge the Bush cabal." Yes, more than ever -- it's the Media, Stupid.

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.11alive.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=42979

Cleland Responds to Coulter Attack

Former Senator Max Cleland on "Hardball With Chris Matthews."

Cleland in Vietnam.

Max Cleland

Former Sen. Max Cleland defended his military service record Saturday night in response to comments from columnist and television commenter Ann Coulter that accused him of playing up injuries he suffered in the Vietnam War for political gain.

Coulter, in a column published this week, said that Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, is no war hero, but rather a victim of a tragic, accidental grenade explosion who plays up his amputations for political gain.

“If Cleland had dropped a grenade on himself at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator in the first place. Maybe he’d be the best pharmacist in Atlanta,” Coulter said in her column, published on February 11.

“He didn’t ‘give his limbs for his country,’ or leave them ‘on the battlefield,” Coulter said. “There was no bravery involved in dropping the grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight.

In fact, Cleland was wounded picking up a grenade that someone else dropped, during what he says was a combat mission.

“I volunteered for a combat mission with the 1st Air Calvary division going into break the siege at Khe Sahn, and if that isn’t a combat mission, you ought to ask some of the people that were there and the 200 guys that were killed in that mission.”

As he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Cleland has questioned President Bush’s military record and touted Kerry’s, who served as Navy lieutenant during the Vietnam War.

“(Bush) goes into Iraq and then three weeks in the battle stands on an aircraft carrier, dressing up pretending to be a super hero, and the guy hardly showed up for drills in Alabama,” Cleland says. “He got favorable treatment in Vietnam.”

Rusty Paul, a Georgian Republican Party strategist, said Coulter crossed the line with her comments.

“You can’t take away from Max Cleland his record of service to this country and the sacrifice that he’s made, regardless of the circumstances. To me, that’s out of bounds to talk about that,” he said.

Paul, however, said attacking the politics of Cleland and Kerry was well within bounds. “I think the voters would prefer to talk about what George Bush’s view for the future is versus John Kerry’s rather than what happened 30 years ago,” he said.

President Bush released all his Vietnam-era records Friday to counter Democrats’ suggestions that he shirked his duty in the Texas National Guard. • (Bush Orders Release of Vietnam Files)

Hundreds of pages detailed Bush’s service in the Guard in Texas and his temporary duty in Alabama while working on a political campaign there in the early 1970s. Democrats have questioned whether Bush ever showed up for duty in Alabama.

Kerry led the Senate's investigation into BCCI's multibillion dollar crash, and here's what he had to say: 'The Bank of England delayed unconscionably in closing BCCI, and millions of investors were hurt... It was negligent and costly

Two more US soldiers, and two Iraqi children, died last night in Iraq. For what? A neo-con wet dream, nothing more...MEANWHILE, the Emperor still has no uniform...Despite the best (worst) efforts of the three blind mice (i.e., the "White House correspondents" from AnythingButSee, SeeBS and NotBeSeen), the release of records concerning the _resident's "service" in the
Alabama National Guard is producing some amazing material. For example, www.democrats. com reports the following: On 2-13-04, the White House changed one crucial AWOL document before releasing it to the media: they removed the name of Maj. James Bath from the order that grounded Bush. Bush and Bath were good friends, and it's possible they were grounded on the
same order because they were busted for the same alcohol or drug crime. In 1976, when Bush Sr. became head of the CIA, Bath became a CIA liason. In 1978, when Bush graduated from B-school and started his first business named Arbusto ("shrub"), Bath invested as much as $1 million from funds he managed on behalf of Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Salem was Osama's big brother, and died in a mysterious plane crash in Texas in 1988. bin Mahfouz, a powerful Saudi banker, was one of the largest stockholders in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. (Enter "James Bath" and "bin Mahfouz" in our search engine). Is the White House afraid we'll "connect the dots" between Bush, the Bin Laden family, and Saudi money dating back to 1978?
And that's one of several examples. No, it is not over.
MEANWHILE...Here's something from Sen. John F. Kerry's past that Ed Gillespie won't be twisting in any new hit piece...And yes, of course, the story is from America's best newspaper, the Guardian, published in the UK...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,11268,1148264,00.html

Old Lady won't be keen on President Kerry

Conal Walsh on how the Democrat was a big critic over
BCCI

Sunday February 15, 2004
The Observer

If John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachussetts, gets
to the White House this November, they won't be
cheering his victory in Threadneedle Street.

He may be riding high in the US presidential race
today, but Kerry first came to Britain's attention as
the senator who accused the Bank of England of turning
a blind eye to fraud at BCCI.

Kerry led the Senate's investigation into BCCI's
multibillion-dollar crash, and here's what he had to
say: 'The Bank of England delayed unconscionably in
closing BCCI, and millions of investors were hurt...
It was negligent and costly... I'm saying very
directly that the Bank of England had sufficient
information in front of it to close BCCI 15 months
earlier than it did.'

That was back in 1992, and it's not something the Bank
needs to be reminded of. But Kerry is probably one of
the few people in the world who know the vast and
complex BCCI affair inside out. He is one of the Old
Lady's sharpest critics and, come New Year, he could
also be the world's most powerful man.

Which can hardly be comforting to the Bank as it seeks
to defend itself against a huge compensation action
brought by BCCI's victims at the High Court in London.
This began last month and will still be going on
beyond Kerry's likely endorsement as Democrat
candidate, and even, probably, beyond his showdown
with George W Bush.

At the time, the Bank tried to dismiss Kerry's
conclusions as 'extraordinary' and having 'no factual
basis'. But later it was also pilloried by the
official British report into the BCCI disaster, and
these days not even the Bank denies that it was at
fault. After all, it was financial regulator when the
London-based finance house collapsed in 1991 with £7
billion of undeclared debts - the biggest banking
fraud in history.

But the Bank strongly denies it was deliberately
negligent. This is the central claim made by BCCI's
creditors in the current London trial, and threatens
to overturn the Bank's legal immunity (as a Government
agency) from being sued.

Lawyers for the creditors, who are demanding damages
of £1bn, have spent the first few weeks of the trial
airing internal Bank memos. They seem to show that
Threadneedle Street long suspected BCCI's involvement
in a range of criminal activities, but chose not to
intervene - allegedly in the expectation that it could
shift responsibility for a messy scandal on to
regulators abroad.

Among the intelligence received by the Bank during the
Eighties were claims - later proved true - that Manuel
Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, and Abu Nidal's
terrorist organisation were using BCCI accounts to
launder money. Bank officials also had long-standing
doubts about BCCI's solvency, but apparently did not
step in.

Further questions are going to be asked about what
Ministers, civil servants and some of the City's top
institutions knew about BCCI before its meltdown.
Meanwhile, BCCI is fast becoming a fashionable subject
again in Washington, too, as the US media pore over
their would-be president's record.

Kerry spent almost two years leading the powerful
Foreign Relations Sub-committee's investigation of the
meltdown, memorably describing BCCI's activities as 'a
panoply of financial crimes limited only by the
imagination of its officers'. He damned the Bank in
his 800-page report, as well as Price Waterhouse,
BCCI's auditor.

Some commentators suggest Kerry 'went easy' at the
time on Clark Clifford, a prominent Democrat and
former US Defence Secretary with ties to BCCI. On the
other hand, one of the (unheeded) recommendations he
made in his report - that US authorities actively
pursue evidence that BCCI was being used to fund an
incipient Pakistani nuclear programme - now seems
prescient, given recent revelations about Pakistan's
role in nuclear proliferation.

Kerry plans to make a crackdown on banking secrecy and
tougher regulation a key component of his campaigning
rhetoric. For the Bank of England, that could yet mean
an unwanted role in America's presidential race.

Hi-Tech Voting Machines 'Threaten' US Polls: Scientist Warns That Electronic Votes Cannot Be Safeguarded

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem)took to the air waves on
NotBeSeen (NBC) Meat the Press yesterday, looking
forward to a brawl with Ed Gillespie (forgive us,
Dizzy), the RNC chairman. But Gillespie wimped out and
would not share the air with Rangel, fearful of
getting whopped. So Tim Russert, uncharacteristically,
let Charlie speak almost uninterruptedly. It was
inspiring and encouraging...
Here are some highlights:
MR. RUSSERT: So the president has not satisfied you on
this issue yet?
REP. RANGEL: It's the American people. And the records
have not indicated as to whether or not after all of
the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it took to
train this man, then why was his pilot's ability to
fly suspended? Why was he able to get involved in the
campaign? These are really issues especially when he
says on your program that he's the war president and
that he is willing to have a whole lot of Americans,
over 530 lives lost, 2,000 people maimed, for a war
that we didn't have to fight according to some of the
experts. And now we're challenging whether or not he's
properly served this country. I think these are
legitimate issues.
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, he was honorably discharged.
That must mean something.
REP. RANGEL: It does mean something but it didn't mean
that he volunteered to go to Vietnam. It didn't mean
that he served in combat. And all I'm saying is that I
know the National Guard and the National Guard that we
got today that I, with tears in my eyes, see go over
to Iraq and the Reservists that we have today. This is
not what we had in the '70s. This is something that
our men and women did not expect to have to do. And
when he gets on your program and says that we're
denigrating the National Guard, we are not. They
didn't have the record-keeping ability. That's why the
president has to come forward and not just wait for
someone to say, "I remember seeing him once in the
chow line," or, "I think I saw him." He was George
Bush's son. Everyone knew who he was...
MR. RUSSERT: Have John Kerry's allegations about
George Bush being controlled by special interests been
neutralized by his own fund-raising activities?
REP. RANGEL: Let's first get to Ed Gillespie, who
refuses to get on this program with me, who is a
lobbyist, who understands this better than I do
because he spent his whole life being a lobbyist for
the vested interests in the United States. And you ask
him the question as to whether or not in one year
George Bush has received more vested interest lobbying
money than Senator Kerry throughout his Senate career.
And for him to talk about dirty politics and have this
stuff on his Web site, I don't think is credible. And
so George Bush is the guy that's been able to get the
pharmaceutical money, the oil money, the
anti-environment money. And so I would hope if this
campaign is going to be on who has received the most
in terms of lobbying money, let the war begin because
Bush has wiped us out. He's got hundreds of millions
of dollars, and all I would hope is that
George--Gillespie would make that public. If you want
to provide a service to the American people, as you
did, and get the president to release his records as
it relates to whether he served or didn't serve in the
National Guard, get Gillespie to just have the
lobbying records of--I keep saying governor because I
can't forget Florida. But just have the president's
records released on the lobbying money he has. MR.
RUSSERT: You say you can't forget Florida. REP.
RANGEL: I can't forget Florida. I really can't forget
Florida. It took a long time for my people to get the
right to vote. And once they got it, they did it the
way that they should have. We won the popular vote.
And then all of a sudden, the Supreme Court comes in
and says, "We got enough votes for Bush. Stop
counting." And that's what happened.
MR. RUSSERT: But our Constitution provides that
whoever wins the Electoral College is the president of
the United States. It's not popular vote.
REP. RANGEL: Well, some say that Mayor Daley
controlled the number of votes that Kennedy got, and
clearly the Republicans got even if that happened
because there is no question that people who are
entitled to vote were not allowed to vote in Florida.
And so it was a bad count that we got. And we will
never, never, never forget Florida. This is the only
time that we have an appointed president of the United
States in our history.
MR. RUSSERT: Before you go, you talk about this with
such passion. What do you think the minority turnout
is going to be in 2004? Is the outrage that you're now
showing on this show, does it exist in the minority
community across the country?
REP. RANGEL: There's no question about it. And you
don't have to talk about Senator Kerry for president
or George Bush being out. All you have to do is go
into a minority community and have a button on. And
just say, "Don't forget Florida." And it will say the
whole story.
And yes, speaking NEVER, NEVER, NEVER forgetting
Fraudida, it is important to note that the sanctity of
the vote is in more danger today than it was in
2000...Here is an excellent piece from America's best
newspaper, The Guardian, published, of course, in the
UK...

Thwart the Theft of a Second US Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0216-01.htm

Published on Monday, February 16, 2004 by the
Guardian/UK
Hi-Tech Voting Machines 'Threaten' US Polls: Scientist Warns That Electronic Votes Cannot Be Safeguarded

by Tim Radford and Dan Glaister

US voters will go to the polls in November using
electronic voting machines which cannot be verified, a
computer scientist warned yesterday.

David Dill, of Stanford University, told the American
Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in
Seattle, that 1,600 technologists and 53 elected
officials had joined his crusade for a "paper trail"
so that electronic voting machines could be checked.

In an election for a seat in the Florida house of
representatives last month, touch-screen machines
recorded 127 blank ballots. The race was won by 12
votes. No recount was possible because there was
nothing to recount.

In an election in Indiana last year, an electronic
system recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election
with fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

The system is set for its first significant test in
just over two weeks when several states will use the
machines for both the Democratic primaries and for
several local votes held on the same day. These states
include Georgia, Ohio, California and Maryland. San
Diego in California has bought more than 10,000
machines, while the state of Maryland has spent $55m
on 16,000 machines for its voters.