From richardpower at wordsofpower.net Wed Mar 30 15:56:07 2005 From: richardpower at wordsofpower.net (richard power) Date: Wed Mar 30 15:56:11 2005 Subject: [Liberation News Service]: LNS Oceania Review (41/05): April Fool's Day Edition Message-ID: <20050330205607.68600.qmail@web207.biz.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Remember that at least 1528 US soldiers have died for nothing in the Bush cabal's foolish military adventure in Iraq. Remember, too, that their grieving families are forbidden to take photos of their flag-drapped caskets. Remember that this debacle in the desert has cost you over $150 billion dollars. Remember that the Italian journalist, rescued by an Italian secret agent killed by US forces *after* the two had reached safety, had written on the use of napalm and the bombing of a hospital in Fallujah...Remember that Osama bin Laden has yet to be brought to justice for the mass murder of innocents on 9/11/01...Remember that the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen from you...Remember that the US mainstream news media is worse than complicit in the Bush abmonination's crimes against the US Constitution and against humanity, it is a full partner in a triad of special interests (e.g., energy, weapons, media, tobacco, pharmacueticals, etc.)...Yes, let’s sell F16s to the Pakistanis. They have done such an excellent job: harboring Bin Laden and high level Al Qaeda, providing nuclear weapons secrets to North Korea and others (use your imagination), etc. But, of course, none of it makes any sense…April Fool's Day...The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life.” Except, of course, if the life is that of a US Marine or a National Guardsman or an Italian secret agent or a journalist from anywhere who refuses to crawl "embed." The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life.” Except, of course, if the life is that of a five-month-old child (Sun Hudson) who had the plug pulled on him (in Texas under a law signed by the maximum leader for the minimum-minded while he was Governor) because the child's condition was "hopeless" and because his family could not afford the cost of keeping on the life-sustaining machines. The maximum leader of the minimum-minded says, ”err on the side of life," yet obstinately refuses to acknowledge, despite the overwhelming preponderance of data and the indisputable consensus of scientific opinion, that global warming aggravated by the consumption of fossil fuels is not only a grim reality but that it will be responsible for far more deaths than terrorism in the next few decades...The maximum leader of the minimum-minded dispatched his brother Jeb potentate of Fraudida(and next in line to the imperial throne) to seize the body of the brain-dead Terri Shiavo, against the wishes of her husband and the will of courts, in order to stick feeding tubes back into it, but, local authorities resisted. Was this the first skirmish in the second civil war and did we (not just progressives, the judge who is resisting and had to resign from his own church is a conservative Republican) win that first skirmish… ”Err on the side of life”? April Fool's Day... For the Bush Cabal, a brain-dead hospice patient is the perfect voter. Randall Terry can fill out her absentee ballot for her and receive White House funding for it as a faith based initiative. April Fool's? No, the Death of the Republic. Unless you remember and resist, unless you restore fair elections and a free press to the USA... The April Fool's Day edition of the LSN Oceania Review is organized into ten sections of important op-ed pieces and news items. Please read them and share them with others. They are available on the LNS site archive, with its searchable database, for the sake of researchers and students. Remember, and resist. Here are the highlights: Death of the Republic? Walter C. Uhler, www.walter-c-uhler.com: In fact, if Professor Lukacs is correct, I should drop the references to Fascism and focus, instead, on the similarities to be found when comparing America's National Socialism under Bush with Germany's National Socialism under Hitler (never forgetting, of course, that Bush's naked aggression comes nowhere near Hitler's psychopathic willingness to exterminate or enslave entire populations)… Unlike Mussolini, Hitler asserted that the "Volk" preceded the "Reich," and "religions are more stable than forms of states." [p. 120] Hitler's populism propelled him to power. And, as Lukacs notes, with the eventual expansion of democracy (and, thus, the welfare state) to the working classes, "we are, at least in one sense, all national socialists now." [p.41] But with Hitler's National Socialism, as with George Bush's today, "nationalism was a more important factor of his people's loyalty to him than were the various social improvements and institutions [of the Third Reich]." [p.131] In fact, according to Lukacs, President Bush has depended on nationalism more than Hitler: "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004, for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history… Not even Hitler chose war in 1939 to enhance or reaffirm his popularity with the German people, not at all." [p. 211] Nevertheless, Lukacs refuses to predict that the "new barbarism all around us…will inevitably overwhelm us." [p. 242] When in despair, he recalls Edmund Burke, who said: "He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." [pp. 242-243] Thus, he concludes, "Hitler and Stalin are gone, and George W. Bush will soon be gone, too; but then so are their German National Socialism and their Communism and so will be his 'conservatism.'" [p. 243] Yet, the question remains: "How much more damage will Bush's National Socialism inflict on America and the world before it is tossed on the trash heap of history?" City Pages: Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point? Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name. And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat. CP: You've observed many times in your writing that the United States has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) than citizens? Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda machine that we have no class system…We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so many farms in the '30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and pieces, which we have done. If we don't have class interests officially, then therefore we have no political parties… CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into spectators of this process? Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't. Paul Krugman, NY Times: Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself. We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous… Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs. And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation… But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer… America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here. Editorial, The Nation: Apologists for these egregious compromises would have us believe that Democrats, as a minority party, have little leverage. But the Social Security debate belies such claims; with Democrats sticking together against privatization, it is the Republicans who have found themselves under pressure to compromise. The same goes for the Democratic refusal to give ground on ethics issues, which has done so much to increase pressure on scandal-plagued House majority leader Tom DeLay. Unfortunately, shows of solidarity on Social Security and ethics issues represent the exception rather than the rule when it comes to checking and balancing the White House and its Congressional allies. Again and again Democrats have failed the basic tests of an opposition party. They couldn't muster the forty votes needed to mount a Senate filibuster against Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General, only twelve Democrats opposed the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State and none opposed the nomination of Michael Chertoff to head the Department of Homeland Security, despite concerns about Rice and Chertoff that were as troubling as those regarding Gonzales's role in approving torture. House Democrats have been even less effective in their opposition than their Senate colleagues. Despite polls showing that the vast majority of Americans opposed federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, only fifty-three Democrats opposed DeLay's move to override Florida state law and judicial rulings in a rush to satisfy the demands of the GOP's most extreme constituencies. Only thirty-six opposed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which Representative Jan Schakowsky correctly identified as a move to "put Big Brother in charge of deciding what is art and what is free speech." And just thirty-nine rejected the Administration's demand for another $81.4 billion to maintain the occupation of Iraq and related military misadventures. Theft of the 2004 Election Rob Zaleski, Madison Capital Times: Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it." He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around. "I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this week. Well, sorry guys, but he can't. There were, Joiner says, too many things that occurred on Nov. 2 that "still don't smell right." He can't just pretend everything is rosy, he says, when he reads that Steven Freeman, a respected University of Pennsylvania professor, says the odds of the exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were about 662,000 to 1. Thom Hartmann: "Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines." The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S. Presumably the "mother machines" Teresa was talking about are the "central tabulator" computers, like the Windows-based Diebold central tabulator PC that Howard Dean hacked into and untraceably changed an election on - in 90 seconds - live on the "Topic A With Tina Brown" CNBC TV show late last year. As Dean noted while hacking the Diebold machine on national television, "In 1998, only 7% of all U.S. counties used electronic voting machines." But, Dean noted of the 2004 race, "in the next presidential election, roughly 1 in 3 of us will use one Complicity of the Corporatist News Media Scott Galindez, www.truthout.org: If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it." Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary." CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville. Editors & Publishers: Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer fired over "Rathergate,” has inked a deal to tell her side of the scandal, reportedly for a high six-figure sum. The publisher, St. Martin's Press, beat out a reported half a dozen others. It announced today that the book would come out in the fall with a tentative title of “The Other Side of the Story.” St. Martin's said that Mapes "will chronicle what really happened at CBS and reveal the corporate, political and ideological agendas that threaten the integrity of journalists and the news." Mapes was fired Jan. 10 after an independent panel found CBS rushed the "Bush memo" story on the air without proving that documents were real. Mapes insists the story was accurate, and that the documents were not forged. Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., MediaChannel.org: Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line. The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help. www.buzzflash.com: How could the Executive Editor of the New York Times be the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week? I mean after all, the Times endorsed Kerry and, as BuzzFlash has noted, generally posts traditionally liberal editorials. And, BuzzFlash links to New York Times articles almost everyday. So, is BuzzFlash.com being disingenuous for naming the Executive Editor of the New York Times our GOP Hypocrite of the Week? No, not at all. Because, Bill Keller is a prime example of a mainstream newspaper editor who doesn't appear to read his own paper's editorials or learn much from its occasional news stories that point out the daily failures and lies of the Bush Administration. As we noted in a recent BuzzFlash editorial, the United States citizens need an investigative reporter to break open the untold story of the subservience of the mainstream press to the Bush Administration. In that editorial, we lay out some of our case as to why Keller is a Republican White House lackey and note: "If the role of journalism is to challenge authority by seeking out the truth behind the official statements, the New York Times fails miserably, with a few exceptions here and there. It in no way conveys the radicalism of the people in the White House, nor runs longer investigative pieces on their chronic deceptions and dishonesty. It pretty much accepts their news handouts at face value." Former Ambassador Joe Wilson noted that the mainstream media seems to think that presenting a fact from a critic, you need to balance it with a lie from the White House. The media pretends that they can't make a judgment between two competing claims to "facts," even when one side (the Bush "spin of the day") can easily be shown to be a lie. Furthermore, the New York Times news pages don't in anyway take into account the unprecedented totalitarian-state-like manipulation of the media that has been undertaken by the Bush administration. On a daily basis, the New York Times news section tacitly participates in this propaganda machine, the likes of which hasn't been around since Goebbels or the former Soviet Union. Editorial, Madison Capital Times: James Madison warned more than two centuries ago, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." …American media have become a cesspool of political spin, product placement and celebrity gossip. Popular information that matters, and the means of acquiring it, is being choked off by the handful of corporations that have come to control the vast majority of American broadcast and print communications. And the consolidation of media ownership - about which the founder of this newspaper, William T. Evjue, began warning in 1917 - is growing dramatically more problematic. In other words, Madison is being proven right as we watch and listen and read media that serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy while denying the vast majority of American citizens the power that knowledge gives. The tragedy is evident in a war that was sold as both easy and necessary but that continues to claim Iraqi and American lives and that it emptying the public treasury of the funds that should pay for schools, health care and other basic needs. The farce is evident in the Bush presidency, which continues despite the evidence of deceit, mismanagement and a worldview so warped that it has made America a more hated country than at any time in her history. If America had better media, we would have a better president. And we would not be stuck in the quagmire that is Iraq. Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security William O. Beeman, www.truthout.org: Iran's security chief, Hassan Rowhani proclaimed in October, 2004 that it was in Iran's best interest for George W. Bush to be re-elected over John Kerry. His comment left American commentators stunned in disbelief. However, it is now clear that Rowhani was right: the Bush administration has done more than any other American leader to advance the interests of Shi'a Islamic political leadership in Iran and indeed, in the rest of the Middle East. Some groups of religious supporters in Iran are beginning to call President Bush "the 13th Imam," an ironic reference to the 12 historical Imams sacred to the branch of Shi'ism dominant in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. President Bush's support for Shi'ism may be unintentional, to be sure, but there is no doubt about the effects of his administration's policies in boosting Shi'ite power throughout the region. The Bush administration has lent massive help to the Iranian economy by allowing U.S. corporations to circumvent the Clinton-era economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic… Josh Meyer, LA Times: A federal criminal investigation has uncovered evidence that the government of Pakistan made clandestine purchases of U.S. high-technology components for use in its nuclear weapons program in defiance of American law. Federal authorities also say the highly specialized equipment at one point passed through the hands of Humayun Khan, an Islamabad businessman who they say has ties to Islamic militants. Even though President Bush has been pushing for an international crackdown on such trafficking, efforts by two U.S. agencies to send investigators to Pakistan to gather more evidence have hit a bottleneck in Washington, said officials knowledgeable about the case. Robert Scheer, LA Times: Consider this dizzying series of Bush II-era actions: We have thrown away thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars after crying wolf on Iraq's long-defunct nuclear weapons program and now expect the world to believe similar scary stories about neighboring Iran. We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen. We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan. Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China. The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Eric Lichtblau, NY Times: Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show. The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show… The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times. The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden. Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security Jonathan Stempel, Reuters: Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest person, last year increased his bet against the U.S. dollar 78 percent to $21.4 billion, resulting in a $1.84 billion gain. He also said he would be happy if his bet were to fail. In his annual letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) (BRKb.N: Quote, Profile, Research) holding company, the 74-year-old said Berkshire held $21.4 billion of foreign currency contracts spread among 12 currencies. A year earlier, Berkshire had $12 billion of contracts over five currencies. Buffett is concerned that U.S. policies are causing trade and budget deficits to spiral higher and might cause non-U.S. investors to pull money out of the country. This, he said, will put downward pressure on the dollar, which already trades near lifetime or multi-year lows against several major currencies. Last year, the U.S. trade deficit rose 24 percent to a record $617.7 billion. Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security Steve Connor, Independent/UK: One of Britain's most eminent scientists has attacked President Bush for acting like a latter-day Nero who fiddles while the world burns because of global warming. Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said the Bush administration must accept the case has been made about the link between man-made pollution and climate change. Continuing to deny the impact of human activities on the environment may ultimately have catastrophic consequences for everyone on the planet, he said. The Royal Society has calculated that the 13 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions from the United States since 1990 will dwarf the cuts resulting from all other countries that will follow the Kyoto protocol. In a speech to policy-makers in Berlin today, Lord May will also castigate elements within the British media who promote "misleading" opinions about the true nature of the scientific uncertainties surrounding climate change. "If the public are misled into thinking climate change does not pose a serious potential threat, some policy-makers could more easily find an excuse not to act. The United States administration has shown that this is the case," Lord May said. "All countries must accept the case has been made ... We need to ensure our own leaders and opinion-formers in the media are not allowed to act as modern-day Neros over climate change, fiddling while the world burns," Lord May said. The War is Iraq is Worse than Immoral or Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid Greg Palast, www.truthout.org: Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists." "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US. An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat… The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan, crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas… Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved." The chosen successor to Mr Carroll, a Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state oil company preferred by the industry. Italian hostage accuses US of trying to kill her as thousands mourn her rescuer John Hooper, Guardian/UK: Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the far-left daily Il Manifesto, was wounded as bullets ripped into the car taking her to Baghdad airport to be flown out of Iraq. In a vivid account, written for her newspaper, she described how Nicola Calipari, the international operations chief of Italy's military intelligence service, was shot in the head as he tried to shield her. "I heard his last breath as he died on top of me," she wrote. Amid a growing sense of anger, disbelief and sorrow in Italy, about 10,000 people filed through Rome's Victor Emmanuel monument yesterday to pay respects to Mr Calipari, whose body lay in state. He will receive a state funeral today. JERRY FRESIA, www.counterpunch.com: The top U.S. general in Iraq, Army gen. George Casey, has stated that the US had no indication that Italian officials gave advance notice of the route of the vehicle in which Giuliana Sgrena and slain officer Nicola Calipari were riding. As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I would argue that this statement is absolutely ludicrous. Based upon intelligence collection capabilities of even 3 decades ago, it is reasonable to assume that the US intercepted all phone communication between Italian agents in Iraq and Rome, monitored such traffic in real time and knew precisely where Sgrena's vehicle was at all times, without advanced notice being provided by Italian officials… I also believe that a clear motivation for preventing Sgrena from telling her story is quite evident. Let us recall that the first target in the second attack upon the city of Fallujah was al-Fallujah General Hospital. Why? It was the reporting of enormous civilian casualties from this hospital that compelled the US to halt its attack. In other words, the control of information from Fallujah as to consequences of the US assault, particularly with regard to civilians, became a critical element in the military operation… Information, based upon intelligence or the reporting of brave journalists, may be the most important weapon in the war in Iraq. From this point of view, the vehicle in which Nicola and Giuliana were riding wasn't simply a vehicle carrying a hostage to freedom. It is quite reasonable to assume, given the immorality of war and of this war in particular, that it was considered a military target. Naomi Klein on “Democracy Now!” reporting on Giuliana Sgrena: One of the things that we keep hearing is that she was fired on on the road to the airport, which is a notoriously dangerous road…And I was on that road myself, and it is a really treacherous place with explosions going off all the time and a lot of checkpoints. What Giuliana told me that I had not realized before is that she wasn't on that road at all. She was on a completely different road that I actually didn't know existed. It's a secured road that you can only enter through the Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for ambassadors and top military officials. So, when Calipari, the Italian security intelligence officer, released her from captivity, they drove directly to the Green Zone, went through the elaborate checkpoint process which everyone must go through to enter the Green Zone, which involves checking in obviously with U.S. forces, and then they drove onto this secured road. And the other thing that Giuliana told me that she's quite frustrated about is the description of the vehicle that fired on her as being part of a checkpoint. She says it wasn't a checkpoint at all. It was simply a tank that was parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, they were just -- it was just opening fire by a tank. The other thing she told me that was surprising to me was that they were fired on from behind. Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian U.K.: In the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted. Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were redoing the security council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world," Bolton once said. Lately, as undersecretary of state for arms control, he has wrecked all the nonproliferation diplomacy within his reach. Over the past two decades he has been the person most dedicated to trying to discredit the UN. George Orwell's clock of 1984 is striking 13. The euphoria that Bush's European trip marked a conversion on the road to Brussels is fading. For it was Bush himself who decided to reward Bolton with a position where he could continue his crusade as a "convinced Americanist" against the "globalists," especially those at the UN and the EU. Paul Krugman, NY Times: Dogmatic views about the universal superiority of free markets have been losing ground around the world. Latin Americans are the most disillusioned. Through much of the 1990's, they bought into the "Washington consensus" - which we should note came from Clinton administration officials as well as from Wall Street economists and conservative think tanks - which said that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to economic takeoff. Instead, growth remained sluggish, inequality increased, and the region was struck by a series of economic crises. The result has been the rise of governments that, to varying degrees, reject policies they perceive as made in America… Not long ago, the growing alienation of Latin America from the United States would have been considered a major foreign policy setback. So much has gone wrong lately that we've defined disaster down, but it's still not a good thing. Where does Mr. Wolfowitz fit into all this? The advice that the World Bank gives is as important as the money it lends - but only if governments take that advice. And given the ideological rigidity the Pentagon showed in Iraq, they probably won't. If Mr. Wolfowitz says that some free-market policy will help economic growth, he'll be greeted with as much skepticism as if he declared that some country has weapons of mass destruction. Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, says that the Wolfowitz nomination turns the World Bank into the American Bank. Make that ugly American bank: rightly or not, developing countries will see Mr. Wolfowitz's selection as a sign that we're still trying to impose policies they believe have failed. Nathan Guttman, www.haaretz.com: Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was reinstated a few weeks ago, after sitting at home for half a year and being barred from returning to his job on the Iranian desk in the Department of Defense's policy division. Franklin was at the center of a lengthy FBI investigation after suspicions arose that he transfered classified information about U.S. policy on Iran to members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). In the seven months since the affair made headlines on the CBS evening news, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps, but its ramifications are already being felt. While Franklin is back at work, and, say well-placed sources, is expected to reach a plea bargain, the spotlight has moved to the AIPAC officials - two senior members were suspended for the duration of the case and four other senior officials were forced to testify at length before the special investigative jury in Virginia (whose proceedings are classified) appointed for the case. John P. O’Neil Wall of Heroes Laura Zuckerman, Reuters: Montana's Democratic governor has touched off a political fight with state Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out during what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season. Newly elected Gov. Brian Schweitzer infuriated Republican lawmakers -- the minority party in state government for the first time in more than a decade -- who see his request as a back-door way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq. "He's figured out how to use the wildfire season to protest the Iraq war," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan said on Tuesday. "It's an anti-war statement and condemnation of Bush's actions." The governor and his supporters deny those charges in a growing political battle that comes as weather experts say a seven-year drought and a severely reduced snowpack could lead to a devastating summer of wildfires. Amy Feigenbaum, Weslyan Argus: Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress. Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses… Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power. "We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's." While his lecture gave a pessimistic view of the next four years, he did offer hope for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the last election, he noted an emerging pattern in the West, which he called community building. Our government needs new leadership, he said. The people need to support better politicians and than work to get these people elected. LLOYD AXWORTHY, Open Letter to Condi Rice, Winnipeg Free Press: I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world. These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states. To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto. To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan. And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices. On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will… There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water. Daniel Ellsberg, www.commondreams.org: The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago. For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and "ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell. Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later, could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its implications for their security? Kulchur War, Defense of Science, Separation of Church & State Juan Cole, www.juancole.com: The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model. Carol Marbin Miller, Miami Herald: Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Herald has learned. Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding. For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called ``a showdown.'' In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice. ''We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,'' said a source with the local police. www.mediamatters.com: In coverage of the Terri Schiavo case, CNN host Daryn Kagan and senior analyst Jeff Greenfield made sweeping assertions about public opinion of the case that are undermined by polling data.Following footage on the March 24 edition of CNN's Live Today of protestors urging the restoration of Schiavo's feeding tube, Kagan claimed that there are "a lot of people in this country agreeing with them that this would be a death without dignity." Kagan further claimed that there are "[s]trong, divided opinions across the country." In a report on CNN's Live From... on the impact of the widely aired videotapes of Schiavo, Greenfield stated, "Whatever the medical facts, it is not hard to understand why the average person, looking at those images [of Schiavo], sees them as at least raising doubt." Greenfield's remark followed footage of one of the doctors hired by Schiavo's parents claiming that Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state. …polls do indicate that on the case's central issue -- the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube -- the public is not as divided or as conflicted as Kagan and Greenfield suggest.. • In a March 22 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 52 percent of respondents agreed with that day's court decision to leave Schiavo's feeding tube unattached; 39 percent disagreed. • In a March 21-22 CBS News poll, 61 percent of respondents thought Schiavo's feeding tube should have been removed, while 28 percent thought it should have remained in place. Further, 66 percent did not think the feeding tube should be restored while 27 percent thought it should. Asked if Congress and the president should intervene in the Schiavo case, 82 percent said no; 13 percent said yes. Even among evangelicals, 68 percent felt that the president and Congress should stay out of the matter. In a March 20 ABC News poll, 63 percent of respondents said they support the March 18 court decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube while 28 percent were William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org:. It's the hypocrisy, stupid. It goes on and on and on, and it is exhausting in the extreme to consider, much less address and attack. Lately, the hypocrisy needle has been pegged over into the red. Leave it to the Republican majority to take an important issue, an issue filled with questions about medical ethics, the rights of the disabled people, the rights of spouses, the place of federalism in a national debate and the simple value of human life, and transmogrify it into a ghoulish circus sideshow best used to score political points and do a little fundraising on the side…Consider: • The Republicans, party of states rights, have bulldozed Florida law and the basic underpinnings of Federalism to take a hand in this matter. Florida law allows a spouse to stand surrogate when medical decisions of life and death are required, but since sticking to their states-rights guns would not give the conservatives the outcome they desire, they betrayed a central ethic of their political philosophy without batting an eye; • The Republicans, party of the sanctity of marriage, have taken over the role of husband in the process of knocking over their Federalist principles. Gay people getting married is a horrid affront to the sanctity of marriage, but the United States Congress finds no problem elbowing itself into the kitchen-table decisions made between a husband and a wife; • The Republicans, party of moral values, are enjoying an incredible fundraising opportunity in flogging the Schiavo story. One cannot swing one's cat by the tail without striking a plea for financial assistance from the far-right Republican-allied groups that have turned one family's plight into a river of cash; • Republicans, party of the 'Culture of Life,' have not one word to say about Sun Hudson. Hudson was a five-month-old baby born in Texas with a genetic disorder that required him to be sustained on machines. Thanks to a law signed by then-Governor Bush in 1999, Texas hospitals are allowed to remove patients from machines if they deem there is no hope, and if the patient's family cannot afford to sustain care. Sun Hudson was removed from his machines two weeks ago, over the thunderous outrage of his mother, and he died. Congressional Republicans were nowhere to be found when the life left his little body; • Republicans, party of Tom DeLay, have not one word to say about DeLay's staggering double standard in this matter. In 1988, DeLay's father was injured in an accident and left in a condition quite similar to that of Mrs. Schiavo. DeLay sat in private counsel with his family, heard the verdict of the doctors that his father would never recover, considered the stated wishes of his father that he did not want to be left to live sustained by machines should such a thing come to pass, and decided to let the man pass. Had a mob of self-righteous Congressional Democrats tried to batter their way into the decision-making process of the DeLay family in 1988, Tom would have likely attacked them with his bug-extermination equipment, and he would have been fully justified in doing so.