[Liberation News Service]: LNS Oceania Review (41/05): April Fool's Day Edition

[richard power]

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.