Clinton, 9/11, and the Facts

In this essay, William Rivers Pitt gives credit to the Clinton adminstration for their anti-terrorist efforts regarding al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden. He goes on to condemn the Bush administration for their failure to take steps to respond to, or even to acknowledge, the well-documented threat of muslim extremists:

Clinton, 9/11 and the Facts
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 30 August 2006

The fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is less than two weeks away, but the avalanche has already begun. Oliver Stone's film "World Trade Center" has been advertised in all corners and is being screened across the nation. CNN has announced that it intends, on the 11th, to rebroadcast all of the coverage of the attacks from 8:30 a.m. until midnight. If you don't have cable, they say, you can watch it for free on the CNN web site.

ABC intends to mark the occasion in far more grand a fashion. Starting September 10th and ending September 11th, the network will show a miniseries titled "The Path to 9/11." According to reports from early screenings, the writer/producer of the miniseries, Cyrus Nowrasteh, has crafted a television polemic intended to blame the entire event on President Clinton.

Nowrasteh, an outspoken conservative of Persian descent whose family fled Iran after the fall of the Shah, spoke last year at the Liberty Film Festival, described by its founders as Hollywood's first conservative film festival. Govindini Murty, actress, writer, and co-director of the Liberty Film Festival, wrote a review of "The Path to 9/11" for the right-wing online news page FrontPageMag.com.

In the review, Murty states, "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible. This is the first Hollywood production I've seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama bin Laden."

FrontPageMag, it should be noted, held a symposium back in May to argue that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which were never found despite being the main reason for invasion, were actually spirited out of Iraq by Russia on the eve of the 2003 attack. So it goes.

Leaving aside the wretched truth that the far right is once again using September 11 to score political points, the facts regarding the still-lingering effort to blame the Clinton administration for the attacks must be brought to the fore. Nowrasteh, at several points in his miniseries, rolls out a number of oft-debunked allegations that Clinton allowed Osama bin Laden to remain alive and free before the attacks.

Roger Cressy, National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism in the period 1999-2001, responded to these allegations in an article for the Washington Times in 2003. "Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaeda," wrote Cressy. "As President Bush well knows, bin Laden was and remains very good at staying hidden. The current administration faces many of the same challenges. Confusing the American people with misinformation and distortions will not generate the support we need to come together as a nation and defeat our terrorist enemies."

Measures taken by the Clinton administration to thwart international terrorism and bin Laden's network were historic, unprecedented and, sadly, not followed up on. Consider the steps offered by Clinton's 1996 omnibus anti-terror legislation, the pricetag for which stood at $1.097 billion. The following is a partial list of the initiatives offered by the Clinton anti-terrorism bill:

* Screen Checked Baggage: $91.1 million
* Screen Carry-On Baggage: $37.8 million
* Passenger Profiling: $10 million
* Screener Training: $5.3 million
* Screen Passengers (portals) and Document Scanners: $1 million
* Deploying Existing Technology to Inspect International Air Cargo: $31.4
million
* Provide Additional Air/Counterterrorism Security: $26.6 million
* Explosives Detection Training: $1.8 million
* Augment FAA Security Research: $20 million
* Customs Service: Explosives and Radiation Detection Equipment at Ports: $2.2 million
* Anti-Terrorism Assistance to Foreign Governments: $2 million
* Capacity to Collect and Assemble Explosives Data: $2.1 million
* Improve Domestic Intelligence: $38.9 million
* Critical Incident Response Teams for Post-Blast Deployment: $7.2 million
* Additional Security for Federal Facilities: $6.7 million
* Firefighter/Emergency Services Financial Assistance: $2.7 million
* Public Building and Museum Security: $7.3 million
* Improve Technology to Prevent Nuclear Smuggling: $8 million
* Critical Incident Response Facility: $2 million
* Counter-Terrorism Fund: $35 million
* Explosives Intelligence and Support Systems: $14.2 million
* Office of Emergency Preparedness: $5.8 million

The Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself. Within the National Security Council, "threat meetings" were held three times a week to assess looming conspiracies. His National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prepared a voluminous dossier on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, actively tracking them across the planet. Clinton raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave in the last three years of his tenure.

Clinton's dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous "wag the dog" tactics. The news networks actually broadcast clips of the movie "Wag the Dog" while reporting on his warnings, to accentuate the idea that everything the administration said was contrived fakery.

In Congress, Clinton was thwarted by the reactionary conservative majority in virtually every attempt he made to pass legislation that would attack al-Qaeda and terrorism. His 1996 omnibus terror bill, which included many of the anti-terror measures we now take for granted after September 11, was withered almost to the point of uselessness by attacks from the right; Senators Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were openly dismissive of the threats Clinton spoke of.

Specifically, Clinton wanted to attack the financial underpinnings of the al-Qaeda network by banning American companies and individuals from dealing with foreign banks and financial institutions that al-Qaeda was using for its money-laundering operations. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, gutted the portions of Clinton's bill dealing with this matter, calling them "totalitarian."

In fact, Gramm was compelled to kill the bill because his most devoted patrons, the Enron Corporation and its criminal executives in Houston, were using those same terrorist financial networks to launder their own dirty money and rip off the Enron stockholders. It should also be noted that Gramm's wife, Wendy, sat on the Enron Board of Directors.

Just before departing office, Clinton managed to make a deal with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to have some twenty nations close tax havens used by al-Qaeda. His term ended before the deal was sealed, and the incoming Bush administration acted immediately to destroy the agreement.

According to Time magazine, in an article entitled "Banking on Secrecy" published in October of 2001, Bush economic advisors Larry Lindsey and R. Glenn Hubbard were urged by think tanks like the Center for Freedom and Prosperity to opt out of the coalition Clinton had formed. The conservative Heritage Foundation lobbied Bush's Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, to do the same.

In the end, the lobbyists got what they wanted, and the Bush administration pulled out of the plan. The Time article stated, "Without the world's financial superpower, the biggest effort in years to rid the world's financial system of dirty money was short-circuited."

ABC's miniseries skates right over this, and likewise refuses to address the myriad ways in which the Bush administration failed completely to defend this nation from attack. All the efforts put forth by the Clinton administration were cast aside when Bush took office, simply because they wanted nothing to do with the outgoing government. Condoleezza Rice, by her own admission, did not even bother to look at the massive compendium of al-Qaeda data compiled by Sandy Berger until the morning of September 11.

After the attacks, virtually every member of the Bush administration put forth the talking point that, "No one could have anticipated anyone using airplanes as bombs." The facts tell a different story.

In 1993, a $150,000 study was undertaken by the Pentagon to investigate the possibility of airplanes being used as bombs. A draft document of this was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with the intention of crashing it into a company building. Again in 1994, a pilot crashed a small airplane into a tree on the White House grounds, narrowly missing the building itself. Also in 1994, an Air France flight was hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower.

The 1993 Pentagon report was followed up in September 1999 by a report titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism." This report was prepared for the American intelligence community by the Federal Research Division, an adjunct of the Library of Congress. The report stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to Al Qaida's martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."

Ramzi Yousef was one of the planners and participants in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Yousef's right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad, was captured and interrogated in 1995. During that interrogation, Murad described a detailed plot to hijack airplanes and use them as weapons of terrorism. The primary plan was to commandeer eleven commercial planes and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean. The secondary plan was to hijack several planes, which would be flown into CIA headquarters, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, the White House and a variety of other targets.

Ramzi Yousef eluded capture until his final apprehension in Pakistan. During his 1997 trial, the plot described by Murad resurfaced. FBI agents testified in the Yousef trial that, "The plan targeted not only the CIA, but other U.S. government buildings in Washington, including the Pentagon."

Abdul Hakim Murad described plans to use hijacked commercial airplanes as weapons in 1995. Ramzi Yousef's trial further exposed the existence of these plans in 1997. Two reports prepared by the American government, one from 1993 and another from 1999, further detailed again the existence and danger of these plots. The Federal Express employee's hijacking attempt in 1994, the attempted airplane attack on the White House in 1994, and the hijacking of the Air France flight in 1994 by terrorists intending to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower provided a glaring underscore to the data.

This data served to underscore the efforts made by the Clinton administration to combat international terrorism and attacks against the United States. Unfortunately, the data and the work that inspired it was not followed up on.

A mission statement from the internal FBI Strategic Plan, dated 5/8/98, describes the FBI's Tier One priority as 'counterterrorism.' The FBI, under the Clinton administration, was making counterterrorism its highest priority. The official annual budget goals memo from Attorney General Janet Reno to department heads, dated 4/6/2000, detailed how counterterrorism was her top priority for the Department of Justice. In the second paragraph, she states, "In the near term as well as the future, cybercrime and counterterrorism are going to be the most challenging threats in the criminal justice area. Nowhere is the need for an up-to-date human and technical infrastructure more critical."

Contrast this with the official annual budget goals memo from Attorney General John Ashcroft, dated 5/10/2001. Out of seven strategic goals described, not one mentions counterterrorism. An internal draft of the Department of Justice's plans to revamp the official DoJ Strategic Plan, dated 8/9/2001, describes Ashcroft's new priorities. The areas Ashcroft wished to focus on were highlighted in yellow. Specifically highlighted by Ashcroft were domestic violent crime and drug trafficking prevention. Item 1.3, entitled "Combat terrorist activities by developing maximum intelligence and investigative capability," was not highlighted.

There is the internal FBI budget request for 2003 to the Department of Justice, dated late August 2001. This was not the FBI's total budget request, but was instead restricted only to the areas where the FBI specifically requested increases over the previous year's budget. In this request, the FBI specifically asked for, among other things, 54 translators to transcribe the backlog of intelligence gathered, 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff, and 200 professional intelligence researchers. The FBI had repeatedly stated that it had a serious backlog of intelligence data it has gathered, but could not process the data because it did not have the staff to analyze or translate it into usable information. Again, this was August 2001.

The official Department of Justice budget request from Attorney General Ashcroft to OMB Director Mitch Daniels is dated September 10, 2001. This document specifically highlights only the programs slated for above-baseline increases or below-baseline cuts. Ashcroft outlined the programs he was trying to cut. Specifically, Ashcroft was planning to ignore the FBI's specific requests for more translators, counterintelligence agents and researchers. It additionally shows Ashcroft was trying to cut funding for counterterrorism efforts, grants and other homeland defense programs before the 9/11 attacks.

Along with these new priorities, which demoted terrorism significantly, there were the warnings delivered to the Bush administration about potential attacks against the United States. Newspapers in Germany, France, Russia and London reported in the months before September 11th a blizzard of warnings delivered to the Bush administration from a number of allies.

The German intelligence service, BND, warned American and Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack important American targets. Egypt warned of a similar plot to use airplanes to attack Bush during the G-8 summit in Genoa in June of 2001. This warning was taken so seriously that anti-aircraft missiles were deployed around Columbus Airport in Italy.

In August of 2001, Russian intelligence services notified the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself confirmed that this warning was delivered "in the strongest possible terms," specifically regarding threats to airports and government buildings.

In that same month, the Israeli security agency Mossad issued a warning to both the FBI and the CIA that up to 200 bin Laden followers were planning a major assault on America, aimed at vulnerable targets. The Los Angeles Times later confirmed via unnamed US officials that the Mossad warnings had been received.

On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush received his Presidential Daily Briefing. The briefing described active plots to attack the United States by Osama bin Laden. The word "hijacking" appeared in that briefing. Bush reacted to this warning by continuing with his month-long vacation in Texas.

Richard Clarke, former Director of Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council, has worked on the terrorist threat for the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations, amassing a peerless resume in the field. He became a central figure in the commission investigating the September 11 attacks. Clarke has laid bare an ugly truth: The administration of George W. Bush did not consider terrorism or the threat of al-Qaeda to be a priority prior to the attacks.

Clarke, along with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who as a member of the National Security Council was privy to military strategy meetings, indicated that the Bush administration was obsessed with an invasion of Iraq from the day it arrived in Washington. This obsession continued even after the attacks, despite the fact that the entire intelligence community flatly declared that Iraq was not involved.

Five years later, the questions surrounding what exactly happened on September 11, and why they were allowed to happen, remain unsettled. A recent national poll conducted by Scripps Howard/Ohio University states that more than one third of Americans believe that Bush's government either actively assisted in the 9/11 attacks, or allowed them to happen so as to create a justification for war in the Middle East.

The New York Post, reporting on this poll, stated, "Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be."

"Thirty-six percent of respondents overall," continued the Post, "said it is 'very likely' or 'somewhat likely' that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them 'because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.' 'One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right,' said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also called the 9/11 Commission). His Congressionally-appointed investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent, but did not participate in, the attacks by al-Qaeda five years ago. 'A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. 'Many say the government planned the whole thing.'"

The passage of time will, in all likelihood, finally expose the truth behind exactly what happened on September 11, and why. Until the moment of final revelation comes, however, we are all best served by a systematic analysis of the facts surrounding that dark day. Efforts such as this ABC miniseries to use 9/11 as a partisan club should be shunned, and hard data should be highlighted instead.

Back in 2003, CBS was forced to pull its miniseries "The Reagans," after conservative groups lambasted the network for crossing the line into advocacy against the Reagan administration. A similar effort should perhaps be undertaken to compel ABC to pull "The Path to 9/11." At no time should a conservative producer with an anti-Clinton axe to grind be allowed to use public airwaves to broadcast a rank distortion of the truth, especially on the anniversary of the worst day in our history.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006J.shtml

America's Rottweiler

America's Rottweiler
By Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom

Saturday 26 August 2006

In his latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one."

Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these are perhaps the most important words.

The main product of this war is hatred. The pictures of death and destruction in Lebanon entered every Arab home, indeed every Muslim home, from Indonesia to Morocco, from Yemen to the Muslim ghettos in London and Berlin. Not for an hour, not for a day, but for 33 successive days - day after day, hour after hour. The mangled bodies of babies, the women weeping over the ruins of their homes, Israeli children writing "greetings" on shells about to be fired at villages, Ehud Olmert blabbering about "the most moral army in the world" while the screen showed a heap of bodies.

Israelis ignored these sights, indeed they were scarcely shown on our TV. Of course, we could see them on Aljazeera and some Western channels, but Israelis were much too busy with the damage wrought in our Northern towns. Feelings of pity and empathy for non-Jews have been blunted here a long time ago.

But it is a terrible mistake to ignore this result of the war. It is far more important than the stationing of a few thousand European troops along our border, with the kind consent of Hizbullah. It may still be bothering generations of Israelis, when the names Olmert and Halutz have long been forgotten, and when even Nasrallah no longer remember the name Amir Peretz.

IN ORDER for the significance of Assad's words to become clear, they have to be viewed in a historical context.

The whole Zionist enterprise has been compared to the transplantation of an organ into the body of a human being. The natural immunity system rises up against the foreign implant, the body mobilizes all its power to reject it. The doctors use a heavy dosage of medicines in order to overcome the rejection. That can go on for a long time, sometimes until the eventual death of the body itself, including the transplant.

(Of course, this analogy, like any other, should be treated cautiously. An analogy can help in understanding things, but no more than that.)

The Zionist movement has planted a foreign body in this country, which was then a part of the Arab-Muslim space. The inhabitants of the country, and the entire Arab region, rejected the Zionist entity. Meanwhile, the Jewish settlement has taken roots and become an authentic new nation rooted in the country. Its defensive power against the rejection has grown. This struggle has been going on for 125 years, becoming more violent from generation to generation. The last war was yet another episode.

WHAT IS our historic objective in this confrontation?

A fool will say: to stand up to the rejection with a growing dosage of medicaments, provided by America and World Jewry. The greatest fools will add: There is no solution. This situation will last forever. There is nothing to be done about it but to defend ourselves in war after war after war. And the next war is already knocking on the door.

The wise will say: our objective is to cause the body to accept the transplant as one of its organs, so that the immune system will no longer treat us as an enemy that must be removed at any price. And if this is the aim, it must become the main axis of our efforts. Meaning: each of our actions must be judged according to a simple criterion: does it serve this aim or obstruct it?

According to this criterion, the Second Lebanon War was a disaster.

FIFTY NINE years ago, two months before the outbreak of our War of Independence, I published a booklet entitled "War or Peace in the Semitic Region". Its opening words were:

"When our Zionist fathers decided to set up a 'safe haven' in Palestine, they had a choice between two ways:

"They could appear in West Asia as a European conqueror, who sees himself as a bridge-head of the 'white' race and a master of the 'natives', like the Spanish Conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonists in America. That is what the Crusaders did in Palestine.

"The second way was to consider themselves as an Asian nation returning to its home - a nation that sees itself as an heir to the political and cultural heritage of the Semitic race, and which is prepared to join the peoples of the Semitic region in their war of liberation from European exploitation."

As is well known, the State of Israel, which was established a few months later, chose the first way. It gave its hand to colonial France, tried to help Britain to return to the Suez Canal and, since 1967, has become the little sister of the United States.

That was not inevitable. On the contrary, in the course of years there have been a growing number of indications that the immune system of the Arab-Muslim body is starting to incorporate the transplant - as a human body accepts the organ of a close relative - and is ready to accept us. Such an indication was the visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem. Such was the peace treaty signed with us by King Hussein, a descendent of the Prophet. And, most importantly, the historic decision of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian people, to make peace with Israel.

But after every huge step forward, there came an Israeli step backward. It is as if the transplant rejects the body's acceptance of it. As if it has become so accustomed to being rejected, that it does all it can to induce the body to reject it even more.

It is against this background that one should weigh the words spoken by Assad Jr., a member of the new Arab generation, at the end of the recent war.

AFTER EVERY single one of the war aims put forward by our government had evaporated, one after the other, another reason was brought up: this war was a part of the "clash of civilizations", the great campaign of the Western world and its lofty values against the barbarian darkness of the Islamic world.

That reminds one, of course, of the words written 110 years ago by the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in the founding document of the Zionist movement: "In Palestine, we shall constitute for Europe a part of the wall against Asia, and serve as the vanguard of civilization against barbarism." Without knowing, Olmert almost repeated this formula in his justification of his war, in order to please President Bush.

It happens from time to time in the United States that somebody invents an empty but easily digested slogan, which then dominates the public discourse for some time. It seems that the more stupid the slogan is, the better its chances of becoming the guiding light for academia and the media - until another slogan appears and supersedes it. The latest example is the slogan "Clash of Civilizations", coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1993 (taking over from the "End of History").

What clash of ideas is there between Muslim Indonesia and Christian Chile? What eternal struggle between Poland and Morocco? What is it that unifies Malaysia and Kosovo, two Muslim nations? Or two Christian nations like Sweden and Ethiopia?

In what way are the ideas of the West more sublime than those of the East? The Jews that fled the flames of the auto-da-fe of the Christian Inquisition in Spain were received with open arms by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The most cultured of European nations democratically elected Adolf Hitler as its leader and perpetrated the Holocaust, without the Pope raising his voice in protest.

In what way are the spiritual values of the United States, today's Empire of the West, superior to those of India and China, the rising stars of the East? Huntington himself was compelled to admit: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." In the West, too, women won the vote only in the 20th century, and slavery was abolished there only in the second half of the 19th. And in the leading nation of the West, fundamentalism is now also raising its head.

What interest, for goodness sake, have we in volunteering to be a political and military vanguard of the West in this imagined clash?

THE TRUTH is, of course, that this entire story of the clash of civilizations is nothing but an ideological cover for something that has no connection with ideas and values: the determination of the United States to dominate the world's resources, and especially oil.

The Second Lebanon War is considered by many as a "War by Proxy". That's to say: Hizbullah is the Dobermann of Iran, we are the Rottweiler of America. Hizbullah gets money, rockets and support from the Islamic Republic, we get money, cluster bombs and support from the United States of America.

That is certainly exaggerated. Hizbullah is an authentic Lebanese movement, deeply rooted in the Shiite community. The Israeli government has its own interests (the occupied territories) that do not depend on America. But there is no doubt that there is much truth in the argument that this was also a war by substitutes.

The US is fighting against Iran, because Iran has a key role in the region where the most important oil reserves in the world are located. Not only does Iran itself sit on huge oil deposits, but through its revolutionary Islamic ideology it also menaces American control over the near-by oil countries. The declining resource oil becomes more and more essential in the modern economy. He who controls the oil controls the world.

The US would viciously attack Iran even it were peopled with pigmies devoted to the religion of the Dalai Lama. There is a shocking similarity between George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The one has personal conversations with Jesus, the other has a line to Allah. But the name of the game is domination.

What interest do we have to get involved in this struggle? What interest do we have in being regarded - accurately - as the servants of the greatest enemy of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular?

We want to live here in 100 years, in 500 years. Our most basic national interests demand that we extend our hands to the Arab nations that accept us, and act together with them for the rehabilitation of this region. That was true 59 years ago, and that will be true 59 years hence.

Little politicians like Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are unable to think in these terms. They can hardly see as far as the end of their noses. But where are the intellectuals, who should be more far-sighted?

Bashar al-Assad may not be one of the world's Great Thinkers. But his remark should certainly give us pause for thought.

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Uri Avnery

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

JonBenet and American Politics

TV News Vultures Circling JonBenet's Corpse - Again
By Jeff Cohen
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 21 August 2006

The top story on TV news lately has not been the Iraq war or tentative Lebanon peace, or major court rulings on tobacco and warrantless wiretapping, or oil prices, or pension "reform," or any of a dozen stories that affect millions of citizens.

TV's top story - a new suspect in the decade-old murder of 6-year-old beauty princess JonBenet Ramsey - affects very few people.

But it has the potential of grabbing millions of us, as spectators. That's the beauty of the story to the owners and managers of TV news - my former bosses. They couldn't be more thrilled to see new life in the tabloid story of the death of Little Miss Colorado, a story they'd grudgingly given up on years ago.

In a media system dominated by entertainment conglomerates, it's no accident that we're served up a steady stream of "top" stories saturated by sex, violence and celebrity: OJ, Princess Di, JonBenet, JFK Jr., Condit/Levy, child abductions (especially upper-middle class blonde girls), Laci Peterson, the runaway bride, the missing teen in Aruba, etc.

Let's face it: The Murdochs and Disneys and Time Warners and GEs that own our media system much prefer a nation of mindless consumers and spectators over a nation of informed, active citizens. They like the fact that avid TV viewers know all the intimate details about the JonBenet or OJ murder cases - and almost nothing about how big corporations lobby against middle-class interests in Washington.

Best of all to TV news managers, tabloid stories are cheap to cover, especially when pundits or legal experts can fill up hours of time with their (often ridiculously wrong) speculation. And these are stories that can't possibly offend powerful forces in Washington, or advertisers.

In my new book, Cable News Confidential, I describe my years as a pundit at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. Their instinct toward tabloidism is like a junkie's impulse toward crack. I know what it's like to have to fill up airtime with speculation on a tabloid story when there's no news to report. And I've seen my share of innocent people accused of murder by on-air analysts who suffered no repercussions for the evidence-free accusations. (In the JonBenet case, her parents were repeatedly found guilty of murder on TV.)

In the summer of 2001, as terrorists went about plotting the 9/11 attacks, cable news was obsessed with one, and only one, huge story: the disappearance of DC intern Chandra Levy. She'd had an affair with Congressman Gary Condit, who was wrongly accused over and over on cable news of involvement in the murder. Levy was the apparent victim of random street crime.

In 2002, I spent hours on-air at MSNBC as the "Beltway sniper" terrorized the DC area with long-range rifle attacks. The one thing most experts were sure about in the weeks of speculation is that the culprit was white, and he was a loner. Wrong and wrong. There were two culprits, both black.

It was the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995 that had changed TV news forever. That's when management saw that "news," turned into soap opera, could actually compete with entertainment programming for ratings ... and was much cheaper to produce.

The next year, after MSNBC and Fox News had launched to compete with CNN, JonBenet was murdered. TV news thought it had its next OJ-type story, and the kiddie beauty pageant footage - looking creepily like kiddie-porn - began to run in an endless, exploitive loop. But the JonBenet case lost steam when no one was charged. The circus-trial never materialized. Thankfully, Monica Lewinsky burst on the scene and cable news went virtually all-Monica-all-the-time until Clinton's impeachment acquittal in 1999.

The Clinton acquittal left cable news in the doldrums again. But wait, a JonBenet grand jury was now stirring in Boulder. By October 1999, indictments were expected. For cable news, the long-coveted trial and ratings bonanza were finally at hand. All eyes were on Boulder. The prosecutor stepped to the mike and announced the grand jury's conclusion: There was insufficient evidence to charge anyone.

It was a crushing setback for TV news. I went on the air on Fox News and joked that we could expect "mass suicides" among cable news executives. My prediction was unfortunately wrong.

With the arrest of a murder suspect in Thailand, the tortured soul of JonBenet Ramsey is once again prey for TV news. She lived six sparkling years. And corporatized media has been able to feast on her death for many years since.

Today, TV news viewers are witnessing the spectacle of in-depth examination and wide-ranging debate about whether the JonBenet suspect is the real culprit - exactly the kind of depth and questioning that's usually missing on the big issues that affect millions of us: war and peace, economics, environmental degradation, Constitutional freedoms. If only we'd had such probing when the Bush crowd dragged our country into Iraq.

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Jeff Cohen is the founder of the media watch group FAIR, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Pete Hoekstra--The Argument for Attacking Iran

Just When You Thought You'd Seen Everything: Hoekstra's Hoax
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 25 August 2006

Talk about chutzpah! I was suffering a bit from outrage fatigue yesterday but was shaken out of it as soon as I downloaded an unusually slick paper, "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States," released this week by House intelligence committee chair, Pete Hoekstra.

No, not "Hoaxer." This is serious - very serious. The paper amounts to a pre-emptive strike on what's left of the Intelligence Community, usurping its prerogative to provide policymakers with estimates on front-burner issues - in this case, Iran's weapons of mass destruction and other threats. The Senate had already requested a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. But Hoekstra is first out of the starting gate. Professional intelligence officers were "as a courtesy" invited to provide input to Hoekstra's report.

While you can't judge a book by its cover, you can glean insight these days from the titles given to National Intelligence Estimates and papers meant to supplant them. Remember "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," the infamous NIE of October 1, 2002, by which Congress was misled into approving an unnecessary war? "Continuing" leaped out of the title, foreshadowing the one-sided thrust of an estimate ostensibly commissioned to determine whether WMD programs were "continuing," or whether they had been dead for ten years. (The latter turned out to be the case, but the title - and the cooked insides - provided the scare needed to get Congress aboard.)

Now suddenly appears a pseudo-estimate titled "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States." To wit, the challenge set before the Intelligence Community is to get religion, climb aboard, and "recognize" Iran as a strategic threat. But alas, the community has not yet been fully purged of recalcitrant intelligence analysts who reject a "faith-based" approach to intelligence and hang back from the altar call to revealed truth. Hence, the statutory intelligence agencies cannot be counted on to come to politically correct conclusions regarding the strategic threat from Iran.

Hoekstra to the Rescue

Pete Hoekstra apparently has set his sights on outstripping his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, for first honors as intelligence partisan of the year. Roberts, who has torpedoed all attempts to complete the long-promised study on whether the George W. Bush administration played fast and loose with intelligence on Iraq, is a formidable competitor, but Hoekstra is moving up steadily on the right. Tellingly, his zeal (and that of FOX News) recently found him well ahead of even Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing an Army report that units had dug up corroded canisters of chemical agent dating back decades, Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) insisted that weapons of mass destruction had indeed been found in Iraq. "We were right all the time!"

Shameless as Cheney and Rumsfeld have been in stretching the truth, not even they would go along with that one. No doubt they pledged to find more credible ways to shore up Santorum's flagging campaign to hang onto his Senate seat. One can understand the pressure on Santorum to find some deus ex machina to rescue his campaign. What was most remarkable was his ability to enlist the chair of the House intelligence committee in this charade and make him the laughingstock of Washington. Was Hoekstra unfamiliar with the donnybrook over the administration's fatuous claims of WMD in Iraq, and its eventual concession that there were none there? Where has he been?

As recently as May 4, in answer to a question after a speech in Atlanta, Rumsfeld conceded, "Apparently there were no weapons of mass destruction." Was Hoekstra so naive as to think he could pressure the administration into recanting its painful recantation and risk opening that still festering wound?

Undiminished Zeal

The snub by the administration has not affected Hoekstra's zeal to do its bidding, even if further embarrassment waits in the wings. He has violated all precedent in consenting to have his committee author this faux-National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, making it out to be a strategic threat. But a threat to whom? The answer leaps off the cover. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is pictured giving a Nazi-type salute behind a podium adorned with a wide poster (in English) "The world without Zionism." And atop the first page stands an Ahmadinejad quote: "The annihilation of the Zionist regime will come ... Israel must be wiped off the map ..."

The authors make a college try to persuade that Iran is also a threat to the US, but is singularly unpersuasive. Like Cheney's major speech of August 26, 2002, which provided the terms of reference and conclusions of the subsequent NIE of October 1, 2002, it merely asserts that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and probably has offensive chemical and biological weapons programs and "the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East." The text then tacks on for good measure Iranian support for terrorist groups and support for the insurgency in Iraq.

The paper gives most space to the nuclear issue (shades of the "mushroom cloud" conjured up before Congress voted to authorize war on Iraq in October 2002). But the best it can do in conjuring up a threat that most see as 5 to 10 years out is that a nuclear-armed Iran might be emboldened to "advance its aggressive ambitions in and outside of the region ... [and] ... threaten US friends and allies." Stretching still further, the authors argue that Iran might think that a nuclear arsenal might protect it from retaliation and thus would be "more likely to use force against US forces and allies in the region." Last, but hardly least: "Israel would find it hard to live with a nuclear armed Iran and could take military action against Iranian nuclear facilities."

Principal Author

The Hoekstra-issued draft bears the fingerprints of one Frederick Fleitz - the principal drafter, according to press reports. Fleitz did his apprenticeship on politicization under John Bolton when the latter was Under Secretary of State, and became his principal aide and chief enforcer while on loan from the CIA. In this light, his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy is even more inexcusable. CIA analysts, particularly those on detail to policy departments, have no business playing the enforcer of policy judgments; they have no business conjuring up "intelligence around the policy."

Fleitz must have flunked Ethics and Intelligence Analysis 101. For he is the same official who "explained" to State Department's intelligence analyst Christian Westermann that it was "a political judgment as to how to interpret" data on Cuba's biological weapons program (which existed only in Bolton's mind) and that the intelligence community "should do as we asked."

But Iran Doesn't Need Electricity

The authors include this familiar canard: "Iran's claim that its nuclear program is for electricity production appears doubtful in light of its large oil and natural gas reserves." But back in 1976 - with Gerald Ford president, Dick Cheney his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense, and Henry Kissinger national security adviser - the Ford administration bought the Shah's argument that Iran needed a nuclear program to meet its future energy requirements.

They persuaded the hesitant president to offer Iran a deal that would have meant at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric, had not the Shah been unceremoniously ousted three years later. The offer included a reprocessing facility for a complete nuclear fuels cycle - essentially the same capability that the US, Israel, and other countries now insist Iran cannot be allowed to acquire. Cheney must have forgotten all this, when he noted early last year that the Iranians are "already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy."

The Current Hype on Iran

Hoekstra's release of this paper is another sign pointing in the direction of a US attack on Iran. Tehran is now being blamed not only for inciting Hezbollah but also for sending improvised explosive devices (IEDs) into Iraq to kill or maim US forces. There is yet another, if more subtle, disquieting note about the paper. It bears the earmarks of a rushed job, with very little editorial scrubbing. There are misplaced modifiers, and verbs often do not take enough care to agree in number with their nouns.

One wag suggested that the president may have taken a direct hand in the drafting. My guess is even more troubling. It seems to me possible that the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal told Hoekstra to get the paper out sooner rather than later, as an aid to Americans in "recognizing Iran as a strategic threat."

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Wiretapping in America: The Moment of Decision is Near

Wiretapping in America: The Moment of Decision Is Near
By Bill Simpich
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 25 August 2006

Two district court rulings in the last month focus on whether the National Security Agency (NSA) will be free to eavesdrop on Americans as a matter of domestic policy. Since the end of World War II, the United States intelligence agencies have amassed a remarkable record of tiptoeing past the gaze of any watchdog, with the nation's courts always providing a large amount of slack. The odds are good that both of these cases will be heard by the United States Supreme Court before George Bush completes his term of office, if they are not mooted by the passage of the National Security Surveillance Act this autumn.

The outcome of these NSA cases and this autumn's Congressional vote will affect the entire future of this country. One case is a class action filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleging that AT&T has given the National Security Agency (NSA) secret, direct access to the phone calls and emails going over its network and handing over communications logs detailing the activities of millions of ordinary Americans. The government has intervened and demanded that the case be dismissed last month because the suit could expose "state secrets." Highly classified documents were transported under armed guard to San Francisco for viewing by Judge Walker. The plaintiffs' attorneys were not allowed to see the documents. Last month, US District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the case could go forward: "The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security."

Many other cases have now been consolidated with the EFF suit being heard in San Francisco under the aegis of Judge Walker, a Bush appointee who has a libertarian streak but is no civil rights activist. Walker has ruled against the Bush administration argument that the "state secrets" privilege is implicated, but it is virtually certain that his ruling will be stayed pending appeal to the Ninth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.

The second case is even more important, as it challenges Bush's power to order the NSA to engage in this eavesdropping. Bush will argue that he had the right to eavesdrop based on both the president's duty to protect the populace in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution and a 2001 "Authorization for Use of Military Force" issued by Bush himself pursuant to his inherent war powers in the Constitution.

This case was filed by the ACLU in Detroit, and there was a favorable ruling by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor on August 17 holding that "The defendants are permanently enjoined from directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in any way, including, but not limited to, conducting warrantless wiretaps of telephone and Internet communications, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III ..."

She further declared that the program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III." (Note: FISA regulates the government's collection of "foreign intelligence" information to assist US counterintelligence agencies, while Title III (also known as "the Wiretap Statute") sets forth the stricter guidelines over domestic law enforcement surveillance.

As in the AT&T case, Judge Taylor's ruling will undoubtedly be stayed until it is heard by the Supreme Court. Although her ruling was heavily criticized by both sides for being overly general and for cribbing large quotes from the Keith decision (discussed below), a review of the ruling indicates that the first-day critics did not have a good grasp of the facts. The judge's ruling had more vague statements than one would expect, precisely because the government refused to provide any significant facts to the judge that had not already been leaked by the New York Times and other media sources.

The reason that the stakes are so high in these cases is explained in the aphorism, "If the CIA is the eyes of US surveillance, the NSA is the ears." NSA's mission is to eavesdrop, through the use of the Internet, telephone calls, radio, and other intercepted forms of communication. Author James Bamford explains that one method is to "take entire streams of communications coming down from satellites, which can contain millions of communications, and they sort of intercept those communications with large dishes and filter the information through very quick computers that are loaded with names of people, words that they're looking for …" Bamford adds that if the communications are by microwave or undersea cable, the NSA can eavesdrop on all of these techniques, either using satellites in space or ground stations or submarines that can actually tap into undersea cables."

Many observers have stated that it is apparent that Bush wants to attack a Vietnam-era ruling known as "Keith" - rather than the rather exotic "US v. US District Court" - relied on by Judge Taylor in last week's ruling. Judge Damon Keith was the courageous Michigan district court judge who ruled against government wiretapping of White Panther activists Pun Plamondon, John Sinclair and John Forrest, despite Nixon's contention that it was necessary for "national security." In a landmark decision, Judge Keith held that the Fourth Amendment and case law flatly prohibited the federal government from conducting electronic surveillance without a court order. President Nixon challenged Keith all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost in a unanimous decision in 1972.

Many Washington insiders believe that the Keith decision was key in Nixon's resignation, as after the Supreme Court had reached its decision on Friday, June 16, 1972, there was a leak that the decision would be announced publicly on Monday, June 19. Members of the Committee to Reelect the President had previously installed bugs at offices of Democrats in the Watergate Building. The thinking goes that in view of the impending Supreme Court ruling, the White House ordered that the bugs be removed. Howard Hunt and the rest of Nixon's Plumbers came to the Watergate on Saturday night. The fallout from the break-in was what led to Nixon's resignation in 1974, and then to the investigation of the NSA itself in 1975 that exposed the rogue role of the NSA.

In the post-Watergate atmosphere, the Church Committee took a hard look at the NSA for the first time. It emerged that from its inception in 1952 until mid-70s, the NSA worked hand in glove with Western Union in "Operation Shamrock," reading every telegram that came in and out of the United States (Statement of James Bamford, Democracy Now!, 12/19/2005). Even more insidious was the exposure of "Operation Minaret," revealing that between 1970 and 1975, the agency also monitored the calls of thousands of anti-Vietnam War protesters who were violating no laws (Statement of James Bamford).

After these revelations became public and during the Church Committee hearings in 1975, there was serious talk of prosecuting NSA higher-ups. Because of the institutional difficulties in prosecuting intelligence officers, the government opted to enact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and then the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to act as a firewall (Bamford). For the first time in US history, a super-secret court was created to provide a stamp of approval on intelligence eavesdropping.

Until recently, the FISA court was a rubber stamp. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the court denied "only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered [by the FISA court] which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

"But since 2001," the Post Intelligencer continues, "the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered 'substantive modifications' took place in 2003 and 2004 - the most recent years for which public records are available." Even this tiny amount of independence was apparently too much for the Bush administration and the intelligence establishment.

Legal commentator Eugene Volokh points out that the Keith opinion concluded that there was no national security exception to the Fourth Amendment for evidence collection involving domestic organizations, but expressly held open the possibility that such an exception existed for foreign intelligence collection. (Volokh Conspiracy blog, 8/17/2006). Without judges like William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and William Douglas on the bench, the ruling could be quite different on this score.

Nations around the world are highly alarmed by the NSA's unlimited powers. A report issued by the European Parliament in January 1998 revealed a giant US spy technology network, known as ECHELON, that tracks telephone, fax and email information throughout the world, but particularly in the European Union (EU) and Japan. (Steve Wright, An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, European Parliament: Scientific and Technologies Options Assessment, Luxembourg, January 6, 1998. Also see Bruno Giussani, "European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses," The New York Times, February 24, 1998.) What makes a bad situation even worse, according to famed attorney Martin Garbus, is that when the Bush administration admitted to this wiretapping, the claim was that "it was wiretaps for surveillance between domestics and people overseas. Now, they've admitted it's the wiretapping and investigation of people within the Unted States, domestic calls to domestic calls." The import of Garbus's remark is clear. By the time this case gets to the Supreme Court, the integrity of the Keith decision itself may be in question. Simultaneously, Senator Arlen Specter has introduced S 2453 to be heard this autumn, the National Security Surveillance Act, which would increase the president's authority to act outside of FISA, eliminate the longstanding exclusivity of FISA, and allow the president to exercise unchecked authority to wiretap American citizens and enter their homes without a warrant. Will the American people be indefinitely subjected to secret government eavesdropping? Does Congress have the gumption to tie the hands of the NSA if the Supreme Court goes the wrong way? Or is the USA prepared to admit that there is simply no way to control its intelligence agencies?

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Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney specializing in suits against confidence artists both in and out of government. He is a resident of San Francisco and active in United for Peace and Justice and the upcoming Declaration of Peace mobilization to take place September 21-28, 2006, in Washington, DC, and throughout the country.

The Record of George W.

GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington , DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

LAW ENFORCEMENT
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the
influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's
license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost"
and is not available.

MILITARY
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take
a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the
Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

COLLEGE
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a
cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE
I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business
in Midland, Texas , in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find
any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my
stock.
I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took
land using taxpayer money. With the help of my father and our friends in
the oil industry, including Enron CEO Ken Lay, I was elected governor of
Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS
I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies,
shortly thereafter, Texas earned notoriety as the most polluted state in
the Union .
During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden
city in America.
I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions
in borrowed money.
I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American
history.
With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's
appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by
over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT
I am the first President in U.S . history to enter office with a
criminal record.
I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one
billion dollars per week.
I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.
I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.
I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any
12-month period.
I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.
I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the
U.S. stock market.
In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and
that trend continues every month.
I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any
administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza
Rice, had a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
I set the record for most campaign fundraising trips by a U.S.
President. I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving
the most corporate campaign donations.
My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends,
Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in
U.S. History, Enron.
My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to
assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election
decision.
I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against
investigation or prosecution.
More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair
than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs
in history.
I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused
to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.
I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.
I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded
government contracts.
I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any
President in U.S. history.
I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in
the history of the United States government.
I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S.
history.
I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations
remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.
I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law. I refused to allow
inspectors access to U.S . "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have
refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.
I endorsed the torture of prisoners in US custody
I presided over the Abu Ghraib prison torture fiasco, possibly the
biggest embarrassment the US has ever suffered.
I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election
inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).
I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any
President since the advent of t elevision.
I set the all- time record for most days on vacation in any one-year
period.
After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst
security failure in U.S. history.
I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center
attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country
in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.
I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to
simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people),
shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of
mankind.
I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked,
pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I
did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S.
citizens, and the world community.
I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in
duty benefits for active duty troop s and their families-in-wartime.
In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking
Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.
I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans
(71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and
security.
I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a
WMD.
I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to
justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES
All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's
library, sealed and unavailable for public view.
All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my
bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public
view.
All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President,
attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and
unavailable for public review.
I am a member of the Republican Party.


PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTIONS

The case for universal health care in the U.S.

The Case For Single Payer, Universal Health Care For The United States

Outline of Talk Given To The Association of State Green Parties, Moodus, Connecticut on June 4, 1999

By John R. Battista, M.D. and Justine McCabe, Ph.D.



1. Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care as a right of citizenship? The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems, while 1 (Germany) has a multipayer universal health care system like President Clinton proposed for the United States.

2. Myth One: The United States has the best health care system in the world.

* Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990

* Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960

* Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.

* Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana

* Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.

* Conclusion: The United States ranks poorly relative to other industrialized nations in health care despite having the best trained health care providers and the best medical infrastructure of any industrialized nation

3. Myth Two: Universal Health Care Would Be Too Expensive

* Fact One: The United States spends at least 40% more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care

* Fact Two: Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting office show that single payer universal health care would save 100 to 200 Billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits.

* Fact Three: State studies by Massachusetts and Connecticut have shown that single payer universal health care would save 1 to 2 Billion dollars per year from the total medical expenses in those states despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits

* Fact Four: The costs of health care in Canada as a % of GNP, which were identical to the United States when Canada changed to a single payer, universal health care system in 1971, have increased at a rate much lower than the United States, despite the US economy being much stronger than Canada’s.

* Conclusion: Single payer universal health care costs would be lower than the current US system due to lower administrative costs. The United States spends 50 to 100% more on administration than single payer systems. By lowering these administrative costs the United States would have the ability to provide universal health care, without managed care, increase benefits and still save money

4. Myth Three: Universal Health Care Would Deprive Citizens of Needed Services

* Fact One: Studies reveal that citizens in universal health care systems have more doctor visits and more hospital days than in the US

* Fact Two: Around 30% of Americans have problem accessing health care due to payment problems or access to care, far more than any other industrialized country. About 17% of our population is without health insurance. About 75% of ill uninsured people have trouble accessing/paying for health care.

* Fact Three: Comparisons of Difficulties Accessing Care Are Shown To Be Greater In The US Than Canada (see graph)

* Fact Four: Access to health care is directly related to income and race in the United States. As a result the poor and minorities have poorer health than the wealthy and the whites.

* Fact Five: There would be no lines under a universal health care system in the United States because we have about a 30% oversupply of medical equipment and surgeons, whereas demand would increase about 15%

* Conclusion: The US denies access to health care based on the ability to pay. Under a universal health care system all would access care. There would be no lines as in other industrialized countries due to the oversupply in our providers and infrastructure, and the willingness/ability of the United States to spend more on health care than other industrialized nations.

5. Myth Four: Universal Health Care Would Result In Government Control And Intrusion Into Health Care Resulting In Loss Of Freedom Of Choice

* Fact One: There would be free choice of health care providers under a single payer universal health care system, unlike our current managed care system in which people are forced to see providers on the insurer’s panel to obtain medical benefits

* Fact Two: There would be no management of care under a single payer, universal health care system unlike the current managed care system which mandates insurer preapproval for services thus undercutting patient confidentiality and taking health care decisions away from the health care provider and consumer

* Fact Three: Although health care providers fees would be set as they are currently in 90% of cases, providers would have a means of negotiating fees unlike the current managed care system in which they are set in corporate board rooms with profits, not patient care, in mind

* Fact Four: Taxes, fees and benefits would be decided by the insurer which would be under the control of a diverse board representing consumers, providers, business and government. It would not be a government controlled system, although the government would have to approve the taxes. The system would be run by a public trust, not the government.

* Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care administered by a state public health system would be much more democratic and much less intrusive than our current system. Consumers and providers would have a voice in determining benefits, rates and taxes. Problems with free choice, confidentiality and medical decision making would be resolved

6. Myth Five: Universal Health Care Is Socialized Medicine And Would Be Unacceptable To The Public

* Fact One: Single payer universal health care is not socialized medicine. It is health care payment system, not a health care delivery system. Health care providers would be in fee for service practice, and would not be employees of the government, which would be socialized medicine. Single payer health care is not socialized medicine, any more than the public funding of education is socialized education, or the public funding of the defense industry is socialized defense.

* Fact Two: Repeated national and state polls have shown that between 60 and 75% of Americans would like a publicly financed, universal health care system

* Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care is not socialized medicine and would be preferred by the majority of the citizens of this country

7. Myth Six: The Problems With The US Health Care System Are Being Solved and Are Best Solved By Private Corporate Managed Care Medicine because they are the most efficient

* Fact One: Private for profit corporation are the lease efficient deliverer of health care. They spend between 20 and 30% of premiums on administration and profits. The public sector is the most efficient. Medicare spends 3% on administration.

* Fact Two: The same procedure in the same hospital the year after conversion from not-for profit to for-profit costs in between 20 to 35% more

* Fact Three: Health care costs in the United States grew more in the United States under managed care in 1990 to 1996 than any other industrialized nation with single payer universal health care

* Fact Four: The quality of health care in the US has deteriorated under managed care. Access problems have increased. The number of uninsured has dramatically increased (increase of 10 million to 43.4 million from 1989 to 1996, increase of 2.4% from 1989 to 1996- 16% in 1996 and increasing each year).

* Fact Five: The level of satisfaction with the US health care system is the lowest of any industrialized nation.

* Fact Six: 80% of citizens and 71% of doctors believe that managed care has caused quality of care to be compromised

* Conclusion: For profit, managed care can not solve the US health care problems because health care is not a commodity that people shop for, and quality of care must always be compromised when the motivating factor for corporations is to save money through denial of care and decreasing provider costs. In addition managed care has introduced problems of patient confidentiality and disrupted the continuity of care through having limited provider networks.

8. Overall Answer to the questions Why doesn’t the US have single payer universal health care when single payer universal health care is the most efficient, most democratic and most equitable means to deliver health care? Why does the United States remain wedded to an inefficient, autocratic and immoral system that makes health care accessible to the wealthy and not the poor when a vast majority of citizens want it to be a right of citizenship?

Conclusion: Corporations are able to buy politicians through our campaign finance system and control the media to convince people that corporate health care is democratic, represents freedom, and is the most efficient system for delivering health care

9. What you can do about this through your state Green Party

* Work to pass a single payer, universal health care bill or referendum in your state. State level bills and referenda will be most effective because a federal health care system might in fact be too bureaucratic, and because it is not politically realistic at this time.

* Bills or referendum must be written by and supported by health care providers for the legislature to take them seriously. It is thus imperative to form an alliance with provider groups. The most effective provider group to go through is Physicians For A National Health Program which has chapters in every state (see hand out for partial listing of contact people). A number of states already have organized single payer efforts: Massachusetts, California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Maryland. Join with them.

* A first step is to contact state representatives from PNHP and offer to join with them to write and support a bill bringing single payer, universal health care to your state if this has not already been done. The Connecticut and Massachusetts Bills can be used as models to make this task easier (email us at riverbnd@javanet.com and we will send you copies of the bills). A referendum is another way to go, in which case the California referendum can be used as a model.

* A second step is to contact state legislators and find a group who are willing to sponsor such a bill.

* A third step is to create a coalition of groups to work together to support and publicize this work, or to try to bring together existing groups to work together on this project. Labor unions, progressive democratic groups, Medicare/Senior Advocacy groups, the Labor Party, the Reform Party, UHCAN, existing health care advocacy groups, and state health care provider groups are all imporatnt to work with and get to join such a coalition. The state medical society and state hospital association are critical to work with in order to get any legislation passed. Try to get them to work with you to design a new model for health care delivery. They will be particularly concerned about who will control the system, and be very mistrustful of government. A public trust model with participation by providers, hospitals, business, the public and government is like to be much more acceptable to them than a pure government system. Emphasize doing away with managed care, and get them to try and work with you to find other ways to control costs (necessary to convince politicians) such as quality assurance standards, which will also protect them from malpractice

* A fourth step is to give talks in support of your bill or referendum where ever possible. Senior groups, medical staffs, church groups, high school assemblies, and labor unions are particularly good sources. Excellent materials including slides, a chart book and videos are available through PNHP.

* A fifth step is to raise money through fund raisers, contributions and benefits held by entertainers. Benefits are particularly useful in bringing out people who you can inform about single payer, universal health care and your efforts.

* A sixth step is to develop media access. The creation of videos that can be shown on local cable access TV stations is very effective. Newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and articles by the press are critical. Radio interviews and radio talk shows are important.

* Getting the public to write and call their state representatives in support of a proposed bill is critical, as is coordinating testimony at a public hearing.

* Because the data about single payer universal health care are so revealing of the problems with corporate America, and because the US citizenry is so concerned and dissatisfied with our health care system these efforts may yield surprisingly positive results and be helpful in establishing the Green Party in the US as a party of the people, by the people and for the people.

We would be happy to help you. Contact us by email at riverbnd@javanet.com, by phone at 860-354-1822, or by mail at 88 Cherniske Road, New Milford, CT 06776



http://www.worldpolicy.org/globalrights/econrights/canada-health.html

Bush Failures on Homeland Security

Hokum on Homeland Security
The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 20 August 2006

Ever since British intelligence did such a masterly job in rounding up terrorists intent on blowing up airliners, the Bush administration has relentlessly tried to divert attention from the disintegration in Iraq and focus instead on its supposed prowess in protecting our country against terrorist attacks. That ploy ought not to wash. While the administration has been pouring its energies and money into Iraq, it has fallen far behind on steps needed to protect the homeland.

You would not know that from listening to the president or other top officials in recent days. In a tour of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia last week, President Bush declared that "America is safer than it has been" and assured Americans that "we're doing everything in our power to protect you."

If only that were so. The sad truth is that while some important steps have been taken to harden our defenses against terrorist attacks, gaping holes remain in our security net.

For starters, consider aviation, where billions have been spent to improve airline and airport security, with only middling results. The likelihood that terrorists will be able to hijack passenger jets as they did on 9/11 has been greatly reduced by hardening cockpit doors, arming pilots on some routes and placing many more air marshals on flights. The screening of all passengers, their carry-on bags and their checked luggage has also made it much harder to smuggle standard bombs or metallic weapons aboard.

But there is still no system to detect liquid explosives, a shocking deficiency more than a decade after terrorists were caught preparing to use such explosives to bring down a dozen airliners over the Pacific Ocean. The installation of "puffer" machines to detect trace explosives is lagging, and a program to integrate explosive-detection machines into the automated baggage conveyor systems at airports will not be finished, at the current pace of spending, for another 18 years.

Very little of the commercial air cargo that is carried aboard planes is screened or inspected, mostly because neither the shippers nor the airlines want to disrupt this lucrative flow of business. There is still no unified watch list to alert airlines to potentially dangerous passengers, and a prescreening program that would match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists remains stuck in development. All this in the industry that has received the most lavish attention since 9/11.

Even worse gaps remain in other areas. Port security relies primarily on certifying that cargo shipments are safe before they are loaded on freighters headed for this country. Only a small percentage of containers are screened once they hit our shores, raising the fearsome possibility that a nuclear or biological weapon might be smuggled in and detonated here.

Programs to keep dangerous nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union out of the hands of terrorists through greater security are moving so slowly that it will take another 14 years to complete the job. This is reckless beyond belief when nuclear terrorism is the most frightening prospect of all.

On the industrial front, the nation's chemical plants, perhaps the most lethal and vulnerable of all our manufacturing complexes, remain dangerously underdefended, mostly because the government has been unwilling to compel private industry to take action. A new tamper-proof identification card for workers in the far-flung transportation industry has yet to be issued.

The leaders of the 9/11 commission issued a final report last December analyzing how well the administration and Congress had done in carrying out the commission's 41 recommendations. They awarded only one A minus (for disrupting terrorist financing), a batch of B's and C's, and a dozen D's in such critical areas as reforming intelligence oversight, assessing infrastructure vulnerabilities and sharing information among government agencies. A failure to share intelligence allowed the 9/11 terrorists to succeed despite advance hints of their presence and intentions.

The commission awarded five failing grades, the most serious of them for Washington's failure to allocate homeland security funds based on risk. Even after moderate tinkering with the formulas this year, greedy legislators from states that face little danger continue to siphon off funds that would be better used to protect New York, Washington and other large cities likely to hold the greatest attraction for terrorists.

Almost everyone agrees that the administration has taken some important steps toward greater security, but as the leaders of the 9/11 commission recently commented, it has not made the issue a top priority. The long, costly, chaotic occupation of Iraq, though touted as a front line of the war on terror, has actually sapped energy, resources and top-level attention that would be better applied to the real threat, a terrorist attack on the homeland.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082106C.shtml

Nobody Ever Died from Talking

In this Truthout op-ed, William Fisher argues that the Israeli disaster against Hezbollah in Lebanon puts the U.S. in the position of having no real choice other than to begin direct negotiations with Iran and Syria:

Nobody Ever Died From Talking
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 21 August 2006

If, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously declared, Israel's response to Hezbollah's rocket attacks marked "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," the US is likely to be in labor for a long time.

Who won this 34-day war is still an open question. Both sides are claiming victory, though President Bush seems a lot more certain than the Israelis, whose fractious Knesset is already publicly questioning the quality of the Israel Defense Force strategy and leadership. But it is clear that this campaign put a large dent in the notion of Israeli invincibility.

And, at least as of now, it has made Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah a hero in much of Lebanon and most of the rest of the Muslim world. While diplomats were talking about donor conferences to mobilize international resources for reconstruction, Hezbollah was already handing out large amounts of cash to help the dispossessed relocate and start to rebuild.

The effectiveness of the United Nations cease-fire resolution - a measure the US actively delayed for weeks - remains to be seen. President Bush and Secretary Rice vowed to block it until the UN agreed to address the "root cause" of the conflict. Hezbollah was identified as that root cause. But almost everyone agrees that Hezbollah is but one dangerous symptom. Ask Nasrallah about the root cause and he will tell you loud and clear that it is the very existence of the State of Israel.

Once Secretary Rice finally got around to working with France to develop a cease-fire resolution, objections from the Arab world and others obliged the UN Security Council to water it down virtually to the vanishing point. It is virtually identical to the Security Council's previous resolution on this issue, except that the multinational force will be larger. If it ever materializes.

The most serious lapse was France's insistence that it would not deploy troops for a "hot war." While claiming it would "lead," France has thus far agreed to provide only one engineering company, or about 200 soldiers. Moreover, the troops that join the multinational force in southern Lebanon will not be mandated to disarm Hezbollah. Nor will the Lebanese Government - of which Hezbollah is a member - whose army clearly lacks both the political will and the strength to do the disarming. Hezbollah is to disarm itself. Right!

Meanwhile, America's delay in seeking a cease-fire and its seemingly unquestioning support of Israel's arguably disproportionate response to Hezbollah attacks and hostage-taking was further alienating leaders in much of the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

And, while Lebanon and northern Israel were being battered, Israel's "other issue" - the so-called roadmap to a two-state solution - wasn't going away. The only thing that went away was media attention. Now Israel's post-mortem investigation of the Lebanon campaign will make it even more difficult for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to make any progress on this key issue - on which the Bush Administration has been largely AWOL for six years. Now, that absence may not be critical; as a result of the Lebanon adventure, the US has lost its credibility as an "honest broker" of a comprehensive Middle East peace process.

The bottom line is that both the US and Israel have been significantly weakened by the Lebanon war. If there are any State actors who are perceived to have been strengthened by this adventure, they are Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's patrons and facilitators. This may or may not be the reality, but it is the widely held diplomatic and public perception - so the reality may be irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Iran sits on its long border with Iraq, apparently able and willing to do whatever it takes to turn sectarian violence into a full-blown civil war. And Syria provides an ideal location for the trans-shipment of more deadly rockets to Hezbollah.

The timing could not be worse, because in a few weeks, the Security Council will again turn to the issue of trying to rein in Iran's nuclear program. The US and the EU3 will press for robust sanctions; but it is doubtful the Russians and the Chinese will agree. The result may be no resolution, or another slap-on-the-wrist resolution that changes nothing. Yet, the US has had sanctions against Iran for some years and the oil-rich theocracy appears to have little trouble finding suitors.

If multilateral diplomacy via the UN fails to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, what's left? It is now generally accepted that a US military option is a non-starter, though some of Mr. Bush's neo-con advisors refuse to recognize this inconvenient reality. The American experience in Iraq - not to mention the Israeli assault on Lebanon - shows once again that neither air power alone nor even more conventional "shock and awe" tactics can defeat a well-trained, well-equipped guerrilla insurgency. Even if we knew where Iran's nuclear facilities were located.

Moreover, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the American military substantially over-stretched, and it is doubtful that even the Karl Rove super-spin machine could get the American people to muster any appetite for yet another uncertain and expensive military adventure.

Thus, the one avenue still open to President Bush is the one he most fiercely rejects: direct talks between the US and Iran and Syria. Syria's last attempt at a rapprochement with the US, several years ago, was rejected out of hand by the Bush administration. And, as Mike Wallace's recent "60 Minutes" interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran made clear between the lines, a dialogue with the US is the only option his country might find attractive. Nothing would confer more legitimacy and dignity on the Iranian regime than engagement by the world's remaining superpower. And neither Iran nor Syria can afford to risk being isolated from the rest of the world.

Conferring legitimacy and dignity on the Iranian and Syrian regimes should not be the rationale for engaging these regimes. The objective should be serious face-to-face diplomacy that leaves Iran and Syria in no doubt that there are rewards for cooperation and penalties for rogue conduct. Talks through proxies and threats in the Security Council are clearly not getting the job done.

At the end of the day, President Bush may be compelled to defer his "democracy now" rhetoric for realpolitik. He may actually have to authorize direct talks with Iran's populist demagogue leader as well as with the Syrian leadership. This would doubtless trigger many in his party to label Mr. Bush as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century. He would have to swallow his "birth pangs of a new Middle East" agenda and risk dealing with a cataclysmic rebellion from his party's far-right wing.

But the more important question is how effective a lame duck administration - weakened by a bungled war, support of a questionable Lebanese adventure, and plummeting public support - would be if such negotiations ever got started. For example, does the US still have the leverege to persuade Iran to exercise its influence over Hezbollah? And Syria to cease being Hezbollah's supply line?

The prospects are not great, but may not be totally bleak. After all, there is only one USA. And talking to Iran and Syria doesn't mean George W. Bush would jump on Air Force One and head for Tehran or Damascus tomorrow.

It has been 26 years since the US government had any official relationship with Iran. For the past six years, the president has tried to outsource negotiations with Iran to the EU3. And it has resisted talking with Syria at all, though Syria might be an easier task since the US still has diplomatic relations there.

Re-starting a genuine diplomatic dialogue with both these countries would likely begin with a lengthy series of much lower-level contacts. These would probably focus on narrower issues, rather than on any grand bargain. With luck, a framework for expanded and higher-level discussions might emerge. The parties might be able to identify and execute a few confidence-building measures. Eventually, far down this road, Secretary Rice would participate. All of this would be to prepare the ground for the president.

Critics of this option will point out that while Iran and Syria are talking to the US, Iran will be buying more time to develop its nuclear weapon and creating more sectarian violence in Iraq, Syria will be busy re-supplying Hezbollah, and both countries will be using US engagement to enhance their prestige in the world, while continuing to espouse the destruction of Israel.

And they could be right. That's why the US should seek the cooperation of the major powers in the UN. But first the Bush administration needs to get over its notion that engagement is appeasement. The US "engages" with many unsavory regimes throughout the world - and showers its financial largesse on many of them.

On a purely practical level, what choices does America have when it has run out of good options?

The best of the remaining bad options may be talking. And nobody ever died from talking.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082106A.shtml

Bin Laden wanted Bush to be re-elected

Osama's Ploy

So, in fall 2004, with Bush fighting for his political life in a tight race against Democrat John Kerry, bin Laden took the risk of breaking nearly a year of silence to release a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before the U.S. election.

Bush's supporters immediately spun bin Laden's tirade into his "endorsement" of Kerry and pollsters recorded a jump of several percentage points for Bush, from nearly a dead heat to a five- or six-point lead. Four days later, Bush hung on to win a second term by an official margin of less than three percentage points. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis."]

The intervention by bin Laden - essentially urging Americans to reject Bush - had the predictable effect of driving voters to the President. After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden intended.

"Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" after the videotape had dominated the day's news, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.

Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."

From Robert Parry's "Is Bush a Clear and Present Danger?":

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082306K.shtml