Wednesday, October 10, 2007
THE SILENCED MAJORITY: Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid kiss the ring of power, BETRAY voters, constituents, and American citizens.....
As Irish officials loyal to England once helped perpetrate the "Great Irish Famine" (by EXPORTING GRAIN from the island at the height of the famine that claimed 1.5 million lives), so too do NANCY PELOSI, HARRY REID, STENY HOYER, and the "Democratic leadership" AID, ASSIST, and PERPETRATE the MASS-MEDIA SWINDLING of the American public... TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars for the 'war on terra' with no oversight of BILLIONS lost in fraudulent contracts; with the United States diplomatic corps now incorporating mercenary gunmen with, literally, LICENSE TO KILL; with American forces run TORTURE PRISONS, and with combat-wounded veterans NEGLECTED upon returning to America...
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The Silenced Majority
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/09/AR2007100901733.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
We are condemned, the smart guys tell us, to stay in Iraq. None of the three leading Democratic presidential candidates will pledge to remove all U.S. forces by 2013. In the think-tankocracy of Washington, defense intellectuals of both parties argue that pulling up stakes is not an option.
"Some of the people mentioned as possible defense secretaries under a Democratic White House," The Post's Thomas E. Ricks reported last month, "offer a vision of a U.S. presence in Iraq that does not differ markedly from that of the Bush administration." Even the fantastical idea floated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- that U.S. forces should settle into a permanent presence in Iraq as they have in South Korea -- seems to have won at least tacit acceptance among many defense deep thinkers.
Everyone's on board except the American people, but what do they matter?
When the Pew Research Center polled Americans in September, it found 54 percent support for bringing U.S. forces home immediately or over the next two years. Thirteen percent said we should keep troops in Iraq but set a timetable for withdrawal, while 25 percent favored keeping troops there and not setting a timetable. Pew didn't ask if we should station forces there for half a century, as we have in Korea. Maybe the pollsters' lawyers told them they might be held liable if they asked a question that induced cardiac arrest.
In the past several years there's been great concern about the erosion of individual rights as a consequence of the Bush administration's "war on terror" and war in Iraq. I share this concern. But the administration's critics, myself included, have been remiss in noting a development even more corrosive to American democracy -- the erosion of majority rule.
A fundamental premise of democracy is that elections matter. That belief is being tested today as it seldom has before. In 2006, the Republicans were swept from power in Congress because the American electorate had had it with the war and with Congress's unquestioning acquiescence to President Bush's blind and obdurate faith in the eventual success of the American mission. In responding to the election by sending more troops to Iraq and keeping these troops there until the limits of our manpower compel their return next year, Bush merely doubled down on his unwinnable bet on his unwinnable war.
Congressional Democrats have honorably tried and failed to scale back the war; the Senate's requirement of a 60-vote supermajority to alter policy requires supermajority support from the public for an altered Senate. And looking at the tea leaves for 2008, a heavily Democratic Senate and a Democratic president may well be swept into power.
They won't be, however, if Democratic voters have despaired of the efficacy of elections. For millions of Democrats, the contested verdict of 2000 and the overturned verdict of 2006 -- war is repudiated, war is escalated -- were bad enough. The killer for Democratic prospects would be if millions of Democrats believed that a President Clinton, or Obama, or Edwards, would keep a significant number of troops in Iraq, too.
On this particular, Democratic primary voters do have some choices.
Many of Hillary Clinton's foreign and military policy advisers, such as Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, supported the war at first, then criticized its conduct, then supported the surge. On the war, at least, they could as easily be providing advice to John McCain. The same cannot be said of the majority of foreign and military policy mavens aligned with her two chief rivals.
Recently, Clinton herself resurrected old doubts about her foreign policy judgment that she had managed to tamp down over the past half-year by favoring a timeline for the withdrawal of most U.S. forces. In voting for the Lieberman-Kyl legislation that deemed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, she opened the door for Bush and Vice President Cheney to charge into Iran, or its airspace, with what they would claim to be congressional permission.
Clinton insists that the resolution provides no such permission, but she should know by now that this administration will take an errant cough as permission. These are, after all, the same folks who construed the half-million-vote deficit of the 2000 election as a mandate.
If Democrats are to win in 2008, it will be because they represent a decisive break, not a partially veiled continuity, with George Bush's policies, and with his war policies most of all. The Democratic candidates, Clinton especially, need to assure voters that their voice matters more than those of the Beltway theorists who supported the war at the outset and still can't contemplate ending the occupation. They need to assure voters, in short, that they take democracy in America seriously.
meyersonh@washpost.com
Bush, former Secretaries of State, favor WHITEWASH of Armenian GENOCIDE, 1.5 million killed by systematic murder?!
The banality of evil: Starving children and an orderly line of civilians - soon to be victims - marched off to eternity and mass-murder....
Photo-library of the Armenian Genocide: in yet another display of AMERICAN SHAME, NO LESS than FIVE former SECRETARIES OF STATE of America are trying to WHITEWASH and ELIMINATE, from historical recognition, this systematic mass-murder GENOCIDE.
http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Image:Geno14.JPG
It looks like the "BREAD AND CIRCUS" agenda or ancient, totalitarian Rome - voyeur sadism in name of imperial state profit and power - has infected even the very top tiers of America's foreign policy establishment, as it has already long infected Fox 'news' ("if it bleeds, it leads!") viewers.
White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/09/AR2007100902347.html?hpid=topnews
During the early years of WWI, Turkey's nominally secular leaders "The Young Turks," heirs to power in Turkey as the (Turkey-based) Islamic-Sultanate Ottoman Empire collapsed under pressure from "modern" European nations, organized and executed THE SYSTEMATIC GENOCIDE of up to 1.5 MILLION Armenian men, women and children, marching the unfortunate victims by the thousands into the Syrian desert to die of thirst, rape, torture, or mass executions by Turk police/militia/military or Kurdish mercenary units, First military Armenian men were DRAFTED into the Turkish military over a period of years or decades in typical conscript fashion; then the genocide was unleashed when the regime rounded up and executed Armenian political and cultural leaders in early 1915, swiftly followed by mass-execution of Armenian men in the military, followed by the deportation and genocide of surviving men, women and children to the Syrian Desert.
Armenia, like 'Kurdistan' today, had the unfortunate fortune to be a landlocked peoples astride the crossroads of trade - and conquest - between East (Asia) and West (Europe). Like mountain clans throughout the world, the Armenians were fiercely independent, and fierce fighters. By comparison, Rome, a city founded in a relatively flat river delta, were also fiercely warlike. Historically, those empires that gain control over flatlands adjoining great rivers become greater empires than mountain based confederations, because river valleys produce more grain and agricultural output, and thus can sustain greater populations and larger armies. Starting as recently as the past millenium (i.e. only 1,000 years ago or less), the Turks migrated from Central Asia at the crest of armed conquest, as the Persians, Mongols, Huns, and other tribes migrating West had before them. The Turkish-clan Ottomans converted to Islam in ______, and initially swarmed around and bypassed the Christian Armenians in their mountainous strongholds as the Turks concentrated on destroying and occupying the Greek Byzantine empire; but over the following centuries the Armenians would be subject to the same indignities and humiliations of conquered peoples everywhere, including the occassional massacre stoked by political or religious (Turkish, Kurdish, or other) leaders and agitators. The toll of massacres of Christain Armenians at the hands of Islamic Ottoman Turks built up prior to WWI as the Ottoman Empire shrank and collapsed, its colonial conquests under pressure from resurgent, modern European military power (eg. the French invasion of Egypt under Napoleon, the British control of the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy, the increasing power of the German and Asutrian empires to the north, etc.), and as the new Triumverate of "secular" leaders decided to ally Turkey with Germany and Austria-Hungary (their traditional rivals for empire in Eastern Europe), Turkey was put under the strain of WAR with Russia and England. It was early in this Eastern phase of WWI that Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide - with little notice from a world that was caught up in the do-or-die survival fighting of WWI, anyways.
The two leading causes of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany after WWI were the tremendous sense of loss, helplessness, and bitter rage in Germany for losing the war ( loss of WWI to the Allies), and of the dehumanizing HYPER-INFLATION as the German government printed (literally) tons of Riechsmarks to pay off the WAR REPARATIONS imposed on Germany by the VERSAILLES TREATY. As Hitler gained power in the early 1930s and he directed the rounding up of enemies of the regime - "ENEMIES OF THE STATE" - the nation's polished and educated elite told him that the world would not countenance the destruction of Germany's Jewish sub-culture. To which Hitler is said to have responded" "LOOK AT THE ARMENIANS - NO ONE did anything for them, they are forgotten already."
Indeed, BRITAIN, while at war with Turkey, had no small part in the Armenian Genocide, because Britain was paranoid of Russian ACCESS to the Mediterranean, and PREFERRED THE ELMINATION of Armenians, to their rescue by the (fellow Christian) Czar's army, which could potentially have given Russia a foothold in Asia Minor (present day Turkey), and potentially access to ports adjacent to the Med from which Russia could have projected her Navy into the Med.
Either way, the historical record is clear: Britain and France seriously FAILED at preserving their victorious peace (re rise and Conquest of Europe by Hitler two decades later), the JEWISH 'nation" spreadout through Europe was party to that failure, and all three nations/races (Britain, France, and European Jews) payed the price, and then some, for those failures.
In retrospect, it looks like the REFUSAL of "civilized Europe" to note the ARMENIAN GENOCIDE was the quick and easy way out... with disasterous ramifications later.
And America's former SECRETARIES OF STATE should be ASHAMED for putting REALPOLITIK - amoral Machevellian self-interest - ABOVE honesty, principle, and truthful reporting re the memory of 1.5 MILLION men, women, and defenseless children SLAUGHTERED at the altar of big-nation policy.
THE SOONER AMERICA AKNOWLEDGES THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE, the SOONER we can patch up affairs with Turkey and move on from this dark, dismal truth.
Putting it off JUST DELAYS THE INEVITABLE day of reckoning, and thus contributes to the continuation of POWER POLITICS that CONTRIBUTED TO THE GENOCIDE in the first place.
==========================================
White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia
Genocide Label for WWI-Era Killings Has House Support
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007; Page A01
A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.
All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.
Discussion Policy
Pelosi, whose congressional district has a large Armenian population, has brushed aside such concerns and said she supports bringing the resolution, for the first time, to a full vote in the House, where more than half of the members have signed on as co-sponsors. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has passed such a resolution before, is set to vote on it today.
House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide, has been pushed doggedly by a congressman whose Southern California district contains the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the country. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D) won his seat in 2000 after his Republican predecessor was sandbagged when then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reneged on a pledge and pulled the bill from the floor after a last-minute plea from President Bill Clinton.
Schiff, who defeated Rep. James Rogan after Hastert killed the floor vote, said the deaths so long ago still resonate with Armenians. "It is an insight you get when you have lots of Armenian constituents," he said, saying it reminded him of conversations he had while growing up Jewish. "But imagine losing the entire family and having the successor state say it never happened."
Few people deny that massacres killed hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children during and immediately after World War I.
But Turkish officials and some historians say that the deaths resulted from forced relocations and widespread fighting when the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire collapsed, not from a campaign of genocide -- and that hundreds of thousands of Turks also died in the same region during that time.
"This is the greatest accusation of all against humanity," said Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, referring to genocide. "You cannot expect any nation to accept that kind of labeling." He said the reaction in the Turkish parliament would be one of fury, noting that the Turkish military cut contacts with the French military and terminated defense contracts under negotiation after the French National Assembly voted in 2006 to criminalize the denial of Armenian genocide.
Pelosi had long been a co-sponsor of the resolution. The Armenian National Committee, one of the many Armenian organizations that have sought passage of the measure for years, has given her an "A" grade for her stance on Armenian issues.
Now as speaker, Pelosi will face a choice between her role as a national leader and her previous campaign pledges as a member of Congress. U.S.-Turkish relations are already under some strain because Kurdish militant groups have attacked Turkish targets from bases in Iraq, with Ankara suggesting it may launch its own attack. Turkey plans to hold a "neighbors" conference on Iraq pushed by the United States later this month, but a recent poll by the nonpartisan group Terror Free Tomorrow found that 83 percent of Turks would oppose assisting the United States on Iraq if the Armenia resolution passed.
It is a problem that has caused other politicians to flinch. As a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to ensure that "our nation properly recognizes" what he called "a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension." But, angering Armenian groups, Bush refused to use the term in the annual presidential statement on the subject made on April 24, generally considered the beginning of the killings in 1915. President George H.W. Bush and Clinton also refused to refer to genocide in their annual statements, for fear of offending Turkey.
Among other things, the resolution calls on the president to use his annual message to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide."
In the Senate, where one-third of its members are co-sponsoring the resolution, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) supports the measure, as do the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.).
The State Department, which collected the signatures of the former secretaries of state, has lobbied against the resolution, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried and U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson calling lawmakers yesterday to "urge them not to vote for this," according to an interview Fried gave the Anatolia news agency.
The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm DLA Piper and $105,000 a month to the Livingston Group, and it recently added communications specialists Fleishman-Hillard for nearly $114,000 a month, according to records filed with the Justice Department. Turkish lawmakers were on Capitol Hill yesterday, warning that passage would put military cooperation with Turkey at risk.
Meanwhile, leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members, a budget of $3.6 million last year and phone banks that are running on overtime calling members of Congress. The organization has signed up 53 non-Armenian ethnic groups, including a number of Jewish groups, to support the resolution.
Some Jewish groups have found themselves in a bind because Turkey is one of the few Muslim nations to have diplomatic relations with Israel.
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid BETRAY the Constitution. "NOTHING" rises to level IMPEACHABLE CRIMES, the fearful duo tells American citizens...
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doth Protest Too Much... and, like Al Gore in the summer of 2000, they take themselves a tad TOO SERIOUSLY.
Yes, Mr. Vice President (Gore), your 2000 presidential campaign DOES mean the difference between war and peace; between keeping the nation on track for BUDGET SURPLUSES vs right-wing "rob the peons, loot the budget and back-door tax plunder (printing money, tax cuts for billionaires); between health care for millions of children, and yet another ghoulish Right-Wing attack on the Christian virtues of defending "THE LEAST AMONG US"... All those were reasons why your campaign SHOULD HAVE GONE AGAINST THE RECORD of Texas Governor George W. Bush, instead of pretending you were all "DIGNIFIED" and above-the-fray with your imperial AF-2 jet and your "moral values" VP nominee, Joe "economic hit-man from the insurance, credit, finance, pharmaceutical, military, and AIPAC industries" Lieberman.
TODAY, JOE LIEBERMAN's TREACHEROUS AGENDA from the 2000 campaign - PROMISING Democratic voters "I WILL FIGHT FOR YOUR VOTES!" even as he put more effort into his Connecticut senate re-election campaign than he put in to the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign - is now THE TEMPLATE for the DEMOCRAT PARTY inside the Beltway in Washington DC.
NANCY PELOSI and HARRY REID have MADE IT OFFICIAL: NOTHING that George W. Bush or Dick Cheney has done, can do, will do, WARRANTS IMPEACHMENT.
NOTE to Harry and Nancy: YOU TAKE YOURSELVES TOO SERIOUSLY! WE ALL UNDERSTAND that an IMPEACHMENT in Congress WILL NOT RESULT in a CONVICTION in the Senate, given the Republicans 49 vote discipline.
ALL an IMPEACHMENT in Congress would be is an EFFECTIVE CENSURE of the Bush White House, and a thorough AIRING of their dirty laundry.
But NANCY PELOSI has decided to ROB AMERICAN CITIZENS of even this SYMBOLIC oversight, of this CONSTITUTIONAL EXAMPLE that THE PRESIDENT IS AS RESPONSIBLE FOR FOLLOWING THE LAWS of America as average American citizens are.
In this audio clip,
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/reidbrown.mp3
Harry Reid says Impeachment would be "A WASTE OF TIME" and that "IMPEACHMENT WOULD BE A VERY FOOLISH IDEA."
Like Al Gore in 2000, President Clinton in the Monica affair, John Kerry with his 'deer-caught-in-headlights' campaign of 2004, and the Democrats on the eve of the IRAQ WAR resolution, it is HARRY REID and NANCY PELOSI WHO LOOK FOOLISH.
They have GIVEN THIS PRESIDENT CARTE-BLANCHE TO IGNORE the US Constitution, and to START A WAR AGAINST IRAN.
They have told American citizens, "YES, THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW, BEYOND THE CONSTITUTION."
They have GIVEN REPUBLICANS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF PR, in REFUSING to AIR OUT Republican dirty-laundry, the Bush administration's serial crimes and lies to Congress...
They have ABANDONED voters ROBBED OF THEIR VOTES by the Bush-Republican Party.
Mr. Reid, YOU ARE A FOOLISH OLD MAN. The Only reason your are Senate Leader is NOT because of your "LEADERSHIP" abilities - quite the opposite, your fellow Democrat sentors choose you precisely because YOU WOULDN'T TELL THEM WHAT TO DO - the "get along, go along" guy from the gambling state and "Sin City," when America actually NEEDS a fierce and determined leader.
And Nancy Pelosi: do you think YOUR GRANDCHILDREN are IMMUNE from the consequences of the DICTATORIAL POWERS you have just bestowed on the Bush-Cheney White House?
Yes, Mr. Vice President (Gore), your 2000 presidential campaign DOES mean the difference between war and peace; between keeping the nation on track for BUDGET SURPLUSES vs right-wing "rob the peons, loot the budget and back-door tax plunder (printing money, tax cuts for billionaires); between health care for millions of children, and yet another ghoulish Right-Wing attack on the Christian virtues of defending "THE LEAST AMONG US"... All those were reasons why your campaign SHOULD HAVE GONE AGAINST THE RECORD of Texas Governor George W. Bush, instead of pretending you were all "DIGNIFIED" and above-the-fray with your imperial AF-2 jet and your "moral values" VP nominee, Joe "economic hit-man from the insurance, credit, finance, pharmaceutical, military, and AIPAC industries" Lieberman.
TODAY, JOE LIEBERMAN's TREACHEROUS AGENDA from the 2000 campaign - PROMISING Democratic voters "I WILL FIGHT FOR YOUR VOTES!" even as he put more effort into his Connecticut senate re-election campaign than he put in to the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign - is now THE TEMPLATE for the DEMOCRAT PARTY inside the Beltway in Washington DC.
NANCY PELOSI and HARRY REID have MADE IT OFFICIAL: NOTHING that George W. Bush or Dick Cheney has done, can do, will do, WARRANTS IMPEACHMENT.
NOTE to Harry and Nancy: YOU TAKE YOURSELVES TOO SERIOUSLY! WE ALL UNDERSTAND that an IMPEACHMENT in Congress WILL NOT RESULT in a CONVICTION in the Senate, given the Republicans 49 vote discipline.
ALL an IMPEACHMENT in Congress would be is an EFFECTIVE CENSURE of the Bush White House, and a thorough AIRING of their dirty laundry.
But NANCY PELOSI has decided to ROB AMERICAN CITIZENS of even this SYMBOLIC oversight, of this CONSTITUTIONAL EXAMPLE that THE PRESIDENT IS AS RESPONSIBLE FOR FOLLOWING THE LAWS of America as average American citizens are.
In this audio clip,
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/reidbrown.mp3
Harry Reid says Impeachment would be "A WASTE OF TIME" and that "IMPEACHMENT WOULD BE A VERY FOOLISH IDEA."
Like Al Gore in 2000, President Clinton in the Monica affair, John Kerry with his 'deer-caught-in-headlights' campaign of 2004, and the Democrats on the eve of the IRAQ WAR resolution, it is HARRY REID and NANCY PELOSI WHO LOOK FOOLISH.
They have GIVEN THIS PRESIDENT CARTE-BLANCHE TO IGNORE the US Constitution, and to START A WAR AGAINST IRAN.
They have told American citizens, "YES, THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW, BEYOND THE CONSTITUTION."
They have GIVEN REPUBLICANS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF PR, in REFUSING to AIR OUT Republican dirty-laundry, the Bush administration's serial crimes and lies to Congress...
They have ABANDONED voters ROBBED OF THEIR VOTES by the Bush-Republican Party.
Mr. Reid, YOU ARE A FOOLISH OLD MAN. The Only reason your are Senate Leader is NOT because of your "LEADERSHIP" abilities - quite the opposite, your fellow Democrat sentors choose you precisely because YOU WOULDN'T TELL THEM WHAT TO DO - the "get along, go along" guy from the gambling state and "Sin City," when America actually NEEDS a fierce and determined leader.
And Nancy Pelosi: do you think YOUR GRANDCHILDREN are IMMUNE from the consequences of the DICTATORIAL POWERS you have just bestowed on the Bush-Cheney White House?
Sunday, October 7, 2007
MORE on the STATE DEPARTMENT as sponsors, employers, shield, partner-in-crime of Blackwater HIRED KILLERS in Iraq....
State Dept. ignored Blackwater warnings
Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackwater7oct07,1,4463745.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true
The United States has a long history of breaking and tearing up treaties unilaterally.... Today, the STATE DEPARTMENT's BILLION DOLLAR CONTRACTS with BLACKWATER and other "security" companies are the 21st century equivalent of the US government - or local state and county governments - paying BOUNTIES for scalps of those American 'Indian' tribes designated as "savages"...
ACCOUNTABILITY: Complaints about Blackwater guards’ behavior were acknowledged by some in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but received little high-level attention.
Diplomats had raised concerns about guards' endangering of Iraqi civilians, but the complaints got little attention.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.
But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.
The procedures have come under critical scrutiny since a Sept. 16 shooting involving contractors for Blackwater USA, the State Department's main security contractor, killed at least 11 Iraqis and set off a series of American and Iraqi investigations.
On Friday, in a tacit acknowledgment of the policy's shortcomings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered drastic increases in supervision of the security contractors. Meanwhile, the House, flatly rejecting the current approach, on Thursday approved in a 389-30 vote legislation that would subject contractors to U.S. criminal law.
The developments -- and the dramatically heightened attention to violence involving security contractors -- have not surprised current and former officials who have served in Iraq and seen incidents that injured Iraqis and destroyed their property.
"It's about time," said Janessa Gans, who was a U.S. official in Iraq for nearly two years, describing her reaction to news that the Iraqi government was threatening to expel Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 shooting.
Gans said that during her travels around the country she saw heavily armed contract guards frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property, and she was shocked that they appeared to have so little accountability and that the Iraqis often found it difficult to obtain justice or compensation.
Gans, who related her experiences in an interview and in an opinion article published in Saturday's Times, described one incident. In 2005, a heavily armored Chevy Suburban at the head of her U.S. convoy smashed into a tiny car carrying an elderly man, a younger woman and three frightened children.
When she objected, the contractors pointed out that they were trained to treat all Iraqis as potential terrorists. Gans said she replied: "If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now."
Several other officials formerly assigned to duty in Iraq agreed to discuss concerns about security procedures but insisted on anonymity because they still are employed by the government and are not authorized to express their views. Some officials who have had similar experiences while at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad declined to describe them out of concern that they could be identified through the details of their accounts.
Their views of Blackwater and other security contractors are at odds with the descriptions in recent weeks from Rice and other top State Department officials, who have praised the guards as providing effective service under dangerous conditions.
Blackwater's chief executive noted last week that no U.S. official has been killed under Blackwater's protection.
Nonetheless, concerns have been voiced at times even by the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte, now the deputy secretary of State, had been overheard urging contractors to slow down and take more care as they careened through the streets.
"He was frequently exasperated," Gans said. "He would say, 'Is that necessary?' "
Gans said she complained to high-level embassy officials. Other current and former officials said that the concerns frequently were discussed among embassy staff and were acknowledged by some members of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which oversees contractors for the State Department.
But the complaints and concerns received little high-level attention, for several reasons, said diplomats who served in Iraq. In the crisis atmosphere of Iraq, the security problems seemed less urgent than other issues. In addition, even staff members who were uneasy with the arrangement were ambivalent because they wanted aggressive protection when they felt personally endangered.
When leaving the gates of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, "you want the biggest, meanest guys in the world protecting you," said a U.S. official who served in Baghdad and has been moved to another post in the region.
The private security contractors working for the State Department have operated under murky legal guidelines. While U.S. laws apply to contractors working for the Pentagon, workers for the State Department do not fall clearly under American or Iraqi law, allowing some to escape punishment for wrongdoing.
In May 2005, an Iraqi cabdriver with two passengers in the back seat was traveling down a broad thoroughfare when a five-car U.S. convoy carrying U.S. officials heading back to the Green Zone approached from a side street. The driver, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 34, stopped about 50 feet from the convoy, but bullets ripped into his Opel, killing one passenger and striking Hattab's shoulder.
Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackwater7oct07,1,4463745.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true
The United States has a long history of breaking and tearing up treaties unilaterally.... Today, the STATE DEPARTMENT's BILLION DOLLAR CONTRACTS with BLACKWATER and other "security" companies are the 21st century equivalent of the US government - or local state and county governments - paying BOUNTIES for scalps of those American 'Indian' tribes designated as "savages"...
ACCOUNTABILITY: Complaints about Blackwater guards’ behavior were acknowledged by some in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but received little high-level attention.
Diplomats had raised concerns about guards' endangering of Iraqi civilians, but the complaints got little attention.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.
But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.
The procedures have come under critical scrutiny since a Sept. 16 shooting involving contractors for Blackwater USA, the State Department's main security contractor, killed at least 11 Iraqis and set off a series of American and Iraqi investigations.
On Friday, in a tacit acknowledgment of the policy's shortcomings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered drastic increases in supervision of the security contractors. Meanwhile, the House, flatly rejecting the current approach, on Thursday approved in a 389-30 vote legislation that would subject contractors to U.S. criminal law.
The developments -- and the dramatically heightened attention to violence involving security contractors -- have not surprised current and former officials who have served in Iraq and seen incidents that injured Iraqis and destroyed their property.
"It's about time," said Janessa Gans, who was a U.S. official in Iraq for nearly two years, describing her reaction to news that the Iraqi government was threatening to expel Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 shooting.
Gans said that during her travels around the country she saw heavily armed contract guards frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property, and she was shocked that they appeared to have so little accountability and that the Iraqis often found it difficult to obtain justice or compensation.
Gans, who related her experiences in an interview and in an opinion article published in Saturday's Times, described one incident. In 2005, a heavily armored Chevy Suburban at the head of her U.S. convoy smashed into a tiny car carrying an elderly man, a younger woman and three frightened children.
When she objected, the contractors pointed out that they were trained to treat all Iraqis as potential terrorists. Gans said she replied: "If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now."
Several other officials formerly assigned to duty in Iraq agreed to discuss concerns about security procedures but insisted on anonymity because they still are employed by the government and are not authorized to express their views. Some officials who have had similar experiences while at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad declined to describe them out of concern that they could be identified through the details of their accounts.
Their views of Blackwater and other security contractors are at odds with the descriptions in recent weeks from Rice and other top State Department officials, who have praised the guards as providing effective service under dangerous conditions.
Blackwater's chief executive noted last week that no U.S. official has been killed under Blackwater's protection.
Nonetheless, concerns have been voiced at times even by the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte, now the deputy secretary of State, had been overheard urging contractors to slow down and take more care as they careened through the streets.
"He was frequently exasperated," Gans said. "He would say, 'Is that necessary?' "
Gans said she complained to high-level embassy officials. Other current and former officials said that the concerns frequently were discussed among embassy staff and were acknowledged by some members of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which oversees contractors for the State Department.
But the complaints and concerns received little high-level attention, for several reasons, said diplomats who served in Iraq. In the crisis atmosphere of Iraq, the security problems seemed less urgent than other issues. In addition, even staff members who were uneasy with the arrangement were ambivalent because they wanted aggressive protection when they felt personally endangered.
When leaving the gates of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, "you want the biggest, meanest guys in the world protecting you," said a U.S. official who served in Baghdad and has been moved to another post in the region.
The private security contractors working for the State Department have operated under murky legal guidelines. While U.S. laws apply to contractors working for the Pentagon, workers for the State Department do not fall clearly under American or Iraqi law, allowing some to escape punishment for wrongdoing.
In May 2005, an Iraqi cabdriver with two passengers in the back seat was traveling down a broad thoroughfare when a five-car U.S. convoy carrying U.S. officials heading back to the Green Zone approached from a side street. The driver, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 34, stopped about 50 feet from the convoy, but bullets ripped into his Opel, killing one passenger and striking Hattab's shoulder.
US STATE DEPARTMENT in Iraq is PROVIDING COVER for BLACKWATER RANDOM MURDER of IRAQI CIVILIANS.....
Blackwater enablers
editorial by Madison Capital Times
10/04/2007
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/editorial/249391
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman finally got to the heart of the Blackwater contract-killing scandal when he reviewed e-mails detailing how the U.S. State Department worked with the private security firm to hide the bloody trail of its mercenaries.
After an intoxicated Blackwater thug shot and killed an Iraqi guard last December, the State Department counseled the corporation on how much to pay the family of the Iraqi to keep silent and then arranged for the Blackwater employee to exit Iraq without facing any consequences for his actions. Waxman produced records of Internet communications detailing the coverup.
"It's hard to read these e-mails and not come to the conclusion that the State Department is acting as Blackwater's enabler," Waxman told a hearing that saw Blackwater founder Erik Prince claim with a straight face that his company "acted appropriately at all times" during an incident last month that left 11 Iraqis dead and inspired an effort to force the company to withdraw its mercenaries from Baghdad.
Prince's brazen claim that his teams of paid killers "acted appropriately" begged the question: Who is defining the word "appropriately"?
Waxman pointed to the answer. Blackwater, which has collected more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2001 to do security work once assigned to Marines, may be an indefensible operation. But the firm has not operated in a void.
Blackwater is an extension of the U.S. government.
Blackwater operates at the behest of the U.S. Defense Department and State Department.
And when the State Department helps the company pay off the families of its victims and helps to extract killers from circumstances in which they might be arrested and prosecuted, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her cronies become far more appropriate subjects of scrutiny than Erik Prince.
Every indication is that Prince is a very bad man.
But evil done by Prince and his employees has been committed on the government dime, and with the advice and consent of the government.
How interwoven are the operations in Iraq of the State Department and Blackwater? The initial State Department report of last month's killing spree involving Blackwater employees was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the U.S. Embassy's Tactical Operations Center in Baghdad. The report was distributed under the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
The lines of distinction between the State Department and Blackwater no longer exist.
Yes, of course, it is appropriate to hold Erik Prince to account.
But it is even more appropriate to ask: What did Secretary of State Rice know and when did she know it?
Waxman opened Tuesday's hearing by declaring, "I know many of you believe that Blackwater has been unaccountable to anyone in our government. I want you to know that Blackwater will be accountable today."
That's a great start. But this investigation will not be done until Condoleezza Rice and her top aides have been placed under oath and required to testify about the high crimes and misdemeanors that enabled Blackwater and its employees to kill without consequences.
editorial by Madison Capital Times
10/04/2007
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/editorial/249391
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman finally got to the heart of the Blackwater contract-killing scandal when he reviewed e-mails detailing how the U.S. State Department worked with the private security firm to hide the bloody trail of its mercenaries.
After an intoxicated Blackwater thug shot and killed an Iraqi guard last December, the State Department counseled the corporation on how much to pay the family of the Iraqi to keep silent and then arranged for the Blackwater employee to exit Iraq without facing any consequences for his actions. Waxman produced records of Internet communications detailing the coverup.
"It's hard to read these e-mails and not come to the conclusion that the State Department is acting as Blackwater's enabler," Waxman told a hearing that saw Blackwater founder Erik Prince claim with a straight face that his company "acted appropriately at all times" during an incident last month that left 11 Iraqis dead and inspired an effort to force the company to withdraw its mercenaries from Baghdad.
Prince's brazen claim that his teams of paid killers "acted appropriately" begged the question: Who is defining the word "appropriately"?
Waxman pointed to the answer. Blackwater, which has collected more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2001 to do security work once assigned to Marines, may be an indefensible operation. But the firm has not operated in a void.
Blackwater is an extension of the U.S. government.
Blackwater operates at the behest of the U.S. Defense Department and State Department.
And when the State Department helps the company pay off the families of its victims and helps to extract killers from circumstances in which they might be arrested and prosecuted, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her cronies become far more appropriate subjects of scrutiny than Erik Prince.
Every indication is that Prince is a very bad man.
But evil done by Prince and his employees has been committed on the government dime, and with the advice and consent of the government.
How interwoven are the operations in Iraq of the State Department and Blackwater? The initial State Department report of last month's killing spree involving Blackwater employees was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the U.S. Embassy's Tactical Operations Center in Baghdad. The report was distributed under the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
The lines of distinction between the State Department and Blackwater no longer exist.
Yes, of course, it is appropriate to hold Erik Prince to account.
But it is even more appropriate to ask: What did Secretary of State Rice know and when did she know it?
Waxman opened Tuesday's hearing by declaring, "I know many of you believe that Blackwater has been unaccountable to anyone in our government. I want you to know that Blackwater will be accountable today."
That's a great start. But this investigation will not be done until Condoleezza Rice and her top aides have been placed under oath and required to testify about the high crimes and misdemeanors that enabled Blackwater and its employees to kill without consequences.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Democrat "leaders" ENABLE ABUSES, criminal violations, by Bush-Cheney White House....
Helen Thomas: Democratic 'leaders' ENABLE Bush administration CRIMINAL ABUSES of US laws and international standards...
Robert Parry echoes that grim truth (bottom this post): "Bush SLAPS Democratic leaders in the face" yet again!
photo: Symbolic of Democratic cowardice, complicity, and corruption, to the immediate right of this photograph cowardly Democratic Senator John Kerry DOES NOTHING as campus police ARREST and haul off a student, for that student having the temerity to ask Senator Kerry why he NEVER STOOD UP FOR Black voters in 2004 DISENFRANCHISED by Republican criminal corruption in Ohio and other states (including Florida). (Note: in the video at the end of Kerry's droning 2 hour presentation to University of Florida students, the two campus police women start to ARREST UF STUDENT John Meyer at THIRTY FIVE SECONDS into his questions to Senator Kerry.... and Kerry does NOTHING as the police SWARM the student, haul him to the back of the classroom, handcuff him, and then TASER an American citizen for - ASKING A QUESTIONS about the massive, wholesale, ILLEGAL DISENFRANCHISEMENT TECHNIQUEST of at least four US national elections, from 2000 to 2006.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMSNjXhhhg&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdemocraticnationusa%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F2007%5F09%5F01%5Farchive%2Ehtml
By TAKING IMPEACHMENT "off the table," Speaker NANCY PELOSI and her Democrats ENABLE BUSH administration LIES, CORRUPTION, CRIMINALITY.....
<< President Bush has NO BETTER FRIENDS than the SPINELESS Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy [and other administration gross abuses of power]. >>
The Democrats who enable Bush
By Helen Thomas
Hearst Newspapers
updated October 4, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334324_thomas05.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.
Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.
Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?
When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting."
Obama dodged, too: "I think it would be irresponsible" to say what he would do as president.
Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: "I cannot make that commitment."
They have left the voters little choice with those answers.
Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front-runners.
On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., are more definitive in their calls for quick troop withdrawals.
But Biden wants to break up Iraq into three provinces along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq.
To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush.
Now comes a surprising Clinton fan.
President Bush told Bill Sammon -- Washington Examiner correspondent and author of a new book titled "The Evangelical President" -- that Clinton will beat Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a "formidable candidate" and better known.
Sammon says Bush revealed that he has been sending messages to Clinton to urge her to "maintain some political wiggle room in your campaign rhetoric about Iraq."
The author said Bush contends that whoever inherits the White House will be faced with a potential vacuum in Iraq and "will begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy."
Bush ought to know about campaign rhetoric. Remember how he ridiculed "nation building" in the 2000 presidential campaign? Now he claims he is trying to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI IS ANOTEHR DEMOCRATIC LEADER who has EMPOWERED BSH's WAR.
Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn't like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure [from the intensive AIPAC lobby].
Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent.
Members of Congress seem to have forgotten their constitutional prerogative to declare war; World War II was the last time Congress formally declared war.
Presidents have found other ways to make end runs around the law, mainly by obtaining congressional authorization "to do whatever is necessary" in a crisis involving use of the military. That's the way we got into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers. On Nov. 3 Thomas will be the guest speaker at the ACLU of Washington's Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner; for details, contact aclu-wa.org.
=========================================
Why Not Impeachment?
By Robert Parry
October 5, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/100507.html
The disclosure that the Bush administration secretly reestablished a policy of abusing “war on terror” detainees even as it assured Congress and the public that it had mended its ways again raises the question: Why are the Democrats keeping impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “off the table”?
After the Democratic congressional victory last Nov. 7, Washington Democrats rejected calls for impeachment from rank-and-file Democrats and many other Americans, considering it an extreme step that would derail a bipartisan strategy of winning over Republicans to help bring the Iraq War to an end.
That thinking got a boost on Nov. 8, the day after the election, when President Bush announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the appointment of former CIA Director Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Iraq Study Group and was believed to represent the “realist” wing of the Republican Party.
One Democratic strategist called me that day with a celebratory assertion that “the neocons are dead” and rebuffed my warning that Gates had a troubling history of putting his career ahead of principle, that he was a classic apple-polisher to the powerful. [See the Consortiumnews.com’s Archive, “Who Is Bob Gates?”]
The Democrats also missed the fact that Rumsfeld submitted his resignation the day before the election – not the day after – along with a memo urging an “accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases” in Iraq from a high of 110, to 10 to 15 by April 2007, and to five by July 2007.
In other words, Rumsfeld’s ouster didn’t signal Bush’s new flexibility on ending the war, as the Democrats hoped, but a repudiation of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on Iraq.
Even when the Rumsfeld memo surfaced in early December, the Democrats ignored it, sticking to their wishful script that the Rumsfeld-Gates switch marked a recognition by Bush that it was time to begin extricating U.S. forces from Iraq.
Those rose-colored glasses got smudged badly when Bush instead announced in January that he was ordering an escalation, sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.
But instead of responding with their own escalation – and putting impeachment back “on the table” – the Democrats opted for a strategy of wooing moderate Republicans to mild-mannered legislative protests.
As an opening shot in this Nerf-ball battle, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fired off a symbolic resolution to express disapproval of Bush’s “surge,” a meaningless gesture that Republicans kept bottled up for weeks making the Democrats look both feckless and inept.
Dangling Moderates
The failed “anti-surge” resolution should have clued in the Democrats to what was in store. The congressional Republicans would keep dangling the prospect that a handful of moderate Republicans finally might abandon Bush’s war policy.
But, like the end of a rainbow that keeps receding as one pursues it, the promise of moderate Republicans switching sides could never be reached.
The final act of legislative disillusionment came on Sept. 19 when Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, reneged on a commitment to support a bill by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to guarantee longer home leave for combat troops.
Warner said he reversed himself after he was lobbied by Defense Secretary Gates. “I endorsed it,” Warner said. “I intend now to cast a vote against it.”
With Warner’s help, Republicans blocked Webb’s amendment on a procedural vote that fell four votes short of the 60 needed.
Neoconservative pro-war Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, hailed the defeat of Webb’s proposal as proof “Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future, … that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this [Bush] strategy of success from going forward.”
Soon, the Republicans were stampeding the Democrats into supporting condemnations of MoveOn.org for its “General Betray Us” ad and into urging Bush to adopt an even more belligerent posture against Iran by labeling its Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Prods Bush to Go After Iran.”]
Still, despite nearly a full year of futility in challenging Bush’s war – as public approval of the Democratic Congress sank to near record lows – the leadership kept the issue of impeachment off the table. It was as if national Democrats had concluded that the American people admired timidity and incompetence.
New Slap
Now, President Bush has slapped the Democrats in the face again by misleading them on his continuing policy of allowing harsh interrogations (that many would call torture) of terror suspects. Bush apparently is confident that the Democrats will swallow whatever humiliation he serves up.
The New York Times revealed on Oct. 4 that the Bush administration only pretended to repudiate earlier legal opinions that Bush had the right to abuse and torture detainees. Secret memos from 2005, which reaffirmed that right, were kept from Congress.
“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ‘abhorrent’ in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations,” the Times reported.
“But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” [NYT, Oct. 4, 2007]
The Bush administration achieved its sleight of hand on torture policy by purging traditional conservative lawyers, such as former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had resisted White House assertions of virtually unlimited powers for Bush as Commander in Chief.
In 2004, those lawyers – under Attorney General John Ashcroft – mounted a remarkable rebellion against the White House theories of an imperial presidency. Goldsmith and Comey objected to the legality of several anti-terror operations approved by Bush, including the memos permitting torture and warrantless wiretaps.
Their opposition to Bush’s program for warrantless spying on Americans led to a dramatic showdown when then-White House counsel Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card went to Ashcroft’s hospital room where he was recovering from surgery. They urged him to overrule Comey who had balked at reauthorizing the spying, but Ashcroft refused.
Soon, the dissident Justice Department lawyers were headed out the door. Ashcroft, Comey and Goldsmith all resigned and were replaced by more compliant lawyers, led by Bush’s longtime legal adviser Gonzales.
The Times reported that the memo reaffirming Bush’s broad authority over treatment of detainees was signed by Steven Bradbury, who followed Goldsmith as head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department office responsible for opinions relating to issues of presidential authority.
Unlike other lawyers in that sensitive job, Bradbury also has emerged as a vocal defender of Bush’s detention policies and wiretapping operations. In an interview with the Times, Bradbury said, “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out.”
However, the Times also reported that the White House kept Bradbury on a tight leash by delaying his formal appointment in hopes of avoiding another situation like the one with the independent-thinking Goldsmith.
Harriet Miers, who replaced Gonzales as White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official told the Times.
After the Times’ article appeared, congressional Democrats – feeling misled again by the White House – demanded to see the confidential memos on interrogations. But Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the White House would resist turning over the memos.
At some point, the congressional Democrats may have to face up to the hard choice before them: either put impeachment of Bush and Cheney back “on the table” or accept that the United States has ceased being a constitutional Republic governed by the principle that no man is above the law.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
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Robert Parry echoes that grim truth (bottom this post): "Bush SLAPS Democratic leaders in the face" yet again!
photo: Symbolic of Democratic cowardice, complicity, and corruption, to the immediate right of this photograph cowardly Democratic Senator John Kerry DOES NOTHING as campus police ARREST and haul off a student, for that student having the temerity to ask Senator Kerry why he NEVER STOOD UP FOR Black voters in 2004 DISENFRANCHISED by Republican criminal corruption in Ohio and other states (including Florida). (Note: in the video at the end of Kerry's droning 2 hour presentation to University of Florida students, the two campus police women start to ARREST UF STUDENT John Meyer at THIRTY FIVE SECONDS into his questions to Senator Kerry.... and Kerry does NOTHING as the police SWARM the student, haul him to the back of the classroom, handcuff him, and then TASER an American citizen for - ASKING A QUESTIONS about the massive, wholesale, ILLEGAL DISENFRANCHISEMENT TECHNIQUEST of at least four US national elections, from 2000 to 2006.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMSNjXhhhg&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdemocraticnationusa%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F2007%5F09%5F01%5Farchive%2Ehtml
By TAKING IMPEACHMENT "off the table," Speaker NANCY PELOSI and her Democrats ENABLE BUSH administration LIES, CORRUPTION, CRIMINALITY.....
<< President Bush has NO BETTER FRIENDS than the SPINELESS Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy [and other administration gross abuses of power]. >>
The Democrats who enable Bush
By Helen Thomas
Hearst Newspapers
updated October 4, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334324_thomas05.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.
Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.
Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?
When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting."
Obama dodged, too: "I think it would be irresponsible" to say what he would do as president.
Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: "I cannot make that commitment."
They have left the voters little choice with those answers.
Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front-runners.
On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., are more definitive in their calls for quick troop withdrawals.
But Biden wants to break up Iraq into three provinces along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq.
To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush.
Now comes a surprising Clinton fan.
President Bush told Bill Sammon -- Washington Examiner correspondent and author of a new book titled "The Evangelical President" -- that Clinton will beat Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a "formidable candidate" and better known.
Sammon says Bush revealed that he has been sending messages to Clinton to urge her to "maintain some political wiggle room in your campaign rhetoric about Iraq."
The author said Bush contends that whoever inherits the White House will be faced with a potential vacuum in Iraq and "will begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy."
Bush ought to know about campaign rhetoric. Remember how he ridiculed "nation building" in the 2000 presidential campaign? Now he claims he is trying to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI IS ANOTEHR DEMOCRATIC LEADER who has EMPOWERED BSH's WAR.
Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn't like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure [from the intensive AIPAC lobby].
Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent.
Members of Congress seem to have forgotten their constitutional prerogative to declare war; World War II was the last time Congress formally declared war.
Presidents have found other ways to make end runs around the law, mainly by obtaining congressional authorization "to do whatever is necessary" in a crisis involving use of the military. That's the way we got into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers. On Nov. 3 Thomas will be the guest speaker at the ACLU of Washington's Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner; for details, contact aclu-wa.org.
=========================================
Why Not Impeachment?
By Robert Parry
October 5, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/100507.html
The disclosure that the Bush administration secretly reestablished a policy of abusing “war on terror” detainees even as it assured Congress and the public that it had mended its ways again raises the question: Why are the Democrats keeping impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “off the table”?
After the Democratic congressional victory last Nov. 7, Washington Democrats rejected calls for impeachment from rank-and-file Democrats and many other Americans, considering it an extreme step that would derail a bipartisan strategy of winning over Republicans to help bring the Iraq War to an end.
That thinking got a boost on Nov. 8, the day after the election, when President Bush announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the appointment of former CIA Director Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Iraq Study Group and was believed to represent the “realist” wing of the Republican Party.
One Democratic strategist called me that day with a celebratory assertion that “the neocons are dead” and rebuffed my warning that Gates had a troubling history of putting his career ahead of principle, that he was a classic apple-polisher to the powerful. [See the Consortiumnews.com’s Archive, “Who Is Bob Gates?”]
The Democrats also missed the fact that Rumsfeld submitted his resignation the day before the election – not the day after – along with a memo urging an “accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases” in Iraq from a high of 110, to 10 to 15 by April 2007, and to five by July 2007.
In other words, Rumsfeld’s ouster didn’t signal Bush’s new flexibility on ending the war, as the Democrats hoped, but a repudiation of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on Iraq.
Even when the Rumsfeld memo surfaced in early December, the Democrats ignored it, sticking to their wishful script that the Rumsfeld-Gates switch marked a recognition by Bush that it was time to begin extricating U.S. forces from Iraq.
Those rose-colored glasses got smudged badly when Bush instead announced in January that he was ordering an escalation, sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.
But instead of responding with their own escalation – and putting impeachment back “on the table” – the Democrats opted for a strategy of wooing moderate Republicans to mild-mannered legislative protests.
As an opening shot in this Nerf-ball battle, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fired off a symbolic resolution to express disapproval of Bush’s “surge,” a meaningless gesture that Republicans kept bottled up for weeks making the Democrats look both feckless and inept.
Dangling Moderates
The failed “anti-surge” resolution should have clued in the Democrats to what was in store. The congressional Republicans would keep dangling the prospect that a handful of moderate Republicans finally might abandon Bush’s war policy.
But, like the end of a rainbow that keeps receding as one pursues it, the promise of moderate Republicans switching sides could never be reached.
The final act of legislative disillusionment came on Sept. 19 when Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, reneged on a commitment to support a bill by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to guarantee longer home leave for combat troops.
Warner said he reversed himself after he was lobbied by Defense Secretary Gates. “I endorsed it,” Warner said. “I intend now to cast a vote against it.”
With Warner’s help, Republicans blocked Webb’s amendment on a procedural vote that fell four votes short of the 60 needed.
Neoconservative pro-war Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, hailed the defeat of Webb’s proposal as proof “Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future, … that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this [Bush] strategy of success from going forward.”
Soon, the Republicans were stampeding the Democrats into supporting condemnations of MoveOn.org for its “General Betray Us” ad and into urging Bush to adopt an even more belligerent posture against Iran by labeling its Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Prods Bush to Go After Iran.”]
Still, despite nearly a full year of futility in challenging Bush’s war – as public approval of the Democratic Congress sank to near record lows – the leadership kept the issue of impeachment off the table. It was as if national Democrats had concluded that the American people admired timidity and incompetence.
New Slap
Now, President Bush has slapped the Democrats in the face again by misleading them on his continuing policy of allowing harsh interrogations (that many would call torture) of terror suspects. Bush apparently is confident that the Democrats will swallow whatever humiliation he serves up.
The New York Times revealed on Oct. 4 that the Bush administration only pretended to repudiate earlier legal opinions that Bush had the right to abuse and torture detainees. Secret memos from 2005, which reaffirmed that right, were kept from Congress.
“When the Justice Department publicly declared torture ‘abhorrent’ in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations,” the Times reported.
“But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” [NYT, Oct. 4, 2007]
The Bush administration achieved its sleight of hand on torture policy by purging traditional conservative lawyers, such as former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had resisted White House assertions of virtually unlimited powers for Bush as Commander in Chief.
In 2004, those lawyers – under Attorney General John Ashcroft – mounted a remarkable rebellion against the White House theories of an imperial presidency. Goldsmith and Comey objected to the legality of several anti-terror operations approved by Bush, including the memos permitting torture and warrantless wiretaps.
Their opposition to Bush’s program for warrantless spying on Americans led to a dramatic showdown when then-White House counsel Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card went to Ashcroft’s hospital room where he was recovering from surgery. They urged him to overrule Comey who had balked at reauthorizing the spying, but Ashcroft refused.
Soon, the dissident Justice Department lawyers were headed out the door. Ashcroft, Comey and Goldsmith all resigned and were replaced by more compliant lawyers, led by Bush’s longtime legal adviser Gonzales.
The Times reported that the memo reaffirming Bush’s broad authority over treatment of detainees was signed by Steven Bradbury, who followed Goldsmith as head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department office responsible for opinions relating to issues of presidential authority.
Unlike other lawyers in that sensitive job, Bradbury also has emerged as a vocal defender of Bush’s detention policies and wiretapping operations. In an interview with the Times, Bradbury said, “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out.”
However, the Times also reported that the White House kept Bradbury on a tight leash by delaying his formal appointment in hopes of avoiding another situation like the one with the independent-thinking Goldsmith.
Harriet Miers, who replaced Gonzales as White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official told the Times.
After the Times’ article appeared, congressional Democrats – feeling misled again by the White House – demanded to see the confidential memos on interrogations. But Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the White House would resist turning over the memos.
At some point, the congressional Democrats may have to face up to the hard choice before them: either put impeachment of Bush and Cheney back “on the table” or accept that the United States has ceased being a constitutional Republic governed by the principle that no man is above the law.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
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Friday, October 5, 2007
"SPINELESS" Democratic "leaders," in BEING WEAK, are worth MILLIONS of dollars to Republican propaganda and PR efforts...
Nancy Peosi, Harry Reid, Steny Hoyer, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden - these WEAK, ANEMIC, self-centered Democratic "leaders" are worth TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to the Bush-Cheney agenda, says Helen Thomas, the Dean of the Washington press corps, and one of the very few honest reporters inside the beltway.
- Over the past 7 years, the Democrats have MASTERED RETREATING from the Republican media flame-thrower. Rush Limbaugh snarls and smears combat-wounded US Iraq war veterans - ONLY ONE Democratic Congressman fights back, and his effort is so drowned out that we can't even pull up his name or video!
Rhandi Rhodes takes on BLACKWATER and other US mercenary companies - cowering Dems RETREAT into the woodwork, leaving Randi to fight those multi-million dollar government funded companies ON HER OWN!
================================
The Democrats who enable Bush
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334324_thomas05.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.
Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.
Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?
When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting."
Obama dodged, too: "I think it would be irresponsible" to say what he would do as president.
Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: "I cannot make that commitment."
They have left the voters little choice with those answers.
Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front-runners.
On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., are more definitive in their calls for quick troop withdrawals.
But Biden wants to break up Iraq into three provinces along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq.
To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush.
Now comes a surprising Clinton fan.
President Bush told Bill Sammon -- Washington Examiner correspondent and author of a new book titled "The Evangelical President" -- that Clinton will beat Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a "formidable candidate" and better known.
Sammon says Bush revealed that he has been sending messages to Clinton to urge her to "maintain some political wiggle room in your campaign rhetoric about Iraq."
The author said Bush contends that whoever inherits the White House will be faced with a potential vacuum in Iraq and "will begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy."
Bush ought to know about campaign rhetoric. Remember how he ridiculed "nation building" in the 2000 presidential campaign? Now he claims he is trying to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush's war.
Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn't like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure.
Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent.
Members of Congress seem to have forgotten their constitutional prerogative to declare war; World War II was the last time Congress formally declared war.
Presidents have found other ways to make end runs around the law, mainly by obtaining congressional authorization "to do whatever is necessary" in a crisis involving use of the military. That's the way we got into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers. On Nov. 3 Thomas will be the guest speaker at the ACLU of Washington's Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner; for details, contact aclu-wa.org.
- Over the past 7 years, the Democrats have MASTERED RETREATING from the Republican media flame-thrower. Rush Limbaugh snarls and smears combat-wounded US Iraq war veterans - ONLY ONE Democratic Congressman fights back, and his effort is so drowned out that we can't even pull up his name or video!
Rhandi Rhodes takes on BLACKWATER and other US mercenary companies - cowering Dems RETREAT into the woodwork, leaving Randi to fight those multi-million dollar government funded companies ON HER OWN!
================================
The Democrats who enable Bush
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334324_thomas05.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.
Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.
Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?
When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting."
Obama dodged, too: "I think it would be irresponsible" to say what he would do as president.
Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: "I cannot make that commitment."
They have left the voters little choice with those answers.
Some supporters were outraged at the obfuscation by the Democratic front-runners.
On the other hand, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., are more definitive in their calls for quick troop withdrawals.
But Biden wants to break up Iraq into three provinces along religious and ethnic lines. In other words, Balkanize Iraq.
To have major Democratic backing to stay the course in Iraq added up to good news for Bush.
Now comes a surprising Clinton fan.
President Bush told Bill Sammon -- Washington Examiner correspondent and author of a new book titled "The Evangelical President" -- that Clinton will beat Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a "formidable candidate" and better known.
Sammon says Bush revealed that he has been sending messages to Clinton to urge her to "maintain some political wiggle room in your campaign rhetoric about Iraq."
The author said Bush contends that whoever inherits the White House will be faced with a potential vacuum in Iraq and "will begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy."
Bush ought to know about campaign rhetoric. Remember how he ridiculed "nation building" in the 2000 presidential campaign? Now he claims he is trying to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is another Democratic leader who has empowered Bush's war.
Pelosi removed a provision from the most recent war-funding bill that would have required Bush to seek the permission of Congress before launching any attack on Iran. Her spokesman gave the lame excuse that she didn't like the wording of the provision. More likely, she bowed to political pressure.
Is it any wonder the Democrats are faring lower than the president in a Washington Post ABC approval poll? Bush came in at 33 percent and Congress at 29 percent.
Members of Congress seem to have forgotten their constitutional prerogative to declare war; World War II was the last time Congress formally declared war.
Presidents have found other ways to make end runs around the law, mainly by obtaining congressional authorization "to do whatever is necessary" in a crisis involving use of the military. That's the way we got into the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers. On Nov. 3 Thomas will be the guest speaker at the ACLU of Washington's Bill of Rights Celebration Dinner; for details, contact aclu-wa.org.
DEMOCRATS - NOT REPUBLICANS! - SUPPORT Bush-Cheney lust to BOMB Iran...!!!
HALLELUJAH! The AIPAC stranglehold on the (formerly) "DEMOCRTIC" party is FINALLY OUT IN THE OPEN for the entire universe to see....
btw, author Jon Weiner is no stranger to the AIPAC (American Jewish) community - (he wrote this article about the relatively recent dominance of 'Holocaust as the touchstone imagery for American Jewish identity' in 1999)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990712/wiener
and Seymour Hersh was raised Jewish, as well.
http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/01/18/hersh/index1.html
NEEDLESS TO SAY, when our "Democratic OPPOSITION 'leaders'" are more HAWKISH (war-lusting) than ALL Republicans except Bush, Cheney, and their AEI-funded Neo-con war cheerleaders, then the Democrat Party is an "OPPOSITION" party IN NAME ONLY - SHEER FRAUD! Sheer TREACHERY!
==============================================
Who Wants To Bomb Iran? Democrats, Not Republicans, Says Seymour Hersh
by Jon WeinerPosted
October 4, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-wiener/who-wants-to-bomb-iran-_b_67229.html
The following piece is part of an ongoing series of OffTheBus reports by citizen policy experts critiquing different aspects of Campaign
When George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about their plans to bomb Iran, they are told "You can't do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated"--that's what a Republican former intelligence official told legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "But," the former official went on, "Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."
I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, "Target Iran," is featured in The New Yorker this week.
When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, "Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of - we might as well say it - Israeli and Jewish input." He added the obvious: "a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns" from Jewish contributors.
But while Democrats argue that we must "do something" about an Iranian nuclear threat, Hersh says the White House has concluded their own effort to convince Americans that Iran poses an imminent threat has "failed." Apparently the public that bought the story of WMD in Iraq is now singing the classic Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again."
Moreover, Hersh reports, "the general consensus of the American intelligence community is that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb" - so the public is right to be skeptical.
As a result, according to Hersh, the focus of the plans to bomb Iran has shifted from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to an emphasis on the famed "surgical strikes" on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere. The White House hopes it can win public support for this kind of campaign by arguing that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is responsible for the deaths of Americans in Iraq.
Why don't Bush and Cheney "give a rat's ass" about getting Republicans reelected to the Senate and the House in 2008? "Of course that was hyperbole to make a point," Hersh said. "When it comes to choice between bombing Iran and taking some political heat, the president will do what he wants. Look, no decision has been made, no order has been given, I've never said it's going to happen. But I had breakfast this morning in Washington with somebody who's close to a lot of military people, and there's a sense among them that the president is essentially messianic about this. He sees this as his mission. It could be because God is telling him to do it. It could be because his daddy didn't do it. It could be because it's step 13 in a 12-step program he was in. I just don't know."
The biggest problem in US relations with Iran, Hersh said, is that Bush refuses to "talk to people he doesn't like. . . . We dealt with China, we dealt with the Soviet Union in those bad days of Stalin and Mao. But there is no pressure whatsoever" coming from the leading Democratic presidential candidates demanding that Bush negotiate with the Iranians rather than bombing them.
btw, author Jon Weiner is no stranger to the AIPAC (American Jewish) community - (he wrote this article about the relatively recent dominance of 'Holocaust as the touchstone imagery for American Jewish identity' in 1999)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990712/wiener
and Seymour Hersh was raised Jewish, as well.
http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/01/18/hersh/index1.html
NEEDLESS TO SAY, when our "Democratic OPPOSITION 'leaders'" are more HAWKISH (war-lusting) than ALL Republicans except Bush, Cheney, and their AEI-funded Neo-con war cheerleaders, then the Democrat Party is an "OPPOSITION" party IN NAME ONLY - SHEER FRAUD! Sheer TREACHERY!
==============================================
Who Wants To Bomb Iran? Democrats, Not Republicans, Says Seymour Hersh
by Jon WeinerPosted
October 4, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-wiener/who-wants-to-bomb-iran-_b_67229.html
The following piece is part of an ongoing series of OffTheBus reports by citizen policy experts critiquing different aspects of Campaign
When George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about their plans to bomb Iran, they are told "You can't do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated"--that's what a Republican former intelligence official told legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "But," the former official went on, "Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."
I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, "Target Iran," is featured in The New Yorker this week.
When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, "Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of - we might as well say it - Israeli and Jewish input." He added the obvious: "a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns" from Jewish contributors.
But while Democrats argue that we must "do something" about an Iranian nuclear threat, Hersh says the White House has concluded their own effort to convince Americans that Iran poses an imminent threat has "failed." Apparently the public that bought the story of WMD in Iraq is now singing the classic Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again."
Moreover, Hersh reports, "the general consensus of the American intelligence community is that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb" - so the public is right to be skeptical.
As a result, according to Hersh, the focus of the plans to bomb Iran has shifted from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to an emphasis on the famed "surgical strikes" on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere. The White House hopes it can win public support for this kind of campaign by arguing that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is responsible for the deaths of Americans in Iraq.
Why don't Bush and Cheney "give a rat's ass" about getting Republicans reelected to the Senate and the House in 2008? "Of course that was hyperbole to make a point," Hersh said. "When it comes to choice between bombing Iran and taking some political heat, the president will do what he wants. Look, no decision has been made, no order has been given, I've never said it's going to happen. But I had breakfast this morning in Washington with somebody who's close to a lot of military people, and there's a sense among them that the president is essentially messianic about this. He sees this as his mission. It could be because God is telling him to do it. It could be because his daddy didn't do it. It could be because it's step 13 in a 12-step program he was in. I just don't know."
The biggest problem in US relations with Iran, Hersh said, is that Bush refuses to "talk to people he doesn't like. . . . We dealt with China, we dealt with the Soviet Union in those bad days of Stalin and Mao. But there is no pressure whatsoever" coming from the leading Democratic presidential candidates demanding that Bush negotiate with the Iranians rather than bombing them.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Speaker Pelosi caught in Hollwood movie General Patton timewarp: War no longer virtuous, but we still love a WINNER....
audio:
http://www.patriotsherald.com/movies.php?m=GenPatton.mov
Speaker of the House - leader of Congress - Nancy Pelosi is caught in a Hollywood time-warp. On the one hand, George C. Scott's monologue as General Patton instructing the audience on the virtues and glory of war is an ancient concept from the age of calvary, from before the invention of automatic weapons, poison gas, and aerial bombs, much less from before nuclear weapons, turned humans into canon fodder on a previously unimagined scale. On the other hand, Americas STILL LOVE A WINNER, and can not stand the notion of losing.
It is the fear of being TAGGED for all eternity as "the leader who LOST the Iraq war" that has Nancy Pelosi as terrified as a family in Baghdad, not knowing if the knock at their door is a trigger happy American patrol, a Sunni militia ethnic cleansing squad, or a vengeful Shiite ethnic cleansing raid.
Speaker Pelosi GAVE UP her ability to MAKE GEORGE W. BUSH _THE_ personification of the hated, never-ending war, when she "TOOK IMPEACHMENT OFF THE TABLE." Now, America is STUCK with the remaining months of the Bush-Cheney presidency, and for the next 100 years Republicans will blame Democrats for the debacle that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and a host of Right-Wing neocons created, planned, and misadministered, into a legacy of potential war crimes, broken bodies, billions in deficits, and an increasingly hair-trigger world. A world that in an instant could destroy the half century of global commerce and cooperation we have all come to know and depend on.
Speaker Pelosi, like so many other senior Democrats, has fallen victim to the notion that "LEADERSHIP" means going to fundraisers, telling your donors what they want to hear, putting on well-marketed and pretty election campaigns to pacify voters, and trying not to ruffle the feathers of your fellow senior party leaders, by which you win brownie points and become elected leader by your peers.
SOMETIMES _LEADERSHIP_ means doing what may not be popular in the short-term, to achieve what is BEST in the long term. By FAILING to make the many crimes, omissions, derelictions of duty, gross failures, and ongoing CORRUPTION of the Bush-Cheney White House the FOCUS of a national IMPEACHMENT debate, Speaker Pelosi has squandered that opportunity. By refusing to DEFEND AMERICAN VALUES she now looks like a shell-shocked denzian of NO-MAN'S-LAND... which in fact she is.
=======================================
Weak Has a Face, and It's Speaker Nancy Pelosi's
Posted October 3, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darin-murphy/weak-has-a-face-and-its_b_66987.html
-------------------------------------
Vote on Iraq Again and Again
by SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD
Posted October 3, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-russ-feingold/vote-on-iraq-again-and-ag_b_66938.html
Over in Iraq, our troops get up every day and risk their lives in the middle of an Iraqi civil war. They have to do their job, no matter what the risk, and no matter what the cost. They do what they are asked to do...and so should Congress. Congress's job right now should be to bring our troops home safely, and we can't turn away from this issue just because it's tough going. The only way we will ever get our troops out is by putting constant pressure on supporters of this disastrous war. Let's make them vote again and again, so that they have to go back home and explain why they keep voting to keep our troops in Iraq. When they feel the heat for their vote, that's when they will change their vote, and that's how we will bring our troops home.
The message from the voters last November was clear -- safely redeploy our troops out of Iraq. Telling ourselves "we don't have the votes now, so what's the point" doesn't cut it. I understand that we may not get to 67 or 60 or even 50 votes on Feingold-Reid right now. But remember, when I first proposed that Congress use its constitutional power of the purse to end the war, support was scarce at best. Now, the majority of Senate Democrats, including our leadership and presidential candidates, are firm supporters. If we give in to the defeatist "we don't have the votes" attitude, we're playing right into the hands of the president and supporters of his war who cannot wait for the day they don't have to talk about Iraq. If supporters of this war are going to vote to keep our troops in a situation that is hurting our military as well as our national security, they should be prepared to defend it every day.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
CHEVRON pipeline is the conduit that fuels Burma's MURDEROUS THUG REGIME....
Because GREED, lust for profit, centralization of wealth and power, and WORSHIP of MONEY are the elements that govern America's Right-leaning corporate media, THIS STORY about CHEVRON's SUPPORT for the MASS-MURDER BURMA REGIME is only found on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" newscast.....
=========================================
Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
By Amy Goodman
Posted on Oct 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/
The image was stunning: tens of thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks marching through the streets of Rangoon [also known as Yangon], protesting the military dictatorship of Burma. The monks marched in front of the home of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was seen weeping and praying quietly as they passed. She hadn’t been seen for years. The democratically elected leader of Burma, Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since 2003. She is considered the Nelson Mandela of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation renamed Myanmar by the regime.
After almost two weeks of protest, the monks have disappeared. The monasteries have been emptied. One report says thousands of monks are imprisoned in the north of the country.
No one believes that this is the end of the protests, dubbed “The Saffron Revolution.” Nor do they believe the official body count of 10 dead. The trickle of video, photos and oral accounts of the violence that leaked out on Burma’s cellular phone and Internet lines has been largely stifled by government censorship. Still, gruesome images of murdered monks and other activists and accounts of executions make it out to the global public. At the time of this writing, several unconfirmed accounts of prisoners being burned alive have been posted to Burma-solidarity Web sites.
The Bush administration is making headlines with its strong language against the Burmese regime. President Bush declared increased sanctions in his U.N. General Assembly speech. First lady Laura Bush has come out with perhaps the strongest statements. Explaining that she has a cousin who is a Burma activist, Laura Bush said, “The deplorable acts of violence being perpetrated against Buddhist monks and peaceful Burmese demonstrators shame the military regime.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said, “The United States is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place.” Keeping an international focus is essential, but should not distract from one of the most powerful supporters of the junta, one that is much closer to home. Rice knows it well: Chevron.
Fueling the military junta that has ruled for decades are Burma’s natural gas reserves, controlled by the Burmese regime in partnership with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Offshore natural gas facilities deliver their extracted gas to Thailand through Burma’s Yadana pipeline. The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military.
The original pipeline partner, Unocal, was sued by EarthRights International for the use of slave labor. As soon as the suit was settled out of court, Chevron bought Unocal.
Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.”
The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal’s exemption from the Burma sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.
Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.
Human-rights groups around the world have called for a global day of action on Saturday, Oct. 6, in solidarity with the people of Burma. Like the brave activists and citizen journalists sending news and photos out of the country, the organizers of the Oct. 6 protest are using the Internet to pull together what will probably be the largest demonstration ever in support of Burma. Among the demands are calls for companies to stop doing business with Burma’s brutal regime.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
© 2007 Amy Goodman
=========================================
Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
By Amy Goodman
Posted on Oct 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/
The image was stunning: tens of thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks marching through the streets of Rangoon [also known as Yangon], protesting the military dictatorship of Burma. The monks marched in front of the home of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was seen weeping and praying quietly as they passed. She hadn’t been seen for years. The democratically elected leader of Burma, Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since 2003. She is considered the Nelson Mandela of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation renamed Myanmar by the regime.
After almost two weeks of protest, the monks have disappeared. The monasteries have been emptied. One report says thousands of monks are imprisoned in the north of the country.
No one believes that this is the end of the protests, dubbed “The Saffron Revolution.” Nor do they believe the official body count of 10 dead. The trickle of video, photos and oral accounts of the violence that leaked out on Burma’s cellular phone and Internet lines has been largely stifled by government censorship. Still, gruesome images of murdered monks and other activists and accounts of executions make it out to the global public. At the time of this writing, several unconfirmed accounts of prisoners being burned alive have been posted to Burma-solidarity Web sites.
The Bush administration is making headlines with its strong language against the Burmese regime. President Bush declared increased sanctions in his U.N. General Assembly speech. First lady Laura Bush has come out with perhaps the strongest statements. Explaining that she has a cousin who is a Burma activist, Laura Bush said, “The deplorable acts of violence being perpetrated against Buddhist monks and peaceful Burmese demonstrators shame the military regime.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said, “The United States is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place.” Keeping an international focus is essential, but should not distract from one of the most powerful supporters of the junta, one that is much closer to home. Rice knows it well: Chevron.
Fueling the military junta that has ruled for decades are Burma’s natural gas reserves, controlled by the Burmese regime in partnership with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Offshore natural gas facilities deliver their extracted gas to Thailand through Burma’s Yadana pipeline. The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military.
The original pipeline partner, Unocal, was sued by EarthRights International for the use of slave labor. As soon as the suit was settled out of court, Chevron bought Unocal.
Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.”
The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal’s exemption from the Burma sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.
Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.
Human-rights groups around the world have called for a global day of action on Saturday, Oct. 6, in solidarity with the people of Burma. Like the brave activists and citizen journalists sending news and photos out of the country, the organizers of the Oct. 6 protest are using the Internet to pull together what will probably be the largest demonstration ever in support of Burma. Among the demands are calls for companies to stop doing business with Burma’s brutal regime.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
© 2007 Amy Goodman
Burma Regime's "White Shirt" militia thugs... TERRORISTS IGNORED by US leaders and "mainstream media"...
CNN video: POLICE and civilian pro-regime milita thugs armed with sticks, batons, tear-gas, and bullets disperse PEACEFULL crowds, savagely beat individuals, and load entire trucks with passive prisoners to be deported to slave-labor death camps out of view in the rural countryside...
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=49750&cl=4344598&ch=49799&src=news
BURMA: Soldiers Fire Into Crowds, Regain Rangoon Streets
By Moe Yu May and Marwaan Macan-Markar
RANGOON, Sep 28 (IPS) - After turning its guns on the country’s protesting Buddhist monks and at least three monasteries in this city, Burma’s heavily armed soldiers had no hesitation firing at a group of civilian protesters chanting angry slogans near a high school in the Tamwe Township.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39447
BURMA: Whiteshirts - Junta's Storm Troopers
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39466
Despite the junta's brutal crackdown civilian protests continued on the weekend
BANGKOK, Sep 30 (IPS) - In much the same way that Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler unleashed their respective ‘blackshirts’ and ‘brownshirts’ to terrorise dissenters, Burma’s military regime has deployed its ‘whiteshirts’ against protesting Buddhist monks and civilians.
At formal events in the South-east Asian country, these storm troopers -- members of the pro-government militia the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA)-- appear in white, long-sleeved Burmese-style shirts and dark green sarongs.
But at other times, they appear in civilian attire and pass off as members of the public with missions that range from being the eyes and ears of Burma’s brutal military regime to using force to crush dissent. In fact, it was the USDA that the junta first turned to when former university student leaders and opposition party activists took to the streets in mid-August to protest against a sudden 500 percent spike in fuel prices.
‘’The military government used the USDA to break up these protests and to harass, intimidate and attack the unarmed civilians demonstrating against the oil price increase,’’ says Naing Aung, secretary general of the Forum for Democracy in Burma (FDB), a group made up of Burmese political exiles living in Thailand. ‘’They later went to the protestors’ homes and arrested them.’’
Similar acts of terror were on display after the junta ordered its heavily armed troops and the much feared riot police to crush public discontent that had ballooned to a popular uprising by Monday, Sep. 24, led by thousands of Buddhist monks. ‘’The USDA’s members acted like the police in plain clothes to go after the protesters,’’ Naing Aung told IPS. ‘’They worked together with the soldiers and the riot police.’’
When not abusing unarmed civilians on the streets, over the past month, the whiteshirts flexed their muscles in others areas to contain rage against the junta that had broken to the surface after nearly 20 years of silent criticism. One of its tasks was to target media outfits in the country that paint an unflattering picture of Burma, which the ruling junta renamed Myanmar years ago.
Members of the USDA were among those responsible for ‘’at least 24 serious violations of the freedom to report news and information since Aug.19,’’ states a note released by two groups, the Burma Media Association, a body made up of Burmese journalists operating outside the country, and Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), the global media rights watchdog. The USDA men were part of a raiding party that ‘’confiscated equipment’’ from Burmese journalists working for Japanese news organisations.
Little wonder then the USDA has been on the radar of human rights monitors. A statement released in April by the global lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW) described how some 100 men ‘’carrying clubs and other home-made weapons attacked and beat Myint Naing and Maung Maung Lay, members of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters,’’ in a village 100 km north-west of Rangoon. ‘’The attacks were carried out by members of the USDA.’’
One event that earned this paramilitary group international notoriety was the May 2003 attack on pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). The brutality unleashed by an estimated 2,000 pro-government thugs while Suu Kyi and her party leaders were campaigning in Depayin, upper Burma, led to some 70 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
But, after the ‘’Depayin massacre,’’ as pro-democracy groups describe the violence, it was Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi and her colleagues who got arrested while the whiteshirts got away. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since then, recording a total of 11 years in incarceration over the past 19 years.
Officially, however, the USDA is presented with a lily-white image ever since it was created in 1993 by Burma strongman senior Gen. Than Shwe. The Burmese public has been told that the USDA is a ‘’social welfare organisation’’ with a development mission for the good of all citizens, according to a study released in May 2006 by the Network for Democracy and Development, a group of Burmese political activists living in exile.
‘’The USDA has managed to insert itself into the distribution of aid and assistance by NGOs (non-governmental organisations),’’ adds the study. ‘’The USDA further functions to provide high attendance levels at mass rallies held in support of the (junta’s) policies or in denunciation of the opposition or international community.’’
Burmese citizens within the country that IPS spoke with earlier this year admitted that coercion was often used by local USDA officials to force members to join the paramilitary group. It has an estimated membership of some 23 million across the country has public servants, teachers, local officials and even high school students.
Till the recent bloody crackdown -- in which protesters including Buddhist monks, have been killed, beaten and arrested -- the junta had set about promoting the USDA as the ‘’political face’’ of the regime.
Its reach and organisational structure, spanning Burma’s villages, townships, divisions and cities, was considered pivotal in the regime’s design to have the USDA serve as the civilian side of the junta. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta is officially known, has been under growing international pressure to push through political reforms to create a functioning democracy.
Yet the USDA’s involvement in the crackdown since mid-August may have undermined the official image that the SPDC has projected for this force for Burma’s ‘’public welfare.’’ The USDA’s reputation is at ‘’its lowest,’’ says Zin Linn, information director of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, the country’s democratically-elected government forced into exile.
‘’The hands of the USDA have been stained with blood since the Depayin massacre,’’ he said in an interview. ‘’The latest assaults by its members have removed all doubts about their role to suppress the people on the junta’s orders. The public is very angry with them.’’ (END/2007)
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http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=49750&cl=4344598&ch=49799&src=news
BURMA: Soldiers Fire Into Crowds, Regain Rangoon Streets
By Moe Yu May and Marwaan Macan-Markar
RANGOON, Sep 28 (IPS) - After turning its guns on the country’s protesting Buddhist monks and at least three monasteries in this city, Burma’s heavily armed soldiers had no hesitation firing at a group of civilian protesters chanting angry slogans near a high school in the Tamwe Township.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39447
BURMA: Whiteshirts - Junta's Storm Troopers
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39466
Despite the junta's brutal crackdown civilian protests continued on the weekend
BANGKOK, Sep 30 (IPS) - In much the same way that Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler unleashed their respective ‘blackshirts’ and ‘brownshirts’ to terrorise dissenters, Burma’s military regime has deployed its ‘whiteshirts’ against protesting Buddhist monks and civilians.
At formal events in the South-east Asian country, these storm troopers -- members of the pro-government militia the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA)-- appear in white, long-sleeved Burmese-style shirts and dark green sarongs.
But at other times, they appear in civilian attire and pass off as members of the public with missions that range from being the eyes and ears of Burma’s brutal military regime to using force to crush dissent. In fact, it was the USDA that the junta first turned to when former university student leaders and opposition party activists took to the streets in mid-August to protest against a sudden 500 percent spike in fuel prices.
‘’The military government used the USDA to break up these protests and to harass, intimidate and attack the unarmed civilians demonstrating against the oil price increase,’’ says Naing Aung, secretary general of the Forum for Democracy in Burma (FDB), a group made up of Burmese political exiles living in Thailand. ‘’They later went to the protestors’ homes and arrested them.’’
Similar acts of terror were on display after the junta ordered its heavily armed troops and the much feared riot police to crush public discontent that had ballooned to a popular uprising by Monday, Sep. 24, led by thousands of Buddhist monks. ‘’The USDA’s members acted like the police in plain clothes to go after the protesters,’’ Naing Aung told IPS. ‘’They worked together with the soldiers and the riot police.’’
When not abusing unarmed civilians on the streets, over the past month, the whiteshirts flexed their muscles in others areas to contain rage against the junta that had broken to the surface after nearly 20 years of silent criticism. One of its tasks was to target media outfits in the country that paint an unflattering picture of Burma, which the ruling junta renamed Myanmar years ago.
Members of the USDA were among those responsible for ‘’at least 24 serious violations of the freedom to report news and information since Aug.19,’’ states a note released by two groups, the Burma Media Association, a body made up of Burmese journalists operating outside the country, and Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), the global media rights watchdog. The USDA men were part of a raiding party that ‘’confiscated equipment’’ from Burmese journalists working for Japanese news organisations.
Little wonder then the USDA has been on the radar of human rights monitors. A statement released in April by the global lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW) described how some 100 men ‘’carrying clubs and other home-made weapons attacked and beat Myint Naing and Maung Maung Lay, members of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters,’’ in a village 100 km north-west of Rangoon. ‘’The attacks were carried out by members of the USDA.’’
One event that earned this paramilitary group international notoriety was the May 2003 attack on pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). The brutality unleashed by an estimated 2,000 pro-government thugs while Suu Kyi and her party leaders were campaigning in Depayin, upper Burma, led to some 70 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
But, after the ‘’Depayin massacre,’’ as pro-democracy groups describe the violence, it was Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi and her colleagues who got arrested while the whiteshirts got away. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since then, recording a total of 11 years in incarceration over the past 19 years.
Officially, however, the USDA is presented with a lily-white image ever since it was created in 1993 by Burma strongman senior Gen. Than Shwe. The Burmese public has been told that the USDA is a ‘’social welfare organisation’’ with a development mission for the good of all citizens, according to a study released in May 2006 by the Network for Democracy and Development, a group of Burmese political activists living in exile.
‘’The USDA has managed to insert itself into the distribution of aid and assistance by NGOs (non-governmental organisations),’’ adds the study. ‘’The USDA further functions to provide high attendance levels at mass rallies held in support of the (junta’s) policies or in denunciation of the opposition or international community.’’
Burmese citizens within the country that IPS spoke with earlier this year admitted that coercion was often used by local USDA officials to force members to join the paramilitary group. It has an estimated membership of some 23 million across the country has public servants, teachers, local officials and even high school students.
Till the recent bloody crackdown -- in which protesters including Buddhist monks, have been killed, beaten and arrested -- the junta had set about promoting the USDA as the ‘’political face’’ of the regime.
Its reach and organisational structure, spanning Burma’s villages, townships, divisions and cities, was considered pivotal in the regime’s design to have the USDA serve as the civilian side of the junta. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta is officially known, has been under growing international pressure to push through political reforms to create a functioning democracy.
Yet the USDA’s involvement in the crackdown since mid-August may have undermined the official image that the SPDC has projected for this force for Burma’s ‘’public welfare.’’ The USDA’s reputation is at ‘’its lowest,’’ says Zin Linn, information director of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, the country’s democratically-elected government forced into exile.
‘’The hands of the USDA have been stained with blood since the Depayin massacre,’’ he said in an interview. ‘’The latest assaults by its members have removed all doubts about their role to suppress the people on the junta’s orders. The public is very angry with them.’’ (END/2007)
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Bush VETOES CHILD HEALTH CARE for CHILDREN... Congress SURRENDERS the Media narrative to Bush's haughty veto pen.....
RETURN TO ORIGINAL SIN: Democrats in late 2007 fighting the battle that Vice President Al Gore REFUSED to fight in 2000: then Texas Governor Bush's SLASHING of pre-school, after-school, and HEALTH CARE for Texas SCHOOLCHILDREN, in favor of huge TAX CUTS for Texas BILLIONAIRES and multi-millionaires!
Bush veto for child health bill
by BBC world news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7026454.stm
<< It is only the fourth time President Bush has used his veto power
US President George W Bush has vetoed a bill to expand a children's health care insurance scheme, after it was passed with a large majority in the Senate. >>
RETURN TO ORIGINAL SIN: Al Gore made at least three crucial errors in his presidential election campaign, all revolving around Mr. Gore's BUYING IN TO the Right-Wing Republican "MORAL VALUES" themes. Bill Clinton may have been a self-absorbed narcissist, but as a "child of the '60s" from a broken household on the wrong side of the tracks in the small Deep South town (Hope, Arkansas), Clinton realized how much WILFUL IGNORANCE and "MORAL VALUES" had been USED as theme to MAINTAIN and PERPETUATE SEGREGATION, disenfranchisement, and violent, criminal abuse of people's Civil Rights- and as a "liberal Democratic" politician, Clinton rejected those abusive, unconstitutional, and often violent themes that revolved around "Moral Values" as the center of their justification. Mr. Gore, having been brought up a senator's son, may have worked hard as a youth and during his career, but never really experienced the struggle to make ends meet that growing up on "the wrong side of the tracks" meant to millions of Americans. So, following the failed IMPEACHMENT (no conviction) by the lame-duck Tom DeLay Republican Congress of President Bill Clinton in the senate in 1998, Vice President Gore EMBRACED the notion that HIS "MORAL VALUES" were SUPERIOR to President Clinton's "moral values," and in falling for this Republican "moral values" con, Mr. Gore selected... leading Democratic critic of the Clintons, Senator Joe Lieberman, to be his running mate.
For the TREACHERY of not being faithful to "the one who brung him to the dance" (Clinton selected an out-of-Washington Gore to be his running mate), Gore was repaid by Lieberman's even crasser TREACHERY: Lieberman REFUSED to drop out of his SENATE RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN, signalling to the ENTIRE WORLD (except the cuckolded Mr. Gore) THAT LIEBERMAN WAS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT RETAINING HIS SENATE SEAT, THAN WINNING THE ELECTION FOR HIS RUNNING MATE! Mr. Gore's FAILURE to DEMAND that Lieberman REJECT HIS SENATE BID, or DROP OUT as VP candidate, signaled Gore's dismal lack of executive skills.
It only got worse from there, because FALLING VICTIM to Republican "MORAL VALUES" propaganda is THE HEART AND SOUL of the American political equilibrium existent today. Gore had been unable to undermine insurgent ex-senator BILL BRADLEE's "I COULD DO BETTER" primary challenge, and in "going negative" against Bradlee's so-called "liberal" themes, Gore ALIENATED the very "liberal" Democratic voters ('base') who SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIS MOST ARDENT SUPPORTERS! ALL Gore had to do was point out that, in the face of the 1994 Gingrich "Republican Revolution," Senator Bill Bradlee - with an almost GUARANTEED re-election - REFUSED TO EVEN TRY to run again, thereby ASSISTING the Gingrich right-wing authoritarian (and, we would soon learn, "moral values" HYPOCRITE!) revolution!
BILL BRADLEE _DROPPED OUT_ of the fight vs the Gingrich revolution in 1996, but came roaring back in 2000, to claim the Democratic mantle as presidential candidate?
Unfortunately, by not being able to knock Bradlee out bloodlessly, Gore learned THE WRONG LESSON: in the general campaign against George Bush, Gore would NOT let his campaign go NEGATIVE... against the DISMAL RECORD of Texas Governor GEORGE W. BUSH!
IF EVER a candidate for high-office deserved a NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN against his very public (but often secret) record, it was the Texas governor who had gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, whose gubernatorial administration had WRECKED Texas' BUDGET SURPLUS by giving TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES and Texas' wealthiest corporations, whose state was wracked with government corruption scandals (funeral-gate), and whose administration had, in the process, turned Texas into the MOST POLLUTED STATE in the union!
It is this later "hands off Bush' record" tactic that is now REVISITING the Democrats SEVEN YEARS LATER: not only did then Texas Governor Bush WRECK the Texas BUDGET SURPLUS left him by Democratic Governor Ann Richards.... but Bush did so, WHILE SLASHING social services to Texas citizens - including PRE-SCHOOL, AFTER-SCHOOL, and HEALTH CARE for TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN!!!
DEMOCRATS are REFIGHTING THIS BATTLE in OCTOBER 2007... because AL GORE REFUSED to fight the "good fight" _genuine_ "MORAL VALUES" battle in 2000 (the health and welfare of America's children should be THE most "moral values" isse of them all), and Democrats have REFUSED TO MAKE AN ISSUE OF IT EVER SINCE!
For SEVEN LONG YEARS Democrats REFUSE TO HIGHLIGHT THE TRUE COSTS of Mr. Bush's TAX CUTS FOR BILLIONAIRES - CEDING the moral values HIGH GROUND on this issue, the issue that is at the very heart of American democratic governance, and thereby ALLOWING the "major media" corporate-dominated press and broadcasters to IGNORE THE REAL ISSUES, TRIVIALIZE or SMEAR Democratic candidates and leaders, and instead continue propagating the Righ-Wing propaganda narrative "SLASH HEALTH CARE FOR CHILDREN - in name of 'free market capitalism" agenda!
Bush veto for child health bill
by BBC world news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7026454.stm
<< It is only the fourth time President Bush has used his veto power
US President George W Bush has vetoed a bill to expand a children's health care insurance scheme, after it was passed with a large majority in the Senate. >>
RETURN TO ORIGINAL SIN: Al Gore made at least three crucial errors in his presidential election campaign, all revolving around Mr. Gore's BUYING IN TO the Right-Wing Republican "MORAL VALUES" themes. Bill Clinton may have been a self-absorbed narcissist, but as a "child of the '60s" from a broken household on the wrong side of the tracks in the small Deep South town (Hope, Arkansas), Clinton realized how much WILFUL IGNORANCE and "MORAL VALUES" had been USED as theme to MAINTAIN and PERPETUATE SEGREGATION, disenfranchisement, and violent, criminal abuse of people's Civil Rights- and as a "liberal Democratic" politician, Clinton rejected those abusive, unconstitutional, and often violent themes that revolved around "Moral Values" as the center of their justification. Mr. Gore, having been brought up a senator's son, may have worked hard as a youth and during his career, but never really experienced the struggle to make ends meet that growing up on "the wrong side of the tracks" meant to millions of Americans. So, following the failed IMPEACHMENT (no conviction) by the lame-duck Tom DeLay Republican Congress of President Bill Clinton in the senate in 1998, Vice President Gore EMBRACED the notion that HIS "MORAL VALUES" were SUPERIOR to President Clinton's "moral values," and in falling for this Republican "moral values" con, Mr. Gore selected... leading Democratic critic of the Clintons, Senator Joe Lieberman, to be his running mate.
For the TREACHERY of not being faithful to "the one who brung him to the dance" (Clinton selected an out-of-Washington Gore to be his running mate), Gore was repaid by Lieberman's even crasser TREACHERY: Lieberman REFUSED to drop out of his SENATE RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN, signalling to the ENTIRE WORLD (except the cuckolded Mr. Gore) THAT LIEBERMAN WAS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT RETAINING HIS SENATE SEAT, THAN WINNING THE ELECTION FOR HIS RUNNING MATE! Mr. Gore's FAILURE to DEMAND that Lieberman REJECT HIS SENATE BID, or DROP OUT as VP candidate, signaled Gore's dismal lack of executive skills.
It only got worse from there, because FALLING VICTIM to Republican "MORAL VALUES" propaganda is THE HEART AND SOUL of the American political equilibrium existent today. Gore had been unable to undermine insurgent ex-senator BILL BRADLEE's "I COULD DO BETTER" primary challenge, and in "going negative" against Bradlee's so-called "liberal" themes, Gore ALIENATED the very "liberal" Democratic voters ('base') who SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIS MOST ARDENT SUPPORTERS! ALL Gore had to do was point out that, in the face of the 1994 Gingrich "Republican Revolution," Senator Bill Bradlee - with an almost GUARANTEED re-election - REFUSED TO EVEN TRY to run again, thereby ASSISTING the Gingrich right-wing authoritarian (and, we would soon learn, "moral values" HYPOCRITE!) revolution!
BILL BRADLEE _DROPPED OUT_ of the fight vs the Gingrich revolution in 1996, but came roaring back in 2000, to claim the Democratic mantle as presidential candidate?
Unfortunately, by not being able to knock Bradlee out bloodlessly, Gore learned THE WRONG LESSON: in the general campaign against George Bush, Gore would NOT let his campaign go NEGATIVE... against the DISMAL RECORD of Texas Governor GEORGE W. BUSH!
IF EVER a candidate for high-office deserved a NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN against his very public (but often secret) record, it was the Texas governor who had gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, whose gubernatorial administration had WRECKED Texas' BUDGET SURPLUS by giving TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES and Texas' wealthiest corporations, whose state was wracked with government corruption scandals (funeral-gate), and whose administration had, in the process, turned Texas into the MOST POLLUTED STATE in the union!
It is this later "hands off Bush' record" tactic that is now REVISITING the Democrats SEVEN YEARS LATER: not only did then Texas Governor Bush WRECK the Texas BUDGET SURPLUS left him by Democratic Governor Ann Richards.... but Bush did so, WHILE SLASHING social services to Texas citizens - including PRE-SCHOOL, AFTER-SCHOOL, and HEALTH CARE for TEXAS SCHOOLCHILDREN!!!
DEMOCRATS are REFIGHTING THIS BATTLE in OCTOBER 2007... because AL GORE REFUSED to fight the "good fight" _genuine_ "MORAL VALUES" battle in 2000 (the health and welfare of America's children should be THE most "moral values" isse of them all), and Democrats have REFUSED TO MAKE AN ISSUE OF IT EVER SINCE!
For SEVEN LONG YEARS Democrats REFUSE TO HIGHLIGHT THE TRUE COSTS of Mr. Bush's TAX CUTS FOR BILLIONAIRES - CEDING the moral values HIGH GROUND on this issue, the issue that is at the very heart of American democratic governance, and thereby ALLOWING the "major media" corporate-dominated press and broadcasters to IGNORE THE REAL ISSUES, TRIVIALIZE or SMEAR Democratic candidates and leaders, and instead continue propagating the Righ-Wing propaganda narrative "SLASH HEALTH CARE FOR CHILDREN - in name of 'free market capitalism" agenda!
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Mass Murder- massacres - of Monks and protesters in Burma - IGNORED by Bush-Cheney White House, Cowering Dems in Congress, and 'major media'.....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484903
Soldiers SHOOT Japanese video cameraman, protesters in BROAD DAYLIGHT: video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/sep/28/japanese.journalist.shot
HALLIBURTON a complicit partner in WAR CRIMES by Burma junta against their own people: THOUSANDS of monks MURDERED by the election-stealing, dictator regime in Burma. Dick Cheney's HALLIBURTON company WILLING BUSINESS PARTNERS with the MURDEROUS REGIME: making DICTATORSHIPS out of democratic voting IS WHAT the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton-Ernon-Blackwater administration does best....
ABOUT HALLIBURTON
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/burma.html
Burma
Halliburton has participated in a number of energy development projects in Burma, including the notorious Yadana and Yetagun pipelines. Prior to the Yadana pipeline's construction, the Burmese military forcibly relocated towns along the onshore route. According to the U.S. Department of Labor and the Multinational Monitor, "credible evidence exists that several villages along the route were forcibly relocated or depopulated in the months before the production-sharing agreement was signed."
According to EarthRights International (ERI) -- the Yadana and Yetagun pipeline consortia - Unocal, Total and Premier - knew of (especially from their own consultants) and benefited from the crimes committed by the Burmese military on behalf of the projects. An ERI investigation concluded that construction and operation of the pipelines has involved the use of forced labor, forced relocation and even murder, torture and rape. In addition, as the largest foreign investment projects in Burma, the pipelines will provide revenue to prop up the regime, perhaps for decades to come.
Shortly before the election in 2000, Dick Cheney admitted on the Larry King Live! show that Halliburton had done contract work in Burma. Cheney defended the project by saying that Halliburton had not broken the U.S. law imposing sanctions on Burma, which forbids new investments in the country. "You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that's not consistent with our principles here in the United States," Cheney told Larry King. "But the world's not made up only of democracies."
Halliburton's engagement in Burma began as early as 1990, two years after the military regime took power by voiding the election of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. In the early 1990's, Halliburton Energy Services joined with Alfred McAlpine (UK) to provide pre-commissioning services to the Yadana pipeline.
In 1997, after Dick Cheney joined Halliburton, the Yadana field developers hired European Marine Services (EMC) to lay the 365-kilometer offshore portion of the Yadana gas pipeline. EMC is a 50-50 joint venture between Halliburton and Saipem of Italy and it operates an extensive fleet of pipelay installation vessels.
This was not the last time that a Halliburton company did business with Burma. In 1998, a subsidiary of Dresser Industries called Bredero-Price (now Bredero Shaw) manufactured the coating for the Yetagun pipeline, the onshore portion of which runs parallel to the Yadana pipeline. Dresser was purchased by Halliburton that same year. Bredero Shaw offers a range of pipe coating systems for protecting pipelines above ground, below ground and offshore. It is the world's largest international applicator of pipeline coatings for the oil and gas industry.
More Information: HalliburtonWatch.org
Democrats so weak, Disempowered, pathetic that they can not make an issue of TEN TRILLION DOLLAR Bush DEFICITS.....
Congress raises limit again as U.S. debt nears $10 trillion
By Rob Hotakainen
McClatchy Newspapers
October 1, 2007
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/20068.html
WASHINGTON — As the national debt heads for the $10 trillion mark, generous Americans are sending checks to the federal government.
Donations to the Bureau of the Public Debt have topped $2.5 million so far this year. That’s the highest amount since at least 1996.
It’s not making much of a dent, though.
For the fifth time since 2001, Congress is raising the debt limit, increasing it by $850 billion to $9.815 trillion. The Senate approved the plan on a 53-42 vote Thursday night. The House of Representatives has already signed off on the plan, without a direct vote.
That’s $9,815,000,000,000.00.
According to the folks who follow this stuff closely, the national debt has been rising by an average of $1.36 billion per day since September of last year.
And each citizen now has a share of nearly $30,000.
But Congress has an easy solution to deal with the mounting red ink. Instead of fretting over it, members simply allow the government to borrow more money, much to the consternation of some critics.
“American families don't have the luxury Congress has,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who opposed the increase. “They can't get a new loan or new credit cards after they have maxed out their capability to borrow. Yet instead, every day in this body we do essentially that.”
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. , said Congress had to approve more borrowing by early October or the government wouldn’t be able to pay its bills.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who heads the Senate Budget Committee, said the national debt “has exploded” as a result of President Bush's tax cuts, forcing the federal government to borrow more money abroad. He said the United States is “in hock” to Japan, owing more than $600 billion, and China, owing more than $400 billion. He said the rising debt comes at the worst possible time, right before a flood of baby boomers retires, but that Congress has no choice but to raise the debt ceiling.
“If we fail to act in a timely way on raising the debt limit, the creditworthiness of all United States instruments would be called into question,” Conrad said. “That could have a very severe effect on already shaky financial markets.”
Bush’s supporters say the president has had little choice but to rack up more debt to pay for two wars because he inherited a weakened economy in 2001.
Coburn said it’s irresponsible to raise the debt limit while Congress creates or expands federal programs that will result in additional borrowing. He said his colleagues for years have “raided the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to hide the true size of the annual budget deficit” and that it’s time for Congress to reduce spending.
“We have been on notice since that time that we needed to make the effort to rein in wasteful Washington spending so that we do not have to, in fact, borrow more money against our children's future,” he said. “Only 10 years ago it was $5.95 (trillion). We have increased the debt in the last 10 years by 50 percent.”
Until the early 1960s, people couldn't donate money to the federal government with a specific use in mind. When a Texas woman wanted to contribute money specifically to lower the debt, she got Congress to pass a law creating a special fund for gifts. Since then, thousands of Americans have contributed, donating $1.6 million last year alone. In 2006, a 98-year-old Ohio woman donated her $1.1 million estate.
Pete Hollenbach, the bureau’s spokesman, said the names and addresses of donors are kept secret because of privacy concerns. Most of the donations are modest, with people sending checks of $25 to $50 as they express a desire to both reduce the debt and give a little something back to their country. Hollenbach said donations usually peak during tax season.
ON THE WEB
The U.S. debt to the penny and who holds it.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
HOW TO DONATE
If you’d like to donate, make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt. In the memo section, note that it’s a gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. And mail your check to: Attn Dept G, Bureau of the Public Debt, P. O. Box 2188, Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Supreme Court "Justice" Clarence Thomas a narcissistic, entitled whiner.....
Supreme Court "Justice" Clarence Thomas a narcissistic whiner.....
This paragraph from a Washington Post review of US Supreme Court "Justice" Clarence Thomas' new biography reveals HOW NARCISSISTIC, SELF-PITYING, DELUDED, and self-centered 'Justice' Thomas is:
<< Racial imagery abounds in "My Grandfather's Son," a continuation of his description of the Senate hearings as a "high-tech lynching."
"As a child in the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along," he writes. "My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony." >>
NO... Mr. Thomas... THE LYNCH-MOB KLANSMAN of the KKK and racist South WOULD NEVER HAVE LET YOU BE NOMINATED FOR US Supreme Court Justice IN THE FIRST PLACE. The "white liberal lynch mob" you profess to despise is/are the people who COURAGEOUSLY WENT DOWN TO MISSISSIPPI, GEORGIA, ALABAMA, and other states, often RISKING THEIR LIVES to bring an end to SEGREGATION, so you could advance in society to your full potential. THEY DIDN'T WANT TO LYNCH YOU - they merely wanted to keep you pathetic whinning posterior off of the Supreme Court!
HOW could an educated and reasoned man mistake a DENIAL OF CONFIRMATION for one of the highest positions in the land, with the LYNCH MOB RIGHT WING, who would never have allowed you to go to college in the first place, had they had their choosing?
This SAD, PATHETIC NARCISSISM of the "token Black" on the Supreme Court is confirmed by the last paragraph of the Post's review:
<< But by the time he was confirmed, he said, the prize meant little. Instead of watching the Senate roll call, he drew himself a bath. His wife came to tell him he had been confirmed 52 to 48.
"Whoop-dee-damn-doo," Thomas writes. >>
For CLARENCE THOMAS, it is NOT about the prestigious, influential job (of being a USSC Justice) and the potential impact he could have as a role-model for millions of minority students and children... it is about his WOUNDED VANITY.
In the great tradition of Right-Wing self-centered sense of ENTITLEMENT, CLARENCE "whoop-de-do" THOMAS is a text-book portrait of self-pity and scorn for those whose efforts, in the past, helped him achieve his high position.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/28/AR2007092801634_2.html?nav=rss_politics&sid=ST2007092900506
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