Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Dowd Skewers The Other George

Sorry, Right Number is what Maureen Dowd titles her latest piece of columnist wizardry. Frankly, for pure wit and wordsmanship--if not passion and the burning sense of social mission of Mr. Kristof and a few others--Ms. Dowd has no peer in the elite world of big-time columnists. Only one man's opinion, of course. Read on and enjoy:
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, George Tenet was asked why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11.

Thirty months earlier, German intelligence had passed on a hot tip to the C.I.A. — the Al Qaeda terrorist's first name and phone number.

"The Germans gave us a name, Marwan — that's it — and a phone number," the director of central intelligence replied, adding: "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11, with then additional data."

For crying out loud. As one guy I know put it: "I've tracked down women across the country with a lot less information than that."

Mr. Tenet is not in any trouble for that sorry answer, of course, just as he hasn't had to pay any penalty for building up the phantom arsenal that Saddam only dreamed he had.

The catchphrase du jour is Donald Trump's snappy, "You're fired." But no one has lost a job over the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 or the war that was trumped up and velcroed to 9/11. In fact, the only people the president and vice president are trying to put out of business are the members of the commission charged with figuring out how 9/11 happened and how to prevent another one.

The White House seems more worried about the public's finding out how much it knew and how little it did before 9/11 than it does about identifying and fixing security weaknesses.

After trying to kill the commission and then trying to put Dr. Strangelove-Kissinger in charge, President Bush and Dick Cheney have done their best to hamper the panel that's the best hope of the 9/11 widows, widowers and orphans to get justice.

"This is not no-fault government," said Lorie Van Auken, a 9/11 widow. "You don't just let people go on doing what they're doing wrong."

It is a triumph of chutzpah for Mr. Bush to thwart the investigation into 9/11 at the same time he seeks re-election by promoting his handling of 9/11 and scaring us with the specter of more terrorism. He's even using 9/11 memorials as the backdrop for his convention in New York.

Last week, the president played it sly, acting as though he was willing to extend the commission's deadline to finish the work that was taking longer because the administration was stonewalling. But the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, was clearly helping out the White House, answering the "who will rid me of this meddlesome panel?" call.

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, who helped create the commission, played hardball, threatening highway funds and federal jobs if the commission didn't get two extra months. Mr. Hastert caved.

Mr. McCain said he's expecting the same administration "obfuscation and delay" when he sits on Mr. Bush's hand-picked intelligence review board. "That's why I made sure I got subpoena power," he said. "No bureaucracy will willingly give you information that may be embarrassing to them."

Especially not such a secretive, paranoid and high-handed administration. Bush officials act as though they own 9/11, even while refusing to own up to any 9/11 mistakes.

Because of 9/11, they think they can suspend the Constitution, blow off investigators, attack nations pre-emptively, and keep Americans afraid by waging a war against terrorism that can never be won.

As Bob Kerrey, a frustrated member of the 9/11 commission, told Chris Matthews, the U.S. should have declared war on Osama as soon as it became apparent that he had an army with a "tremendous, sophisticated capability" and an ideology that dictated killing Americans.

"To declare war on terrorism, it seems to me to have the target wrong," he said. "It would be like after the 7th of December, 1941, declaring war on Japanese planes. We declared war on Japan. We didn't declare war on their tactic. . . . Terrorism is a tactic."

A Bush 41 official agreed: "You can't fight terrorism conventionally like a war. Any 16-year-old kid can strap on dynamite and take down any building. It must be fought clandestinely, dealing with the underlying causes and taking security measures in our own country."

Here's a hot tip: If you think the White House should be more cooperative with the 9/11 commission, call George at (202) 456-1111.

I'm sure everyone outside the C.I.A. can take it from there.
The New York Times
 

11:38 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Diplomatic Baggage...

While it is certainly not always the case in the delicate world of diplomacy, sometimes actions speak louder than even silence. Chief American delegate James Kelly's performance during the last 36 hours of the six-party talks in Beijing is perhaps a case in point. Having spent the last hours of the public hoopla over the conclusion of the six-party talks at the Chinese broadcast news nerve-center, CCTV, as a guest commentator, I became privy to a piece of news--and reported it to an audience of hundreds of millions across Asia--that will probably not be reported in the American press, but should be.

It was well-reported that Mr. Kelly kept his silence publicly throughout the talks; unlike the other parties, he made no comments to any of the some 600 journalists from around the world covering the event. There is certainly nothing wrong with that; in many respects, it is commendable, since most comments by diplomats during a period of negotiations are pure pablum and not having to listen to it, much less report it, is a relief to most journalists. What was not reported was that allegedly Mr. Kelly had his bags packed and sent to the airport well before that day's talks began. According to Chinese sources this reporter trusts, Kelly did not do this quietly, as a simple matter of efficiency for a busy man. He did it in such a fashion that it was an unspoken diplomatic statement to his fellow negotiators--but not so that it would fly into the radar of the press corps--something on the order of: This is crap, I'm outa here. [I must make this caveat very clear: This reporter has no first-hand knowledge of this happening--i.e., I did not witness any of it personally. I do trust my sources, however, and am reporting it as such.]

America is already woefully short on friendly diplomatic capital in much of the world due to the Bush administration's profoundly undiplomatic words, gestures and actions dating from the very beginning of his presidency. In that light, if true, the behavior of Mr. Kelly was misguided at least, and deliberately insulting at worst. Let us hope there were circumstances unknown to me and the news brain-trust at CCTV which would explain why this departure gambit was necessary. It could have a completely innocent explanation. If so, however, it was lost on the other parties--certainly the Chinese hosts--involved in attempting to resolve one of the most dangerous flashpoints in our world, nuclear proliferation in northeast Asia.

Below you will find two pretty good journalistic wrap-ups of the six-party talks, first by Reuters, and below that, Joseph Kahn's reportage of the talks in The New York Times; nowhere will you find any mention of Mr. Kelly's "baggage," that which he came with, and that which he left with:
BEIJING (Reuters) - Six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis ended on Saturday without a breakthrough but a senior U.S. official said the meetings had advanced Washington's agenda of disarming Pyongyang.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing closed the four-day session saying all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next set of talks in Beijing before the end of June.

"Differences, even serious differences, still exist," Li said at the closing ceremony, without specifying what gaps remained

China's chief negotiator, Wang Yi, cited an "extreme lack of trust" between the U.S. and North Koreans and said further discussions were needed on the scope of both the North's proposal to freeze its nuclear programs and the U.S. demand for dismantling all atomic arms schemes.

But a senior U.S. official declared the talks, which also involved South Korea, Japan and Russia "very successful," saying all but Pyongyang had agreed to the goal of a nuclear-free North.

"The event has exceeded my expectations in a very important respect. It's been very successful in moving the agenda toward our goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling (CVID) of DPRK nuclear programs," the U.S. official said. "CVID is now more on the table than ever."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was also upbeat despite acknowledging that "key differences remain." He said in a statement the United States welcomed the results of "very serious discussions" and cited as progress the agreements to make the talks more regular.

After the first inconclusive round in August, it took six months of intense shuttle diplomacy to organize new talks, something the United States wanted to avoid repeating. It had proposed a formal schedule for fresh negotiations and establishing groups that would meet in between the rounds.

Russia's chief delegate, Alexander Losyukov, said the talks achieved "modest" results. But he called the working groups "a reasonable base for the continuation of discussions of those problems arising from the different positions."

Analysts said, however, that Washington and Pyongyang could both dig in their heels in this U.S. presidential election year.

"North Korea does not have to strike any agreement now, ahead of the November election in the United States," said Yu Suk-ryul of Seoul's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. "The United States has a need to avoid collapse of the talks before the election."
There is much more to this wrap-up and analysis at Reuters.com

And there is this report and analysis from Joseph Kahn in The New York Times:
BEIJING, Feb. 28 — The United States and North Korea said Saturday that they were committed to deepening negotiations over the North's nuclear weapons program, ending four days of inconclusive discussions with an unusual show of conciliation.

Senior Bush administration officials and Kim Kye Kwan, North Korea's top negotiator at the six-nation talks here, said that while their main differences remained unresolved, the talks had proved useful. They pledged to meet in smaller working groups soon and hold another formal session before the end of June.

"We had substantive discussions about the nuclear issue with the goal being the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," Mr. Kim said, in a rare news conference at the North Korean Embassy here. "My delegation has adopted a businesslike attitude with the intention of resolving the issue peacefully through dialogue and negotiations."

He accused the United States of maintaining a "hostile policy" and blamed it for the lack of a breakthrough. Still, his criticism was not as sharp as the message North Korea sent after sessions in April and August, when its negotiators said they planned to abandon talks and expand the nuclear program.
There is much more of Joseph Kahn's article in The New York Times...
  

6:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From Dubya's Mouth...

It is time for some more Bushisms, as collected by Jacob Weisberg:
"Do you have Blacks, too?" --To Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso; Washington, D.C.; November 8, 2001

"I'm sure you can imagine it's an unimaginable honor to live here." --In a White House Address to agriculture leaders; June 18, 2001

"One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end." --Washington, D.C.; January 8, 2003

"You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles." --Referring to his meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin; Rome; July 23, 2001

"Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself." --On how far we'd be willing to go to defend Taiwan; Good Morning America; April 25, 2001
  

4:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Truth About John Kerry, Finally

If you are a Democrat, an Independent, or even a moderate Republican who isn't keen on four more years of Bush, but you are wary of supporting Senator Kerry because of much that has been written or said about his antiwar activities upon his return from Vietnam, you MUST read The New York Times article below. Please.
On April 22, 1971, John Kerry, a decorated 27-year-old Navy veteran of two tours in Vietnam, electrified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with his passionate testimony against the war, and with tales from fellow veterans about 'the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do' in Southeast Asia.

As both a veteran and anguished opponent of the Vietnam War, Mr. Kerry has spent years working to square the circle of a conflict that divided his generation, and the nation. Now, his old words have come back to haunt his presidential campaign, as conservative backers of President Bush question whether Mr. Kerry is "a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester," as National Review Online recently asked.

The full picture is complex. In 1970 and 1971, Mr. Kerry was among the most prominent spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose major patrons included the actress Jane Fonda, and which later staged takeovers of public buildings and walkouts from Veterans Administration hospitals. But when Mr. Kerry was involved, contemporaries recount, he often took steps to moderate the group's actions, believing it was better — for it, and him — to work within the political system that he ultimately sought to join. When he organized the mass march on Washington that resulted in his Senate testimony, Ms. Fonda was nowhere to be seen.

"I think Kerry made a big effort not to have me invited to participate in that," Ms. Fonda said in a telephone interview this week. "Because I think he wanted the organization to distance itself from me, that I was too radical or something." She added: "I went to North Vietnam in July of 1972, so it was not even `Hanoi Jane' yet, but I was still considered a lightning rod and radical. He knew that they had to get the attention of Congress, and he didn't want any unnecessary baggage to come with them."
Please read the rest of this article in The New York Times...
  

2:10 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Is A National Shame...

It is arguably better to be an unemployed man looking for work in China, than a black man seeking work in New York City--by far. The figures released below are a national shame and embarrassment:
It is well known that the unemployment rate in New York City rose sharply during the recent recession. It is also understood that the increase was worse for men than for women, and especially bad for black men. But a new study examining trends in joblessness in the city since 2000 suggests that by 2003, nearly one of every two black men between 16 and 64 was not working.

The study, by the Community Service Society, a nonprofit group that serves the poor, is based on data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and focuses on the so-called employment-population ratio - the fraction of the working-age population with a paid job - in addition to the more familiar unemployment rate, the percentage of the labor force actively looking for work.

Mark Levitan, the report's author, found that just 51.8 percent of black men ages 16 to 64 held jobs in New York City in 2003. The rate for white men was 75.7 percent; for Hispanic men, 65.7; and for black women, 57.1. The employment-population ratio for black men was the lowest for the period Mr. Levitan has studied, which goes back to 1979.

"We're left with a very big question,'' Mr. Levitan, a senior policy analyst with the society, said in an interview. "As the economy recovers, will we see a rise in employment among black men in tandem with the rise in employment of city residents generally? In other words, is this fundamentally a cyclical problem or is it more deeply structural? I fear that it is more deeply structural."
The New York Times...
  

1:37 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The FBI: A Conspiracy Theorist's Best Friend

And you thought conspiracy theorists were all members of the tin-foil hat set.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered an internal review on Friday of its files to determine whether documents that might have been related to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were improperly withheld from investigators or defense lawyers in the case, a government official said.

The move came in response to an Associated Press article this week that raised fresh questions about whether Timothy J. McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the bombing, may have had more than one accomplice.

The article said documents never introduced at Mr. McVeigh's trial showed that F.B.I. agents had destroyed evidence and had failed to share other information that raised the possibility that a gang of white supremacist bank robbers may have helped Mr. McVeigh.

The evidence indicated that the robbers, a group called the Aryan Republican Army, possessed explosive blasting caps similar to those Mr. McVeigh stole and a driver's license with the name of an Arkansas gun dealer who may have been robbed as part of the Oklahoma City plot.

While the Oklahoma City bombing has been a source of widespread conspiracy theories, law enforcement officials say they have seen no solid evidence that anyone other than Mr. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, who will stand trial on state charges in Oklahoma next week, was involved in an attack, which killed more than 160 people.
There is more, in The New York Times...
  

1:16 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, February 28, 2004

Calpundit: "If I've Lost Aaron, I've Lost Middle America"

CalPundit has a great post on Aaron Brown's Pique at the GOPers, in particular, Dennis Hastert:
"IF I'VE LOST AARON, I'VE LOST MIDDLE AMERICA"....Even mild-mannered Aaron Brown is disgusted at the partisan hackery so obvious in Dennis Hastert's decision to prevent the 9/11 commission from doing its job:
Calpundit
  

3:08 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, February 27, 2004

Consumer Complaints Online In China...?

China mind-boggle number two: Consumer complaints online. With nary a comment, this from ChinaTechNews.com:
March 15 is China's Consumers' Rights Day, but the country got an early gift this past week when portal Sohu.com helped open an online forum for Chinese consumers and enterprises to discuss and settle quality problems of products. China Consumers' Association (CCA) helped setup the website located at http://www.online315.com.

Consumers' complaints about shoddy products and bad service get much press in China, helped by vigilante consumer advocates like Wang Hai. And it's not uncommon for Chinese courts to hear cases about products worth less than five yuan (US$0.60), and to rule in favor of the consumer.

"Through the Internet, Chinese consumers have a more convenient and efficient way to complain and solve quality problems," said Teng Jiacai, secretary-general of the CCA.

Founded in 1984, the CCA is the most important organization for Chinese consumers to complain and defend their rights and interests. By the end of 2003, the CCA had accepted almost 8 million cases and recovered about 5 billion yuan (US$602.4 million) for consumers.

"The CCA and Sohu.com will make a scientific analysis of information on consumer complaints and the reconciliation between consumers and enterprises, and will regularly publicize the analysis result," said Wu Gaohan, deputy secretary-general of the CCA.
ChinaTechNews.com
  

8:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Another Refrain of: "Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong The News"

Every day things change a little bit more in China. When you consider the raindrop in the river of time that is 28 years in China, and what kind of life, society and government was the norm here when Mao died in 1976, the news that Chinese citizens in Shanghai will now be able to pay their bills online boggles the mind. Of course, this is only a viscerally stunning factoid if one is from my generation; which in my particular case means that the only China I read about, or saw on TV in America, for 28 years of life was...well, unpleasant, to say the very least. To fully appreciate this sentiment it must also be understood that when one is in their mid-fifties, 28 years seems like only yesterday. This then is most interesting news from ChinaTechNews.Com:
From next month, Shanghai citizens will only need to log on to http://www.962233.com or http://www.shfft.com, and they will then be one mouse-click away from paying all their bills such as gas, water, phone, etc.

Some people living in certain commercial buildings will be even more fortunate--they will be able to go through the process merely by scanning their bills into automatic paying terminals installed near their homes.

This "Payment Network" is one of the practical benefits that the Shanghai Municipal government has been promising to its citizens for 2004. Currently, the system has been completed and is ready to begin operation.
ChinaTechNews.com
  

8:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, February 26, 2004

This is beyond the pale...

When is this going to stop? Is rape a part of the "fabric" of American "life and values" we want to export to all of the "lesser" nations we preach to and the others we threaten to remake in our image by force? This is not street crime, which is all but impossible to prevent; apprehension of perpetrators is about the most we can expect of our criminal justice system in civilian society. But in our highly regimented and monitored armed forces prevention should be doctrinal if not doctrinaire by definition, particularly in a combat theatre of operation where watching one another's back is the code, not aping the beast with two backs by force. Sexual assaults in these numbers are symptomatic of something very wrong that goes very deep.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 -- The United States military is facing the gravest accusations of sexual misconduct in years, with dozens of servicewomen in the Persian Gulf area and elsewhere saying they were sexually assaulted or raped by fellow troops, lawmakers and victims advocates said on Wednesday.

There have been 112 reports of sexual misconduct over roughly the past 18 months in the Central Command area of operations, which includes Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, military officials said on Wednesday.

The Army has reported 86 incidents, the Navy 12, the Air Force 8 and the Marine Corps 6.

Military officials said that the bulk of the charges were being investigated and that some had already resulted in disciplinary actions, but they could not provide specifics. They said a small number of the reports had turned out to be unfounded.

In addition, about two dozen women at Sheppard Air Force Base, a large training facility in Texas, have reported to a local rape-crisis center that they were assaulted in 2002. The Air Force Academy in Colorado is still reeling from the disclosure last year of more than 50 reported assaults or rapes over the last decade. ...

The issue came to a boil at a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where Senate Democrats and Republicans sharply questioned the Pentagon's top personnel official and four four-star officers for what the lawmakers said were lapses in the military's ability to protect servicewomen from sexual assaults, to provide medical care and counseling to victims of attacks and to punish violators.

Lawmakers said they were particularly appalled by reports that women serving in roles from military police to helicopter pilots had been assaulted by male colleagues in remote combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, where immediate medical treatment and a sense of justice seemed to be lacking.

"No war comes without cost, but the cost should be born out of conflict with the enemy, and not because of egregious violations by some of our own troops," said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services personnel subcommittee.
There is more to this story in The New York Times
  

8:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Old Grey Lady Smiles Upon Kerry

Surely to no one's surprise, The New York Times today endorsed John Kerry for next week's New York primary. Still the best newspaper in the world by far, The Times echoes and in some points only alludes to the real strengths of Senator Kerry that I have seen for almost three decades; points that I will bring forth more fully in a piece that I am still working on. In the interim, read this editorial carefully, and try to hold back the knee-jerk responses that "sound bite" journalism has instilled in so many minds about one of the most intellectually complex, exquisitely nuanced and emotionally courageous leaders of the last three decades in America.

I know that many will guffaw at my words here; I ask you please to truly think about what leadership is and what it is not. Here, I will briefly tell you only some of what it isn't: It isn't a legislative record of bills with one's name on them; legislators and legislation are about compromise and deals struck. That is why so few Senators were elected president during the 20th Century. Leadership is also not about consistent ideology--or ideology of any kind, but most certainly not consistent ideology. Here let me paraphrase the great Supreme Court Justice and thinker, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: I reserve the right to change my mind; or here to quote him exactly: "To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

I will have much more to say about why I believe that John F. Kerry is exactly the man America needs at this most pivotal moment in time: a time when the next wrong, rash, faith-based move could send us hurtling down not a slippery slope but a self-righteously greased crevasse without end. Indeed you should now know that John Kerry is the "leader" who was the model for my essay: Give Me That Old Time Liberalism.
The search for a Democratic presidential nominee has been defined by an Anyone-but-Bush sentiment, an obsession with choosing the man who will run the best campaign. But in the end, the party needs to pick the person who is most qualified to be president. That's why this page endorses Senator John Kerry in Tuesday's primary.

Senator John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's only serious competitor, has been terrific on the campaign trail. He has a great speech and enormous discipline, and he makes a direct and genuinely emotional connection with people of all backgrounds. It's easy to envision him as the nominee four or eight years down the line, or on the ticket for vice president this fall. But Mr. Edwards has spent only a few years in public life. When he departs from his stump speech and discusses domestic issues or -- particularly -- foreign affairs, his lack of experience shows.

It's true that Mr. Edwards has as much or more experience than George Bush did when he entered the White House in 2001. But that was a different era. Now Americans understand better that they live in perilous times, and they aren't likely to feel comfortable switching leaders this fall if the challenger seems to require a lot of on-the-job training. Mr. Bush himself was not well served by the thinness of his resume when Sept. 11 occurred.

Mr. Kerry, one of the Senate's experts in foreign affairs, exudes maturity and depth. He can discuss virtually any issue of security or international affairs with authority. What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple. He understands the nuances and shades of gray in both foreign and domestic policy. While he still has trouble turning out snappy sound bites, we don't detect any difficulty in laying down a clear bottom line. His campaigning skills are perhaps not as strong as his intellectual ones, but they are pretty good and getting better. Early in the race he alienated some audiences with brittle, patronizing lectures. But he has improved tremendously over the last few months. His answers are focused and to the point, and his speeches far more compelling.

If Mr. Kerry wins the nomination, the Bush administration will undoubtedly attempt to paint Mr. Kerry as a typical Massachusetts liberal, but his thinking defies such easy categorization. His positions come from mainstream American thought, centrism of the old school. He has always worried over budget deficits. His record on the environment is extremely strong. He is a gun owner and hunter who supports effective gun control laws, a combat veteran who, having seen a great deal of death, opposes capital punishment. A sense of balance comes through when he is talking. Unfortunately, so far in this campaign Mr. Kerry has shown little interest in being daring, expressing a thought that is unexpected or quirky on even minor issues. We wish we could see a little of the political courage of the Vietnam hero who came back to lead the fight against the war.

While Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards have both demonstrated the physical and mental endurance that now seems a requisite for presidential candidates, Mr. Kerry has been the real comeback star this year. His early campaign was disastrous, and his slip from favorite to also-ran was so dramatic as to be embarrassing. But he pulled his organization together and handily won the early primaries. This was not the first time in his political career -- or his life -- that he has shown the toughness to keep going when things turn sour. That's a quality critical to a presidential nominee -- and to a president.

The primary contest has now come down to two competing arguments. Mr. Kerry's supporters say Mr. Edwards suffers from a gravitas gap. Mr. Edwards's partisans say Mr. Kerry is on the wrong end of a charm chasm. The senator from Massachusetts seems to us to have warmed up a good deal since the campaign began. He can take the edge off his patrician aura, at least in part, by retelling the story of his Vietnam exploits and bringing back loyal blue-collar friends from the service to attest to his virtues as a leader.

Almost everyone who has been watching the Democratic campaign would love to merge Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards into one composite super-candidate, with Mr. Kerry's depth and Mr. Edwards's personal touch with the voters. In the television era, likability is extremely important. But this is a serious business, and Mr. Kerry, the more experienced and knowledgeable candidate, gets our endorsement.
The New York Times
  

6:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Two Crucifixions For The Price Of One

Only Ms. Dowd can crucify Gibson and Dubya at the same time in 700 words and also render a masterpiece of the columnist's craft. Golly Jeeze Damn, but the lady can turn a phrase; in this instance every sentence is a well-turned phrase, not unlike Dylan's genius in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," where each line could be a song title itself. She titles hers: Stations of the Crass
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Mel Gibson and George W. Bush are courting bigotry in the name of sanctity.

The moviemaker wants to promote "The Passion of the Christ" and the president wants to prevent the passion of the gays.

Opening on two screens: W.'s stigmatizing as political strategy and Mel's stigmata as marketing strategy.

Mr. Gibson, who told Diane Sawyer that he was inspired to make the movie after suffering through addictions, found the ultimate 12-step program: the Stations of the Cross.

I went to the first show of "The Passion" at the Loews on 84th Street and Broadway; it was about a quarter filled. This is not, as you may have read, a popcorn movie. In Latin and Aramaic with English subtitles, it's two gory hours of Jesus getting flayed by brutish Romans at the behest of heartless Jews.

Perhaps fittingly for a production that licensed a jeweler to sell $12.99 nail necklaces (what's next? crown-of-thorns prom tiaras?), "The Passion" has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western. You might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, "A Fistful of Nails."

Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, scorns it as "a repulsive, masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film" that uses "classically anti-Semitic images."

I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. "The Jews may have killed Jesus," he said. "But they also gave us `Easter Parade.' "

The movie's message, as Jesus says, is that you must love not only those who love you, but more importantly those who hate you.

So presumably you should come out of the theater suffused with charity toward your fellow man.

But this is a Mel Gibson film, so you come out wanting to kick somebody's teeth in.

In "Braveheart" and "The Patriot," his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history . . .

Like Mr. Gibson, Mr. Bush is whipping up intolerance but calling it a sacred cause.

At first, the preacher-in-chief resisted conservative calls for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He felt, as Jesus put it in the Gibson script (otherwise known as the Gospels), "If it is possible, let this chalice pass from me."

But under pressure from the Christian right, he grabbed the chalice with both hands and swigged — seeking to set a precedent in codifying discrimination in the Constitution, a document that in the past has been amended to correct discrimination by giving fuller citizenship rights to blacks, women and young people.

If the president is truly concerned about preserving the sanctity of marriage, as one of my readers suggested, why not make divorce illegal and stone adulterers?

Our soldiers are being killed in Iraq; Osama's still on the loose; jobs are being exported all over the world; the deficit has reached biblical proportions.

And our president is worrying about Mars and marriage?

When reporters tried to pin down White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday on why gay marriage is threatening, he spouted a bunch of gobbledygook about "the fabric of society" and civilization.

The pols keep arguing that institutions can't be changed when, in fact, they change all the time. Haven't they ever heard of the institution of slavery?

The government should not be trying to legislate what's sacred.

When Bushes get in trouble, they look around for a politically advantageous bogeyman. Lee Atwater tried to make Americans shudder over the prospect of Willie Horton arriving on their doorstep; and now Karl Rove wants Americans to shudder at the prospect of a lesbian — Dick Cheney's daughter Mary, say — setting up housekeeping next door with her "wife."

When it comes to the Bushes' willingness to stir up base instincts of the base, it is as it was.

As the Max von Sydow character said in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," while watching a TV evangelist appealing for money: "If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."
The New York Times
  

4:47 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Enshrining Bigotry By The Great unifier & Compassionate Conservative

As eloquently passionate as is Andrew Sullivan's response to Bush's astonishingly mean-spirited political pandering, today's editorial in The New York Times will perhaps be more effective and it also is important reading. I reproduce it in full below:
With his re-election campaign barely started and his conservative base already demanding tribute, President Bush proposes to radically rewrite the Constitution. The amendment he announced support for yesterday could not only keep gay couples from marrying, as he maintains, but could also threaten the basic legal protections gay Americans have won in recent years. It would inject meanspiritedness and exclusion into the document embodying our highest principles and aspirations.

If Mr. Bush had been acting as a president yesterday, rather than a presidential candidate, he would have tried to guide the nation on the divisive question of what rights gay Americans have. Across the nation, elected officials and others have been weighing in on whether they believe gays should be allowed to marry, have civil unions, adopt, visit their partners in hospitals and be free from employment discrimination. Except for a throwaway line about proceeding with "kindness and good will and decency," the president's speech was a call for taking rights away from gay Americans.

President Bush's studied unwillingness to talk about the rights gay people do have is particularly significant given the wording of the Federal Marriage Amendment now pending in Congress. It calls for denying same-sex couples not only marriage, but also its "legal incidents." It could well be used to deny gay couples even economic benefits, which are now widely recognized by cities, states and corporations. Such an amendment could radically roll back the rights of millions of Americans.

In his remarks yesterday, President Bush tried to create a sense of crisis. He talked of the highest Massachusetts court's recognition of gay marriage, San Francisco officials' decision to grant marriage licenses to gay couples and a New Mexico county's doing the same thing. He did not say the New Mexico attorney general found that gay marriages violate state law, the California attorney general is asking the California Supreme Court to review San Francisco's actions, and Massachusetts is considering amending its State Constitution to prohibit gay marriage. The president, who believes so strongly in states' rights in other contexts, should let the states do their jobs and work out their marriage laws before resorting to a constitutional amendment.

The Constitution has been amended over the years to bring women, blacks and young people into fuller citizenship. President Bush's amendment would be the first adopted to stigmatize and exclude a group of Americans. Polls show that while a majority of Americans oppose gay marriage, many would prefer to allow the states to resolve the issue rather than adopting a constitutional amendment. They understand what President Bush does not: the Constitution is too important to be folded, spindled or mutilated for political gain.
The New York Times
  

1:32 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, February 25, 2004

The Passion...?

"The Passion," IS going to stir unprecedented passion in those who see it. Judging by a lengthy series of scenes from the film just aired by CNN (Asian Edition), it can be said that the film crosses cinematic lines like none other. The graphic, ripping, primal violence inflicted upon flesh, whether believed to be divine flesh or only sublimely human flesh, surpasses anything this author--and WGA (screenwriter's Guild of America) member--has seen in a commercially released motion picture to date. The historian and writer in me applauds the authenticity of the true barbarity of crucifixion Mr. Gibson has painstakingly rendered in his film.

However, if the scenes, dialogue and commentary aired by CNN are an accurate portrayal of the film's story, then the same historian and writer parts of me are appalled at the film's dangerously erroneous assertion that Pilate was blameless and that it was a Jewish mob alone that cried out for the torture and murder of Jesus. That is not only a gross historical inaccuracy, it is shameful anti-semitism. Should such a film or idea be banned or censored? Absolutely not. Should it and its allegedly hateful message be argued against? If true, yes, loudly and passionately.

That argument has been joined well and strongly in The New York Times. I was going to blog its review of the movie in these pages. But again, Richard at The Peking Duck, has beaten me to it:
The New York Times reviews The Passion

And it's not pretty:
The Peking Duck
  

6:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Daily Dish Disses Dubya...

The Daily Dish Disses Dubya. A couple of hours ago, I watched Aaron Brown interview Andrew Sullivan on CNN, during which he made it clear he could no longer endorse nor vote for Bush based in large part upon the president's announcement that he will seek a Constitutional Amendment that would essentially ban gay "marriage" in the United States of America. I seldom agree with Mr. Sullivan--particularly in the area of foreign policy--but it will be no surprise to you that on this matter I do, and I do so mostly on a Constitutional basis: Such laws or statutes should be handled at the state level, individually. It is clearly a States Rights issue. While Mr. Sullivan of course has deeper personal views on the subject, he is clearly basing his opinion in the larger public policy debate on the "Federalist" position concerning the division of rights between the states and the national government as set forth in the United States Constitution.

My position on this is a bit thorny for me politically and philosophically since I am a strange hybrid whose views are a combination of those most famously framed in the arguments between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton--with a significant dash of Jacksonian sentiments thrown in. However, we can--and I do--frame this issue as also being about equal freedoms for one and all--individual human rights trumping those of the society as a whole. I was just about to blog the "NewsNight" interview and Sullivan's written eloquence and passion from The Daily Dish when I saw that Richard, the proprietor and author of The Peking Duck had already done so--Richard has always been on top of breaking events, but with his arm now out of a splint, he is doubly tough to beat to the click.

Consequently, I will defer and point you to The Peking Duck:
Andrew Sullivan: "War is declared"

In an emotional post that has already generated thousands of emails, Andrew Sullivan takes off the kid gloves and says President Bush's support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage will make gays see the Republican party 'as their enemy for generations."
The Peking Duck
  

4:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, February 24, 2004

CalPundit Whacks Lt. Bush Again...

CalPundit has whacked Lt. Bush again. And he has scanned the documentary evidence and placed it on his blog for all to see. If you think that honesty is a virtue in a president--I'm not totally convinced that it always is, but I am a relativist--You MUST click on Kevin Drum's post below:
VOLUNTEERING FOR VIETNAM.... I've gotten a couple of emails claiming that RNC chairman Marc Racicot was on NPR this morning and said (paraphrasing), "President Bush volunteered for duty in Vietnam, but wasn't chosen."
And while you are there, be sure and follow his link to Josh Marshall who confirms it, plus adds much more.

These folks who are working for Bush must be taking money on the side to take a dive...

CalPundit
 

11:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




C.I.A. Asleep On Their Watch?

The C.I.A. Asleep On Their Watch? Apparently, yes. However, is it really fair to look back that far when we play the "Hindsight is 20-20 Game"? I'm inclined to look at this to see what we can do better in the future instead of playing our Capital's favorite game: "The Blame Game." Read this story from The New York Times and see what you think.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say. ...

In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him.

The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates had been obtained by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an Islamic militant in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks, German officials said.

After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior German intelligence official said.

"There was no response" at the time, the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that "Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down, American officials say.

The Germans considered the information on Mr. Shehhi particularly valuable, and the commission is keenly interested in why it apparently did not lead to greater scrutiny of him.

The information concerning Mr. Shehhi, the man who took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the south tower of the World Trade Center, came months earlier than well-documented tips about other hijackers, including two who were discovered to have attended a meeting of militants in Malaysia in January 2000.
There is a lot more to this story in The New York Times...
  

8:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China Gets Punk'd

China Gets Punk'd. So often we read complaints from westerners who come to China and find that things aren't exactly as promised and they scream bloody murder about the cunning, inscrutable Chinese who exploited them in revenge for something that happened a Century-and-a-half ago, say, the first Opium War. Well, here's an amusing example of the opposite.
Mathew Richardson is in trouble on two continents. The 23-year-old fourth-year engineering student at St. Peters College, Oxford, was invited to fly to Beijing to teach a few classes. He claims that he thought that he would be teaching a group of high school students. The fact that it might be a bit unusual for a fourth-year to be paid UK 1,000 and set up in a luxury Beijing hotel didn't seem to throw up any flags for Richardson.

However, when he showed up at Beijing University, he was informed that not only would he be lecturing scholars from all over China, but the lecture series was going to be on economics, a subject that Richardson knew nothing about. So, what did Richardson do? He gave it the proverbial college try and faked his way through the lectures.

Using materials he copped from an A-Level econ textbook, Richardson began his lectures. He was two days into the series when he realized that he was fast running out of material from the text and his interpreter may have been onto him. Feeling that his luck was about to run out, Richardson flew the coop during a coffee break and returned to Britain, where what he describes as a "media storm" on his blog broke around him.

The beginning of the saga can probably be attributed to mistaken identity -- officials in China had tried to arrange for Matthew Richardson, associate professor of finance at New York University, who has quite a resume in international financial markets. Unfortunately, they missed that Matthew Richardson by an ocean.

So the British Matthew Richardson is back home, and Beijing University and the Chinese government are officially pissed at him. Bad enough? No. He has been referred to the dean at Oxford for discipline by the master at St. Peters. Among the possible punishments is expulsion -- according to the master, "undergraduates are not allowed to be absent in term time without prior permission."
Wouldn't you know it had to be a blogger with that much...chutzpah. Or is it a larcenous heart?

Plastic
  

6:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, February 23, 2004

More Down Time...

Sorry for the lack of new posts; tech problems still prevail. Not for much longer, though--I think. Today we had to scrape the template clean, rebuild it, and replace it. But, a big part of the problem is at least known and being dealt with: the RSS Feed and Reader app I was using (BlogMatrix) wasn't just down, it was gone. Literally. The dude quit! He closed up his shop without telling any of his clients. Nice fellow, huh? Whaddaya expect when it's free...

I will shortly have TWO feeds up: The new "Atom" version of XML, and then a regular XML, accomplished through the good folks at BlogStreet and BlogLines. Here I am talking as if I know what I am TALKING about. Whatever. It's supposed to work is what I am being told.

Thank you for your patience. Again. And again!
  

11:16 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Full of Himself at Any Age

Ralph "Glory Hound" Nader has destroyed any legacy he might have had by his megalomania. The man does not believe in democracy; the man believes in seeing his name in print. "Unsafe At Any Speed," a book about auto safety, made him his name and his first taste of money. But, yet again, what he has proven is that the only taste he really likes is fame. After what he cost this nation in 2000, and what he is doing now, all he will die with is infamy.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced Sunday he will run again for the presidency, declaring that Washington has become "corporate occupied territory'' and arguing there is too little difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.

Nader, who will turn 70 this week, said he contemplated retirement but decided against that. "I've decided to run as an independent candidate for president,'' he announced on NBC's "Meet The Press.''

"This country has more problems and injustices than it deserves,'' Nader said, bemoaning a "democracy gap.'' He said he needed to get into the race to "challenge this two-party duopoly.''

"There's too much power and wealth in too few hands,'' he said. "They have taken over Washington.'' ...

Asked if he would withdraw if he concluded his candidacy would merely ensure President Bush's re-election, Nader told interviewer Tim Russert, ``When and if that eventuality occurs, you can invite me back on the program and I'll give you the answer.''

Nader decided against running under the banner of the Green Party. His candidacy four years ago has been blamed by many Democrats for costing Al Gore the election against George W. Bush.

Last week, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe revealed that he had met with Nader several times urging him not to run. ...

"It's his personal vanity because he has no movement. Nobody's backing him,'' New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson said Sunday in advance of Nader's announcement.

"The Greens aren't backing him. His friends urge him not to do it. It's all about himself,'' Richardson told `"Fox News Sunday.''

"Now, Ralph's made some great contributions to consumer issues over the years, but clearly it's not going to help us,'' he said. "I don't think he'll have a sizable impact, but it's terrible if he goes ahead because it's about him. It's about his ego. It's about his vanity and not about a movement that supposedly he headed for many years very effectively.''
The New York Times
  

12:20 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, February 22, 2004

"Soldier for the Truth"

Has America been the victim of a coup d'etat and we've been too blind or scared to notice? That is a strong question for this journalist to ask in print. But ask it I must; I believe many of you will also ask it when you read the article and interview below. Bits and pieces of this story have been wafting around for months, but in a profile and Q & A of Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, U.S. Air Force, by a journalist I know, Marc Cooper, in the LA Weekly, a publication I also know well, it all comes together and chills me to the quick.

I am going to reproduce it here in full--and, yes, it is long--because, if nothing else, I want a record of it here in these pages. I beseech you to read it, please. Then I want you to think about it. Then I want you to research it some, if you will, and then I want you to do something about it: pass it on to anyone who will listen.
Soldier for the Truth

Exposing Bush's talking-points war

by Marc Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?
Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti's organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy -- an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You heard this in staff meetings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you be specific?

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

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

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

They were political . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:15 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Skilling & Lay of Enron Shame Should Read This Story

They Shoot White-Collar Crooks and Governmental Thieves in China. In fact, they shot one yesterday. I ask you, would that have deterred Enron and WorldCom executives back in the States?
A top county official was executed Friday in this capital of southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region for bribery and abuse of power.

Wan Ruizhong, former Communist Party secretary of the region's Nandan County, was convicted of taking bribes and abusing his power, and executed following approval by the Supreme People's Court.

Wan was also convicted of plotting to cover up a mine accident that killed 81 miners in July 2001, according to the Nanning City Intermediate People's Court.

The deaths occurred when the county's Lajiapo mine, which was under Wan's direct jurisdiction, flooded July 17, 2001.

Investigation of the accident led to the exposure of Wan and other corrupt officials in the county.

Wan was also sentenced to the confiscation of his personal property of 500,000 yuan (about 60,000 US dollars), and his illegal income of 2.68 million yuan (323,000 US dollars) has been turned over to the national treasury.

His appeal was rejected by the Guangxi Regional Higher People's Court Aug. 26, 2002.

Only a day before Wan's execution, Yan Zhihua, another prefectural official, was sentenced to one year in prison with a two-year reprieve for his role in the cover-up.

Other officials responsible for mine accidents in the area have been sentenced to death, 10 years and 13 years in prison, respectively, for their roles in similar cover-ups.
Yikes!

People's Daily
  

2:55 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It's Official, Wang Qishan Is Mayor of Beijing

I'll Never Forget the Press Conference When I and at Least One Billion Chinese Got To See and Hear Wang Qishan For the First Time. It was last April and the mayor of Beijing had just been fired over the SARS debacle, and Wang Qishan, who had hastily been called up from Hainan Dao, China's Hawaii, to become the acting Mayor in the midst of a maelstrom both national and international, fielded hard questions from real journalists for almost two hours and he didn't shirk a single question. It was an amazing display of public policy on-the-fly that was thought to be extinct in China: my students were stunned, never in their young lives had they seen such a thing, a no-holds-barred live press conference with real answers. Well, almost a year later, he gets the job for real:
Wang Qishan was elected on Saturday morning as mayor of Beijing at the second session of the 12th Beijing Municipal People's Congress that opened on Monday.

Wang was made acting mayor of Beijing on April 22 last year in accordance with a decision made by the Standing Committee of the 12th Beijing Municipal People's Congress.

According to Chinese laws, the standing committee of the people's congress at the local level is authorized to appoint local officials up to the position of deputy heads. Only the annual plenary session of the people's congress is entitled to elect head of the local government.

Wang, born in July 1948, was a native of Tianzhen in Shanxi Province, north China. He joined the Communist Party of China (CPC)in 1983.

In 1969, Wang was sent to the countryside to work as a farmer in neighboring Shaanxi Province. He served the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in 1971-1973, graduated from the History Department of Northwest China University in 1976, and began to work in the Institute of Modern Chinese History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1979.

Wang worked in the rural policy and development research centers of the Secretariat of CPC Central Committee and the State Council between 1982 and 1986.

Wang served as general manager and Party secretary of the China Rural Trust and Investment Company in 1988. He was appointed as vice president of the Construction Bank of China in 1989, and became vice governor of the People's Bank of China in 1993 and president of the Construction Bank of China in 1994. He was elected president of the Chinese Investment Society in 1995.

In 1997, Wang became a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee, and was elected vice governor of Guangdong Province in 1998.

Wang was appointed director of the Economic Restructuring Office of the State Council in 2000, and secretary of the CPC Hainan Provincial Committee in 2002-2003. He was elected chairman of the Standing Committee of the Hainan Provincial People's Congress in January 2003.

Wang was made acting mayor of Beijing and deputy secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee in April 2003.

Wang is chairman of the organizing committee for the Beijing Olympic Games slated for 2008.

He is an alternate member of 15th CPC Central Committee and member of 16th CPC Central Committee.
The People's Daily
  

2:34 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Limited War With China" Say Again!?