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. 

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Kristof Breaks His Silence On Iraq

Nicholas Kristof breaks his silence on the war in Iraq; simply put, it is a must read, for you, but most importantly for the man who unfortunately got us into this mess without a plan save the as yet secret words his personal savior, Jesus "The-Promised-Land-Will-Be-Yours-If-You-And-Sharon-Can-Kill-Enough-Evil-Doers-To-Hold-It" Christ, whispered into his goofy ears:
A U.S. security report earlier this year about Iraq declared: "Recently, hostile forces have attempted to lure coalition forces into ambushes by feigning injuries. . . . An Iraqi posing as a taxicab driver feigned a breakdown and detonated his vehicle when four soldiers approached, killing them all. . . .

"It is not recommended you stop your convoy to offer assistance to `wounded/injured' Iraqis."

That's a parable for our challenge in Iraq. We know we need to win over hearts and minds, but who wants to be blown up helping Iraqis who seem to be injured in car crashes?

I've been quiet on Iraq lately because it's so tempting — but rather unhelpful — to rant one more time about President Bush's folly in launching this war. It's far harder to figure out what to do now that he's gotten us chest-deep in the mire.

I'm not certain that we can make a success out of Iraq, and the question John Kerry posed in 1971 is still a fair one: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" One senses an impatient rustling as people look for the exits from Iraq.

Yet rushing out would be a mistake. If we give up on Iraq, it will collapse into civil war, leaving Iraqis worse off than they were under Saddam and turning the country with the world's second-largest oil reserves into a failed state that spawns terrorists. There are a few steps we can take that offer some hope of a turnaround for our occupation:

• Deploy 25,000 additional troops in Iraq for at least a few months to try to achieve a secure transition.

• Stick to the June 30 transition and give the Iraqis full sovereignty. The administration's plan to convey only what it calls "limited sovereignty" is a mistake, for it risks inflaming Iraqi nationalism. The only hope of getting Iraqis to behave responsibly is to give them responsibility.

• Count to one googolplex before rushing into Falluja and Najaf to wipe out the resistance. Most Iraqis know that Moktada al-Sadr is a hotheaded blowhard. But nationalism leads Iraqis to rally around anyone we go after. We have already made Mr. Sadr a hero by closing his newspaper, and our best hope for destroying him is to leave him alone, let Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani discredit him and let the shadowy Thulfiqar Army carve up his Mahdi militia.

• Dump Ahmad Chalabi and other carpetbaggers. They are American stooges who undermine the legitimacy of any government they are in. The Dawa and Sciri religious parties may agree with us less, but they have genuine support and can be the building blocks of a transitional Iraqi government. If we give them real authority, there will be a convergence of interest: Dawa and Sciri want a stable Iraq even more than we do.

• Disentangle ourselves from Ariel Sharon, that bloodstained figure embraced by President Bush as "a man of peace." By assassinating Hamas leaders and threatening to do the same to Yasir Arafat, Mr. Sharon is undermining our efforts in Iraq. Mr. Bush squandered our legitimacy in Iraq when he and Mr. Sharon chummily gave away Palestinian rights this month.

• Bring back the most professional and least political Baathist generals. Iraq's most desperate need now is for security, and we need them.

Mr. Bush is starting to move on a few of these issues, but he needs to act more decisively on each. Only then would we have some hope of stanching the sacrifice of young soldiers — those whom Wilfred Owen, the great World War I poet, unforgettably described thus: "The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;/Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,/And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."
The New York Times
  

2:38 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Dubya Sends A Shrill Woman Out To Fight Kerry Over The Terrible Truths Of War...

The "Wimp Factor" is back front and center in another Bush reelection campaign. Knowing he cannot go even one round in the battle with John F. Kerry over who is best equipped to be a bona fide Commander-in-Chief, the AWOL Kid sends the shrew of the "Florida Coup d'etat," the ball-busting Karen "Low Blow" Hughes instead. It isn't a fair fight, of course, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman; it has everything to do with her being an ignorant human being:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- One of President Bush's closest confidants challenged Sen. John Kerry on Sunday to further explain comments he made in 1971 that he participated in "atrocities" in Vietnam.

"I wish we knew a little bit more about that," Karen Hughes, the former White House communications director, said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"Did he think he did commit them or not? And who else did? And what was he really saying? Was he totally exaggerating? Was he making it up? I think the press ought to follow some line of inquiry about that." ...

Bush campaign officials -- who have had to handle persistent questions about the president's National Guard service during the war -- have largely steered clear of the topic, preferring to focus on Kerry's Senate votes on national security issues.

But Hughes, who remains a close political adviser to Bush even though she is no longer on the White House staff, waded into the dispute.

"I remember watching Senator Kerry, back when he was against the war, when he came home, and I was very troubled by the kind of allegations that he hurled against his fellow veterans, saying that they were guilty of all kinds of atrocities," said Hughes, the daughter of a retired Army officer who served in three wars, including Vietnam.

"As someone whose father was over there fighting, I don't appreciate that. I resent that. I know my father was not guilty of any atrocities, and I really find that that's an irresponsible kind of charge to make."
CNN.com

Anyone who claims that "atrocities" are never committed by even the good-guys during war, most particularly in civil-wars based upon ideology when the enemy is indigenous, utilizing guerilla and insurgency tactics, is exceedingly ignorant of military history, recent and past.

There is no question that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam, as did their opponents; it is well-documented fact. I don't know about you, but almost all of my close friends who served in combat in Vietnam, and returned alive, spoke to me of the terrible things that that war forced them to do almost routinely. One of my closest boyhood friends told me a story. During his first week in country, an adolescent Vietnamese girl came running up to a convoy of personnel carriers with other children to get the candy he and his buddies were handing out as they passed through a village. Suddenly she tossed a satchel charge into the truck just ahead of his, killing and maiming many of his comrades in arms. He said from that moment on during his year in Vietnam--which included being decorated for bravery during the siege of Khe Sanh, one of the very few pitched-battles our troops fought in Vietnam--he shot everything, man, woman, child and beast that even moved whenever he was "in the field," which in that war was just about every place that wasn't a base camp or Saigon.

On the same night he told me that story, he also told me proudly of a competition he and his fellow Marines would sometimes "play" when in a "free-fire zone." It went like this: How much living flesh can you destroy with one burst of an M-60 machine gun? This young man, one of the sweetest, friendliest, kindest teenagers small-town America ever produced, and perhaps the best pure running back I ever played with, chugged a beer, smiled, and told me that his best effort had been "one mama-san, three kids, two chickens, a dog and a water buffalo."

Was he exaggerating? Perhaps, but I will never know. Later that night, with far too many beers in him, which he drank in my family's restaurant as we celebrated his and his twin brother's homecoming--together, they had just returned from combat in Vietnam only the day before--were killed in a head-on collision on Highway 90 in Biloxi, Mississippi. I remember and cry every time I visit their graves, which is often; as fate would have it, Mike and Joe are buried only a few feet away from my father.

War itself, almost by definition, is an atrocity. What the sights, sounds, smells and fears of combat do to the human conscience of very young men is surely an "atrocity." Because, for years or months at a time, they become almost immune to the horrors that steel, lead, napalm and TNT inflicts upon human flesh.
 

9:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Must Watch: "The Jesus Factor" Get A Small Look Below...

"We need common sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God" -- George W. Bush. For all of you who can watch American television, I proudly, and fervently, ask you to watch an important FRONTLINE documentary film, "The Jesus Factor," on PBS, Thursday, April, 29, 9 PM (Eastern Standard Time). I say "proudly" because my wife's son, Marin Sander-Holzman, a promising young film maker, served as assistant editor on this project--many, many months in the making--that examines the extraordinary, and really quite frightening, influence that the far-right Christian fundamentalist movement has on the man who is the president of the United States of America, the most ethnically, culturally, religiously diverse nation on Earth.

"The Jesus Factor" does this more thoroughly than any mainstream television program has yet done. Below is the Title and Credits page, which in one glance should scare the bejesus out of you if you believe it is imperative that the separation of church and state remain one of the primary pillars of our beloved republic, as did the Founding Fathers, who enshrined its importance by making it the first words of the first clause of the first sentence that is the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
  

6:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, April 27, 2004

U.S. Congressmen Tell Beijing To Release Yang Jianli

The Chinese central government's public relations woes continue. However, when it comes to incarcerating "foreign agents" without due process, the United States Congress is on decidedly shaky ground. While the protests and demands are undoubtedly out of legitimate concern and have a sound legal basis, the Congressmen's moral authority can be too easily dismissed by China with the old saw: Put your own house in order before preaching its virtues to others.
US lawmakers demand China release democracy activist

A group of senior American Congressmen has demanded the release of imprisoned democracy activist, Yang Jianli.

Mr Yang, a US resident, has been in prison in China for two years, on charges of illegal entry and spying for Taiwan.

He was tried in August last year but, as yet, no verdict has been issued.

By Chinese law, a Beijing court should have handed down a verdict or set him free within two and a half months of the closed-door, one-day trial.

In a letter to Chinese President, Hu Jintao, 67 Republican and Democrat congressmen say the imprisonment of the 40-year-old scholar is "an extraordinarily inhumane act unworthy of a great nation."

They have warned that US-Chinese relations will be harmed by Mr Yang's continued imprisonment and "brutal treatment".
ABC RADIO AUSTRALIA
  

1:06 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, April 26, 2004

Pat Tillman Is A Hero: A Crystal Clear Shout From the Proud LEFT

I'm just about as "left" as it gets. Many folks over the years have labeled me as a "radical leftist," and just as many times I have not disagreed. I have been called a "Socialist" even more often; and just as often I have agreed, but always with the caveat, or slight correction: "Make that a Democratic Socialist, if you please." In the long ago olden days, I was sometimes called a "Communist"; depending upon the speaker of that accusation, I had different responses. If it was a rabid John Bircher type for whom I had no intellectual respect and wanted to enjoy watching his eyes and neck veins pop out, my response was, "You're damn right!" If it was from a centrist democrat for whom I had a fair degree of intellectual respect, my most frequent response would be the apocryphal quote: "Hell, every man worth his salt was a Communist in the 30's." Sometimes, with a few scotches in me, and I was in the mood to shock my mother's prayer-meeting friends, I myself would announce that I was a "godless Communist." But, in truth, I am not a Communist; never have been and never will be--but I damn sure am a proud leftist.

Of course, there was another epithet far too often hurled my way; a hateful, horribly ugly term, so hated still that I cannot spell it in its full ugliness: "You n****r lover!" That one always brought a response, and swiftly: my right and left fists aimed at the head--or heads--of the bigot(s) who was dumb enough to hail me so. Unfortunately, being a civil rights activist in Mississippi in the mid-60's, that name and the violence it begat was so frequent and terrible that I try now to forget as much of it as I can.

Why this overlong litany of my varying degrees of labeling in the political and metaphysical realms? Because I am also a Jock, a damn proud Jock--alright, in truth, I am a prematurely old and broken-down ex-jock. While I was a 4-sport letterman at Ocean Springs High School (Mississippi) in the early-to-mid-60's--when they still had such phrases--my sports of choice were football (American) and baseball. I was fairly good at both: I went to college originally on a football scholarship; and in baseball I made it all the way to the big leagues as a scout, and to college ball as a coach.

Oh, by the way, from high school on, I was also successful as a poet, a painter (and not houses), an actor, an author, a playwright, a screenwriter, and a professor--yep, a dyed in the wool egg-headed intellectual I was and am still.

I know it goes against the stereotype, but I have always lived and worked firmly established in both the world of the jock and the world of the artsy-fartsy intellectual, always hating the commonly spoken myth that the two worlds are mutually exclusive. The dumb jock vs. the effete intellectual. This nonsense also exists in the political realm: Jocks were supposed to be arch conservative Bible-thumping flag-wavers, and members of the intelligentsia were limp-wristed, yellow-bellied traitors. Let me say this, while the label "Hippie" was certainly an accurate description of me for a spell, peacenik never was, and never will be.

So, where am I going with all this personal history? Very recently, two of my favorite bloggers, Richard at The Peking Duck, and Conrad at The Gweilo Diaries, posted on a blasphemy--Mocking Pat Tillman, or Why so many people hate The Left and R.I.P. Pat Tillman, respectively--that is almost beyond imagination except that it is too goddamned true and out there for all to see. This ugliness, this inhumanity is directed against the NFL football player and U.S. Army Ranger, Pat Tillman, who just a few days ago was killed in action in Afghanistan, and this is what it is:
Dumb Jock Killed in Afghanistan
And this is the press entity responsible for such hateful ignorance:
Portland Independent Media Center
Go ahead, click, and see who they are, and what they did, and what people are saying about it. Then come back here for a few paragraphs and a link to the original story the Indymedia sourced for their shameful use of their undeniable right of free speech.
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who forfeited a multimillion dollar contract and the celebrity of the National Football League to become a U.S. Army Ranger, was killed in Afghanistan during a firefight near the Pakistan border on Thursday, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Tillman, 27, was killed when the combat patrol unit he was serving in was ambushed by militia forces near the village of Spera, about 90 miles south of Kabul, the Afghan capital. Tillman was hit when his unit returned fire, according to officials at the Pentagon. He was medically evacuated from the scene and pronounced dead by U.S. officials at approximately 11:45 a.m. Thursday. Two other U.S. soldiers were injured and one Afghan soldier fighting alongside the U.S. troops was killed.

The death of Tillman, the first prominent U.S. athlete to be killed in combat since Vietnam, cast a spotlight on a war that has receded in the American public consciousness. As Iraq has come into the foreground with daily casualty updates, the military campaign in Afghanistan has not garnered the same attention, though there are still more than 10,000 U.S. troops in the country and fighting continues against remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Tillman was the 70th U.S. soldier to die within Afghanistan's borders since U.S. forces invaded the country in October 2001. According to the Department of Defense, 117 U.S. soldiers have died worldwide in Operation Enduring Freedom. Tillman was assigned to Company A of the 2nd battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., an elite Army light-infantry unit often used for difficult assault missions around the world.

Tillman stunned his family, coaches and teammates in 2002 when he walked away from a three-year contract worth $3.6 million. At the time, the move was viewed as a strong example of post-9/11 patriotism. After four seasons with the Cardinals, the aggressive safety -- whose 224 tackles in a single season was a team record -- simply told the organization that he was joining the Army with his brother, Kevin, a former minor league prospect in the Cleveland Indians system. By May 2002, they had both enlisted.

Part of the decision was timing. The Rangers do not accept recruits over the age of 28. Tillman was 25 at the time.

"The people who knew Pat, the less surprised you were," Pete Kendall, his Cardinals teammate, said yesterday during a news conference at the team's practice facility in Arizona. "For someone to walk away from several million dollars and a life of relative ease to put his neck on the line literally for $18,000 to $20,000 with no guarantee for tomorrow, you had to be surprised by that. Pat is the only one I know in our modern day of athletics who did it. This was sort of out of the blue and totally unexpected nationally. But the more you knew Pat, the more you understand why."

On Sept. 11, 2001, Tillman walked into the media room at the Cardinals' training facility and sat with reporters watching the coverage of the terror attacks, transfixed by the events of the day. In his last on-camera interview, the next day, Tillman alluded to his deep patriotism and seemed to be setting the stage for his enlistment.

"My great grandfather was at Pearl Harbor and a lot of my family has gone and fought in wars and I really haven't done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that," he said. "And so I have a great deal of respect for those that have and what the flag stands for."
Washington Post
  

9:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Democracy Down For The Count In Hong Kong...

Renege is a renege is a renege is a renege...and while not a scholar on the basic agreement in force since Great Britain returned Hong Kong to China, it does appear to me that a renege is exactly what was announced by Beijing today while calling it everything but that. Damn shame, credibility, or one's good name or one's good word, is the single most important element of trust between people and nation-states. This is not the signal that one would think the central government would like to send to Taiwan by way of proxy. Bad law not only makes for bad policy, it makes for long misunderstandings...

Below is a straightforward announcement from Reuters; below that is a whopper of an explanation by the "journalists" at China Daily.
HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's top parliamentarians voted on Monday to rule out full direct elections for choosing Hong Kong's leader and all its legislators in 2007 and 2008, one of its lawmakers said.

"There will be no universal suffrage for electing (Hong Kong's) third Chief Executive," Tsang Hin-chi, a Hong Kong member of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, or China's parliament, told reporters in Beijing.

"There will be no universal suffrage for all legislators (for elections in 2008)," he added. Tsang's comments were carried live by Hong Kong's Cable Television.
Reuters.com

A renege by any other name would smell as foul: Below is indecipherable--by me, anyway--doublespeak from China Daily attempting to explain the rationale behind the NPC Standing Committee's ruling. If you can understand what it means you are far smarter than this reporter.

The half by half ratio for members of the Council from functional groups and from constituency election shall remain unchanged, the Decision said, adding that the procedures for voting on bills and motions in the Legislative Council shall remain unchanged.

However, the Decision said that specific methods for selecting the Chief Executive in 2007 and forming the Legislative Council in 2008 could be "appropriately modified" in the principle of gradual and orderly progress and in accordance with the Basic Law, the Decision said.

The NPC Standing Committee explained in the decision that Hong Kong's history for democratic election is not long, and it has been for no more than seven years that Hong Kong residents have exercised the democratic rights of participating in selecting the HKSAR Chief Executive.

Since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the number of directly-elected members in the Legislative Council has been increased remarkably. After half of the members are directly elected in constituency and half are elected by functional groups, the influence of the directly-elected members upon Hong Kong society's general operation, especially the influence upon the executive-led mechanism is yet to be tested by practice, it said.

Moreover, various social circles in Hong Kong currently still have considerable differences about methods for selecting the Chief Executive and for forming the Legislative Council after 2007, and no broad consensus has been reached yet, it noted.

Under such circumstances, conditions do not satisfy the general election of the Chief Executive and the general election of all Legislative Council members, the Decision said.
Uh...say what?

China Daily
  

5:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, April 25, 2004

Go Figure: U.S. Treasury Wants China To Play Larger Role In G-7

Roll over Vladimir, tell Mao Zedong the news: The Big Leagues of Capitalism want to call China up to the Show. It certainly makes sense; it's just a whip-lash to actually see in print, in Bloomberg.com, no less. Also, can anyone answer a puzzlement I'm afflicted with: does the United States have a "China Policy" that isn't as unpredictable as a squall in the Gulf of Mexico? Is it any wonder that Beijing is more than a little skeptical at just about everything that comes out of Washington?
April 24 (Bloomberg) -- China's emerging presence in the world economy means it should be allowed to play a bigger role in meetings of the Group of Seven industrial nations, a U.S. Treasury official said.

The official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity after G-7 finance ministers and central bankers met in Washington, said the G-7 should embrace Chinese leaders more and find ways of strengthening the dialogue between them.

"China is clearly playing a larger role in the global economy,'' Treasury Secretary John Snow said in a separate briefing. "Its continued progress is important to us and to others in the G-7.''

The U.S., the world's largest industrial economy, wants to broaden ties with China, the largest developing nation, as the Chinese economy outperforms Japan's. The U.S. official declined to say whether China should be added to the G-7, saying that was an invite one country couldn't extend alone.
More mixed signals...Bloomberg.com
  

7:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Beware The allure Of The Cult Of Perpetual Victimhood...

In a very recent post, Richard, the author and proprietor of The Peking Duck, brought our attention to a truly insightful essay by David Brooks ostensibly on the teenage "Columbine Killers," Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which blows away the popular myth of these underage murderers as victims of abuse by the popular in-crowd. Every high school has one and probably always will. As Mr. Brooks documents, Harris and Klebold weren't victims of bullies, they were flat-out perps, Harris particularly was an "icy cold" supreme egoist mass-murderer on the same metaphysical plane as other more infamous devotees of the self as "superman." The victims, in his eyes, were all of us, the masses of "subhumans" with whom he wished not to share his life and world.

As powerful and accurate as Mr. Brooks is in his defrocking of these mythologized American high school murderers, in this post I wish to memorialize in these pages--and present for your edification--the last four graphs of the "Columbine Killers" column. Here, Mr. Brooks' insight digs deeper and reaches into the demonic pit of the suicidal mass-murderers who prey upon much greater masses than Harris and Klebold in the end did, the Islamic supreme egoists who are popularly believed to be acting out of a semi-legitimate cult of victimhood. Perhaps you might have had such thoughts. It is not something to be ashamed of. We in the west often like to read virtue into all victims of alleged "oppression," and often we are right to do so. However, in the cases at hand, read the words below and think again.
Now, in 2004, we have more experience with suicidal murderers. Yet it is striking how resilient this perpetrator-as-victim narrative remains. We still sometimes assume that the people who flew planes into buildings -- and those who blew up synagogues in Turkey, trains in Spain, discos in Tel Aviv and schoolchildren this week in Basra -- are driven by feelings of weakness, resentment and inferiority. We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.

But it could be that whatever causes they support or ideologies they subscribe to, the one thing that the killers have in common is a feeling of immense superiority. It could be that they want to exterminate us because they regard us as spiritually deformed and unfit to live, at least in their world. After all, it is hard to pull up to a curb, look a group of people in the eye and know that in a few seconds you will shred them to pieces unless you regard other people's deaths as trivialities.

If today's suicide bombers are victims of oppression, then the solution is to lessen our dominance, and so assuage their resentments. But if they are vicious people driven by an insatiable urge to dominate, then our only option is to fight them to the death.

We had better figure out who these bombers really are. After Columbine, we got it wrong.
The New York Times
  

5:49 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Life As A Rat Is The REAL Dork...

Some dude with a dorky name--Daniel Duprie--and an even dorkier face--see photo below--is the DORK. I know, I know, Phil, dear editor of Living In China and my friend, we are not supposed to flame one another in this wonderful community of bloggers, but I am breaking that rule because a member of this community has publicly attacked a friend and colleague of mine at CCTV International, Channel 9--Mark Rowswell, otherwise known as Da Shan, and has attacked him ad hominem.

I do not have a problem with his criticism of Mark's television program, "Communicate in Chinese." Intellectual criticism is fair play in matters of art, literature, entertainment, deng deng; but to attack him for his looks? And I quote:
"...with this massive idiot grin on his face. Besides this, he looks ridiculous in his traditional Chinese dress. I think traditional Chinese dress is colourful and beautiful, but on Mark Rowswell it looks stupid. He just looks so incredibly dorky."
Let me say this about Mark Rowswell, he came here some years ago just as this Duprie guy did, to teach English to Chinese middle schoolers; but, unlike so many others, he worked hard and mastered reading, writing and speaking Mandarin. Through luck and opportunity, he came to the attention of the fine people at CCTV International and over time and with perseverance he worked a part-time gig into a television career that is much larger than the language program Mr. Duprie takes such umbrage with. He is an accomplished man of great warmth and intelligence. He has done what so many others only dream of.

In my media career in the States, I worked with all kinds of talent, from the nasty no-talent but lucky jerks, to the really talented salt-of-the-earth types who made it through hard work. I would place Mark Rowswell in the latter category.

The picture you see below, along with the link to this rat's weblog and a quick look around it, should put the matter of who is the real dork to rest in a heartbeat:
Life of a Rat


This is a Dork!
  

3:15 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Forget The Medals, Kerry Still Carries The Metal, And He Damn Sure Has The Mettle

The case is closed, and somewhat embarrassingly for AWOL Dubya. It turns out that Senator Kerry is still carrying deep in his thigh the shrapnel from the combat wound for which he received his second Purple Heart. Along with the life-altering experience that serving with honor and emotional integrity in America's most controversial, most unpopular and longest war placed upon the psyche of the next President of the United States, Senator Kerry carries within him the physical evidence of the brutality and never-ending consequences of war between nation-states. It is not surprising--and therefore telling--that this man, who by all measurable criteria was born and trained to lead others in times of crisis, has not spoken of this himself.

I'm sure he doesn't like talking about it. I have some small understanding of that phenomenon; for almost 40 years I have carried the lead from a gunshot wound--not from Vietnam, from another kind of war, fought in my home state of Mississippi--behind my left eye which cannot be removed without the likelihood of losing sight in that eye. I do not like talking about it unless I also have in me a goodly amount of Scotch.

So what are the Nervous-Nellie neocons going to say about this news? They who know nothing about the choices and consequences of life-threatening violence other than possibly contracting gangrene from a cut received when their slide-rules fell out of their white shirt-pockets in their rush to acquire a deferment from serving in that searingly divisive war in Southeast Asia. We all knew the type; they were sucking up to teachers and authority figures in every high school class in America. We all know the type now; they are the goody-two-shoe ideologues that to our great peril are governing America at one of the most crucial periods in its modern history.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry still carries a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh from a 1969 Vietnam War wound that led to his second Purple Heart, his doctor said on Friday.

Kerry, the commander of a "swiftboat" in the Mekong Delta in late 1968 and 1969, was hit by the shrapnel in a Feb. 20, 1969, firefight. Dr. Gerald Doyle, Kerry's personal physician, said removal would have required an even wider incision in the leg.

"A decision was made to leave the shrapnel in place," Doyle said in a letter summarizing 35 pages of military medical records taken from Kerry's personal files. "Successful removal would have necessitated an extensive wider exposure."

The Massachusetts senator, who released his military records earlier this week after questions were raised about his first Purple Heart, also made the medical records available for inspection by reporters on Friday.

Doyle briefed reporters on the records in a conference call and released the letter summarizing them. The Navy files released earlier in the week did not include Kerry's medical records.

The records indicated Kerry, who is challenging President Bush for the White House, had shrapnel removed from his upper left arm in December 1968 and from his upper buttock in March 1969 after he was wounded in action.

Kerry won three Purple Hearts, as well as a Silver Star and Bronze Star, while in Vietnam.

The military records were released by the campaign under pressure from Republicans after one of Kerry's former commanders questioned his first Purple Heart and the severity of the shrapnel wound to Kerry's arm.

Regulations governing Purple Hearts, given for injuries caused by enemy action, do not specify a level of severity for the wounds. The Navy records indicate the first wound was treated with an antibiotic dressing after the shrapnel was removed.

The records also provided some other glimpses into Kerry's health, showing he was diagnosed with pneumonia twice while in the Navy, once in 1966 and once in 1967.

He also suffered from "an episode of an upper respiratory infection and bronchitis, as well as a minor nonspecific urinary tract infection, and both responded to tetracycline successfully," Doyle said.
Reuters
  

12:42 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, April 23, 2004

From Dubya's Mouth...

Time for some more Bushisms, as collected by Jacob Weisberg:
"The great thing about America is everybody should vote." --Austin, Texas; December 8, 2000

"If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room care, we're going to have gag orders." --St. Louis; October 18, 2000

"States should have the right to enact reasonable laws and restrictions particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live." --Cleveland; June 29, 2000

"There's an old saying in Tennesse--I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee--that says, fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again." --Nashville, Tennessee; September 17, 2002

"The United States and Russia are in the midst of a transformationed relationship that will yield peace and progress." --Washington, D.C.; November 13, 2001
  

11:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Things Didn't Go As Well In China As Kim Jong Il Would Have Liked

Kim Jong Il doesn't have all of the boss cards he needs in this dangerous game of "Liar's Poker" he is playing--he's missing the one card he must have: China.
"He's losing Chinese political and economic support more and more every day," said Park Joon-young, a political science professor at Ewha Women's University in Seoul. "Everybody is expecting something good out of this (meeting), because Kim Jong Il made a new move and came out of his den."

In the end, it is North Korea that suffers the most if the standoff continues, analysts say. "They know they have to cut a deal," said Ron Huisken, a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at Australian National University in Canberra. "They just have to get the best deal that they can. "
There is more at the Associated Press via My Way News
 

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Thursday, April 22, 2004

James Kelly, In Testimony Before Congress, Sounds Strong Warning To Taiwan

Assistant Secretary of State, James Kelly, minces no words on the realities of a U.S. defense of Taiwan in testimony before a congressional hearing of the House international relations committee. Yikes! The right-wing nut-cases will go bonkers over this. I can hear it now: "Bush loses Taiwan to communists." I mean, 55 years ago, their rallying cry was: "Democrats lost China to reds!" And it went on for decades. The label of "(Fill in the Blank) lost China to Commies" was maliciously attached to anyone slightly left of John Foster Dulles, or John Birch himself. As if 750 million folks (back then) and half a continent could be "lost."
The US warned Taiwan on Wednesday that the island's defence could not be ensured if it were to unilaterally move towards independence and insisted that China's threats of military action must be taken seriously.

In testimony before the US House international relations committee James Kelly, assistant secretary of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said: "We have very real concerns that our efforts at deterring Chinese coercion might fail if Beijing ever becomes convinced Taiwan is embarked on a course towards independence and permanent separation from China.

"While we strongly disagree with the approach, it would be irresponsible of us and Taiwan's leaders to treat these statements as empty threats."

When asked whether the Taiwanese were under the impression that the US was willing to defend them at all costs Mr Kelly replied: "If they heard that they misunderstood."
Financial Times

There is also this in Channel News Asia
"Taiwan must be stopped in these efforts," Kelly said, amid continuing worry over moves by President Chen Shui-bian toward greater independence during campaigning ahead of Taiwan elections last month.

Kelly made his remarks at a hearing heralding 25 years of strengthening diplomatic and trade relations with Taiwan -- a delicate balancing act that has often required assuaging Beijing, even while providing military assistance to the island.

Lawmakers held the hearing to mark the silver anniversary of the 1979 legislation, which members of praised as a success -- albeit a somewhat precarious one.

"The current situation is a delicate balance which is in the interest of all to maintain," said Representative Henry Hyde, Republican chairman of the committee.

The panel's top Democrat, Representative Tom Lantos, hailed the legislation, which affirms the "one China" policy and commits Washington to coming to Taiwan's defense if attacked by Beijing, as "flexible and durable."

Lawmakers also stressed US commitment to strict adherence to the policy, which defines the island as a part of China.
Channel News Asia
  

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Why They Hate Us, Really

Everybody needs to read the essay below; all of this killing must stop. It is time to listen to anyone who has an idea other than what everybody everywhere is doing now. Because, folks, this mess, all of it, is insanity masquerading as pragmatism at best and ideology at worst. No More Body Parts! No More Body Parts! No More Body Parts!
For the last five weeks I have been traveling through the Middle East, meeting diplomats, officials, policy experts, military leaders, students and ordinary citizens. I learned something very important: the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people.

"The Palestinian issue is really what discredits the United States throughout the region," a senior Western diplomat with years of experience in the Middle East told me. Or, as one student after another put it after the university lectures I conducted across the region: "Why do Americans have to be so biased?"

In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries, the large majority of people I spoke with are ready to tolerate the Jewish state — most even understand that the final boundaries of Israel will include some of the heavily settled areas beyond the pre-1967 borders. They also understand that few if any Palestinians will return to the homes they lost after the war that erupted when Israel declared its independence in 1948. And they are prepared to accept, though not to relish, America's close relations with Israel. Beyond that, they want increased American support for their domestic political reforms and for initiatives to enhance regional cooperation for economic growth and fighting terrorism.

But one thing sticks in their craw: Why doesn't America care more about the Palestinians' future?

They have a point. America's Middle East policy is unnecessarily zero-sum. We can be more pro-Palestinian without being less pro-Israeli. Indeed, to the degree that American policies help create support for compromise among Palestinians, pro-Palestinian initiatives can help Israel too.

Take compensation. United Nations resolutions call for financial compensation for Palestinians who cannot return to their family homes in Israel. Israel's position that it cannot accept millions of refugees and their descendants is reasonable enough, and the Bush administration's support of it is nothing new. But we should be equally clear about compensation.

Many questions need answering: where can Palestinians go to have their claims for lost property adjudicated and certified? What tribunal will hear these claims? What principles will guide its deliberations? Where will the money come from to pay the claims when peace is finally made?

The United States can and should take the lead in building an international consensus on the compensation issue and, working with allies in Europe and elsewhere, help raise money to ensure that it is more than a pious wish.

There is more we can do. Millions of Palestinians are now stateless. (Jordan has integrated the refugees within its borders; other countries have not.) When peace comes, all Palestinians should be citizens of some state with full economic and social rights. The new Palestinian state will need financial help to absorb many of these refugees; and neighboring states who agree to integrate Palestinians should also receive international aid.

In addition, while many Palestinians are well educated, many others are poor and lack skills. They depend on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for basic services and support. Who takes the agency's place when peace comes and the Palestinians aren't refugees anymore?

Taking the lead on these and other issues vital to the Palestinians would not bring quick progress toward peace in the region, nor would it undo overnight the consequences of decades of suspicion and resentment. But it would help to reduce anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and beyond, as well as to advance the cause of peace.

Walter Russell Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Power, Terror, Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk.
The New York Times
  

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I Know Where The Buck Stops...

If you want to know exactly where the buck stops, all you have to do is go click, and enjoy the movie:



Click Right HERE


MotherJones
  

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Is Lying About $700 Million A Tempest In A Diamond-Studded Platinum Teapot?

When you say it really fast, $700 Million doesn't sound like much more than military pocket-change, right? Certainly not enough to bother Congress over. Of course, not. Almost three-quarters of a billion dollars? Said that way, it sounds like even less--I mean, fractions are small, aren't they?
The $700 Million Question

Desperate to tamp down outrage from Congress, the White House and its allies yesterday spun out various responses to Bob Woodward's allegation that the administration secretly took $700 million from the hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan and diverted it into Iraq war planning in 2002. Yet no one provided any proof that Woodward's charges were inaccurate. As a new American Progress backgrounder shows, if Woodward's charges are true, the administration's actions not only raise constitutional questions, they also raise statutory questions; federal law required the president to notify Congress before moving any money. While the administration sent two documents to Congress outlining some spending, both the 8/9/02 and 10/17/02 White House notifications in question said nothing about Iraq, instead only mentioning deliberately vague things like "increased situational awareness" and "increased worldwide posture."

NO PROOF FROM MCCLELLAN: White House press secretary Scott McClellan did not deny the president secretly diverted money, but claimed, "Congress was kept fully informed of all expenditures." He provided no proof. He also had no answer as to why top congressional appropriators such as Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said they had never been informed.

WOLFOWITZ DENIAL PROMPTS CALL FOR HEARINGS: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also did not deny Woodward's fundamental assertion, instead trying to absolve the White House by claiming, "No funds were made available that had Iraq as the only objective." Wolfowitz also implied there was no need to notify Congress because Congress supposedly authorized the spending in its October 2002 war resolution. But that resolution included no authorization to spend money without notifying Congress. White House ally Sen. John Warner (R-VA) tried to shut further questioning down, saying, "At this point I think the matter has been fully responded to." But at least one conservative lawmaker indicated that Wolfowitz's answers were unsatisfactory: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "said there would be hearings into possible fund diversions and 'the mechanics of moving money around.'"

HOUSE CHAIRMAN CHANGES THE SUBJECT: House Appropriations Chairman Bill Young (R-FL), the man charged with overseeing federal spending, also refused to deny Woodward's charges. He instead tried to deflect the issue with a non-sequitur, "saying the $700 million was small compared with $159 billion in additional money Congress has provided to fight terrorism since the 2001 attacks." He implied that because over a half billion dollars was not a lot of money, and because of a supposed "lack of specificity" by Woodward, "it is impossible to determine what specific funds" were spent without congressional approval.

WHITE HOUSE CHANGES THE STORY: The LA Times reports White House Deputy Press Secretary Trent Duffy also did not deny Woodward's charges, instead acknowledging that money was used for a "significant buildup" of troops in the Persian Gulf – but only "to aid weapons inspectors." Of course, the United Nations' weapons inspectors never requested hundreds of thousands of troops to mass on the Iraqi border.

RICE NEEDS A GEOGRAPHY LESSON: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CBS's Face the Nation that, while she had no details about the $700 million, circumventing Congress was acceptable because Afghanistan and Iraq are "within the entire region." Her answer ignored the fact that Asia and the Mideast are separate geographic regions - more than 1400 miles separate Kabul and Baghdad. By Rice's logic, this would mean Austin, Texas is in the same region as Nicaragua. In fact, the U.S. State Department has two separate bureaus and two separate Assistant Secretaries of State to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan. Her answer also ignores the fact that fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (as approved by Congress) had nothing to do with invading Iraq.
The Center for American Progress
  

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Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Now This Is A Political Dirty Trick

A curse takes political dirty tricks to a whole new level. My question: is Mr. Howard even a little bit worried? Can one totally dismiss such an idea? Even subconsciously? Would it work on a "resolute" prayerful politician such as Bush?
COLAC, Australia (AP) -- An Aboriginal woman clad in animal skins has put a traditional curse on Prime Minister John Howard, apparently in retaliation for government plans to abolish Australia's top indigenous elected body.

Howard encountered the woman on a visit to Colac, an outback town with 500 people in the southern state of Victoria.

Supporters turned up to greet the prime minister along with angry Aboriginal protesters and the woman, known only as Moopor.

Painted in traditional tribal makeup and wearing possum skins, Moopor stood silently and cast the curse by pointing a small bone at Howard as he climbed into a waiting car. Howard smiled and waved at Moopor before leaving.

Moopor refused to speak with reporters, citing unspecified Aboriginal cultural reasons.

It was not clear what effect the curse was intended to have on the prime minister.
CNN
  

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The Pottery Barn Rule...

Bob Woodward is a journalist's journalist. While as a stylist he seldom dazzles his readers with narrative legerdermain, he is an old-fashioned stickler for accuracy and backing up what a source tells him with two or three other sources. Not unlike one of the most quoted lines in his book so far, if it's in the book "you can take it to the bank" as being true. Without having the privilege yet of reading the book, from the excerpts that have been published, and his interviews on "Larry King Live" and "60 Minutes," I must say that the theme and quotes below are my favorite:

WASHINGTON, April 16 — Two months before the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned President Bush about the potential negative consequences of a war, citing what Mr. Powell privately called the "you break it, you own it" rule of military action, according to a new book. ...

"You're sure?" Mr. Powell is quoted as asking Mr. Bush in the Oval Office on Jan. 13, 2003, as the president told him he had made the decision to go forward. "You understand the consequences," he is said to have stated in a half-question. "You know you're going to be owning this place?"

It has been well known that Mr. Powell was the most skeptical among Mr. Bush's senior advisers about the wisdom of invading Iraq. But the new details described in the book, at a time when the American occupation has met with new perils, add considerably to a portrait of a secretary of state who expressed private reservations about the administration's policy but never issued a public protest about the administration's course. ...

In Mr. Woodward's account of the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell in January 2003, the president is described as having simply informed the secretary of state of his decision to go to war in Iraq, as part of a 12-minute meeting in which Mr. Bush made a conscious decision not to ask Mr. Powell for advice.

But, according to the book, Mr. Bush did ask Mr. Powell "Are you with me on this?" and told him, "I want you with me." Mr. Powell is quoted as having replied: "I'll do the best I can. Yes sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President." ...

Over a period that began in early 2002, Mr. Powell is depicted as having cautioned Mr. Bush and other advisers repeatedly about the potential drawbacks of military action in Iraq. The "you break it, you own it" principle he cited in delivering those warnings was privately known to Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, as "the Pottery Barn rule," the book says.

"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," Mr. Powell is said to have told Mr. Bush in the summer of 2002. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all."
Of all the predictions and assertions about invading Iraq before the fact, perhaps Colin Powell's Pottery Barn Rule warnings were the most accurate.The New York Times
 

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Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Right Wingers Snapping At Dubya

Don't you just love it when the right-wingers start eating their own? I give you just that, from the Editorial Page of The Wall Street Journal
Bush's Brahimi Gamble

America shows weakness in Iraq by passing the buck to the U.N.

One mystery of the last year in Iraq is that a U.S. occupation that is supposed to midwife democracy has put so little trust in Iraqis. The Bush Administration may be compounding that error now by abdicating decisions about the June 30 transition to Iraqi rule to U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. ...

Perhaps the President knows something about Mr. Brahimi's intentions that the rest of us don't. The U.N. envoy was helpful in brokering Afghanistan's postwar government, though in that case the U.S. clearly had a favorite for president in Hamid Karzai. In Iraq Mr. Brahimi is being assigned the role of de facto Douglas MacArthur.

This includes assailing U.S. military commanders for their tactics in the middle of a battle zone. As Marines fought house-to-house in Fallujah last week, Mr. Brahimi took to the Arab airwaves to declare that "Collective punishments are not acceptable--cannot be acceptable, and to cordon off and besiege a city is not acceptable."

Whose side is Mr. Brahimi on? Fallujah is the base of the Baathist insurgents and foreign fighters who are killing Americans. Only this weekend, insurgents who had fanned out from Ramadi and Fallujah ambushed and killed 10 Marines near the Syria border. Unless Fallujah is cleared out as a terror sanctuary, many more Americans will be ambushed and no Iraqi government will be safe.

The one-sided "cease-fire" in that city, along with Mr. Brahimi's comments, have already sent a signal of weakness that will only embolden our enemies. The fastest way for Mr. Bush to lose support at home would be if Americans see their soldiers restrained from doing what it takes to win by U.N. statements or political control. That's when his own base begins to walk.

We also doubt the political benefits of this U.N. intervention. The point seems to be to distance any transition government from the taint of U.S. occupation--never mind that any government will still depend on 135,000 American troops for security. And never mind that Mr. Brahimi, a Sunni who ran the Arab League when it was cozy with Saddam Hussein, may not have any more credibility with Iraq's Shiite majority than L. Paul Bremer.
The Wall Street Journal
  

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Ms. Dowd Says It's Time For Powell To Go

Colin Powell made a big mistake when he chose to throw his lot in with the Republican Party after retiring from service as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is every likelihood that he would have been the first African-American Vice President on the Gore ticket. He was universally respected as a man of integrity with rare leadership skills. Many democrats, myself included, admired him greatly, even after he spurned the party, and even after he accepted the Secretary of State position in the Bush administration. I for one, admire him still, even though I know him now to be flawed, particularly in his judgment of where loyalty to country trumps loyalty to "the team." As a lifetime military man, team loyalty was an ingrained trait. Unfortunately, it has not served him or the nation well.

The revelations in Bob Woodward's book, the candor with which Secretary Powell spoke concerning his true feelings about Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice--but, notably, not Bush, himself--has pretty much assured what many people have been saying privately for some time, namely that Secretary Powell will not be in the cabinet if Bush is reelected. Or, and this would have to be classified as a very long shot indeed, Cheney and Rumsfeld would take their leave instead. I am of the strong opinion that Secretary Powell shouldn't wait to be "dropped" and should resign now, taking whatever highground is left to him in a sharply written farewell speech. He would be leaving while he still has more than a little credibility abroad, and while he is still quite popular with the American public.

Ms. Dowd is less kind than I am in this matter, but her writing sparkles nonetheless and her targets are all hit with uncanny accuracy, to wit:
When Colin Powell decided that Dick Cheney's crazy "fever," as he called the vice president's obsession with linking 9/11 and Saddam, was leading the country into a war it did not need to fight, he should have bared his heart to the president and made his case using the Powell doctrine -- with overwhelming force.

Mr. Bush probably wouldn't have listened. He was in Mr. Cheney's gloomy sway, and Rummy's bellicose sway. And W. felt competitive with his more popular top diplomat.

But Mr. Powell should have tried. And if the president didn't listen, the secretary should have quit -- not let himself be used by the vice president and his "Gestapo office" of Pentagon neocons, as Mr. Powell referred to them, to put a diplomatic fig leaf on a predetermined war plan and to present bogus intelligence to the U.N.

He knew his word held enormous weight around the world. And he knew he was the only one, out of all the officials in on the clandestine rush to war, who had fought in a war. He should have spoken up for all those soldiers who would fight and die and be maimed for Dick Cheney's nutty utopian dream of bombing the world into freedom, and W.'s dream of being so forceful with Saddam, the slime bag who survived his father's war, that he would forever banish his family's bete noire -- the wimp factor.

It would have been much more honorable than playing Achilles sulking in his Foggy Bottom tent, privately pouting to Bob Woodward that he had warned the president about the Pottery Barn effect ? break Iraq and "you know you're going to be owning this place" -- and tattling that his colleagues were engaged in "lunacy."

"At times, with his closest friends, Powell was semidespondent," his pal Mr. Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack." "His president and his country were headed for a war that he thought might just be avoided, though he himself would not walk away."

Mr. Woodward, who is clearly channeling Mr. Powell, as he has done to present Mr. Powell's side of the story in past books, recreates his innermost thoughts: "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first gulf war just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to Al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was."

Everyone in Washington has been puzzling over how Mr. Cheney, a reasonable, cautious, popular man in the first Bush administration, turned into Pluto, king of the underworld and proponent of worst-case scenarios and pre-emption.

But Mr. Powell shared his dread, Cassandra-like, with Mr. Woodward: "The more Powell dug, the more he realized that the human sources were few and far between on Iraq's W.M.D. It was not a pretty picture."

George Tenet comes across in the book as another profile in cravenness. On Dec. 21, 2002, the C.I.A. chief went to the Oval Office with an aide to present "The Case" on W.M.D. Even Mr. Bush, already deeply enmeshed in war plans, was taken aback at the paucity of it. "Nice try," Mr. Bush said. "I don't think this is quite -- it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from." Turning to Mr. Tenet, he added: "I've been told all this intelligence about having W.M.D. and this is the best we've got?"

When the president asked how confident he was, Mr. Tenet, premier apple polisher, gave Mr. Bush the answer he wanted to hear: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!"

Just as the Democratic president ducked behind the parsed line, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," so the Republican president ducked behind the parsed line, "I have no war plans on my desk."

The plans for invading "The House of Broken Toys," as the C.I.A. referred to Iraq, may not have been sitting on his desk, but he secretly started planning with Rummy for war with Iraq in November 2001, and with Tommy Franks starting the next month. Once they were thick into the planning, the president couldn't turn back, of course. That would make him like the loathed Bill Clinton -- a lot of bold talk and not much action -- not like "The Man," as Mr. Cheney called his warrior president.
The New York Times
  

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Monday, April 19, 2004

Is It Just My Paranoia?

Perhaps my reading of the "Tiananmen Papers" is cause for me to read too much in the article below announcing new security measures regarding all public activities in Tiananmen Square to take effect on Tuesday. I haven't seen any news on the health of Zhao Ziyang of late. Is this a less than subtle hint that bad news is approaching regarding his stay upon this earth and that a repeat of 15 years ago will not be allowed a chance to get a start, period?
BEIJING, April 19 (Xinhuanet) -- A new regulation on administration of the area in and around Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing urges the institution of an emergency mechanism for sound, stable social order in the area.

The regulation, passed by the municipal people's government and to take effect officially Tuesday, requires the rigid control in the area so as to prepare for any emergency.

It also asks for obeisance of strict control measures during solemn occasions including national flag hoisting and lowering, festival celebrations and national conventions of great importance.

Any activities affecting social order, public security and the environment in the Tian'anmen area will be banned and penalized, according to the regulation.

The regulation explicitly calls on local administration departments to launch emergency drills in accordance with the mechanism. Meanwhile, it requires local public security and other law enforcement departments to make their own specific preparations for any possible emergencies in compliance with the mechanism. Staff training and drills are also urged.

The magnificent Tian'anmen Square, situated at the center of the national capital, is the largest city square in the world, which has witnessed the founding of new China in 1949 and numerousother grand political events in the country.
Xinhuanet
  

5:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Some Really Scary Bushisms From Woodward's Book

Remember, please, the immortal words of Bob Dylan: "If God is on our side, he'll stop the next war."
"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty."

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious belief played throughout that time.

"Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness."
This next line is so Bush, it almost proves that this ghost worship business has some validity, with the holy ghost making so many stupid humans in his own image.
Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."
But the scariest words from Bush's mouth to Woodward are the following:
Bush said he did not remember asking the question [to go to war or not] of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, who fought Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But, he added that the two had discussed developments in Iraq.

"You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said.
Yeah, and we didn't elect him, either!

Isn't it yet clear to everyone with at least a high school education that the greatest evil in this world is the result of the three dominant western monotheistic religions of this world--Jew, Christian and Muslim, ghost worshippers all--killing other ghost worshippers because their ghost is the one true ghost?

Goddamn all ghost worshippers except those like Jimmy Carter, because he actually practices what the great teacher Jesus Christ tried to teach--long before that fool Paul came along and mucked it up for all time.

Washington Post
  

2:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"House of Bush, House of Saud" You Must Read The Truth About The Bush Family



I have been studying the history of the "House of Bush" for many years. It hasn't been as easy as one might think, researching the history of such a famous family. Eventually, one comes to understand why: It is by their design. This important trait of keeping secrets was learned from the robber barons who were their models and benefactors--even though the last three generations of Bush men chose political life over the banking/munitions-oil/intelligence sphere which was the basis of their wealth and international influence. Although that also was very much by design .

I suppose secrecy is paramount if such a family is grooming sons for national office. This is surely true when the family "interests" range from selling arms and munitions to all sides in the revolutions and conflicts that afflicted Europe, Asia and the Americas in the early 20th Century, to actively supporting, organizing and financing the eugenics movement that was popular in America during the years directly after World War One. Publicly popular that is until Adolph Hitler started giving the eugenics movement a public relations problem--stamping out the "bad genes" of retardation, homosexuality and criminality was then politically acceptable goals, whole races was a different matter to many. Not the House of Bush, however; Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather, and Prescott's in-laws, the Walkers, and their close friends, the Harriman and Dulles families, quietly went about providing the rising Hitler with the munitions and financing that ensured the ascendancy of the Third Reich. Prescott Bush would continue being Hitler's American banker a year into World War Two, until Congress censured him and stripped him of his Nazi-supporting companies under the Trading With the Enemies Act.

There are so many really shocking "secrets" in the Bush family closet, it is one of the reasons it is difficult to get them known by the public. The truth is so thickly sordid that many journalists, and reviewers of the few serious books that do get published, jump to the conclusion that this much dirt surely signifies a hatchet job done on a family that came to America on the Mayflower. All of this evilness can not possibly come from one of the original American families, one that is related by blood to English kings and queens of famous lore, and an astonishing number of American presidents--which is understandable when you grasp what it means to be from a family that reallydid come over with the first pilgrims. Their blood truly is part of the root blood-stock that is at the bluest heart of anglophile American aristocracy, which also then is related to many of the other royal families of Europe. This frustrating "crystal glass wall" put up by journalists and reviewers of books and "rumor" articles about the Bush family has finally become visible to all, and no longer ipso facto part of the "conspiracy buff" label that has served to discredit others, with the publishing of at least two recent books.

Kevin Phillips' AMERICAN DYNASTY: Aristocracy, Fortune, And The Politics Of Deceit In The House Of Bush, Viking, New York, 2004, is an important book and has sold very well. But even though Mr. Phillips is one of the most established, mainstream authors of political books, a life-long Republican who at times was an activist with the party, the "shocking" truths he writes of almost never make it from the book review pages onto the news pages of the nation's major dailies. The same thing is being done, a bit more viciously though, to a new book by Craig Unger, ''HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties,'' Scribners, New York, 2004. While Jonathan D. Tepperman, who reviews the book for The New York Times, obviously has some kind of axe to grind, he does not attack Mr. Unger on his facts, he simply sprinkles the "conspiracy theories" phrase in enough places to discredit the book as much as he can get away with. Even this heavy-handed approach however cannot completely hold sway, and he is forced to write enough truth about the book to assure those of us doing serious work on the only "Dynastic Restoration" in the republic's history that an important resource is coming our way.

There are a couple of facts and the questions they raise that I want to leave you with before sending you on to a few paragraphs from Mr. Tepperman's flawed review of "House of Bush, House of Saud." George W. Bush's partner in his jack-of-all-trades oil services company formed in the late 70's, Arbusto, was and is the brother of Osama bin Laden--that's a 25 year relationship with the brother of the "Great Evil One"! Of course, in the 80's, even Osama himself was a "partner" of sorts with Dubya's father, who was greatly involved with equipping Osama's boys in their Jihad against the Soviet Union in his position within the intelligence community--which was much more extensive than his short public stint as CIA director--and as vice president.

The question is simple, the answer I'm afraid is complex and frightening: It is widely known that the entire bin Laden clan in the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, perhaps close to a score of them, was allowed to fly home to Saudi Arabia in a chartered airliner immediately after the attacks when no other non-military air craft were allowed to fly. Nothing new there: but why were they not aggressively interrogated before being given such royal treatment? In the criminal justice business, the family of a murder suspect, no matter how estranged their relations might be with the suspect at the time, is considered as valuable as gold as sources of information that might lead to the suspect. Often they are threatened with being named material witnesses if they are deemed to be less than cooperative. Why? Because family is family, and all good homicide detectives know that almost always someone in a suspect's family keeps in touch with the "bad seed." But even if that proves not to be the case, something they know, perhaps the most innocent detail that only a family member might know, can lead to a hot trail. This is Detective work 101. Why was it totally absent in the worst murder case in American history?
Unger, a former deputy editor of The New York Observer who has written for The New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair, goes to great lengths to outline just how attached the two clans have grown over the years. The Bushes and al-Sauds do indeed share a close (if complicated) relationship; in fact, these connections have already been extensively documented elsewhere. Yet the stakes in the relationship are so high that it is probably worth reading about them one more time. For this reason, Unger's muckraking impulse to explain the awkward United States-Saudi alliance should be applauded.

There's certainly plenty of muck for him to uncover. As he meticulously details, both George Bushes have made fortunes over the years by trading on their famous name to persuade rich backers to invest in their various (usually oil-related) businesses. Sometimes these backers have been Saudi, sometimes even members of the royal family. And a few have come from another Saudi clan: the bin Ladens.

Although Unger relies too heavily on other people's work in sketching the Bush-Saudi links, he does provide a valuable service in highlighting the enormous amounts of money involved. He even puts a price tag on the Saudis' contributions to the Bush family: a staggering $1.476 billion, paid out over 30 years as gifts to Bush-related charities, as generous perks (including a Saudi-sponsored European hunting trip for George H. W. Bush and his 1991 gulf war cabinet just after the November 2000 general election) and as investments in Bush-related businesses like Harken Energy or the Carlyle Group.
The New York Times
 

2:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Adlai E. Stevenson III, Seeing Things As Clearly As His Daddy Did

Adlai E. Stevenson, the former Democratic Senator of Illinois, writes a really fine op-ed piece in The New York Times. I know I am aging myself greatly, but I so admired his father, even though I was far too young to vote for him. I remember watching the two Democratic National Conventions that nominated him on a boxy black and white TV set with my father, who did indeed vote for him both times. Golly, things were so stuffy in those days; the fact that he was divorced was big news and the subject of much debate on how it would effect his chances against Ike. Ah, politics were really fun in those days; the national conventions were pure reality TV drama at its best! Read his son's insightful look at the intelligence failures of past and present:

Investigating the Iran intelligence failure in the late 1970's, I learned that the C.I.A. had no analyst who spoke Farsi. The agencies rely on foreign intelligence services, which support the policies of their own governments.

Foreign policy in the Bush administration reflects a lack of experience in the real world away from a Washington overrun with armchair polemicists and think-tank ideologues. Too many inhabitants of this world have no experience in the military, where one learns to expect the unexpected, or in international finance, where America's vulnerability also resides. This White House is well known for its hostility to curiosity and intellectual debate.

After all, terrorism is not a phenomenon of recent origin. Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, did not expect his gunshot to bring about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He expected only a reaction — and the empire's reaction led to World War I and its own downfall. The United States government's reaction to the attacks of 9/11 could end up inflicting great damage on America.

The Bush administration demonstrates the point. One pre-emptive war against the dictator of a desert quasi-state crippled by international sanctions has stretched the American military thin. The United States is widely perceived to be waging war against Islam in the Middle East, a perception reinforced by the president's decision this week to support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and his settlement plan.

Meanwhile, the dollar — a barometer of confidence in the American economy and polity — has sunk against other currencies. In Spain, Argentina, Germany, South Korea and Pakistan, candidates win public office by denouncing or distancing themselves from the Bush administration. This record owes nothing to failures of intelligence.

Studies have recommended reforms of the intelligence community. But reform does not change the limited nature and function of intelligence. There is no substitute for the pragmatic intelligence of policy makers acquired from history and experience in the real world — and the courage to act on it.

Before 9/11, neoconservatives like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney inhabited a world of contending great powers in which force and technology were transcendent. Terrorists armed with box cutters — and now Iraqis resisting the occupation — have exploded their fantasy. The failures of the Bush administration are not those of foreign intelligence but of a cerebral sort of intelligence.
The New York Times
  

12:32 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The First Installment In The 5-Part Series of Excerpts From Woodward's Book In The Washington Post



Bob Woodward continues to deliver the goods; he's still the best insider after all these years:
Shortly after New Year's Day 2003, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a private moment with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Bush felt the effort to get United Nations weapons inspections inside Iraq on an aggressive track to make Saddam Hussein crack was not working. "This pressure isn't holding together," Bush told her.

The media reports of smiling Iraqis leading inspectors around, opening up buildings and saying, "See, there's nothing here," infuriated Bush, who then would read intelligence reports showing the Iraqis were moving and concealing things. It wasn't clear what was being moved, but it looked to Bush as if Hussein was about to fool the world again. It looked as if the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer, and was likely doomed to fail.

"I was concerned people would focus on not Saddam, not the danger that he posed, not his deception, but focus on the process and thereby Saddam would be able to kind of skate through once again," Bush recalled in an interview last December.

"I felt stressed," he added. All the holiday parties at the White House had not helped. "My jaw muscle got so tight. And it was not just because I was smiling and shaking so many hands. There was a lot of tension during that last holiday season."

There was another factor at work that was not publicly known. Sensitive intelligence coverage on U.N. inspections chief Hans Blix indicated that he was not reporting everything and not doing all the things he maintained he was doing. Some in Bush's war cabinet believed Blix was a liar.

"How is this happening?" Bush asked Rice. "Saddam is going to get stronger."

Blix had told Rice, "I have never complained about your military pressure. I think it's a good thing." She relayed this to the president.

"How long does he think I can do this?" Bush asked. "A year? I can't. The United States can't stay in this position while Saddam plays games with the inspectors."

"You have to follow through on your threat," Rice said. "If you're going to carry out coercive diplomacy, you have to live with that decision."

"He's getting more confident, not less," Bush said of Hussein. "He can manipulate the international system again. We're not winning.

"Time is not on our side here," Bush told Rice. "Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war."
You will want to read this series, even if you are planning on buying the book--which might be problematical for those of us in China.

Washington Post
 

12:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, April 18, 2004

A United Press International Analysis of "Bush's changing world"

Here is a "world view" of this past week by Claude Salhani, UPI International Editor
WASHINGTON, April 16 (UPI) -- Oh, what a week this has been. With just over 70 days left before the June 30 much-anticipated Great Handover of sovereignty back to Iraqis, the country erupted in unprecedented violence. ...

Meanwhile, as the violence continued, President George W. Bush maintained that this is proof that things are improving in the country and that the violence is the attempt by "terrorists" and agitators to upset the apple cart.

In his nationally televised press conference last week Bush reiterated over and over that he believed his task was to "change the world." The president feels so strongly about his mission that he repeated the phrase no less than four times during his 17-minute opening statement.

-- "A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change."

-- "I also know that there is an historic opportunity here to change the world. And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better."

-- "It will change the world. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East is vital to future peace and security."

The president's optimism is to be applauded. However, one can't help questioning whether the increased violence in Iraq along with another important event that transpired this past week -- the president's unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the de facto annexation of a number of West Bank settlements -- will change the world, but in the wrong way.

If the president believes his unilateral support of Sharon's plan -- acting outside of the "road map" framework put together by the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations) -- is going to speed up peace in the Middle East, he forgot to ask the Palestinians, without whom, peace in the Middle East is hardly possible. ...

Here is what Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia had to say: "No one can renounce Palestinians' rights such as the right of return and the right to establish a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. This is a flagrant bias toward Israel." ...

The view from other parts of the Arab world was not much brighter. The United Arab Emirates' al-Khaleej newspaper accused the U.S. president of having hammered the "last nail in the coffin of the peace process, put(ing) the entire region once again in danger, and (of loosing) ... minimum credibility, responsibility and morals."

London's al-Quds al-Arabi blasted Bush and accused him of "destroying all hopes for peace and stability in the region and the world."

The world is indeed changed this week, maybe not as the president expect, but it is changed nevertheless.
United Press International
  

4:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Could Publicizing The Arrest Of Moussaoui Have Halted The 9/11 Attacks?

An article in the Houston Chronicle presents one of the most intriguing ideas to come out of the 9/11 Commission that I've yet seen on how the hijackers might have been thwarted at best, or halted for a period of time, at worst. Apparently Bob Woodward's book and higher profile matters concerning both Iraq and 9/11 overshadowed this report. Frankly, having spent a goodly part of my career trying to get inside the heads of murderers--not suicidal terrorists, I must stress--I believe there is a very good chance that it might have had the stated effects.

While the 19 hijackers were deluded lunatics, they seemingly were not stupid--the "success" of their diabolical mission was their only consideration. If they had seen Moussaoui, one of their co-conspirators, arrested and the suspicious activities that led to his arrest become public, along with a highly publicized security alert for confederates who were also engaged in learning to fly airliners, they might very well have stayed low or changed their plans to other targets at the last minute thereby increasing the odds of making a mistake and getting caught. Very interesting "what might have been" if nothing else.
WASHINGTON -- The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has concluded that the hijackers probably would have postponed their strike if the U.S. government had announced the arrest of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 or had publicized fears that he intended to hijack jetliners.

A report on the case released this week noted that "publicity about the threat" posed by Moussaoui "might have disrupted the plot." Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, said the conclusion is based in part on extensive psychological profiles of the Sept. 11 hijackers, who were "very careful and very jumpy."

"Everything had to go right for them," Kean said. "Had they felt that one of them had been discovered, there is evidence it would have been delayed."

Such a delay could have given the FBI, the CIA, and British and French intelligence services more time to discover Moussaoui's ties to al-Qaida and the terrorist cell in Germany that planned the attack. The FBI also might have had more time to track down two hijackers who had entered the country but were not located before the attacks.

These and other findings disclosed by the commission this week make it clear that the scope of missed opportunities in the Moussaoui case was broader than previously believed. A wide array of U.S. counterterrorism officials and foreign intelligence services -- including the director of the CIA -- knew about Moussaoui's arrest but repeatedly missed the clues he offered to the catastrophe that was about to unfold, the reports and testimony show. ...

Timothy Roemer, a commission member and former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said the Moussaoui case "is really a plausible way to deflect parts of 9/11, as plausible as they come."

According to staff reports and testimony this week, CIA Director George Tenet and his senior deputies were briefed on the case within days of Moussaoui's arrest, but never told the president, the White House counter-terrorism group or even the acting director of the FBI, who learned about the case on the day of the attacks. The CIA brief given to Tenet was titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

Moussaoui was ultimately charged as a conspirator after the attacks and is jailed in Alexandria, Va., awaiting federal trial. He has publicly declared his allegiance to al-Qaida but denied he was part of the plan to strike New York and Washington.
Houston Chronicle
 

4:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Is Rummy Getting Soft?

Donald Rumsfeld admitting he hadn't figured all the angles? It must be snowing in hell.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday that he never expected so many American troops to be dying at this point in the war in Iraq, a rare admission from an official who almost never publicly concedes an error in fact or judgment.

"I certainly would not have estimated that we would have had the individuals lost that we have had lost in the last week," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. At least 89 U.S. troops died in April. ...

Secretary of State Colin Powell also said he did not expect such fierce resistance. In an interview with Polish Public Television, Powell said, "We knew there would be many problems ahead," but the administration "did not know how tough the resistance would be a year later from these former regime elements and terrorists."

He added, "We are adapting to the situation."

"I fear this administration is far more worried about conceding mistakes than it is concerned about sticking to a failed policy," Biden said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The hour for hubris and arrogance is long past. It's time for leadership."
USA Today
  

4:26 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Another Bad Movie We Have seen Before...

Captive American GI's, looking bedraggled and oh so vulnerable and always far too young, surrounded by angry, menacing captors from another culture, broadcast into our living rooms is an all too familiar emotional gutcheck for those of us old enough to remember Bob Gibson keeping all opposing hitters under 2 earned runs per 9 innings for an entire season, Cassius Clay before he became Muhammad Ali, or several thousand U.S. Marines completely surrounded and engaged in hand-to-hand combat at a place called Khe Sanh.

Goddammit, history--and television--repeats itself, again. And we must anguish over the price of staying the course, again.
(CNN) -- A videotape showing a uniformed man who identifies himself as a missing U.S. soldier was broadcast Friday on the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera.

The tape shows six men -- four holding rifles and one with a pistol -- standing behind a man seated on the ground and wearing a U.S. Army uniform, who gives his name as Keith Matthew Maupin.

The man, who does not appear to have shaved in several days, wears a camouflage hat in the video.

"We have taken one of the U.S. soldiers hostage," the narrator said.

"He is in good health and being treated based on the tenets of Islamic law for the treatment of soldiers taken hostage. We will keep him until we trade him for our prisoners in the custody of the U.S. enemy. We want them to know -- and the whole world to know -- that when we took him in, he came out of his tank holding a white flag and he lay face down on the ground, just like other soldiers."

U.S. Central Command spokesman Capt. Bruce Frame said Maupin is one of two U.S. soldiers unaccounted for since last Friday, when their fuel convoy came under attack by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire near Baghdad.
CNN.com
  

4:12 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Krugman Nails The Vietnam Analogy

It is of course foolhardy for any major political figure other than Senator Kennedy to say that Vietnam is an appropriate analogy for what has been happening in Iraq for almost exactly a year now--Teddy Kennedy can get away with it because 1) he has the wisdom and intellect to grasp the larger pictures of history, 2) he never has to worry about being reelected to his senate seat, 3) he will never again run for the presidency--which is most unfortunate for the republic and has been for more than 20 years. This is also mostly the case because factually any literal comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam at this stage are laughable. Metaphorically, however, or even rhetorically, it is another matter altogether.

If you are old enough, and you listen to the statements coming out of the White House and the Pentagon regarding whether we have enough troops in country or not, or why we are there and why we must stay there, and you do not have a nagging sense of seeing this very bad movie before, then you were either too stoned or you were on another planet from 1964 to 1975. Paul Krugman does remember, and in his column in today's The New York Times nails the Vietnam analogy onto what should be our collective conscious lest 7 or 8 years from now, Aaron Brown instead of Walter Cronkite will return from an Iraq war equivalent to the siege of Hui and look straight into the camera lens and tell America that the war cannot be won and we must cut our losses and bring the troops home.

I am not suggesting that we pull out of Iraq now or anytime soon, and neither does Mr. Krugman. He is suggesting that we must do something differently this time--perhaps just a bit of critical and creative thinking; horrors, horrors that such a suggestion might be to ideologues running this war, regardless--or this nightmarish movie will indeed become a perpetual rerun. Below are only some of his most salient paragraphs from a column that must be read:
Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.

It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict. ...

Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army.

Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government ? as opposed to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge.

If we aren't promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war have already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they no longer have high hopes for what we may accomplish, but they fear the consequences if we leave. The irony is painful. One of the real motives for the invasion of Iraq was to give the world a demonstration of American power. It's a measure of how badly things have gone that now we're told we can't leave because that would be a demonstration of American weakness.

Again, the parallel with Vietnam is obvious. Remember the domino theory?

And there's one more parallel: Nixonian politics is back.

What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious were Nixon's efforts to suppress dissent, like the "Tell It to Hanoi" rallies, where critics of the Vietnam War were accused of undermining the soldiers and encouraging the enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a meta-Nixon: he declared that anyone who draws analogies between Iraq and Vietnam undermines the soldiers and encourages the enemy.
Read the entire column in The New York Times
  

3:20 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Kristof, A Playwright?

Nicholas Kristof weighs in on the 9/11 Who-Screwed-Up Controversy by displaying a heretofore unknown gift for writing dialogue. No, it isn't Shakespeare, or even David Mamet, but what it lacks in dramaturgy is amply compensated for with truth and insight, plus a great big dose of common sense on a subject that has been woefully short of same. Why are there so few public voices that will come right out and speak the honest to goodness truth, namely: The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented? That is not the same as saying they should have been prevented.

As much as I believe George W. Bush's presidency has been a disaster this nation may not overcome for a very long time, I am not suggesting that he alone should shoulder the blame, or that individual blame should be placed upon any one or any particular group of people. I am simply saying that the attacks could have been prevented; to say otherwise belies the facts we are learning every day and belies the very goal of the 9/11 Commission. If the attacks could not have been prevented, then an inquiry and whatever comes out of it is much like pissing into the wind: it brings relief but gets your white linen suit quite wet and stinky. Think about it. But first read Mr. Kristof's superb column in today's The New York Times:
The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.

It wouldn't have been easy, and it's likely that a Gore administration would not have prevented the attacks either. But President Bush's assertion this week that "nobody in our government at least -- and I don't think the prior government -- could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale" was disingenuous. So was his refusal to accept responsibility for lapses before 9/11. Just suppose that after the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing about Osama bin Laden's plans, the conversation had gone like this:

Bush So the Evil One wants to attack inside the U.S.? Any idea where?

C.I.A. briefer Sir, it could be almost anywhere, anytime. But pattern analysis suggests a target both huge and symbolic, perhaps another explosion to topple the World Trade Center, or the Sears Tower or the Capitol. And bin Laden has always looked for targets in aviation.

Bush Gosh. Hijacking planes?

Briefer Yes, Mr. President, there are reports of a hijacking plot to ransom the blind sheik. Or bin Laden could seek to shoot a bunch of planes down -- in 1998, we put out a classified report called "Bin Laden Threatening to Attack U.S. Aircraft." Or he could blow up planes and airports.

Bush Whoa. How would he do that?

Briefer Project Bojinka was a terror plot in 1995 to blow up as many as 12 United, Delta and Northwest jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean at the same time, killing 4,000 people. The Philippine police apprehended a key figure, Abdul Hakim Murad, along with the detonators. We let the Filipinos "interrogate" Murad. After he'd been beaten with a chair, burned with cigarettes and half-drowned, he disclosed a plan for a suicide airplane attack on the C.I.A.'s headquarters.

Bush You mean using a plane as a missile?

Briefer Exactly, Mr. President. We judged this credible partly because Murad was a licensed pilot who had trained at four U.S. flight schools. For that matter, Al Qaeda has shown an intriguing desire to train operatives as pilots. A defector named L'Houssaine Kherchtou was scheduled to go to flight school in Nairobi. A third, Essam al-Ridi, learned flying in Texas. A fourth, Ihab Ali Nawawi, studied flying in Oklahoma.

Bush What about the Tom Clancy novel where the pilot crashes a plane into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress? Could Big Beard be planning something like that?

Briefer Sir, that wasn't just Clancy. In 1974, a man named Sam Byck hijacked a plane in hopes of crashing it into the White House and killing President Nixon. And in 1994, Algerians hijacked a plane so they could crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In 1996, Iranian terrorists reportedly planned to hijack a Japanese plane and crash it into Tel Aviv. The use of planes as weapons has been a growing concern, and that's why we took measures to protect the Atlanta Olympics from aerial attack.

Bush O.K., tell Tenet to get himself down here in the next few days. I want to make sure that we're doing everything possible to prevent whatever the Evil One is planning. I want people at our borders looking out for bad guys. And if Big Beard is into aviation, let's watch flight schools and airports. We're America. Nobody pushes us around.

Briefer Mr. President, the bureau already has 70 investigations open on bin Laden. They're on top of it.

Bush I want to make sure. Word's got to get out that stopping an attack is top priority. If there's chatter about a major attack soon -- Oklahoma City or worse -- I don't want us sitting on our duffs. I want to light a fire under the bureaucracy. Let's kick butt.

Such an imagined conversation is a bit unfair because it has the clarity of hindsight. But we need to learn from our mistakes, and three conclusions flow from the missed opportunities of the Bush and Clinton administrations.

First, it's time to replace George Tenet. I've resisted that until now because he's been great for morale at the C.I.A. But after two major intelligence failures, 9/11 and the missing Iraqi W.M.D., it's time for a new director of central intelligence.

Second, we need to restructure the intelligence community so one person really is in charge of all the pieces and budgets, as the Scowcroft commission recommended.

Third, an apology or a hint of remorse would show leadership and salve our hurt. Mr. Bush should recognize that acceptance of accountability is not a sign of weakness.
The New York Times
  

1:38 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, April 17, 2004

An Honest Republican Critic Whose "Patriotism" Cannot Be Impugned

I will admit that I am by birth and life experiences a reflexive opponent of the Republican Party and thereby republicans--I cannot help it anymore than I can my reflexive response to, say, asparagus (don't even put it on my plate). But there are exceptions to almost all things human, and that simplistic adage is the only explanation I can offer for my admiration of Senator John McCain--in truth, I have this consistent fantasy that one day he is going to wake up and realize that he is actually a democrat and we will effortlessly pick up a senate seat. The good senator has again given me reason to admire him and to continue my silly hope that he will one day cross the aisle:
(CNN) -- The Pentagon should have known it needed more troops in Iraq and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have overruled his generals on the matter, Sen. John McCain said Thursday night.

"I was there last August. I came back after talking with many, many people, and I was convinced we didn't have enough boots on the ground," said the senator from Arizona and decorated Vietnam War veteran.

McCain made his case on CNN's "Larry King Live" a few hours after Rumsfeld announced that 20,000 U.S. troops scheduled to come home from Iraq would be held another 90 days. ...

"I'm saying it's not an accident that this was the bloodiest month of the war since combat ended, and we need to adjust," he said.

Despite the early military planning mistakes, McCain said, "I think we must succeed in Iraq. We cannot fail. We must do whatever's necessary."

He said one thing that was necessary was a long-range plan that included "significant troop increases for a long period of time."

McCain dismissed claims from Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials that they were providing as many troops as commanders on the ground in Iraq requested.

"The decisions have to be made at the highest level," McCain said, noting how previous presidents made tough decisions despite their generals' opposition.

"Harry Truman overruled Douglas MacArthur. Abraham Lincoln overruled his generals. Franklin Delano Roosevelt overruled his military people because -- as Napoleon said -- war is too important to be left to the generals."

McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years, acknowledged that "things go wrong in war. Mistakes happen."

"I think we missed an opportunity during the first six months or so of our occupation of Iraq," he said.

He predicted that U.S. forces will be able to retake cities now under insurgent control.

"But putting down the kind of insurgency, which is becoming more and more sophisticated every day, is going to be a real challenge," he said.
CNN.com
  

8:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, April 16, 2004

The Good And Bad Truth Of Press Freedom In China...

The article below, from The New York Times, produced in full, is the best reporting yet done on the present and future of a free press in China
GUANGZHOU, China -- After two years of state-imposed firings and staff reassignments and the suspension of one of its publications, the Chinese authorities have sharply stepped up their tactics in a campaign to rein in this country's most widely respected news organization.

In recent weeks, alleging managerial corruption, provincial courts here have handed down harsh prison sentences for senior executives of the Southern media group's Southern Metropolitan Daily and have initiated charges against the newspaper's top editor.

The provincial authorities in Guangzhou, China's third-largest city and a longstanding incubator of innovative journalism, have accused the newspaper's leaders of embezzlement. But reporters throughout the country and international advocates of press freedom see the case as a major test of China's new, reform-minded leaders' pledges to transform the country into a law-based society that tolerates greater freedom of expression.

Chinese journalists say that more than any other publications, Southern Metropolitan Daily and its sister magazine, Southern Weekend, the country's most popular weekly, have been responsible for reinventing the Chinese press, by creating a journalism that even within the constraints of state ownership and censorship pushes for the truth.

In the past several years, the publications have broken news about deaths in police custody and environmental damage related to the huge Three Gorges dam project and have celebrated repeated scoops over the outbreak, cover-up and then recurrence of the SARS virus.

If the newspaper's leaders lose their judicial appeals, journalists from the Southern media group, Chinese intellectuals and colleagues from other publications say, the embattled newspaper will have also exposed the limits of free expression and political reform in their country.

In an unusually bold petition, dozens of prominent journalists and academics have decried the prosecutions as the "illegal use of all kinds of measures, including juridical methods, to limit press freedoms and crack down on the media and limit its space."

If the persecution of the newspaper does not end, the signers warned that "the authority and credibility of the party and the government bodies and the legislature will be questioned, and news media whose responsibility is to push the society forward will find it difficult to survive."

Although the official charge was embezzlement of company bonuses, most observers say the most immediate apparent cause for Southern Metropolitan Daily's legal troubles was its reporting in December of a suspected re-emergence of the SARS virus, which caused a deadly epidemic a year earlier.

Yu Huafeng, the newspaper's general manager, was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison. Li Minying, a former editor in chief, was sentenced to 11 years. Cheng Yizhong, the paper's top editor, is under arrest and has been charged with embezzlement.

"The convictions and trials are a severe blow to the country's media reforms," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet project at the University of California-Berkeley. "It shows the leadership fears the country's press might be getting out of control and has decided to strike back.''

The Southern media group has curious origins for a muckraking paper that regularly irritates the authorities. It was founded in 1997 by the provincial Communist Party, just as the region's economic growth kicked into high gear.

Guangzhou had already been a breeding ground for the country's liberalizing economic reforms. The city has long been a relatively freewheeling place, far from Beijing and near Hong Kong, whose intensely competitive news media make censorship here almost pointless.

For weeks, reporters and editors at the newspaper and at Southern Weekend have been unwilling to speak publicly about their situation for fear of inviting further trouble for their publications or being made targets themselves. Privately, though, several employees spoke of an atmosphere of fear, but also of intense pride at what their journalism had accomplished.

"There is an end-of-an-era feeling about this building, filled with all kinds of feelings: depression, sadness and anger," said one veteran of the newsroom. But even though the news staff realizes that it has to be cautious for now, the reporter said, it will be difficult to arrest the push for freer expression.

"I don't think you can say we are all afraid," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If it closes it closes, but that would create a very strong feeling among people, both readers and within the industry."

Contemplating the same kind of penalty, another staff member from the group reached another conclusion, one echoed by many journalists.

"If they close the Southern Daily it wouldn't matter," he said. "The newspaper's example has already been absorbed by journalists all over China, and their goal is not just to copy it, but to do even better."

That kind of spirit is not driven by journalistic idealism alone, but also by intense commercial competition among Chinese newspapers, the vast majority of which, though officially state-owned, no longer receive subsidies.

An editor from Southern Metropolitan Daily who met with a foreigner in a cafe after work said his staff was under immense stress because of the trials. He still managed to be philosophical about the Chinese press, whose continued growth and improvement he called unstoppable.

"All Chinese media have three functions: mouthpiece for the government and party, to support themselves by making money and, thirdly, to give journalists a means to influence society," he said. "The three goals are irreconcilable, and if you go too far in any one direction, the result is trouble. We are all learning there is a bottom line somewhere, and although nobody wants to be punished, no one knows where it lies exactly."
The New York Times
 

2:33 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Where The Buck Stopped...

At least we now know where the buck stopped: The World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.
WASHINGTON, April 14 — George J. Tenet and his deputies at the Central Intelligence Agency were presented in August 2001 with a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly" about the arrest days earlier of Zacarias Moussaoui, but did not act on the information, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Wednesday.

An interim report by the panel's staff offered a stinging assessment of the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet's leadership and was made public during a hearing at which Mr. Tenet disclosed that he had little contact with President Bush during much of the summer of 2001, a period when intelligence agencies were warning of a dire terrorist threat. ...

The panel's report on Wednesday on the C.I.A. offered the first detailed evidence about the agency's failure to follow up on the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui, a French-born Islamic extremist who was taken into custody in Minnesota in August 2001 after arousing the suspicions of his flight-school instructors. After Sept. 11, Mr. Moussaoui, an avowed Qaeda member, was tied to the terrorist cell in Germany that conducted the attacks.

C.I.A. officials have been unwilling to say what, if anything, the agency had known about Mr. Moussaoui before Sept. 11. But the commission disclosed this week that information about his arrest on Aug. 17 had been relayed within days to the highest levels of the C.I.A., including to Mr. Tenet, and the commission's report on Wednesday revealed the headline of the briefing, which was part of a larger report about intelligence developments that summer.

"In late August, the Moussaoui arrest was briefed to the D.C.I. and other top C.I.A. officials under the heading `Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly,' " the staff report said, offering no other detail on what the document contained. "The news had no evident effect on warning."

Mr. Tenet said he could not recall details about the way the agency handled the Moussaoui reports.

Throughout August, the Moussaoui case was in the control of F.B.I. agents in Minnesota, who tried to get their superiors in Washington to take an interest because of their fear that he might be a terrorist. The information was passed to the C.I.A., and eventually to Mr. Tenet, through a F.B.I.-C.I.A. counterterror center.

The staff report also disclosed that the C.I.A. for years had intelligence in its files suggesting that Al Qaeda might hijack passenger planes and try to use them as missiles, but the reports were never drawn together in a larger analysis of the threat.

The reports cited a 1996 warning about a terrorist plot to fly a plane laden with explosives into an American city; a 1996 warning that Iranians intended to hijack a Japanese plane and crash it into Tel Aviv; and a 1995 warning that terrorists intended to fly a plane into C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. The agency also knew that an Algerian terrorist group hijacked an Air France jet in 1994 with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower, a plot that failed because none of the terrorists knew how to fly.
Read the whole article in The New York Times
 

2:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Cost Of Democracy in Iraq...

Where will we build their wall of honor, and how many names will it eventually have?
Although President Bush declared major combat over almost a year ago, last week was the deadliest yet for Americans in uniform. The Department of Defense identified 64 service members who died in the week that ended on Saturday. Until then, the highest toll had come many months ago, not long after the start of the war last March, in a week when 50 Americans died.

The dead came from cities and small towns across the continental United States, as well as from Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands. They came from all the major service branches — the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, as well as the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve.

They were as young as 18, as old as 45. At least two were women.

And this week their remains were returned home. ...

As chilling scenes of deadly skirmishes and hostage-taking played out in Iraq, funerals, one after the next, began filling long days in places like this. In different corners of the country, as the total American death toll climbed above 670, the eulogies, the salutes, the coffins came faster than ever.
Read the full story in The New York Times AP Photo: Emily Holt looks at a photo of Kyle Crowley posted on a wall at California High School in San Ramon, Calif. Crowley, 18, was a Camp Pendleton Marine who was killed Monday in Iraq.
 

1:53 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Friedman Is Back In Form, Mostly

Friedman is getting his nose out of the Bush Family's Rear End and starting to make sense again:
America's Baghdad boss, Paul Bremer, is absolutely right when he insists that we must turn over sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30, as promised. Why? Because we may have trained thousands of Iraqi policemen, but without a government of their own, they are defending America — which they will never do with vigor. The only thing they might defend is a government of their own. Moreover, right now many Iraqi leaders blame the U.S. for what is going wrong in Iraq. The Bush team deserves much blame, but not all. Iraq's nascent leaders will act in a concerted and responsible fashion only when they — like Hamas, Arafat and Hezbollah — have the burden of responsibility.

I'm not advocating unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. I am advocating putting every ounce of energy we have behind the U.N. effort to replace the current Iraqi Governing Council with a legitimate, broad-based caretaker government to run Iraq from July 1, 2004, until elections in January 2005. Hard, but not impossible.

After decades of colonialism and misrule, and then a traumatic dictatorship in an already tribalized society, Iraqi national identity is weak — and insecurity only weakens it more by prompting people to fall back on their tribal units. But there is an Iraqi identity. It takes security, though, for it to emerge. Even Iraqis don't know how strong it is, and they won't know until they are handed the keys.

Only then can we gradually shift the burden for Iraq's self-construction or self-destruction to Iraqis themselves. Only then will they begin to be accountable — and accountability is the mother of both self-restraint and self-government.
Read the whole column at The New York Times
  

1:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dowd On JFK, Dubya, the Almighty, and the Almighty

Ms. Dowd nails it again:
After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: "This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, 'An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.' . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed -- and no republic can survive."

Compare Kennedy with Mr. Bush, who conceded no errors and warned that any Vietnam analogy with Iraq — in this acid flashback moment when 64 U.S. troops were reported to have died last week and when McNarummy is forcing up to 20,000 troops to stay in Iraq — "sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."

He reiterated that his mission is dictated from above: "Freedom is the almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world."

Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops, and given that our marines are surrounding a cleric in the holy city of Najaf, we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war. That would only further inflame the Arab world and endanger our overstretched military, so let's hope that Mr. Bush's reference to the almighty was to Dick Cheney.
Read the whole column atThe New York Times...
 

12:59 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, April 15, 2004

You Contradicting Sack of Siberian Sheep...dip(?)

Ah, those folks at the Daily Mislead has caught the Bumbling Prevaricator again, and they do it every day.
Bush Contradicts Self At His Own Press Conference

During last night's prime time press conference, President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings" 1. But just minutes later at the same press conference the president proved he was not telling the truth.

Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings 2.

His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack" 3 after receiving intelligence warnings 4.

At the press conference, Bush also claimed to have no "inkling whatsoever" 5 about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post today reports that newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive one intelligence briefing about an imminent Al Qaeda attack, but "a stream" of repeated warnings 6. In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil."

Sources:

1. President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference, 04/13/2004.
2. "Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit", Los Angeles Times, 09/27/2001.
3. Wall Street Journal, 04/01/2004.
4. "Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings", CBS News, 05/10/2002.
5. President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference, 04/13/2004.
6. "Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings", Washington Post, 04/14/2004.
Misleader.org
  

11:29 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




IMF Gives China Numbers Thumbs Up...with qualifications

The IMF projects continued good news for China, but adds a few of caveats:

The Chinese economy can sustain its 25-year expansion at a rapid clip of six to 9 per cent a year, and its impact on the rest of the world will be deep, according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report.

However, failure to reform would spell trouble for China, which has expanded at an average rate of more than 9 per cent a year for two-and-a-half decades.

"Looking ahead, further implementation of key structural reforms could allow China to maintain economic growth of about six to 9 per cent although setbacks in the reform process would carry serious downside risks to the growth outlook," the twice-yearly World Economic Outlook said.

In the long-run, China is likely to play a bigger global role than any of the other post-World War II economic powers such as Japan, or South East Asian nations.

The outlook for China itself depends heavily on its commitment to reform. ...

The IMF highlighted as top tasks:

Strengthening banks balance sheets, making them more market-based, and developing financial markets so as to improve the allocation of investment.

"While significant steps have already been taken, further measures will be needed to improve banks risk management, internal controls, governance structure and ability to price risk."Setting up a well-functioning labour market to facilitate the migration of labour.

China has already improved training and education and provided incentives for re-employment.

But to improve efficiency, it would have to allow more labour mobility, and expand the social safety net.

Pensions, once provided by state companies, would have to cover people working in private companies and be made portable.

Reforming state companies.

"Notwithstanding important steps that have already been taken to improve the market orientation of these enterprises, excess labour continues to depress productivity, corporate governance is still weak, and most enterprises continue to operate without hard budget constraints and with a heavy social burden, including the provision of many social services for their employees."

Shoring up long-term government finances.

Even with banking, corporate and pension reforms, and asset sales, the Chinese Government would likely have to take extra measures to cut spending, boost income and reform fiscal relations between central and local governments if it was to finance future pensions, education, health and environmental needs.
ABC News Online
 

10:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From Dubya's Mouth

Time for some Bushisms, as collected by Jacob Weisberg:
"We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile." --Des Moines, Iowa; August 21, 2000

"And there's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail." --Washington, D.C.; October 4, 2001

"My pro-life position is I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." --As quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle; January 23, 2001

"The point is, this is a way to help inoculate me about what has and is coming." --On his anti-Gore ad, in an interview with the New York Times; September 2, 2000
  

9:12 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Scalia: A Double Pox On You

What Antonin Scalia did in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is a double bummer for me: He is a disgrace to all Italian-Americans--I have some standing to say this, as the UNICO 1997 Italian-American of the Year. And he committed his infamy not only in my home state of Mississippi, but also where I went to college, The University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg. May the Golden Eagles take a dump on his brainless head.
Antoinette Konz is a young education reporter for The Hattiesburg American, a daily newspaper with a circulation of about 25,000 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Ms. Konz, 25, has only been in the business for a couple of years, so her outlook hasn't been soiled by the cranks and the criminals, and the pretzel-shaped politicians that so many of us have been covering for too many years to count.

She considered it a big deal when one of the schools on her beat, the Presbyterian Christian High School, invited her to cover a speech that was delivered last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

About 300 people, many of them students, filled the school's gymnasium for the speech. They greeted Justice Scalia with a standing ovation.

Ms. Konz and a reporter for The Associated Press, Denise Grones, were seated in the front row. They began to take notes. And when Justice Scalia began speaking, they clicked on their tape recorders.

What's important about this story is that Justice Scalia is a big shot. Not only is he a member in good standing of the nation's most august court, he's almost always among those mentioned as a possible future chief justice.

Compared with him, Ms. Konz and Ms. Grones are nobodies.

Justice Scalia, the big shot, does not like reporters to turn tape recorders on when he's talking, whether that action is protected by the Constitution of the United States or not. He doesn't like it. And he doesn't permit it.

"Thirty-five minutes into the speech we were approached by a woman who identified herself as a deputy U.S. marshal," Ms. Konz told me in a telephone conversation on Friday. "She said that we should not be recording and that she needed to have our tapes."

In the U.S., this is a no-no. Justice Scalia and his colleagues on the court are responsible for guaranteeing such safeguards against tyranny as freedom of the press. In fact, the speech Mr. Scalia was giving at the very moment the marshal moved against the two reporters was about the importance of the Constitution.

Ms. Konz said neither she nor Ms. Grones wanted to comply with the marshal's demand.

"It was very distracting, very embarrassing," she said. "We were still trying to listen to what he was saying."

The marshal, Melanie Rube, insisted.

The A.P. reporter tried to explain that she had a digital recording device, so there was no tape to give up. Ms. Konz said the deputy seemed baffled by that.

Eventually both recordings were seized.

If this had been an old-time Hollywood movie, the Supreme Court justice would have turned a kindly face toward the marshal and said, in an avuncular tone: "No, no. We don't do that sort of thing in this country. Please return the recordings."

But this is the United States in the 21st century where the power brokers have gone mad. They've deluded themselves into thinking they're royalty, not public servants charged with protecting the rights and interests of the people. Both recordings were erased. Only then was the reporters' property returned.

When agents acting on behalf of a Supreme Court justice can just snatch and destroy information collected by reporters, we haven't just thumbed our nose at the Constitution, we've taken a very dangerous step in a very ugly direction. The depot at the end of that dark road is totalitarianism.

I called Jane Kirtley, a professor of media, ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, and asked her what was wrong with what the marshal did. She replied, "Everything."

Not only was it an affront to the Constitution to seize and erase the recordings, Ms. Kirtley believes it was also a violation of the Privacy Protection Act, a law passed by Congress in 1980.

"It protects journalists not just from newsroom searches," she said, "but from the seizure of their work product material, things like notes and drafts, and also what's called documentary materials, which are things like these tapes, or digital recordings."

Ms. Konz told me: "All I was doing with that tape recorder was making sure that I was not going to misquote the justice. My only intention was to report his words accurately."

After the encounter with the marshal, she said, "I went back to the office and I just felt absolutely — I just felt horrible."
The New York Times
  

2:08 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




How Specific Must Intelligence Be?

Oh, something on the order of this...
  

1:35 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Psst! Wanna See an Iraqi Idol?

Easy, just go click on...
Iraqi Idol
  

12:18 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, April 13, 2004

The Nation Says Rice Is Toast Politically

John Nichols of The Online Beat has an intriguing take on Condi Rice's performance before the 9/11 Commission well beyond the issues of national security but rather on her political future which, frankly, I had never imagined was even a possibility, much less a probability. But then I have had a bare minimum of respect for her at any time in her career--well, she isn't too shabby with a piano, but was even less than shabby as an anachronistic sovietologist somehow under the delusion that the Cold War hadn't ended.
Unfortunately for Rice, however, her testimony will be remembered for a single exchange. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste asked Rice if she could recall the title of President Bush's daily briefing document for August 6, 2001, which crossed her desk more than a month before operatives associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Queda network attacked the world Trade Center and the Pentagon. After several inept attempts to avoid the question, Rice finally answered, "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.' "

Rice knew she was in trouble; she claimed immediately that the August 6 briefing paper was a speculative document, not a real warning. The administration's defenders then spent the rest of the day trying to convince Americans that they had not heard what they had, in fact, heard. But, as 9/11 widow Lorie Van Auken correctly noted after the title was revealed, "That pretty much says it all."

What it says, above all, is that Condoleezza Rice will forever be remembered as the national security adviser who knew bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States but who, by all indications, felt no great sense of urgency about that threat. On "The Daily Show," host John Stewart simply played the tape of Rice's response to Ben-Veniste's inquiry. It got the best laugh of the night.

Fair or not, the impression that Rice created on Thursday will spell the end of her political prospects. She will never win a place on a national Republican ticket as a candidate for president or vice president. No matter how much Republican operatives may try to spin her back onto the short list, it is simply impossible to imagine that Rice, or anyone else, could survive the repeated airings of that exchange in an election year.

Because Rice has always been a political player, as opposed to a genuine security analyst or strategist, this is the dramatic news from her appearance before the 9/11 commission.

Because Rice has always been a political player, as opposed to a genuine security analyst or strategist, this is the dramatic news from her appearance before the 9/11 commission.

Remember, as recently as late February, political reporters and strategists were buzzing about the prospect that Rice would end up on a 2004 or 2008 GOP ticket. In late February, when rumors swirled that Vice President Dick Cheney might be dumped from Bush's ticket this year, the National Journal mentioned two possible replacements: former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rice. The Reuters news service sent the story of the Rice-replaces-Cheney speculation around the world. Former presidential adviser Dick Morris announced that Rice was one of only two Republicans who could win the presidency in 2008 -- the other being Secretary of State Colin Powell. Conservative activists launched a "Bush-Rice '04" website at www.bushrice04.org, and declared, "our mission is to convince President Bush that his best chance at reelection, and the Republican party's best chance for victory in 2008, is to choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate in the 2004 presidential election."

The Bush/Rice website will keep campaigning to make the national security adviser the Republican nominee for vice president. In low-level Republican circles, Rice will continue to be portrayed as vice presidential or presidential timber, just as some of the faithful continue to imagine that former Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris will someday be a U.S. Senator.

But it is a fool's mission now.

Condoleezza Rice is not finished as a Bush administration insider. But she is, unquestionably, finished as a candidate for vice president or president.
There is much more at The Nation weblog The Online Beat
  

11:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Springtime In New Orleans Is The Sexiest Place In The World...

Most of my adult life--and a goodly number of sultry nights from my teens--was spent in the "City That Care Forgot," New Orleans, unquestionably the most deliciously sinful city in America. So forget politics, censorship, deadlines and lose yourself in sex without obligations, guided with only a little guilt by a couple of not-so-old friends of mine...
The first time, I was terrified. I thought everything had to be perfect: my toenails, my fingernails, my dress. I was excited and nervous, and I finally got a call.

That's when I began to be addicted to risk.

The client was at a hotel downtown. I remember his name; to this day I can picture him. What surprised me was how easy it was. I had thought it would be difficult. That was almost scary to me, how easy it was to be hired, to actually take off your clothes and do that with someone.

I made more money that night than in two weeks at my regular job. I was tickled pink. I had always been a good girl; I always did the right thing. That was the first time I experienced what it was like to have secrets. It was that aspect of the business that I grew to hate the most, the secrecy, but at the time I was so empowered because I had a secret.

The first mistake I made was to quit my day job. I got sucked into the money. At the time, I was thinking, why should I work my ass off 40 hours a week? But once you let go of that day job, you really have to lie to everyone.
Gambit Weekly
 

2:40 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Chinese Hostages Freed

Somebody smartened up in a hurry:
BEIJING (Reuters) - Seven Chinese kidnapped in the volatile Iraqi town of Falluja have been released, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency and the Arabic television station Al Jazeera.

The station aired footage showing at least six of the men, one with a bandaged forehead, sitting in a room as a first secretary of the Chinese embassy in Iraq expressed thanks and joy at their release.

Xinhua said two of the captives had been slightly injured in a traffic accident, but did not elaborate.

China's ambassador to Iraq, Sun Bigan, told Xinhua the hostages were all safe.

The abductions had threatened to overshadow a visit to China by Vice President Dick Cheney, a key force behind the American-led invasion of Iraq -- which China opposed -- who was due to arrive in Beijing from Tokyo Tuesday.

Al Jazeera's footage also showed a cleric representing the Association of Islamic Clerics, Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi, saying the detainees had been handed over to him at a mosque.

Xinhua earlier quoted Chen Xianzhong, a Chinese merchant in Baghdad, as saying the association had taken care of the seven at a "secret place" after their release late Monday, Iraqi time.

MEN FROM FUJIAN

The seven men -- Xue Yougui, Lin Jinping, Li Guiwu, Li Guiping, Wei Weilong, Chen Xiaojin, and Lin Kongming -- entered Iraq from Jordan Sunday morning and were abducted in Falluja, west of Baghdad, Xinhua said earlier.

They were from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian, the oldest 49 and the youngest 18. Xinhua did not say what they were doing in Iraq.
Reuters
  

11:17 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Buck Stops...Nowhere?

It is , of course, too much to ask that George W. Bush govern up to the level of a hat salesman from Missouri. After all, Harry S. Truman, common man that he was, was a Democrat without silver-spoon pretensions and had served his country at the national level prior to his accidental presidency--surely the only thing Dubya does share with President Truman--as a United States Senator before becoming FDR's last vice president. But that which President Truman is most famous for--other than Firing Douglas MacArthur, and defending his daughter's acumen with a piano by calling a reporter a "son of a bitch" in public--the now immortal words and world-wide English language idiom, "The Buck Stops Here," while unquestionably a most laudable sentiment, is not a difficult one to achieve. Many human beings have to do it every day; they are the emotionally honest ones who simply accept responsibility for their actions, say so, and move on.

Below, in full, is an editorial from today's The New York Times dealing with this issue without invoking the name of Truman, but that is its only failing. I approve of it so much that I am reproducing it in full so that I may have it as a record in these pages. I do hope you will take the time to read it in its entirety.
The Silent President

President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings ? although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City.

The most striking thing about the president's comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.

No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.

It is time for the president to drop his political posture and reassure the country that his first and foremost concern is not his re-election but the safety of Americans at home and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether anything could or should have been done differently, he must demonstrate that he is asking those questions of himself. Instead of preparing — as the administration seems to be preparing — to blame the C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White House itself is part of the problem.

Perhaps no other administration would have responded differently to the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August 2001. But most other presidents did not limit critical briefing papers to little more than a page, give political advisers such a prominent place in the White House and so dramatically restrict the number of policy makers who had access to the Oval Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at least one of those flaws, but no one else had them all.

The "fact sheet" the White House released over the weekend along with the August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to mount an attack on the United States was familiar information and "publicly well known." It said the presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the inattentive president.

Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, gave a bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who so far has agreed to appear before the commission only in private and in the company of the vice president.

This is not a time for more secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is asking Americans to simply take his word for the need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, the American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began his answer with "That's a good question.")

Mr. Bush needs to speak out fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He is chief executive of a country that once trusted him to lead in perilous times. The public supported his decision to go to war in the Middle East because most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an election in November. It is what he needs to run the country, and he is in grave danger of losing it. Neither administration officials nor political advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on to the country's ebbing confidence. The president must do this himself, and quickly.
The New York Times
  

3:05 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




There Is One Major American Political Leader Who Knows Exactly Where The Buck Stops

While I am not wavering one iota in my support for John Kerry--even though he is dead wrong on China and jobs--there are many days when I wish that the man at the head of the Democratic ticket was another Kerrey, spelt with an extra e, as in the former Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey. He is also much in the news of late, as a member of the 9/11 Commission. He was an exceedingly fine Senator, and a very intelligent man who left Capitol Hill for academia, where he is president of New York's New School University, a very unique and distinguished center of higher education in Manhattan's Greenwich Village--I once lived next door to it back in the 60's when the West Village was the most exciting place in the world to be (sorry about that, San Francisco).

While Bob Kerrey was admittedly involved in what could be called "war crimes" when he was in Vietnam, serving as a Navy Seal in the infamous "Phoenix" CIA assassination program, what he and his men did they were ordered to do. I will not judge a man for what happens in combat when he is young and under orders. You may. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Many of you may think that is a disgrace; again, I do not. When old men stop sending young men into battle and start leading them into it, perhaps I will change my views on what happens when the shooting starts and the fear and adrenalin runs amok.

He has an op-ed piece in today's The New York Times that let's hope will be read by both the man who is the sitting president and the man who much of the world hopes will be the sitting president come next spring. I can only hope that all of you will take the time to read it. He is a man who definitely understands the emotional honesty it takes to know where the buck stops.
At Thursday's hearing before the 9/11 commission, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, gave a triumphal presentation. She was a spectacular witness.

I was a tough critic of some of her answers and assertions, though I believe I was at least as tough with the national security adviser for President Clinton. At the beginning and end of every criticism I have made in this process, I have also offered this disclaimer: anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

Two things about that failure are clear to me at this point in our investigation. The first is that 9/11 could have been prevented, and the second is that our current strategy against terrorism is deeply flawed. In particular, our military and political tactics in Iraq are creating the conditions for civil war there and giving Al Qaeda a powerful rationale to recruit young people to declare jihad on the United States.

The case for the first conclusion begins with this fact: On 9/11, 19 men defeated every defense mechanism the United States had placed in their way. They succeeded in murdering 3,000 men and women whose only crime was going to work that morning. And they succeeded at a time of heightened alert -- long after we recognized that Al Qaeda was capable of sophisticated military operations.

Remember, the attack occurred after President Clinton had let pass opportunities to arrest or kill Al Qaeda's leadership when the threat was much smaller. It occurred after President Bush and Ms. Rice were told on Jan. 25, 2001, that Al Qaeda was in the United States, and after President Bush was told on Aug. 6, 2001, that "70 F.B.I. field investigations were open against Al Qaeda" and that the "F.B.I. had found patterns of suspicious activities in the U.S. consistent with preparation for hijacking."

Once again I know that President Clinton, President Bush and Ms. Rice all faced difficult challenges in the years and months before 9/11; I do not know if I would have handled things differently had I been in their shoes. It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

But this recognition does not absolve me of my obligation to ask those who were responsible for our national security at the time what they did to protect us against this terrorist threat.

One episode strikes me as particularly important. On July 5, 2001, Ms. Rice asked Richard Clarke, then the administration's counterterrorism chief, to help domestic agencies prepare against an attack. Five days later an F.B.I. field agent in Phoenix recommended that the agency investigate whether Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools. He speculated that Mr. bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel.

Ms. Rice did not receive this information, a failure for which she blames the structure of government. And, while I am not blaming her, I have not seen the kind of urgent follow-up after this July 5 meeting that anyone who has worked in government knows is needed to make things happen. I have not found evidence that federal agencies were directed clearly, forcefully and unambiguously to tell the president everything they were doing to eliminate Qaeda cells in the United States.

My second conclusion about the president's terrorism strategy has three parts. First, I believe President Bush's overall vision for the war on terrorism is wrong. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. The real enemy is a small group of radical Islamists who have chosen to wage a war on all infidels -- military and civilian alike.

Second, the importance of this distinction is that it forces us to face the Muslim world squarely and to make an effort to understand it. It also allows us to insist that we be judged on our merits -- and not on the hate-filled myths of the street. Absent an effort to establish a dialogue that permits respectful criticism and disagreement, the war on terrorism will surely fail. The violence against us will continue.

Such a dialogue does not require us to cease our forceful and at times deadly pursuit of those who have declared war on us. Quite the contrary. It would enable us to gather Muslim allies in a cause that will bring as much benefit to them as it does to us. That's why President Bush was right to go to a Washington mosque shortly after Sept. 11. His visit -- and his words of assurance that ours was not a war against Islam but against a much smaller group that has perverted the teachings of the Koran -- earned the sympathy of much of the Muslim world.

That the sympathy wasn't universal, that some in the Arab world thought the murder of 3,000 innocents was justified, caused many Americans to question whether the effort to be fair was well placed. It was -- and we would be advised to make the effort more often.

Third, we should swallow our pride and appeal to the United Nations for help in Iraq. We should begin by ceding joint authority to the United Nations to help us make the decisions about how to transfer power to a legitimate government in Iraq. Until recently I have not supported such a move. But I do now. Rather than sending in more American forces or extending the stay of those already there, we need an international occupation that includes Muslim and Arab forces.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 commission and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is president of New School University.
The New York Times
  

2:46 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dr. Henry Lee Concludes Room For Reasonable Doubt In Taiwan Shooting

I count myself fortunate to have known and worked with the renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee for more than 15 years now. Henry is a truly unique man: He left Taiwan for America as a young cop with a wife and kids in the mid-60's, knowing very little English. He soon earned a Ph.D in Bio-Chemistry and a Ph.D in Molecular Biology from NYU; he has solved over 6000 murder cases; he is the only bad-guy catcher in the world to be the recipient of the Distinguished Criminalist Award from both the American Academy of Forensic Science and the International Association of Forensic Science, both organizations' highest honor; he is a charter member of the International Homicide Detectives Association; he was called on by Congress to identify the evidence in mass graves in the Balkans, and to determine if Vince Foster actually committed suicide.

Henry has written almost 20 books, but once solved a murder case by finding and identifying the minute remains of a wife who had been passed through an industrial-grade woodchipper by her insurance-hungry husband and then scattered over acres of Connecticut countryside; he has been a professor of forensics at Yale and the University of New Haven; for over 20 years he was the chief of forensics, Connecticut State Police; when he was ready to retire, the governor convinced him to accept the position of Connecticut Public Safety Commissioner--top cop for the whole state, a political position he filled admirably but did not enjoy. I could go on and on, his C.V. runs over fifty pages.

Yes, Henry is an extraordinary intellect; surely the only true genius I have actually known and believed--of the others I have known in many fields that were advertised as such, I have my doubts. Henry is also very loyal, soft-spoken, unassuming and exceedingly kind. However, many people know these things about Henry Lee. From my books, of course, but also from his books, and others, and all the daily press from being the star witness at the most famous trials of the past 25 years--only twice for the defense: the O.J. Simpson murder case, and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial.

What only his close friends know, however, is that he is also the funniest man alive! I mean it. Sometimes I laugh so hard I hurt myself. He could have had an outstanding career as a comedian. Yes, it helps him with juries, no doubt. Jurors love him. Some have named their children after him.

So why am I waxing on about Henry so much tonight? Because he is in the news again. In The New York Times here, but many newspapers in the world had Henry Lee stories today. Henry released some of his findings regarding the Chen Shui-bian shooting in Taiwan today. Knowing Henry as I do, I can read between the lines of what he says officially--he is always the objective scientist, and will never offer opinions. But Henry does have opinions. Henry loves to talk crime scene reconstruction way into the wee hours of any night. It is called the "Scenario Game" amongst Criminalists; no one alive plays it better than Henry. But Henry can only play this game with close associates and it is almost always off-the-record. There have been times when Henry has allowed me to be his "voice" when he did not want to be quoted directly, but felt certain things should be known by the public.

I must say categorically that this is not one of those times. As yet, Henry and I have not been able to communicate on his work in the Chen Shui-bian case. I do not know if we will discuss the case any time soon; he is very busy, I am still quite sick with Bronchitis, but all too busy nonetheless, and have gone back to work anyway. And if we do, I have no idea if any of it will be on-the-record. What the hell, I have retired from crime writing!

I do want to say this much before you read the article below: It is very important to look at what he is not saying. And that there is an obvious "space" between what he does say. I will sum it up by repeating part of the title of this post: There is room for doubt. Now, while that may sound like mush-mouth pablum to you, in the crime business, "reasonable doubt" is as big as Mt. Everest. Also, answer the question that he tantalizingly leaves hanging like a vapor trail in the air. Why does an assassin use nonlethal homemade bullets? Most likely fired from an ineffectual homemade weapon? And we are not talking about professional home-load goodies that serious shooters like to use. Undoubtedly the shots came from outside the jeep; Chen Shui-bian did not shoot himself, and no one in the jeep shot him. But still there is that question, and room for reasonable doubt...?
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Sunday, April 11 -- A team of American forensic specialists concluded at a press conference here today that President Chen Shui-bian could not have shot himself in a shooting incident on March 19 that may have helped him win reelection the next day, but said the evidence did not show whether the attack was staged.

At the government's invitation, Henry Lee, a former Taipei police captain, led a team of American experts here to look into the case. Mr. Lee emigrated to the United States in the 1960's and testified as a forensic expert for the defense in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Mr. Lee said that one of the two homemade bullets used in the attack came through the windshield from somewhere outside and in front of the Jeep. That finding appeared to rule out a suggestion by the Nationalists in the past week that the President might have been shot by one of his aides in the Jeep.

The homemade bullets used in the attack probably would have been stopped by a bulletproof vest, which the president was not wearing, Mr. Lee said. The bullets had oval-shaped front ends, he said, adding that, "It's not a sharp, penetrating design."

But Mr. Lee cautioned that any bullet can be lethal at short range if it strikes in the head.
There is much more in The New York Times
  

1:59 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, April 12, 2004

Ms. Dowd, of course...

Whenever I am really blue and become convinced there is a god because I can fathom no other reason for such a preponderance of stupid people being on earth save only for the fact that a very stupid god must have indeed created humans in his own image, I click on a link at The New York Times and read Maureen Dowd and remember why I so happily take humanism over ghost worship every day of the week and twice on Sunday...
Young Americans are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq, trying to fulfill the audacious vision of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to remold Iraq in the image of America.

But while we try to turn them into us, who have we become?

The president presents himself as an avatar of American values, plain-spoken cowboy and tough flyboy.

But Condi Rice's testimony on Thursday raises the depressing possibility that we've lost the essence of our frontier spirit: the ingenious individualist who gets around the system and faces down the drones.

From Abigail Adams to Tom Sawyer to Bugs Bunny to Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith to Indiana Jones, the best American character is plucky, nimble, clever, inventive.

So it's disturbing to see our government reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and lumbering gait, especially since we are up against such a creative, chameleonlike enemy.

Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle.

This no-can-do spirit marked George Tenet's lame excuses to senators in February who wanted to know 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, even though the Germans gave the agency his name and phone number. "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11," Mr. Tenet said.

And what would Eliot Ness say about an F.B.I. that is less computer savvy than American preschoolers and Islamic terrorists? The F.B.I. is only halfway through modernizing its computers, which could not, before 9/11, do two searches at once, such as "Al Qaeda" and "flight schools." Can't we draft Bill Gates for duty?

This ominous passivity was threaded through the testimony of Ms. Rice, a brainy and accomplished woman who should represent the best of America. She blamed "systemic" and "structural" impediments that prevented the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. from sharing. She complained that other people hadn't recommended what she should do; even the terrorists were faulted for not giving specifics.

The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — "There will be attacks in the near future" — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. "But they don't tell us when," Ms. Rice protested. "They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how." Paging Nancy Drew.

Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in "tit for tat" with Saddam.

The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S.

The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire.

What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed "historical."

W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview.

On Iraq, they ran roughshod over the system. On Al Qaeda, Condi blamed the system, saying she couldn't act on Richard Clarke's plan until there was a strategy, a policy, "tasking," meetings, etc.

The F.B.I. officials who ignored Coleen Rowley as she tried to break through the obtuse leadership of Louis Freeh's F.B.I. to get evidence on Zacarias Moussaoui, and Kenneth Williams, the Phoenix agent who outlined the Al Qaeda plot to train Arab terrorists in our flight schools, have not been held accountable. Why aren't the heroic Ms. Rowley and Mr. Williams running something?

Dick Clarke has struck a chord because his passionate efforts reflected those great American virtues of ingenuity and brashness. Even if he was a bit of a cowboy, loading up his .357 sidearm to return to the West Wing the night after 9/11, at least he was not dozing through High Noon.
The New York Times
  

11:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Iraqi Hostage-Taking Hits Too Close To Home--Mine

For reasons far too complex to explain here, all Mississippians share a bond of kinship that transcends the normal affinity one has for neighbors and fellow citizens of an American state. I can only tell you that my heart is heavier by far than it has been for quite a spell, and it has nothing to do with the raging Bronchitis that has felled me for over a week now.

No. My heart is breaking for Tommy Hamill and his family. When you read this article from the always excellent Christian Science Monitor, your heart will also ache:
Adventure and work sent Tommy Hamill to Iraq. Now a town prays for him.

MACON, MISS. – After years of trying to make it as a dairy farmer in rural Mississippi, Tommy Hamill finally decided last summer to do what virtually no one in agriculture ever wants to: sell the family farm.

He needed to pay off a mounting debt. Yet the sale didn't cover all the family's obligations. So Mr. Hamill, concerned about meeting his family's needs, and inspired by a sense of adventure and patriotism, took a job with a US contractor in Iraq that provided food, fuel, and clothing for US troops.

Now his well-intentioned decision has landed him in the middle of an international crisis with wrenching repercussions for his family and friends and posing new political challenges for the US occupation of Iraq.

As the lone American in a new wave of hostage-taking in Iraq, Hamill has overnight become a symbol of the dangers and deteriorating circumstances on the ground.

To his family and friends in this rural town in north central Mississippi, though, the crisis a half a world away is singularly personal. "Prayers are all we need right now," Hamill's wife, Kellie, said in an interview. "I'm doing about as good as can be expected under the circumstances."

"I got God, and I just trust in God," Vera Hamill, Tommy Hamill's grandmother, said.

For now, that's mainly all the family and those who know him in this impoverished stretch of Mississippi can do - pray and watch television for some glimmer of good news, and hope the next phone call does not bring the news they fear most.

Hamill was taken hostage Friday in the war-torn country by gunmen who rocketed a fuel convoy on the road between Baghdad and Fallujah. Saturday, in a video, the abductors threatened to kill and mutilate him if American troops did not pull out of Fallujah.

In the clip given to the Al-Jazeera, Hamill was shown in front of an Iraqi flag emblazoned with the words "Allahu Akbar," or God is great. Hamill gives his name and says he is 43 and from Mississippi. In part of the video, an announcer quotes Hamill as saying his captors were not mistreating him.

Photo, CAMP ANACONDA: Thomas Hamill attended a morning drivers' meeting late last month at Camp Anaconda. Weeks later, he was taken hostage by gunmen.
ANDREW INNERARITY/HOUSTON CHRONICLE/AP
Please read on at the Christian Science Monitor
 

2:16 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Seven Chinese citizens kidnapped in Fallujah? Very Dumb Move...

I think we can safely assume that at least some of the insurgents in Iraq are being led by perhaps the dumbest of all god's children. Why on Earth provoke the very biggest kid on the block who has steadfastly rebuked the unilateral invasion of Iraq and is almost a next door neighbor with perhaps the largest standing army in the world? STUPID, thy name is whoever made this decision.

Seven Chinese citizens became the latest foreigners to be kidnapped in Iraq when they were abducted by an armed group, state media quoted a Chinese diplomat in Baghdad as saying.

The seven entered Iraq from Jordan early Sunday and were most probably abducted in the flashpoint city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, Xinhua news agency quoted the diplomat as saying.

The seven men were from eastern Fujian province, according to a name list provided by the diplomat. The oldest was 49, the youngest 18, it added.

Xinhua said that Al Arabiya television's correspondent in Fallujah had interviewed some foreigners released by kidnappers on Sunday who said they had met seven people with Chinese passports being held in a secret location.

The captives were reportedly in good health and not handcuffed, but it remained unclear what the kidnappers would do with them.
China Daily
  

1:24 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




One Good Line From Friedman

This is one hell of a great sentence in an otherwise bumpy column looking for a rest stop for the formerly unflappable Mr. Friedman to catch his breath. Not to overly mention his once fabled wits now that he is not only sucking up to Dubya but his nefarious father whose hereditary, life-long love for black ops and all despots with access to any size oil reserve got the world pretty much into this fix:
If it is America alone against the Iraqi street, we lose. If it is the world against the Iraqi street, we have a chance.
The New York Times
 

1:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Pulitzter Prize Winning Series You Must Read



The Toledo Blade, of Toledo, Ohio, is and should be very proud of their first Pulitzer Prize, which was announced last week. Staff writers Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss, and Joe Mahr received the investigative reporting prize for their series - "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths" - detailing how the most "elite U.S. Army fighting unit in the Vietnam War killed unarmed civilians and children during a seven-month rampage." It is breathtaking reporting with heartbreaking realities. I will say nothing more but give you a link to the entire series: "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths" from The Toledo Blade. Congratulations, guys.
  

12:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What Dead Eye Georgie Knew...

With my father being a civilian scientist and technical writer attached to the Air Force for almost the entirety of the Cold War, specializing in early warning detection--most specifically NORAD and its coordination with the Strategic Air Command (SAC, you know, the B-52s armed with nukes that were flown around the clock)--I am not completely a dummy when it comes to United States Air Force procedure. Having said that, I will tell you that from the moment I first saw the news of planes flying into the WTC Towers, I have had a problem with why in the hell jets weren't scrambled in time to shoot down the 2nd airliner incoming on New York. Now with the release of the August 6, 2001 PDB, and the "chatter" that Dr. Rice quoted in her testimony--"very, very, very big...", "Unbelievable...," "Big uproar,"--I have even more of a problem with there not being fighter jets already in the skies over the Northeast corridor that morning of 9/11/01.

From what I read in the PDB, it would seem only prudent to have had fighter jets constantly in the air over the parts of America that instantly come to mind when one hears "very, very, very big," "Unbelievable" and "Big uproar." My dead dog could have instantly homed in on the twin towers, the Capitol, the Pentagon and the White House. And please don't bring up the cost of such an operation, even if it would have been carried on for 6 months. We spent umpteen times that much during the NORAD and SAC days with a lot of very big planes constantly criss-crossing the upper North American rim for years when intelligence told us that the actual likelihood of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was somewhere between nil and none--although the public was never told this. It was all show for MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction that both sides swore by.

But bin Laden and hijackings and blowing up buildings was a CERTAINTY, it was only a matter of where and when. Well, the "chatter" upswing that summer was a damn good start at when, and the where with the what. They were not talking about a giant Wal-Mart or the Mall of America! Returning to the scene of the crime isn't an axiom of police work because of cop TV shows. They had already hit the World Trade Center once, but in their mind not sufficiently. Hindsight is always 20-20, true. However, reading current intelligence reports and matching them with history, opportunity--al Queda cells in country taking flying lessons--and profiling, should at least be up to only needing dime store reading glasses!
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.

Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a memo prepared for Bush and declassified Saturday.

White House aides and outside experts said they could not recall a sitting president ever publicly releasing the highly sensitive document, known as a PDB, for presidential daily briefing.

The Aug. 6, 2001 PDB referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of (Osama) bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, asked the White House to declassify the document at its meeting Thursday. It is significant because Bush read it, so it offers a window on what Bush and his top aides knew about the threat of a terrorist strike.

The PDB made plain that bin Laden had been scheming to strike the United States for at least six years. It warned of indications from a broad array of sources, spanning several years.
Now comes the partisan parsing of what Dubya & Company knew and what they could or should have done about it: Isn't democracy grand? Actually, yes, it just gets messy and overly wordy most of the time. First, the good guys, I mean, the Dems:
Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska, said the memo's details should have given Bush enough warning to push for more intelligence information about possible domestic hijackings.

"The whole argument the government used that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States - this memo said an attack could come in the United States. And we didn't scramble our agencies to that," he said.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commissioner and former Watergate prosecutor, said the memo calls into question national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's assertion Thursday that the memo was purely a "historical" document.

"This is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security," he said.
Now we hear from the GOPers, undoubtedly the bad guys--and girls. It is so much fun now being able to be so subjective in my reporting, after years of attempting to be objective; there are few pluses to getting older, but for this old journalist, the freedom to take sides is most decidedly one of them.
Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor, said the memo "didn't call for anything to be done" by Bush.

The memo's details confirm that the Bush administration had no specific information regarding an imminent attack involving airplanes as missiles, Thompson said.

"The PDB backs up what Dr. Rice testified to. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said.
Now back to the "evidence."
"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After President Clinton launched missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington," the memo said.

The memo cited intelligence from other countries in three instances, but the White House blacked out the names of the nations.

Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of millennium celebrations in 2000 "may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.," the document stated.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam, who was caught trying to cross the Canadian border with explosives about 60 miles north of Seattle in late 1999, told the FBI that he alone conceived an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the document said. Ressam is still awaiting sentencing after agreeing to testify in other terrorism cases.

Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaida planner who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002.

Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said.

"The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it warned.
Associated Press
  

12:13 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, April 11, 2004

Bloody Easter Sunday In The Holy Lands of the Old Testament

What can be said except that we grieve, we mourn, we anguish with frustration, but we cannot quit this job, in this mess, this time...
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - Gunmen shot down a U.S. attack helicopter during fighting in western Baghdad on Sunday, killing its two crew members. ...

A pall of black smoke rose on Baghdad's western edge where a military spokesman said the AH-64 Apache helicopter was downed by ground fire in the morning. More helicopters circled overhead, while U.S. troops closed off the main highway - a key supply route into the capital.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told a news briefing Sunday that the two-member crew was killed and a quick-reaction team was collecting the bodies. ...

Heavy firing was heard, and tanks and Humvees moved into the area near the suburb of Abu Ghraib, where masked gunmen have wreaked havoc in the suburb for the past three days, attacking fuel convoys and blowing up tanker trucks. Insurgents kidnapped an American civilian and killed a U.S. soldier in the area Friday.

The captors of the American hostage - Thomas Hammil, a Mississippi native who works for a U.S. contractor in Iraq - threatened to kill and burn him unless U.S. troops end their assault on Fallujah by 6 a.m. Sunday. The deadline passed with no word on Hammil's fate.

Video footage aired on Arabic television Sunday showed the bodies of two dead Westerners - apparently a pair of Americans seen by APTN cameramen on Friday being dragged out of a car on the Abu Ghraib highway, in a different incident from Hammil's kidnapping.

The cameramen fled the scene Friday, and the fate of the two men was unknown. But one of the bodies in Sunday's footage resembled one of the Americans taken out of the car.

The new video showed the bodies surrounded by gunmen, who are heard on the tape saying the two are American intelligence officers. One of the bodies lay sprawled on the pavement, his face bloodied and his right leg drenched in blood. The other body had been rolled face down, his shirt lifted to reveal a bullet hole in his back. Both wore dark T-shirts and khaki pants often worn by private contractors.

Also Sunday, Germany's Foreign Ministry said two security agents for the German Embassy in Baghdad who have been missing in Iraq for several days are most likely dead.

The two German men, ages 38 and 25, were traveling from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad on a routine trip Wednesday and were ambushed near Fallujah, according to the ministry. Other vehicles in the convoy reached the embassy on Thursday after coming under fire, the ministry said.

Fallujah - 35 miles west of Baghdad - saw occasional sniper fire Sunday, but was still the quietest it has been all week. Sunni insurgents and Marines agreed to a cease-fire that started early Sunday will last until the evening amid talks between Iraqi officials on how to end the violence. ...

The most serious break in Sunday's peace came when a sniper opened fire on U.S. patrol, wounding two Marines, commanders said. In the ensuing gunbattle, at least one insurgent was killed. After the firefight, the city was largely quiet again.

"They are not playing by the rules, sir," Marine Capt. Jason Smith radioed to his commander after taking fire in another incident in which the troops did not fire back.
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP)
  

10:29 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dubya's Losing The Numbers Game, and His Texas Cool? The Picture Tells The Story...

Is the SCREAM coming next? The unrelenting bad news out of Iraq is wreaking havoc on the now exposed bogus "Terrorism Warrior," which means he will swiftly wreak even more vengeful havoc with the truth in his attacks on any American citizen who tries to exercise his constitutional right to free speech and dare to criticise the administration on anything.

When will he start shutting down newspapers in the United States using his Patriot Act powers? This is what happens when American citizens and the American news media allows the first--and please let it be the last--dynastic "restoration" in the Republic's history to happen without comment or protest save for authors of books: book publishing, the last great bastion of free speech in America, and it is under assault by multinational conglomerates.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Six out of 10 Americans say the Bush administration underestimated the threat of terrorism prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and nearly two out of three are at least somewhat concerned Iraq could become another Vietnam, according to a Newsweek Poll released on Saturday.

The poll of 1,005 adults taken on Thursday and Friday also showed a 51 percent disapproval rating for President Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq, where violence has flared up in the last week amid calls by Muslim clerics for an uprising against the U.S.-led occupation.

Reflecting an erosion of confidence in Bush's leadership in the war on terror and his conduct of the Iraq war, Democratic challenger John Kerry was the choice of 50 percent of the respondents to become the next president in November in a one-to-one matchup with Bush.
There is much more on the bad numbers at: My Way News

Photo (Reuters) Bush makes remarks on job training and the economy at South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado, Arkansas, April 6, 2004.
  

8:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Chongqing Internet Bar Closed Because Customers Are Killed By Train--uh, say what?

This incident must get the Tortured Logic of the Month Award (its a brand new award [ed.]). What a stretch for a reason to shut down internet access. How about arresting the parents? 48 hours of continuous net surfing? You just have to read this and trust me that it came straight from ChinaTechNews.com:
Authorities in Chongqing Municipality, southwest China, shut down an unlicensed Internet bar involved in the death of two teenager Internet surfers, the government said Thursday.

The Industrial and Commercial Administration of Shapingba District, where the bar was located, confiscated five computers and illegal gains after two junior middle school students were crushed to death by a train on March 31 when they fell asleep on the train track having surfed the Internet for over 48 hours in the bar.

During the accident, another Internet-addicted student Luo Hua was awakened by the train and narrowly escaped the tragedy, according to Li Bo, director of the district bureau of culture, radio and television, one of the local watchdogs over Internet services. Following the accident, the government set up a joint investigation team of police, the administration, the bureau and other relevant governmental departments.

Internet bars appeared in the rural Huilongba Town a year ago as a result of increasing restrictions over Internet bar services in the downtown city. Many of the bars, attracting students to surf online around-the-clock, were not officially approved for operation and therefore moved to rural areas to escape inspections, according to officials of the investigation team.
ChinaTechNews.com
  

7:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, April 10, 2004

Is Iraq, the "perfect storm" ?

The Christian Science Monitor has an exceedingly fine analysis of the immediate situation in Iraq and how it happened, it is required reading, please. I will start you off with the lede and second graph and let you go clickity-click for the rest.
In Iraq, a 'perfect storm'

A series of events has triggered the bloodiest crisis to date for US forces in postwar Iraq.

BAGHDAD - The US closure of an irregularly published newspaper with just 5,000 readers seemed a tiny moment in the struggle for stability in Iraq. But the March 28 move to close Al Hawza, controlled by militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, now looks like the edge of a violent storm.

How its twin fronts - of Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents - built and combined to create what might be described as the perfect Iraqi sandstorm is only now coming into focus. At the time, no one would have forecast that the deaths of four US security contractors alone would result in a major military campaign in Fallujah. Similarly, the US coalition hardly anticipated that the closure of just one of 100-plus newspapers in Baghdad would form the genesis of a Shiite revolt in half a dozen cities around Iraq.
The Christian Science Monitor

If you haven't already done so while you were there--or even if you didn't go there at all (for shame)--you also need to read The Christian Science Monitor piece on how the war news is starting to affect voters:
Support eroding for Bush on Iraq

WASHINGTON – As violence and US casualties mount in Iraq, President Bush is facing a precarious political situation at home - and a potentially critical moment in the presidential campaign.

Current polls suggest that public opinion on the conflict could be approaching a tipping point. While Americans have always been divided over the war, a majority has consistently held that the US made the right decision in deposing Saddam Hussein. But some polls now find a majority disapproving of Mr. Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq, and, according to a recent Pew survey, a sizable margin believes the administration does not have a plan to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. The number of Americans calling for the troops to come home is rising, with just a bare majority now favoring keeping US troops in the region.
The Christian Science Monitor
  

3:13 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, April 09, 2004

Well Said...

While still much under the debilitating effects of a bronchial infection, for the most part, I believe The New York Times editorial below eloquently states my viewpoint on Ms. Rice's stalwart defense of her boss and his administration. It is reproduced in full:
The Rice Version

In her long-awaited public testimony yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, the most diligent of public servants, made it clear that under her direction the Bush administration touched all the proper bases in planning an antiterror program. The State Department was told to 'work with' other countries. F.B.I. field offices were 'tasked' to increase surveillance on known terrorists. Warnings were issued, meetings were held. But Ms. Rice was utterly unconvincing when she tried to portray Al Qaeda as anything approaching a top concern for the White House.

If President Bush were not making 9/11 the center of his re-election campaign, it might be possible for the country to settle on a realistic vision of how the White House handled the threat posed by Al Qaeda before the terrible attacks on New York and Washington occurred. The administration tried to behave responsibly, but it missed the boat.

Ms. Rice was at her weakest in her testimony before the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks when she attempted to portray Mr. Bush himself as a hands-on administrator with a particular concern about terror threats. Her description of the president as tired of "swatting flies" and spoiling for a real fight with Osama bin Laden was especially poorly chosen. "Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11?" asked former Senator Bob Kerrey.

The administration argument that it had only gotten intelligence about potential terrorist attacks abroad in the summer of 2001 was rather drastically undermined when Ms. Rice revealed, under questioning, that the briefing given Mr. Bush by the C.I.A. on Aug. 6, 2001, was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Ms. Rice continues to insist that the information was "historical" rather than a warning of something likely to occur. The briefing memo has been withheld from the public, but the White House is doing the right thing in rethinking that position. It should also rethink the president's insistence on answering the committee's questions only briefly, in private and — most strangely — only in the company of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The question of most concern to the public, and particularly the tortured families of the 9/11 victims, was whether the attack could have been averted if Al Qaeda had been something more than one policy concern among many for the administration. Certainly, if the president had reacted quickly and aggressively to the C.I.A.'s August briefing, he might have convened a cabinet meeting and directed every official to come up with immediate antiterrorism plans — including the totally out-of-the-loop transportation secretary, Norman Mineta. But even if Mr. Bush had attempted to move the federal bureaucracy with optimum energy, it's likely the short-term outcome would have been more warnings issued and more studies planned.

The central role of the F.B.I. in failing to predict the attacks is one of the many things on which Ms. Rice seems to basically agree with Richard Clarke, the administration's former counterterrorism coordinator turned chief critic. Both officials drew pictures of an agency that dragged its feet and failed to report information from field agents that would have pointed to a possible terrorist attack from the sky. The Bush administration, after some early resistance, has tried since 9/11 to get the F.B.I. and C.I.A. to share information with each other and the rest of the administration. It will be important to hear the investigating committee's thoughts on what further action is needed to retool the F.B.I. for the modern world.

If Ms. Rice were not set on burnishing the commander in chief's image as the hero of 9/11, she might have been able to admit that Mr. Bush is a hierarchical manager who expects his immediate underlings to run things, and who guessed wrong about what deserved the administration's most immediate and intense attention. The president and his top foreign policy advisers came into office determined to build a missile defense shield, fixated on Iraq as the top problem in the Middle East and greatly concerned about China. But there's no reason to doubt Ms. Rice's contention that after 9/11, Mr. Bush unequivocally picked Afghanistan as the first military target. Given the overwhelming evidence of the partnership between the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, any other decision would have been inconceivably irresponsible.

The real challenge came after the Afghan invasion, when Mr. Bush had to decide what to do next — rethink the outdated world view his advisers had brought into office, or snap back into old reflexes and go after Iraq, the enemy of the last generation. It was then that he chose the wrong path.
The New York Times
  

6:31 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, April 08, 2004

Sorry Folks...

Blogging is going to be scarce, if at all, for a short spell, hopefully. I have been laid low by a nasty case of Bronchitis. I am pretty much bed-ridden and feel like hell!
 

5:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Handmade Grenade

One Hell of a pinup picture. Have a look at this lowdown baby close up...


An Iraqi militiaman aligned with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr wears a makeshift grenade on his belt while guarding the Kufa mosque April 7, 2004. The U.S. military has suffered 31 combat deaths in Iraq since Sunday. Photo by Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters

  

10:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Al Bawaba, the "Middle Eastern Internet Network," Reports On The "Iraqi Resistance"

As we continue our sampling of press reports, here is an Arab view of the apparent change in the war in Iraq:
Shiites and other Iraqi resistance fighters challenged the U.S.-led occupation forces on two fronts Tuesday, in the south and in the city of Fallujah. ...

In Fallujah, US Marines drove into the center of the city under heavy fire before pulling back before nightfall. Hospital officials said eight Iraqis died Tuesday and 20 were injured, including women and children.

U.S. warplanes firing rockets razed four houses in Fallujah late Tuesday, witnesses said. A doctor said 26 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed and 30 injured in the air-strike. The rockets destroyed the houses in two neighborhoods in the city after nightfall, the witnesses said.

U.S. occupation authorities also launched a crackdown on Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia following riots in Baghdad and cities and towns to the south. ...

In the latest U.S. deaths, five Marines were killed Monday - one in Fallujah and the others on the western outskirts of Baghdad - and five U.S. soldiers were killed in attacks in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul on Monday and Tuesday. Eight Americans were killed in Sadr City, Baghdad on Sunday. ...

Fearing a U.S. move to arrest him, al-Sadr on Tuesday left a fortress-like mosque in the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, where he had been holed up for days, his aides said.

Al-Sadr declared he was prepared to die to oust the Americans. He urged his followers to resist foreign forces. "I'm prepared to have my own blood shed for what is holy to me," he said.
Al-Bawaba

The most disturbing aspect to this story, was in a "comment" to it by:
SA

suitcase nuke

just a matter of time b4 the US is nuked

One company commander said
"As soon as we crossed the line, there was a huge change in tone in the people, a real uneasy feeling," the commander said at an early evening briefing. "Little kids made roadblocks."
-------------
I hate to say it but the my country will get exactly what it deserves one day soon.
I just hope they choose a rural area to detonate.
I said it was disturbing; but it is even more frightening. It's one thing to be hated by the forces arrayed against you, but from within?

It is interesting to note the disclaimer on the comments box:
Keep your contributions civil, tasteful and relevant. Albawaba reserve's the right to be selective in publishing readers' comments
  

8:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Are We Facing A United Muslim Front In Iraq?

That appears to be the conclusion of Karl Vick's story filed from Baghdad in today's Washington Post, as I continue to sample the war coverage on what seems to have been a pivotal weekend--and week, actually--in the insurgency coalition troops are now confronting:
Muslim Rivals Unite In Baghdad Uprising

BAGHDAD, April 6 -- On the streets of Baghdad neighborhoods long defined by differences of faith and politics, signs are emerging that resistance to the U.S. occupation may be growing from a sporadic, underground effort to a broader insurrection by militiamen who claim to be fighting in the name of their common faith, Islam.

On Monday, residents of Adhamiya, a largely Sunni section of northern Baghdad, marched with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose call for armed resistance was answered by local Sunnis the same afternoon, residents said.

As protesters chanted anti-occupation slogans in Abu Hanifa Square, militants were seen hustling toward the site carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, residents said. The guerrillas opened fire on the U.S. armor deployed near the demonstration, attacking from positions in a neighborhood where militants appear to be not just tolerated but encouraged.

"I saw three mujaheddin on this street, and another three moving up this side," said Abu Hassan, pointing toward narrow lanes running toward the square on either side of the bakery where he works. On the other side of the counter, a customer spoke excitedly of guerrilla fighters arriving in several Toyota Coaster minibuses, then melting into the neighborhood.

"Everywhere among the houses they hid," said the young customer, who left without giving his name. "Then they started shooting at the American army."

"It's all so we will have a resistance, Adhamiya and Moqtada combined," Hassan said.

The bakery did brisk business Tuesday afternoon. In a city where the ordinarily jammed streets had light traffic for a second straight day, residents confided that they were ordering enough bread to last two or three days, stockpiling a staple in expectation of street fighting in the days ahead.

"What Moqtada Sadr did simply woke up the people," said Sarmad Akram, 36, who owns the small food shop next door. "Now the people have the guts to resist."

The exchange, in a middle-class Sunni quarter, was one scene Tuesday that appeared to challenge the assessment by U.S. military officials that Sadr speaks for only a radical fringe in Iraq and that his calls for mass resistance will resonate only with his followers.

Directly across the Tigris River, in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, shops were shuttered and residents kept their own watch for the approach of armored columns from an occupation base at the top of the street.

The scene was calm, but a half-hour earlier a rocket-propelled grenade had ripped into a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the neighborhood, killing a U.S. soldier, the third killed in Kadhimiya in two days.
There is a lot more to this atricle in the Washington Post...
  

7:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




George F. Will: A War President's Job

The only things I knew for certain that George Will and I shared was a love of baseball, and that we had competing baseball books during the summer and season of 1990. Both were touted as the baseball books that year and both made some of the best-seller lists, but his beat mine royally in total sales on its way to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List. I didn't mind, his MEN AT WORK was one of the best baseball books of the decade; and plenty of nice things were written about my THE BOYS WHO WOULD BE CUBS, and it did well enough. On the one or two occasions we have met over the years--at ball park press boxes--I found him to be a most fine, genteel gentleman--who probably wouldn't remember my name. If he did, he would most likely remember my "leftist" politics and my connection to the TRIAL OF THE CENTURY (as in O.J.).

Why this little trip down a memory lane that is only mine, not yours? Because I have found something else that George Will and I agree on. It is well-voiced in his column today; I am including it amongst the assorted Iraq war journalism I am highlighting in today's pages of The LongBow Papers in view of the apparent sea change that has whip-lashed us all into varying levels of depression. With that, I give you George F. Will's A War President's Job:
After last week's murder of four American civilian contractors in Fallujah, U.S. leadership in Baghdad promised that the response against that city would be 'precise' and 'overwhelming.' But precisely who is to be overwhelmed, and what will be the metric of success at overwhelming? How many troops will it take to find those involved in the killing of the contractors? And on the basis of what intelligence?

As this is written, headlines speak of 1,200 Marines "encircling" Fallujah, which is as populous as Newark, N.J. It is a sign of things falling apart that common language seems unable to get a purchase on Iraq's new reality -- a civil war defined by the uprising of many Shiites against the U.S. occupation.

Nothing in America's national experience is comparable to today's dependence on the good will of a reclusive 73-year-old Shiite ayatollah, Ali Sistani. That dependence would be ominous enough if he were the uncontested voice of Iraq's Shiite majority. But now his 30-year-old rival, Moqtada Sadr, has summoned his followers to "terrorize your enemy" -- America.

By proclaiming himself allied with two terrorist organizations -- "I am the beating arm for Hezbollah and Hamas here in Iraq" -- he compelled U.S. commanders to seek his arrest, which would mean martyrdom in the eyes of his followers. In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot -- there will be many -- will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence.

When Sadr's forces took to the streets with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, many of the freshly minted Iraqi security forces took flight. It is too late for debate about being in Baghdad. And the (relatively) pretty phase of empire -- the swift dispatch of an enemy army -- is over. Regime change, occupation, nation-building -- in a word, empire -- are a bloody business. Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq's urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism -- violence that has slipped the leash of states.

For the near term, U.S. policy must flow from Napoleon's axiom: "If you start to take Vienna -- take Vienna." We started to take Iraq 13 months ago. That mission is far from accomplished.

A U.S. official in Baghdad accurately insists that the violent insurgency involves "a minuscule percentage" of the 25 million Iraqis. However, history usually is made not by majorities but by intense minorities. Remember 1917, and this from Richard Pipes's "The Russian Revolution": "The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million." There may have been fewer Bolsheviks than there are members of Sadr's militia, which is one of many. The cancellation last weekend of a Baghdad trade fair was symbolic of the ability of a minuscule minority to sow chaos sufficient to prevent a majority from attending to mundane matters.

Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents. The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control."

The transfer is to be to an institutional apparatus that is still unformed. This is approaching at a moment when U.S. forces in Iraq, never adequate for postwar responsibilities, are fewer than they were.

U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient for that mission; unless the civil war is quickly contained, no practicable U.S. deployment will suffice. U.S. forces worldwide cannot continue to cope with Iraq as it is, plus their other duties -- peacekeeping, deterrence, training -- without stresses that will manifest themselves in severe retention problems in the reserves and regular forces.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been told that they are at war. They have not been told what sacrifices, material and emotional, they must make to sustain multiple regime changes and nation-building projects. Telling such truths is part of the job description of a war president.
The Washington Post
  

6:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Does The Ghost Of Vietnam Have Dubya By The Ass--Yet?

On virtually all levels, the war in Iraq just cannot be compared to the decade and the 55,000 dead that was the Vietnam War. But metaphorically? Or more importantly for the Bushies, politically, is there an analogy that can be made to stick like a campaign bumper sticker to a commander-in-chief that has--marginally--more in common with LBJ than PT-109 JFK?
WASHINGTON -- With U.S. troops fighting pitched battles on two Iraqi fronts last night, a question dismissed by the White House as naive last summer has gained increasing currency this spring.

Is this George Bush's Vietnam?

The charge was made in a Monday speech by one of the country's most polarizing politicians, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, the 42-year veteran of Congress.

He struck a chord in this nation and the question was being put to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, on network television yesterday while most Americans were still digesting the latest Iraqi battles over their morning coffee.

By nightfall, with the Pentagon confirming at least 12 Americans dead in a firefight in Ramadi — and raging battles in Falluja suggesting the toll will rise — the Vietnam comparisons were everywhere. ...

"I completely agree this is Bush's Vietnam," said Terry Anderson, an expert on the Vietnam era and a veteran of the war who is now a historian at Texas A&M University.

"Just like (former U.S. president) Lyndon Johnson, (President George W.) Bush has totally misjudged the culture in which they are fighting," Anderson said in an interview.

"Just like LBJ, we are trying to bring democracy to people who are not particularly interested in U.S.-style democracy and just like LBJ, we are rotating out battle-hardened people with new troops. And just like LBJ, Bush is not telling Americans they are going to be there for years."

One difference, Anderson says, is that public support for the war in Iraq has ebbed much more quickly. He says the American electorate began turning against the Vietnam war only two years into the conflict, souring on it forever following the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive.

"You had massive rallies against this war even before Bush went in," he says, "because the Vietnam experience jump-started opposition to this war." ...

"You're starting to hear that `Q' word — quagmire," pollster John Zogby told the Reuters news agency yesterday. That word has become synonymous with the Vietnam war which drove Johnson from office.

"The public seems confused," Zogby said. "How do we get out? Do we send more troops? How do we cut casualties? It's all becoming a big problem for Bush."
The Toronto Star...
  

5:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Instant Revolt, Just Add Cultural Insults...

How could we not know how close to the surface the revolt was boiling, and how wide was its base? Its not as if we don't have indigenous human intelligence in country now. This is the nightmare of urban combat that we thought had been avoided with the rapid collapse of Saddam's regular military forces a year ago. And now that it has religious and nationalist motivations rather than fighting for the politics of a despotic regime, this kind of urban guerilla warfare may be infinitely more difficult to defeat.

Unfortunately, with the many mistakes already made due to the lack of planning and preparation for winning the peace, there are no good options other than a long, drawn out war of attrition that will end only when one side can no longer physically or politically sustain the loss of life. Since it is not our homes and cities flowing with blood and charred body parts, take three guesses which side that will be, and the first two don't count. What hath our unilateral arrogance wrought...it did not have to be this way.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 6 -- The word went out on Tuesday at noon, with the blast of the call to prayer: American soldiers had raided an office of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, and torn up a poster of his father, one of Iraq's most revered martyrs.

The Khadamiya bazaar exploded in a frenzy. Shopkeepers reached beneath stacks of sandals for Kalashnikov rifles. Boys wrapped their faces in black cloth. Men raced through the streets, kicking over crates and setting up barriers. Some handed out grenades. Within minutes this entire Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad had mobilized for war.

"We're going to attack a tank!" yelled Majid Hamid, 32, waving an assault rifle. ...

American officials estimate the number of people in his private army at 3,000. But as the display of force o Tuesday showed, there were thousands of men and boys in just one Baghdad neighborhood ready to fight for Mr. Sadr. And as battles raged throughout the country, in Sunni bastions like Falluja and Ramadi and in Shiite areas like Sadr City, it was growing increasingly clear that the militias could materialize almost instantaneously. While many people — bakers, teachers, sandwich makers — hold normal jobs, when the call comes, they line up with Mr. Sadr's force, the Mahdi Army.

"This man is not a firefighter," said Lt. Mohammed Abu Kadar, tapping one of his men on the shoulder outside a fire station in Khadamiya. "He is Mahdi Army."

"This man, too," the lieutenant, a two-star officer of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, said, grabbing another firefighter. "He may wear this uniform, but he is Mahdi Army."

Then the lieutenant tapped his own chest. "We may work for the government now," Lieutenant Kadar said. "But if anything happens, we all work for Sadr." ...

There may also be an ominous synergy developing between Sunni and Shiite insurgents. On Monday, insurgents fought a gun battle against United States troops in a Sunni neighborhood near Khadamiya in which three soldiers were killed. Witnesses said the attackers included a mix of Shiites and Sunnis. "There were Shiites from Sadr City and mujahedeen from Falluja," a hotbed of Sunni resistance, said Ayad Karim, a shopkeeper. "Now the resistance is united."

On a white sheet hung from the bullet-ridden walls of a Sunni mosque were the words: "Our banner in Adamiya is the same banner as in Khadamiya. If they have a problem, we are their backup and their right hand."

According to witnesses, the disturbance on Tuesday started when American soldiers raided a Khadamiya office of Mr. Sadr's, looking for weapons. Jaffar Qasim, a 29-year-old guard, said the soldiers kicked away the lunch he was eating and then ripped off the wall a poster of Mr. Sadr's father, who was assassinated in 1999. Hours later, Mr. Qasim was still crying. His hands vibrated with frustration. The American soldiers, he said, also stomped into a prayer room where shoes are forbidden.

"If I could kill them I would," he said, looking at the dusty footprints of combat boots on a worn red carpet. "But I had my orders. And I didn't have a gun."
The New York Times...
  

2:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Multi-Front Revolt: Has The Worst Case Scenario Begun In Iraq?

Fierce Fighting Spreads to 6 Iraqi Cities: How do we fix this mess? Go back to full-scale war mode with a large redeployment of troops? I don't know. Let us hope that someone will step forward with an idea that will work. Because, yes, "quagmire" in the desert is no longer an inaccurate use of words.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 6 -- American forces in Iraq came under fierce attack on Tuesday, with as many as 12 marines killed in Ramadi, near Baghdad, and with Shiite militiamen loyal to a rebel cleric stepping up a three-day-old assault in the southern city of Najaf, American officials said.

In Falluja, where last week American security contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated, American warplanes fired rockets at houses, and marines drove armored columns into the heart of the city, where they fought block by block to flush out insurgents. Several arrests were made.

It was one of the most violent days in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, with half a dozen cities ignited. One of the biggest questions at day's end was the role of most of the majority Shiites previously thought to be relatively sympathetic to American goals. ...

Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric who is wanted by American forces in connection with a killing last year, continued to stir up his followers. In a statement issued Tuesday from Najaf, he urged disciples to keep up the fight.

"America has shown its evil intentions," Mr. Sadr said, "and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it. They must defend their rights by any means they see fit."

He also aligned himself with Iraq's most influential religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. "I proclaim my solidarity with Ali Sistani, and he should know that I am his military wing in Iraq," he said.

Mr. Sadr, whose followers on Sunday began the most serious insurrection of the postinvasion period, said, "I will put the city with the golden dish between Ali Sistani's hands after liberation." ...

His black-clad militiamen have rolled over Iraqi security forces in a number of cities, including Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriya, Basra and Baghdad, and taken over government offices.

The string of successes seems to inflate Mr. Sadr's popularity and draw more recruits to his Mahdi Army militia. In some cities, like Kufa, his followers have completely replaced police and security forces, essentially establishing an occupation-free zone and patrolling towns in blue and white government cars that just days ago were driven by the new Iraqi security forces.

Mr. Sadr has moved from a mosque in Kufa, where he was holed up Monday, to his main office in Najaf. Hundreds of militiamen were protecting the office. On Tuesday night, military flares could be seen burning over the area. ...

The trouble began a little more than a week ago, when the American authorities shut down Mr. Sadr's newspaper, Al Hawza, after they accused it of printing lies that incited violence.

That started a cycle of protests that grew larger and more unruly until they culminated in all-out street battles on Sunday.

Mr. Sadr, the son of a revered Shiite cleric who was assassinated in 1999, has drawn support from the masses of Shiites who welcomed the Mr. Hussein's overthrow but grew disillusioned with the American occupation. Posters of the cleric and his father are everywhere, and Mr. Sadr's bearded visage has now become the face of the resistance.

"He is expressing what we all feel," said Sabah al-Rubaidi, a 62-year-old engineer in Baghdad. "We tried to be patient. We did not fight the occupation like the Sunnis right away. But now there is no difference. The war is everywhere, north, east, south and west."
The New York Times...
 

12:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Matt Stoller's Take On The "Kos" Infamy, Required Reading

Matt Stoller, of The Blogging of the President: 2004, examines the "Kos" infamy in a thoughtful, objective, lengthy fashion that is important not as a defense of the idiocy the man wrote--it isn't, there is none--but as an analysis of political blogging at this stage of its infancy. After all, this is the first presidential election in the life of the blogosphere. If you're serious about political blogging as more than a hobby, it should be considered as required reading; BopNews.Com:
The Daily Kos, a moderate blog where the center left eats its partisan red meat and draws substantial fundraising power, is run by Zuniga, a veteran of the military and Democratic activist. Markos has become the standard-bearer for online liberal politics; he runs the liberal community from which sprang the Dean and draft Clark campaigns. For the last two and a half years, Zuniga has probably written two to three thousand words a day. He has at this point channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates, and helped create a public space where grassroots activists could meet and organize. He is as close as you get to the big time in the blog community, and he has a transparent track record of angry but moderate statements (and corrections, when necessary).
Continue reading at BopNews.Com
  

11:35 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Long Hard Truth...

Follow The Peking Duck and click the link to Josh Marshall for a strong dose of reality of what is happening in Iraq. It will not cheer you up, but it is better than living with false hope; and real solutions usually follow hard truths.
From the Peking Duck:

... There seems to have been a major shift over just the past few days. A tipping point? I don't know, but Josh Marshall, who is usually pretty level-headed and able to keep his emotions out of his posts today sounds downright grim.
 

8:59 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Could Zhoa Ziyang's Passing Spark a Repeat of Hu Yaobang's

Mr. Zhao's seriously ill health must be occasioning both grave retrospective and prognosticative thinking at the very top of the Chinese central government--if not an overwhelming sense of deja vu for several leaders in particular. Eerily enough, I proffer this while I am reading the English edition of THE TIANANMEN PAPERS, Compiled by Zhang Liang, PublicAffairs, NY, 2001, having been able to buy a copy on my recent trip back to the States.

The book is every bit as fascinating, instructive and troubling as I had been led to believe it would be. The Chinese language edition is doubly so I am told, but then I can't read Chinese. While living "in interesting times" is the too often schizoid but granted wish of writers and thinkers, let us hope history does not repeat itself almost exactly 15 years later.
BEIJING, April 5 -- Zhao Ziyang, a former Communist Party chief who became a potent symbol of thwarted political reform after he was purged during the crackdown on dissent in 1989, is critically ill and is being kept alive by a respirator at his home in Beijing, people close to Mr. Zhao's family said Monday.

Though Mr. Zhao has long been under house arrest and out of public view, his death could pose a challenge to China's leadership.

Analysts say advocates of faster political change inside and outside the Communist Party may view his passing as an opportunity to highlight demands for more open government and for a reassessment of the army's violent suppression of student-led protests in 1989.

In a nation where deaths of respected leaders and anniversaries of official atrocities have become occasions for public displays of dissent, Chinese leaders now potentially face a confluence of bad omens.

Officials have already been trying to squelch demands that they revise their own account of what happened in Beijing on June 3 and 4, 1989, as the 15th anniversary of the incident approaches.

They now face the possibility that Mr. Zhao, who was removed from power after taking a soft line on the 1989 protests, could die and provide an additional impetus to those seeking redress for the crackdown, which killed hundreds around Beijing.

Mr. Zhao, 84, suffering from lung and heart problems, had a serious case of pneumonia in late February and early March and was considered close to death at that time, according to a person who maintains contact with the former leader's children. Doctors told his family that they felt that his condition was potentially fatal, this person said. ...

Mr. Zhao was treated in a Beijing hospital and returned home when his condition stabilized, those people said. He now uses a respirator to breathe and his condition remains critical, they said.

Underscoring the sensitivity of the matter, doctors who work closely with China's top leaders, including Hu Jintao, the president and Communist Party chief, and Jiang Zemin, the former party chief who remains China's top military official, visited Mr. Zhao in the hospital and have kept close tabs on his condition, the individuals said.
The New York Times...
  

2:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The House of Bush: The Family That Lies and Schemes Together

Every dynastic restoration has at least one ascendant black prince, a doddering, dethroned king, a cunning would-be minister of state, and an avaricious fool. I'll let you cast the roles in the dastardly House of Bush; the following short piece from Mother Jones offers some clues:
No Bush Left Behind

Now that Jenna and Barbara can legally drink, Neil Bush has resumed his mantle as the Bush most likely to embarrass the White House. Neil, whose disastrous directorship of the Silverado S&L cost American taxpayers $1 billion during his father's administration, admitted during recent divorce proceedings not only to bizarre encounters with Thai prostitutes, but also to cashing in on his family name with lucrative "consulting" contracts.

In August 2002, Bush inked a $2 million contract to provide "expertized advices" to a semiconductor firm owned by the son of Jiang Zemin. Bush admitted in court he had no experience in the industry but offered, "I've been working in Asia quite a long time." More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.'s ex-campaign manager to "take advantage of business opportunities" in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week.

This isn't the first time Bush has been caught up in the pay-to-play world of corporate cronyism. In December 2002, Bush used a trip to Saudi Arabia—where his family has many friends—to raise venture capital for his educational-software company, Ignite! The firm's products, which help prepare kids for state assessment tests, are already being used in Governor Jeb's Florida.

To be fair, being a Bush brother without a public office can't be easy. As Neil Bush once asked his critics, "What am I supposed to do—nothing in life?"
MotherJones.com
  

12:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Senator Kennedy Beating Up On Dubya Isn't A Fair Fight

Ted Kennedy is in fine fighting form:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, on Monday launched a withering election-year attack on President Bush's domestic agenda and again blasted him over his handling of Iraq.

"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," Kennedy declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

Kennedy's speech drew a stern rebuke from the Senate majority whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who took to the Senate floor to denounce Kennedy's remarks as "vicious" and "outrageous."

Kennedy, the Senate's most pre-eminent liberal voice, repeated earlier assertions that Bush led the United States into the Iraq war on false pretenses and that the continuing conflict there has distracted the nation's attention away from what Kennedy sees as the real war on terrorism.

"President Bush gave al Qaeda two years ... to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan," Kennedy said, talking about the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden. "As the terrorist bombings in Madrid and other reports now indicate, al Qaeda has used that time to plant terrorist cells in countries throughout the world, and establish ties with terrorist groups in many different lands."
CNN
  

11:03 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Taking It For The Team...

The Taiwanese equivalent to falling on your sword, while awaiting the results of Dr. Henry Lee's forensics investigation:
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan Interior Minister Yu Cheng-hsien has resigned in the wake of an assassination attempt on the island's president, Chen Shui-bian, just over two weeks ago.

Police Chief Chang Shih-liang has also offered his resignation, but Premier Yu Shyi-kun will hold it until a replacement is chosen, according to a spokesman.

Cheng and Chang offered their resignations on Monday.

President Chen and Vice President Annette Lu were shot while campaigning in an open car in southern Taiwan on March 19th.

The interior ministry is responsible for domestic security.

The premier's spokesman told CNN Monday that the minister had decided to "take political responsibility for the assassination attempt on the president." ...

Chen's rival in the presidential race, Lien Chan of the Nationalist Party, has insinuated the shooting might have been staged by the president to win sympathy votes.

Meanwhile, opposition supporters hurled stones and water bottles on Sunday when some 1,000 riot police tried to end a demonstration demanding a recount of the razor-thin election victory.

At least seven people were injured when scuffling broke out as police tried to disperse around 100 protesters who had camped outside the Presidential Office overnight, television news reports said.

In a speech at Saturday's protest, Lien demanded a special investigative commission be set up to find out the truth about the shooting.

"Why not address the people's demands? What is it you cannot say?" The Associated Press reports Lien saying.
CNN.com
  

10:46 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From Dubya's Mouth...

It's time for a few more Bushisms as collected by Jacob Weisberg:
"We ought to make the pie higher." --South Carolina Republican debate; February 15, 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." --La Crosse, Wisconsin; October 18, 2000

"It's going to require numerous IRA agents." --On Al Gore's tax plan; Greensboro, North Carolina; October 10, 2000

"When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were...it was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." --Iowa Western Community College; January 21, 2000
  

2:10 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, April 05, 2004

Screw Kos

It's pretty hard to get much to the "left" of me politically; I mean, there's not a lot of room there to stand. That is, except in military matters once United States armed forces are engaged in any combat zone. While I might disagree strongly on why, where and when American men and women should be militarily engaged before the fact, once they are there each and everyone of them deserves and gets my whole-hearted support. And that includes civilians in support roles to the military--my father was a civilian writer and scientist assigned to the Air Force for almost 30 years.

I cut my radical teeth in the civil rights and free speech movements of the 60's. The anti-Vietnam war movement was extremely uncomfortable and problematical for me. Politically, I thought we were backing a corrupt regime in a civil-war where I believed the nationalist movement of the north had a better case to be made for legitimacy after beating both the Japanese and the French in a struggle to throw off the yoke of imperialism. However, I could not actively protest the war when American men and women were engaged in combat. When I was drafted in 1968, I kissed a wife and baby son goodbye and got on the bus thinking I would be in Vietnam within a few short months--a collapsed left lung cut that short and I was a civilian again even before basic training.

I wrote against the politics of the war; I argued privately against our continued involvement. But I could never publicly protest against the men and women fighting and dying in that hellish war; they made the only honorable choice between two evils, fighting, killing and dying in the name of your country even when home and hearth aren't on the line, or cutting and running from your obligation and letting some other citizen do the job in your stead.

You ask why I am laying out this old and certainly not unique story? Because a fellow "liberal" blogger--a blogger with whom I am allied in the "Blog for Kerry" Feedster aggregator--has crossed the line shamefully and this is the only way I know how to segue into and explain my position for stating how far he has gone in obliterating the line of civil political debate.

By now you have probably read about "Kos" and what he recently wrote regarding the four American contractors murdered and defiled in Fallujah, Iraq, last week in his Daily Kos blog--an event which my blogging of has me embroiled, believe it or not, in a cyber slugfest with Chinese journalism students in America. In the off-chance that you haven't come across the "Kos" infamy, I want to point you toward a weblog and a blogger with whom I probably wouldn't agree on much if anything politically, but I certainly agree with his view of what Kos wrote, and I certainly agree with his very novel, and very American way of dealing with Mr. Kos, to wit:
Fried Man

The Left, Kos, and sides

As I mentioned before, I really believe that Kos wants us to fail in Iraq.
It's worth looking at the contrast with another of the top Democratic bloggers, Kevin Drum.
There is a whole lot more there that you should know about and perhaps get involved in, at the: Fried Man
  

7:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, April 04, 2004

Shame On ME! Say Many Chinese...

It seems that I've stirred up a hornet's nest at The LongBow Papers. In a post not far below this one, China Daily, Shame On You!, I took great umbrage at four extremely graphic images of the four civilians murdered, mutilated, dismembered, and hung in Fallujah, Iraq, which China Daily chose to put on the front page of Thursday's English language print edition (not on their website.) From the hate e-mail that has been pouring in, one would think I had called for the desecration of Mao's tomb. Also, strangely enough, my traffic went out of sight, and a great proportion of it was from servers at American universities.

What I thought was a minor post that might be of marginal interest to a few expat readers in the Living In China community, has instead struck a nerve that I would not have imagined possible for me and this weblog. As surely my regular readers know, and a number of my critics tell me none too politely, I am most often considered far too supportive of the Chinese central government and its state-owned press, for which I am a frequent contributor as an English language television news and world events commentator. But that is old news and does not need restating here.

What I believe is news, and worth thought and discussion, is the reaction the post generated. Since blogging as a form of journalism, or at least as a medium for the dissemination of ideas, is currently being much discussed, I believe it is instructive if we examine this incident just a bit. What I find particularly of interest, is how one post can get picked up by some referrer--in this case it appears most likely to be a news group or forum popular with American university journalism departments--and the readers click through but only read the post in question without scoping out the environs any further before firing off an angry e-mail.

In regular journalism, particularly print journalism, a news story or article will almost always include some repetitive or background material under the safe assumption that the reader is coming upon the subject for the first time. Should bloggers do the same? Include a "catch up" paragraph or sentence with every post? I do not know. To at least get a perspective for further thought, I am going to post a sampling of the e-mails that the China Daily, Shame On You! piece brought out of the cyber woodwork, without full names or e-mail addresses, ranging from moderate to nasty in sequential order:
Prof. Bosco,
I'll make this real short. I read your comments condemning the China Daily in your personal Weblog today and I don't think your outraged response is well justified, at least not from my Chinese point of view. Considering the fact that you used to be a journalist, I had expected you to base your criticism on a more or less rational reasoning process, rather than the arbitrary, instant conclusion you drew.

Chinese journalists may have rather a problematic set of values compared with those of US journalists, but I don't see why there is a direct link between printing those photos and the "transparently anti-American sentiment" you accuse them of. Without discussing the merits of the war itself, those photos may well provoke negative feelings towards the perpetrators for the very graphic cruelty of their deeds, as they would further instigate anti-American sentiments among China Daily's readers.

The few years I've been studying in the United States I've seen in mainstream US media far more gruesome depiction of crimes against humanity in other countries. Among other things I am thinking of the charred and painted faces of Sadam's sons and grandson. Maybe you could argue that they belong to a different level of humanity, but to me, an non-interested outside observer, killing is killing, a crime, or "horrors that human beings all too often inflict upon human flesh" as you so eloquently put it.

I am not suggesting that you consider US lives more valuable than those of anybody else's. Neither am I denying that there exists deeply rooted anti-American sentiments in China as in many other parts of world. I am just saying that the debate in US media about what photos to show of the attack does not necessarily apply to the China Daily, and that China Daily isn't necessarily preaching a Chinese jihad against America by putting those pictures on their front page.

=====
Cheers,

Wang XXXX
Graduate School of Journalism
UC Berkeley

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Joseph,
I read your article about China Daily. Though I do not necessarily agree with how the[y] presented the photos, I do not agree with your opinions either. I must remind you that considering 1 in 5 person in the world are Chinese, what do you think none of the terrorists were/are/will from China or has any association with Chinese? China is probably one of the safest countries around the world for Americans. American should be grateful for China that she is trying her best to build a constructive partnership with USA. Imagine if China join the Islamic world. USA did a lot of shameless things to Chinese. Just look at this one: U.S. granted immunity from japanese germ and chemical war criminals, who had used thousands of human as experiment materials, exchange for their data and helped covering up the human experiment - An act utterly ignoring international laws and against Humanity.

I challenge you to read the following two books: Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-up. For brief information on the issues, please go to: http://www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html#unit731

Japs try to hide their shits in their ass, but can they hide the smell? Unfortunately American played a dirty role in the shameless cover-ups. Please remember: the ghosts of Japanese militarism are haunting in Japan. As the only country who nuked japs, what will USA face if Japanese want to revenge when USA is not strong enough to keep Japanese Militarism in the cage? Please give China some patience, time and probably some applauses. As one of the major peaceful power in the history, China will be an important factor to maintain the prosperity of the world. It is not easy to find a rise of major power who are as peaceful as China today. Think about the rise of UK, Russia, Japan, even USA. Probably my views are kinda one-sided. But I believe they deserve your rational consideration.Wish you a great day in China.

vista XXXXX

Dear Joseph,
Sorry for so many typos because I wrote in hurry. Another issue I challenge you to learn is the exclusion of Chinese in the past 150 years. Even today, USA treats Chinese especially those from Mainland in humiliating ways.

Put your feet in Chinese shoes, you will probably understand how some Chinese feel torwards USA. There is still a lot to learn from the cllapose of Roman Empire.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why Shame on you.

Why are you mad about China Daily? I have seem much more
outrageous description of humanity crimes in other countries
from mainstream American media.

Tao xxxx

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

America, Shame On You!

You invade other's country for oil. Now the dead is just for justice.
Nothing related to china daily. If you don't want to work in china, go out!
China Daily is just publish the news.

Shame on you America!

XXXXXX He

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A raper went to other people's house without
authorization and tries to rape a woman. Unfortuntely
he gets killed. Looks you strongly supportly the raper.
Let's see if the raper goes to your home. what's your feeling.
Shame on you and brainless comments
A Guest

XX Liu

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Criminy! Supporting rapists am I? Thank goodness the authorities don't see it the same way. The State-owned media had me live on CCTV International last night doing commentary for the ceremony of the expansion of NATO. Westerners, particularly western journalists, aren't often given the opportunity to apear on live television broadcasts in China.

All of this has been enlightening--I just don't know of what!
  

3:09 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Some Hard Truths...

...from an excellent analysis of the situation in Iraq:
Ambush: The Long Shadow of a Mob

BAGHDAD -- For any Westerner who knew Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the most perplexing aspect of the year since the Iraqi dictator was toppled has been comprehending how so many in this nation of 25 million moved from the impassioned moment of their liberation to a rapid and embittered discounting of the American role in ridding them of the hated tyrant.

Almost 12 months from the day when Iraqis tossed flowers at American tank crews rolling into Baghdad, much has been corrected. What looting destroyed, American money has largely restored, and much larger flows of reconstruction aid are beginning. ...

And now, in Falluja, the anniversary has been marked by ambush followed by mutilation of the dead - acts of such horror, directed against Americans, that the mind struggles to cope with the shock. America's tribunes in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III and the top generals, reacted with outrage, speaking of barbarity and a violation of the basic rules of civilization, and they vowed retribution.

The readiest explanation, least disturbing to the hopes of Americans here, is to dismiss the killings of the four Americans and the burning, mutilation and hanging of the bodies as an eruption of evil, beyond logic. To Mr. Bremer, the frenzied crowds were "cowards and ghouls." To American generals, they were "people who want to turn Iraq back, to an era of mass graves, of rape rooms and torture chambers and chemical attacks," as the American command's chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said.

But even if all this is true, the sense that lingers is that Falluja marked a watershed in the effort to transplant to the Arab world a facsimile of American society, with democratic norms and institutionalized tolerance. After Falluja, fewer Westerners here than ever, outside the American military and civilian establishment, could still believe that the American vision is likely to triumph over an insurgency that has featured recurrent acts of inhumanity, including suicide bombings that have killed more than 1,000 Iraqis.
There is much more in The New York Times...
  

3:18 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Let's Make Enemies"

Below are three paragraphs excerpted from an article I really want you to read; you need to read it. Trust me, please.
While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of thirty Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in Iraq's new "free market." It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both of his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "You can't imagine how much relief we felt," he says.
The Nation
 

1:36 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Which Dummy Will Speak? Does It Matter?

I give you Ms. Dowd, but please return her posthaste, she is a national treasure:
Charlie McCarthy Hearings

Following is the text of a letter sent yesterday to Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton of the Sept. 11 commission from Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush.

While we continue to hold to the principles underlying the Constitutional separation of powers, that the appropriate and patriotic action for the Commission is to shut down and stop pestering us, the President is prepared, in the interest of comity and popularity, to testify, subject to the conditions set forth below.

The President at all times, even on trips to the men's room, will be accompanied by the Vice President.

The Commission must agree in writing that it will not pose any questions directly to the President. Mr. Bush's statements will be restricted to asides on Dick Cheney's brushoffs, as in "Just like he said," "Roger that" and "Ditto."

Another necessary condition, in keeping with the tenets of executive privilege: Mr. Cheney will require that the Commission observe the rules of his favorite show from the Eisenhower Administration, "What's My Line?" The panelists, in the manner of Dorothy Kilgallen and Bennett Cerf, must try to guess what the President and Vice President didn't know and when they didn't know it through questions that elicit a "yes" or "no."

After 10 "no" answers, the panel will not be allowed to question Mr. Cheney or anyone else in the Administration ever again. In the mystery-guest round, Richard Ben-Veniste, Bob Kerrey and other Democrats on the Commission will be blindfolded.

(Or Mr. Cheney is willing to follow the precedent of Garry Moore and Bess Meyerson, using "I've Got A Secret" rules: The Vice President will whisper a secret about the Administration's inadequate response to terrorism in the President's ear and each panelist will have 30 seconds to question Mr. Cheney in an attempt to guess the secret, which he will not reveal even if they guess right.)

As an additional accommodation, the President and Vice President have now agreed to take a "pinkie oath," looping little fingers with each other, while reserving the right to cross the index and middle fingers of their remaining hands and hide them behind their backs.

We must deny your request that Mr. Cheney bring along a PowerPoint presentation depicting who was in and out of the loop, in accordance with separation-of-PowerPoint principles. The Vice President has decreed that the loop of influence is under the cone of silence.

The White House is taking the extraordinary step of bowing to public opinion — even though Mr. Cheney states that he doesn't give two hoots about public opinion. Therefore, the Vice President will only entertain questions about negligence in fighting terrorism concerning the critical period between Jan. 21, 1993, and Jan. 20, 2001. As President Bush stated on Tuesday, March 30, the Commission must gain "a complete picture of the months and years before Sept. 11."

The Vice President will not address any queries about why no one reacted to George Tenet's daily "hair on fire" alarms to the President about a coming Al Qaeda attack; or why the President was so consumed with chopping and burning cedar on his Crawford ranch that he ignored the warning in an Aug. 6, 2001, briefing that Al Qaeda might try to hijack aircraft; or why the President asked for a plan to combat Al Qaeda in May and then never followed up while Richard Clarke's aggressive plan was suffocated by second-raters; or why the President was never briefed by his counterterrorism chief on anything but cybersecurity until Sept. 11; or why the Administration-in-amber made so many cold war assumptions, such as thinking that terrorists had to be sponsored by a state even as terrorists had taken over a state; or why the President went along with the Vice President and the neocons to fool the American public into believing that Saddam had a hand in the 9/11 attacks; or why the Administration chose to undercut the war on terrorism and inflame the Arab world by attacking Iraq, without a plan to protect our perilously overextended forces or to exit with a realistic hope that a democracy will be left behind.

The Commission must not, under any circumstances, ask the Vice President why American soldiers and civilians in Iraq are being greeted with barbarous infernos rather than flowery bouquets.

Finally, we request that when the President finishes with this painful teeth-pulling visit, the Commission shall offer him a lollipop.
The New York Times
  

12:51 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




New Market For Freelance Writers In China

Always looking for another place to pitch a story? Then you're a genuine freelance writer. This may be good news; another market for writers is seldom bad news.
English-language magazine launched for expats in China

BEIJING -- A Chinese publisher announced Friday the launch of a nationwide English-language magazine to help China's growing expatriate population understand the country where they live.

The China Intercontinental Press, publisher of English-language magazines in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, obtained a publication license this month to launch its first formal issue of That's China, magazine administrator William Wang said. (Kyodo News)
Japan Today
 

12:47 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, April 01, 2004

China Daily, Shame On You!

I do not know if many of you have ready access to the English language print edition of China Daily; we do, it is delivered to our door everyday, courtesy of the Chinese Foreign Ministry for whom we work. It is all but impossible for me to express the rage and vile bitterness I feel as I type these words, and this is some hours after that rage began when I first saw the giant full-color photographs of the civilian contractors' charred bodies being mutilated, dragged and then hung from a bridge across the Euphrates River in Falluja, Iraq, on the front page of China Daily. On the front page! Extra large, in fact, the four-photo montage took up about a quarter of the front page. In one of the photos, we see two Iraqis gleefully savaging one charred body with shovels!

I have seen far more than my share of the horrors that human beings all too often inflict upon human flesh; it came with the territory of being a journalist with a specialty in murder. I have learned to be able to eat my lunch while examining crime-scene and autopsy photos of murder victims. But that was my choice and it was my job.

I cannot imagine what possessed the management of the state-owned press when they made the decision to put such horrific photographs on their front page. I do know how much I at this moment despise them for it. Many of you know that I have a much more tolerant attitude towards the Chinese central government I work for as a professor of media at the China Foreign Affairs University than perhaps most Americans--but not today. I do not know how I will feel tomorrow, or next month. But today, I feel only revulsion and shame for those responsible for displaying such transparently anti-American sentiment on the front page of their flagship newspaper. Goddamn them for it. Goddamn them!
Iraqis drag 4 US bodies through streets

In a scene reminiscent of Somalia, frenzied crowds dragged the burned, mutilated bodies of four American contractors through the streets of a town west of Baghdad on Wednesday and strung two of them up from a bridge after rebels ambushed their SUVs.
China Daily
  

8:42 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Will Definitely Get The Truth In The Chen Shooting Now

Dr. Henry Lee, the world's foremost forensic scientist, is leading the forensic team working the Chen Shui-bian shooting. Henry, from whom I learned the forensics of the murder business, is a prominent figure in two of my books, and we have worked other cases that I did not publish. Other than my long deceased father, Henry is the greatest mind and human being I've had the great honor of knowing in a career full of meeting and working with a number of the so-called great minds of the late 20th Century. He is a very dear friend; I miss him. We were supposed to get together this past Spring Festival and winter break because two of the cases we worked together are featured in a new Court TV series chronicling Henry's greatest cases, but bad weather in New Orleans and last minute bad scheduling all around prevented it.

One thing is for sure, with Henry working the case, we will learn the truth about the assassination attempt. Cyril Wecht, the pathologist Henry chose to be a part of the team, I also know rather well, although we have been on opposite sides of a few cases and he can get a bit far afield in his theories at times, but with Henry in charge, Cyril minds his P's & Q's. I suppose Michael Baden, the best pathologist in the business, with whom Henry most often collaborates, and a real favorite of mine, must be tied up on another case. Golly, it's funny, everytime I think I'm out of the crime business, Henry gets a really good case and I'm soon packing a bag, catching a plane and then neck deep in the biz again. But not this time. I am absotively, posilutely retired from the true crime beat. I swear it! Besides, I don't do belly-grazing-wounds.
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Though 8,000 miles from Taiwan, Connecticut is about to become the Western Hemisphere headquarters for the investigation into the controversial election-eve shootings of Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president this month.

Renowned Connecticut forensic scientist Henry C. Lee and state police Maj. Timothy M. Palmbach, who supervises the state police forensic laboratory, are among four forensic experts who will review evidence related to the incident.

Palmbach left Taiwan Tuesday to return to Connecticut with photographs of the shooting scene and Chen's wounds, videotapes, and shell casings and bullets from homemade ammunition, among other evidence.

"Some of the evidence, by its very nature, is going to make this task much more complicated," Palmbach said at a press conference Tuesday, before boarding a plane home. "The ammunition used in this case is not commercially manufactured. It is of the homegrown variety. ... But we do conclusively agree that President Chen was indeed shot." ...

Lee, who was at a seminar in New Zealand Tuesday and then en route to Tasmania, could not be reached for comment. He is expected to review the physical evidence and photographs brought back by Palmbach early next month, then fly to Taiwan for further investigation. Before coming to the United States in 1965, Lee was a captain on the Taiwan police force and has made numerous trips back.

Palmbach stressed Tuesday that their final report could be some time coming.

"This is still a preliminary investigation. There is further evidence we would like to see and that we hope will be made available to us," Palmbach said.

"Forensic science many times cannot provide all the answers that you might be seeking in an investigation," Palmbach added. "As to why and who and from what [circumstances] did this [assassination attempt] develop, that cannot and will not be answered by the physical evidence."

Investigators already have determined the bullets were made by hand and may have been fired from a replica gun converted to become a working model. It is illegal to sell or possess firearms in Taiwan.

Lee, who directed Connecticut's forensic lab for more than two decades, is "retired" now but does a great deal of forensic consulting work.

Lee hand-picked the team for the Taiwan investigation. It includes noted Pittsburgh pathologist Cyril H. Wecht, who investigated President Kennedy's assassination, Chandra Levy's killing, and the fire at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, to name just a few of his high-profile cases.

Wecht examined the 4½-inch gash under Chen's navel and concluded it was "consistent with a gunshot wound."

"There is no question at all in our minds that the wound on President Chen's abdomen is what we would call a grazing type gunshot wound," Wecht said Tuesday, after the team's initial three-day investigation.
The Hartford Courant
  

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