[ As DemocracyNow! (1 Oct. 2004) reports: Bush Campaign Helped Write Allawi Speech The Washington Post is reporting that the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush’s reelection campaign were “heavily involved” in drafting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s speech before the U.S. Congress last week. Unnamed administration officials told the Post that Dan Senor sent Allawi recommended phrases and helped him rehearse the speech. Senor is the former spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the official U.S. occupation of Iraq. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the British Foreign Service also reportedly helped Allawi with the text […]
Monthly Archives: September 2004
91 posts
9 Sept. 2004 | East Hampton Star by E.L. Doctorow I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. But this president does not know what […]
by Quentin Pratt Bill O’Reilly repeatedly insulted the Daily Show’s audience during an interview with John Stewart, referring to them as “stoned slackers” several times during the interview. This prompted some research which found the following: Viewers of Jon Stewart’s show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch “The O’Reilly Factor,” according to Nielsen Media Research. “Daily Show” viewers are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of college education, while O’Reilly’s audience is only 24 percent more likely to have that much schooling. On top […]
29 September 2004 | The Independent Pregnant chads, vanishing voters… the election fiasco of 2000 made the Sunshine State a laughing stock. More importantly, it put George Bush in the White House. You’d think they’d want to get it right this time. But no, as Andrew Gumbel discovers, the democratic process is more flawed than ever …
[ Thanks to Bob Lee for spotting this piece. –BL ] Keywords: depleted uranium September 29, 2004 | New York Daily News In early September 2003, Army National Guard Spec. Gerard Darren Matthew was sent home from Iraq, stricken by a sudden illness. One side of Matthew’s face would swell up each morning. He had constant migraine headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and a burning sensation whenever he urinated. The Army transferred him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for further tests, but doctors there could not explain what was wrong. Shortly after his return, his wife, Janice, became pregnant. […]
26 Sept 2004 | Toronto Star by SANDRO CONTENTA LANDSTUHL, Germany?At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives. They’re the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq. They’re the maimed and the scarred that hospital staff believe are largely invisible to an American public ignorant of their suffering. “They have no idea what’s going on here, none whatsoever,” says Col. […]
[ So it is not only Dick Cheney who “traded with the enemy”! From the piece: the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, [Prescott Bush] worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty. Thanks to Matt Miller […]
27 Sept. 2004 | Misleader.org President Bush and his allies have insisted that violence in Iraq is limited to a few isolated pockets of resistance. President Bush said last Wednesday that there are a “handful of people who are willing to kill in order to stop the process.”1 The next day, Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told reporters at a press conference in the Rose Garden “there is nothing, no problem, except on a small pocket in Fallujah.”2 Information in a secret report compiled for the administration suggests that Bush and Allawi are misleading the public about the scope […]
28 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! The Guardian of London is reporting that links have been discovered between senior U.S. military officials and a failed coup plot in the oil-rich African nation of Equatorial Guinea. The Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of Defense for African affairs reportedly met twice with a British man who has been accused of being one of the coup organizers. The coup has received considerable attention in Britain because former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s son Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested for helping to fund the failed plot. The president of Equatorial Guinea has accused the US of backing […]
28 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! The New York Times is reporting that the CIA’s National Intelligence Council warned President Bush in two classified reports in January 2003 that an invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict. The existence of these two classified reports had not been previously disclosed and offer new proof that the President was warned before the invasion that the Iraq invasion could lead to destabilize the region. The report was written by the same group that wrote the recent classified National […]
28 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! Time Magazine has revealed that the White House had developed a secret plan where it would covertly use the CIA to help pro-U.S. candidates win in the upcoming Iraqi election. The plan was reportedly discarded after protests from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Time reports House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to voice her opposition. Some officials within the Bush administration have defended the plan saying it is needed to counter outside influence from other countries including Iran. This comes as the Los Angeles Times is reporting that in Afghanistan numerous […]
28 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! More than one third of the retired soldiers being reactivated for duty in Iraq are refusing to go. The Army is threatening to charge some of the former soldiers with desertion. This according to a report in USA Today. The Army has called up about 1600 former soldiers as part of what is known as the Individual Ready Reserve. More than 600 have not shown up; many have requested exemptions for health and personal reasons. 14 of these soldiers have already been declared AWOL. Senator John Kerry has accused President Bush of instituting a backdoor […]
27 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! CBS News has taken the unusual step of publicly admitting that it has killed a major story because the network feels it would be ?inappropriate” to air it before the presidential election. The story is the result of a major six-month investigation into how the Bush administration obtained forged documents that made it appear Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African nation Niger. The uranium claim was cited by President Bush during his 2002 State of the Union as a reason to go to attack Iraq.
22 Sept. 2004 | Daily Kos . com Dan Rather, CBS News Anchor 1. given documents he thought were true 2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts 3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case 4. when confronted with the facts, apologized and launched an investigation 5. number of Americans dead: 0 6. should be fired as CBS News Anchor George W. Bush, President of the United States 1. given documents he thought were true 2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts 3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case […]
2004 | NewsGateway [ click here for the video (Windows Media format) ] Stan Goff comments: “The ‘tell’ is in the audio. When the pilot asks permission to fire, he reports a large number of people? not armed people. People. And permission is granted instantly. This is an indication that the mission guidance is to shoot anyone who is in the street. This is a clear war crime, and one that begins with the commander?s stated intent in the operations order. The pilot?s exclamation of satisfaction, ‘Aw dude!’, at the end just underlines how this casual sadism comes to dominate the psyches […]
[ Unfortunately, the Bush campaign might be right that, statistically, its target voter group — under-educated fundamentalists — can be manipulated by such kooky, deceptive scare tactics. –BL ] September 24, 2004 | New York Times by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK The Republican Party acknowledged yesterday sending mass mailings to residents of two states warning that “liberals” seek to ban the Bible. It said the mailings were part of its effort to mobilize religious voters for President Bush.
25 September 2004 | World Socialist Web Site by Bill Van Auken Nature has dealt a cruel blow to the people of Haiti, deepening the intense suffering and oppression that centuries of imperialist domination have inflicted upon the Caribbean nation’s impoverished population. Tropical Storm Jeanne has buried Gonaives, the birthplace of Haiti’s struggle to cast off slavery and colonialism 200 years ago, in a sea of mud. Over 1,700 bodies have been recovered and dumped in mass graves. Thousands more people in the city as well as in cut-off rural areas are presumed dead. Tens of thousands have been left […]
[ As reconstruction monies are diverted to “security” … –BL ] September 25, 2004 | New York Times by JAMES GLANZ BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 24 – A virulent form of hepatitis that is especially lethal for pregnant women has broken out in two of Iraq’s most troubled districts, Iraqi Health Ministry officials said in interviews here this week, and they warned that a collapse of water and sewage systems in the continuing violence in the country is probably at the root of the outbreak. The disease, called hepatitis E, is caused by a virus that is often spread by sewage-contaminated drinking […]
22 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! In others from the United Nations, the Scotsman newspaper is reporting the Bush administration is facing condemnation for failing to join more than 100 countries as part of a new campaign to raise an extra $50 billion annually to combat global hunger. The U.S. rejected proposals to raise money to fight global hunger that included a global tax on financial transactions and a tax on the sale of heavy arms. Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva responded to the US decision by saying, “How many more times will it be necessary to repeat that […]
Anglican Network Urges Sanctions on Israel: Report 24 Sept. 2004 | IslamOnline.net London — Inspired by an earlier successful campaign against apartheid in South Africa, a leading international Anglican group has asked sanctions on Israel and a boycott of businesses there to protest the occupation of Palestinian lands, a leading British newspaper reported Friday, September 24. The call by the influential Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN) comes amid growing concern in Israel at rising support among churches, universities and trade unions in the west for a divestment campaign modelled on the popular boycott of apartheid South Africa, The Guardian […]
24 Sept. 2004 | DemocracyNow! Rumsfeld: Up to 25% Of Iraq May Not Vote in Election [The nonelected prime minister of Iraq, Ayad] Allawi, vowed the Iraqi elections scheduled for January would go ahead as planned. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday revealed that between 20 to 25 percent of the country may not take part in the elections because of continued violence. Rumsfeld admitted it would be “an election that’s not quite perfect.” Pentagon Plans 15,000 More Troops For Iraq The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Pentagon has plans to send 15,000 more troops to Iraq ahead of […]
Sep. 23, 2004 | OneWorld US by Jim Lobe WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Bush administration has failed to realize the hopes and dreams of women and girls in much of post-Taliban Afghanistan, according to several human and women’s rights groups who warned Wednesday that the time to redress the situation is fast running out. Washington has largely failed so far to take women’s roles into account in relief and reconstruction projects, to provide remotely adequate funding for women’s groups, and above all, to secure most of the country against the violence and misrule of warlords and armed groups, according to […]
According to Michael Moore, most Americans are much more progressive than we know, perhaps more than they themselves know. If Mike is right, it would be worth sending any friends that you suspect might be unaware of how anti-Bush they really are to some of the vote matching sites on the net. The Christian Science Monitor’s Election 2004 Quiz The VotingCatholic.org Catholic Voting Project Voting Quiz The PoliticalCompass.org Political Categorization Quiz The OnTheIssues.org PresidencyMatch-2004 Quiz
September 21, 2004 | The Guardian by Neil Clark ‘Wars, conflict – it’s all business,” sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is already well under way in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another “liberation” mission.
by Bob Nichols Project Censored Award Winner Oklahoma City – Twenty three or more of the bomb makers at the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, called simply “The Plant” locally, have caught “acute hemolytic anemia.” [ see the McAlester News Capital-Democrat news stories ] All the sickened production employees worked on the 2000 Pound Penetrator Bomb (“Bunker Busters”) line. [ link ] It is also possible that they have radiation poisoning from handling, ingesting, swallowing, breathing, and being exposed to Uranium oxide, uranium, and other forms of the deadly metal in the air. There are 22,000,000 pounds of uranium stored on base according to […]
22 Sept. 2004 | Salon.com In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique — and used it against the American people. by Sam Gardiner On Thursday, Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will speak before a joint meeting of Congress, and from what he said in London on his way to the United States, it looks like Americans are going to be getting more of the strategic information operations that have been crucial to Bush’s policy on Iraq from the beginning. On Monday, Allawi […]
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 | michaelmoore.com 9/22/04 Dear Mr. Bush, I am so confused. Where exactly do you stand on the issue of Iraq? You, your Dad, Rummy, Condi, Colin, and Wolfie — you have all changed your minds so many times, I am out of breath just trying to keep up with you! Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and your cabinet have taken over the years represents your CURRENT thinking: 1983-88: WE LOVE SADDAM. On December 19, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was sent by your dad and Mr. Reagan to go and have a friendly meeting […]
[ According to the new Johns Hopkins study twenty-four countries ranked better than the United States in infant mortality rates in 2000. Out of 191 countries, the United States ranked 33rd in its death rate for children under age 5. The United States, out of 187 countries, ranked 68th in immunizing children against diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus; 89th for polio; and 84th for measles. U.S. teens ranked 18th out of 28 industrialized countries in a self-reported survey of not feeling healthy. [P]artial explanations for the United States? low rankings may be the country’s income inequity and inadequacy of the health services system. The United States […]
September 23, 2004 | Washington Post [Page A04] by Jonathan Weisman Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today.
[ Will this further endear the U.S. to the Middle East? –BL ] 21 Sept. 2004 | Haaretz by Aluf Benn The United States will sell Israel 5,000 smart bombs for $319 million, according to a report made to Congress a few weeks ago. The funding will come from the U.S. military aid to Israel, and the bombs range from airborne versions, guidance units, training bombs and detonators. The bombs are guided by satellite, in a system already in the Israel Defense Forces arsenal. The guidance unit receives a signal from a satellite, correcting the bomb’s course to the target. The […]
[ From the piece: If you want to build a bomb, you simply sign the treaties, join the IAEA, then use your entitlements to do what they were designed to prevent. –BL ]
21 September 2004 | New York Times by JAMES GLANZ BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 20 – Iraqi officials in charge of rebuilding their country’s shattered and decrepit infrastructure are warning that the Bush administration’s plan to divert $3.46 billion from water, sewage, electricity and other reconstruction projects to security could leave many people without the crucial services that generally form the backbone of a stable and functioning democracy. Under the plan, which was proposed last week and would require approval by Congress, the money would pay for training and equipping tens of thousands of additional police officers, border patrol agents and […]
[ Well put, Batch. –BL ] 18 Sept. 2004 by Nathaniel Batchelder, Oklahoma City Peace House EVERYTHING AT STAKE: People I admire most include Ralph Nader and folks committed to the Greens. Because I and they are aligned on so many issues, I pray they consider the high regard underlying my words: Elections are not ?OPINION SURVEYS? to separate the righteous from the less. Elections determine WHO will sit in the seats of power for 2, 4, or 6 years, thus WHO we get to LOBBY for all the things we believe in. The voter?s choice is ALWAYS: someone better or […]
[ From the piece: … even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead’s detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested White House involvement. –BL ] GOP Activist Made Allegations on CBS Memos: An Atlanta lawyer who helped get Clinton disbarred is the blogger who called them fakes by Peter Wallsten September 18, 2004 | Los Angeles Times WASHINGTON — It was the first public allegation that CBS News had used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush’s Air National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted on the Web within hours of airtime, citing proportional spacing […]
[ As the Guardian reports bad news for Bush in the draft report from the U.S.-appointed Iraq Survey Group (below), it also reports (17 Sept. 2004) that, according to the National Intelligence Estimate Even the best-case scenario for Iraq is a political, economic and security situation described as tenuous…. At a hearing to discuss the White House’s requests to divert more than $3bn from aid [for Iraq] to security, senators of both main parties lambasted the lack of progress on the ground. So far less than $1bn of the $18.4bn allocated has been spent…. Referring to the lack of overall […]
16 Sept. 2004 | Guardian by Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger in Washington The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly for the first time last night that the US-led war on Iraq was illegal.
16 Sept. 2004 | United Press International by Mark Benjamin WASHINGTON — Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. The Pentagon said most don’t fit the definition of casualties, but a veterans’ advocate said they should all be counted. In addition to those evacuations, 32,684 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan now out of the military sought medical attention from the Department of Veterans Affairs by July 22, according to VA reports obtained by UPI. The number of those visits to VA […]
16 Sept. 2004 | Misleader.org Vice President Cheney has regularly attacked the national security credentials of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), calling him weak on terrorism. But according to a new report, it was Cheney who actually did business with terrorist countries and traveled abroad to attack America’s counter-terrorism efforts in the 1990s. As The American Prospect documents, Cheney oversaw Halliburton’s effort to do business with Iraq and Iran in the 1990s, despite American sanctions against those countries. During his time as CEO, he oversaw Halliburton’s $73 million worth of business with Saddam Hussein.1 This, despite his claim that he had […]
September 19, 1999 | The Observer [London] by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Antony Barnett Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert programme sponsored by the Clinton Administration which continued until last year. The Observer can also disclose that the Government has spent about ?1 million in training more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in Britain since it came to power. Human rights campaigners claim a number of these are likely to have links with those complicit in the attrocities. The US programme, codenamed ‘Iron […]
September 14, 2004 | Associated Press by Ben Feller Washington — The United States is falling behind other countries in having a high-school-educated public, with the gap widening the most among young adults, a new comparison of industrialized nations shows. A total of 87 percent of U.S. adults age 25 to 34 have finished high school, which puts the country 10th behind such nations as Korea, Norway, the Czech Republic and Japan.
Speeches ignore impending U.S. debt disaster: No mention of fiscal gap estimated as high as $72 trillion September 12, 2004 | San Francisco Chronicle by Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau Washington — The first of the 77 million-strong Baby Boom generation will begin to retire in just four years. The economic consequences of this fact — as scary as they are foreseeable — are all but ignored by President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, who discuss just about everything but the biggest fiscal challenge of modern times. Yet whoever wins the 2004 race will become the first U.S. president […]
September 14, 2004 | FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) In the past week, a handful of stories have cast doubt on whether George W. Bush fulfilled his National Guard obligations 30 years ago. Reports by the Associated Press (9/7/04), Boston Globe (9/8/04) and U.S. News & World Report (9/20/04) have all raised new questions about Bush’s military service. Though each of these stories has been accompanied by significant official documentation, developments in the investigations by AP, U.S. News and the Boston Globe have been largely sidetracked by the fixation on questions about the authenticity of documents aired on CBS […]
14 Sept. 2004 | Washington Post by Mike Allen The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade. A staple of Bush’s stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator’s campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.
[ In 2001, The Onion must have been unaware of how unfunny this piece would be in retrospect! Thanks to Annie Butler for bringing it to my attention. –BL ] 18 January 2001 | The Onion WASHINGTON, DC—Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.” Above: President-elect Bush vows that “together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us.” “My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at […]
The Washington Post reports that outgoing U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who was in charge of western Iraq, dealt a blow “against top U.S. military and civilian leaders who ordered the [April] Fallujah invasion and withdrawal.” After the late March “killing [in Fallujah] of four U.S. security contractors, whose bodies were mutilated or burned by a celebrating mob[,] Conway said he resisted calls for revenge, and instead advocated targeted operations and continued engagement with municipal leaders.” The U.S.-led assault on Fallujah, he said, “served to increase ‘the level of animosity’ in the city.”
September 13, 2004 | Washington Post [Page A01] by Jackie Spinner BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 — Car bombings, mortar attacks and clashes between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi security forces killed at least 80 civilians across the country Sunday, Iraqi officials said. In Baghdad, the scene of some of the most intense fighting in months, at least 27 people were killed and 107 were wounded. A U.S. military helicopter fired into a crowd of civilians who had surrounded a burning Army armored vehicle in the capital, killing 13 people, said Saad Amili, spokesman for the Health Ministry. Among those killed was […]
14 Sept. 2004 | Misleader.org Displaying a brazen disregard for the facts, Vice President Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati Thursday that Iraq had “provided safe harbor and sanctuary…for Al Qaeda.”1 There is no evidence to support Cheney’s claim. The 9/11 Commission – which spent months exhaustively studying the issue – concluded there was no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.2 After the release of the report, Cheney claimed there was “overwhelming” evidence of a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq and that he had “probably” seen evidence that was not shared with the commission.3 After investigating the matter, the 9/11 […]
excerpted from September 12, 2004 | San Francisco Chronicle by Vicki Haddock This past week … the 1,000th U.S. casualty [in Iraq] reclaimed our attention. [That’s nearly three times as many as in the first Gulf War.]… It’s been 16 months since President Bush celebrated under a banner extolling “Mission Accomplished,” more than a year since he taunted those seeking to attack Americans inside Iraq with: “Bring ’em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” Since then, insurgents have “brought it on” with a vengeance. The casualty rate for coalition troops in Iraq now is […]
by Brendan Lalor “The enemy of America is ‘Made in America’; this is an inescapable fact,” according to Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, which has just released a series of essays entitled, 9/11 and the “War on Terrorism” as part of its E-Reports and Monograph Series online. Chossudovsky explains that The “Islamic Militant Network” (the forerunner of Osama bin Laden?s Al Qaeda), was created and sustained by the CIA. He criticizes the 9/11 Commission Report as devoid of a historical perspective. While it provides all the […]
[ This piece follows up one from last month. –BL ] September 12, 2004 | The lndependent [London] by Geoffrey Lean Up to 400,000 New Yorkers breathed in the most toxic polluting cloud ever recorded after the twin towers were brought down three years ago, but no proper effort has been made to find out how their health has been affected, according to an official report. The US government study provides the latest evidence of a systematic cover-up of the health toll from pollution after the 9/11 disaster, which doctors fear will cause more deaths than the attacks themselves. The Bush […]
Fri, Sep. 10, 2004 | Knight Ridder Keywords: Swift Boat Veterans by MEG LAUGHLIN AND TOM INFIELD WASHINGTON – Texas oilmen, led by takeover specialist T. Boone Pickens, helped fuel the anti-Kerry advertising campaign of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a report filed Friday shows. Pickens contributed $500,000 to the group, the report said. A second oilman from Dallas, Albert Huddleston, contributed $100,000. The group, whose controversial attacks on the war record of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry have attracted national attention, claims it has raised $6.7 million, but it portrays itself as a grass-roots effort thriving on small contributions. […]
[ This story follows up an earlier piece. –BL ] September 11, 2004 | Boston Globe by Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to ”sugar coat” President Bush’s service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time. But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters […]
by Brendan Lalor Scholars in the tradition of Just War Theory distinguish between jus ad bellum (justice in going to war) and jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war). The distinction facilitates nuanced moral discussion about which actions and motives of warring parties might or might not be justified, and helps prevent overgeneralization of blame and innocence. A warring party might have been justified in going to war, but not in its conduct of the war; or it might be blamed not for its conduct but for inadequate justification; and so on. To my knowledge, scholars have not […]
[ Americans remain OutFoxed! –BL ] 10 Sept 2004 | Editor and Publisher Media failure or willful public indifference to the truth? ‘E & P’ readers sound off and point fingers. by Greg Mitchell NEW YORK — The latest Newsweek poll, released this week, revealed that 42% of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein’s regime was “directly involved” in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, despite all the evidence to the contrary. That’s nearly as many as the 44% who disagree. It seems to matter little that every official federal probe, most recently the much-lauded 9/11 Commission, has […]
10 Sept 2004 | Washington Post [A24] by Bradley Graham and Josh White A senior U.S. Army general who investigated the abusive treatment of prisoners in Iraq said yesterday that the CIA may have avoided registering up to 100 detainees in U.S. military facilities, a number far higher than the eight cases that Army officials had previously cited. The disclosure by Gen. Paul J. Kern at a Senate hearing stunned lawmakers, who grew more aggravated as they heard Kern and another general involved in the probe describe their own unsuccessful efforts to obtain documents from the CIA about the unregistered […]
10 Sept 2004 | Los Angeles Times by Debora Vrana The cost of providing health insurance for American workers has climbed an average of 11.2% this year — five times as fast as wages — according to a survey released Thursday.
[ The dust has yet to settle on questions regarding the memos at issue in the story below. CBS insists its sources are “unimpeachable.” Either way, it’s worth remembering that the memos were not the whole 60 Minutes scoop. Oklahomans won a victory in connection with this story, which broke on CBS’s 60 Minutes: the affiliate in Oklahoma City, KWTV, had planned to preempt the show, but decided to air it due to an overwhelming volume of calls. Grassroots action! Thanks to Alexandra Dadlez for sending the AP piece below. In a related piece, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof […]
[ This story follows up the hype pushed by the Bush Administration and FoxNews about the possibility of attack by Iraqi drone planes! (See, e.g., the Fox story below.) It’s worth noting that the Associated Press debunked the Fox story long ago. –BL ] U.N. Inspectors Dispute U.S. Theories on Iraqi Drones Sep 7, 2004 | Reuters by Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS – U.N. inspectors said they had no evidence that Iraq had developed drones capable of delivering chemical or biological weapons, as the Bush administration contended in making its case for war, according a report obtained Tuesday.
Sep. 13, 2004 | Time by TIMOTHY J. BURGER Some democrats on the Hill claim that they are worried a second Bush Administration may prove more militarily aggressive than the first. One reason: a Democratic official tells TIME that a leading Pentagon hawk recently hinted that the doctrine of pre-emptive war could soon apply to potential new targets. During a private Aug. 19 conference call with Capitol Hill aides from both parties, sources say, senior Pentagon policy official William Luti said there are at least five or six foreign countries with traits that “no responsible leader can allow.” An outspoken […]
7 September 2004 | Aljazeera by Khalid Amayreh in Hebron Israeli rabbis say killing enemy civilians during war is ‘normal’ A group of prominent Jewish rabbis have asked the Israeli army not to flinch from killing Palestinian civilians in the context of the ongoing military campaign against armed groups resisting the occupation. In a letter to the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, published on Tuesday, the rabbis said killing enemy civilians is “normal” during the time of war and that the Israeli occupation army should never hesitate to kill non-Jewish civilians in order to save Jewish lives. “There is no […]
September 7, 2004 | New York Times by PAUL KRUGMAN The best book I’ve read about America after 9/11 isn’t about either America or 9/11. It’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent. Better than any poll analysis or focus group, it explains why President Bush, despite policy failures at home and abroad, is ahead in the polls.
9/11 three years on: ‘War on terror’ has not stopped terrorism 8 Sept 2004 | Green Left Weekly by Rohan Pearce & Alison Dellit The appalling end to the hostage crisis in Beslan, Russia on September 4, which left more than 300 dead, had people all over the world horrified. The killing of so many children helped neither the Chechens fighting the Russian occupation of their country, nor those of us fighting war and state-sponsored terrorism all over the world. The only people who were really aided by the slaughter were those pursuing the misnamed ?war on terror?, in particular […]
September 6, 2004 | WorkingForChange.com & Morphizm.Com by Greg Palast In celebration of the working person’s holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration’s plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime. I’m sure you already knew that — if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of last year’s Federal Register. According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place its little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay for a “benefit” of $1.53 billion. I put “benefit” in quotes because, […]
7 September 2004 | Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq – As U.S. forces again battled insurgents loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign passed 1,000 on Tuesday, according to an Associated Press tally. The grim milestone was surpassed after a spike in fighting that has killed 14 U.S. service members in the past two days.
6 September 2004 | Los Angeles Times Plan would allow voting to proceed in January but might undermine credibility of the results by Patrick J. McDonnell BAGHDAD — Iraq remains on course to hold landmark elections in January, but violence could force authorities to exclude hotspots such as the western city of Fallouja from voting, a top U.S. general said here Sunday. Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operations chief of more than 150,000 mostly U.S. troops, said in an interview that the “cancer” of anti-American militancy in places such as Fallouja would not derail national elections. A “contingency” plan, Metz […]
7 Sept 2004 | StopTheNRA.com In 6 days, banned guns — including Uzis, AK-47s, and Tec-9s — will be coming back to our neighborhoods, courtesy of President Bush, unless the Assault Weapons Ban is renewed. Sign the petition.
7 Sept 2004 | MoveOn.org Today, a group in Texas, Texans for Truth, is launching an ad campaign that highlights Bush’s absence from duty in 1972. The ad features Robert Mintz, who served in Alabama’s 187th Air National Guard when Bush claims to have been there. In the ad, Robert Mintz says simply and powerfully that “I heard George Bush get up and say ‘I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery Alabama.’ Really? That was my unit. And I don’t remember seeing you there. So I called friends. ‘Did you know that George served in our unit?’ […]
7 Sept 2004 | Misleader.org President Bush yesterday said that because of his leadership, “America and the world are safer.”1 But almost three years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden remains at large, while the U.S. government admits top al Qaeda leaders are planning attacks on America from the Afghan-Pakistan border region.2 And now a new book confirms the President actually shifted key resources away from the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Knight-Ridder reports that in his upcoming book, U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) disclosed that General Tommy Franks told him on Feb. 19, 2002, four months after the invasion […]
September 5, 2004 | New York Times by DEXTER FILKINS BAGHDAD, Iraq — At a recent meeting with a group of tribal sheiks, an American general spoke with evident frustration about the latest Iraqi city to fall into the hands of insurgents. “Not one dime of American taxpayers’ money will come into your city until you help us drive out the terrorists,” Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste said in his base in Tikrit, tapping the table to make sure he was understood. The sheiks nodded, smiled and withdrew, back to the city that neither they, nor the American military, […]
03 September 2004 | Aljazeera Residents of Falluja have taken to the streets after Friday prayers to denounce the continuous bombing of their homes and to support their city’s security forces. Hundreds of protesters condemned the killing of civilians by US warplanes, calling US air raids a cowardly action and calling on US soldiers to fight them on the battlefield. “Air strikes are cowardly. Get down and face us on the battlefield,” the crowd chanted.
[ For more on Republican deception at the Convention, see this AP story. –BL ] 3 September 2004 | FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) It is the function of journalism to separate fact from fiction. In covering the Republican National Convention of 2004, the media made isolated efforts to point out some of the convention speakers’ more egregious distortions, but on the whole failed in their vital role of letting citizens know when they are being lied to. To take the example that dominated the convention perhaps more than any other claim: Professional politicians and political correspondents alike know that […]
‘Who was this guy who came in late and left early?’ After thirty years of silence, Mary Jacoby finds out what the future President really did in 1972 September 2, 2004 | Salon.com Before Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family’s political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George HW Bush phoned his friend and asked a favour: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W Bush? […]
Things getting sticky for owner of sticker 1 Sept 2004 | The Salt Lake Tribune by Matthew D. LaPlante Derek Kjar is not the president’s biggest fan. But the 19-year-old Salt Lake County man says he does not intend to harm President Bush with anything more than a vote for John Kerry come November. Just to be sure, though, agents from the Secret Service recently paid Kjar a visit, telling him that his neighbors had alerted them to a potentially threatening bumper sticker on his car. The sticker, which can be found on a number of Web sites, features a […]
2 September 2004 | United Press International WASHINGTON — U.S. newspapers are moving stories of American troops dying in Iraq to the back pages, the Washington Monthly has reported. The magazine noted in its September issue that on July 9, the Los Angeles Times put the story of five soldiers being killed on page 7 and the New York Times put it on page 8. On July 22, the magazine said, The Washington Times headlined a story “U.S. Troops Dying Two Per Day Since Turnover in Iraq,” but only put it on page 10. Also, “stories of the wounded, nearing […]
1 September 2004 | New York Times by PAUL MELLER and ELIZABETH BECKER BRUSSELS, Aug. 31 – The World Trade Organization on Tuesday authorized the European Union and seven other leading American trading partners to impose more than $150 million in retaliatory sanctions on exports from the United States. The ruling comes after Congress refused for two years to repeal a tariff subsidy for American companies that the W.T.O. found to be in violation of global trade laws. The decision by the trade organization, based in Geneva, is the latest example of several cases where Washington has been found to […]