[ While George W. Bush repeatedly insists that his Administration has given the military everything it needs in Iraq, the story below is one of a persistent stream of reminders that Bush’s claim is false and that troop safety is less important than many other priorities of his Administration. From the piece: … the unit’s trucks were not yet armored… None of the trucks in his command were armored when they arrived in Iraq, General Chambers said. A sampling of related stories from the last year and a half: Bio/Chem Attack Protection Questioned (14 Feb 2003) U.S. Troops Buying Own […]
Daily Archives: October 18, 2004
6 posts
by Brendan Lalor In a land in which presidential candidate G.W. Bush delivers campaign speeches in halls to which only adoring fans are granted entrance, the crackdown against dissent continues. To point to just a couple representative cases from the regular slew of cases: “Police in riot gear fired paintballs filled with cayenne pepper Thursday night to disperse a crowd of protesters assembled in this historic gold mining town where President Bush was spending the night after a campaign appearance.” (Associated Press, 15 Oct 2004) “Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush […]
[ From the piece: 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored. Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error. –BL ] October 17, 2004 | Associated Press Tallahassee, Fla. — Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a published report Saturday.
October 17, 2004 | New York Times by RON SUSKIND Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. ”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people […]
16 Oct 2004 | Boston Globe by Bryan Bender WASHINGTON — About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations, which could not find records for numerous rebuilding projects and other payments. One chunk of the money — $1.4 billion — was deposited into a local bank by Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq but could be tracked no further: The auditors reported that they were shown a deposit slip but could find no […]
[ This follows up articles printed here on the economic attack on Iraq. –BL ] Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys R Us? 16 Oct 2004 | Guardian Naomi Klein Iraqis are still being forced to pay for crimes committed by Saddam Next week, something will happen that will unmask the upside-down morality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On October 21, Iraq will pay $200m in war reparations to some of the richest countries and corporations in the world. If that seems backwards, it’s because it is. Iraqis have never been awarded reparations for any of the […]