Bin Laden Disappears from U.S. Terrorism Radar Screen
Posted Saturday, August 9, 2003 by vgdesign

Perspective by Stan Moore, Media Monitors Network

American official Paul Wolfowitz emphasized this week that the "war on terrorism" is now focused on Iraq. But he failed to explain by what definition Iraq was part of the war, other than as a victim of U.S. state terrorism, a fact readily understood by peoples all over the world. Perhaps Wolfowitz was referring to Iraqi victims of the unlawful occupation, who have seized arms and killed a few American troops in resisting the illegal preemptive war for oil and resultant looting of their homeland by American corporate interests and the US / Chevron / Texaco / Bechtel / Halliburton army. Perhaps that is why U.S. Air Force jets proudly wear "the Texaco star".

And in all the hype and news coverage in Iraq, it appears that a true, committed, anti-US terrorist, Osama bin Laden has been more or less forgotten. The same bin Laden who appeared on 60 Minutes and warned the U.S. population of his agenda of destruction of the "great Satan" cannot even get any sound bites on the U.S. media these days, whereas deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is not only the lead story in countless reports, but has thousands of U.S. troops hot on his trail, even though he has little ability to hurt U.S. interests at this point.

The War on Terrorism now appears to be a diversion from warring on terrorism! >>More

American media should be more like the BBC
Posted Friday, August 8, 2003 by vgdesign

By Margaret T. Gordon, The Seattle Times

It is late July, 2003. American troops in Baghdad are said to have killed two sons of the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and many Iraqis — as well as many Americans — don't know whether to believe it, despite graphic photographs.

Revelations over the past spring and early summer indicate that President Bush, knowingly or not — and there is some question about which — used information from faulty intelligence when he claimed in his State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. And then there is the matter of the nonexistent or yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction.

Most Americans who are still paying attention to these matters feel they are getting spun continuously, and almost jokingly offer up facts and arguments they've read or heard — and their opposites. Citizens are asking journalists and media critics why the media don't "do something" to discover and publish "the truth." Why don't journalists seem to be trying to get to the bottom of this?

Why, indeed. >>More

Jim Lobe: How neo-cons influence the Pentagon ...
Posted Friday, August 8, 2003 by vgdesign

WASHINGTON - An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House. >>More

Oct. 27, 2002: Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy
Posted Friday, August 8, 2003 by vgdesign

Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate assessments of Iraq intelligence.

Administration hawks who have been leading proponents of invading Iraq oversee the Pentagon unit, which is producing its own analyses of raw intelligence reports obtained from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies, the officials said.

The dispute pits hardliners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community against professional military and intelligence officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq. >>More

The Smell of VICTORY? Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

By ELAINE CASSEL, CounterPunch

John Ashcroft is out of control. The August 6 New York Daily News  scooped the story that answers the question, "What happened to Patriot II?" Remember that disgusting piece of legislation that Ashcroft said was merely a "draft" of revisions of the USA Patriot Act? Even the Congress, caught sleeping through Patriot I, woke up for that one. It featured absurd concepts like stripping Americans of their citizenship and sending them off to some island somewhere to rot.

Old Patriots never die, they just reinvent themselves, always victorious, naturally. The News  says that Ashcroft will be traipsing across the country at taxpayer expense drumming up support for the VICTORY Act, scheduled to be introduced to the Senate in September by none other than roarin' Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

VICTORY--Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act--will enable Ashcroft and clan to: >>More

IRAQ BODY COUNT: Adding indifference to injury
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

At least 20,000 civilians were injured in the Iraq war: Why are the occupiers ignoring their suffering and their needs?

Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.

The Iraq Body Count Project has never published a running total of injuries suffered in the war because injuries encompass a scale from the grievous and incapacitating to the light and fully recuperable, and in the absence of information about severity it makes no sense to assign the same unit value to each report of injury. But because injuries are not all comparable does not mean that they can or should be excluded from an accounting of the human costs of the war. On the contrary, the need to investigate and assess them is especially urgent, for many of the injured may still be suffering and their condition may be improved if we act promptly.

The protagonists of the war have repeatedly claimed an inability to provide accurate estimates of civilian deaths. Insofar as some casualties may have been burned beyond recognition, pulverised into dust or buried quickly according to Islamic custom and never officially recorded, there is indeed a possibility that not every death can be accounted for. Injuries are another matter. The injured are alive, perhaps receiving treatment, and the cause, nature and extent of their injuries will appear in medical, official, and informal records.

What follows is Iraq Body Count (IBC)’s attempt to provide an overview of the scale of the problem that needs to be tackled more directly by those who have the means to do so. >>More

U.S. ties to Saudi elite may be hurting war on terrorism
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

By Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill, Boston Herald - December 10, 2001

A steady stream of billion-dollar oil and arms deals between American corporate leaders and the elite of Saudi Arabia may be hindering efforts by the West to defeat international Islamic terrorism.

U.S. business and political leaders are so wedded to preserving the gilded American-Saudi marriage that officials in Washington D.C. continue to give the oil-rich Gulf monarchy a wide berth, despite mounting evidence of support in Saudi Arabia for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, some experts say.
...
A Herald  examination of corporate records, intelligence reports and published accounts - as well as interviews with terrorism and foreign policy experts - reveals an extraordinary array of U.S.-Saudi business ventures which, taken together, are worth tens of billions of dollars.

They range from deals to pipe oil and natural gas out of former Soviet republics and develop Saudi Arabia's own vast natural gas reserves, to lucrative but rarely talked about arrangements pairing private U.S. military contractors with virtually every branch of the Saudi armed forces. >>More

[Names Named, Dollars Counted. Here is the information the U.S. Treasury Department formally refused on Tuesday to provide to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.]

Jihad virus attacks Pentagon logic
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

THE ROVING EYE by Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

BANGKOK - Pentagon spin, via Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has it that "Iraq now is the central battle in the war on terrorism." Al-Qaeda's No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, aka The Surgeon, has proved Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's No 2, wrong.

Al-Zawahiri had warned "the American people" that what they had seen so far were only the "initial skirmishes" of a war. Two days later, a devastating bomb at the Marriott Hotel in southern Jakarta killed at least 16 people and wounded about 150, most of them Indonesians, not Westerners.

The International Islamic Front, or call it the al-Qaeda global franchising business, was just waiting for an opening. The Bush administration's logic in its "war against terror" is that security does not exist unless martial hygiene is fully imposed.
...
Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon will have to revise their logic. Martial hygiene is not working.

The Bush administration's first reaction to September 11 was to try to destroy al-Qaeda. But Osama bin Laden could not be captured. Ayman al-Zawahiri could not be captured. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, could not be captured. So the screenplay had to be changed, to Wolfowitz's original idea: smash Saddam Hussein. Evil metamorphosed from Osama to Saddam. Saddam may be gone, but al-Qaeda remains, and on top of it the US now faces a national liberation struggle in Iraq that is led neither by remnants of the Ba'ath Party nor by al-Qaeda, but by Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites alike. >>More

Hispanic Leaders Call Upon Bush to Stop Merger Between Univision and HBC
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

Leaders from the Latino community called upon President Bush and the Federal Communications Commission to stop the pending merger between Univision (the country's largest Spanish-language television network with its vertically integrated record labels, Internet portal, and affiliation with the major concert promotion company) and HBC (the country's largest Spanish-language radio network), as well as any other media merger which would create a monopoly in Spanish-language TV and radio broadcasting.

The group asserted that the already declining number of minority broadcast media owners, along with the controversial new FCC rules allowing greater media concentration and the proposed merger between Univision and Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation (HBC), will combine to drastically decrease access that Spanish-speaking Americans have to diverse, competing sources of news, information, entertainment and other cultural programming in the broadcast media, and to opportunities for media ownership. >>More

HIGHTOWER: GOP Goes from Ironic to Intimidation
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 by vgdesign

APPARENTLY THE Bushites think that "Irony" is the name of a far off planet, for they never seem able to see it in their own work.

Irony is George W standing adamantly against affirmative action, oblivious to the obvioius fact that he's the privileged poster-child of America's aggressive affirmative action program for the rich.

But one of the latest actions by the Bushites proves that they couldn't find irony if we let them use the Hubble Telescope. It came in the form of a threatening letter sent to Wisconsin TV stations by the Republican Party's top lawyer, Caroline Hunter. It seems that these stations were airing an ad produced by the Democratic Party, that calls for a bipartisan independent investigation of the false information used by Bush and the White House to mislead the American people about the supposed "imminent threat" posed by weapons of mass destruction they claimed were in Iraq.

The lawyer's letter to the TV stations demanded that they not air this ad because -- get this—she blithely says that stations have "no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people."

Yoo-hoo, Ms. Hunter, call home once you zoom past Pluto. Oh, the irony! >>More

Masters of deceit
Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2003 by vgdesign

Convicted felons responsible for thousands of deaths are calling the shots at the White House
By Isabel Hilton, The Guardian

The announcement that Admiral John Poindexter's latest brainwave - to encourage betting on the likelihood of a terrorist attack - had been terminated was characteristically bland. It began: "The Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced today that DARPA's participation in the Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) program has been withdrawn"

The language does not betray the repugnant nature of the project, but then Poindexter is expert at disguising repugnant projects in bland language. He came to prominence in the Reagan administration, where the word "freedom" was used to justify renewed support for Latin American military dictatorships guilty of some of the most egregious human rights abuses on the planet. President Jimmy Carter had frozen them out, but Ronald Reagan's election meant a renewed round of invitations to Pentagon cocktail parties for Latin American torturers. >>More

Jim Lobe: War Critics Zero In on Pentagon Office
Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2003 by vgdesign

WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (IPS) - On most days, the Pentagon's 'Early Bird', a daily compilation of news articles on defence-related issues mostly from the U.S. and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the Defence Department's top leadership.

But few could help notice last week that the 'Bird' omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April.

''What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,'' Kwiatkowski wrote. ''If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq) has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defence'' (OSD).

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted ''a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress''. >>More

>>Karen Kwiatkowski: Archives

Jack Shafer: Richard Perle Libel Watch, Week 20
Posted Wednesday, August 6, 2003 by vgdesign

Only 32 more weeks before the statute of limitations runs out.

Almost five months ago, Richard Perle put Seymour Hersh on notice that a libel suit was coming his way in retaliation for his piece in The New Yorker. But rather than filing his suit in, say, a court of law, Perle picked a friendlier venue —the news pages of the neoconservative New York Sun —to air his first pleading.

Perle told the Sun  he would sue Hersh in Britain because it's easier to win a case there, a legal strategy the Sun  conveyed to its readers with all the art and subtlety of a press release. If the Sun  were a court of law and Sun  co-owner Conrad Black were its judge, Hersh would be pounding rocks on Devil's Island right now.

But the Sun  isn't, nor is Black, and as a consequence, Hersh prowls the earth a free man, stirring up trouble for the Bush administration. And Perle? He still hasn't sued Hersh, and almost once a month the big fella steps in a gooey brown pile, after which the press and legislators pummel him with conflict-of-interest charges. >>More

Campaign to Stop the War Profiteers and Corporate Invasion of Iraq
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

The Institute for Southern Studies

A handful of well-connected corporations are poised to make billions in profits off the death and destruction of war in Iraq.

Merchants of misery like Bechtel, Halliburton, MCI and others — many with scandal-ridden records — are raking in massive profits through insider “reconstruction” contracts. Other multinationals are leading a “second invasion” of corporate interests seeking to seize control of Iraq’s oil, water and other resources — resources that belong to the Iraqi people.

It’s time to stop the war profiteers and corporate looters of Iraq. Join Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and others in the campaign today! >>More

Voice of free Iraq walks out on US
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

By Brian Whitaker, The Guardian

A broadcaster who became known as "the voice of free Iraq" after the fall of Saddam Hussein has walked out of his job, saying the United States is losing the propaganda war.

Failure to invest in the new Iraqi broadcasting service means foreign channels are gaining popularity at the expense of the US, Ahmed al-Rikabi, the American-appointed director of TV and radio said yesterday.

"The people of Iraq, including the Sunni Muslims, are not about to turn against their liberators, but they are being incited to do so. These [foreign] channels contribute to tension within Iraq," he said. >>More

Message from Robert McChesney: Help finish the FCC fight
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

Because millions of Americans took the time to petition their legislators and the FCC, Congress is now on the brink of overturning the media ownership rule changes.

The FCC decision was a blatant power grab by media industry lobbyists and their pro-business Washington allies. Big Media lobbyists are now making a full-court press to keep the new rules and expand media monopolies. Together we can stop them.

If we can get 1 million signatures demanding a rollback of the new rules, Congress will be forced to act in the public interest.

This is a new petition. We need everyone to sign it now, including those who signed previous FCC petitions.

Sign the Petition to Roll Back FCC Media Ownership Rules! >>Here

Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

Results are 'remarkably similar' to using napalm - By James W. Crawley, San Diego Union-Tribune

American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs – similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War – in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad.

Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River. The explosions created massive fireballs.

"We napalmed both those (bridge) approaches," said Col. James Alles in a recent interview. He commanded Marine Air Group 11, based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, during the war. "Unfortunately, there were people there because you could see them in the (cockpit) video.

"They were Iraqi soldiers there. It's no great way to die," he added. How many Iraqis died, the military couldn't say. No accurate count has been made of Iraqi war casualties. >>More

End the Occupation * Investigate the Lies * Bring the Troops Home * NOW
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

August 6–10 United For Peace & Justice Days of Action

On May 1, 2003 President Bush, in a televised speech from an aircraft carrier, announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. More than two months later, Iraqi civilians and U.S. G.I.’s are being killed every single day as our military tries to force an unpopular occupation on the Iraqi people – most likely, 6,000 to 8,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, as well as over 230 American soldiers.

The occupation’s cost has skyrocketed to $3.9 billion per month – $46.8 billion per year – while total funds for reconstructing Iraq are barely over 10% of that (most of which is Iraq’s money). At home, budgets for schools and important social services are being slashed.

Meanwhile, a flood of government leaks and media reports confirm that the anti-war movement was right all along: The Bush administration lied about the alleged Iraqi threat to scare us into backing their war.

ORGANIZE A PROTEST AUGUST 6 – 10! >>Take Action

Powell(s): Resignation Report(s) All Wrong
Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by vgdesign

FCC chairman tells aides he won't quit

WASHINGTON (AP) - Soon after joining the Federal Communications Commission, Michael K. Powell said one of his mottos would be: "Fight with ideas and not emotion."

His efforts to ease rules governing media ownership are prompting plenty of emotional debate - and lots of criticism of Powell. So much that Powell met with top aides after returning from vacation yesterday and assured them that he won't quit.

"The chairman is aware of the speculation in the press and industry about his future," said Jonathan Cody, Powell's special policy adviser. Powell "assured senior staff that it is his firm intention to continue to lead the commission and implement our agenda." >>More
...
Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday dismissed as gossip and nonsense a published report that he had sent word to the White House he would not serve in a second Bush administration.

"I don't know what they are talking about," Powell said of the story in The Washington Post. "I serve at the pleasure of the president. The president and I have not discussed anything other than my continuing to do my job for him." >>More