White House is ambushed by criticism from America's military community
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by symbolman

George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's.

But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.

From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.

Less visible, but no less passionate, has been the ongoing voicing of grievances over the internet. A prominent military affairs specialist, David Hackworth, keeps a website filled with angry reflections on conditions in Iraq for both the military and the local civilian population, and the government that put the troops there. "Imagine this bastard getting away with such crap if we had a draftee army," runs one typically scabrous anti-Bush line from Mr Hackworth.

More considered analysis is also available online, such as this reflection from a 23-year-old serving in the US Air Force, who wonders what the Iraq mess is going to do to the future of the US military: "The powers that be are destroying our military from the inside, especially our Army.

"How many of these people that are 'stranded' (for lack of a better term) in Iraq are going to re-enlist? How many that haven't deployed are going to re-enlist ... how many families are going to be destroyed?" he asked.>> More

The madness will end when BUSH and his war profiteering batwinged lieutenants are IMPEACHED. These people have dishonored and are destroying our nation - they are a blight upon us and need to be removed from office if we are ever to be taken seriously as a world power again. BUSH and CO need to be TRIED for crimes against Humanity, for TREASON against our Nation, to be stripped of all funds and all monies they have stolen, and the companies that assisted in the theft be turned over to the Treasury at once for the Rebuilding of OUR COUNTRY.

Oct 25 March on Washington - Impeachment Contingent
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by vgdesign

A Message from VoteToImpeach.org

In the last months the Impeach Bush campaign has made incredible progress. Hundreds of thousands have voted online and on paper ballots, newspaper ads have been placed in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle  and in a number of mid-size publications, thousands of people have written letters to the editor and impeachment committees exist in a growing number of cities.

This historic effort has an opportunity now to take a big step forward. On October 25th the Impeach Bush campaign will make a huge showing at the National March on Washington DC that will draw tens of thousands of people. The march is focused on Bush's illegal war in Iraq and the main demand will be Bring the Troops Home Now!

There will be worldwide and national media coverage of this activity. The VoteTo Impeach campaign believes it is essential that thousands of people that day hold signs, banners and placards that say Impeach Bush Now!

Many will bring their own signs and banners with that message. VoteToImpeach will also be printing thousands of signs and placards, as well as distributing lawn signs, window signs, bumper stickers and buttons with that message. >>More

>>March on the White House and the Pentagon to Bring the Troops Home Now!

>>Bring Them Home Now!

Krugman to Guardian: 'I do get rattled'
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by vgdesign

Paul Krugman is a mild-mannered university economist. He is also a New York Times columnist and President Bush's most scathing critic. Hence the death threats. He talks to Oliver Burkeman - The Guardian

The letters that Paul Krugman receives these days have to be picked up with tongs, and his employer pays someone to delete the death threats from his email inbox. This isn't something that can be said of most academics, and emphatically not of economic theorists, but Krugman isn't a typical don. Intercepting him in London on his way back home to New Jersey after a holiday in France, I half expect to find a couple of burly minders keeping a close eye on him, although they would probably have to be minders with a sound grasp of Keynesian macroeconomics.

"I can't say I never get rattled," the gnomish, bearded 50-year-old Princeton University professor says a little hesitantly, looking every inch the ivory-tower thinker he might once have expected to be. "When it gets personal, I do get rattled." >>More

What's up with the French? The "Not-American" Strategy
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by vgdesign

France is challenging U.S. claims to a super-national right to manipulate or erase the sovereignty of nations - The Black Commentator

We have arrived at a pregnant moment in history. The Pirate’s furious lunge for world domination has come undone in the place it was to have begun. Less than six months after George Bush launched his campaign of Shock and Awe against Iraq and, by extension, the planet, he found himself on national television looking shell-shocked and awful, mouthing words that amounted to a plea for help from the international community.

“[W]e cannot let past differences interfere with present duties,” said Bush to the world, visibly at war with his own lips. “Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation.”

Bush’s September 7 speech was labored and lifeless, as if all his energies were consumed by the struggle not to babble, sputter and bark. His henchpersons do little better as they flail about for language to lend dignity – if not majesty – to their chief’s upcoming speech to the UN. It is an impossible mission, since the breakdown of the Bush men’s imperial venture cannot be fixed on imperial terms. Thus, the door has been opened for – who else? – France. >>More

Tragedy in New York: French Fried Friedman
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by vgdesign

The Writings of Greg Palast, September 18, 2003

How sad. The last remaining neurons of Thomas Friedman's shrinking brain were apparently lost in hot bubbling tub of deep fatuousness today.

The evidence is in Friedman's loony-tunes comment, "Our War with France," in this morning's Paper of Record. You can only conclude the man's mind has been French Fried.

What got Friedman's brain a-boilin' is the impertinent suggestion by French diplomats that, if the US invaded Iraq to bring democracy, then why not allow Iraqis to vote. Vote! Can you imagine! It's all that silly 'libertay, equalitay' stuff that unsophisticated Americans believed before the Patriot Act.

Friedman calls voting a, "loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty." Friedman, Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein all have the same line: Iraqis aren't ready for democracy. Well, I suppose Tom Paine would have disagreed -- but, hell, he moved to France. >>More

The Death of Independent Voices in the Media
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003 by vgdesign

Senate Remarks by Senator Robert C. Byrd, September 15, 2003

... In October 1958, a pioneer of the broadcast industry took the podium at the Mayfair Hotel in Chicago to address his colleagues at the annual convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. On that night, when reporters, news directors, sponsors, and network executives gathered to honor excellence in their industry, Edward R. Murrow called it his duty to speak about what was happening in the radio and television industry.

Mr. Murrow, one of the most honored and respected journalists in our nation's history, criticized his colleagues for failing in their obligation to the people of this country.

"Our history will be what we make it," Murrow said. "If there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will find there evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live."

He continued. "One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising, and news . . . The top management of the networks, with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, or show business. By the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this."

Here we are, almost 45 years later. What would Mr. Murrow think of today's media? >>More

Robert Scheer: White House's Cynical Iraq Ploy: 'Misspeak' First, 'Correct' It Later
Posted Thursday, September 18, 2003 by vgdesign

Americans are finally awakening to the stupid and craven things being done in the name of protecting us

... Even if the leaders of the Bush team were half as smart as they think they are, it would be amazing that they "misspoke" as often as they have. As happened Sunday when Tim Russert challenged Vice President Dick Cheney to defend his claim, made on "Meet the Press" before the war, that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. "Yeah, I did misspeak," Cheney admitted. "We never had any evidence that [Hussein] had acquired a nuclear weapon."

The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness, and Wolfowitz's latest performance is a classic example — even his correction needs correcting. >>More

Joe Conason: The BBC's bullies can dish it out, but they can't take it
Posted Thursday, September 18, 2003 by vgdesign

Events in the US suggest that the time is ripe for a liberal media rebellion

To an American, there is much that sounds awfully familiar about Beebwatch - the series launched last week by the Daily Telegraph  editor Charles Moore to root out "soft left" bias in the BBC. Moore's determination to inflict daily humiliation on the network coincides neatly with efforts by Rupert Murdoch and the Tory opposition to deprive Britain's great broadcasting institution of its licence fee, just as its charter is coming up for renewal.

At the very least, this campaign aims to intimidate the BBC's management from broadcasting anything that might offend reactionary sensibilities; but its ultimate goal is the crippling, or even the abolition, of the BBC itself.

Moore's tone echoes the American right's incessant whining about "liberal media bias". And while British broadcasting is structurally (and qualitatively) very different from its US counterpart, the conservative agenda in both countries is identical: to stigmatise dissent and to dominate discourse.

Once upon a time, there were "liberal media" in America - or at least there were major media outlets unafraid of being called liberal. >>More

Paths Of Glory Lead To A Soldier's Doubt
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by symbolman

An American carrying out his duty in Iraq wonders aloud why he's there - By Tim Predmore

For the last six months I have participated in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom.

---
So then, what is our purpose here?

Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we so often have heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof? Or is it that our incursion is a result of our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. Coincidence?

This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. At least to me, oil seems to be the reason for our presence.

There is only one truth, and it is that Americans are dying. There are 10 to 14 attacks on our servicemen and -women daily in Iraq, and it would appear that there is no end in sight.

I once believed that I served for a cause: "to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States." Now I no longer believe that; I have lost my conviction, as well as my determination. I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.>> More

This is an ACT OF BRAVERY - especially in the midst of the LYING TRAITORS in the White House who sue or jail anyone illegally that stands up to their cowardice. When the military doesn't back you anymore then you are NOT THEIR LEADER - no matter how many forced photo ops Rove lines up. Bush has never been a leader, maybe a CHEER Leader - But having gone AWOL for over a year he isn't worthy of shining these REAL TROOPS boots. SUPPORT THE TROOPS - IMPEACH BUSH.

House Dems to Force Media Ownership Vote
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by vgdesign

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Democrats say they will try to force a vote on a resolution repealing new media ownership rules, defying the Republican leadership which pledged to kill the measure.

The fight over the resolution moved to the House after the Senate approved the legislation with a 55-40 vote Tuesday. The resolution seeks to undo changes to Federal Communications Commission regulations governing ownership of newspapers and television and radio stations.

Critics say those changes could lead to a wave of media mergers and ultimately stifle diversity and local viewpoints in news and entertainment. A federal appeals court already has temporarily placed the rules on hold.

After the Senate vote, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, summed up the resolution's prospects in the House: ``It's going nowhere -- dead on arrival.''

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said if the Republicans held a vote on the measure ``it would pass overwhelmingly.'' >>More

Leak of the Week: The Bolton Testimony - Judith Miller. Again.
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by vgdesign

Press Box by Jack Shafer, Slate

Suppose you had an advance copy of the testimony that Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton was scheduled to give to a House subcommittee today that details the dangers posed by Syria's unconventional weapons program. And let's suppose that you wanted to leak it to the reporter who would give it the most favorable bounce in today's papers.

Would you give it to New York Times  reporter Douglas Jehl, who followed a Knight Ridder story on July 18, 2003, with a critical account of how the CIA and other agencies blocked Bolton's July House appearance?

Or would you give it to Judith Miller, the New York Times  reporter who has given sympathetic play time and again to leakers and defectors bearing information about weapons of mass destruction?

You needn't ask. >>More

Will the Media Let Bush Lose?
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by vgdesign

By Sam Parry, The Consortium for Independent Journalism

The U.S. news media may soon face a dilemma: Can pundits keep calling George W. Bush "the popular war-time president" – a favorite stock phrase – if his poll numbers sink much further? For two years, the phrase has been a media cliché for Bush often delivered with a pleasing smile from an agreeable talking head. Or it’s used like a club against some critic who is out of step with the American people.

ABC Evening News used the phase to describe Bush both when Howard Dean announced his Democratic candidacy in June and when John Kerry announced his in September. To a degree, the "popular war-time president" repetition has created a self-fulfilling reality, especially when reinforced by generally fawning news coverage, laudatory books like "The Right Man," an action-figure doll in a flight suit, and even a hero-worshipful Sept. 11 docu-drama (which put brave words into Bush’s mouth though he spent most of that awful day sitting frozen in a Florida classroom or fleeing to Louisiana and Nebraska).

Similarly, the U.S. news media has framed next year’s election around the repeated question, "Is Bush Unbeatable?" – again suggesting that Bush is next to invincible. But the latest polls suggest that Bush’s voter support is fading fast in the face of job losses, a worsening deficit and continuing violence in Iraq. >>More

WILLIAM SAFIRE: The Senate Says No
Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by vgdesign

Libertarians of the left and right are resisting the concentration of power and insisting on the preservation of competition. This strange bedfellowship will not equivocate, and we will be heard.

... The F.C.C. chairman, Michael Powell, sensing that not even his friendship with Senator John McCain nor his backing by Big Media is stopping the popular groundswell, has resorted to a fear appeal: that stopping more gobbling up of local stations by the broadcast networks will be the ruination of "free TV."

That's the ludicrous party line being peddled by G.E., which owns NBC. But four-fifths of broadcast network TV is now delivered to homes by cable or satellite — not free — and NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are making money hand over fist. "Powell's Last Stand" on this false argument has become an embarrassment to the Bush White House, which has been foolishly threatening to veto any disapproval of the F.C.C.'s abdication of the public interest. (The G.O.P. leader Tom DeLay still can't get 148 signatures on a letter promising to sustain what would be Bush's first veto.)

How do we break out of this impasse, with the mediopoly and its political trained seals on the merger side, and with the most diverse coalition of lefties and righties ever assembled on the other?

Senator Trent Lott, a Republican, knows how these things work; I crosshatched his analysis with that of a savvy Democratic mole in the House. >>More

Republican Party Operative Accused Of Placing "Swinging Couple" Ads Get $150,000 During The 2000 Recount
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by symbolman

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Where Did A Republican Party Operative Accused Of Placing "Swinging Couple" Ads Get $150,000 During The 2000 Recount To Finance A Campaign To Oust Florida Supreme Court Justices?

Why is a story about a "backwater" detail of the battle over the 2000 recount still valid? Because it sheds insight into how the Bush Cartel and the Republican Party operate. The Bush Cartel depends upon our shortened news cycle (every six hours or so) -- and the Pro-Bush corporate owned media -- to prevent Americans from connecting the dots that tie together the vast right wing conspiracy.

That means, for example, that a "minor" story that emerged just this past week will quickly be forgotten. It is about how an obscure Arkansas figure who was key to Ken Starr's Whitewater persecution was recently appointed as the Inspector General for the Pentagon:

The Bush administration has quietly installed a surprising figure in a high-level Pentagon post: L. Jean Lewis, the former federal fraud investigator who kicked up major controversy in the ’90s over her allegations about the Clintons’ Whitewater dealings....

Although there's been no public announcement of her return to government, Lewis has been given a $118,000-a-year job as chief of staff in the traditionally nonpartisan Defense Department’s inspector general office. With 1,240 employees and a budget of $160 million, this office is the largest of its kind in the government. It investigates fraud and audits Pentagon contracts, including the billions of dollars being awarded in Iraq to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel.>> More

10,000 prisoners in custody in Iraq: US military
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by vgdesign

BAGHDAD (Xinhuanet) - Around 10,000 prisoners are held in custody across Iraq, 3,800 more than the previous figure, the US military said Tuesday.

The extra number of prisoners were newly announced because they had previously not been categorized and were only recently been classified as "security detainees," Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told reporters at Abu Ghuraib detainee center, 20 km westof Baghdad.
...
There are now a total of 4,400 prisoners classified as security detainees, in addition to 300 prisoners of war and 5,300 criminals,she added.

Several hundred of the prisoners are third country nationals, including six claiming to be Americans and two who said they were Britons, Karpinski said. >>More

Inside an Iraqi Jail >>View Slideshow

Britain, US postpone WMD report for lack of evidence
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by vgdesign

By Tom Regan, The Christian Science Monitor

Liberal critics had hinted that US President George Bush would try to use it as his "September surprise"; a report by the Iraq Survey Group which would prove that Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. But now the Sunday Times of London, and other publications, say that the report has been delayed "indefinitely" because the group was unable to get any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

David Kay, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group, had hinted in July that he had seen enough to convince him that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did have a program to produce weapons of mass destruction. But last week British officials said they believed Kay had been "kite-flying" and that no hard evidence had been uncovered.

The Sunday Times report comes two days after NBC reported that the search for WMD in Iraq had "been a bust."

"He [David Kay] has not found the kinds of things the administration expected to find - large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that were destroyed prior to the war," David Albright, a former UN weapons' inspector, told NBC News. >>More

Senate Defies Bush, Overturns FCC Ruling
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by vgdesign

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-led U.S. Senate on Tuesday defied Bush administration opposition and voted to rescind new regulations allowing large media companies to grow even bigger.

The Senate approved, 55-40, a resolution that would roll back the Federal Communications Commission rules allowing television networks to own more local stations and permitting conglomerates to own a newspaper, television stations and radio outlets in a single market.

The measure faces a tougher battle in the U.S. House of Representatives and a threat of a veto by President Bush if it reaches his desk. >>More

>>The 55-40 Roll Call

Law and order: Militias rule in Najaf - police
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by vgdesign

By Sarmad S. Ali, Iraq Today - The Independent Voice of Iraq

Najaf - In the wake of the latest trouble and turmoil at Najaf, unbridled conflicting militias overrule badly equipped police whose role is being undermined day in day out. Policemen, however, have greatly protested that neither the general Police Directorate nor Coalition upholds their authority.

At Ghari police station, the one responsible for protecting the shrine of Imam Ali, policemen complained of the administrative corruption prevalent among senior police officers in the governorate and the rampant behaviour of militias represented by Badr forces and Muqteda al-Sader's Jaysh al-Mahdi.

" Officials here don't support us. They did not supply us with guns to protect ourselves and to do our job and some of the officers bought themselves guns and we don't have furniture to sit on even these chairs in this room we brought from the director's home " said Lt. Mohammed Abdel Hussein.

The police station is stripped bare of any comforts. The director's room has an old fan with some rickety chairs and a desk and the rest of the police station is almost deserted. Some rooms show walls that are dilapidated and cracked. Officers have no sanitary toilets and no resting place. When citizens visit the police station for a complaint, they have to stand outside because the place is neither roomy nor furnished. Even the telephone was brought from the director's home. >>More

Equipment, stockpiles wear thin as U.S. tries to keep up conditions, morale in Iraq
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 by vgdesign

By Joseph L. Galloway, Knight Ridder Newspapers

... Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee told Knight Ridder that a private contractor, Kellogg Brown and Root, built and staffed almost all of the 32 dining halls where most American troops deployed to Iraq now get two hot meals per day. Brownlee added that 13 newly built ice plants would be operational in Iraq in October. Kellogg Brown and Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., which Vice President Dick Cheney ran before he became the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2000.

"Soldiers' quality of life is less than adequate overall. We have guys living in tents in the dirt. The units on the ground are living hard; others are living in air-conditioned palaces," said Maj. Gen. Chris Christianson, the new chief of Army logistics, who was on the staff of Lt. Gen. Dave McKiernan, the ground commander in Iraq during the war.

He said Kellogg Brown and Root had the single-source contract for food, laundry, showers, toilets and bug control for American troops in Iraq and is the contractor for transportation and distribution of food and water and mail. >>More