Life in OUR America, Volume 2, The Livyjr Files Options

[Livyjr]

Change a name or two and you have a typical secret meeting chaired by the organ grinder, Mr. Cheney himself.

A.B.

Yes, we do, don't we!

And there was just a quote in one of these articles the other day where George W. Bush was saying how "transparent" this whole process was over there in his client puppet state of Iraq because the press was allegedly all over the process of picking what is alleged to be a new government, although that is somewhat questionable right now, from all appearances here.

SO!

Transparency?

Yeah, okay, George, fine, if that's what you think, but it don't look that way from where I am sitting!

[Livyjr]

The word "Svengali" has entered the language meaning a person who, with evil intent, tries to persuade another to do what is desired.

Rove?

Hhhhmmmm!

Isn't he that SVENGALI feller we've all been hearing so much about in here?

And the question is one of whether George W. Bush is an ANTINOMIAN because the SVENGALI Rove makes him be one, or would he have been one naturally?

And this gives us a SEGUE right into this next story, which probably has poor Rush Limbaugh and that crowd of mouth-runners on CLEARCHANNELSWORLDWIDE who imitate him by copying his voice and his style of rabid attack of LIB-RAWLS and intellectuals, ALL FOAMIMG AT THE MOUTH IN RAGE!

And HOORAY for that say I!

World - OneWorld.net
 
"Left-Right Coalition Rises to Oppose USA Patriot Act Provisions"

Thu Mar 24,11:20 AM ET   

Abid Aslam, OneWorld US

WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 24 (OneWorld) - A novel coalition of conservatives and liberals normally at each other's throats over the nature of government and free speech have made common cause to oppose key parts of the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), long vilified by conservatives, has joined forces with right-wing groups the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Free Congress Foundation to spearhead the ''Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances'' coalition.

The Patriot Act's supporters have said it has kept America safe since 2001 but opponents have said the law is intrusive and threatens to let the government spy on innocent Americans.

The new coalition will lobby Congress to roll back provisions allowing law enforcement agents to look at library users' records and to conduct unannounced searches of homes and private offices.

''Checks and balances are absolutely essential, even and especially during times of threat,'' said coalition leader Bob Barr, a former Republican Congressman from Georgia who voted for the law in 2001.

''Our message is universal."

"Liberty is not divisible, even in the face of terrorism, and we must not allow any part of it to be sacrificed in our efforts to defeat acts of terrorism.''

CounterPunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html

November 1, 2002

"Exposing Karl Rove"

by WAYNE MADSEN

He's America's Joseph Goebbels.

As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush.

Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage.

From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.

Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War II B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through his mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on behalf of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya's "Svengali," Rove has practiced the same style of slash and burn politics as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti.

Many of us remember the Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the 1972 campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker, and cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New Hampshire's French Canadian population.

Rove's hero also forged letters on fake Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising dinners, and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates.

Segretti's brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm, and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom Eagleton.

Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House job -- he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing illegal campaign material.

In many respects, however, the apprentice Rove has far exceeded the chicanery and evil-mindedness of his mentor Segretti.

Rove is a tech-savvy puppet master for Bush.

Take, for example, last June's discovery of a "lost" CD-ROM in Lafayette Park across from the White House.

Contained on the CD was a PowerPoint presentation given by White House political director Ken Mehlman to Rove on the strategy for next Tuesday's off-year election.

The slide show showed First Brother Jeb Bush being vulnerable in Florida.

Jeb Bush later joked that the disc was part of a plot cooked up by him and his brother to make it appear that he was vulnerable in order to rally an otherwise complacent GOP base in the Sunshine State.

Or was it a joke?

Jeb Bush and his political minions like Katherine Harris have shown us that if anyone thinks what the GOP has done in Florida is funny they have an incredibly sick sense of humor.

Rove's own tendency to be sick-minded originates with his mentor Segretti.

The 2000 GOP primary was a chance for Rove to hone his skills in dirty tricks.

His target then was Senator John McCain who appeared to be within striking distance of Dubya in South Carolina after the then-GOP maverick's surprise upset victory in New Hampshire.

Rove's operation proceeded to target McCain with false stories:

* McCain was a stoolie for his captors in the Hanoi Hilton (this from a lunatic self-promoting Vietnam "veteran");

* McCain fathered a black daughter out of wedlock (a despicable reference to McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter);

* Cindy McCain's drug "abuse";

* and even McCain's "homosexuality."

In the spirit of Segretti, Rove engineered a victory for Dubya but at the cost of trashing an honorable man and his family.

Muskie, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Hart, Tsongas, Clinton, Biden, Dole, Perot, and others had all seen the Segretti/Rove slash and burn tactics before.

And Rove's penchant for fascistic demagoguery and outright lying continues to this very day.

After Paul Wellstone's sons asked that Vice President Dick Cheney not attend the Minneapolis memorial service for their father, mother, and sister, the White House explained that the real reason wasn't the surviving Wellstone family's abhorrence for Cheney but the fact the family didn't want Cheney's Secret Service protection to interfere with public access to the service.

Of course, the Rove and Ari Fleischer disinformation machine forgot to take into account that two attendees, Bill and Hillary Clinton, had their own Secret Service details.

But such is the case with a White House that takes its lessons from Goebbels and the editorial staff of the old Soviet News Agency Tass.

Rove's dirty fingerprints could also be seen in the Iowa Senate race between Tom Harkin and GOP candidate Greg Ganske.

A few months ago, a story was leaked that the Harkin campaign had employed a spy within the Ganske campaign.

To put this in a Rove context, we must go back to the 1986 Texas gubernatorial race in which Rove's candidate Bill Clements was taking on Democratic Governor Mark White.

Just before a debate between the two candidates, Rove spun the story that his office had been bugged.

No proof.

But the insinuation that White's people had carried out the bugging was reported by the media.

In the election, Clements defeated White.

Rove stashed away more political capital into his already heavy knapsack of ill-gotten IOUs.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, we were obviously treated to more Rove chicanery when the following Associated Press story hit the wires:

"A woman who worked for a media company that produced ads for President George W. Bush's campaign was indicted for secretly mailing a videotape of Bush practicing for a debate to Vice President Al Gore's campaign."

Yes, that videotape, along with a 120-page briefing book, just happened to turn up in Gore's headquarters as fast as the CD-ROM turned up in Lafayette Park.

The sourcerer Segretti must be very proud of his apprentice.

In 1980, no Republican bemoaned the fact that Jimmy Carter's debate briefing book was swiped and found its way into the hands of the Reagan-Bush campaign.

In Rove's world, its only an affront when someone "steals" your own campaign secrets and not when your are on the receiving end of a heist.

"If you're not with me, you're against me."

Bush's binary view of "good and evil" and "friend and enemy" sits well with the Rove strategy.

Georgia's conservative but libertarian-minded Representative Bob Barr found out about this in last August's primary when his GOP primary opponent John Linder began spreading around stories that Barr was "soft on terrorism."

Because Barr was skeptical about a number of aspects of the Bush-Ashcroft USA PATRIOT Act, he became a target for the Rove machine.

However, it was likely that Barr became a target earlier on when he supported Steve Forbes against Bush in the 2000 primary.

Bush apparently means to say, "If you've not always been with me, you're against me."

It must have really been a dilemma for Bush and Rove to have to come to the support of John Sununu, Jr. in the New Hampshire Senate race.

Although Daddy made George W. unceremoniously give the axe to Sununu's father as White House Chief of Staff during the Bush 41 administration, the man who the junior Sununu defeated in the primary, Bob Smith, was even more of a problem.

He had the temerity to quit the Republican Party in 2000 and run against Dubya for President.

So in Bushspeak, which is obviously borrowed from Forrest Gump's scripts, "if you're less with me than the other guy, you're more against me."

Undoubtedly, Rove was also behind the campaign to "get" Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney who was the first nationally-known politician to question what Bush may have known beforehand about 9-11.

She was defeated by a former Republican state judge who had supported the wacky Alan Keyes for President in 2000.

Never mind, McKinney was "less with Bush" than Keyes, so it was more important to get McKinney who was "more against" Bush.

In all seriousness, rewarding the GOP on November 5 will only increase the appetite of Rove to amass more and more power into the White House.

The advent of a Democratic-controlled Senate and House might even begin to spell the end of the road for Segretti's star pupil.

German opposition figures in the mid-1930s often lamented the fact that they could have stopped the rise of the Nazis if only they had been more united in a common front when they had a chance.

However, they fell prey to the media manipulation of Goebbels and fought among themselves more than they did against the menace from the far right.

We Americans also have an early opportunity to stem an out-of-control and anti-constitutional regime with the Rasputin-like Rove at the after steerage helm of our ship of state.

That opportunity presents itself next Tuesday--Election Day.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.

Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

[jeffmoskin]

And speaking of the need to be able to read and comprehend what you are reading just to be a responsible citizen of this democracy, let alone the person who would call himself president of ALL America, what have we here?

"The Iraq War and America's Tradition of Foreign Policy Idealism: Three Recent Books Illuminate the Subject"

By ANTHONY DWORKIN

Monday, Mar. 28, 2005

Alan Curtis, "Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America's Promise At Home and Abroad" (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2004)

Jussi M. Hanhimaki, "The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy" (Oxford Univ. Press 2004)

Michael Walzer, "Arguing About War" (Yale Univ. Press 2004)

Not since Vietnam has foreign policy been at the center of political debate in America in the way that it is now.

For two years, the U.S. has been divided by passionate arguments about whether the Iraq war was morally justifiable or politically wise.

Meanwhile, the unsettled aftermath of the U.S. occupation ensures that these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

Strikingly, the debate over Iraq - and about President Bush's international policies in general - has scrambled some traditional (albeit simplistic) assumptions about ideology and foreign policy.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, moral idealism in foreign policy has generally been seen as a Democratic position.

But it is a Republican president who now purports to espouse an idealistic approach to world affairs, seeking to establish a new international order on the basis of ending tyranny and advancing freedom.

In pushing the expansion of democracy, Bush said in his recent inaugural speech, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

By contrast, the Democratic candidate in last year's presidential election, Senator John Kerry, emphasized primarily the costly and counterproductive nature of the war in Iraq, describing it as an unnecessary distraction from the more important objective of defeating Al Qaeda.

In contrast to Bush, Kerry took a position closer to the foreign policy tradition of realism - an outlook which aims at the promotion of national security, wealth, and power through conventional diplomatic means.

Realists, who distrust talk of a world order based on values like democracy or self-determination, have more often been associated with the Republican political tradition.

Of course, many people opposed the war in Iraq precisely because they thought it was immoral - thus adopting an idealist anti-war view.

But at a minimum, the national debate over Bush's global policies illustrates how contested the notions of national interest and morality in foreign policy have become.

Can President Bush, with his doctrine of regime change, really claim to be heir to the long American tradition of moral idealism in foreign policy?

And can the Democrats find a way to oppose him that rises above strategic realism, to incorporate a moral vision of their own?

In their different ways, the three books I will review here all provide openings to consider these important questions.

Hanhimaki on Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, who was responsible for the foreign policy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, is generally regarded as the arch-practitioner of realpolitik in American diplomatic history.

The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, by the Finnish academic Jussi Hanhimaki, provides a thorough and judicious account of Kissinger's record.

Kissinger's view of world affairs was clearly set out in the foreign policy report to the U.S. Congress that he drafted for the recently-inaugurated President Nixon in February 1969.

The document said that America would regard its Communist adversaries "as nations pursuing their own interests as they perceive these interests, just as we follow our interests as we see them."

The report added that the structure of peace would come "from a realistic accommodation of conflicting interests."

In other words, Kissinger hoped to shift the tenor of America's relations with Russia and China from an ideologically-motivated hostility to an approach that more closely resembled the nineteenth-century European balance of power.

Kissinger believed that the United States should treat its Cold War enemies not as ideological adversaries, but rather as rival powers, alternately collaborating with them and playing them off against each other to maximize America's strategic advantage.

Hence, using his favorite method of back-channel diplomacy, Kissinger pushed forward détente with the Soviet Union, and reopened relations with China that had been frozen since the revolution twenty-two years earlier.

Hanhimaki explores Kissinger's handling of American foreign policy through a detailed narrative that is based, in large part, on many files that have only recently been opened.

The book confirms that Kissinger was a highly skilled and assiduous negotiator - for instance, in his shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt in the aftermath of the 1973 October (or Yom Kippur) War.

But it also makes clear the limitations - moral and strategic - inherent in Kissinger's realpolitik.

The moral case against Kissinger is familiar, based upon the secret bombing of Cambodia, his backing of Pakistan during the crisis over East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971, his part in the campaign to undermine Salvador Allende in Chile, and his tacit endorsement of Indonesian President Mohamed Suharto's invasion of East Timor in 1975.

Hanhimaki doesn't seek to minimize the human cost of these policies, but neither does he portray them as abnormally wicked in the context of the times.

His real concern is to point out the strategic failures of Kissinger's foreign policy- and it is here that his book is at its most persuasive.

By viewing every regional conflict in the context of great-power rivalry, Kissinger failed to acknowledge their local and regional causes.

The result generally was that his elaborately constructed schemes had little staying power, and often left a legacy that harmed America's longer-term interests.

In Vietnam, for example, Kissinger's combination of "peace through strength" (meaning a series of aggressive bombing raids while negotiations continued) and back-channel negotiations with the Soviet Union and China did produce a peace settlement in 1973 - but it was never likely to last.

Two years later, the South Vietnamese were overrun by North Vietnam, and the U.S.-backed Cambodian government of Lon Nol had also fallen to the brutal Khmer Rouge.

Similarly, in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 and the Angolan civil war that began in 1975, Kissinger threw American weight behind discreditable leaders who would end up on the losing side.

Hanhimaki concludes that Kissinger's central failing was that - for all his claims to be rethinking the ground rules of American foreign policy - he did not succeed in challenging the basic Cold War orthodoxy that saw everything through the lens of a single global struggle:

"His policies relied on preconceived notions, not particularly innovative for their time, about the overarching significance of American credibility and the Soviet-American relationship."

By the end of Kissinger's time in charge of U.S. foreign policy, even his vaunted relationships with the Soviet Union and China were faltering.

At home, détente was coming under attack from politicians like Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who wanted to tie economic relations with the Soviet Union to improvements in their human rights record.

(It is an historical irony that many of the neoconservatives associated with the policies of George W. Bush worked with Jackson around this time and were deeply influenced by his critique of the amoral realism of Kissinger's foreign policy.)

Meanwhile, the relationship with China had reached an impasse over the issue of Taiwan.

Kissinger's high-handed and secretive style - he once described himself as the Lone Ranger of U.S. foreign policy - meant that he built up little domestic support for his policies.

Although opinion polls showed that he himself retained a high level of public approval throughout his career in public life, Kissinger felt little need to base his actions on values that were widely shared among the American public.

No wonder, then, that in the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter was able to defeat President Ford in part through his promises of a more moral foreign policy.

"A foreign policy based on secrecy has had to be closely guarded and amoral," Carter charged during the campaign.

Walzer on War

The same year Carter took office, the political theorist and social critic Michael Walzer published his influential book Just and Unjust Wars.

The book was an intellectual response to the war in Vietnam, and its achievement was to jump-start a revival of the tradition of just war theory as a moral standard for assessing the use of military force in modern times.

Since then, Walzer has continued to write on the relationship between war and morality.

His new book, Arguing About War, is a collection of his recent essays on the subject.

The volume divides into a set of theoretical chapters exploring various aspects of the morality of armed conflict, and a series of practical essays in which Walzer applies "just war" thinking to recent real-world conflicts.

War is, of course, the most violent and destructive face of foreign policy - the one that has the most far-reaching consequences for human life - and it is also the time when national security is most urgently at stake.

The question of morality in warfare therefore represents the debate about the role of values in foreign policy in its most consequential and difficult form.

Among the most interesting aspects of Walzer's book are his reflections on how the situation today differs from that of the Vietnam era, when his first book on the subject was written.

In one essay, entitled "The Triumph of Just War Theory," he presents a generally optimistic account of how moral standards are incorporated into contemporary war-fighting.

After Vietnam, Walzer writes, both military officers and statesmen realized that the way a war was fought could be a decisive factor in whether it was successful: the United States lost in Vietnam in large part because civilians in Vietnam were alienated by the brutal way the conflict was conducted.

Summing up these lessons, Walzer argues that "there are now reasons of state for fighting justly."

"One might almost say that justice has become a military necessity."

This essay was written in 2002, and today Walzer might acknowledge that his confidence in the triumph of just war theory was premature.

There is no doubt that the U.S. armed forces make a much greater effort now to avoid harming civilians than in the Vietnam era; for instance, possible targets are reviewed by military lawyers to make sure that they comply with the requirements of the laws of war.

But there is another area of war-fighting where recent American conduct has in fact been worse in recent conflicts than it was in Vietnam.

This is, of course, in the treatment of prisoners.

The U.S. Army recently announced that 27 detainees had been killed in U.S. custody since August 2002.

Many hundreds of people have been held as "unlawful combatants" in Guantanamo for as long as three years, without the protection of prisoner of war status or any meaningful due process rights.

By contrast, in Vietnam, the U.S. Army treated prisoners well and gave prisoner of war status to guerrilla fighters who had a weaker claim to it, under a narrow reading of the law, than do Taliban captives from Afghanistan today.

A key difference, of course, is that large numbers of Americans were being held as captives by the North Vietnamese in Vietnam.

Concern over how they were being treated provided a powerful incentive for the U.S. Army to observe decent standards itself.

Another difference that Walzer sees between the Vietnam era and today lies in the aftermath of war.

Traditionally, "just war" thinking has concentrated on the circumstances in which it is right to go to war (jus ad bellum), and the way you should fight once war has started (jus in bello).

But Walzer argues convincingly that contemporary wars require a much greater attention to post-war justice, dealing with issues like occupation and democratization.

In his section on recent conflicts, Walzer collects a series of impressive essays on Iraq.

He argues that the war in Iraq was not a just war, because it was launched before it was necessary:

"Though disarming Iraq is a legitimate goal, morally and politically, it is a goal that we could almost certainly have achieved with measures short of full-scale war."

Walzer also argues persuasively that overthrowing tyranny cannot be a legitimate justification for invading another country, unless it is necessary to prevent an ongoing campaign of massacre or ethnic cleansing.

Essays on "Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense"

The question of Iraq also hangs over the third of the books reviewed in this article, a collection of essays entitled Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense.

This is a wide-ranging selection of articles, all written from a broadly progressive viewpoint, and designed to set out an alternative vision to the policies of the Bush administration.

The essays in the book vary greatly in quality, but there are a few thoughtful and persuasive chapters on foreign policy.

Perhaps the best is an essay by Jessica Tuchman Matthews about "the challenge of managing dominance."

Matthews argues pragmatically that the Bush administration's triumphalism is short-sighted, because America's current dominance is unlikely to last.

She says that, instead, we should "approach this historical moment with a keen sense of the limits that we confront."

We should place less faith in what can be achieved through force of arms, particularly given the obvious difficulties of building a decent post-war society in Iraq, and place more emphasis on diplomacy and democracy assistance.

Matthews says the Democrats have flubbed the challenge of coming up with a decent national security policy of their own.

She outlines what the elements of such a policy might be: reliance on alliances rather than short-term coalitions; building strong international institutions to deal with new global challenges; and a better balance in spending between diplomacy and force.

In her conclusion, Matthews addresses head-on the claim that President Bush's aggressive democracy promotion is a contemporary updating of the policies of Woodrow Wilson, the archetypal moral idealist in foreign policy.

Although Wilson believed in the promotion of democracy, Matthews points out, he also believed that America should be embedded "in international organizations and rules to which we were not an exception, but an integral part."

The Bush administration, by contrast, believes America should stand alone above the international community and be unconstrained.

Reading these three books together gives the clear impression that the relationship between values and national interest in foreign policy is more complex than it is often made out to be.

For instance, many people who abhor the cynical way that Kissinger looked at conflicts in Angola, Cambodia or East Pakistan might nevertheless be sympathetic to his claims that détente produced appreciable benefits like the Helsinki agreements of 1975.

The same people might also be profoundly opposed to the war in Iraq - a conflict that was promoted by officials who cut their teeth attacking Kissinger for his "value-free" approach to the Soviet Union in the 1970's.

In foreign policy debates - at least in democratic societies - there is never going to be one position that is agreed by all parties to be the "moral" one and another that is agreed to best represent the "national interest."

Instead, there are likely to be an interlocking series of arguments in which both parties claim the mantle of justice and strategic value for their favored course of action.

And in a democracy, it is the voters who will ultimately decide which group has made the better overall case.

Anthony Dworkin is editor of the Crimes of War website http://www.crimesofwar.org an online journal covering international law and armed conflict.

Very interesting collection of books and theories. But now that the cold war is over, the struggle is for...

ENERGY!!

And every now and then, a story such as this next one will "catch my eye", and so, I will "capture" it for inclusion in here, in this record which we are creating in here of LIFE in OUR America!

Does it have any meaning?

Too early to tell, but since it is a thing of interest, I am including it!

Strange times we live in, and this is a part of that "strangeness", and so:

Science - AP

"Scientists Puzzled No Tsunami After Quake"

Tue Mar 29,11:05 AM ET   

By JAYMES SONG, Associated Press Writer

EWA BEACH, Hawaii - Tsunami experts could not understand why Monday's forceful earthquake off Indonesia failed to produce massive waves similar to those generated by the Dec. 26 quake that killed at least 175,000 people in the same region.

A magnitude 8.7 quake shook Indonesia's west coast, killing hundreds of people and spreading panic that another devastating tsunami was on the way.

There was no tsunami, but a small wave was detected by a tide gauge on Cocos Island near Australia, about 1,500 miles south of the epicenter, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center on Oahu.

"I'm baffled an earthquake this size didn't trigger a tsunami near the epicenter," said Robert Cessaro, a geophysicist at the center, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It is responsible for monitoring seismic and ocean conditions in the Pacific and alerting Pacific Rim nations and U.S. agencies.

Center Director Charles McCreery said earthquakes of at least 8.0 magnitude usually generate major tsunamis.

"We expected some destructive tsunami with some distant destructive effects."

"It was surprising," he said.

The latest event also demonstrated "there's a whole world of uncertainty about trying to judge a tsunami based on the earthquake data," he said.

The warning center initially estimated the Dec. 26 earthquake to have a magnitude of 8.0, but it turned out to be larger, with a magnitude of 9.0.

Monday's preliminary estimate was magnitude 8.5 but had no destructive tsunami.

"The one we initially thought was bigger turns out to have no effect," McCreery said.

"The one we initially thought was smaller had a huge effect."

"This is the challenge of tsunami warning."

The warning center, established in 1949, came under heavy criticism following the December tsunami for not being more aggressive about warning Asian nations and possibly saving thousands of lives.

Earlier this month, a group of 58 European tsunami survivors and relatives of victims sued NOAA and other agencies, alleging the center did not do enough to warn people about the disaster.

"Although we certainly wish that somehow the event unfolded in a way that we could've done more for the region, we really did all we could under the circumstances," McCreery said.

Since then, several Indian Ocean nations have established communications with the center and are now on its alert list.

On Monday, the facility was able to alert those nations.

The Indian Ocean has no warning center similar to the one in Hawaii.
___

On the Net:

Pacific Tsunami Warning Center: http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/

This is an easy one: The epicenter was directly underneath the island and therefore the island absorbed the shock wave. The December quake was under the ocean, and the water took the shock, thus creating a tidal wave.

This post has been edited by jeffmoskin: Mar 30 2005, 11:29 AM

[Livyjr]

And here I am, just coming in the door, and I see that jeffmoskin has been here before me, and has left some comments for me to consider, and while I am doing that, let's update the IRAQ SITUATION!

Where do things over there stand right now?

World - Reuters

"Iraq's Leaders Seek Way Out of Deadlock on Govt."

Wed Mar 30, 7:48 AM ET

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's quarrelsome politicians went back to the drawing board Wednesday to try and form a government after failing even to appoint a speaker for a parliament that was elected fully two months ago.

Despite public assurances of progress, the failure to put a government in place showed the difficulty of forging political agreement in a country divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Some politicians are now talking of several more weeks before a cabinet may be named, leaving government in limbo at time when economic reconstruction and the struggle against insurgents are pressing priorities.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who walked out of a chaotic and inconclusive second sitting of the National Assembly Tuesday, remains in a strong position, nine months after being appointed under the U.S.-led occupation authorities.

The interim constitution, drawn up under U.S. occupation with U.N. assistance, requires a two-thirds majority in the 275-member parliament to name a three-strong presidential council, which will in turn appoint a prime minister.

This means that in order to form a government the mostly Shi'ite bloc strongly influenced by Islamists which won a narrow majority in the assembly must reach a deal with the main Kurdish coalition, which won 75 seats in the Jan. 30 election.

The Shi'ites and Kurds also have to try to accommodate Sunni Arabs, a minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein but has been left with little representation after most of them stayed away from the polls through intimidation or anger.

There are only 17 Sunni Arabs in parliament.

If Sunnis feel marginalized, however, support for the mostly Sunni insurgency against U.S. and new Iraqi forces could grow.

Sunnis could also thwart ratification of a constitution, which is due to be put to a referendum toward the end of the year and will require support in 16 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

After two months of talks, a joint declaration by the Shi'ite and Kurdish blocs on how to deal with contentious issues such as the status of the ethnically mixed northern oilfield city of Kirkuk has yet to be formally signed.

DIVISIONS

The two sides have also failed to agree on power sharing, and Sunni Arab lawmakers are furious that the Shi'ites and Kurds could end up with 22 out of 30 ministerial posts.

Many Sunni Arabs are annoyed that the Kurds would wield far more power than them, as a result of the failure of most Sunni Arabs to vote.

Kurds turned out in large numbers.

Both groups account for something like a fifth of the population.

To improve their negotiating position, most Sunni lawmakers, including interim President Ghazi al-Yawar, have allied with the 40-strong bloc of Prime Minister Allawi, a secular Shi'ite whose chances of retaining power in a new government are increasing the longer the Kurdish and Shi'ite blocs fail to agree.

The Sunni Arabs had wanted to retain the presidency but the Shi'ites and Kurds have agreed it should go to Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani.

Yawar has declined the position of parliament speaker and there is no agreement on an alternative.

Now Sunni lawmakers say they want Adnan al-Janabi, a Sunni member of Allawi's bloc, as speaker.

They have rejected an alternative Sunni candidate proposed by the Shi'ite alliance.

"The Kurds and Shi'ites cannot force a candidate upon us."

"They are paying the price of ignoring Allawi," said Sunni member of parliament Mishan al-Jibouri.

Although the Shi'ites and Kurds say they want a Sunni speaker to help provide balance, pressure is building within their own blocs to abandon attempts to reach a consensus and vote on a speaker by the next parliament session Sunday.

So far, the Kurds and Shi'ite leaders say they are intent on finding a Sunni Arab acceptable to all to fill the position, which will play a key role in overseeing the writing of a new constitution over the next few months.

Talks are also under way to see if Allawi's bloc will join a national unity government.

"Allawi played this brilliantly and we messed up," an official in one of the Shi'ite alliance parties said.

"Expect limbo for some time."

[Livyjr]

And here I am, returning from over in Mr. A.B.'s "Religion and Politics" thread, where I have been discussing Cyrus the Great as an example of a leader who was held out to be a GOOD LEADER, by the people of his times, which predate the birth of Christ by some 500 years, and the rise of Islam by some 1100 years or so, but interestingly, are somewhat coterminous with Buddha in India, and Lao Tze in China.

The topic over there in Mr. A.B.'s "Religion and Politics" thread is "George W. Bush vs. The Holy Bible", and in my one post on Cyrus the Great, an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Winner is quoting from Cyrus the Great, AND THE POINT IS that the people in the Middle East KNOW who Cyrus the Great is, and they, like me, would make an immediate comparison between George W. Bush and Cyrus the Great, IF OUR MINDS were drawn in that direction, AS THEY WERE THIS LAST ELECTION CYCLE, by Karl Rove's PROPAGANDA MACHINE!

And when that comparison is made, as it is being right now, the CONTRAST between George W. Bush and Cyrus the Great IS STARK!

IF Cyrus the Great was a GOOD RULER, and George W. Bush stands in stark contrast to Cyrus the Great, which he certainly does in my eyes, then what can be said for George W. Bush, BESIDES he is a very unpopular ruler?

Top Stories - USATODAY.com

"Bush approval slips to 45%, lowest of his presidency"

Fri Mar 25, 6:16 AM ET   

By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY

President Bush's approval rating has fallen to 45%, the lowest point of his presidency, according to a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.

The finding, in a poll of 1,001 adults Monday through Wednesday, is a dip from 52% in a poll taken last week.

Bush's previous lowest rating, 46%, was recorded last May.

The White House declined to comment.

end quotes

GEORGE, PLEASE RESIGN FOR THE GOOD OF AMERICA!

Thank you!

And speaking of George "DUBYA" Bush, and his own standing as an alleged "leader", among us, the American people right now today, where exactly is that standing, and how has it been "achieved"?

Let's look and see, shall we?

Top Stories - The Christian Science Monitor

""Bush faces decline in approval ratings"

Wed Mar 30, 3:00 AM ET

From Social Security to Terri Schiavo to sinking polls, Bush fights for public faith amid the perils of a second term.

By Linda Feldmann, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - If President Bush wants to lay blame for his slumping public support on immediate events, he has plenty of targets.

There's his brief intervention into the Terri Schiavo case, which a majority of Americans fault.

There's his inability thus far to make serious headway on Social Security reform, his top second-term priority.

And there's the economy, starting with rising gas and fuel prices and worries over inflation.

Bush advisers, while playing down the latest numbers, tend to fault the recent economic uncertainty.

Several major polls have shown Bush's job approval declining into the mid-40s, a drop of 5 to 7 points in just a week - in some cases, at or near an all-time low for his presidency.

The latest Gallup Poll also shows the highest public pessimism over the economy in two years, with 33 percent saying it is getting better and 59 percent saying it is getting worse.

Ultimately, though, it may just be that successful second terms for American presidents are historically difficult to pull off, and Bush is now bumping into that perception head on.

The politics of second terms are hard to avoid, even for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress.

Bush is not running for reelection, but most of his Republican brethren on Capitol Hill are - and they know that the president's party often suffers its greatest defeats in the second-term midterm elections.

"Members of the president's own party get very nervous, because they know the history and they worry that they're tying their ship to an unsteady anchor," says Darrell West, a Brown University political scientist.

"And of course, the opposition party is gunning for the next midterm elections, too, so they're generally not in a mood to cooperate."

What's behind perceptions of Bush

Bush has raised the stakes by laying out a self-consciously ambitious second-term agenda - not only to reconceptualize Social Security via voluntary partial privatization, but also to remake the tax system and spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

It is on that last point - most centrally, Iraq - that Bush's second term will likely be judged.

But even the progress in Iraq, starting with the holding of elections, hasn't provided the kind of polling dividends Bush might have expected.

In fact, it's possible that the perception of success and the spread of democracy in Iraq works against Bush in the way his father, the first President Bush, failed to turn his own success in the first Gulf War into victory come reelection time.

"Once he's no longer seen as a struggling wartime commander, the public focuses on more perhaps mundane matters, such as the price of gas," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council.

Bush also doesn't seem to be getting much of a bump from the successes of his new secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, whose latest Gallup Poll numbers (taken March 18-20) show a 61 percent approval rating.

It is also questionable whether the most popular person connected to the administration - first lady Laura Bush - could offer any reverse coattails for her husband.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Bush left on a surprise visit to Afghanistan to focus on educational initiatives for Afghan women and also meet with President Hamid Karzai and have dinner with US forces at Bagram Air Base.

Bush himself took to the Rose Garden Tuesday to deliver remarks on freedom and democracy, with an audience of Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans.

In general, Republican strategists say, Bush can help himself most by keeping his eye on the ball and sticking with his goals.

"You can't change your fundamental agenda, based on week-to-week variations in public opinion polls," says GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

"A real leader doesn't do that."

"A real leader sets some ambitious goals ... and has faith that if they are valuable goals to pursue, public opinion will come along."

After all, he and other Republicans say, the second term is only two months old and there is plenty of time to make progress on Social Security reform.

Mr. Ayres, who has polled on Social Security, says the president is correct in continuing to focus on educating the public about the problem.

The greater the understanding of two key facts - that the president's plan would not affect benefits for seniors and that participation in personal accounts would be voluntary - the greater the support for Bush's proposal.

On the other side

Among all the polling data, the silver lining for Bush and the GOP is that the Democratic leadership in Congress is just as unpopular as the Republican congressional leadership.

The latest Pew Research Center poll, released March 24, shows Bush's approval rating at 45 percent, the Republican leadership at 39 percent, and the Democratic leadership at 37 percent.

In fact, rank-and-file Democrats are less happy with their party leadership (56 percent) than are rank-and-file Republicans (76 percent), according to Pew.

So clearly, the Democrats cannot count on gaining from any Republican or presidential misfortune.

This generalized dissatisfaction with politicians is not unusual, says Jim Guth, a political scientist at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

"It isn't always a zero-sum game, where someone loses and someone else gains," says Professor Guth.

"Sometimes everyone loses."

"There's not an assumption among the public that if the president is doing badly, the Democrats must be doing something right."

"It's that Washington is not doing well, and that includes the Democrats."

In the Pew poll, Americans give Congress low marks for working across party lines: Only 18 percent say that's going well.

Only 23 percent say Congress is doing well at dealing with important issues, and only 23 percent say Congress is acting ethically.

The percentage who support Bush's goal of introducing personal accounts into Social Security has declined.

Now 44 percent approve of that idea, down from 46 percent last month and 54 percent in December.

On the administration's plan to allow oil- and gas-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 42 percent are supportive and 46 percent oppose, Pew says.

[jeffmoskin]

This means that in order to form a government the mostly Shi'ite bloc strongly influenced by Islamists which won a narrow majority in the assembly must reach a deal with the main Kurdish coalition, which won 75 seats in the Jan. 30 election.

And the Kurds KNOW that what they don't get in making a deal with the shi'ites RIGHT NOW they will NEVER GET LATER ON.

They want autonomy, which they can probably get, and they want the Kirkuk oilfield which is a problem because the Shi'ites need SOMETHING to offer the Sunnis when they join the government.

So it is an arm-wrestle situation.

We'll see who has the stronger arm.

My money is on the Kurds.

[Livyjr]

And speaking of George "DUBYA" Bush, and his own standing as an alleged "leader", among us, the American people right now today, where exactly is that standing, and how has it been "achieved"?

Let's look and see, shall we?

Top Stories - The Christian Science Monitor

""Bush faces decline in approval ratings"

Wed Mar 30, 3:00 AM ET   

From Social Security to Terri Schiavo to sinking polls, Bush fights for public faith amid the perils of a second term.

By Linda Feldmann, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - If President Bush wants to lay blame for his slumping public support on immediate events, he has plenty of targets.

Yes, he does!

Starting with himself!

"If you don't have any ambitions, the minimum-wage job isn't going to get you to where you want to get, for example!"

"In other words, what is your ambitions?"

"AND, oh, by the way, IF THAT IS YOUR AMBITION, here's what it's going to take to achieve it!"

- The "Not Very Popular These Days" George W. Bush in a speech written for him by some very high-priced indeed speechwriters, to students in Little Rock, Arkansas, on August 29, 2002!

[Livyjr]

And the Kurds KNOW that what they don't get in making a deal with the shi'ites RIGHT NOW they will NEVER GET LATER ON.

They want autonomy, which they can probably get, and they want the Kirkuk oilfield which is a problem because the Shi'ites need SOMETHING to offer the Sunnis when they join the government.

So it is an arm-wrestle situation.

We'll see who has the stronger arm.

My money is on the Kurds.

Top Stories - Knight Ridder Newspapers

"Sunnis' exclusion from political process stokes fears of civil war"

By Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - While American officials point to the bargaining among Shiite Muslim and Kurdish politicians over an interim Iraqi government as evidence that democracy is taking hold in Iraq, some Iraqi analysts and politicians are increasingly worried about the group that's missing from the equation: Sunni Muslims.

Almost two months after national elections, Iraq's Sunni minority remains fragmented and largely alienated from the horse-trading.

If that continues, the group that's long dominated Iraq could find itself shut out of December's prime ministerial election as it was on Jan. 30, when Sunnis won only a few seats in Iraq's new parliament.

Lawmakers had planned to meet this weekend to form a coalition government that's expected to be dominated by Shiites and Kurds, but the session was postponed at least until Tuesday.

On Sunday, Shiite and Kurdish leaders said that many of the key decisions about the new government had been made.

Both groups stand to receive most of the key positions - prime minister, president and the major cabinet posts - leaving the Sunnis further estranged.

Asked about Kurdish demands for 25 percent of the nation's oil revenues, Faraj al Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, said that the Kurds are entitled to a considerable stake of the country's wealth because of their suffering under former dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni.

"We have to take in consideration that Kurdistan has suffered a lot in the past and it has to get what it deserves now," he said.

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1991/h910425g.htm

BNL SUBPOENA RENEWAL

(House of Representatives - April 25, 1991)

[Page: H2547]

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Gonzalez] is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. GONZALEZ. Mr. Speaker, I take the floor today to deliver the third in a series of special orders related to the largest banking scandal in history--the events surrounding the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro scandal.

The BNL scandal is the sensational banking fraud in which the former employees of the BNL provided over $4 billion in loans to Iraq without reporting them to the appropriate State and Federal bank regulatory agencies or even to BNL's own U.S. management in New York or to their headquarters in Rome.

But the BNL scandal had implications far beyond the fact that the State and Federal bank regulatory agencies failed to properly supervise the operations of BNL.

During 1987-89 BNL was the No. 1 source of private Western bank loans to Iraq.

Because of Iraq's poor financial condition, Western banks would not loan money to Iraq without a government guarantee of repayment.

BNL filled the void left by Iraq's inability to borrow by providing over $3 billion in loans that were not guaranteed by Western governments.

About a third of that amount went for food and freight charges while a little over $2 billion was earmarked for the ambitious Iraqi reconstruction program.

We have learned that a good portion of those funds were actually used to upgrade Iraqi military capability.

BNL also provided almost $1 billion in United States Government guaranteed loans to Iraq.

Today I will talk about United States policy toward Iraq and several key people in the administration partly responsible for United States policy toward Iraq--Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger.

I will explore their backgrounds, their interlocking relationships and Henry Kissinger's and Mr. Eagleburger's relationship to BNL.

President Bush, as did his predecessor Ronald Reagan, placed a high value on improving United States-Iraq relations.

Both saw Iraq as an important United States ally in the region.

Iraq was considered an important player in the Middle East peace process, and a key to subduing the Islamic fundamentalist movement in Iran which was perceived as a threat to United States interests in the region.

United States policy makers also saw in Iraq a chance to snatch away a key Soviet ally in the gulf.

President Reagan and President Bush followed a similar course of action in pursuing improved United States-Iraq relations.

That course was increased trade.

Since the United States decided to give the appearance of neutrality in the Iraq-Iran war, it could not provide arms shipments to Iraq.

Given that decision, it was left little choice but to offer trade including U.S. high technology transfer as the cornerstone of its policy.

The majority of our Western allies followed our lead.

A foreign policy based on commercial trade had the advantage of providing Iraq with high quality food and United States technology to upgrade its military capability in order to defeat Iran.

It was also easy to sell back home because this policy benefited the American economy as well as some of the most powerful corporations in our country.

In order for this trade-based foreign policy to work, the United States had to ignore a few Iraqi bad habits including massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment, torture and execution of political prisoners, an almost complete lack of democracy, the use of poison gas against Iraq's own Kurds, the use of poison gas against the Iranians, state-sponsored terrorism, making refugees out of over 100,000 Kurds, the execution of a foreign journalist, continual debt servicing problems, rampant fraud in the CCC program, and the diversion of United States technology to improve Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capability and for many months BNL scandal.

This is an interesting one, indeed, jeffmoskin, and yes, I would have to take the Kurds very seriously, myself, and I do.

They are certainly very organized, from what I have read about them, and they seem to stress education of their young people as a means for the whole nation to improve itself, and thereby get ahead, and who can fault that philosophy?

Certainly not me!

And what about these following two statements, here, jeffmoskin, by the Kurds?

Asked about Kurdish demands for 25 percent of the nation's oil revenues, Faraj al Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, said that the Kurds are entitled to a considerable stake of the country's wealth because of their suffering under former dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni.

"We have to take in consideration that Kurdistan has suffered a lot in the past and it has to get what it deserves now," he said.

end quotes

Just think what might have been over there for both the Sunnis and the Kurds had people like George H. W. Bush, the father to this present one, not given material support to Saddam Hussein's "reign of terror" over there in Iraq, all those years ago!

Had George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld NOT GIVEN AID AND COMFORT and material support to Saddam Hussein and his alleged TAY-RIST government, in all likelihood, Kurdistan might not have suffered a lot in the past, and so, the Kurds today might not be looking for so much in REPARATIONS for this suffering by them that could have been caused in part by the material support given to Iraq by George H. W. Bush!

And had George H. W. Bush NOT GIVEN MATERIAL SUPPORT to Saddam Hussein back then, and by extension, to the Sunnis, who were Saddam's people, then perhaps the Sunnis would not be quite as disliked, or hated, as they are today, where George W. Bush is now giving material support to the Shiites who George H. W. Bush spurned, when he was president!

Boy, between these two Bush's, they sure can make quite a mess of things in this world of OURS, can't they?

[Livyjr]

And what about these following two statements, here, jeffmoskin, by the Kurds?

Asked about Kurdish demands for 25 percent of the nation's oil revenues, Faraj al Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, said that the Kurds are entitled to a considerable stake of the country's wealth because of their suffering under former dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni.

"We have to take in consideration that Kurdistan has suffered a lot in the past and it has to get what it deserves now," he said.

end quotes

Just think what might have been over there for both the Sunnis and the Kurds had people like George H. W. Bush, the father to this present one, not given material support to Saddam Hussein's "reign of terror" over there in Iraq, all those years ago!

Had George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld NOT GIVEN AID AND COMFORT and material support to Saddam Hussein and his alleged TAY-RIST government, in all likelihood, Kurdistan might not have suffered a lot in the past, and so, the Kurds today might not be looking for so much in REPARATIONS for this suffering by them that could have been caused in part by the material support given to Iraq by George H. W. Bush!

And had George H. W. Bush NOT GIVEN MATERIAL SUPPORT to Saddam Hussein back then, and by extension, to the Sunnis, who were Saddam's people, then perhaps the Sunnis would not be quite as disliked, or hated, as they are today, where George W. Bush is now giving material support to the Shiites who George H. W. Bush spurned, when he was president!

Boy, between these two Bush's, they sure can make quite a mess of things in this world of OURS, can't they?

Leaders who impose elaborate strategies on people cause social reactions that undermine the structure of the organization BECAUSE CLEVER STRATEGIES strike a resonant chord in people, and trigger their own cunning responses!

If leaders, instead, GUIDE the organization with simplicity and directness, the inherent cleverness of the people will be disarmed.

Simple and direct leadership is HIGHLY EFFECTIVE when it is intelligently aligned with the general trends in the environment!

FOR THAT REASON, it is essential for leaders to examine both the current patterns in society and the constant laws of nature!

- Commentaries on Tao Te Ching of Lao Tze by R. L. Wing

[Livyjr]

Leaders who impose elaborate strategies on people cause social reactions that undermine the structure of the organization BECAUSE CLEVER STRATEGIES strike a resonant chord in people, and trigger their own cunning responses!

If leaders, instead, GUIDE the organization with simplicity and directness, the inherent cleverness of the people will be disarmed.

- Commentaries on Tao Te Ching of Lao Tze by R. L. Wing

"They said, 'You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people'".

"And I said, you know something?"

"Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing what's the right thing, and what the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work!"

- George W. Bush, Portland, Oregon; October 31, 2000

[Livyjr]

"They said, 'You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people'".

"And I said, you know something?"

"Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing what's the right thing, and what the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work!"

- George W. Bush, Portland, Oregon; October 31, 2000

The question is really one of whether George should resignate, and I, for one, would be for that!

That is an idea that would certainly resonate with me, alright, George resignating, that is, and it would be damn good for OUR America to boot!

March 28, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

"Is No One Accountable?" By BOB HERBERT

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging.

But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one.

People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process.

No charges.

No lawyers.

No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations.

He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box.

He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali's story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government investigators.

If you pay close attention to what is already known about the sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to wonder how far we've come from the Middle Ages.

The alleged heretics hauled before the Inquisition were not permitted to face their accusers or mount a defense.

Innocence was irrelevant.

Torture was the preferred method of obtaining confessions.

No charges were ever filed against Mr. Ali, and he was eventually released.

But what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country's precipitous and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

The lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, a New York-based group, on behalf of Mr. Ali and seven other former detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who claim to have been tortured by U.S. personnel.

The suit charges that Mr. Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody.

It contends that the abuse of detainees was widespread and that Mr. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were well aware of it.

According to the suit, it is unreasonable to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld could have remained in the dark about the rampant mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.

It cites a wealth of evidence readily available to the secretary, including the scandalous eruptions at Abu Ghraib prison, the reports of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, myriad newspaper and magazine articles, internal U.S. government reports, and concerns expressed by such reputable groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(The committee has noted, among other things, that military intelligence estimates suggest that 70 percent to 90 percent of the people detained in Iraq had been seized by mistake.)

Whether this suit will ultimately be successful in holding Mr. Rumsfeld personally accountable is questionable.

But if it is thoroughly argued in the courts, it will raise yet another curtain on the stomach-turning practices that have shamed the United States in the eyes of the world.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law.

"It's that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First.

"The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law."

"That needs to be challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States.

Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

[Livyjr]

The question is really one of whether George should resignate, and I, for one, would be for that!

That is an idea that would certainly resonate with me, alright, George resignating, that is, and it would be damn good for OUR America to boot!

March 28, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

"Is No One Accountable?" By BOB HERBERT

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging.

But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one.

People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process.

No charges.

No lawyers.

No appeals.

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States.

Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States.

Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

Boy, and can it ever!

"Expert: Malnutrition Affects Iraq Kids"

Wed Mar 30,12:45 PM ET

By JONATHAN FOWLER, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA - Malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis has almost doubled since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a hunger specialist told the U.N. human rights body Wednesday in a summary of previously reported studies on health in Iraq.

By last fall, 7.7 percent of Iraqi children under 5 suffered acute malnutrition, compared to 4 percent after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food.

Malnutrition, which is exacerbated by a lack of clean water and adequate sanitation, is a major killer of children in poor countries.

Children who survive are usually physically and mentally impaired for life, and are more vulnerable to disease.

The situation facing Iraqi youngsters is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," said Ziegler, an outspoken Swiss sociology professor and former lawmaker whose previous targets have included Swiss banks, China, Brazil and Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Overall, more than a quarter of Iraqi children don't get enough to eat, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, which is halfway through its annual six-week session.

The U.S. delegation and other coalition countries declined to respond to his presentation, which compiled the findings of studies conducted by other specialists.

In reporting the 7.7 percent malnutrition rate for Iraqi youngsters, the Norwegian-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science said in November that the figure was similar to the levels in some African countries.

Iraq was generally regarded as having good nutrition rates in the 1970s and 1980s, but problems emerged when the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The United Nations later began an oil-for-food program, which allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicine.

That was credited with nearly doubling the Iraqi population's annual food intake and halving malnutrition among children.

Ziegler did not mention the role of Iraq's insurgency in the nutrition problem, something often cited by aid groups.

Late last year, Carol Bellamy, head of UNICEF, said the violence hampers the delivery of adequate supplies of food.

Ziegler also cited an October 2004 U.S. study that estimated as many as 100,000 more Iraqis — many of them women and children — had died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would normally have died, based on the death rate before the war.

"Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels," he said.

The authors of the report in the British-based medical journal The Lancet — researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad — conceded their data were of "limited precision."

Ziegler also told the commission he was concerned about hunger in North Korea, Palestinian areas, Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region, Zimbabwe, India, Myanmar, the Philippines and Romania.

Worldwide, he said, more than 17,000 children under 5 die daily from hunger-related diseases.

"The silent daily massacre by hunger is a form of murder," Ziegler said.

"It must be battled and eliminated."

end quotes

EXCEPT ....

In that battle, there would be NO BIG BUCKS to be made, and so, that battle is not fought!

[Livyjr]

And overheard on the internet:

At one Army base, the annual trip to the rifle range had been canceled for the second year in a row, but the semi-annual physical fitness test was still on as planned.

One soldier mused, "Does it bother anyone else that the Army doesn't seem to care how well we can shoot, but they are extremely interested in how fast we can run?

[jeffmoskin]

This is an interesting one, indeed, jeffmoskin, and yes, I would have to take the Kurds very seriously, myself, and I do.

They are certainly very organized, from what I have read about them, and they seem to stress education of their young people as a means for the whole nation to improve itself, and thereby get ahead, and who can fault that philosophy?

Certainly not me!

And what about these following two statements, here, jeffmoskin, by the Kurds?

Asked about Kurdish demands for 25 percent of the nation's oil revenues, Faraj al Haidari, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, said that the Kurds are entitled to a considerable stake of the country's wealth because of their suffering under former dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni.

"We have to take in consideration that Kurdistan has suffered a lot in the past and it has to get what it deserves now," he said.

end quotes

Just think what might have been over there for both the Sunnis and the Kurds had people like George H. W. Bush, the father to this present one, not given material support to Saddam Hussein's "reign of terror" over there in Iraq, all those years ago!

Had George H. W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld NOT GIVEN AID AND COMFORT and material support to Saddam Hussein and his alleged TAY-RIST government, in all likelihood, Kurdistan might not have suffered a lot in the past, and so, the Kurds today might not be looking for so much in REPARATIONS for this suffering by them that could have been caused in part by the material support given to Iraq by George H. W. Bush!

And had George H. W. Bush NOT GIVEN MATERIAL SUPPORT to Saddam Hussein back then, and by extension, to the Sunnis, who were Saddam's people, then perhaps the Sunnis would not be quite as disliked, or hated, as they are today, where George W. Bush is now giving material support to the Shiites who George H. W. Bush spurned, when he was president!

Boy, between these two Bush's, they sure can make quite a mess of things in this world of OURS, can't they?

The Kurds were actually promised a "Kurdistan" by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. But when all was said and done, the French and Brits created the map we have today and there is no Kurdistan. I think the Turks had something to do with shafting the Kurds. Their peoples overlap regions of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

And yes, those Bushies can sure do a lot of damage.

But hey, as our Governator would say, "It's nothing PERSONAL."

It's the oil, stupid.

[Livyjr]

And here is an interesting story from OUR America that just came in over the "wire":

U.S. National - AP

"Armed Volunteers Plan to Patrol Border"

Wed Mar 30, 4:14 PM ET U.S. National - AP

By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN, Associated Press Writer

TOMBSTONE, Ariz. - Hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, are expected to take up positions along the Mexican border Friday and begin patrolling for illegal immigrants — an exercise some fear could attract racist crackpots and lead to vigilante violence.

Organizers of the Minuteman Project said the civilian volunteers, many of whom were recruited over the Internet, will meet first for a rally in this one-time silver mining town, then fan out across 23 miles of the San Pedro Valley to watch the border for a month and report sightings of illegal activity to Border Patrol agents.

Minuteman field operations director Chris Simcox described the project as "the nation's largest neighborhood watch group" and said one of the goals is to make the public aware of how porous the border is.

Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant from Aliso Viejo, Calif., who organized the project, said that some volunteers will carry handguns, which is allowed under Arizona law, but are being instructed to avoid confrontation, even if shot at.

Still, law enforcement officials and human rights advocates are worried about the potential for bloodshed.

Critics contend the project may attract anti-immigrant racists and vigilantes looking to confront illegal immigrants.

At least one white supremacist group has mentioned the project on its Web site.

"They are domestic terrorists that represent a danger to the country and could promote a major border conflict that will have serious ramifications and consequences," said Armando Navarro, a University of California-Riverside political science professor and coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights, made up mostly of Hispanic activists.

Michael Nicley, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, said the volunteers are "not the kind of help the Border Patrol is asking for."

Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever said he fears immigrant smugglers might open fire on the volunteers.

"I wouldn't anticipate that people of that persuasion would act or react any differently to anybody, citizen or law enforcement alike, if they were confronted and felt like their cargo was in jeopardy," he said.

The project's organizers gave assurances the volunteers will be closely monitored.

"If it gets to a situation where someone's life is in danger," said David Helppler, Minuteman security coordinator, "I will end the project."

Project organizers said they expect 800 to 1,000 volunteers.

How many might actually show is unclear; similar efforts in the past few years flopped.

One of them drew only about a half-dozen people.

On Wednesday, the Homeland Security Department announced that it is assigning 534 additional agents to the porous Arizona border to help keep out potential terrorists and illegal immigrants.

The 370-mile Arizona border is considered the most vulnerable stretch of the 2,000-mile southern border.

Of the 1.1 million illegal immigrants caught by the Border Patrol last year, 51 percent crossed into the country at the Arizona border.

Some people in this town nearly 30 miles north of the Mexican border, best known as the site of the 1881 shootout at the OK Corral, are eagerly awaiting the volunteers' arrival.

Tombstone Mayor Andree De Journett thinks of the volunteers as tourists and said they could boost the local economy.

"I've met five or six of them, they haven't been too bad so far," he said, estimating that 500 extra visitors staying for a month could spend $10,000 or more locally per day.

Marilynn Slade, Tombstone's city clerk, said the more attention drawn to illegal immigration, the better.

"The vast majority of the people feel that the feds should be dealing more aggressively with the problem," she said.

"There's a huge, huge cry down here."
___

On the Net:

Minuteman Project: http://www.minutemanproject.com

U.S. Customs and Border Protection: http://www.cbp.gov

[Livyjr]

CounterPunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html

November 1, 2002

"Exposing Karl Rove"

by WAYNE MADSEN

He's America's Joseph Goebbels.

As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush.

Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage.

From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.

Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

And before I must leave here once again, I wanted to "close the loop" as it were, with respect to this reference above of Karl Rove as America's Joseph Goebbels!

Who was Goebbels, and why should it matter to us that Karl Rove might be OUR re-incarnation of him?

Let's look and see:

Joseph Goebbels
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http:www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels (October 29, 1897 – May 1, 1945) was Adolf Hitler's Propaganda Minister (see Propagandaministerium) in Nazi Germany.

He was a prominent figure of the regime, known for his great rhetorical skills.

He was born to the accountant Friedrich Goebbels and his wife Marian (née Oldenhausen) in Rheydt (now Mönchengladbach) in a Catholic area in the Rhineland.

Because of a club foot he was rejected when he volunteered for military service at the beginning of World War I.

After earning a Ph.D from the University of Heidelberg in 1921, he worked as a journalist and wrote some literature.

Joining the Nazi Party in 1924 (his later statement to have joined the party in 1922 belongs to his early lies), he initially opposed Hitler's leadership, but later changed sides to support him.

His diary shows many instances of great admiration for Hitler.

He played a large role in helping the Nazis achieve and retain power by creating propaganda to present the Nazi ideology to the German people in a favourable light.

He was also a committed anti-Semite, being involved with Kristallnacht in 1938, and later connected with the Nazi Final Solution, especially the deportation of Jews from Berlin.

On February 18, 1943, he delivered the Sportpalast speech, or Total War speech, a prominent speech to motivate the German people to continue the struggle when the tide of World War II was turning against Germany.

During the final stages of the war, before his suicide, Hitler appointed Goebbels Chancellor of Germany in his will (with Karl Dönitz as President—the Führer title was not granted in the will).

His government, which only ended up lasting a few hours, was not recognised by the Allied powers.

On May 1, 1945, Goebbels and his wife killed themselves with the help of SS bodyguards, as well as their six children whom they had given names starting with an 'H' from Hitler:

Like Hitler's final moments, the details of the death of the Goebbels family remain unclear.

While it is assumed that they were all poisoned with cyanide, some contend that he shot his wife Magda Goebbels and himself afterwards; however, when their bodies were found by the Soviets, they were apparently too charred to discern whether this was true.

Goebbels' technique is the name given to the policy of repeating a lie until it is taken to be the truth.

For example when Goebbel took ownership of the "Der Angriff" newspaper he attacked a man called Weiss calling him Isidor Weiss.

Isidor is to German ears an insulting name with strong anti-Jewish connotation.

This was done to such an extent that the public believed Isidor to be his real name and he became a figure of fun and ridicule.

Goebbels in popular culture

In popular culture Goebbels is often seen as the personification of misleading, harmful propaganda.

In George Orwell's "Animal Farm", the pig named Squealer is quite possibly intended to be a direct analog of Goebbels.

Squealer consistently and skillfully misleads the animals of the farm as to the true nature of the corrupt pigs' activities through propaganda and rhetoric.

end quotes

SO?

Squealer!

Karl Rove?

[Livyjr]

This morning, I was listening to the local news on the radio, and they were interviewing local police chiefs and fire chiefs around the area as to the impact that the rising cost of fuel was going to have on them, since they must operate on a fixed budget, unlike George W. Bush, who can simply manipulate here and there, since he is not at all accountable to anyone for anything, and especially fiscal responsibility.

As I listened to these people speaking about the impact of rising fuel prices on their operations, which are directly related to public health and safety in the local communities, it came back home to me one more time exactly how out of touch with the lives of people and communities in OUR America, Washington, D$C$ really is.

For them down there, nothing at all seems to matter.

The law certainly doesn't anyway, and when the law itself becomes a joke, then all else rapidly goes with it, such as stability in OUR local communities, which is where we all must live, BUT NOT THE POLITICIANS!

POLITICIANS live in "cloud-cuckoo land", or maybe, "Never-Never Land", where they are "never, never" without, because of their ability to just keep on taking, and taking, and taking, from us, who, because of them, and their $GREED$, will never, never have enough for OUR communities, for basic things like fire and police protection.

And so, this next story comes as no surprise to me, and I would be surprised if anyone, outside of George W. Bush and the POLITICIANS of both stripes down there in "out-of-touch-with-reality" Washington, D$C$, was surprised, as well.

Like a dog's tail follows the dog wherever the dog goes, so too does "inflation" follow rising prices for raw materials and energy, and you would have thought those "smart boys" down there in "out-of-touch-with-reality" Washington, D$C$ would have factored that into the "equation" BEFORE they went out and created all of this unrest and uncertainty in OUR world which is in part spurring the rapidly rising cost of energy in this country.

OR DID THEY?

Top Stories - Knight Ridder Newspapers

"High oil prices spur broader fears of inflation"

Wed Mar 30, 5:48 PM ET

By Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers

SHADY SIDE, Md. - Soaring fuel costs, rising interest rates and creeping retail prices are hitting American pocketbooks in a combination unseen since the early '80s.

Inflation isn't surging anywhere near the 13.5 percent peak of 1980, but it's rising worrisomely as the economy suffers many strains, with a common root in global competition.

Oil prices grab the headlines, but prices for raw materials such as steel and even meat are rising too.

Growing global demand is to blame.

China, India and Brazil - emerging economies expanding fast - are competing with U.S. business for raw materials, driving up their prices.

Oysterman Don Sheckells feels the inflationary pinch of high fuel prices, which are driving many Maryland watermen to other jobs.

He's one of the few still in Shady Side, working the Chesapeake Bay as he has since 1972.

Disease has ravaged the oysters and cut their harvests, and the jump in marine-fuel costs hit Sheckells hard.

"It used to be 80 or 90 cents a gallon" less than 10 years ago - adjusted for inflation, 85 cents in 1997 would be a bit over $1 today - "but now it's double that," said Sheckells, bracing for $2.00 or more per gallon at his next fill-up.

"It's going to hurt."

When prices of goods and services rise, that's inflation.

Oil prices are now inflation's biggest driver: They reached $57 a barrel earlier this month before tapering off to around $54 this week.

Higher oil prices raise operating costs and eat into the profits of fuel-dependent businesses such as airlines, cruise ships and package-delivery firms, not to mention anyone who drives.

The costs of other raw materials are soaring too.

This month, prices of core intermediate goods - semi-finished goods, such as the nylon used to make a tent - are rising at an annual pace above 8 percent, the Labor Department reported.

That's the fastest in 20 years.

Prices on finished goods rose at a much slower pace: 2.8 percent, still the fastest since 1992.

To quell inflation, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates.

Higher interest rates tend to reduce purchases of homes, cars and other big-ticket items.

That eventually takes the steam out of inflation - and sometimes out of the economy.

If the Fed slows things too much, that can tip the economy into recession, as it has several times in the past 50 years.

Sometimes that's the only way to stop inflation.

When commodity prices began rising last year, many businesses ate the costs and tried to offset them by working more efficiently or cutting back elsewhere.

Now they're starting to pass them on to clients in the form of higher prices.

That means prices are rising throughout the manufacturing chain, and the results eventually show up on store shelves.

"This suggests some further pass-through into higher consumer prices will occur in the months ahead," warns investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York.

Miami-based Carnival Corp., the giant cruise-ship line, anticipates a 23 percent increase in fuel costs this year.

United Parcel Service operates more than 500 planes and 88,000 delivery vehicles.

It tries to control costs by purchasing fuel in bulk.

Last year those costs exceeded $1.4 billion.

With oil prices spiraling, UPS imposed a fuel surcharge March 7 to pass along some of the higher cost to consumers.

Higher oil prices hit manufacturing, too.

PPG Industries of Pittsburgh makes brand-name retail paints such as Olympic, Lucite and Pittsburgh.

On March 15 it announced price increases to defray "the rapid escalation of raw-material costs."

Petrochemicals are used to make paint.

When oil prices go up, paint gets more expensive.

PPG spokesman Jeff Worden said that in the first three months of this year, the company's raw-material costs rose by $50 million.

The Polymer Group of North Charleston, S.C., makes textiles that are used in doctors' scrubs and disposable diapers for consumer-product giants such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble.

Its products contain polyester and polypropylene, both of which come from petroleum.

"We haven't passed on 100 percent" of the cost increases, said Dennis Norman, the company's vice president of strategic planning.

"We're doing everything we can to mitigate the cost increases to customers."

Higher steel prices are making Whirlpool washing machines and Caterpillar tractors more costly.

Higher global meat prices forced Bruce Rohde, the chairman of Con-Agra Foods Inc. in Omaha, Neb., to announce aggressive price increases for lunch meats.

Con-Agra owns brands such as Armour hot dogs, Butterball turkeys and Hebrew National lunch meats.

To clamp a lid on this incipient inflation, the Fed has increased short-term interest rates seven times since last June.

At its most recent move, on March 22, it noted that "pressures on inflation have picked up in recent months" and signaled that more aggressive rate increases may be necessary.

A day later, the Labor Department reported that the consumer price index had shot up by an unexpectedly robust 0.4 percent in February.

The Fed is trying to ease off the gas instead of stepping on the brakes, but getting the balance right is tricky.

If it raises interest rates too far, that could threaten the hot housing market.

Home prices have risen more than 40 percent over the past four years in many metropolitan areas.

Many economists think they're going up largely on expectations of even higher prices rather than economic fundamentals, making home prices a speculative financial bubble that could burst.

Mortgage interest rates tend to rise with Fed rate increases.

If they go high enough, buyers may dwindle and home prices could fall.

That could lead to defaults on mortgages and bankruptcies.

The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage climbed to 6.01 percent this week, compared with 5.40 in the same week of March 2004.

Today's rates remain historically low, but some analysts think there's a psychological barrier at 7 percent, since the 30-year rate has been under that since March 2002, and under 8 percent since August 2000.

Exceed those numbers and buyers may disappear.

Waitress Sandra Howes has had her home near Annapolis on the market since December.

She greets rising mortgage rates with a brave face.

"Maybe they'll help sell my house more quickly," she reasoned between customers at the Double T, an old-fashioned diner.

She hopes someone will snap it up soon to stay ahead of rising borrowing costs.

So far, consumers appear only a little worried about rising prices and interest rates.

The Consumer Confidence Index dipped only slightly for March.

It's published monthly by The Conference Board, a private business-research center.

"We haven't seen much of a drawback on spending."

"It would really depend on how high and how long; I think duration is important here," said Lynn Franco, a Conference Board economist.

"So far, we've seen consumers at least weathering the hikes well."

The test is how far rates have to rise.

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who's balanced these risks since 1987, knows the danger.

As economist Ed Yardeni noted this week:

"The Fed chairman retires on February 1, 2006."

"He certainly doesn't want to burst the housing bubble now and push the economy into a consumer-led recession."

[Livyjr]

March 28, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

"Is No One Accountable?" By BOB HERBERT

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging.

But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one.

People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process.

No charges.

No lawyers.

No appeals.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law.

"It's that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First.

"The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law."

"That needs to be challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States.

Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

As I listened to these people speaking about the impact of rising fuel prices on their operations, which are directly related to public health and safety in the local communities, it came back home to me one more time exactly how out of touch with the lives of people and communities in OUR America, Washington, D$C$ really is.

For them down there, nothing at all seems to matter.

The law certainly doesn't anyway, and when the law itself becomes a joke, then all else rapidly goes with it, such as stability in OUR local communities, which is where we all must live, BUT NOT THE POLITICIANS!

POLITICIANS live in "cloud-cuckoo land", or maybe, "Never-Never Land", where they are "never, never" without, because of their ability to just keep on taking, and taking, and taking, from us, who, because of them, and their $GREED$, will never, never have enough for OUR communities, for basic things like fire and police protection.

And speaking of the "law", and being "out-of-touch" with it down there in Washington, D$C$:

"Justice deprived"

The Bush administration should act upon the second thoughts about military tribunals

Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The notion that foreign terrorism suspects should be prosecuted by military tribunals has its origin in the rash thinking that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What was a bad but perhaps understandable idea then, that suspects on trial at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba weren't entitled to the same rights as defendants tried in U.S. criminal courts or soldiers facing courts-martial, is an indefensible one now.

So much so that the Defense Department is seriously reconsidering the policy, at the urging of military lawyers.

More rights for Guantanamo Bay defendants, and a ban on confessions obtained through torture, are possible after all.

Same goes for the right to hear and contest evidence against them.

Possible, that is, after more than three years of unrelenting protests by federal courts, foreign governments and human rights groups.

It's that first rank of dissent, of course, that is most significant.

A ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington last November put an appropriate stop to one of the first such tribunals, one considering the case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former aide to Osama bin Laden.

Judge Robertson sensibly ruled that even the likes of Mr. Hamdan should have hearings to determine if they are entitled to prisoner-of-war status, which requires a court martial, rather than a military tribunal, under the Geneva Conventions.

The very establishment of the tribunals, the judge said, amounted to improperly bypassing Congress.

Only the objections of Judge Robertson, or any other critic of military tribunals, don't necessarily prevail in the end.

Changing the way Guantanamo Bay detainees are prosecuted is instead the source of an internal White House battle.

Among those resisting new rules is Vice President Dick Cheney.

As Mr. Cheney's counsel, David Addington, put it in a recent meeting of Bush administration officials, according to a New York Times account, "We don't need any changes in the commissions."

But even military courts-martial, the standard wisely advocated for foreign terrorism suspects, have guarantees against self-incrimination and ensure the right to a prompt trial.

By now, the Bush administration should be able, as a matter of consensus, to accept such simple mechanics of justice.

An order signed by Mr. Bush on Nov. 13, 2001, promising that the tribunals would be "full and fair" has come to speak for itself.

That "justice delayed is justice denied," as Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes most famously repeated, of course occupies a central place in the American legal system.

So what might be said of a justice that's not just delayed, but rather simply deprived?

[Livyjr]

And since this story just came in on the "wire", and since it is directly relevant to this IRAQ SITUATION that we are monitoring in here, I will include it for the record right now, instead of dealing with some "housekeeping" matters, such as "JUSTICE DEPRIVED", here in OUR America, and some comments jeffmoskin made above on the "cold war" allegedly being over:

Top Stories - Chicago Tribune

"U.S. stays out of new Iraq's political wars"

28 minutes ago

By Colin McMahon Tribune foreign correspondent

In the hours before the National Assembly opened for business, Iraqi political leaders desperate to find a suitable candidate for the speaker's post asked American diplomats to help twist arms and broker a deal.

The Americans declined, a U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

And Tuesday afternoon, during only its second session, the Transitional National Assembly collapsed into rancor and retreated into secrecy.

Some deputies were irate.

Others were embarrassed.

A few spoke of a political crisis.

But by Wednesday, American officials were treating the setback as a "bump in the road" and insisting that Iraq's march to democracy is unbroken.

"I expect there will be more hiccups like this," said the U.S. diplomat, outlining why the Americans are sticking to a limited role in a process that has dragged on far longer than anyone predicted.

"This is tough for [the Iraqis]."

"This is not part of their historical culture."

The National Assembly is to meet again Sunday.

If the various factions of Shiite Muslims, Kurds and Sunnis can agree on a candidate for speaker, the parliament is expected to appoint one then.

With that done, the assembly could elect the Iraqi president and vice presidents.

Next to come would be a prime minister and a Cabinet.

But few officials want to predict when all those steps would take place.

The Shiites and Kurds who control most of the seats in the assembly have been promising a deal for weeks.

Yet two months after the Jan. 30 elections that energized large parts of Iraq, the nation is still limping along without a government.

Whatever the deal is and whenever it is concluded, U.S. officials say it will come with little American intervention, but not for a lack of concern.

U.S. military and civilian officials acknowledge that the longer Iraq goes without a government, and the deeper the sense of instability, the more insurgents trying to derail the political process will benefit.

Insurgent attacks have dropped in March compared with the past several months, but officials warn that the guerrillas are still capable of numerous small operations and the occasional spectacular one.

Car bomb kills 1 at school

On Wednesday a car bomb outside a primary school in the town of Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad killed a guard.

Insurgents also targeted Shiite pilgrims traveling to Karbala for the religious festival of Arbaeen on Thursday.

At least 10 people were wounded in two attacks, news services reported.

Television channel Al Jazeera also broadcast a tape showing three Romanian journalists who were reported kidnapped Monday.

The three and a fourth unidentified person were seated on the ground in a room while two men, their faces hidden by scarves, trained guns on them, The Associated Press reported.

A land mine also killed a U.S. Marine near the Syrian border, the military said.

The U.S. diplomat who spoke Wednesday on condition of anonymity warned that significant delays would cost Iraq the momentum it gained from the Jan. 30 elections.

If the National Assembly fails to write a new constitution by mid-August, the parliament could invoke a clause in the transitional law giving members six more months to work.

That would push back a national referendum on the constitution, which is supposed to come before mid-October.

It also would push back national elections for a permanent government, which are to be held by year's end.

It would also delay the cause of democracy, the diplomat said.

"Elections generate their own positive momentum," he said.

"This is not the time to slow down."

"The best way to undercut the insurgency and build credibility on the street is to maintain momentum."

But so far, advising and consulting are as far as the Americans say they will step into the process.

Wary of any deal that could be slapped with a "Made in the USA" sticker, U.S. officials are neither dictating terms nor pushing personalities, they say.

"We are not suggesting names for jobs," the diplomat said.

"We are not suggesting numbers for particular parties or lists or factions within the Cabinet.

"Those kinds of tough political compromises have to be made by Iraqis . . . because those compromises have to stick."

Allawi reportedly disappointed

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was reportedly disappointed the United States did not push for him as a compromise transitional prime minister, according to sources in the Sunni political community.

At various times the Kurds and the Shiites have come to the Americans with complaints during their long negotiations over how a new government would work and who would run it.

But generally, Iraqi politicians have advanced the argument that any deal or any government too closely associated with the U.S. would lack credibility among many Iraqis.

"The Americans agree to help us, and we appreciate that, but they have not interfered, and we do not want interference," said Ali al-Dabbagh, a member of the Shiite alliance that dominates the National Assembly.

"They know that applying pressure would destroy the whole process."

The U.S. diplomat declined to speculate on how long a delay is too long, how much instability is too much and when the Americans might feel compelled to step in more aggressively.

"Whatever agreement is ultimately reached, the Iraqis have to abide by it," the diplomat said.

"If it is imposed from the outside it will be only too easy for people to say, `It was forced on me, and I now refuse to abide by it.'"

[jeffmoskin]

"U.S. stays out of new Iraq's political wars"


"Whatever agreement is ultimately reached, the Iraqis have to abide by it," the diplomat said.

"If it is imposed from the outside it will be only too easy for people to say, `It was forced on me, and I now refuse to abide by it.'"

Who says we even care?

We came to secure the OIL.

We did.

We will wait. If they have a civil war, so be it. We'll sell weapons to both sides.

May God and the world forgive our formerly peace-loving nation for the egregious sins of these mad men.