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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 9/18/2003 5:17 AM (GMT -6) |   | Related article:
"BUSH ADMITS 'NO EVIDENCE' LINKS SADDAM HUSSEIN TO 9/11 ATTACKS
http://www.christusvictorministries.org/gbfront/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2604
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/20/2003 6:03 AM (GMT -6) | | Taken from the NewHour today.
dlw
Strong criticism against Mr. Bush's Iraq policy
JIM LEHRER: Two big Democrats, Senator Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Congressman John Murtha (D-Pa.), came out really harsh against President Bush and his Iraq policy, particularly prewar. What's going on there?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jack Murtha, Jim, I mean, most politicians, to use a botanist term, are like heliotropic plants: They turn to the sun, the sun being the microphone, the camera, the reporter.
Murtha is a nonheliotropic politician. He avoids the press. The only reporter he talks to on a regular basis is David Rodgers of The Wall Street Journal for very personal reasons: Rodgers was a conscientious objector in Vietnam who became a combat medic. Jack Murtha, as a 33-year-old former Marine who joined the Marines in Korea, went back and fought in Vietnam for a year. He's that kind of a guy where he got two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Came back, gets elected to the House, first Vietnam veteran. And he's a guy that is probably one of the most handful of respected, influential, knowledgeable members of the House of Representatives and a guy who avoids press coverage.
JIM LEHRER: So what's he doing here...?
MARK SHIELDS: So he comes out and he takes on -- having supported the first President Bush in the Gulf War and having supported with some reservations this President Bush on the war with the Persian Gulf --and says, "we were misinformed, we were misled."
He just came back from Iraq. I did talk to him. He was outraged by he said the 35,000 American troops over there without Kevlar inserts in their jackets in a shooting gallery -- those are the protection that they get -- outraged by the fact that our equipment is inadequate, outraged that he said you've got a very short window. And he thinks that accountability must be imposed and basically he walked right up to the edge of saying, Paul Wolfowitz's head is on the block.
JIM LEHRER: What do you think about this, Bill? Is this important?
WILLIAM SAFIRE: I think this is part of the general thrust toward "you lied to us and we should never have gone into this war, and we're spending too much money and lives and everything over there and come home, America" -- the old George McGovern isolationist pitch.
I don't think it'll fly. I think the president did not lie to us. I think there was sufficient intelligence, just as the British inquiry sort of exonerated Blair recently, that he did not deliberately mislead the British public.
And what we have here is an opportunity to change the score in the Middle East. And it'll be fought on that basis, and you'll have your leftists saying we should never have gone into this and we want to come home. And you'll have your conservatives and I think people in the middle saying we've got to finish this, and if we finish this, we'll not only defend America, we'll do something for democracy in the world.
JIM LEHRER: But you don't believe, whatever your view of it is, you don't believe this has any political traction at all? Senator Kennedy called the prewar thing a fraud, accused the president of actually practicing... you don't think this has traction politically?
WILLIAM SAFIRE: I think quite frankly, the notion of surrender and bring our men back and admit defeat, which is essentially what Kennedy is saying, I don't think that'll fly at all.
JIM LEHRER: Mark?
MARK SHIELDS: I could not disagree... I mean to call Jack Murtha a leftist is really a stretch of hyperbole that even a New York Times columnist might consider humbling.
WILLIAM SAFIRE: I was calling Kennedy a leftist.
MARK SHIELDS: Okay. Jim, the point he makes, that Murtha made and made very, very strongly is that there was misinformation -- that the weapons aren't there, there was no imminent threat. And he was particularly outraged that the treatment of the American troops being put in harm's way. But also, as he called General Shinseki, who said that we needed several hundred thousand troops there, 200,000, he said, being trashed -- of General Zinni, the Marine and Four-Star General who raised questions, serious question about this, being called unpatriotic by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. I think this is the beginning of something very real. Doubts, you can see the Republicans on the Hill growing quite nervous. At the same time, it's not simply a Democratic case, they're moving out of the Defense Department shall having the State Department take over, the pacification, occupation of...
JIM LEHRER: You see this as pure partisan politics today? What about General Zinni and General Shinseki and what Mark said about Murtha? You I think it's still very partisan?
WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, on Shinseki, he said there should be several hundred thousands troops. I read the word 'several' to mean three, like few. And we're not going to have any 300,000 American troops in Iraq. We have half that many now, and we're not going to have many more.
So I think he was, as Wolfowitz said, way off the charts, out of the... out of line. I think quite frankly, we're seeing a turn, we're seeing not too good coverage of the turn, but look at what's happening with the Governing Council of Iraq the ones we appointed. The Arab League decided to get realistic and accepted them in Iraq's seat. Next week, the foreign minister of that group that we appointed will be seated, I bet, at the U.N. That's real progress. We're moving toward the Iraqification of the governing of Iraq. It may take years, but what we're doing there is what we did in Japan and Germany, and we can do it there and I think do it effectively.
dlw:seems like the key word people are using today is misinformation and that there are some serious issues regarding how we've gone about the occupation of Iraq.
Maybe the tide is turning, but what options did we have earlier that could have reduced the number of US soldier fatalities and gotten the Iraqis more involved in their own governance and prevented some of the ever-growing distrust of the US.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/23/2003 2:22 PM (GMT -6) | | http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec03/ekeus_9-22.html
This is a very interesting interview with a former top weapons inspector that gives a thorough and understandable explanation of what the state of our knowledge regarding the capabilities for Weapons of Mass Destruction that the Iraq had prior to GWII.
dlw
JIM LEHRER: And to that search for weapons of mass destruction in post-war Iraq. We get some guidance on how to follow the search from Rolf Ekeus. He is the Swedish diplomat who was the United Nations' top weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1997. Mr. Ambassador, welcome.
Why do you believe no weapons of mass destruction have been found since the end of the war?
ROLF EKEUS: I think that one has been first of all looking not in the right direction or for the right stuff. My feeling is very clearly that the Iraqi policy long before the war was to build capability to develop its capabilities to produce weapons for the situation, for the conflict situation, not to produce for storage and create a problem of storage management.
No hidden stockpiles?
JIM LEHRER: So it was a mistake to think that there were stockpiles buried underground or in warehouses or hidden in various places in Iraq in the first place?
ROLF EKEUS: Definitely, that's my, I tried to tell that for years, that the Iraqi policy was to have a capability to develop qualities -- to develop engineering, design, new types of weapons, especially in the chemical weapons and the bioweapons field in order to at a given moment, when the situation appears, to activate the production, because they learned during the 80's that when they produced say especially nerve agents like sarin, vx and all these things, when they put it in drums, in a storage places, after at least months the quality deteriorated.
And the reason was that Iraq never at least in the early years did not manage to get pure enough warfare agent, it was a matter of science.
JIM LEHRER: You've also written recently, because I read it, you said you believe that the whole concept, in other words their whole reason for wanting the capability had nothing to do with the United States or the West or the world, it had to do with the possibility of going to war with Iran again, is that correct?
ROLF EKEUS: If you think about the situation in '91 when United States liberated Kuwait together with UK, Iraq was flooded with chemical weapons, for instance, and also had the bio program quite advanced. They didn't use any of that stuff, it was weaponized, it was stored in the South, the troops were trained for it. But why didn't they use it? Because the enemy, the American troops were well protected with advanced gas masks and protection suits, tanks had, they were fitted so the gas wouldn't enter the vehicles, and so on.
First of all, the U.S. troops were highly mobile, we were not talking about the first world war when chemical weapons were successful in the trench warfare - very stable warfare -- but a highly mobile situation. The Iraqi troops, which were less well protected, had less advanced technology for protection, would in themselves have been at great risk. So it was clear against an advanced enemy like the U.S., it was not useful to make, to employ such weapons.
However, against Iran, Iraq had an eight-year war from '80 to '88 and it was clear that in that conflict where the country with 64 million people and Iraq's 25 something, war on a conventional level with standard weapons, Iraq would not stay a chance to win that conflict, but indeed against Iran they applied chemical weapons for bombing and it was, according to Iraqi judgment, the decisive use in order to keep --
Reasons for not producing mass quantities
JIM LEHRER: Hans Blix, your Swedish diplomatic colleague who was the last chief weapons inspector from the U. N., he said in an interview last week in London that he's come to the conclusion that, and what you're saying seems to be saying the same thing, that the Iraqis in fact destroyed whatever they had stockpiled after 1991. Do you agree with that?
ROLF EKEUS: No, not at all, because when we came in and UNSCOM in '91, in April '91 after the war --
JIM LEHRER: Even since 1991.
ROLF EKEUS: Yeah, we came in, there we found huge quantities of chemical weapons, certainly they were not destroyed.
JIM LEHRER: In all fairness to Hans Blix, I misspoke -- what he said was since 1991 they had been destroyed through your offices.
ROLF EKEUS: We destroyed them, definitely. It had to be special destruction and it took several years to clean up, in 96, we could end biological weapons destruction programs. We took many years, first to find it. However, I agree, my sense is that they did not produce anything since '91, for several reasons. First of all, it was the presence of weapons experts.
JIM LEHRER: Because you all were there, the inspectors were there, and they were under surveillance all the time.
ROLF EKEUS: Yeah, and they took a political decision, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who defected at some stage and returned and was killed by Saddam, he told me during the debriefings in Amman in '95 that they had taken the decision not to produce during the prevailing circumstances, any new biological, chemical weapons -- but instead develop the quality to…
JIM LEHRER: The capability to do it?
ROLF EKEUS: Precisely, the engineers, process specialists and so on.
JIM LEHRER: So back...
ROLF EKEUS: And quality. Small batches of production to develop quality.
JIM LEHRER: So then if they needed to do it on a quick basis, they first had the capability and they had the ability to produce better stuff.
ROLF EKEUS: And they had very much when we debriefed the scientists and lab people, they had very much the Iranian situation in mind.
JIM LEHRER: Not something involving the United States and the rest of the world.
ROLF EKEUS: No, and of course some opposing elements inside Iraq.
What should inspectors be looking for?
JIM LEHRER: Okay, so let's go back to what's happening on the ground there now or isn't happening on the ground there. What should the U.S., essentially now U.S. weapons inspectors, what should they be looking for then? If they're looking for capability, testing of quality, what should they look for in order to prove that?
ROLF EKEUS: They should certainly, first of all they should bring in the right type of people. And I understand they have started to do that, namely process engineers, specialists, researchers, and go into the civilian production facilities and investigate the whole production line, what's going on in such a facility, what is the input, what kind of chemicals are being put in, what is the output. Can the site manager make it clear explanation what they have been…is there something missing from, if you compare input with output? And to cross-examine the large number of people who have been involved in production.
But it's easier said than done, because my conviction is, as I've been in touch with some of the Iraqi weapons specialists, is that there's still fear for Saddam, they still don't trust that the U.S. will stay there and the guy who comes up and spends everything to, for instance, he may be in deep trouble. If they think if Saddam is watching that and, a treacherous, he's a traitor and will be trouble.
JIM LEHRER: You still believe there's a lot to spill, not about stockpiles but only about this limited experimentation.
ROLF EKEUS: Yes, there's a lot to spill, but we have to recall that several of them are high quality scientists and experts. And we have a situation where these guys have no job and one must identify them, so al-Qaida are not buying in on these tremendous pool of knowledge, of nuclear, chemical and biological science. We have been focusing on the Russian loose nukes, and Russian scientists, but Russian scientists speaking Russian and drinking vodka, he wouldn't be terribly happy with the al-Qaida but a Muslim-Arab would probably…
JIM LEHRER: Let's go back to the pre-war stuff that was said. British intelligence, it was in a British report that the Iraqis could employ biological and chemical weapons at 45 minute-notice. Based on what you're saying that was impossible.
ROLF EKEUS: It doesn't sound rational. If one is fiddling a little, one can say, well, they could have had a couple of bombs hanging around with some low-quality sarin and put it on a plane, and threw it before the plane was shot down, or something. But serious employment of chemical weapons - I don't think they were prepared to and had no intention. So I don't agree with the statement, even if one answers they can make a case for some very limited.
JIM LEHRER: Back to your friend, Hans Blix, he said, meaning the United States and Britain, they over interpreted what they saw, meaning the intelligence information that was available. Do you agree with that?
ROLF EKEUS: First of all, what we know was basically what was known from UNSCOM.
JIM LEHRER: From your organization.
ROLF EKEUS: Yeah, and in '98 as we know. And the final reports there were de facto made up, 90 or 95 percent of the British so-called intelligence report, because that was public, as you know, so we could compare. Then there was some additional information, maybe from defectors. So I think it was not really correct. I think it was a very solid base of knowledge which was had. Then it was the additional interpretation of intelligence which could not, had not been verified. That was a layer above the fundamental basic knowledge.
JIM LEHRER: And out of that came this expectation which, based on what you're saying, of a huge stockpile where troops went in and were finding all these weapons, it was implausible and impossible to begin with?
ROLF EKEUS: It was implausible, it was contrary to Iraq policy, the weapons policy, and that was in the public demand because it had been reported.
JIM LEHRER: Did you tell people that, did you tell anybody who asked?
ROLF EKEUS: Well, I reported to the Security Council in '95. And I must say that I tried to get it through, through all the noise which was…
JIM LEHRER: And there was a lot. Yes. Mr. Ambassador, thank you very much for the update.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/27/2003 4:20 PM (GMT -6) | | 2 Servings of Reality, Please
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 28, 2003
The American public got a real tutorial in diplomacy last week, one that I suspect it could have done without. It was introduced to two concepts: the free rider and the war of choice. How the U.S. public digests these two concepts is going to have a huge impact on our next presidential election.
The free rider lesson was administered by all of America's friends, allies and rivals at the United Nations. President Bush went up there last week, hat in hand, looking for financial and military support for the war he chose to launch in Iraq. I would summarize the collective response of the U.N. to Mr. Bush as follows:
"You talkin' to us? This is your war, pal. We told you before about Iraq: You break it alone, you own it alone. Well, you broke it, now you own it. We've got you over a barrel, because you and your taxpayers have no choice but to see this through, so why should we pay? If you make Iraq a success, we'll all enjoy the security benefits. We'll all get a free ride. And if you make a mess in Iraq, all the wrath will be directed at you and you alone will foot the bill. There is a fine line between being Churchill and being a chump, and we'll let history decide who you are. In the meantime, don't expect us to pay to watch. We were all born at night — but not last night."
Oh, I suspect if the U.S. manages to secure some new U.N. resolution giving more cover to the U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, we will scrounge up a few Indian or Turkish soldiers and maybe a few dollars, but nothing that will make a real dent in the $87 billion price tag the Bush team has presented to the American people.
Sorry folks, we broke it, we own it, and the worst thing we could do now is start shortchanging ourselves. There is a move in Congress to fully finance that part of the $87 billion for U.S. troops in Iraq, but to slash the $20 billion for Iraqi schools and reconstruction. That would be a big mistake. It is that $20 billion that is the key to getting out and leaving behind a reasonably stable, self-governing Iraq.
As if this weren't enough for one week, the U.S. public also got a lesson in wars of choice. It was administered by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector who has been leading the U.S. team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Last week Mr. Kay gave an interim report indicating that in four months of searching in Iraq he has found none of the W.M.D. that President Bush cited as his principal reason for going to war.
What this means for the American people is this: The war to oust Saddam Hussein was always a war of choice (a good choice, I believe). But democracies don't like to fight wars of choice, and, if they do, they want them to be quick sprints, like Bosnia, Kosovo or Grenada — not marathons. Knowing this, the Bush team tried to turn Iraq into a war of necessity by hyping the threat Saddam may have posed with W.M.D.
With Mr. Kay's interim report, it is now becoming clear that this was not a war of necessity at all, it was a war of choice, and, on top of it all, it was a war of choice that is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And, because the Bush team chose to start this marathon largely alone, the free-riding world is going to let us finish it, and pay for it, largely alone.
This is the cold, hard reality and U.S. politics will now be about how we manage it. So far, notes Jeff Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, "the politics of the day, whether by Republicans or Democrats, has not been up to the magnitude of the task. There is disparity between the words people use to describe the challenge and any honest appraisal of what it's going to take to succeed."
President Bush is deeply morally unserious when he tells Americans that we can succeed in this marathon and still have radical tax cuts for the rich and a soaring deficit, and the only people who will have to sacrifice are reservists and soldiers. And the Democrats had better decide: What is their party going to be about? Wallowing in the mess, endlessly criticizing how we got into Iraq, or articulating a broader, more realistic vision for successful nation-building there?
The lessons learned this week, and their implications, are gigantic. They will shape America's role in the world, its perception of itself and its ability to grapple with both foreign and domestic problems for years to come. I think the American people will see this through, but they want a pragmatic, strategically optimistic, morally serious plan to get behind. The leader who presents that will be the next president — I hope.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/27/2003 5:55 PM (GMT -6) | | A chilling indictment of the Bush Administration...that was posted by an atheist over at another board.
This is why it matters to be autonomous of the Republican Party and their candidates, so non-Christians will never associate any party/politician's actions with Christianity.
dlw
The Other Lies of George Bush
by David Corn
www.commondreams.org/views03/0926-12.htm
This article was adapted from the new book, 'The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception' (Crown Publishers).
George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest. In the run-up to the invasion, Bush based his case for war on a variety of unfounded claims that extended far beyond his controversial uranium-from-Niger assertion. He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available evidence. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon; no such report existed (and the IAEA had actually reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to produce weapons-grade material). Bush asserted that Iraq was "harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner"; US intelligence officials told reporters this terrorist was operating ouside of Al Qaeda control. And two days before launching the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Yet former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who is conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, has said that intelligence was full of qualifiers and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence. That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was done, Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs. Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed with this finding.
But Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his agenda. Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving falsifications. While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters declared was his most basic and most important qualification for the job.
His claims about the war in Iraq have led more of his foes and more pundits to accuse him of lying to the public. The list of his misrepresentations, though, is far longer than the lengthy list of dubious statements Bush employed--and keeps on employing--to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq. Here then is a partial--a quite partial--account of the other lies of George W. Bush.
Tax Cuts
Bush's crusade for tax cuts is the domestic policy matter that has spawned the most misrepresentations from his camp. On the 2000 campaign trail, he sold his success as a "tax-cutting person" by hailing cuts he passed in Texas while governor. But Bush did not tell the full story of his 1997 tax plan. His proposal called for cutting property taxes. But what he didn't mention is that it also included an attempt to boost the sales tax and to implement a new business tax. Nor did he note that his full package had not been accepted by the state legislature. Instead, the lawmakers passed a $1 billion reduction in property taxes. And these tax cuts turned out to be a sham. After they kicked in, school districts across the state boosted local tax rates to compensate for the loss of revenue. A 1999 Dallas Morning News analysis found that "many [taxpayers] are still paying as much as they did in 1997, or more." Republican Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry called the cuts "rather illusory."
One of Bush's biggest tax-cut whoppers came when he stated, during the presidential campaign, "The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum." That estimate was wildly at odds with analyses of where the money would really go. A report by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal outfit that specializes in distribution analysis, figured that 42.6 percent of Bush's $1.6 trillion tax package would end up in the pockets of the top 1 percent of earners. The lowest 60 percent would net 12.6 percent. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and NBC News all reported that Bush's package produced the results CTJ calculated.
To deal with the criticism that his plan was a boon for millionaires, Bush devised an imaginary friend--a mythical single waitress who was supporting two children on an income of $22,000, and he talked about her often. He said he wanted to remove the tax-code barriers that kept this waitress from reaching the middle class, and he insisted that if his tax cuts were passed, "she will pay no income taxes at all." But when Time asked the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche to analyze precisely how Bush's waitress-mom would be affected by his tax package, the firm reported that she would not see any benefit because she already had no income-tax liability.
As he sold his tax cuts from the White House, Bush maintained in 2001 that with his plan, "the greatest percentage of tax relief goes to the people at the bottom end of the ladder." This was trickery--technically true only because low-income earners pay so little income tax to begin with. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, "a two-parent family of four with income of $26,000 would indeed have its income taxes eliminated under the Bush plan, which is being portrayed as a 100 percent reduction in taxes." But here was the punch line: The family owed only $20 in income taxes under the existing law. Its overall tax bill (including payroll and excise taxes), though, was $2,500. So that twenty bucks represented less than 1 percent of its tax burden. Bush's "greatest percentage" line was meaningless in the real world, where people paid their bills with money, not percentages.
Bush also claimed his tax plan--by eliminating the estate tax, at a cost of $300 billion--would "keep family farms in the family." But, as the New York Times reported, farm-industry experts could not point to a single case of a family losing a farm because of estate taxes. Asked about this, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, "If you abolish the death tax, people won't have to hire all those planners to help them keep the land that's rightfully theirs." Caught in a $300 billion lie, the White House was now saying the reason to abolish the tax--a move that would be a blessing to the richest 2 percent of Americans--was to spare farmers the pain in the ass of estate planning. Bush's lies did not hinder him. They helped him win the first tax-cut fight--and, then, the tax-cut battle of 2003. When his second set of supersized tax cuts was assailed for being tilted toward the rich, he claimed, "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." The Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute found that, contrary to Bush's assertion, nearly 80 percent of tax filers would receive less than $1,083, and almost half would pocket less than $100. The truly average taxpayers--those in the middle of the income range--would receive $265. Bush was using the word "average" in a flimflam fashion. To concoct the misleading $1,083 figure, the Administration took the large dollar amounts high-income taxpayers would receive and added that to the modest, small or nonexistent reductions other taxpayers would get--and then used this total to calculate an average gain. His claim was akin to saying that if a street had nine households led by unemployed individuals but one with an earner making a million dollars, the average income of the families on the block would be $100,000. The radical Wall Street Journal reported, "Overall, the gains from the taxes are weighted toward upper-income taxpayers."
The Environment
One of Bush's first PR slip-ups as President came when his EPA announced that it would withdraw a new standard for arsenic in drinking water that had been developed during the Clinton years. Bush defended this move by claiming that the new standard had been irresponsibly rushed through: "At the very last minute my predecessor made a decision, and we pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision based upon sound science and what's realistic." And his EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, said the standard had not been based on the "best available science." This was a harsh charge. And untrue.
The new arsenic standard was no quickie job unattached to reasonable scientific findings. The EPA had worked for a decade on establishing the new, 10-parts-per-billion standard. Congress had directed the agency to establish a new standard, and it had authorized $2.5 million a year for studies from 1997 through 2000. A 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) had concluded that the existing 50-ppb standard "could easily" result in a 1-in-100 cancer risk and had recommended that acceptable levels be lowered "as promptly as possible." EPA policy-makers had thought that a 3-ppb standard would have been justified by the science, yet they took cost considerations into account and went for the less stringent 10 ppb.
Bush's arsenic move appeared to have been based upon a political calculation--even though Bush, as a candidate, had said he would not decide key policy matters on the basis of politics. But in his book The Right Man, David Frum, a former Bush economic speechwriter, reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, had "pressed for reversal" of the arsenic standard in an attempt to win votes in New Mexico, one of a few states that have high naturally occurring levels of arsenic and that would face higher costs in meeting the new standard.
Several months after the EPA suspended the standard, a new NAS study concluded that the 10-ppb standard was indeed scientifically justified and possibly not tight enough. After that, the Administration decided that the original 10 ppb was exactly the right level for a workable rule, even though the latest in "best available science" now suggested that the 10-ppb level might not adequately safeguard water drinkers.
The arsenic screw-up was one of the few lies for which Bush took a hit. On the matter of global warming, he managed to lie his way through a controversy more deftly. Months into his presidency, Bush declared that he was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global warming accord. To defend his retreat from the treaty, he cited "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge." This was a misleading argument, for the scientific consensus was rather firm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of thousands of scientists assembled by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, held that global temperatures were dramatically on the rise and that this increase was, to an unspecified degree, a result of human-induced emissions.
In early June 2001 the NAS released a report Bush had requested, and it concluded global warming was under way and "most likely due to human activities." Rather than accept the analysis it had commissioned, the Bush White House countered with duplicity. Press secretary Fleischer maintained that the report "concludes that the Earth is warming. But it is inconclusive on why--whether it's man-made causes or whether it's natural causes." That was not spinning. That was prevaricating. The study blamed "human activities" while noting that "natural variability" might be a contributing factor too.
Still, the Bush White House wanted to make it seem as if Bush did take the issue seriously. So on June 11, he delivered a speech on global warming and pledged to craft an alternative to Kyoto that would "reduce" emissions. The following February he unveiled his plan. "Our immediate goal," Bush said, "is to reduce America's greenhouse-gas emissions relative to the size of our economy."
Relative to the size of our economy? This was a ruse. Since the US economy is generally growing, this meant emissions could continue to rise, as long as the rate of increase was below the rate of economic growth. The other industrialized nations, with the Kyoto accord, were calling for reductions below 1990 levels. Bush was pushing for slower increases above 2000 levels. Bush's promise to lower emissions had turned out to be no more than hot air.
September 11
As many Americans and others yearned to make sense of the evil attacks of September 11, Bush elected to share with the public a deceptively simplistic explanation of this catastrophe. Repeatedly, he said that the United States had been struck because of its love of freedom. "America was targeted for attack," he maintained, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." This was shallow analysis, a comic-book interpretation of the event that covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for developing a full understanding of the attacks. In the view Bush furnished, Osama bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a man motivated solely by irrational evil, who killed for the purpose of destroying freedom.
But as the State Department's own terrorism experts--as well as nongovernment experts--noted, bin Laden was motivated by a specific geostrategic and theological aim: to chase the United States out of the Middle East in order to ease the way for a fundamentalist takeover of the region. Peter Bergen, a former CNN producer and the first journalist to arrange a television interview with bin Laden, observes in his book Holy War, Inc., "What [bin Laden] condemns the United States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East." Rather than acknowledge the realities of bin Laden's war on America, Bush attempted to create and perpetuate a war-on-freedom myth.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was disingenuous on other fronts. Days after the attack, he asserted, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings full of innocent people." His aides echoed this sentiment for months. They were wrong. Such a scenario had been imagined and feared by terrorism experts. And plots of this sort had previously been uncovered and thwarted by security services in other nations--in operations known to US officials. According to the 9/11 inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the US intelligence establishment had received numerous reports that bin Laden and other terrorists were interested in mounting 9/11-like strikes against the United States.
Fourteen months after the attack, Bush said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." But his actions belied this rhetoric. His White House refused to turn over information to the intelligence committees about a pre-9/11 intelligence briefing he had had seen, and the Bush Administration would not allow the committees to tell the public what intelligence warnings Bush had received before September 11. More famously, Bush would not declassify the twenty-seven-page portion of the committees' final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia. And following September 11, Bush repeatedly maintained that his Administration was doing everything possible to secure the nation. But that was not true. The Administration did not move--and has not moved--quickly to address gaping security concerns, including vulnerabilities at chemical plants and ports and a huge shortfall in resources for first responders [see Corn, "Homeland Insecurity," September 22].
It did not start with Iraq. Bush has been lying throughout the presidency. He claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief Ken Lay until after the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. But Lay had been one of Bush's larger contributors during that election and had--according to Lay himself--been friends with Bush for years before it. In June 2001, Bush said, "We're not going to deploy a [missile defense] system that doesn't work." But then he ordered the deployment of a system that was not yet operational. (A June 2003 General Accounting Office study noted, "Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended.") His White House claimed that it was necessary to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "secure America's energy needs." But the US Geological Survey noted that the amount of oil that might be found there would cover up to slightly more than two years' worth of oil consumption. Such a supply would hardly "secure" the nation's needs.
Speaking for his boss, Fleischer in 2002 said, "the President does, of course, believe that younger workers...are going to receive no money for their Social Security taxes." No money? That was not so. A projected crunch will hit in four decades or so. But even when this happens, the system will be able to pay an estimated 70 percent of benefits--which is somewhat more than "no money." When Bush in August 2001 announced he would permit federal funding of stem-cell research only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines--in a move to placate social conservatives, who opposed this sort of research--he said that there were sixty existing lines, and he asserted that his decision "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research." Yet at the time--according to scientific experts in the field and various media reports--there were closer to ten available lines, not nearly enough to support a promising research effort.
Does Bush believe his own untruths? Did he truly consider a WMD-loaded Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to the United States? Or was he knowingly employing dramatic license because he wanted war for other reasons? Did he really think the average middle-class taxpayer would receive $1,083 from his second tax-cut plan? Or did he realize this was a fuzzy number cooked up to make the package seem a better deal than it was for middle- and low-income workers? Did he believe there were enough stem-cell lines to support robust research? Or did he know he had exaggerated the number of lines in order to avoid a politically tough decision?
It's hard to tell. Bush's public statements do suggest he is a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms. You're either for freedom or against it. With the United States or not. Tax cuts are good--always. The more tax cuts the better--always. He's impatient with nuances. Asked in 1999 to name something he wasn't good at, Bush replied, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something." Bush likes life to be clear-cut. And perhaps that causes him to either bend the truth or see (and promote) a bent version of reality. Observers can debate whether Bush considers his embellishments and misrepresentations to be the honest-to-God truth or whether he cynically hurls falsehoods to con the public. But believer or deceiver--the result is the same.
With his misrepresentations and false assertions, Bush has dramatically changed the nation and the world. Relying on deceptions, he turned the United States into an occupying power. Using lies, he pushed through tax cuts that will profoundly reshape the US budget for years to come, most likely insuring a long stretch of deficits that will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the federal government to fund existing programs or contemplate new ones.
Does Bush lie more than his predecessors, more than his political opponents? That's irrelevant. He's guiding the nation during difficult and perhaps perilous times, in which a credible President is much in need. Prosperity or economic decline? War or peace? Security or fear? This country has a lot to deal with. Lies from the White House poison the debates that must occur if Americans are going to confront and overcome the challenges of this century at home and abroad.
Presidential lying, in fact, threatens the country. To render informed and wise choices about the crucial and complicated controversies of the day, people need truthful information. The President is generally in a position to define and dominate a debate more than other political players. And a lie from the White House--or a fib or a misrepresentation or a fudged number--can go a long way toward distorting the national discussion.
Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring honesty back to the White House. During his first full day on the job, while swearing in his White House staff, he reminded his cadre, "On a mantelpiece in this great house is inscribed the prayer of John Adams, that only the wise and honest may rule under this roof." But Adams's prayer would once more go unanswered. There has been no restoration of integrity. Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the United States remains in the hands of a dishonest man.
David Corn is The Nation's Washington editor and also the "Loyal Opposition" columnist for www.TomPaine.com and www.Alternet.org. Corn's work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Harper's Magazine. His books include Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusade and the 1999 novel Deep Background.
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/1/2003 9:01 AM (GMT -6) | | Iraqi WMD may have been bluff
http://www.msnbc.com/news/974235.asp?0dm=N14NN
David Kay eyes theory of deliberate deception
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
THE WASHINGTON POST
Oct. 1 — With no chemical or biological weapons yet found in Iraq, the U.S. official in charge of the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is pursuing the possibility that the Iraqi leader was bluffing, pretending he had distributed them to his most loyal commanders to deter the United States from invading.
SUCH A possibility is one element in the interim report that David Kay, who heads the 1,200-person, CIA-lead team in Iraq, will describe before the House and Senate intelligence committees on Thursday, according to people familiar with his planned testimony.
MISINFORMATION?
In particular, Kay has examined prewar Iraqi communications collected by U.S. intelligence agencies indicating that Iraqi commanders — including Ali Hassan Majeed, also known as “Chemical Ali” — were given the authority to launch weapons of mass destruction against U.S. troops as they advanced north from Kuwait.
The intelligence prompted President Bush to say shortly before the war began last March, “We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons, the very weapons the dictator tells the world he does not have.”
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former United Nations weapons inspector who has been in contact with Iraqi scientists since the war, said: “The idea of deployment and the authority to launch was very solid. But it’s now being looked at as possibly misinformation or that they were playing with us,” he added.
This week, the officials expect Kay to say that Hussein never abandoned his ability to develop chemical and biological weapons, and remained prepared to reconstitute his nuclear program once U.N. sanctions were lifted. Data now being collected will confirm that after U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the Iraqi leader continued to buy commercial equipment that could also be used to develop the prohibited weapons.
“It is risky to say that he was doing nothing,” Albright said. “Saddam was scheming once we took the boot of economic sanctions and monitoring of his facilities off his neck.”
Officials said they expect Kay to document what the U.S. intelligence community has long reported about Iraq’s significant efforts to deceive inspectors, including the hiding of documents and materials related to weapons programs. In a CIA white paper issued in October 2002, for example, CIA Director George J. Tenet said, “Baghdad’s vigorous concealment efforts have meant that specific information on many aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs is yet to be uncovered.”
At least one Iraqi scientist cooperating with the CIA has said that he and others were ordered by Hussein to record all interviews with U.N. inspectors, despite a Security Council resolution calling for inspectors to have unmonitored meetings. In addition, no technicians or scientists involved with the weapons programs were allowed to leave the country, although the resolution called for them to be permitted to go abroad with their families. None ever went.
The Kay group has also obtained what it believes to be new confirmation that the Iraqis were violating the U.N. resolution that prohibited Hussein from extending the range of his missiles and developing fuels to power them.
Kay has focused on gathering the most extensive information to date on the long-held belief that Iraq had developed sophisticated means for hiding weapons, their technical components and chemical and biological ingredients for deadly weapons.
But Hussein may have put in place a double-deception program aimed at convincing the world and his own people that he was more of a threat than he actually was. This included moving equipment and personnel, and making public statements all designed to make the world and his own people believe that they had weapons of mass destruction.
It is a theory that House intelligence committee staff and members are also exploring as they finish 19 volumes of data underlying the National Intelligence Estimate, the main intelligence document used by policymakers to decide whether to invade Iraq.
‘STARTER KITS’
Among the possibilities the committee is exploring is whether Iraq destroyed many of its weapons and equipment before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. After the war, thousands of other weapons were collected and destroyed along with equipment and facilities under the direction of the first group of U.N. inspectors.
In 1998, after those inspectors were withdrawn, the U.S. and British attacked for four days in December, hitting more than 100 targets associated with Hussein’s missiles and weapons of mass destruction programs.
“He might have been bluffing to his own people,” said a senior administration official with access to the underlying data on Iraq.
One of the most popular scenarios, barring the discovery of stockpiled weapons and equipment by U.S. teams, is that Hussein kept what amounted to “starter kits,” precursor chemicals for biological weapons, for example, that could be developed in a matter of days.
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/1/2003 10:23 AM (GMT -6) | | top notch analysis of situation by retired general..
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec03/zinni_09-30.html
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/3/2003 12:50 PM (GMT -6) | | PIONEER PRESS, St. Paul (Minnesota)
DAVID KAY, C.I.A. INVESTIGATOR, NO LONGER SURE TRAILERS WERE LABS
By Dafna Linzer,
Associated Press
The CIA's man leading the hunt for suspected Iraqi weapons showed off a pair of trailers for news cameras this summer, and argued that the two metal flatbeds were designed for making biological weapons.
But faced with mounting challenges to that theory, David Kay is now conceding he could have been wrong and says he doesn't know whether Iraq ever had a mobile weapons program, as top Bush administration officials claim.
According to senior military officers involved in Kay's hunt, experts have been re-examining the trailers for several weeks. Until now, they were the only discovery the administration has cited as evidence of an illicit Iraqi weapons program.
In six months of searches, no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons have been found to bolster the administration's central case for going to war: to disarm Saddam Hussein of suspected weapons of mass destruction.
"On the basis of technical analysis on the two (trailers) that we have, it is not going to be possible to reach a determination," Kay told reporters Friday.
It was a different-sounding Kay from the one who confidently showed off the trailers to NBC Nightly News in its July 15 broadcast.
At the time, Kay told NBC: "I've already seen enough to convince me."
The original tip on the trailers was provided by a defector working with
Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and now a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council in Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin Powell included the information in his Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council.
Two trailers were found in April and May, and the CIA later issued a paper saying the trailers were "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."
The findings were challenged by some intelligence analysts from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency, who said they believe the trailers were probably used to fill hydrogen weather balloons.
But on Sunday, Powell stood by the CIA's assessment during an interview with ABC.
"Even though there are differences within the overall intelligence community, the director of central intelligence examining all of the material with respect to that van and examining counterarguments as to what it might be, stands behind the judgment that what we found was positive evidence of a mobile biological weapons lab and (it has) not been discounted sufficiently.
Five days later, Kay, the CIA representative charged with leading the weapons search in Iraq, said those findings are "still very much being examined."
Kay said Friday that an investigation of the trailers has yielded a number of explanations, including uses for hydrogen, missile propellants and biological warfare production. But no explanation has completely held up under scrutiny and Kay said Iraqis considered knowledgable about the trailers have offered contradictory explanations.
Only the discovery of more trailers will allow the teams the chance to make a solid assessment, Kay said.
Military scientists who analyzed the pair of trailers during the summer doubted they were designed to function as mobile laboratories, according to the three military officers involved in the weapons hunt.
One senior-ranking military commander involved in the search said some people believed the trailers were for making hydrogen for weather balloons. Few, he said, was certain they were for biological weapons.
One of the U.S. scientists involved in the hunt, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some investigators conducting the search believe the Iraqis could have tried to produce biological warfare agents inside the trailers, but not very well.
Also, it would have been hard, if not impossible, to hide the evidence. No traces of anthrax or any other warfare agent have been found during more than a half-dozen tests on the trailers.
Last month, Vice President Dick Cheney repeated the claim that the two trailers were "mobile biological facilities" that could have been used to make several biological agents, including smallpox.
One of the central arguments used by the CIA to support its initial findings is that one trailer had a fermenter. Smallpox, however, isn't grown with a fermenter and experts say it would be impossible to produce this specific virus in a trailer.
"There's no way that these particular labs could have been used to make smallpox," said Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies who authored "Scourge," a recent book on smallpox.
In addition, Tucker said smallpox would need to be grown in a maximum containment laboratory, "not in a trailer with canvas siding. If there had been a leak, it would have spread smallpox all over the country."
[end]
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/3/2003 12:56 PM (GMT -6) | | Anyone seen the movie, "The Road to War"?
Apparently, we knew that N. Vietnam was going to be a hardcase before we got involved there.
This issue of them manipulating us to support the war for the wrong reasons matters because of the precedent it sets if they get away with it.
Maybe Cheney could retire for "health" reasons and be replaced by Powell... That would be in their own interests as a party...
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Mayflower
Registered Member
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Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/3/2003 1:01 PM (GMT -6) | | PIONEER PRESS, St. Paul (Minnesota)
STUDY:
WRONG IMPRESSIONS HELPED SUPPORT IRAQ WAR
By Frank Davies,
Knight Ridder Newspapers
.
To review the study,
go to: http://www.pipa.org
WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war.
The three common mistaken impressions are that:
• U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
• There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.
• People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.
Overall, 60 percent of Americans held at least one of those views in polls reported between January and September by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, based at the University of Maryland in College Park, and the polling firm, Knowledge Networks based in Menlo Park, Calif.
"While we cannot assert that these misperceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions," said Steven Kull, who directs Maryland's program.
In fact, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
U.S. intelligence has found no clear evidence that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaida or was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Gallup polls found large majorities opposed to the war in most countries.
PIPA's seven polls, which included 9,611 respondents, had a margin of error from 2 to 3.5 percent.
The analysis released Thursday also correlated the
misperceptions with the primary news source of the mistaken respondents. For example, 80 percent of those who said they
relied on Fox News and 71 percent of those who said they relied on CBS believed at least one of the three misperceptions.
The comparable figures were 47 percent for those who said they relied most on newspapers and magazines and 23 percent for those who said they relied on PBS or National Public Radio.
The reasons for the misperceptions are numerous, Kull and other analysts said.
They noted that the Bush administration had misstated or
exaggerated some of the intelligence findings, with Bush himself
saying in May: "We found the weapons of mass destruction … and we'll find more as time goes by."
The Bush administration has also been a factor in persistent confusion.
Last month, for example, Bush said there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attack after Vice President
Dick Cheney suggested a link. Cheney, in a "Meet the Press" interview, had described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9-11."
Why some news audiences had more accurate impressions than others was less clear.
Kull cited instances in which TV and newspapers gave prominent coverage to reports that banned weapons might have been found in Iraq, but only modest coverage when those reports turned out to be wrong.
Susan Moeller, a University of Maryland professor, said that much reporting had consisted of "stenographic coverage of government statements," with less attention to whether the government's statements were accurate.
The study found that belief in inaccurate information often persisted, and that misconceptions were much more likely among backers of the war. Last month, as in June, for example, nearly a quarter of those polled thought banned weapons had been found in Iraq. Nearly half thought in September that there was clear evidence that Saddam had worked closely with al-Qaida.
Among those with one of the three misconceptions, 53 percent supported the war. Among those with two, 78 percent supported it. Among those with three, 86 percent backed it. By contrast, less than a quarter of those polled who had none of the misconceptions backed the war.
On the Web:
To review the study, go to: http://www.pipa.org
[end]
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/4/2003 5:16 AM (GMT -6) | | Amen.
quote:
This issue of them manipulating us to support the war for the wrong reasons matters because of the precedent it sets if they get away with it.
Peace & blessings,
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/4/2003 6:08 AM (GMT -6) | | On the same topic...
=====================
PIONEER PRESS, St. Paul (Minnesota)
Saturday, Oct. 04, 2003
'SOURCE' OF NEWS
SWAYS FALSE IDEAS, STUDY FINDS
By David Folkenflik,
Baltimore Sun
Heavy viewers of the Fox News Channel are nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue positions about the war in Iraq as are media consumers who rely on National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting System, a new study shows.
"When evidence surfaces that a significant portion of the public has just got a hole in the picture, this is a potential problem in the way democracy functions," said Clay Ramsay, research director for the Washington, D.C.-based Program on International Policy Attitudes, which studies foreign policy issues.
Fox News officials did not return requests Friday for comment on the study released this week by the research center affiliated with the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs.
Funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation, the study was conducted from June through September. It surveyed 3,334 Americans who receive their news from a single media source. Each was questioned about whether he or she held any of the following three beliefs, characterized by the center as "egregious misperceptions":
• Saddam Hussein has been directly linked with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
• Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
• World opinion favored the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
To date, as measured by government reports and accepted public surveys, each of those propositions is false, according to the center.
The Bush administration has argued that evidence will be found of the weapons in Iraq as will direct links between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. But President Bush has been forced to acknowledge that no such proof has surfaced.
Sixty percent of all respondents believed in at least one of the statements. But there were clear differences in perceptions among devotees of the various media outlets.
Twenty-three percent of those who get their news from NPR or PBS believed in at least one of the mistaken claims. In contrast, 80 percent of Fox News viewers held at least one of the three incorrect beliefs.
Among broadcast network viewers there also were differences. Seventy-one percent of those who relied on CBS for news held a false impression, as did 61 percent of ABC's audience and 55 percent of NBC viewers. Fifty-five percent of CNN viewers and 47 percent of Americans who rely on the print media as their primary source also held at least one misperception.
The three evening network news shows command the largest audiences, together typically reaching between 25 million and 30 million viewers nightly. But Fox News, the top-rated cable news outlet, has increased its viewership by offering a blend of hard news and opinionated talk that often takes on a patriotic sheen. Its top show draws more than 2 million viewers nightly.
"Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions," the report concludes. "Only those who mostly get their news from print media have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention."
The study suggests a strong link between people's understanding of the news and its source. That link held true throughout different demographic segments, such as those based on education level, viewing habits and partisan leanings, Ramsay said.
Online: www.pipa.org
[end]
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DLW
Registered Member
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Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/8/2003 5:56 AM (GMT -6) | | U.S. won’t budge on Iraq resolution
http://www.msnbc.com/news/965704.asp?0dm=N1AON
Negroponte says don’t expect radical changes in draft
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte speaks to the media Monday after a Security Council consultation on a U.S. draft resolution on Iraq at the United Nations.
MSNBC NEWS SERVICES
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 7 — Despite divisions in the 15-member U.N. Security Council, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte Tuesday ruled out making any substantial changes to the Bush administration’s draft resolution on Iraq.
CONSEQUENTLY, council diplomats said the United States had to decide soon whether to drop the effort entirely or push for a split vote in the council that might have limited impact on its goal of broadening military and financial support.
Easy passage of the resolution was assured until Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week turned down U.N. political participation unless Iraqi sovereignty was accelerated.
At a Security Council session Monday, most members wanted the resolution to deal with some of Annan’s suggestions, but Negroponte virtually excluded this.
“What I told the council members was that if in the coming days we put forward a resolution with an idea to putting it to an early vote, that they shouldn’t expect any significant or radical departures from the resolution they have before them,” Negroponte told a news conference.
“It’s certainly our intent at this moment to press ahead with the resolution,” he added.
Among the 15 council members, France, Russia, Germany, China and Syria were expected to abstain while only Britain, Spain and Bulgaria were sure votes, diplomats said.
Full text of draft resolution
The other six council members, Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, expressed misgivings but might support the resolution under U.S. cajoling, the envoys said.
A minimum of nine positive votes are needed to adopt a resolution, but a divided council could minimize its impact.
The resolution calls for the United Nations to help with a constitution and set up elections, tasks which Annan opposes as long as the occupation continues. He also has few staff willing to return to Iraq following the Aug. 19 bombing of U.N. offices in Baghdad that killed 22 people.
But Negroponte said the current hesitation on the part of U.N. officials might not be the case in the future.
The draft resolution would transform the current military operation into a U.N.-authorized multinational force to give political cover to countries hesitating to bolster the occupation. Turkey, however, is considering troops without the U.N. imprimatur.
Lee Feinstein, acting director of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said the United States would continue organizing troops bilaterally and did not expect major contributions at the Madrid meeting.
But he said attitudes towards a U.N. resolution would depend on the degree of domestic political pressure on Congress about the administration’s $87 billion request for Iraq. If the money bill came under severe threat, then strategy toward the United Nations might be more conciliatory.
“The administration could then plausibly argue that they are seeking to broaden the burden,” Feinstein said in a telephone interview. “But until and unless that happens, there will be a lukewarm approach to the United Nations.”
The United States wants to continue the occupation, with duties transferred to Iraqis gradually, until a constitution is written and new elections are conducted, which could take two years.
Specifically, Annan told council members last Thursday he did not want to risk more lives for a marginal political role in Iraq as in the U.S.-drafted resolution.
He outlined a rival blueprint, almost identical to one proposed by France and Germany, that would transfer sovereignty to a provisional government within three to five months, after which work would begin on a constitution and elections.
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DLW
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Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/14/2003 5:04 PM (GMT -6) | | Holding Our Noses
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 15, 2003
I haven't written about Iraq lately because, frankly, it felt like shooting fish in a barrel.
It was sporting to write columns opposing the war back in January, when the White House was conjuring enough Iraqi anthrax "to kill several million people," as well as hordes of cheering Iraqis casting flowers on our soldiers. These days, with that anthrax as elusive as Saddam himself, with the people we've liberated busy killing us, with the bill for Iraq coming in at $90,000 a minute — well, criticizing the war just seems too easy, like aiming a bomb at Bambi.
So I won't do it.
In any case, the real question that confronts us now is not whether invading Iraq was the height of hubris, but this: Given that we are there, how do we make the best of it?
I'm afraid that too many in my dovish camp think that just because we shouldn't have invaded, we also shouldn't stay — or at least we shouldn't help Mr. Bush pay the bill. Mr. Bush's $87 billion budget request for Iraq and Afghanistan is getting pummeled on Capitol Hill this week, partly because people are angry at being misled and patronized by this administration.
Granted, some elements of the budget (like much of our Iraq operation) seem too rooted in our own expectations. In northern Iraq, U.S. engineers reported that it would take $50 million to bring a cement factory in the area to Western standards. The U.S. general there, lacking that kind of money, found some Iraqis who got it going again for $80,000.
And people like those in my hometown of Yamhill, Ore., have trouble understanding why the administration wants to buy Iraqis new $50,000 garbage trucks. On my last visit, I was struck how Oregonians, seeing their local school programs slashed, resent having to subsidize Iraq. That resentment runs deep: the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows Americans opposing the Iraq budget request, 57 to 41 percent.
So my fear is that we will now compound our mistake of invading Iraq by refusing to pay for our occupation and then pulling out our troops prematurely. If Iraq continues to go badly, if Democrats continue to hammer Mr. Bush for his folly, if Karl Rove has nightmares of an election campaign fought against a backdrop of suicide bombings in Baghdad, then I'm afraid the White House may just declare victory and retreat.
In that case, Iraq would last about 10 minutes before disintegrating into a coup d'etat or a civil war.
Couldn't happen, you say? We let Afghanistan fall apart after the victory over the Soviet-backed government in 1992. We let Somalia disintegrate after our pullout in 1993-94. And right now, incredibly, the administration is letting Afghanistan fall apart all over again.
If that happens in Iraq, American credibility will be devastated, Al Qaeda will have a new base for operations, and Iraqis will be even worse off than they were in the days of Saddam Hussein.
Hmm. Who knows? In that event, Saddam might return as the warlord of Tikrit.
How do we reduce the chance that Iraq will collapse? First, by holding our noses and passing the president's budget request for Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqis I've interviewed are often suspicious of U.S. intentions ("You're planning to steal our oil!"), but they're willing to give us a chance if we can stop rapes and get factories open. Slashing that budget — or turning it into a loan to be repaid with oil revenues — would destroy the Iraqi economy and convince many wavering Iraqis that we are conquerors who are best dealt with by blowing us up.
We can also shore up Iraq by arranging an early transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis, as Kofi Annan and others have suggested — a move the administration initially sputtered about but now seems to accept. Sure, it may be only a symbolic gesture, but anyone who says symbols don't matter doesn't understand nationalism.
The greatest foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made over the last half-century has been its obliviousness to nationalism. Today as well, plenty of ordinary Iraqis would prefer to be misruled by Iraqis than ruled by Americans.
Above all, to stave off catastrophe in Iraq, we must keep our troops there and provide security, for that is the glue that keeps Iraq together. I believe that President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq, but he's right about staying there.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 12/17/2003 5:27 AM (GMT -6) | | WMD UPDATE:
---------------------------------------------------------
Published December 16, 2003
WEAPONS INSPECTOR HANS BLIX:
SADDAM DIDN'T HAVE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Tuesday it's becoming "increasingly clear" that Saddam Hussein's regime did not have any weapons of mass destruction.
Blix, who announced the members of a new Stockholm-based independent commission on weapons of mass destruction, said he didn't think Saddam's capture would result in the discovery of any such weapons in Iraq.
"My guess is that there are no weapons of mass destruction left," said Blix, who headed the team of U.N. inspectors that searched Iraq for more than three months before the war without making any significant finds. "I think many of the things that were said (about Iraq having them) were not sufficiently well-based."
Blix said he thought most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed in 1991.
When his inspection teams found a crate of warheads in January, he said they asked themselves "whether this was the tip of an iceberg, or was it just an ice floe floating around" as a remnant.
"I think it's getting safer and safer to say that it was just an ice floe," Blix said.
The international commission was established this year in Stockholm and aims to provide a new impetus for international efforts to curtail — or stop — the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Blix is head of the body. The former Swedish foreign minister led the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981-97 and retired from the United Nations in June.
The body, which was proposed by U.N. Undersecretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala in 2002, is the first international commission focused on weapons of mass destruction since the Tokyo Forum in 1999.
"My ambition for this commission is that we will be able to provide realistic and constructive ideas and proposals aimed at the greatest possible reduction of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction," Blix said.
Blix added that the group plans to analyze the amount of nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological weapons, as well as the means to deliver them, but won't do any actual inspections. It will meet two to three times a year to discuss its findings.
Areas of concern included the Korean peninsula, Iran, tensions between India and Pakistan, as well as terrorism, he said.
The commission will present a final report on its findings, along with concrete ideas and proposals for how to battle the spreading of weapons of mass destruction, around the end of 2005. The first report, which is expected at the end of next year, will be delivered to the United Nations, he said.
The commission's headquarters will be in Stockholm. Sweden contributed nearly $1.8 million to the body, but will have no say in its course of work.
The commission includes William J. Perry, who was defense secretary in the Clinton administration.
[end]
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 12/17/2003 5:43 AM (GMT -6) | | Published December 17, 2003
BUSH 'DISMISSES'
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
DEBATE
December 17, 2003 - 1:41PM US President George W Bush today dismissed any distinction between whether former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction or planned to acquire them.
"So what's the difference?" he asked in an interview with ABC television in response to a question whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction -- or, was just trying to acquire them.
"If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger," the president said. "A gathering threat, after 9-11, is a threat that needed to be dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man's a danger."
The Bush administration used claims that Iraq had hidden banned chemical and biological weapons as one of the main justifications for launching an invasion of Iraq last March.
A CIA-led search team sent to Iraq after the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime has so far been unable to find any such weapons.
But in the interview Bush referred to "the possibility that he could acquire weapons." Bush insisted that the intelligence the White House used before the invasion "was good sound intelligence" and was no different than that available to his predecessor.
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a threat," he said. "Otherwise, the United Nations wouldn't have passed, you know, resolution after resolution after resolution, demanding that he disarm."
[end]
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 12/17/2003 1:16 PM (GMT -6) | |
Enhance 'political flexibility', Brother.
Insert: "POSSIBLY".
TO READ:
Beware all rogue countries out there that may <POSSIBLY> ( ! ! ! ) intend to acquire WMD, unless you're selling us lots of really cheap stuff, you are now in danger of potential regime-change!!!!!
DLW wrote:
quote:
Beware all rogue countries out there that may intend to acquire WMD, unless you're selling us lots of really cheap stuff, you are now in danger of potential regime-change!!!!!
dlw
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 12/17/2003 6:00 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by pwpatton
It's extremely unlikely that there will be another situation like this where it is possible to preemptively strike another country. There are a whole host of ways in which to destablize a regime. I think Bush did the right thing here. Some groups estimate 500,000 people were killed by Saddam. I think the world has a moral obligation to deal with these and I don't mean by getting financially involved with them like Germany, France, and Russia. This sort of thing creates a conflict of interest when they are required to vote on what to do about it in the U.N. (which is clearly unwilling to deal with it in any meaningful way).
I agree the situation was extreme and we should adopt this sort of attitude to future situations.
I think that it did matter to try to win the support of much of the rest of the world. I live and work in a foreign country where the opposition against the war was near unamity. The misinformation about WMD and how the Neo-Con wing of the Bush Admin. handled int'l relations turned much of the world against us. It wasn't simply financial connections that mad those countries balk action at the UN, it also was public sentiment, which we were fortunate that Tony Blair was willing to brave against.
And so there really wasn't a need to go unilateral. The case could have been pitched a lot better and propagandized better so that so many Arab-nationals would not be driven to enlist in the Al Quaeda thanks to our current occupation of Iraq.
quote:
Now the topic. Should bush have serious negative political consequences for the WMD claims. I would say no. Here's why:
1. We have a new enemy that is willing to use big weapons on big targets on U.S. soil.
Huh, this wasn't Iraq.
quote:
2. We have a country with an erratic dictator that has used WMDs on it's enemies (Iran in the 80s, Kurds in the 90s?).
They were WMDs that didn't go long distance and that we are equipped against. They are useful against Iranians and Kurds.
quote:
3. There is virtually no one who things Saddam does not possess WMDs (the U.N., the Clinton Admin, The Bush Admin) and Saddam is acting as if he does as well (why wouldn't have have inspections to get the sactions lifted).
not true.
quote:
4. If Saddam (the person that ordered and assisination attempt on Bush Sr.) has weapons WMDs and there is nothing that says he won't share them with this enemy that is willing to use big weapons killing countless civilians:
THEN WE HAVE A BIG PROBLEM.
Regardless of what things some think Bush lied about this is the logic that most people use when they think about this problem.
I believe we have been seen for too long as a paper tiger unwilling to respond meaningfully to our enemies attacks. I think that is no longer a problem. Now we have to deal with the consequences of flexing our muscles, but the consequences of not using our power were 2 destroyed world trade towers and almost 3000 deaths.
Sorry, there were reasons for supporting a regime-change in Iraq but that is a very different topic than the one that is the topic of this thread. Allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power was not what caused 9-11. Our helping to start the USSR's war in Afghanistan and sponsorship of the Al Quaeda certainly helped. We also ended the democratic regime that was elected in Iran I think in the 50s, since they were going to appropriate our oil revenues or something. That led us to set up the Shah, which then gave way to the Ayatollah, which led for us to become buds with Saddam Hussein as the leader of a "moderate" arab-muslim nation, even if he did use some of the weapons we supplied him on his own people.
The history of US policy in the middle east in the last century is quite sad. We must not sugar-coat it and we do need checks against ourselves and our leaders in terms of how we act wrt the middle-east, even if it is a good thing that Saddam Hussein is now captured and Iraq may be able to start towards more democracy in its governance.
dlw
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 12/17/2003 6:00 PM (GMT -6) | |
pwpatton wrote:
quote:
There is virtually no one who things Saddam does not possess WMDs...
I respectfully disagree.
Even members of the Bush Administration have had to concede that their previous "Weapons of Mass Destruction" claims were unsubstantiated.
I might suggest that you read the material in the WMD thread; thoughtfully consider the issues, then decide...
Peace & blessings,
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