posted on May 30, 2003 11:40:57 PM new
Representative Henry Waxman said in a letter dated Thursday that he recently learned of the deal for Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root subsidiary to provide logistical support for US armed forces dating back to 2001.
The contracts awarded to Halliburton, the oil firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites), have been criticized by Waxman and others because of the potential for favored treatment and because many appeared to be awarded without bids.
"When the contracts are combined, the total amount that Halliburton has receieved to date for work related to Iraq is now nerly 500 million dollars," Waxman's letter to US Army Secretary Les Brownlee states.
In addition, Waxman said, the open-ended nature of some oil services contracts make the potential even greater.
One contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers has "a two year duration and a ceiling of seven billion dolalrs," he said, while the second contract "has no ceiling at all," making the amount Halliburton could receive "virtually limitless."
"It is simply remarkable that a single company could earn so much money from the war in Iraq," Waxman said.
The deals "allowed Halliburton to profit from virtually every phase of the conflict with Iraq, including the military buildup prior to the war, the conduct of the war and the restoration of Iraq after the war," the Democratic lawmaker said.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company's logistical support for the army predates Cheney's arrival at Halliburton, and that the company won another award through a biddong process in 2001.
"US government contracts are awarded, not by politicians, but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines," she said in a statement.
Waxman, a fierce critic of the Bush administration, noted that although the contract was awarded through bidding, "the specific task orders issued to the company under the contract can apparently be awarded on a no-bid basis without competition from other qualified contractors."
The Army Corps of Engineers had described its contract given to Halliburton -- run by Cheney from 1995 to 2000 -- as involving oil well firefighting.
But in a May 2 letter replying to questions Waxman, the army said the contract also included "operation of facilities and distribution of products."
The Army Corps of Engineers said the Halliburton contract was designed as a temporary bridge to a contract that would be out to competitive tender. It expected the replacement contract to be awarded at the end of August.
The corps had already come under fire Wednesday over its granting of the Iraqi oil contract on March 8 to Halliburton without putting it out to tender.
posted on May 30, 2003 11:42:31 PM new
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq (news - web sites).
Latest news:
· Iraqi Village Fears Nuclear Contamination
AP - 1 hour, 1 minute ago
· Hunt for Iraqi Weapons Shifting Gears
AP - 2 hours, 21 minutes ago
· US claims Iranian interference in Iraq; Bush begins European tour
AFP - Fri May 30,10:56 PM ET
Special Coverage
A key target is a four-person Pentagon (news - web sites) team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to banned weapons or terrorist groups.
This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA (news - web sites) had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq.
"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."
CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'
The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.
Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.
"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday.
A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analyzed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA.
"In one case, a briefing was presented to Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.
Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics.
"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."
Tenet sat conspicuously behind Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) during a key Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat -- as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos.
Powell said Friday his presentation was "the best analytic product that we could have put up."
SHAPED 'FROM THE TOP DOWN'
Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research working on weapons, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped "from the top down."
"The normal processing of establishing accurate intelligence was sidestepped" in the runup to invading Iraq, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and who deals with U.S. intelligence officers.
Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."
posted on May 30, 2003 11:46:38 PM new
WASHINGTON (May 30) - The United States on Friday announced a major expansion of so-far fruitless efforts to find chemical and biological arms in Iraq, forming a team of 1,400 U.S., British and Australian experts to take up the hunt.
The Pentagon named Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton to head the new Iraq Survey Group, which will try to find alleged arms that Washington cited as its main justification for the invasion of Iraq in March that toppled President Saddam Hussein.
No such weapons have been found, and the move was announced just hours after Lt. Gen. James Conway, the top U.S. Marine officer in Iraq, said U.S. intelligence was ''simply wrong'' in leading the military to believe that the invading troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons.
''The Iraq Survey Group represents a significant expansion of effort in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction as we build on the efforts that are ongoing,'' Dayton, director of operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a Pentagon briefing.
''We may get lucky. We may not. We may find out three months from now that there was a very elaborate deception program going on that resulted in the destruction of stuff.''
While the new group will be staffed by up to 1,400 people from the United States, Britain and Australia, it will increase the number of searchers in Iraq to about 300 from the current 200, Dayton said. Others will be involved in tasks ranging from analyzing documents to questioning people who may have knowledge of such weapons.
With offices in Baghdad, Qatar and Washington, the group will undertake other tasks including collecting information on terrorism, war crimes and prisoner of war issues, he said.
It will replace the U.S. military's 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has been looking for weapons for two months with no success despite visiting 220 of 900 suspected sites. A two-week transition period will begin no later than June 7.
''The goal is to put all the pieces together in what is appearing to be a very complex jigsaw puzzle,'' Dayton said.
But Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said in a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon it was too early to say whether the United States also had been wrong in charging that Iraq had chemical and biological arms when the invasion began 2-1/2 months ago.
''We were simply wrong,'' he said of the assessment that chemical shells or other weapons were ready in southern Iraq and likely to be used against invaders by Saddam's forces.
''Whether or not we are wrong at the national level I think still very much remains to be seen. ... 'Intelligence failure,' I think, is still too strong a word to use at this point,'' said Conway, speaking from the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials have expressed confidence such weapons will be found, although Rumsfeld this week conceded Iraq may have decided to destroy them ahead of the invasion.
Conway said he was convinced when U.S. and British troops swept into Iraq from Kuwait that they would come under chemical or biological attack before they reached Baghdad.
But such shells have not been found even in ammunition storage sites. ''It was a surprise to me then. It remains a surprise to me now that we have not uncovered weapons ... in some of the forward dispersal sites,'' said Conway. ''Believe me, it's not for lack of trying.''
posted on May 31, 2003 01:50:39 PM new
More Bush Hypocrisy: Bush Wants to Drain Social Security Trust Funs
Despite his campaign promises, the truth is that GWBush, as president, proposes to completely drain the Social Security Trust Fund.
Hew also wants to wants to cut 30 percent of the funding from the federal program that trains doctors at children's hospitals, to cut 15 percent of the budget for repairing dilapidated public housing units, to cut 13 percent of the funding for Corps of Engineers public works programs designed to prevent flooding of communities, homes and farms, to cut 10 percent of the funding for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's efforts to reduce job-related deaths, injuries and ailments, and to cut federal funding for environmental protection programs, transportation improvements and aid to farm families that are being driven off the land by the thousands each year. Simply stated, Bush lied. and his intentions are now clear.
posted on May 31, 2003 01:53:49 PM new
Mass Media Hypocrisy: Clinton's Approval Ratings were as High as GDubya's
The media has become nothing more than GWBush's personal mouthpiece, without even a modicum of unbiased reporting. Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and their ilk continually report that Bush's high approval ratings are unprecedented. However, their continual blathering about Bush's popularity represents nothing close to the truth, with no real basis in fact.
In January 1999, immediately after his State of the Union address, President Clinton's approval ratings remained high, reaching an astounding 81% approval rating on or about January 20, 1999. (Gallup Poll, as reported by the Associated Press). Those numbers represented a nine point rise from his December 1998 approval ratings which stood at an amazingly high 73% even after the rabid republican right wing passed the politically motivated articles of impeachment. (Associated Press, December 28, 1998.) The media remains untrustworthy. They push Bush upon us as if he were one of their own. Perhaps he is. After all, today's media giants are controlled by today's corporate giants which continually seek and offer Bush favors. GWBushWatch.com reminds its readers of the truth.
posted on May 31, 2003 01:57:00 PM new
Did George W. Bush do Business with the Taliban?
January 15, 2002
by Gerald Plessner
In the months before the 9/11 atrocities, did the Bush administration see the Taliban as a stable government with which it could do business? Did it block Federal Bureau of Investigation efforts to find and prosecute terrorism so its oil industry friends could negotiate construction of a pipeline across Afghanistan, opening up oil fields in the former Soviet Union to American exploitation?
Those allegations are contained in a book published in Paris late last year. Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), written by French intelligence analysts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, is now receiving considerable attention in this country.
Recently on CNN, Paula Zahn asked Ambassador and former United Nations weapons inspector Richard Butler about the allegations. He said that the book contained "the allegation that instead of prosecuting properly an investigation of terrorism, which has its home in Afghanistan as we now know . . . that (the investigation) was shut down or slowed down in order to pursue oil interests with the Taliban . . . negotiators said to the Taliban, you have a choice. You have a carpet of gold, meaning an oil deal, or a carpet of bombs. That's what the book alleges."
According to the authors, the Bush administration began negotiating with the Taliban immediately after the inauguration. Several meetings took place in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad, the last in August 2001. At that meeting, Christina Rocca, head of Central Asian affairs for the state department, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.
The book outlines how until August 2001, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia," from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.
Those rich oil fields are now controlled by Russia and a pipeline through Afghanistan would break that control at a much cheaper cost of construction, maintenance and security.
It should surprise no one that the Bush administration would, in one of its first international initiatives, move to help its friends in the oil industry. Both the president and vice president Dick Cheney have oil industry backgrounds. The vice president came to his position from the presidency of Halliburton, an oil field service and construction company. The president's father was an oil man before entering politics and is now a consultant to that industry among others. As the first former president to remain involved in businesses deeply effected by government actions, his activities raise interesting questions of conflict of interest, both for himself and the current president.
National Security Council director Condoleeza Rice is a former director of Chevron. Secretaries of commerce and energy Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham have both worked for oil companies. With all the current attention on the Enron bankruptcy, it will be interesting to see if their involvement in this issue raises any questions.
Given the new attention to the persecution of women by the Taliban, did security counselor Rice or state department executive Christina Rocca have any second thoughts about their involvement in negotiations to perpetuate such a vile regime? Could our government's initial lack of interest in the plight of those women have been influenced by the effort to help the administration's oil industry friends? Or did they just not care?
As one of its first acts, the Bush administration allowed tens of millions of dollars to be given to the Taliban regime for its purported suppression of poppy farming. While later evidence suggests that instead of eradicating poppy farming, the Taliban merely warehoused the production and then sold it to finance its repressive regime and its failed survival.
Given the questionable morality of providing any sustenance to the Taliban, other questions demand answers: Was that money given as a show of good faith in the negotiations over a possible pipeline? And if so, how many lives did that cost?
posted on May 31, 2003 03:11:31 PM new
Intelligence Officers Challenge Bush
by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity May 1, 2003
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Intelligence Fiasco
We write to express deep concern over the growing mistrust and cynicism with which many, including veteran intelligence professionals inside and outside our movement, regard the intelligence cited by you and your chief advisers to justify the war against Iraq. The controversy over intelligence on Iraq has deep roots, going back a decade. It came to a head over recent months as intelligence was said to be playing a key role in support of your administration’s decision to make war on Iraq. And the controversy has now become acute, since you have been backed into the untenable position of assuming the former role of Saddam Hussein in refusing to cooperate with U.N. inspectors. (Chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei noted earlier this week, "We have years of experience and know every scientist worth interviewing." The implications not only for U.S. credibility abroad but also for the future of U.S. intelligence are immense. They need to be addressed without delay.
Prominent pundits (and, quite probably, some of your own advisers) are now saying it does not matter whether so-called "weapons of mass destruction" are ever found in Iraq. Don’t let them fool you. It matters a great deal. The Wall Street Journal had it right in its page-one lead article on April 8:
Officials Debate Involving the United Ntations in Verification:
American forces in Iraq are rapidly confronting two other tasks (besides hunting down Saddam Hussein) of enormous importance: finding any weapons of mass destruction and convincing the world the finds are real. The weapons search is a critical one for the Bush administration, which went to war charging that the Iraqi leader had hidden huge amounts of chemical and biological weapons and could pass them on to terrorists. If the United States doesn’t make any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to war.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction six weeks after U.S. and U.K. forces invaded Iraq suggests either that such weapons are simply not there, or that those eventually found there will not be in sufficient quantity or capability to support your repeated claim that Iraq posed a grave threat to our country’s security. Your opposition to inviting U.N. inspectors into Iraq feeds the suspicion that you wish to avoid independent verification; some even suggest that your administration wishes to preserve the option of "planting" such weapons to be "discovered" later. Sen. Carl Levin recently warned that, if some are found "Many people around the world will think we planted those weapons, unless the U.N. inspectors are there with us.
Complicating matters still further, foreign resistance is building to lifting the economic sanctions against Iraq until the United Nations can certify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. Russian President Vladimir Putin this week joined others in insisting that only U.N. weapons inspectors can reliably certify that. With considerable bite and sarcasm, he asked Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 29, "Where are these arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if they were there?
What is at play here is a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions. It is essential that you be able to separate fact from fiction -- for your own sake, and for the credibility of our country’s intelligence community. We urge you to do two things immediately:
(1) Invite U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq without further delay; and
(2) Ask Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to launch an immediate inquiry into the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in providing the intelligence upon which you have based your fateful decision for war against Iraq.
You may not realize the extent of the current ferment within the Intelligence Community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin—cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done with respect to Iraq. What remains not entirely clear is who the cooks are and where they practice their art. Are their kitchens only in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the Vice President’s office? There are troubling signs, as will be seen below, that some senior officials of the CIA may be graduates of the other CIA -- the Culinary Institute of America.
While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war. It is essential that all this be sorted out; Gen. Scowcroft is uniquely qualified to lead such an investigation.
Some things are already quite clear to us from our own sources and analysis. We present them below in the hope that our findings will help get the investigation off to a quick start.
posted on May 31, 2003 03:14:59 PM new
The bad weather over America
By James Carroll, 5/27/2003
HEN WILL the bad weather end? Why the distance between what is and what ought to be? Where are Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? If he was such a threat, why did his army perform so poorly? Does it matter where he is? If the war in Iraq was not about oil, why does the United States insist on its indefinite control? If the war was, instead, about democracy, why are the Iraqi people, including Saddam's proven enemies, excluded from authority? Is Iraq to be like Afghanistan, where war lords rule and heroin thrives? Are there more suicide-bombers now than ever? Has the American war on terrorism advanced safety? How did relations between the United States and its European allies become so fragile? Will history recognize the 21st century Anglo-American combine as a mere continuation of the 19th century British Empire? What do good intentions count for if they cut a wake of wreckage? And is the bad weather the result of an atmospheric low that will not lift without the answers?
Why are taxes being cut when teachers and librarians are being laid off? What happened to campaign finance reform? Why is the United States more divided by race than ever? When did its citizens ever decide to forgo privacy? How can low-income wage-earners support their families? How much longer will the middle class be able to afford health insurance? Why are Americans eating so much bad food? Does prime time television hold a mirror up to the nation? Who teaches children to bring guns to school? What happens to teenagers who fulfill every graduation requirement except the test they can't pass? How many more will fail that test because their teachers were laid off?
Such impossible questions go a long way toward explaining the American mood. We cannot answer them, so we do not ask them, and the emotional weather is lousy. Thus, the patently false ebullience of George W. Bush -- the doubtless man -- is the perfect emblem of a nation so adrift that it dares not look twice at its real condition. Whatever the technical reasons for it, the economy that refuses to recover matches perfectly a broad psychological stagnation that precludes self-knowledge. Why are Americans incapable of looking directly at what we are doing and what we are becoming?
Abroad, the United States wages war on such vaporous pretexts that when they dissipate in the first breeze of mourners wailing, Americans take no notice. A strong tradition of multilateral internationalism is overthrown without political controversy or even debate. An old liberal dream of world federalism, nations united as democratic partners in global governance, is replaced by a program of American unipolarity, world government administered by fiat from Washington. And who in Washington questions this?
At home, an anxious sadness underlies the civic life. Careers feel terribly uncertain. Leisure is a forgotten luxury, which is not all bad because blank spaces in the datebook spark insecurities most of all. Intimate relationships are burdened by what is not discussed, and the confessional to which many people might once have carried such secrets is now dangerous. The Catholic crisis, cutting an entire community loose from moorings of authority and meaning, directly affects only a part of the national population, yet it, too, seems very American. The sadness is as religious as it is political.
In America each boon seems now to carry a curse. Is our freedom secured? Yes, by a government that can eavesdrop on every conversation. Are we well fed? Yes, to the point of obesity. Is our medical care superb? To the point of bankruptcy. Are we the most heavily armed people in history? Frighteningly so. Does the unprecedented success of the national project over the last generation bode well for the next generation? Obviously not. Can we dare to ask why?
An answer is apparent this very day in Iraq. The distance between what is and what ought to be is so vast there that only an act of communal self-blinding can keep Americans ignorant of it. The dark national mood has many causes, but one cries out to be reckoned with immediately. The Iraqi war was a pack of lies, and Washington's war on terrorism is a cynical manipulation of fears for the sake of power. So far, the citizens of the United States have willfully participated in this Bush-led charade. We have done so out of the very insecurity they tell us not to feel, as if the charade, however much it wrecks the world, will protect us. But our underlying sadness indicates what we need to know.
America was not meant to be like this. We are no longer ourselves. The bad weather will not end until we face this cold truth and change it.
posted on June 1, 2003 05:08:05 AM new
Look out ebayauctionguy, I'm relighting the fuse.
Where Are Yesterday's Pens, Mr. President?
Washington, D.C. -
Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry McAuliffe issued the following statement:
"Tuesday the President got his credit card limit raised and today he's spending America's borrowed money on tax breaks that favor the wealthy, that won't generate jobs, and that will weaken rather than strengthen the suffering American economy.
"Yesterday he approved increasing the federal debt to a record $7.4 trillion. It's no wonder he signed the debt ceiling bill behind closed doors. The President didn't want to bring attention to the fact that his tax breaks for the wealthy are being mortgaged on the backs of future generations.
"The President signed the debt ceiling bill with no fanfare, audience or even the light of day. I guess no one wanted any of the souvenir pens he used to sign our economic futures away, but today they'll all be clamoring for one."
Cheryl
My religion is simple, my religion is kindness.
--Dalai Llama
posted on June 1, 2003 07:58:22 AM new
What do you expect ebayauctionguy? any thing that is not socialistic in nature, left wingers will pitch a fit... As usual they expect to get handouts they didn't earn...
...and the fact that Bush's popularity is still high, they just gotta get some yellow journalism in there to try to knock him down, after all it is easiest to throw stones at the one currently on top...
never mind that their legislators have been in congress and must have been doing nothing this whole time.
AIN'T LIFE GRAND...
posted on June 1, 2003 08:11:17 AM new
twelvepole...
The ratings are dropping like a lead balloon.
George Bush Approval............May 19-21..........66%
State of the Country - Rating...May 5-7.............54%
Economic Confidence Rating...May 19-21...........21%
posted on June 1, 2003 09:25:37 AM new
I don't know what educational background you have mlecher, appears to be little if any, but 2/3rds is a majority in all civilized countries.
Don't you have some letters to write... I am sure your congressman enjoys his weekly laugh...
posted on June 1, 2003 01:17:53 PM new
Iraq and the Axis of Oil
CorpWatch
Does anyone remember the Enron scandal and George Bush's ex-best friend Ken Lay? How about WorldCom-the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history? It is hard to stay focused on corporate crime in America when our nation's leaders put the country on a war path.
But there is a connection between Iraq and Enron that should not be overlooked. It is precisely that the drumbeat for war drowns out the clink of handcuffs locking around American business leaders' wrists. It's the fact that the heady rush of patriotism helps mask the hangover of a bubble economy gone bust.
We're not saying that President Bush's call to attack Iraq is strictly a slight of hand to distract the American public from the plethora of domestic problems plaguing his presidency. But at minimum, the looming war with Iraq presents the opportunity for Bush to duck the corporate scandals and reframe the national debate.
We should be at a political crossroads today, discussing issues that are central to the health and well being of the American people. We should be looking for ways to foster real corporate accountability at home. We should be debating how best to build a more just global economic order. And in the name of national security we should be working aggressively to kick the oil habit, while developing environmentally sound renewable energy.
Instead we seem to be perched at the edge of an abyss from which we risk spiraling into a never-ending cycle of war, terrorism, and the evisceration of our democratic rights. Why is Washington risking a morass that might plague the nation and the world for the foreseeable future?
There are no simple or complete answers. But one thing is patently obvious. It's a three-letter word: OIL.
Invading Iraq and taking over its oil fields is a logical, yet totally insane extension of the Bush administration's foreign policy doctrine. For instance, Bush's unilateralism with regard to attacking Iraq (he has been dragged kicking and screaming to the UN security council) is thoroughly consistent with -- and connected to -- the unilateralism he exhibited when he pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
By bailing on Kyoto, Bush, at the behest of the oil industry, dropped out of a treaty designed to save us from the mass destruction of climate change by moving the world away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And if he invades Iraq, Bush further entrenches the deadly connection between US interests and oil interests.
George Bush and Dick Cheney form an axis of oil that sits at the apex of world power. Indeed, they define national security as access to oil. A "successful" war in Iraq could renew US access to oil reserves nearly as large as Saudi Arabia's; this could break the back of OPEC, while providing a bonanza for Bush and Cheney's American and British oil company friends at Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Shell and BP.
But such "success" in Iraq --in addition to the huge toll in immediate human casualties -- will also seriously undermine national and global security. One of the ways it will do so will be to further lock the world into energy consumption patterns that broad scientific consensus has determined will deepen global warming and all its impacts.
In essence, the Bush administration's definition of national security serves US corporate interests, allowing some to profit and others to hide. Beyond this, it is not at all clear who else, if anyone, might benefit from this axis of oil.
George W. Bush was the favorite candidate of the corporate elite and the very wealthy individuals who financed his several hundred million-dollar run for office. The quickest way for Bush to repay these supporters is with a gigantic tax cut, compliments of the U.S. taxpayers and Treasury.
Tax cut supporters claim that the tax money that rich people no longer have to pay will be automatically invested in new business, new plants, new equipment, and consequently new jobs will be created. Proponents also claim that since the U.S. government is now collecting a surplus of tax revenue, it’s time to slow down tax collection. The problem is, this scheme was tried during the early years of the Reagan regime, and as a result our country was plunged into debt to the tune of more than $5 trillion! And to add insult to injury, because of tax loopholes and low tax rates to begin with, wealthy individuals in the U.S. are already some of the lowest-taxed rich people on earth.
When George W. Bush held court in Austin, Texas, with the leaders of big business back in January — including GE CEO Jack Welch — these captains of industry reminded Bush that cutting taxes on business and the wealthy was priority number one. Bush is working hard to keep his promise.
CURRENT STATUS
The Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans are floating a variety of tax cut proposals already, testing out several schemes simultaneously (including one proposal that has already been given approval in the U.S. House; Senate action is not expected to move as quickly). It is already obvious that much of the total tax cut — probably more than $1.3 trillion over the next decade — will end up in the pockets of those earning more than $100,000 per year. The early Bush plan includes a tiny cut for married couples making less than $12,000 per year, no cut at all for couples making less than $45,200 per year, a small cut for couples below $109,250 per year, and large reductions for those earning above $109,250 per year. Single taxpayers at lower income levels will receive very little.
In addition to the discussion of tax rate reductions, Republicans are pushing for changes to the tax code affecting tax credits for children, the "marriage penalty," estate and gift taxes, charitable contributions, and the business research tax. Even the Republicans admit that the business research tax cut is a gift specifically targeted to big business. Many Democrats in Congress are conducting both public and private negotiations with the Bush Administration about the tax cut proposal, an unfortunate display of opportunism and disorganization that does not bode well for the chances of stopping or slowing the pace of or the size of the tax cuts. The tax cut battle is likely to last well into the spring or even early summer months.
UE POSITION
Our union opposes the reckless and unjustified Republican effort to massively reduce taxes for the wealthy. Given the ups and downs of our economy, a massive tax cut could plunge our country back into a debt catastrophe akin to the Reagan fiasco of the 1980s. Our unfair and insanely complex tax system should, however, be reformed to provide for tax relief for working people. The system should also be simplified and made progressive, meaning that those earning virtually nothing pay nothing, and those earning the most pay the most. The thousands of tax loopholes and tax shelters must also be eliminated, compelling wealthy individuals and corporations to finally pay their fair share of the tax burden.
TALKING POINTS
Why doesn’t Congress use the budget surplus to finance a desperately needed national health care program? Or use "surplus" tax revenue to pay off the astronomical national debt that was created by Ronald Reagan and George Bush back in the 1980s? Why on earth would we want to repeat the mistake of granting a huge tax cut that might lead to another debt avalanche?
Instead of an enormous tax cut, why doesn’t Congress use the tax surplus to shore up Medicare, Social Security, and make needed investment in our nation’s public schools? With more than 5 million people in the U.S. now worth at least one million dollars, is this a time to be expanding the ranks of this privileged segment? Do these people need a tax cut?
The claim that rich people will invest their tax-cut bonanza in areas that will produce jobs and new economic activity doesn’t hold any water. During the 1980s wealthy individuals invested their tax cuts in all kinds of unproductive places such as real estate speculation and interest-bearing government treasury bills. Why do members of Congress constantly assume that wealthy people always invest their money with great concern for how many jobs it will create?
According to research done by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D.,S.D.), the Bush tax cut will add up to enough to pay for a new Lexus automobile for the highest tax bracket, enough to pay for a used-car muffler for working people, and nothing at all for those on the bottom.
Members of the Senate and House of Representatives earn $141,300 per year. The leadership of both bodies earn considerably more. Due to Congressional action in 1999, President Bush receives $400,000 per year. And with virtually every member of Congress and President Bush having sources of additional income, this places every member of Congress in the tax bracket likely to receive the biggest tax cut of all!
If Congress is determined to cut taxes on the most wealthy segment of our society, would Congress be willing to eliminate federal income taxes entirely on those earning less than $20,000 per year? Why not?
Bush, like his father and Ronald Reagan before him, promotes tax cuts as a convenient gift to wealthy supporters — and as a backdoor means to slashing federal spending that benefits working people. When taxes are cut, revenue to the government falls, leading to an inevitable belt-tightening. The huge cuts that gutted the funding for the National Labor Relations Board in the 1980s were engineered by the Reagan Administration when reckless tax cuts increased the deficit.
posted on June 1, 2003 02:14:46 PM new
The only reason why 2/3rds of the population aprove of George Bush is becouse most of them only know what the news lets them see. We all know the medaia is the propoganda arm of the Bush administration.
The only people that dont aprove are the ones that do their research and are aware of what the truth really is.
posted on June 1, 2003 02:23:19 PM newThe only people that dont aprove are the ones that do their research and are aware of what the truth really is.
And that is exactly what I keep telling my boyfriend. He needs to read some more. Whatever he is told on network TV, he believes. This from a station that cannot even say "Hump Day" on Wednesday anymore.
Cheryl
My religion is simple, my religion is kindness.
--Dalai Llama
posted on June 1, 2003 02:31:31 PM new
"We all know the medaia is the propoganda arm of the Bush administration"
If we all know that and still 2/3 agree with bush then what the hell are you talking about. Heck I'm not for all of bush's plans but I am not against them all either so don't tell me what I know and don't know and how I should find out the truth. I am capable of my decisions and if they don't happen to be yours also that doesn't mean I didn't factualy research them. JEESHHH !!
posted on June 1, 2003 07:20:32 PM new
If you think the media belongs to the establishment now wait til tuesday after the FCC votes on ownership rules.
posted on June 1, 2003 08:59:51 PM new
Davebraun is right. We haven't seen anything yet. The FCC vote tomorrow is already a done deal according to PBS and NPR. Although there have been thousands (well over 40,000
as of Thursday afternooon) of emails and a general uproar there is a feeling the three republicans will vote against the citizen's right to get unbiased programming.
How many rallies were staged in our honor?
How many were just a photo op to show Europe that Americans backed the President, and they
should too.
Its getting pretty obvious the Bush administation lied about Iraq. We are getting beaten up in the European media. I don't enjoy hearing them say the world is upset with Bush, but the American people don't seem to care. I heard it again today. Is it we don't care or there is no longer any media out there willing to stand up to Bush.
Why didn't we have debates before our rights
for diverse media was given away, or will be tomorrow?
By Tim Jones
Tribune national correspondent
Published March 19, 2003
Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President Bush's strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation's largest owner of radio stations.
In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by up to 20,000 people. The events have served as a loud rebuttal to the more numerous but generally smaller anti-war rallies.
The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique among major media companies, which have confined their activities in the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news. The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50 states and the District of Columbia.
While labor unions and special interest groups have organized and hosted rallies for decades, the involvement of a big publicly regulated broadcasting company breaks new ground in public demonstrations.
posted on June 1, 2003 09:21:46 PM new
The relationship between Clear Channel and George Bush is interesting to be sure. The CEO of Clear Channel purchased a baseball team from Bush at above market value and was given the inside track to manage the West Texas Educational Land Trust in a sweetheart deal which he profited from at the expence of the people of Texas.
For three generations the Bush family dealings have been quite questionable. From Prescott to George 1, to George 2 and least not forget Neal (Silvarado Savings).
posted on June 2, 2003 05:28:35 AM new
CBlev65252 can you show us a chart about the US approval ratings of those countries during the same time periods. that would be more important to most people, everybody loves to hate america but by comparison the numbers are about the same.
posted on June 2, 2003 08:21:21 AM new
I laughed out loud when I saw the FoxNews attempt to spin the latest approval rating. None of their pundits could say, with a straight face, that the latest poll was anything less than disastrous.
For a president coming off recent military action and in the midst of announcing a huge policy measure, it's disastrously low. Even more telling are the 30 percent of poll respondants that actively DISAPPROVE of his performance. And the Halliburton stuff is finally starting to capture peoples' attention. My dad, who worked for a big defense contractor, has an (ahem) generous threshhold for suspicious behavior on the part of contractors. He told me last week that he would not be surprised to see Halliburton eventually bring the Bush administration down. Quote: "They're rotten to the core."
posted on June 2, 2003 09:06:40 AM new
No weapons yet? So what? Liberating Iraq was still the right thing to do.
Weapons of Mass Distortion The effort to discredit Blair and Bush after they won the war.
Monday, June 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
To certain critics of U.S. policy in Iraq, the only thing worse than going to war with Saddam Hussein is the fact that we won. This they can never forgive--which is why they are now trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction.
For these opponents of war, it isn't enough that a tyrant and his psychopath sons have been deposed. It doesn't count that mass graves have been uncovered, that torture chambers have been exposed, or that Saddam's victims can speak freely for the first time in 30 years. The critics are now claiming the war was illegitimate because no one has yet found a pile of anthrax in downtown Baghdad.
These rather selective moralists are leaping on a distorted report about comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on WMD. An advance press release from Vanity Fair magazine spun as news the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz had said the following during an interview in early May: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."
In Europe this has been seized on by the antiwar left as a source of vindication. "Just Complete and Utter Lies," explained the Daily Express of London. Germany's allegedly more august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed: "The charge of deception is inescapable." State-side, meanwhile, the critics are focusing on whether there was an "intelligence failure," or the political manipulation of intelligence, in concluding that Saddam had WMD.
But who's trying to deceive whom here? That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war. U.N. inspections in the 1990s had proved that Iraq had such weapons, including 30,000 liters of anthrax, and Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraq's own Kurds. The French themselves insisted that disarming Saddam of WMD, as opposed to deposing him, had to be the core of U.N. Resolution 1441.
Only last week Democratic Senator Joe Biden was asked by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "Do you believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction going into the war?" Mr. Biden's reply: "Yes I do." Were he and other Democrats also part of the vast WMD conspiracy?
Mr. Wolfowitz's words were no contradiction of anything the U.S. said before the war. The allies had always given multiple reasons for ridding the world of Saddam. British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously used the human rights rationale in a major and well-received speech in Glasgow in March.
The Vanity Fair press release also failed to include that immediately after his WMD remarks, Mr. Wolfowitz had added in the interview: "But there have always been three fundamental concerns: One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism and the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people."
What seems to be going on here is an attempt to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters. If their backing for the war is morally vindicated, they will emerge as even larger forces on the world stage, and so they must be tarnished after the fact as dissemblers.
Within the U.S., the role of the French and the European left is being played by elements of the intelligence community. Parts of the CIA in particular like to think of themselves as Olympian analysts whose views should be accepted as gospel. They resent that Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sometimes challenges holy CIA writ, which has often been wrong about Iraq. In any case, intelligence isn't dogma but is supposed to be merely one tool for elected policy makers, all the more so given the sometimes murky nature of the information.
As to the undiscovered WMD, Iraq is larger than Germany and much of it remains unsearched. As Mr. Bush noted in Poland this weekend, the U.S. has already found two of the mobile biological labs that Colin Powell fingered before the war. Yesterday Mr. Blair added that he's seen more evidence that he will soon make public. But it is also possible that Saddam destroyed much of it, or that some was taken out of the country.
Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory. The allies liberated a country of 22 million people, rid the world of a terrorist ally and have begun a process that may well create a more stable and prosperous Arab world. The credibility gap lies with those who were opposed to achieving all of that.
Your chart may be impressive to some. What all those coountries are failing to remember is WHO SAVED THEIR ASSES FRON HITLER'S THIRD REICH. And that is the thanks we receive.
[ edited by bear1949 on Jun 2, 2003 09:09 AM ]
[ edited by bear1949 on Jun 2, 2003 11:24 AM ]
posted on June 2, 2003 09:54:22 AM new
That was kind of my point in asking for a reverse chart about the US feelings about those same countries. Those polls , while pretty to look at, really don't meant a great deal. Wait for the next disaster, be it an earthquake, massive bombing or some sort of large scale natural dissaster and it will be the united states that send all the relief efforts and help then the scale will rise back up. Right know its simply "hip" to be anti-american in Europe as they have anti war and america news reporting forming their opinion which is what some here say is going on here in the states but just opposite. If it is done in a way to support their agenda its good news reporting and pure fact, if it does not support thier views its a mass media consipiracy. Pretty comical stuff if you sit back and read the multiple posts on different threads by some posters. And of course their anre many great posters that can share a view without seeing the other side as a blithering fool but not as many as in the past. kind of sad
The implications not only for U.S. credibility abroad but also for the future of U.S. intelligence are immense. They need to be addressed without delay.
