Donle’s Daily Dispatches
Volume 1 Issue 186 Today’s News and Views Sunday, July 2, 2006
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Volume 1 Issue 186 Today’s News and Views Sunday, July 2, 2006 |
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Donle's Daily Dispatches RSS News Feeds Latest news and opinion headlines from NPR, BBC, NY Times, etc. |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2536 Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 314 Figures provided by the Iraq Coalition Causality website |
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Remember
Who Made This MESS! |
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Support Our Troops IMPEACH Bush/Cheney |
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Rep. Louise Slaughter's report "America for Sale" (pdf document) |
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Click on Play, then place cursor on Player and right click, select play in Theatre Mode. this is a one hour and thirty-nine minute long movie and well worth watching. - Harold, ed. |
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Listen to Air America Radio while reading today's news and views |
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Sign the ACLU's Petition against torture! We demand our country back. |
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The Not Your Soldier Project gives youth the tools we need to stop the military invasion of our schools and our communities. Not Your Soldier Action Camps bring together young people who are heavily targeted by military recruitment. At the camps, youth learn how to take action to fight military recruitment, the poverty draft, and the corporations that profit off of war. In 2006, Not Your Soldier will be hosting a national camp for youth and adult allies. >>Go to the Pick a Camp section to find out more! If you're interested in hosting a regional Not Your Soldier gathering, find out more here. Not Your Soldier National Days of Action are coordinated days of creative, non-violent direct action where youth take leadership and tell recruiters, "We are Not Your Soldiers!" >>Sign up for our action alert e-mail list! Parents: have questions? Check out Info for Parents, and our FAQ's to find out what the camps will be like. copyright 2005 Not Your Soldier. |
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Today's News and Views |
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July 1, 2006 An Idea for Media -- Cover the War Like a Math Class A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION New York, New York: There is or used to be a debt clock on New York’s 42nd Street chronicling the growing national debt, minute by minute, showing how much money Americans owed. That clock is being rebuilt because the people who made it did not allow enough space on it for anything above, 9 billion, 999 million, 99 thousand and 99 cents. With the debt promising to rise above ten trillion, a new digital clock is being readied. If we can cover our economic distress that way, why not the Iraq war? Who will join me in building a War Clock to show the vast amounts of money being pissed away every second in Iraq? Wouldn’t this be a feature that every TV newscast could update daily, just as they report on the movements of the stock market? All it would require is a simple graphic. The drama of human beings dying and a country like Iraq being devastated doesn’t seem to register on many Americans. Perhaps that’s because, as a nation, market logic has subsumed moral logic and nothing matters unless it is quantified. In the world of sports, people with less than elementary school educations manage to remember intricate sports statistics and understand the computation of complex odds behind gambling. In business, and now increasingly in life, the bottom line separates winners from losers. The tickers are everywhere. We all have to memorize complicated numbers just to get by -- social security numbers, credit scores. Credit cards, ATM numbers etc, etc. So what about the numbers of war? Do you think most Americans understand what this conflict is costing them not only in lives lost but in what used to be called our “national treasure?” Here’s a number most of us don’t know: $291,875,368,544. That’s the official cost of the war, as I write, according to the national priorities project. They break all of this down on their website: http://nationalpriorities.org It breaks down to $2,629 per household. Which in turn translates into $1,168 per person. Those of us here in New York State have coughed up $24,991,439,397. What else could that money have bought? Instead we could have paid for 38,701,306 children to attend a year of Head Start. Instead, we could have insured 174,967,057 children for one year. Instead could have provided 14,164,972 students four-year scholarships at public universities. Instead, we could have built 2,630,942 additional housing units. Instead, we could have hired 5,063,778 additional public school teachers for one year. Now these numbers, of course, don’t cover the costs of the destruction of Iraq or the estimated 250,000 civilians who have died there. It doesn’t cover the costs in human life of “coalition forces” now estimated at 2529. A Casualty Count website http://icasualties.org/oif/ has lots of other numbers about the wounded which may be understated because those shipped “out of country” are not always counted In his book, Imperial Crusades, Saul Landau describes the Pentagon budget. He writes: The 2005 defense budget – the word “defense” has become a joke in the post Cold War world – will reach $500 billion (counting the CIA), $50 billion higher than 2004. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next ten years, the armada of aircraft, ships and killer toys will cost upwards of $770 billion more than Bush’s estimate for long-term defense. He also notes, “As Associated Press’ Dan Morgan reports (June 12 2004, Tallahassee Democrat), the Pentagon “plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism.” And so it goes. Ever upward! There is no bottom line to the bottom line. Much of this is financed not only with taxes but loans from China, Japan and other creditors who will probably never be repaid. Meanwhile, two million Americans went bankrupt last year with many unable to because of a bi-partisan supported "Bankruptcy Reform" bill. (Interested industries spent $154 million in lobbying for it. Home foreclosures are up. College loans are going up at month's end. Credit card debt is strangling millions of American families. The military has been targeted by payday lending scams. The credit squeeze impacts us all. It’s only money. Or is it? During the Vietnam war, we used to speak of the choice as guns or butter? Today, margarine and other spreads have replaced butter while the social safety net is in shreds and no one -- least of all most Democrats -- are even talking about the real bill we are all paying for the lack of good schools and health care. It is time for the news to stop using words. Let’s only talk in numbers. Make every newscast a math class. Maybe then Americans will start getting it -- and getting rid of the people who are getting them. We are about to celebrate Independence Day as a people increasingly dependent on a bad deal that many us don’t even recognize. In God We Trust has been replaced by In Debt We Trust. Our flag doesn’t run -- except in red ink. The bill is coming due. A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new film is about numbers -- In Debt We Trust (InDebtWeTrust.com) comments to dissector@mediachannel.org © BuzzFlash. |
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June 28, 2006 Rob Kall: Progressive Democrats Are the New Conservatives By Rob Kall No Plan, No Positive
Vision--That's a chiseled in granite right wing talking point used to attack
the Democrats. Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006 |
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By Eugene Robinson Finally. It seemed almost too much to hope for, but the Supreme Court finally called George W. Bush onto the carpet yesterday and asked him the obvious question: What part of "rule of law" do you not understand? The justices rejected the kangaroo-court tribunals the administration had planned for the detainees who have been held for years without charges at Guantanamo Bay -- proceedings engineered to have the appearance of due process but not the substance. The ruling is a complicated, nuanced set of concurrences and dissents that will take some time to fully digest, but the fundamental message is clear: Despite his outrageous claims of virtually unlimited presidential power, the self-proclaimed Decider doesn't get to decide everything. "Congress has not issued the Executive a 'blank check,' " Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his opinion. Has anyone broken the news to poor Dick Cheney? The ruling has no immediate impact for the 450 or so Guantanamo detainees who remain in limbo, with no formal charges and no legitimate way to contest their imprisonment. The administration will probably stall, taking its sweet time to come up with a new legal process that complies with the court's requirements. Eventually, though, the inmates will have to be given a day in court or released. I hope this happens before more of them hang themselves. Ironically, the decision comes in the case of a man whom our government seems to have good reason to detain, as opposed to some others who probably were sold to the U.S. military in Afghanistan by warlords who collected a bounty for each prisoner they delivered. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the plaintiff in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , is a Yemeni who is alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver. I, for one, would love to know who rode with bin Laden, where the al-Qaeda leader went, what conversations Hamdan might have overheard. I'd be reluctant to let someone that close to bin Laden slip out of my grasp. But if I wanted to keep Hamdan in custody indefinitely, I'd have to give my reasons in some kind of authentic legal proceeding. The Supreme Court tried to make that clear in 2004 when it rejected the Decider's claims that in wartime he could basically hold whomever he wanted for as long as he wanted, without having to deal with complications such as due process and legal representation. The administration's response was to design military tribunals in which the detainees would not be able to adequately defend themselves. Yesterday the court ruled 5 to 3 that show trials are the same as no trials. Predictably, the majority opinion was written by 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, who has become the court's conscience. Predictably, the swing vote was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has assumed the old Sandra Day O'Connor role. And, predictably, the court's hard-right faction -- Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the newest member of the club, Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- voted to let the Decider do whatever the hell he wants. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had to recuse himself, since he had already ruled on the case (in favor of the president) when he was on a lower court. Remarkably, even if he had been able to vote, the rule of law would have been upheld. Perhaps the greatest impact of the 185-page ruling is that it rejects Bush's claim that the necessity of waging the "global war on terror" gives him extraordinary powers that lie beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. The ruling reminds him of "the court's duty, in both peace and war, to preserve the constitutional safeguards of civil liberty." When Bush gets time to "fully review" the ruling -- yesterday he was occupied with the Japanese prime minister and had only a "drive-by briefing" on the decision -- the above sentence would be a good place to start. He has been told that he is still a president, not an emperor. The court also made an important statement about America's duty to international law. The majority opinion finds that the military tribunals, as structured by the administration, violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice "and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949." In other words, the Decider was wrong when he decided the Geneva Conventions didn't have to be taken into account for suspected al-Qaeda detainees. He was wrong when he asserted that the United States did not have to respect international agreements it has sworn to obey. Does that also apply to torture? To "extraordinary rendition''? To secret CIA prisons? Seems almost too much to hope for. © 2006 The Washington Post Company |
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June 30, 2006 Darkness at Noon for Democracy A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL Ideology doesn't matter. You are a tyrannical thug whether you are Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, or Francisco Franco. And Cheney and his Puppet Bush are thugs in that infamous tradition. People who are utter failures in executing policy often rise to power because they are experts at brutally seizing power and silencing dissent. It is the law of the political jungle. Kill off dissent -- and no one can expose your wretched failures. Democrats on the Hill who still harbor an idea that what is going on is about an alleged "war on terrorism" or fight for liberty or "victory" in Iraq are in need of a new prescription for their glasses. This is a about the raw, ruthless seizure of power and the machineries of state by one radical faction within a democracy. And that radical faction has as one of its major goals the elimination of democracy. Sure, they mouth platitudes about the glories of the homeland, as Hitler did. But take the Holocaust away from the history of the Third Reich and tell us, honestly, if you think the Busheviks are headed in a different direction? Hitler was brilliant in selecting Goebbels as his propaganda minister. Both of them knew that mass media was the way to incite the masses and gain their allegiance to sanction a takeover of the state. Hitler did it with film, radio and print media. The Busheviks are doing it with television and radio as the leading edge of their blitzkrieg toward permanent one-party control of America. Whenever their failures are exposed, they use scare and fear tactics to subdue the public. They launch highly coordinated and disciplined dishonest diversionary tactics -- such as the bogus attack on The New York Times for printing a story on tracing banking transactions that everyone pretty much knew about anyway, especially the terrorists -- for the sole purpose of turning the already lapdog American press into a complete rebirth of the Soviet brand of Pravda. Make no mistake about it, they are seeking laws and prosecution that will make dissent from the party line a crime. These are brown shirts, egomaniacs who mask their lust for total domination and the dismantling of democracy in lofty patriotic rhetoric, which has no meaning to them except as a tool to numb the masses, or to manipulate them emotionally. These are the tactics of the demagogue. The democratic government following the collapse of the Tsarist regime fell to the Soviets because the Soviets were more disciplined, remorseless, and cunning. The same fate befell the Weimar Republic as Hitler manipulated his ascent through a campaign of fear, ringing emotional appeals to "patriotism," scapegoating, and the manipulation of the legal process to make his takeover of the government sanctioned by the Reichstag. If you think that is not happening here, then you are not really thinking at all. You are just a member of the masses who has succumbed to the demagoguery of the barbarians now inside the gates of the White House. You might as well be brain dead if you don't understand the perilous risk to our Constitutional form of government that is now at hand. This is no longer a discussion about the Iraq War. It is the forces of democracy versus the forces of fascism. Don't cringe when you hear the "F" word, as if it is some radical, over the top proclamation. The radicals aren't writing the editorials for BuzzFlash. We are pro-Constitution, pro-democracy and pro-balance of powers. We are patriots. The radicals who would undo the American Revolution are in the White House. They are brilliant at incrementally seizing uncontested power. It is the only thing they do well. The same could have been said of Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. We don't shrink from these comparisons. Just look around and see what is happening. If you don't see it soon, it will be too late. A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL © BuzzFlash. |
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June 30, 2006 A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION This idea has been rattling around in my brain for a while now, but as we approach November's elections, it starts to look less and less insane, as much as we might wish it to be. In fact, an editorial on Buzzflash recently called Darkness at Noon for Democracy has made it look a little more likely, rather than less. Here's my prognostication: Bush is not going to relinquish the office of the presidency on January 20, 2009. No, seriously - don't write off the idea quite yet. Think about what it would take for him to stay on beyond his constitutionally-mandated term of office: Method One: A Third Term 1) There would have to be a constitutional amendment to repeal the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to two terms - difficult, but not impossible. We did it with the 21st amendment, which repealed Prohibition. From congressional passage to state ratifications to law of the land was a scant 9 months. Of course, that involved booze, which is much more important to most people than who is in the White House - but still, it can happen. 2) Then, there would have to be a major turnaround in Bush's popularity that would allow him to be elected to a third term by another 50.7% margin or so (never mind the arguments about how he was not really elected to the first term - that's a discussion for another time.) 3) And all of this would have to happen between November 2006 (no way in Hell it even gets mentioned before the midterms) and July 2008, to allow at least the appearance of freely selecting Bush as the nominee again, and a convention, and a small semblance of a campaign. In other words, in political terms all this would have to happen at the speed of light - again, not impossible, but really really difficult on so many levels, not least of them that more and more people genuinely hate the sumbitch, making it a little harder for him to steal another election. Or there's... Method Two: Martial Law 1) Along about, oh I don't know, September or October of 2008, there will be another 9/11-style (or worse) attack on American soil, or perhaps a genuine act of war against us by another recognizable state - North Korea perhaps, or Iran, though there are numerous other candidates. As in 2001, we will retreat into fear and give away the constitutional farm, as long as Bush will promise not to let the boogeymen get us. 2) As a result of this event, Bush will suspend the Constitution, dissolve Congress, declare martial law, suspend the '08 elections, reassert himself as Commander in Chief, and claim that he does not have to give up the presidency because, hey, the Constitution is what says he has to, and that's suspended. He'll do all this in the name of "national security," and we'll let him get away with it for at least a little while because despite our national penchant for bloodlust and sabre-rattling, we are at heart a bunch of pansies who will, in times of national crisis, follow anything that moves, as long as it promises not to let the bad guys hurt us. Freedom of the press? Gone. Freedom of assembly? Pffft. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness? Out the effin' window. Suspending the Constitution also conveniently makes him unimpeachable, a not-inconsiderable side benefit. 3) And so, America will be plunged into a level of crisis nationally and internationally that will make the Civil War look like a church picnic. Now look - never mind how unlikely all this is. Never mind how unlikely
it would be to be successful if things did go down this way. Even as I write
this, I know how conspiracy-freakish and tinfoil-hattish it sounds. At the very least, I'd like to believe that some combination of the armed forces and American patriots would thwart such a clearly criminal enterprise at the top of our government. But do we really want the military to bail our sorry asses out in this way? They already know they have the manpower and the weapons to take over the government, but do we want to ask them to do so? How do you get that genie back in the bottle? Consider the consequences for Bush, Cheney, et al. if they leave office
quietly, like every other president has done: if a Democrat is elected (more
and more likely with each passing day), every single document, everything
the Bushies have done, is going to see the light of day. Classified
documents that hide illegal acts - suddenly available to the public, or at
least to Congressional investigators. False justifications for war - clearly
on the table. Circumventions of the law - no longer deniable or spinnable.
And criminal charges? Not out of the question, even after they've left
government. No, they can't leave in January of '09. This stuff is not going away just because they leave office, and they know it. Even a country-club prison is still prison. And if you think I'm the only person this idea has ever occurred to, that I'm just a loose cannon of a conspiracy nut and this kind of thing can't happen in America - and if you don't think that the other people who are thinking about this topic are in the White House and environs - then I have some land in Florida I'd like to sell you. That is, if Gov. Bush doesn't already own it. A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION Rich Miles is a free-lance writer, narrator and broadcaster currently living in central Kentucky. His email address is radicalleftie@aol.com. Other essays of his can be found in the Kentucky section of www.theredstate.com and at logicalnegativism.blogspot.com. © BuzzFlash. |
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Right-wing pundits in Internet ratings freefall06/30/2006 @ 9:04 pmFiled by RAW STORY Many well-known right-wing media figures -- including Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly -- are losing their Internet audiences, according to an analysis of Web site ratings by IPD Group and U.S. Politics Today. On the other hand, traffic for Moveon.org has risen. On Thursday, Shakespeare's Sister checked other sites from the right and left at the same tracking service, Alexa.com, used in the analysis. According to the blogger, Free Republic, Hugh Hewitt, World Net Daily, and Pajamas Media have all suffered at least a 19 percent decline, while the traffic at Raw Story, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress has risen. A release issued by IPD Group reads: #An odd thing seems to have happened to mighty right-wing talking head media juggernaut. They are still talking, but fewer people seem to be listening -- at least on the Internet. Alexa.com -- http://alexa.com -- which is owned and operated by Amazon.com, tracks online usage for all Web sites, large and small. At Alexa.com, you can check a site's activity up to the minute, or follow its trail back for many years. At U.S. Politics Today, we thought it might be interesting to see how the right-wing media machine was doing. Not well, it turns out. During the past three months, for instance, http://rushlimbaugh.com traffic ranking has declined 18 percent. He still huffs and puffs away daily on radio, but advertisers might want to double check the size of his audience. If the bottom has dropped out on him online, it likely has had a similar trend line with his radio show. Even Fox News, that gold standard of right-wing media, is down 13 percent. Here are the numbers: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.foxnews.com Ann Coulter is coining money by attacking widows and orphans -- a new game for her since she's run out of Democrats, living and dead, to defame and verbally pillage. You would think with all of the attention the promotion of her new book has given her would raise visitor numbers at her Web site, http://anncoulter.com. Nope. Traffic there is down 10 percent. The audience chart reversal seems to be common across the entire right-wing side of the Internet viewing board. Billoreilly.com -- http://billoreilly.com -- has dropped 40 percent in the past three months. Townhall.com -- http://townhall.com -- that once popular center for right-wing news and commentary, has fallen by 24 percent. The Washington Times Web site is down by 27 percent. And Matt Drudge, once the hottest right-wing name in Internet sites? Alexa.com says http://drudgereport.com is down 21 percent. Could it be that Internet users are getting tired of political sites in general? Maybe so. But http://moveon.org is up 13 percent in the same period. President Bush's fall from grace has been well documented by poll-after-poll. The unpopularity of Congress may not be at historic lows, but those 20-something level of support numbers can't be comforting to those who manage things on Capitol Hill. It seems logical that with enthusiasm draining from the right- wing movement that put the president and the current Congress in place, the media chorus that has lavished praise on them all these many years would be affected by the change in fortune. And so it seems, looking at the Alexa.com numbers -- if they are to be believed. Those graph lines may not directly parallel the decline in GOP poll numbers, but they are all heading in the same direction -- down. |
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| Bozell, however, ignored conclusive
declarations by intelligence officials that the degraded chemical munitions
hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra were not, in fact, in the category of
"weapons of mass destruction" that the United States was looking for at the
time of the invasion in March 2003. Bozell also ignored the Iraq Survey
Group's (ISG) September 2004 final report (known as the Duelfer report, for
former ISG head Charles Duelfer), which noted that degraded chemical
munitions had already been found in Iraq and that they were not proof of a
chemical weapons stockpile or of a renewed Iraqi chemical weapons program.
Indeed, Duelfer stated that the munitions referred to by Santorum and
Hoekstra do not qualify as WMDs, though they may still pose a local hazard.
David Kay, also a former ISG head, claimed that the degraded chemicals in
the weapons were "less toxic than most things that Americans have under
their kitchen sink at this point." Bozell wrote: So it was surprising to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who were investigating whispers that weapons of mass destruction have actually been found by American troops in Iraq, to learn the rumors were true. After badgering administration officials for several months, the government gave the legislators a declassified memo stating that some 500 weapons of mass destruction have been found by coalition forces in Iraq, mostly sarin and mustard-gas agents, some of which "remain hazardous and potentially lethal." But when the legislators released this information, some Bush administration officials poor-mouthed the findings, noting that these old WMDs were hardly evidence of an ongoing post-Gulf War WMD program by Saddam, the fearful scenario that dominated the pre-war debate. Others, like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, emphatically declared that this was hard evidence. Regardless, this memo packs an important rhetorical punch. How many hundreds of times have our major media told us there were "no weapons of mass destruction" found? And how many thousands of times have leftists jumped off that springboard to an elaborate Bush-lied-people-died jeremiad? This discovery should be a crucial, corrective turning point to the stuck-in-2003, pre-war obsessives. The hardened historical narrative needs to be amended. There were WMDs in Iraq that could have been used against our troops or acquired by terrorists. An honest, nonpartisan news media that cared about the facts without political calculation would have taken care to correct the record, even if the findings were comparatively underwhelming to the pre-war scenarios. A fair and balanced story could be done. But the reception of this declassified memo shows we do not have an honest, nonpartisan news media, and political calculation is everything. As Media Matters for America noted, the Duelfer report concluded that "old, abandoned chemical munitions" found in Iraq -- such as the ones hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra -- are not part of a "chemical weapons stockpile." According to the report [emphasis in original]: While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad's desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.
Duelfer appeared on the June 22 broadcast of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, where he stated that these munitions are not weapons of mass destruction: NEAL CONAN (host): The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report? DUELFER: No, the report -- the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq War. They are all almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard. CONAN: Mm-hmm. So these -- were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said it was going into Iraq to find before the war? DUELFER: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions. [...] DUELFER: Sarin agent decays, you know, at a certain rate, as does mustard agent. What we found, both as U.N. and later when I was with the Iraq Survey Group, is that some of these rounds would have highly degraded agent, but it is still dangerous. You know, it can be a local hazard. If an insurgent got it and wanted to create a local hazard, it could be exploded. When I was running the ISG -- the Iraq Survey Group -- we had a couple of them that had been turned into these IEDs, the improvised explosive devices. But they are local hazards. They are not a major, you know, weapon of mass destruction. Kay was quoted in a June 22 Associated Press article dismissing the danger of the degraded chemical munitions: They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004. He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous. "It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said. And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said. — S.S.M. Posted to the web on Wednesday June 28, 2006 at 5:06 PM EST © 2006 Media Matters for America. |
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Munitions Found in Iraq Renew Debate By Walter Pincus Do the 20-year-old Iraqi chemical munitions found by U.S. and coalition forces support the prewar contention that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and justify the invasion of Iraq? That question divided Republicans and Democrats again this week, this time at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on the estimated 500 rockets and artillery shells containing degraded mustard gas or sarin nerve agent. Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) contended that an April report by the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) is clear evidence of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. "Some may want to play down the significance of this report or even deny that WMD have been found in Iraq," Hunter said at Thursday's hearing, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. Citing the United Nations resolutions that called for destruction of all of Hussein's banned weapons, Hunter added that "the verified existence of such chemical weapons" proves they were not destroyed and "in part because of such violations, we voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq." But Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the senior Democrat on the committee, countered that the NGIC report did not address Baghdad's prewar chemical weapons program. Rather, he said, it was "written to address the force protection concerns of our service members in Iraq." "Yes, these certainly are munitions," Skelton added, "but they are not the evidence of prewar assertions made by the administration." The classified overview of chemical munitions says that U.S. forces have found about 500 shells, canisters or other munitions containing the chemical weapons. Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee the shells were produced in the 1980s for the Iran-Iraq war but were not used. Last week, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a strong supporter of the war, touted the findings, provoking protests from some Democrats. In his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, President Bush said that U.S. intelligence indicated "Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." The NGIC study was conducted, Maples said, to allow commanders in Iraq to prepare their troops for potential hazards when they came across the old shells or rockets. Hunter recalled an incident "several years ago," when soldiers disposing of an old artillery round became ill from exposure to chemicals while transporting it. Maples was caught in the verbal crossfire between Republicans and Democrats but proved adept at avoiding answers that aided either side. Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) asked whether the munitions could be characterized as "the Golden Oldies of weapons of mass destruction." Maples said he was "not sure what Golden Oldies are" but added that the munitions were "dangerous. . . . even in a degraded mode, they will produce hazardous and potentially lethal effects and that we would categorize them as weapons of mass destruction." But under questioning, Maples acknowledged that the shells were "a potential risk to our service members in Iraq" but not to 275 million Americans. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who believes the shells represent weapons of mass destruction, asked: "If you took that material and got it out of the country and took it to a metropolitan area, what would be the impact?" Maples replied, "I think conceivably it would have a very large impact." That caused Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.) to ask, "If some bad guys got this stuff and sneaked it into New York City and put it [into] the subways there, would it kill people?" Taken aback slightly, Maples responded, "Potentially . . . yes, sir, it would." Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect." The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about." © 2006 The Washington Post Company |
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July 17, 2006 Issue The president uses signing statements to decree which laws apply to him. by James Bovard For generations, Republican politicians have spoken reverently of the rule of law. But since 2001, this hoary doctrine has been redefined to mean little more than the enforcement of the secret thoughts of the commander in chief. George W. Bush has added more than 750 “signing statements” to new laws since he took office. Earlier presidents occasionally appended such comments to new statutes, but Bush is the first to use signing statements routinely to nullify key provisions of new laws. He perennially announces that he will not be bound by limits on his power and that he will scorn obligations to disclose how federal power is being used. While Bush supporters speak glowingly of originalist interpretations of the Constitution, Bush’s signing statements have far more in common with George III than with George Washington. The Constitution specifies that Congress shall “make all laws” and that presidents must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But Bush—his ego swollen by swarms of groveling intellectuals—has embraced theories that convince him that the president alone may decree what shall be the law. Bush’s most famous signing statement was on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. After White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly declared that Bush enjoyed a “commander in chief override” regarding laws prohibiting torture, members of Congress enacted legislation to make it stark that torture was illegal. The White House engaged in long and arduous negotiations with Congress. After Bush signed this law last Dec. 30, he announced that he would construe it “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.” This was widely interpreted to mean that the law is binding only when Bush pleases. He was reiterating a confidential 2002 Justice Department memo that declared that the federal Anti-Torture Act “would be unconstitutional if it impermissibly encroached on the President’s constitutional power to conduct a military campaign.” Getting the Patriot Act renewed was one of the Bush administration’s highest priorities. After months of negotiations and compromises, a bipartisan agreement was finally reached, giving the White House almost everything it wanted. As part of the deal, Bush administration officials agreed to provide Congress with more details on how Patriot Act powers were being used. The Justice Department would be obliged to disclose to Congress how many Americans’ privacy was being violated by FBI subpoenas known as National Security Letters. (The Washington Post reported that the FBI was issuing 30,000 such letters a year). However, Bush reneged in a “signing statement” quietly released after a heavily hyped White House bill-signing ceremony. Bush decreed that he was entitled to deny Congress any information that would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.” Bush announced that he would interpret the law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information.” In other words, any provision in the law that requires disclosure is presumptively null and void. The crux of the “unitary executive” is that all power rests in the president and that checks and balances are an archaic relic. This is the same “principle” the Bush administration invoked to deny Congress everything from Iraqi war plans to the records of the Cheney Energy Task Force. Bush has invoked the “unitary executive” doctrine almost 100 times since taking office, according to Miami University professor Christopher Kelley. Democrats were furious over what they saw as a Bush Patriot Act double-cross. Representatives Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) bitterly complained to Gonzales: ‘‘Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight. The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight.” The Bush administration ignored the complaint. Bush’s prerogative also apparently includes the right to cover up waste, fraud, and abuse—regardless of how badly taxpayers get boarhogged. After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bush decreed, “The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.” Since the Bush administration seems to consider any unfavorable press coverage a “threat to national security,” it is not surprising that the inspector general found almost nothing—despite pervasive reports and rumors of massive fraud. (There is no evidence that the wording of the signing statement was dictated by Halliburton.) Bush also used a signing statement to undermine the power and independence of an inspector general for Iraq in 2004 legislation. Another frequent target of Bush signing smitings are provisions in laws on whistleblowers. Apparently he considers legal protections for whistleblowers a violation of his own prerogatives. The administration recently swayed the Supreme Court to undermine protections for federal employees who disclose federal crimes, and the Justice Department is signaling that it could prosecute both whistleblowers and journalists who publish leakers exposing government abuses. Some people consider Bush’s “El Supremo” view of his own powers as necessary for the war on terror. But Bush claims this prerogative regarding any foreign intervention. As the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, who has done the best work on this subject, noted, “On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels. After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.” The Colombian government’s paramilitary allies have committed some of the worst atrocities in recent Latin American history. The fact that Bush would claim a unilateral right to engage in what could become a full-scale civil war in Colombia vivifies that his boundless power stems from his job title—not from any conflict with al-Qaeda or other “Islamofascists,” as he likes to call them. Bush’s signing statements also imply that he considers the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878—which prohibited using the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement—null and void. Congress passed laws in 2004 and 2005 prohibiting the military from using intelligence not “lawfully collected” on American citizens. In both cases, as Savage noted, “Bush declared in signing statements that only he, as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be used by the military.” It is appalling that Congress would feel it necessary to pass a law declaring that the Pentagon cannot violate the Bill of Rights—but the president responds by declaring that he will not be bound by any such law—or by the Constitution. The “signing statement” gambit for stretching presidential power was hatched during the Reagan administration. Attorney General Ed Meese instructed Samuel Alito, then a Justice Department lawyer, to analyze how such presidential assertions could buttress the administration’s viewpoints in court. But Alito was a piker compared to George W. Bush. Alito declared that the Justice Department should ‘‘concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress.” Bush, on the other hand, has used signing statements to negate the most important parts of legislation. According to the Bush administration, if the president issues a signing statement memo that is printed in the Federal Register, federal agencies are not obliged to obey laws enacted by Congress. The American Bar Association has appointed a bipartisan panel to examine whether Bush’s signing-statement policies conflict with the Constitution. Their report is due later this summer. However, an ABA report earlier this year that concluded that Bush’s warrantless wiretaps were illegal failed to make the slightest dent in either the administration’s policies or its preening. We have a nullification crisis at the heart of the American Republic. Torture is apparently legal, despite a federal prohibition. Domestic wiretapping is apparently legal, despite clear legal and constitutional prohibitions. Seizing suspects and holding them indefinitely is apparently legal, despite the Constitution’s requirement of habeas corpus. Apparently, the government is not obliged to obey any law that Bush does not personally approve of. And how can we know which laws Bush approves of? It’s a secret. Bush’s personal thoughts thus become the ultimate law of the land—and no one can know if the government is violating the “law” because Bush has not publicly declared what the law is. Why should anyone give Bush the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is obeying all of the laws that he has not yet publicly proclaimed a right to violate? New York University law professor David Golove told the Boston Globe, “Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional.” Americans may have to wait many years to learn what the rule of law meant in 2006. The truth may be suppressed until Bush’s aides begin publishing their memoirs or until the Supreme Court has a change of mood and decides that the executive branch is not entitled to boundless secrecy. In the meantime, don’t count on the legislative branch to right the balance: Bush has encountered almost no effective resistance in his own party to his power grabs. One Republican senator recently told author Elizabeth Drew: “We’ve got to hang with the president because if you start splitting with him or say the president has been abusing power we’ll all go down.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently denounced criticism of the NSA warrantless wiretapping as “insulting” to the president, Drew reported. Apparently, some prominent Republicans believe that the president cannot be criticized even after he admits breaking the law. So what is the meaning of “limited
government” in the Bush era? Merely that the courts and Congress must be
prohibited from limiting the president’s power. July 17, 2006 Issue |
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