Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

October 21, 2005
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Article Here...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times - including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq - and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.

Iraq vote was a fraud (video)

By Evan Derkacz
Posted on October 25, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/27305/

Draft Constitution Adopted by Iraq Voters was the top headline on Google news this morning. This is the first draft of history. And it has an air bubble in it.

"Irregularities."

Veteran ABC News Correspondent Martha Raddatz covered the Iraq constitutional referendum and was a witness to voter fraud [VIDEO -- big thanks to eagle-eyed Peek reader Ed Schwing for the tip].

On PBS' Washington Week Raddatz recounted her experience of going to a Sunni neighborhood and witnessing numerous voters come out to proudly register their opposition to the constitution.

At one polling place, however, she watches as an Iraqi voter fills out seven cards in support of the constitution. According to her, he was by no means the only case. Just the only one during their 20 minute stay.

Yet she still refers to it as irregularities: "There are some irregularities and I can tell you right now, I witnessed them."

Here's how PBS introduces a segment that includes a veteran mainstream media professional who directly witnessed (and recorded on camera) vote fraud:

Administration Awaits Iraq Election Results

The outcome of Iraq's constitutional referendum was uncertain due to accusations of voter fraud, but the next steps to building the new government hinge on the constitution's success.

Oh, just accusations... There are nearly always accusations of voter fraud. One would think this eyewitness account would constitute (sorry, I'm working on the puns...) a gen-u-ine scoop. A broadcast to hang your hat -- not to mention some sexy promos -- on.

Nope. Just allegations. And no need to wait for the consequences of "burying the lead." Here's the first line of today's AP report: "Iraq's landmark constitution was adopted by a majority in a fair vote..."

The Sunnis will be very happy and the insurgency will be over any day now.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/27305/

Texas Court Issues Arrest Warrant for DeLay

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; 5:09 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101900789.html

A Texas court today issued an arrest warrant for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the powerful former House majority leader, ordering him to appear for booking at a county jail in his home district.

The court in Travis County, Tex., set bail for DeLay at $10,000, and a lawyer for the embattled congressman said it would be posted.

Dick DeGuerin, the lead counsel on DeLay's defense team, said the arrest warrant was "a matter of routine," the Associated Press reported.

However, the defense reportedly had hoped to avoid submitting DeLay, formerly the second-ranking Republican leader in the House, to the fingerprinting and mug shot photography that accompanies a formal arrest.

The procedure was required before DeLay makes his first court appearance Friday on conspiracy and money laundering charges in connection with an allegedly illegal campaign financing scheme.

Officially called a "writ of capias," the arrest warrant was a "purely procedural event," but it would require DeLay to surrender to authorities to be fingerprinted and photographed, Travis County Grand Jury Clerk Linda Estrada said, according to Reuters news agency.

A spokesman for DeLay, Kevin Madden, said this was "standard operating procedure" and came as no surprise to defense attorneys.

DeLay was ordered to show up for booking at the Fort Bend County jail in the Houston metropolitan area. It was not immediately clear when he would do so.

A Texas grand jury indicted DeLay Sept. 28 on a criminal count of conspiring with two political associates to violate state campaign finance law. The indictment prompted DeLay to announce that he was temporarily stepping down as House majority leader in accordance with GOP rules.

DeLay denounced the charge against him as "reckless," and he accused the Democratic district attorney prosecuting the case, Ronnie Earle, of being "an unabashed partisan zealot" out to avenge political defeats in Texas.

The indictment, issued on the last day of the grand jury's term, accused DeLay of criminally conspiring to inject illegal corporate contributions into 2002 state elections that ultimately helped the Republican Party redraw congressional boundaries in Texas, leading to victories in the 2004 elections that cemented GOP control of the House of Representatives in Washington. At issue are corporate campaign contributions totaling $190,000 that prosecutors say were illegally channeled through the Republican National Committee for distribution to GOP candidates for the state legislature. Under Texas law, it is illegal to use corporate funds to elect state candidates.

DeLay was accused of conspiring with two associates: John D. Colyandro, the former executive director of a political action committee in Texas that was formed by DeLay, and James W. Ellis, the head of DeLay's national political committee. Colyandro and Ellis had previously been charged in an indictment that did not name DeLay.

Earle obtained a new indictment on Oct. 3 from another grand jury accusing DeLay of money laundering as part of the campaign financing scheme.

DeLay's attorneys filed a motion to quash the indictment on grounds of "prosecutorial misconduct" by Earle. The motion asserted that Earle's original conspiracy indictment charged DeLay with "a crime that did not exist in Texas law." As a result, it said, Earle then "unlawfully" engaged in an "irregular and desperate attempt" to obtain a substitute indictment for money laundering before a statute of limitations ran out on Oct. 3.

The Fix Is In

Grand jury indictments for some of Bush's closest collaborators?

by Chris Floyd
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/10/21/120.html

October 20, 2005
Moscow Times

Having railed at the wanton criminality of the Bush faction for so long, this column naturally partakes of the general glee arising from the looming possibility of genuine, grade-A grand jury indictments for some of the gang's top thugs.

Of course, we all know that the fix is in: If anyone in the White House is actually indicted and convicted for the high crime of exposing the identity of an undercover agent -- in wartime, no less -- they will certainly be pardoned when George W. Bush finally limps away from the steaming, stinking, blood-soaked ruin of his presidency. Nobody will do any hard time; in the end, the whole sick crew will simply pass through the golden revolving door into the lifetime gravy train of corporate grease and right-wing lecture-circuit glory.

Still, it is heartening to see the fever-sweat of fear popping out on the brows of these swaggering world-shakers, these third-rate goons and half-wit cranks posing as great statesmen, if only for a little while. Fear has always been their weapon of choice: They've used it to foment aggressive war, to crush political opposition, to manipulate the electorate and to mask their own incompetence, corruption and greed. Now they're getting a taste of it themselves -- and they can't take it.

You can see it in their darting eyes, the twitches and fidgets: the fear, the nagging worry that perhaps, just perhaps, they haven't got it all nailed down this time; that perhaps, just perhaps, the law is something more than a fancy cane to beat the poor with; that it might, just might, apply to them as well. The sight of Bush's porky puppetmaster, Karl Rove, tottering out of his fourth grand jury appearance last week, with the shadow of manacles dangling before his pinched, bloated face, was an image to warm the cockles of every American patriot's heart.

But this schadenfruede, however tasty and effervescent, is no substitute for the strong meat of justice. And even in the unlikely -- not to say inconceivable -- event that the entire pack of jackals gets herded into the hoosegow for the agent-outing conspiracy, it will not bring back the innocent dead murdered at their command. It will not restore the shattered families writhing in the pits of grief and loss, from Baghdad to Burbank. It will not be recompense for the pointless sacrifice of soldiers and reservists sent on a criminal errand, plunged into a brutal and brutalizing hell -- for nothing, for a chimera, for ideological lunacy, for the enrichment of cats already so fat they can barely stand up and waddle to the dish for another slurp of cream.

Not unless every one of the war conspirators and their chief minions -- Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, Scooter Libby, Andrew Card, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Karen Hughes, John Yoo, Zalmay Khalilzad, George Tenet, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, Stephen Hadley, Jerry Bremer, Nicholas Calio, Richard Perle, Tony Blair and all the rest -- were lined up in the public square with the entrails of their victims draped around their necks would anything approaching justice be done. But as Shakespeare told us long ago, "in the corrupted currents of this world, offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, and oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law."

For while official Washington strains to read the special prosecutor's tea leaves, Bush's war crime grinds on. Last weekend saw the "passage" of the much-ballyhooed Iraqi constitution -- a desperately thrown-together rigamarole that quietly preserves the special privileges for Bush's business cronies imposed by the former satrap, Bremer, while exacerbating the violent ethnic rivalries that Bush has unleashed across the tortured land.

This "victory for democracy" -- achieved, in typical Bushist fashion, through outrageously rigged vote counts, as The New York Times reports -- is in fact a blueprint for disaster. The Kurds will accelerate their U.S.-backed "ethnic cleansing" of the oil-rich north, while the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in the oil-rich south will accelerate their already murderous imposition of Talibanic religious rule. The once-dominant Sunni Arab minority, now marginalized and impoverished, will swell the ranks of the growing insurgency, as Baghdad and the nation's central provinces plunge further into Somali-style anarchy. Terrorist freebooters, set loose in the one of the world's most strategic locations by Bush's destruction of the Iraqi state, will thrive in the chaos.

With no chance for the deliberately enfeebled central Iraqi government to take responsibility for the nation's security, U.S. forces will remain knee-deep in the quagmire, killing and being killed without rhyme or reason -- or hope of escape. Indeed, Bush is already signaling "a longer, broader conflict" in his speeches on the war, The New York Times reports. There is no "exit strategy" because Bush has never intended to leave. The installation of a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq has been the war conspirators' loudly proclaimed goal for many years, long before Bush was shoehorned into power -- as we have noted here incessantly since 2002, citing chapter and verse from their own publications.

This is why they lied their way into war, this is why they outed a CIA agent whose husband exposed one of their lies: to pursue their dream of "global dominance," of endless war profiteering and oil baksheesh. The prosecutor might give them a pinch, but the damage is already done: The dead will stay dead, the maimed will stay maimed, the tortured will never escape their nightmares. And the killing, the wounding and torment will go on.

SPJ Undercuts First Amendment With Miller Award

10/19/05
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2701

The Society of Professional Journalists' decision to give its prestigious "First Amendment Award" to embattled New York Times reporter Judith Miller is a blow to freedom of expression. By rewarding a reporter who was apparently collaborating with and protecting a powerful official in an effort to punish the free speech of a government critic, the SPJ is undermining, not advancing, the principles of the First Amendment.

The award, coming two days after details of Miller's involvement in the CIA leak story and her grand jury testimony were revealed by the New York Times (10/16/05), was defended by SPJ board member Mac McKerral, who told Editor & Publisher (10/17/05), "It's not a lifetime achievement award.... I could understand people being upset if we were recognizing her work over a period of time, but this is an award for being willing to not reveal a source, willing to spend so many days in jail, and that is how we distinguish it…. Issues raised in the past couple of days really had no bearing on the award."

But why wouldn't new information about the case be relevant to a journalism group? For months, Miller claimed a journalistic privilege to protect Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Miller would eventually tell the grand jury that Libby had identified Valerie Plame Wilson--the wife of White House critic and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson--as a CIA employee (New York Times, 10/16/05). Miller seemed to have little doubt about what motivated this disclosure: Asked why she agreed to Libby's request to identify him only as a "former Hill staffer," Miller told the grand jury, "I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson."

In other words, Miller understood that Libby was not a whistleblower but was someone out to punish a government critic. Not only was it unethical for her to agree to identify Libby in a misleading way, but promising him any kind of anonymity in this case violated the Times' rules against allowing unnamed sources to make partisan attacks.

SPJ's case rests on the belief that Miller was not wavering on the principle of not revealing a confidential source. But Miller's refusal to testify doesn't in the end seem as principled as either she or her paper originally claimed--which is the whole reason SPJ deemed her worthy of an award. Instead, the Times' October 16 report suggests that Miller was seeking a suitable waiver from Libby all along, and eventually based her decision not to testify in part on the feeling that she would harm Libby if she testified:

Once Ms. Miller was issued a subpoena in August 2004 to testify about her conversations with Mr. Libby, she and The Times vowed to fight it. Behind the scenes, however, her lawyer made inquiries to see if Mr. Libby would release her from their confidentiality agreement. Ms. Miller said she decided not to testify in part because she thought that Mr. Libby's lawyer might be signaling to keep her quiet unless she would exonerate his client.

The form that "signaling" took, according to Miller, was Libby's explaining that he had testified about their conversations in ways that in Miller's view were false. In other words, she refused to testify because she didn't want to expose her friend as a perjurer. Is this really a journalist that SPJ wants to hold up as an example to others?

There is much that is inexplicable and contradictory in Miller's account of her behavior. But even taking her story at face value, she is a reporter who violated the standards of professional journalism to work with a top White House official to get revenge on a government critic--and then declined to testify to protect him from the criminal consequences of his lies. This context has an obvious bearing on Miller’s qualifications for an award celebrating freedom of expression.

Some Neighborhoods Rebuild, But Part of Lower 9th Remains Off-limits

by Jessica Azulay, NewStandard

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2491

After traveling hundreds of miles to see their flood-ravaged homes, some New Orleans residents found themselves locked out of their neighborhood, which they say has been maligned and targeted by elites with ulterior motives.

Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, Oct 17 - As residents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward trickled into their neighborhood this week at what they thought was the behest of city authorities, the National Guard set up checkpoints along Claiborne Avenue and blocked many from reaching their homes on the northern side of the heavily damaged area.

Frustrated residents – many who had traveled hours last week to finally see what had become of their homes – milled from blocked intersection to blocked intersection, pleading with soldiers to let them through. For the most part, the guards stood their ground, telling angry flood survivors that the area was still too dangerous to enter.

But for many who waited over a month to see if there is anything of their former lives to salvage, to show insurance adjusters proof of damage, or simply to find closure so they can begin to rebuild their lives, the roadblocks symbolized just one more insult from a city they increasingly feel is trying to push them out.

"I want somebody to explain to me, Mr. Mayor, or somebody who's in control, what's really going on," said Doretha Broomfield, a Lower Ninth Ward resident who drove from Cheneyville, Louisiana to inspect her home. "Why can't we go see our property? I would love to have some closure… I know there's nothing there, but I just want to stand there and look."

Addressing Mayor C. Ray Nagin, she said: "I've been in that house at 2607 Tennessee [for] 38 years, Mr. Mayor, 38 years, I raised my kids in that house; my memories are there. I can't go inside the building because it's no longer there. I can't collect memorabilia. There's nothing there for me, but I do want to go in there. It's my right. It's my land."

Ethel Mitchell, who drove 18 hours from North Carolina in order to show her flood-insurance adjuster her house, was also incensed. "I think it's ridiculous that they announce all over the country that the Lower Ninth Ward is going to be open for inspection and then you come all these many miles and they won't let you back in there just to view your house," she said. "It's no different… than it is out here and they claim that it's all toxic back there," she continued, pointing first to the areas that were open to traffic and then down the street past the National Guard checkpoint.

The rules and the reasons for denying people passage beyond Claiborne varied depending on which checkpoint soldiers were asked. Most were allowing insurance inspectors, contractors and government workers past the checkpoints, but denying residents and press.

Some soldiers told residents the area was toxic. Others said people could not enter because there was too much unstable debris. Still others said that the search for bodies had not concluded and that authorities did not want people finding the dead in their homes.

But residents expressed deep skepticism, fueled by suspicion that the government was using Katrina's devastation to obliterate this historic neighborhood in the interest of industry.

"They are going to figure out a way how to get all these people out this area to open up that canal and build a bigger port in there, and this is their opportunity for them to do that," said Anthony Jones, Mitchell's bother. "This is going to be an industry area; they've been trying [to make it so] for years."

Most Lower Ninth Ward residents who spoke to The NewStandard said they believed the levees had been intentionally destroyed – either by dynamite, barges or neglect – in order to divert flood waters from richer neighborhoods. Decades of hostility from the rest of the city and the memory that the government blew up a levee in 1927 to save parts of New Orleans at the expense of poorer areas contribute to the belief.

Residents were also quick to counter what they saw as the unscrupulous media portrayal of their neighborhood as a high-crime, poverty-stricken area.

Tanya Harris, an organizer with national low-income advocacy group ACORN, whose house sat out of reach beyond the checkpoints, emphasized that her neighborhood was known for its high number of grassroots and civic organizations organizing to improve life for residents of the area.

The Lower Ninth Ward is also known as the seat of black home ownership in the area, with a 59 percent owner-occupancy rate. That rate far outstrips the owner-occupancy rate of Orleans Parish as a whole, which stands at just over 46 percent.

It is this investment in the community by its own occupants, and resistance against projects like the Army Corps of Engineers' Canal Expansion project, that residents believe makes it a target for mass removal.

"It's bullshit; it's double talk," said Harris of the excuses she'd heard all day from soldiers. She pointed out that the streets in the unrestricted area were not completely cleared of debris either and pointed down the apparently equally navigable streets visible on the other side of the checkpoints.

She also expressed doubt that the EPA had declared the area was toxic, as many of the soldiers claimed. Later, Colonel Jerry Sneed, who was on sight representing the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, told The NewStandard that the EPA had told him it was safe for people to be there.

In fact, the EPA has said little about much of New Orleans and the actual toxicity levels in the Lower Ninth Ward are not yet fully known. But to Harris, Sneed's statement confirmed her suspicions that soldiers were lying in order to keep her away from her home. Harris is adamant the she and others will live in their neighborhoods and take up their various struggles again.

"We had started so many different projects to boost the Lower Ninth," she said. "It's like we had one step forward and this has brought us ten steps back, and it's like, What do we do now?"

She continued: "I'm not prepared to give up; I'm not prepared to leave. People will return – just like they did before, they will return, I believe that wholeheartedly. I know I'm coming back, my family's coming back. There's no way that we're going to leave the Lower Ninth."

In the end, some residents were able to convince police or other official personnel to drive them into the area to see their homes, but the lucky ones were a minority. Most languished in frustration.

© 2005 The NewStandard

Martial Law In US?

Has the monumental silence from the public and the media in the wake of the President's comments about changing the Posse Comitatus Act so that the executive branch could order the use of the military for search and rescue, enforcing flu quarantines, confiscating privately-owned weapons, and generally erecting a totalitarian state frightened anyone as much as it has me?

Why is no one telling this megalomaniac "NO!"? Why is no one besides the alternative media saying anything at all?

Do you think it's because he resonates so well with their "moral values" (yeah, right!)? More likely it's because people are scared to speak up for fear of reprisal.

Good God, spare us from this arrogant, dangerous man...

Pete

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged

President Bush Teleconference With U.S. Troops Was Choreographed to Match His Goals for Iraq War
By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you."

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

"So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

"You've got tremendous support here at home," Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.
Top Stories

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

Article...

Poll: Lying on Iraq as an impeachable offense

Congress should consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about his reasons for going to war in Iraq, according to half of the Americans surveyed in a recent poll.

The poll, commissioned by the After Downing Street Coalition, a loose aggregation of antiwar, Democratic and progressive groups, was conducted by the nonpartisan firm Ipsos Public Affairs U.S.

Here's how the question was put: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him." Fifty percent of the 1,001 Americans surveyed agreed with that statement, while 44 percent disagreed; 6 percent said they didn't know or declined to answer. The breakdown was not entirely on partisan lines. Twenty percent of Republicans surveyed agreed with the statement, as did 72 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents.

Last June, a similar poll conducted by Zogby International found that 42 percent of those surveyed supported impeachment. As the death toll for American troops in Iraq approaches 2,000 and Bush's sorry approval ratings sag, maybe the "I" word can finally be spoken. Not that it's likely to be heeded in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, where not a single Democrat dares utter the word.

-- Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon

Thurston Howell's Island?

I figured that the repercussions from the eminent domain decision in Kelo would be extreme but I didn't think that they would devolve into parody so quickly. Riviera Beach, Florida is talking about using eminent domain on up to 2,000 homes (6,000 people) to build a yacht club. Once again, life imitates The Onion.

Taxes blah blah jobs blah blah - once again eminent domain is going to be used to take private property from poor people to give it to rich people because it will make things better for, um, the people who happen not to live in the footprint of the new development? The Mayor? I don't know exactly who it is supposed to benefit, but I do know that there is no fucking way that a yacht club is a public fucking service.

(Via Metafilter)

While we're talking about people like our president, who invoke God to justify their policies and actions, our friend, Thomas McCullock, at ThomasMc.com, forwards a great piece by Doug Thompson at Capitol Hill Blue.

In his post, titled The Ghost of Joe McCarthy , Doug makes apt comparisons between the “Red Scare” days of Joe McCarthy and the current terrorist-scare days. He also talks about Bush's unfortunate tendency to tell the world that God made him do it:

"A fundamentalist Christian President who claims God told him to invade Iraq – an act that killed more than 150,000 civilians, mostly women and children – is not that much different from a fundamentalist Islamic fanatic who claims it is the will of Allah that he send young men to America to crash airliners into office buildings and kill 3,000 plus.

"Both are extremists. Both are fanatics. Both use religion as an excuse to kill people. The only real difference is that one has heavy artillery and can kill a lot more innocent people with his extremism. "

Read the rest of this excellent piece here.

Bush's Most Desperate Speech Yet

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet
Posted on October 10, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/26613/

On the very day that New York City received "credible" (then "doubtful") information that 19 operatives had been dispatched to bomb the subways, President Bush gave a speech to remind America that the "war on terror" was on the front burner. Channeling elder statesman David Letterman, Bush claimed that 10 serious terrorist plots had been derailed since 9/11.

Bush was hoping to deliver us from our dangerous preoccupation with Rove's troubles, DeLay's indictment, Frist's SEC problems, the fallout from Katrina, his holy-shit-I've-even-lost-the-evangelicals 37-percent approval rating, and the $3 gallon of gas. You know, to focus on the real threat (Ter'r), and thus, his argument went, to remain in Iraq.

Or, from The New York Times:

A senior White House official said Thursday evening that the president's 40-minute speech arose from Mr. Bush's desire to remind Americans, after "a lot of distractions" in recent months, that the country was still under threat, and had no choice but to remain in Iraq so Al Qaeda did not use it as a base to train for attacks on the United States and its allies.

In other words, Bush is asking America to continue to Fight the Enemy -- though now it's an enemy created by failed policy. He's even exhumed Osama bin Laden again, calculating, apparently, that he has more to gain by invoking the bogeyman than he has to lose reminding the public he hasn't caught him after four years and billions down the drain. Talk about desperation.

Speaking of desperation, listed among the 10 threats derailed over the past four years by the Bush Administration are attempts "to attack ships in the Persian Gulf in late 2002 and 2003; to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow part of the gulf where it opens into the Arabian Sea, in 2002 ... "

One doesn't want to make light of any legitimate threat, nor value the life of one people over another, but does anyone seriously believe that the president went on TV to inspire the confidence of Americans (or to assure them of his leadership) by invoking a 3-year-old plot to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz? Can one in 100 Americans even find the Strait of Hormuz on a map?

And, when one considers the sound-bite companion to "stay the course" -- that America will "stand down when Iraqis stand up" -- the folly of Bush's speech gave way to absurdity because the number of trained Iraqis "standing up" has actually dropped.

On Sept. 29, General George Casey testified that "the number of Iraqi battalions capable of fighting without American support has dropped from three to one." Insurmountable? Not if you move the goal posts and remain vague: "There are over 30 Iraqi battalions in the lead," claimed the president at an Oct. 4 press conference.

So thin was the gruel served up in Thursday's speech, that even the typically charitable New York Times refused to play along. David Sanger's article positively dripped with sarcasm and disdain. After the press grilled Scott McClellan over the Top 10 Derailed Plots mentioned in Bush's speech, and after his underwhelming response (Jose Padilla, Iman Faris), the Times' Sanger noted that a list was "hastily put together" and that "It was not immediately clear whether other items on the list represented significant threats."

Judged in its entirety, Bush's speech was a flailing disaster. But the zenith -- or nadir, depending on your perspective -- has to be Bush's inclusion of Jose Padilla on his list of 10. It goes without saying that if Padilla had plotted what he is accused of plotting -- namely, to detonate a "dirty bomb" on a plane -- then he legitimately belongs on the list.

But Padilla doesn't yet, becuase he hasn't had due process. As Findlaw's Joanne Mariner put it, "The truth of the allegations against [Padilla] -- that he planned to commit acts of terrorism -- has never been tested in court." By including Padilla on that list, Bush shows he's content to convict a man in the court of his own opinion.

The implications of the Padilla case are themselves terror-inducing. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent to the Supreme Court's rejection of the Padilla case on "procedural grounds," put it this way: "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society."

Indeed, if the Bush administration is given the go-ahead to classify anyone it desires an enemy combatant, and thus exclude them from their right to due process, well, you do the math.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/26613/

Terror in NYC?

By Evan Derkacz
Posted on October 7, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/26534/

After a "credible tip" that 19 operatives had been dispatched to bomb the NYC subway system (and some nervous twitching from this Brooklyn --> Manhattan rider), suspicions are rising.

Noting that the "Homeland Security office is calling the threat 'specific but not credible,'" my fellow New Yorker and subway rider, Jazz, takes a deep breath and writes:

"one of the biggest casualties in the 'war on terror' is probably faith in our government...How many times have we seen the 'terror level' alert raised precisely when somebody from the Bush administration or the GOP at large has gotten themselves in trouble?"

"Rove and Libby appear on the verge of being indicted by a Federal Grand Jury, DeLay has already been indicted, and other GOP operatives are being dragged out of the shadows. Support for Bush's war is bottoming out [actually, his approval hit an embarrassingly low 37% yesterday] and his SCOTUS nomination looks to be in trouble. And suddenly... BANG! 'The terrorists are going to blow up the subway!' How terribly convenient."

Via the Heretik: "Sources told NBC that the information came from a single informant of varying credibility...A homeland security official tells NBC News that though the source has "doubtful" credibility, the heightened security in NY is necessary out of an abundance of caution. The source has apparently given some accurate information in the past, and some inaccurate."

The Heretik also excerpts yesterday's press briefing, at which Scott McClellan claims that 10 al-Qaeda threats have been averted -- though he only mentions two.

Ten is a nice round number. Reminds me of that scene in Manchurian Candidate where the McCarthy stand-in's at dinner deciding just how many Communists there are in Congress and camera cuts to a shot of the Heinz 57 sauce on the table before the press conference where he claims -- with unshakable authority -- that there are 57 Communist in Congress! (Running Scared)

Christian Conservatives For Cancer

By Evan Derkacz
Posted on October 7, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/26532/

From the title and teaser you're probably not expecting good news.

Here it is anyway: late stage trials of a vaccine to prevent women from developing virus-related cervical cancer -- a cancer that kills 300,000 women each year -- have been completely successful.

But, Jessica Valenti writes: "who knows if the vaccine will ever actually get to women. The Christian right is doing their best to block the vaccine. Cause it will make you slutty. No, seriously."

She excerpts a Katha Pollitt article explaining that the fact that HPV (one of the cervical cancer-causing viruses the vaccine prevents) is one of the main bogeymen in the Christian conservative scare-kit, they fear that eradication of another dire consequence will cause further sluttiness.

Now how, exactly, is this mindset politically linked with the personal responsibility fanatics? (Feministing)

Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him

By Matthew Rothschild, http://progressive.org/mag_mc100405
October 4, 2005

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”

She says the student was upset.

“He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis.

She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.

“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”

Then they got down to his poster.

“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”

At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.

The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.

“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”

A person in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”

Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.

Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.”

Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We ertainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”

Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”

The Real Reason For Mier's Nomination

Shining up the jackboots, pressing all the brownshirts...
From Attyood

We have no idea whether the Senate is going to confirm Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. For once, it may actually be up to the Democrats, who right now are too busy watching and laughing at conservatives and their cat fights to be bothered with taking a stand. And that may take a while, considering that it's still three years and counting for any type of Democratic position on Iraq.

We do know that's there's a lot of head fakes going on right now. Miers is a conservative...but wait, she's pro gay-rights...but wait, she belongs to a fundamentalist church that opposes abortion...but wait, she used to be a Democrat..but wait, she supports "the Founders" interpretation of the Constitution...but wait...

Don't fall for any of it. And keep your eye on the ball. George Bush wants Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court for one reason, and one reason alone. The president -- and his minions -- want to concentrate an unprecedented amount of power in the executive branch. And Bush wants to use that power to further take away your rights, to use the military to keep order here at home -- and God knows what else.

And he knows that Harriet Miers will help him get there.

Where do we get these crazy ideas from? How about from Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Here's what he was reported saying earlier this week about Miers:

Mehlman yesterday unveiled a politically powerful argument linking Bush’s nomination to the war on terrorism. He said that as a former White House counsel Miers would know the importance of not letting the courts or the legislative branch “micromanage” the war on terrorism.

"Micromanage." Is that what the kids are calling the Bill of Rights these days?

This all starts with the John Roberts nomination. On April 1, Roberts -- then a federal appeals court judge in Washington, met with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (Miers' former boss in the White House counsel's office) to talk about the then-rumored vacancies on the High Court.

Just six days later, Roberts was seated on the appeals bench as a Gonzalez deputy argued in a key case in Bush's crusade to prosecute his war on terror -- allowing military tribunals to try the cases of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. One month later, Roberts interviewed with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, among others, and he finally met Bush face-to-face on July 15 -- the very same day that Roberts and two other judges ruled on behalf of the administration in the Guantanamo matter.

Here's how the Washington Post spun it:

Nobody is alleging that Roberts sided with the administration to curry favor with Bush, but some academics say Roberts should have, at the very least, considered stepping aside to make sure there was not an appearance of conflict.

Appearance, indeed. The rest is history, and now John Roberts is the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. And if Miers joins him, the Bush White House is sure to have two solid votes in its war on terror -- and its war on civil liberties as well.

The Boston Globe gets it:

WASHINGTON -- As President Bush's counsel, Harriet E. Miers continued the expansive interpretation of presidential powers favored by her predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, who backed Bush's authority to hold terrorist suspects without trial, as well as the White House's right to withhold more administration documents from public disclosure than in the past.

Miers has also been outspoken in her support of reauthorizing the Patriot Act, which gave the executive branch new powers of surveillance over US citizens.

Now, Miers is Bush's choice to join the Supreme Court, to replace Sandra Day O'Connor.

That selection determines how much power a president can wield under the Constitution. Her nomination, announced Monday, followed the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who supported broad war powers for the president in a case he heard during his brief tenure as an appellate judge.

The two appointments, both of lawyers with extensive White House experience, have raised alarm among critics of the Bush administration's broad reading of executive branch authority.

"The fact that the president is now seeding the Supreme Court with people who have been handmaidens in his efforts to increase the power of the executive without any check or oversight whatsoever is very disturbing," said Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sued Bush on behalf of prisoners at the US facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

That alone is troubling. But what troubles us even more is this: What exactly does Bush plan on bringing up before the Supreme Court in the next three years that is so important?

Well, unlike the president, we don't have the ability to look into people's hearts, so we can't say for sure. But we're alarmed that there may be a connection to Bush's recent, alarming plans for getting around the Posse Commitatus Act of 1878, which...

passed in 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, and was intended to prohibit Federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states. It generally prohibits Federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under Federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or the Congress. Coupled with the Insurrection Act, the powers of the Federal government to use the US military for law enforcement are limited.

Not if Bush can help it. Just yesterday, the president was talking about using the military in response to an Avian flu outbreak, similar to his recent comments about the military in natural disasters:

Drawing a lesson from Katrina, Bush suggested that he should have the authority to use the military to seal off an infected region in a pandemic, as well as to help deal with natural disasters.

"It's one thing to shut down airplanes. It's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to avian flu," Bush said. "One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move."

To many Americans, that may sound reasonable in the wake of the Katrina disaster. But the truth is that Katrina only spun out of control due to Bush's inept cronies at FEMA, not because we need to send in the 82nd Airborne every time something goes wrong.

What Bush is proposing is a slippery slope. And he knows it will be challenged up to the Supreme Court.

And pretty soon, he'll know that he has the votes.

Jose Padilla and The Death of Liberty

"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive." Judge Antonin Scalia

By Mike Whitney

09/10/05 "ICH" -- -- I had to sit down when I heard the Padilla case had been settled. I literally felt sick to my stomach, like I was gasping for air. The case of Jose Padilla is quite simply the most important case in the history of the American judicial system. Hanging in the balance are all the fundamental principles of American jurisprudence including habeas corpus, due process and "the presumption of innocence". All of those basic concepts were summarily revoked by the 3 judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court. The Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration which claimed that it had the right to indefinitely imprison an American citizen without charging him with a crime. The resulting verdict confers absolute authority on the President to incarcerate American citizens without charge and without any legal means for the accused to challenge the terms of his detention. It is the end of "inalienable rights", the end of The Bill of Rights, and the end of any meaningful notion of personal liberty.

I remember reading 3 or 4 years ago, in Zbigniew Brzezinski's, "The Grand Chessboard", of a strategy to dominate the world that would result in the loss of freedom for American citizens. Brzezinski recognized the inherent threat that liberty posed to the development of empire. He stated:

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." (p.35)

Brzezinski's prescient forecast has proved to be astonishingly accurate. The determination of the neocons, the Federalist Society, the far-right radio giants, the Olin, Scaife, Coors and Bradley foundations, and the entire stable of right-wing, quasi-fascist groups that operate openly within American society, have pounded the final wooden stake into the heart of the personal freedom. The basic legal protections that safeguard the citizen from the arbitrary and hostile action of the state have been rescinded. We all stand naked before the absolute power of the President.

The government has no case against Jose Padilla, a hapless Chicago gang-banger who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at O'Hare airport 3 and a half years ago. He is simply an unwitting victim of circumstance; a convenient scapegoat for eviscerating the rule of law. The Bush administration has used its extraordinary influence in the media to demagogue the case and keep him locked-away without producing one shred of evidence against him. The entire affair has been a grotesque mockery of justice. The hard-right groups that engineered this plot know exactly where the fault-lines in American jurisprudence lie; in the inalienable protections of its citizens.

Padilla became the test-case for shattering the Bill of Rights with one withering blow. It has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectation.

There's no chance that the Supreme Court will retry the case and draw more attention to the shocking details of this judicial-coup; they already punted once before preferring to pass it along to the lower court. Rather, the meaning of the case will be ignored until the president needs to exercise the newly-bestowed powers of supreme leader. That authority is now firmly rooted in the legal precedent established by the Padilla ruling.

No Longer the Land of the Free

Americans seem unaware of the great loss we've all suffered by the Padilla verdict. If the President is allowed to arbitrarily decide who has "inalienable rights", than those rights become the provisional gifts of the government rather than a reliable shield against the abuse of state power. It means that every American citizen is as vulnerable to the same violation of human rights as the men currently imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. It also means that the legal wall that shelters the citizen from the random violence of the political establishment has been reduced to rubble.

The Padilla ruling is the blackest day in American history. The icons of American liberty; the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Statue of Liberty; are empty shrines if they are not underscored by the guarantee of freedom. The Vietnam Memorial, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the 4th of July, the Federalist Papers, and the American flag; all gratuitous expressions of a principle that has vanished from the political landscape.

Every man and woman who ever wore an American uniform and died in the service of their country, died in vain. Their sacrifice has been rendered completely worthless by the action of the 4th Circuit Court.

George Bush has now extinguished every meaningful part of the American dream. The last vestige of the social contract has been defiled and desecrated by the administration and their court. Personal freedom is dead in America; it was impaled by the verdict against Jose Padilla. How many thousands or, perhaps, millions of Americans will die or endure incalculable suffering to regain what we have lost on this tragic day?

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

CBS's One-Sided DeLay Discussion

All-Republican panel discusses a "Republican problem"
From FAIR
10/4/05

It was no surprise that the Sunday morning talkshows would focus on the indictment of Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay on conspiracy charges. But CBS' Face the Nation covered the DeLay scandal in an unusual manner: by convening a panel of three Republicans.

Congressmembers David Dreier of California, John Shadegg of Arizona and Jim Leach of Iowa--all Republicans--were host Bob Schieffer's only guests on the topic.

Why the curious booking decision? Schieffer explained midway through the interview: "Let me just point out, I didn't invite any Democrats to be on this morning because I thought this was a Republican problem and wanted to give you a chance to talk about it."

But how could the allegation that DeLay illegally funneled corporate donations to Texas Republicans in an effort to win local elections and gerrymander the state's Congressional districts be considered merely a "Republican problem"? Given that the redistricting scheme increased the size of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the DeLay story affects everyone.

In the discussion of the DeLay scandal, the opposition party did come up: Dreier commented, for instance, that "frankly, there is really no plan that has come forward from Democrats on any issue whatsoever." Presumably if Democrats had been invited to take part in the program, they would have had a response to that statement--not to mention a different take on DeLay's woes.

It's not the first time CBS has apparently determined that a given subject was an exclusively Republican matter. After last November's election--which saw the GOP solidify its power in the White House and Congress--Face the Nation turned to three Republicans to talk about the election: senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Chuck Hagel (11/7/04).

This is not typically how Face the Nation has handled controversies involving Democratic politicians. After the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, for instance, the program (2/8/98) interviewed Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta for reactions. When there were allegations that Vice President Al Gore was connected to fundraising violations at a Buddhist temple, Face the Nation (7/20/97) discussed the charges with Republican Sen. Thad Cochran and Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The show did not describe these affairs as "Democratic problems."

ACTION:
Contact CBS and tell them that this weekend's Face the Nation discussion about Tom DeLay should not have been turned over exclusively to Republican politicians. Let them know that DeLay's indictment is not, as anchor Bob Schieffer put it, a "Republican problem," but a national one.

CONTACT:
CBS Face the Nation
Phone: (202) 457-4481
ftn@cbsnews.com

Also, you can contact CBS's new "Public Eye" ombudsman:
publiceye@cbsnews.com

Read: The Killing Was Necessary(!)

The U.S. army has again exonerated itself in the killing of an Iraq war correspondent. An internal investigation "confirmed that he was killed by an American soldier and then left dead in his car--but concluded that the killing was necessary."

This is cause for public outrage, indictment, conviction and incarceration for all complicit.

It will, of course, go completely unpunished if all we do is read about it.

It is well past time to rise up, cast off our given role as mere consumers and reclaim our role as citizens in a free and open society! Time to stop allowing the corporate/military complex to control the flow of (mis)information! Let us raise the black flags now!--Pete

Article...

The 'Myth' of Iraq's Foreign Fighters

Report by US think tank says only '4 to 10' percent of insurgents are foreigners.

By Tom Regan | Christian Science Monitor

The US and Iraqi governments have vastly overstated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq, and most of them don't come from Saudi Arabia, according to a new report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS). According to a piece in The Guardian, this means the US and Iraq "feed the myth" that foreign fighters are the backbone of the insurgency. While the foreign fighters may stoke the incurgency flames, they only comprise only about 4 to 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgents.

The CSIS study also disputes media reports that Saudis comprise the largest group of foreign fighters. CSIS says "Algerians are the largest group (20 percent), followed by Syrians (18 percent), Yemenis (17 percent), Sudanese (15 percent), Egyptians (13 percent), Saudis (12 percent) and those from other states (5 percent)." CSIS gathered the information for its study from intelligence services in the Gulf region.

The CSIS report says: "The vast majority of Saudi militants who have entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathisers before the war; and were radicalized almost exclusively by the coalition invasion."

The average age of the Saudis was 17-25 and they were generally middle-class with jobs, though they usually had connections with the most prominent conservative tribes. "Most of the Saudi militants were motivated by revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a non-Arab country. These feelings are intensified by the images of the occupation they see on television and the internet ... the catalyst most often cited [in interrogations] is Abu Ghraib, though images from Guantánamo Bay also feed into the pathology."

The report also gives credit to the Saudi government for spending nearly $1.2 billion over the past two years, and deploying 35,000 troops, in an effort to secure its border with Iraq. The major problem remains the border with Syria, which lacks the resources of the Saudis to create a similar barrier on its border.

The Associated Press reports that CSIS believes most of the insurgents are not "Saddam Hussein loyalists" but members of Sunni Arab Iraqi tribes. They do not want to see Mr. Hussein return to power, but they are "wary of a Shiite-led government."

TheLos Angeles Times reports that a greater concern is that 'skills' foreign fighters are learning in Iraq are being exported to their home countries. This is a particular concern for Europe, since early this year US intelligence reported that "Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose network is believed to extend far beyond Iraq, had dispatched teams of battle-hardened operatives to European capitals."

Iraq has become a superheated, real-world academy for lessons about weapons, urban combat and terrorist trade craft, said Thomas Sanderson of [CSIS].

Extremists in Iraq are "exposed to international networks from around the world," said Sanderson, who has been briefed by German security agencies. "They are returning with bomb-making skills, perhaps stolen explosives, vastly increased knowledge. If they are succeeding in a hostile environment, avoiding ... US Special Forces, then to go back to Europe, my God, it's kid's play."

Meanwhile, The Boston Globe reports that President Bush, in a speech Thursday that was "clearly designed to dampen the potential impact of the antiwar rally" this weekend in Washington, said his top military commanders in Iraq have told him that they are making progress against the insurgents and "in establishing a politically viable state."

Newly trained Iraqi forces are taking the lead in many security operations, the president said, including a recent offensive in the insurgent stronghold of Tal Afar along the Syrian border – a key transit point for foreign fighters and supplies.

"Iraqi forces are showing the vital difference they can make," Bush said. '"They are now in control of more parts of Iraq than at any time in the past two years. Significant areas of Baghdad and Mosul, once violent and volatile, are now more stable because Iraqi forces are helping to keep the peace."

The president's speech, however, was overshadowed by comments made Thursday by Saudi Arabia's foreign minister. Prince Saud al-Faisal said the US ignored warnings the Saudi government gave it about occupying Iraq. Prince al-Faisal also said he fears US policies in Iraq will lead to the country breaking up into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite parts. He also said that Saudi Arabia is not ready to send an ambassador to Baghdad, because he would become a target for the insurgents. "I doubt he would last a day," al-Faisal said.

Finally, The Guardian reports that "ambitions for Iraq are being drastically scaled down in private" by British and US officials. The main goal has now become avoiding the image of failure. The paper quotes sources in the British Foreign department as saying that hopes to turn Iraq into a model of democracy for the Middle East had been put aside. "We will settle for leaving behind an Iraqi democracy that is creaking along," the source said.

Immediate Withdrawal!

It is far more reasonable, based on what we now know, to assume that if the U.S. were to leave Iraq quickly, the level of violence would be reduced, possibly drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key reasons:

1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;

2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;

3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;

4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.

Challenging the Times

By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher
Posted on September 20, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/25756/

What will it take, exactly, for The New York Times to declare on its editorial page that the United States should begin to bring to a close its adventure in regime change and national building Iraq? Other newspapers face the same question, of course, but as the nation's leading journal, and with plenty of influence -- at least in elite and left-liberal circles -- any shift by the Times is sure to have wide repercussions.

It wasn't long ago that the Times was actually calling for more U.S. troops in Iraq. Lately it has made no sweeping calls, up or down. But considering recent events, you'd expect a ringing call to disengage at any moment, especially since there is some evidence that at the Times -- in contrast to, say, The Washington Post -- the editorialists actually ponder what's in their own news pages. And those pages have been filled with plenty of fodder for arguing in favor of a phased withdrawal.

Just yesterday came news of the murder of a Times reporter/photographer, Fakher Haider, in Iraq. Surely this is not reason enough for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq -- but look at the circumstances. Haider was apparently killed not by insurgents or terrorists or even run-of-the-mill Sunnis or Baathists, but by Shiite militia and police ostensibly aligned with "our" side. Freelance American journalist Steven Vincent died under the same circumstances in August.

These two killings took place in Basra, long described as one of the major success stories in Iraq. In today's edition, the Times said the city "has grown increasingly violent, with a complex web of sectarian agendas playing itself out almost daily on the streets." Shiite militias, reporter Robert Worth noted, are even fighting British troops.

Just last week, the Times looked inside another "model" city, Najaf, and found similar or worse problems there, with reconstruction projects "hobbled by poor planning" and "corrupt contractors." Sure, these cities are relatively calmer than Baghdad, but is this reason enough to justify a never-ending U.S. presence? And what of all the new tales of rampant corruption or missing billions elsewhere in that land?

Then there's the cost of the Katrina catastrophe. The Times has lamented the true budgetary trainwreck that the hurricane will cause under the current Bush plans, or maybe under any scheme. If it was once true that we could not afford to fight a foreign war while also boosting homeland security, it is now certain that the hurricane recovery makes this impossible. Added to the possible costs: Some people actually want to spend a lot more money on reducing poverty.

The longterm post-Katrina threat to the American economy and our children's futures is enormous. So: Will the Times declare that it is not just desirable, but imperative, that we start to end our hideously costly occupation of Iraq?

If it did that, it could (and no doubt would) say that it does this with a heavy heart -- while pointing out that several years of sacrificing our treasury, and the lives and limbs of thousands of Americans, is quite enough to give the Iraqis a good head start on solving their own problems. And, more than ever, our own people need our help now.

The American public, if not the editorial boards of most newspapers, seem to understand this well enough. Polls in the past week clearly show that they want to shift spending from the New Iraq to the Old South.

Now, it's true that neither newspaper editors nor public officials should blindly follow public opinion on any matter. Yet it is startling to note the disconnect between public views of Iraq, as gathered by pollsters, and what opinion leaders and, even most Democratic politicians, are willing to declare.

Every major poll, for quite some time now, has revealed that the majority of American people feel that 1) invading Iraq was a mistake 2) based on misleading information or lies and that 3) things are going poorly for the U.S. in Iraq because 4) President Bush is handling the war badly so 5) we should immediately begin withdrawing. About 1 in 3 Americans take the "radical" position of a complete pullout ASAP.

The Times editorial board surely agrees with points one through four -- yet has not yet make the logical conclusion that is #5.

I haven't even mentioned other concerns, such as the loopholes in the Iraqi constitution, the new Iraqi leaders' possible alignment with Iran, and the coming threat to women's rights (all previously denounced by the Times). And if the Times needs just one more reason to shift course, surely it is provided in the fresh evidence, from the federal response to Katrina, that this gang occupying the White House does not deserve, and can not be trusted, to continue to carry out our open-ended commitment in Iraq. How many more years of "Rummy, you're doin' a great job," can we take?

For the sake of our physicial and financial security here at home, something has to give: and that something must be Iraq. Come on, New York Times board. We know you can say it. Probably, you even want to.

Greg Mitchell is editor of E&P and author of seven books on politics and history.

ZNet Commentary: Are You A Speed Freak?

September 22, 2005, ZNET
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Are you a speed freak?
That's what Daimler Chrysler wants to know.
Everything about their current campaign pushing the new Dodge Charger is about speed and power.
We learned about this campaign last week. We picked up USA Today, and out dropped a glossy 23-inch-by-21-inch color poster.
On one side is a picture of the Charger SRT8. 425 horsepower. 6.1 Liter SRT Hemi V8 engine. 420 lb-ft of torque. 0 to 60 mph in the low 5 seconds. (The low 5 seconds?)
"Grab Life by the Horns," it said at the top.
Then in bigger letters at the bottom: "Get Your Adrenaline Out of Neutral."
Flip over the glossy ad, and there is a picture of Charger R/T in red.
And the question, emblazoned in red: "Are you a speed freak?
The ad encourages you to go to .
So, we went there.
And clicked on "power freak." There is an animation of a Charger R/T ripping through some road barriers and fencing.
We then clicked on "speed freak." To the music of the Soledad Brothers, (Break Em On Down), we learn that the car is "wickedly fast -- a sleek fastback silhouette slips through the wind as pure, unadulterated speed crescendos from one adrenaline rush to the next."
Back to the glossy ad that dropped out of USA Today.
Also, in large letters is the following: "Remember, Speed Limits Are Laws, Not Suggestions."
We reached Suraya Da Sante, a corporate spokeswoman, at Daimler's home office in Detroit.
"The ad campaign is not necessarily about speed per se," she says. "It's more about unleashing your desires."
What about the 0 to 60 mph in the low 5 seconds?
"We certainly don't want to encourage someone to do that on 0 to 60 on a residential street or even a highway," she says. "If you want to do that, there are racing tracks around where you can take the car."
Racing tracks?
"Yes, there are places where you can take your car to race," Da Sante says.
The whole ad campaign is about power and speed. Why insult our intelligence and say, "Remember, Speed Limits Are Laws, Not Suggestions?"
Well, it's never appropriate to break the law -- laws are there to protect us, she says.
Da Sante says she isn't sure whether Daimler's legal department required that they put that statement in the ad.
She says that the demographic for the Charger is a 40-to-59-year-old male, married with two kids, income from $65,000 to $90,000, and living in the suburbs of a large city. She says that the psychographic is someone who is confident, self-expressive, genuine and enterprising.
What about the video on the web site, with the driver knocking down barriers and ripping through fences?
"That is an animated video," she says. "It is clearly fantasy. It's not real people ripping down a road. It is more like a game. Gaming graphics are popular. It is not a television commercial where it is a real vehicle and someone is launching a vehicle 20 feet in the air. They were designed to get you excited and tap into that untamed spirit."
The campaign is more than just speed, she says.
The theme of the ad campaign: unleash.
The ideal customer is someone who wants to liberate their untamed spirit, she says.
They are looking for ways to go out and grab life by the horns.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed a law revoking the national 55 mph speed limit.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that one act by President Clinton has cost thousands of lives.
Richard Retting of the Institute says. "When speed limits are raised, it's no surprise that drivers go faster, and when drivers go faster, there are more deaths."
Retting says that the auto companies are just adding fuel to the fire.
He says that the DaimlerChrysler ad "encourages reckless, irresponsible driving."
But the ad says -- right there in large print - "Remember, Speed Limits Are Laws, Not Suggestions."
"Are they saying -- we didn't mean what we just said?" Retting asks.
Retting says that there were 41,000 deaths on U.S. highways last year.
At least a third of them are due to speeding.
That's at least 13,000 deaths per year due to speeding.
That would be four 911s.
Every year.
Due to speeding.
And irresponsible ads like the DaimlerChrysler ad are just fueling the fire.
Bloody Daimler.
Bloody Chrysler.
Bloody Dodge.
Bloody Charger.

Chavez Offers Cheap Oil To US Poor

President Chavez was in New York last week for a summit of world leaders at the United Nations. In his speech, Chavez blasted US foreign policy and accused the Bush administration of trying to hijack the UN summit. He described the United States as a terrorist nation because it is harboring the televangelist Pat Robertson who recently called for his assassination. Chavez has long charged that the US was behind the aborted coup against him in 2002.

In the interview, he reveals for the first time, details of a plan to offer of cheap oil to the poor...of the United States.

Democracy Now! met with President Chavez on Friday in his first sit-down interview in the United States. I interviewed him with Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez and Margaret Prescod of Pacifica Radio station KPFK at the Venezuelan ambassador to the UN's residence here in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: Welcome Mr. President to the United States. You have come to a country who’s government, the U.S. government, you have accused of trying to assassinate you. What evidence do you have of this and of your other charge that it was involved with the attempted coup against you?

PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: Thank you for the invitation to come to this show, Juan, Amy and Margaret and my greetings to all the people and the viewers and the listeners to these programs these well known programs. Let’s talk about life, rather than death, because we are fighting for life. However there are always threats, those who are devoted to the struggle for life and use the truth as a flag and or principles as a lifeline. There is no doubt whatsoever that the U.S. government, lead by Mr. Bush, planned and participated in a coup d’etat in Venezuela in April, 2002. There’re many
proofs and evidence of this. There is a U.S. lady who wrote a book called the Chavez’s Code,” Mrs. Eva Golinger and she was sitting here not too long ago, and she is very close and there are declassified documents that she has found thanks to an effort to investigate the situation.

I have many evidences that my assassination was ordered on April the 11. More precisely on April the 12, and I was ready to die, however thank God and thanks to the Venezuelan people and thanks to the soldiers, Venezuelan soldiers, this order was not accomplished and this order was given by Washington. And there are many evidences and witnesses, however I would like to talk about life and greet the U.S. people with a lot of affection, with a lot of love and with a lot of pain due to the tragedy in New Orleans and the gulf states.

We’ve been accompanying these states from the very beginning, and we’ve been watching TV and receiving reports by our ambassadors and the CITGO people from the very beginning, cooperating very humbly trying to save lives and assist the homeless. We have offered assistance, up to five million dollars, a very modest sum, but I guess it would be useful. We have offered medicine, water, and electric power plants, the same way Cuba offered doctors. So far we have not being authorize to reach the area.
However, we hope the best for the poor, the poorest of these countries.

AMY GOODMAN: And televangelist Pat Robertson, his call for your assassination. What do you demand now, what is your response to that?

PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: Well as a matter of fact, Robertson is not acting alone. He’s just conveying, in a perhaps desperate manner, the thinking of those people closer to Mr. Bush. This is the voice of the most radical - of the extreme right wing in the U.S., I am totally convinced that is the situation with Mr. Robertson. And as you can see, so far there has been no reaction by the U.S. government in this regard. There’s nothing being said about these terrorist remarks that is in full breach of international law and breaches the laws of the United States.

But it’s not only Mr. Robertson here. For some time, for some months, people who participated in a coup attempt in Venezuela and are living here in the United States. And from TV stations in this country these people are calling for my assassination. A week ago, in another TV show, people in uniform, in fatigues, like terrorists. Venezuelans and Americans and Cubans exiled in the United States, and a former agent of the CIA, very recently said on TV that Chavez should be dead already. That Robertson is right. So this is the desire and the voice of the ultraconservative right-wing elite of the United States. They threatened Chavez. Chavez is nothing. Who is me? I’m nothing.

They are threatening the world. That is serious. They invaded Iraq. Without any reason whatsoever. They violated international law and are ignoring the rules of the U.N. Terrorists bombard complete cities, such as Fallujah, Baghdad, innocent women and children. Now, history is long. Hiroshima for instance-- Nagasaki, Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Santo Domingo. No, that is not - they do not represent the people of the United States. They are part of the imperialist dictatorship that the U.S. people are suffering today.

MARGARET PRESCOD: Mr. President, on behalf of KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Southern California, welcome to the United States. We have been waiting for this moment. Many people in the United States have been shocked at the racism they have witnessed against low income people in New Orleans and the other gulf cities and we wonder how Venezuelans view what has happened. And also you are clearly working to unite people of color throughout the world. You are the first Latin American president we know of who identifies as black and indigenous, and this breaks a long tradition of racism in the Americas. You’ve also identified with the people of Haiti who are fighting to defeat a brutal coup against their president how crucial do you think the defeat of all racism is to making the fundamental economic and social changes needed to save the world from the destruction of the market?

PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: When we were children, we were told that we have a motherland, and that motherland was Spain. However, we have discovered later, in our lives, that as a matter of fact, we have several motherlands. And one of the greatest motherlands of all is no doubt, Africa. We love Africa. And every day we are much more aware of the roots we have in Africa. Also, America is our motherland. Africa, America - and Bolivar used to say that we are a new human race in Latin America, that we are not
Europeans, or Africans, or North Americans. That we are a mixture of all of those races, and there is no doubt that Africa resounds with a pulse like a thousand drums and happiness and joy.

But, also there’s a lot of pain when you think of Africa. Yesterday, I met with the president of Mozambique, because fully aware of these roots and these realities, we have designed an agenda for Africa in Venezuela. And we have spoken to other South American leaders. Lula for instance, is fully aware of the African roots of brazil and South America, and I want to share the African agenda with other leaders in South America, but Venezuela has also it’s own African agenda. In the case of Mozambique. The life expectancy in Mozambique is 38 years old, and going down, because AIDS is
causing havoc in the population. It’s terrible, it’s a tragedy, it’s a million Katrina’s hitting this country. The president of Mozambique told me the number of children, orphaned children, whose parents have died as a result of AIDS. The teachers are dying, the doctors are dying. That’s a tragedy, and it’s a disgrace, and that’s why it hurts. It hurts so much to see the U.N. opening its doors to listen to speeches and speeches and more speeches, while at the same time, every year a population equivalent to Argentina today, or Columbia die of hunger, or Venezuela die of hunger, and those deaths could be avoided. Most of them are children, little girls, little boys, and most of them are in Africa.

So, we need like a shaking of the world. To shake up the world. That’s why when people talk about my style-- my style - that’s why the speech I delivered yesterday before the United Nations Assembly – because it doesn’t work! It’s not working. If we reduced the military expenses in 10 percent of the world, we would have enough money to save millions of lives in this world.

In Venezuela, with the little resources - few resources - we have initiated a program to bring food to feed the poor people in Venezuela, and we are covering today 15 million people in Venezuela - receiving this food distribution and assistance. And most of them receive this food for free, and others a percentage, they have to pay only 50 percent of the total amount for the food they eat. Of course this is possible only if the people themselves, participate and with a new awareness.

Racism is very characteristic of imperialism. Racism is very characteristic of capitalism. Katrina is – indeed, has a lot to do with racism - no doubt about it. Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth, because of my curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it’s African. So we need a new morality, a new ethic at this point. And from my Christian point of view, we need a revolution of the ethic. And in the political and economic fields we need to take back the flag of socialism, in my view - in order to be able to defeat - with the will of the people, with the participation of the people – to beat those ominous phenomenon such as racism.

AMY GOODMAN: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in his first interview in the United States.

Article...

No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame

by SHARON OLDS

[from the October 10, 2005 issue, The Nation]

For reasons spelled out below, the poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington, which, coincidentally or not, takes place September 24, the day of an antiwar mobilization in the capital. Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush to read from their works. Three years ago artist Jules Feiffer declined to attend the festival's White House breakfast as a protest against the Iraq War ("Mr. Feiffer Regrets," November 11, 2002). We suggest that invitees to this year's event consider following their example. --The Editors

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

There Is No 'Noble Cause' For War

By Cindy Sheehan, TruthOut.org
Posted on September 20, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/25684/

It has been one month, one week, and 4 days since I sat in a ditch in Crawford, Texas.

My request was very simple: I wanted to speak to the man who has sent over a million of our young people over to fight, kill, and die in a country that was absolutely no threat to the United States of America. I wanted to ask him: "What is the Noble Cause that you keep talking about?"

Well, we all know now that George Bush never came down the road to talk to me. Thank God! Many people have been saying that I am the "spark," "catalyst," "face of the anti-war movement," etc. I beg to differ.

George Bush and his arrogant advisers are the spark that lit the prairie fire of peace activism that has swept over America and the entire world. If he had met with me that fateful day in August it would not have been good for him (because I knew he was going to lie and I would have advertised that fact) but it would have had less of an impact on the peace movement if he had.

Upon reflection on the events of this past August, I have come up with two reasons why George could not meet with me: He is a coward, and there is no Noble Cause. If George had as much courage and integrity in his entire body as Casey had in his pinky, he would have met with me. But, ironically, if George had that much courage and integrity he never would have preemptively invaded a practically defenseless country. His syncophantic cabinet and hangers-on are also incontrovertible evidence that he is a coward. No one had better dare disagree with him. How dare a mom from Vacaville, California, have the nerve to contradict the emperor of Prairie Chapel Road!!??

Article...

Pocket Paradigm

THOSE WHO dreamed up the federal government-enforced Constitution Day for schools and colleges might want to spend that day reading the Tenth Amendment which says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The way the feds repeatedly get around the Tenth Amendment is through greenmail, saying in effect, "We don't have the right to tell you what to do but we do have the money so if you want our money you have to do what the Tenth Amendment says we can't tell you do." Since schools and college get federal funds, they are easy targets of greenmail.

This would be a worthy topic of discussion in schools and colleges on Constitution Day.
-- Sam Smith, Progressive Review

MICHAEL BROWN EXPLAINS IT ALL

NY TIMES - Mr. Brown acknowledged that he had been criticized for not ordering a complete evacuation or calling in federal troops sooner. But he said the storm made it hard to communicate and assess the situation.

"Until you have been there," he said, "you don't realize it is the middle of a hurricane."

The jokes just write themselves, don't they?--Pete

White House Backs NASA Plan for Vehicles

A curious article, wouldn't you say?--Pete

September 16, 2005
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/science/space/16nasa.html

The White House has approved NASA's plan to replace the nation's aging fleet of winged spaceships with a new generation of vehicles meant to carry human explorers back to the Moon and onward to Mars and beyond, aerospace experts said yesterday.

The new rockets and spaceships are a radical departure for the space program, rearranging the components of the space shuttle into a new design expected to be more powerful than the shuttle but also safer. The shuttle has had two fatal accidents in 114 missions.

"It's a thumbs-up for NASA to pursue the shuttle-derived vehicle," said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and an adviser to the NASA initiative. "The question is the schedule, not the basic approach."

Other experts, who refused to be identified because the space agency will not formally announce the proposal, also spoke about the plan yesterday.

The redesign proposal was first reported in August by agency officials and private experts. Unlike the shuttle, the new vehicles would separate the jobs of hauling people and cargo into orbit and would put the payloads atop the rockets - as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.

But by making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its cost.

The plan has been ready for unveiling for roughly six weeks but was held up because of delays in White House approval.

Yesterday, the aerospace experts said Michael D. Griffin, NASA's administrator, met with White House officials on Wednesday and won a preliminary approval for the project despite continuing questions about how to pay for it.

One problem is that the existing shuttle is still consuming a large share of the agency's budget. A complicating factor, they added, is growing fiscal pressure on Washington because of the government's unexpected need to help rebuild New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The Bush administration has called for the shuttles to be retired by 2010. Dr. Griffin had wanted the first of the replacement vehicles to be ready to fly by 2011. But the experts said yesterday that the earliest conceivable date for the first flight of the replacement was now 2012.

The smaller rocket, for carrying people, would still dwarf the shuttle, which stands 184 feet high. The larger one, for lifting heavy cargoes and spaceships but not people, would rise to a height of some 350 feet, rivaling the Saturn 5 rockets that sent astronauts to the Moon.

In theory, the cargo hauler would have its first test flights in 2016 and 2017 and first hurl people toward the Moon in 2018, the experts said

Global Warning

Click for larger image

FBI Ordered to Lift Patriot Act Gag on Librarian

A federal judge today ruled that the FBI must lift a gag that is preventing an organization with library records from participating in the Patriot Act debate. The opinion comes in a case brought by the ACLU challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that authorizes the FBI to demand records without judicial review.

"We are extremely pleased that the court has recognized that gagging our client from participating in the Patriot Act debate violates the First Amendment and is profoundly undemocratic," said Ann Beeson, ACLU Associate Legal Director and the lead attorney in the case. "Today's ruling makes clear that the government cannot silence innocent Americans simply by invoking national security."

The decision marks the second time a federal court has dealt a blow to the National Security Letter (NSL) provision of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the FBI to demand a range of personal records such as the identity of a person who has checked out books from a library or engaged in anonymous speech on the Internet. The first ruling, which also came in a case brought by the ACLU, found that the entire NSL provision was unconstitutional.

In last week's decision, which has been stayed until September 20 to allow the government to appeal, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall held that the "John Doe" organization has a First Amendment right to engage in the "current and lively debate in this country over the renewal of the PATRIOT Act."

TAKE ACTION: Urge Attorney General Gonzales to lift the gag on the Patriot Act debate. Sign the ACLU petition.