America deserves better

America Deserves Better # 26B

2004-09-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
Please read the following, and then ask yourself if this is the kind of government you want. Surely America deserves better.
Sincerely, Murray

By Nat Hentoff
Were it not for the determination of Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. andCharles Grassley, R-Iowa, Attorney General John Ashcroft would still be preventing the public from knowing the allegations of an FBI whistleblower that the agency has been covering up its own incompetence that is dangerous to national security. The dismissed accuser, Sibel Edmonds
a linguist and translator with expertise in Mideast languages -was hired by the FBI soon after Sept. 11. As the Boston Globe recently reported: "Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11,2001, attacks, (Emonds) said, she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English."
Moreover, on Oct. 27, 2002, Edmonds told a CBS- TV "60 Minutes" reporter that there was a large backlog of untrallslated FBI interviewswith possible terrorists, as well as wiretaps. But she was told to do her work slowly so that the FBI could geta bigger budget to hire more translators. For her industrious whistle-blowing, Edmonds was fired in March 2002.
Taking up her cause, Sell. Grassley told "60 Minutes" that Edmonds' accusations were "absolutely credible," adding that the FBI, with its pattern of concealing its weaknesses, "needs to be turned upside down." Edmonds sued to get her
job and her reputation back. But, so intent was the Justice Department to deep-six her case that, in May of this year (as reported by 9/11 Citizens Watch) "the FBI retroactively classified information about Edmonds' claims provided to congressional staff more than two years ago."
Accordingly, senators involved in her case had "to remove previously public material from their Web sites." On July 6, it looked as if this gag rule might become permanent when Judge Reggie Waltoll of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed Edmonds' lawsuit on the basis of Ashcroft having invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege."
But Sells. Leahy and Grassley were not deterred. In a July 9 letter to Ashcroft, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine and FBI Director Robert Mueller, the senators said . they knew of Fine's investigative reportS on Edmonds' allegations wanted to see them.
Seeing that letter, I called the Inspector General's office and was told that a copy of the reports would be sent to those senators, who have security clearance, but the public would not have access. The reports have arrived, but the senators are forbidden to disclose any of that information to the public because the reports remain classified.
But the Inspector General's spokesman tells me that Fine is working with the Justice Department and the FBI to permit declassified sections of those reports to become available to the rest of us. That this administration overclassifies information has long been a complaint of the press and members of Congress. But the reclassification of previously public access to Edmonds' charges has been described by attorney Michael Kirkpatrick of Public Citizen in stinging terms to the Project on Government Oversight:
"We have been doing national security litigation for more than 30 years, and in our view, this is the most egregious misuse of the classification authority we've seen. Classification is to keep secret information that is sensitive. It is not to suppress debate over (previously) widely public information. Yet that is exactly what Ashcroft is doing."
Adds Edmonds: This is part of "John Ashcroft's relentless fight against me, and my information." This fight is also directed against what is now quaintly known as "the public's right to know" in our essential oversight responsibility over our government as responsible citizens.
-Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendmentand the Bill of Rights.

America Deserves Better # 26

2004-09-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
I am not saying that the outrageous cover-ups detailed in this letter wouldn't have happened under a different administration. After an event like 9/11 some people are going to do anything to cover their asses. However, it did happen under this administration, and then high level people all the way up to the Attorney General continued the cover-up, even invoking national security and gagging Ms. Edmonds to do so. (See letter 26B). How can we have an administration that, on the one hand continually invokes orange alerts, and on the other hand permits a key link in the anti-terrorist chain to continue to malfunction? Those of you who believe Bush is doing a great job of fighting the war on terror might want to rethink your position. America deserves better. Defeat this administration, and if we succeed in defeating this administration, hold Kerry's feet to the fire to do better.
Best regards, Murray

Letter to Thomas Kean from Sibel Edmonds
Dear Chairman Kean:
It has been almost three years since the terrorist attacks on September 11 [2001], during which time we, the people, have been placed under a constant threat of terror and asked to exercise vigilance in our daily lives. Your commission, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, was created by law to investigate "facts and circumstances related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001" and to "provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism", and has now issued its "9-11 Commission Report". You are now asking us to pledge our support for this report, its recommendations, and implementation of these recommendations, with our trust and backing, our tax money, our security, and our lives. Unfortunately, I find your report seriously flawed in its failure to address serious intelligence issues that I am aware of, which have been confirmed, and which as a witness to the commission, I made you aware of. Thus I must assume that other serious issues that I am not aware of were in the same manner omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations. Considering what is at stake, our national security, we are entitled to demand answers to unanswered questions, and to ask for clarification of issues that were ignored and/or omitted from the report. I, Sibel Edmonds, a concerned American citizen, a former FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] translator, a whistleblower, a witness for a United States congressional investigation, a witness and a plaintiff for the Department of Justice inspector general investigation, and a witness for your own 9-11 Commission investigation, request your answers to, and your public acknowledgement of, the following questions and issues:
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 we, the translators at the FBI's largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down, even stop, translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of "extensive backlog of untranslated documents", and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translated information, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up (please refer to the CBS 60 Minutes transcript dated October 2002, and provided to your investigators in January-February 2004). This issue has been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee (please refer to Senator [Charles] Grassley's and Senator [Patrick] Leahy's letters during the summer of 2002, provided to your investigators in January-February 2004). This confirmed report has been reported to be substantiated by the Department of Justice Inspector General Report (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report). I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue and the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004).
Today, almost three years after [September 11], and more than two years since this information has been confirmed and made available to our government, the administrators in charge of language departments of the FBI remain in their positions and in charge of the information front lines of the FBI's counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence efforts. Your report has omitted any reference to this most serious issue, has forgone any accountability whatsoever, and your recommendations have refrained from addressing this issue, which when left unaddressed will have even more serious consequences. This issue is systemic and departmental. Why did your report choose to exclude this information and this serious issue despite the evidence and briefings you received? How can budget increases address and resolve this misconduct by mid-level bureaucratic management? How can the addition of a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, address and resolve this problem?
Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish translator, was hired by the FBI after September 11, and was placed in charge of translating the most sensitive information related to terrorists and criminals under the bureau's investigation. Melek Can Dickerson was granted Top Secret Clearance, which can be granted only after conducting a thorough background investigation. Melek Can Dickerson used to work for a semi-legit organizations that were the FBI's targets of investigation. Melek Can Dickerson had on going relationships with two individuals who were FBI's targets of investigation. For months Melek Can Dickerson blocked all-important information related to these semi-legit organizations and the individuals she and her husband associated with. She stamped hundreds, if not thousands, of documents related to these targets as "Not Pertinent". Melek Can Dickerson attempted to prevent others from translating these documents important to the FBI's investigations and our fight against terrorism. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, Mike Feghali, took hundreds of pages of top-secret sensitive intelligence documents outside the FBI to unknown recipients. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged signatures on top-secret documents related to certain [September 11-related] detainees. After all these incidents were confirmed and reported to FBI management, Melek Can Dickerson was allowed to remain in her position, to continue the translation of sensitive intelligence received by the FBI, and to maintain her Top Secret Clearance. Apparently bureaucratic mid-level FBI management and administrators decided that it would not look good for the bureau if this security breach and espionage case was investigated and made public, especially after going through Robert Hanssen's case (FBI spy scandal). This case (Melek Can Dickerson) was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee (please refer to Senator Leahy's and Grassley's letters dated June 19 and August 13, 2002, and Senator Grassley's statement on CBS 60 Minutes in October 2002, provided to your investigators in January-February 2004). This Dickerson incident received major coverage by the press (please refer to media background provided to your investigators in January-February 2004). According to [FBI] director [Robert] Mueller, the inspector general criticized the FBI for failing to adequately pursue this espionage report regarding Melek Can Dickerson (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report). I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and additional documents (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004).
Today, more than two years since the Dickerson incident was reported to the FBI, and more than two years since this information was confirmed by the United States Congress and reported by the press, these administrators in charge of FBI personnel security and language departments in the FBI remain in their positions and in charge of translation quality and translation departments' security. Melek Can Dickerson and several FBI targets of investigation hastily left the United States in 2002, and the case still remains uninvestigated criminally. Not only does the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory position, he has been promoted to supervising Arabic-language units of the FBI's counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence investigations. Your report has omitted these significant incidents, has forgone any accountability whatsoever, and your recommendations have refrained from addressing this serious information security breach and highly likely espionage issue. This issue needs to be investigated and criminally prosecuted. The translation of our intelligence is being entrusted to individuals with loyalties to our enemies. Important "chit-chats" and "chatters" are being intentionally blocked. Why did your report choose to exclude this information and these serious issues despite the evidence and briefings you received? How can budget increases address and resolve this misconduct by mid-level bureaucratic management? How can the addition of a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, address and resolve this problem?
Over three years ago, more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four to five major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months. The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counter-terrorism Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing "302" forms, and the translator translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the special agent in charge, and after [September 11] the agents and the translators were told to "keep quiet" regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice inspector general. The press reported this incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004, stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001, and further, the Chicago Tribune quoted an aide to director Mueller that he (Mueller) was surprised that the commission never raised this particular issue with him during the hearing (please refer to Chicago Tribune article, dated July 21, 2004). Mr Sarshar reported this issue to your investigators on February 12, 2004, and provided them with specific dates, location, witness names, and the contact information for that particular Iranian asset and the two special agents who received the information (please refer to the tape-recorded testimony provided to your investigators during a 2.5 hours' testimony by Mr Sarshar on February 12, 2004). I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue, the names of other witnesses, and documents I had seen (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004). Mr Sarshar also provided the Department of Justice inspector general with specific information regarding this issue (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report).
After almost three years since September 11, many officials still refuse to admit to having specific information regarding the terrorists' plans to attack the United States. The Phoenix Memo, received months prior to the [September 11] attacks, specifically warned FBI HQ of pilot training and their possible link to terrorist activities against the United States. Four months prior to the terrorist attacks the Iranian asset provided the FBI with specific information regarding the "use of airplanes", "major US cities as targets", and "Osama bin Laden issuing the order". Coleen Rowley likewise reported that specific information had been provided to FBI HQ. All this information went to the same place: FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and the FBI Washington Field Office, in Washington DC. Yet your report claims that not having a central place where all intelligence could be gathered as one of the main factors in our intelligence failure. Why did your report choose to exclude the information regarding the Iranian asset and Behrooz Sarshar from its timeline of missed opportunities? Why was this significant incident not mentioned, despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? Why did you surprise even director Mueller by refraining from asking him questions regarding this significant incident and lapse during your hearing (please remember that you ran out of questions during your hearings with director Mueller and [Attorney General] John Ashcroft, so please do not cite a "time limit" excuse)? How can budget increases address and resolve these problems and failure to follow up by mid-level bureaucratic management at FBI Headquarters? How can the addition of a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, address and resolve this problem?
Over two years ago, and after two "unclassified" sessions with FBI officials, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent letters to director Mueller, Attorney General Ashcroft, and Inspector General Glenn Fine regarding the existence of unqualified translators in charge of translating high level sensitive intelligence. The FBI confirmed at least one case: Kevin Taskesen, a Turkish translator, had been given a job as an FBI translator, despite the fact that he had failed all FBI language proficiency tests. In fact, Kevin could not understand or speak even elementary-level English. He had failed English-proficiency tests and did not even score sufficiently in the target language. Still, Kevin Taskesen was hired, not due to lack of other qualified translator candidates, but because his wife worked in FBI Headquarters as a language proficiency exam administrator. Almost everybody in FBI Headquarters and the FBI Washington Field Office knew about Kevin. Yet Kevin was given the task of translating the most sensitive terrorist-related information, and he was sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate the interrogation of and information for all Turkic-language detainees (Turkish, Uzbek, Turkmen, etc). The FBI was supposed to be trying to obtain information regarding possible future attack plans from these detainees, and yet the FBI knowingly sent unqualified translators to gather and translate this information. Further, these detainees were either released or detained or prosecuted based on information received and translated by unqualified translators knowingly sent there by the FBI. Senator Grassley and Senator Leahy publicly confirmed Kevin Taskesen's case (please refer to Senate letters and documents provided to your investigators in January-February 2004). CBS 60 Minutes showed Kevin's picture and stated his name as one of the unqualified translators sent to Guantanamo Bay, and as a case confirmed by the FBI (please refer to CBS 60 Minutes transcript provided to your investigators). Department of Justice inspector general had a detailed account of these problems (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report). I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue and the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004).
After more than two years since Kevin Taskesen's case was publicly confirmed, and after almost two years since CBS 60 Minutes broadcast Taskesen's case, Kevin Taskesen remains in his position, as a sole Turkish- and Turkic-language translator for the FBI Washington Field Office. After admitting that Kevin Taskesen was not qualified to perform the task of translating sensitive intelligence and investigation of terrorist activities, the FBI still keeps him in charge of translating highly sensitive documents and leads. Those individuals in the FBI's hiring department and those who facilitated the hiring of unqualified translators due to nepotism/cronyism are still in those departments and remain in their positions. Yet your report does not mention this case, or these chronic problems within the FBI translation departments, and within the FBI's hiring and screening departments. The issue of accountability for those responsible for these practices that endangers our national security is not brought up even once in your report. This issue, as with others, is systemic and departmental. Why did your report choose to exclude this information and these serious issues despite the evidence and briefings you received? How can budget increases address and resolve the intentional continuation of ineptitude and incompetence by mid-level bureaucratic management? How can the addition of a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, address and resolve this problem?
In October 2001, approximately one month after the September 11 attack, an agent from a [city name omitted] field office, re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that it could be re-translated. This special agent, in light of the [September 11] terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance), and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington Field Office and re-translated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas. It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided not to send the re-translated information to the special agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate. This supervisor stated that sending the accurate translation would hurt the original translator and would cause problems for the FBI language department. The FBI agent requesting the re-translation never received the accurate translation of that document. I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue, the name and date of this particular investigation, and the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004). This information was also provided to the Department of Justice inspector general (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report).
Only one month after the catastrophic events of September 11, while many agents were working around the clock to obtain leads and information, and to investigate those responsible for the attacks, those with possible connections to the attack, and those who might be planning possible future attacks, the bureaucratic administrators in the FBI's largest and most important translation unit were covering up their past failures, blocking important leads and information, and jeopardizing on going terrorist investigations. The supervisor involved in this incident, Mike Feghali, was in charge of certain important Middle Eastern languages within the FBI Washington Field Office, and had a record of previous misconducts. After this supervisor's several severe misconducts were reported to the FBI's higher-level management, after his conducts were reported to the Inspector General's Office, to the United States Congress, and to the 9-11 Commission, he was promoted to include the FBI's Arabic-language unit under his supervision. Today this supervisor, Mike Feghali, remains in the FBI Washington Field Office and is in charge of a language unit receiving those chitchats that our color-coded threat system is based upon. Yet your report contains zero information regarding these systemic problems that led us to our failure in preventing the [September 11] terrorist attacks. In your report, there are no references to individuals responsible for hindering past and current investigations, or those who are willing to compromise our security and our lives for their career advancement and security. This issue, as with others, is systemic and departmental. Why does your report choose to exclude this information and these serious issues despite all the evidence and briefings you received? Why does your report adamantly refrain from assigning any accountability to any individuals responsible for our past and current failures? How can budget increases address and resolve these intentional acts committed by self-serving career civil servants? How can the addition of a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, address and resolve this problem?
The latest buzz topic regarding intelligence is the problem of sharing information/intelligence within intelligence agencies and between intelligence agencies. To this date the public has not been told of intentional blocking of intelligence, and has not been told that certain information, despite its direct links, impacts and ties to terrorist related activities, is not given to or shared with counter-terrorism units, their investigations, and countering terrorism related activities. This was the case prior to [September 11], and remains in effect after [September 11]. If counter-intelligence receives information that contains money laundering, illegal arms sale, and illegal drug activities, directly linked to terrorist activities, and if that information involves certain nations, certain semi-legit organizations, and ties to certain lucrative or political relations in this country, then that information is not shared with counter-terrorism, regardless of the possible severe consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents cited "direct pressure by the State Department", and in other cases "sensitive diplomatic relations" is cited. The Department of Justice inspector general received detailed and specific information and evidence regarding this issue (please refer to DOJ-IG report Re: Sibel Edmonds and FBI Translation, provided to you prior to the completion of your report). I provided your investigators with a detailed and specific account of this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and the names of certain U.S. officials involved in these transactions and activities (please refer to tape-recorded 3.5 hours' testimony by Sibel Edmonds, provided to your investigators on February 11, 2004).
After almost three years the American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized under the unspoken policy of "protecting certain foreign business relations". The victims' family members still do not realize that information and answers they have sought relentlessly for over two years has been blocked due to the unspoken decisions made and disguised under "safeguarding certain diplomatic relations". Your report did not even attempt to address these unspoken practices, although, unlike me, you were not placed under any gag. Your hearings did not include questions regarding these unspoken and unwritten policies and practices. Despite your full awareness and understanding of certain criminal conduct that connects to certain terrorist related activities, committed by certain US officials and high-level government employees, you have not proposed criminal investigations into this conduct, although under the laws of this country you are required to do so. How can budget increases address and resolve these problems, when some of them are caused by unspoken practices and unwritten policies? How can a new bureaucratic layer, "intelligence czar", in its cocoon removed from the action lines, override these unwritten policies and unspoken practices incompatible with our national security?
I know for a fact that problems regarding intelligence translation cannot be brushed off as minor problems among many significant problems. Translation units are the front line in gathering, translating, and disseminating intelligence. A warning in advance of the next terrorist attack may, and probably will, come in the form of a message or document in foreign language that will have to be translated. That message may be given to the translation unit headed and supervised by someone like Mike Feghali, who slows down, even stops, translations for the purpose of receiving budget increases for his department, who has participated in certain criminal activities and security breaches, and who has been engaged in covering up failures and criminal conducts within the department, so it may never be translated in time if ever. That message may go to Kevin Taskesen, or another unqualified translator; so it may never be translated correctly and be acted upon. That message may go to a sympathizer within the language department; so it may never be translated fully, if at all. That message may come to the attention of an agent of a foreign organization who works as a translator in the FBI translation department, who may choose to block it; so it may never get translated. If then an attack occurs, which could have been prevented by acting on information in that message, who will tell family members of the new terrorist attack victims that nothing more could have been done? There will be no excuse that we did not know, because we do know.
I am writing this letter in light of my direct experience within the FBI's translation unit during the most crucial times after the [September 11] terrorist attacks, in light of my first hand knowledge of certain problems and cases within the bureau's language units, and in light of what has already been established as facts. As you are fully aware, the facts, incidents, and problems cited in this letter are by no means based upon personal opinion or un-verified allegations. As you are fully aware, these issues and incidents were found confirmed by a senior Republican senator, Charles Grassley, and a senior Democrat senator, Patrick Leahy. As you know, according to officials with direct knowledge of the Department of Justice inspector general's report on my allegations, "none of my allegations were disproved". As you are fully aware, even FBI officials "confirmed all my allegations and denied none" during their unclassified meetings with the Senate Judiciary staff over two years ago. However, neither your commission's hearings, nor your commission's 567-page report, nor your recommendations include these serious issues, major incidents, and systemic problems. Your report's coverage of FBI translation problems consists of a brief microscopic footnote (Footnote 25). Yet your commission is geared to start aggressively pressuring our government to hastily implement your measures and recommendations based upon your incomplete and deficient report.
In order to cure a problem, one must have an accurate diagnosis. In order to correctly diagnose a problem, one must consider and take into account all visible symptoms. Your commission's investigations, hearings, and report have chosen not to consider many visible symptoms. I am emphasizing "visible", because these symptoms have been long recognized by experts from the intelligence community and have been written about in the press. I am emphasizing "visible" because the few specific symptoms I provided you with in this letter have been confirmed and publicly acknowledged. During its many hearings your commission chose not to ask the questions necessary to unveil the true symptoms of our failed intelligence system. Your commission intentionally bypassed these severe symptoms, and chose not to include them in its 567-page report. Now, without a complete list of our failures pre-[September 11], without a comprehensive examination of true symptoms that exist in our intelligence system, without assigning any accountability whatsoever, and therefore, without a sound and reliable diagnosis, your commission is attempting to divert attention from the real problems, and to prescribe a cure through hasty and costly measures. It is like attempting to put a gold-lined expensive porcelain cap over a deeply decayed tooth with a rotten root, without first treating the root, and without first cleaning/shaving the infected tooth.
Respectfully
Sibel D Edmonds
CC: Senate Judiciary Committee
CC: Senate Intelligence Committee
CC: House Government Reform Committee
CC: Family Steering Committee
CC: Press

America Deserves Better # 25

2004-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
Following is an excerpt from the August Scientific American. The whole article gives a balanced comparison of nuclear vs conventional weapons for bunker busting, but misses two key points and underplays the third, following:
1)Who are we likely to need to use bunker busters against?
2)Given the downwind fallout probability from a nuclear bunker buster (see below), all our unidentified enemy would have to do is put his bunkers under urban areas to tie our hands anyway.
3)We could not know how effective such weapons would be, nor how much fallout they would really cause without testing, and that would be in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
I had no idea, until I read this, that this administration is gearing to start up the nuclear arms race again. This is the worst example I have seen yet of their irresponsible "Empire mentality". The specific program is a back door way of using a weapon we don't need, and probably couldn't use in any case, to get back into an activity that more responsible leaders, including the President's father, had long since disavowed.
I am sure the staunchest of the good Christian Republicans among you would be opposed to this initiative, and I would ask you to discuss this matter with your congregations.
Both America and the world deserve better than this, the most urgent reason yet that I have seen to defeat this administration.
Yours in horror and revulsion, Murray
Snip
Renewed interest in "nuclear bunker buster " bombs was revealed in the US "Nuclear Posture Review" of Dec., 2001, a classified defense document leaked to the press a few months afterward. The report advocated study of new nuclear military technologies to expand the strategic options available to the Pentagon. Under the auspices of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, $6.1 million was spent in 2003 for research on a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) bomb, followed by another $7.5 million in 2004. The administration plans to raise these appropriations sharply and spend $484.7 million between 2005 and 2009. At the same time, Congress has approved an Advanced Concepts Initiative, which will explore more exotic and more controversial variations on the same theme. To many observers, these substantial spending allocations and this breadth of research suggest that the administration has already tacitly committed to building RNEPs and is actively considering developing other types of nuclear bombs.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington, D.C. based Arms Control Association, declared that "the Bush administration's do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do nuclear weapons policies contradict the U.S.'s NPT [NonProliferation Treaty] commitments and jeopardize the future of the treaty." Other critics have derided the concept of small nuclear weapons as "immaculate preemption," unconvinced that even a comparatively small nuclear explosion could yield useful results without leaving an unacceptably nasty mess.
Some weapons designers have argued that low-yield earth-penetrating nuclear arms, with explosive yields ranging from the equivalent of 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT , would provide unique tactical and strategic capabilities while minimizing unwanted collateral effects in particular, the atomic fallout typically generated in abundance by more powerful bombs. Shifting from big nuclear devices that burst at the earth's surface to smaller ones that detonate below ground could indeed reduce the radioactive fallout released by a factor of about 20 – but it would by no means make the smaller munitions clean.
By decreasing the explosive power required to terminate a buried target, the use of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons lessens the amount of incidental radioactive fallout. Four scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory (Bryan L. Fearey, Paul C. White, John St. Ledger and John D. Immele) recently estimated in the journal Comparative Strategy that a small nuclear bomb that penetrated the ground 10 meters before exploding could be roughly 1/40th the size of a bomb detonated at the surface, and still achieve its goal. But is that reduction sufficient to contemplate deploying earth-penetrating nuclear bombs? According to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment's report "The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions," fully containing the fallout from a one-kiloton nuclear weapon requires detonating it 90 meters underground in a carefully sealed cavity. Today's best penetrator missiles can reach a depth of only about six meters in dry rock, and as Robert W. Nelson of Princeton University has argued in Physics Today, limits on the strengths of materials suggest that 20 meters might be a theoretical maximum.
These figures leave little doubt that use of a nuclear bunker buster would spread fallout; in an urban area, a kiloton size bomb could kill tens of thousands. .Consider a one-kiloton bunker buster bomb set off at relatively shallow depth less than 10 meters in wind conditions averaging 10 kilometers an hour. Although the numbers will vary slightly depending on detonation depth, geology and weapon details, the basic results will be similar. If it takes six hours for people in the vicinity to evacuate, then calculations show that nearly everyone downwind of the blast within approximately five kilometers would still be killed by fallout, and half the inhabitants eight kilometers away would die. Only if the nearest population center is 10 or more kilometers downwind will the fallout lead to few if any rapid fatalities. Even if the number of casualties were small, extensive areas adjacent to the blast zone would be contaminated with radioactivity.
One crucial question is whether new tactical nuclear weapons can be developed without resuming nuclear testing, which would clearly be in defiance of the NNP treaty. In 1993 Congress enacted a prohibition-called the Spratt-Furse ban-against any research that could lead to a new, small, nuclear weapon, one with a yield of less than five kilotons. Led by Representative John Spratt of South Carolina and then Representative Elizabeth Furse of Oregon the legislature sought to continue the moratorium on nuclear testing begun by President George H. W. Bush. Some of the lawmakers also sought to forestall nascent efforts to build a new generation of small nuclear arms.
Some defenders of the ban argued that these substantially new weapons systems would require demonstrations to certify them. According to this line of reasoning, repeal of the Spratt-Furse prohibition would constitute the first step toward a resumption of nuclear testing, threatening international arms control efforts. In May 2003, in a near party-line vote, the Spratt-Furse ban was repealed. snip

America Deserves Better # 27

2004-09-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
It is too long since I have addressed ADB. I have been busy with energy, my other preoccupation. Today one of my ADB correspondents sent me an article that nicely makes my next letter. This article addresses the most dangerous and repulsive aspect of the Bush administration. It reflects megalomania, pure and simple. The author of this piece underestimates the effect of vindicating the Vulcans' position through reelection of Bush. The next step for megalomania unchecked is increased aggression and atrocity abroad, and supression of dissent at home. Even tinpot dictators like Mussolini could pull that off. Bush himself may not have the will to such action, but the war in Iraq suggests otherwise, and never underestimate Cheney and Rumsfeldt.
Do we really need a "defense" (theres an Orwellian term for you) budget that equals the rest of the world's defense budgets combined? What threat could we possibly face that justifies such a travesty? Obviously the only possible such threat would be one of our own making, - turning the entire rest of the world aggressively against us. One can't imagine a more dangerous or more unAmerican posture for our nation.
Obviously we would be much better off with the military budget halved, the deficit sharply reduced, and a renewed network of allied nations. That won't happen if Bush is reelected.
Do we really want a government that follows the warped writings of of an extremist middle-east mind, the kind of mind that we just expended a fortune to remove from Iraq? America deserves better. Defeat this administration.
Sincerely yours, Murray
Beware the Vulcans: Why this US Vote is so Critical
August 26, 2004 by the Globe and Mail / Canada by Lawrence Martin
In his book The Rise of the Vulcans , James Mann writes of what he calls one of the most significant foreign policy documents in decades. Written in 1991 by the Pentagon's Zalmay Khalizad, the paper set forth "a new vision for a world dominated by a lone American superpower, actively working to make sure that no rival group or group of rivals would ever emerge."
Formal alliances were to be downgraded, and collective security given short shrift. American muscle would be the arbiter of the new world order.
Mr. Khalizad was part of a pack of Pentagon hard-liners -- or Vulcans, as some of them liked to call themselves -- that included Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.
Though it is generally accepted that 9/11 triggered the changes in the world's power dynamic, these men had been plotting since the late 1960s, as the even-tempered Mann book reveals, to bring an end to great power diplomacy and the collective security system.
The Khalizad document became their bible and, when Ralph Nader handed the Republicans the White House in 2000, they began implementing its tenets. If they win the election this fall -- the most high-stakes election in memory -- they will try to finish the job.
The influence of the Vulcans has been pivotal. As the Cold War closed and their manifesto was being written, there were other options open to the United States. As they did after the Second World War, the Americans could have chosen to strengthen multilateral organizations and forge a new concept of collective security. They could have scaled back their overseas power and devoted resources to domestic afflictions. Some in Washington advocated big defense-spending cuts, with the savings going toward making America the real shining city on the hill -- one without the poverty and the glaring inequalities and the health-care shortages. But the cuts would have left the Pentagon with only 10 times the might of its average competitors, as opposed to 20. The Vulcans wanted 20.
George Bush Jr. took office speaking of the need for alliances and power-sharing. "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us," he said of the world's other nations. But when he surrounded himself with supporters of the Khalizad document, the die was cast. Unilateralism became a buzzword. The Iraq war -- largely a product of the enthusiasms and exaggerations of Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz -- signaled that the old balance-of-power system was going up in smoke, replaced by the new one-superpower world view.
For the United States, the irony is considerable. It has long held claim to being one of the great democracies. But what, as the critics ask, is democratic about one country running, if not subjugating, a world of more than 200 nations?
The election in November is so critical because it will be seen as either ratification or repudiation of Vulcan unilateralism. On the face of it, the Democratic Party is hardly proposing radical change. John Kerry is fuzzy on Iraq and no dove on military spending. He ludicrously plans on increasing the already-hyperventilating Pentagon budget, making it the biggest in history when the military capacity of the enemy -- pockets of terrorists as opposed to giant armies and arsenals -- is the smallest in history.
But Mr. Kerry is running to the right of how he would govern. His heavily liberal record is that of an internationalist. A victory by him would signal a major attitudinal shift. As he makes ringingly clear, he wants to rebuild alliances, reinvigorate the concept of collective security and make America respected in the world again.
While Bush must be somewhat chastened by the "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco, by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and by the thousands of deaths his war has engendered, he would see victory as vindication. Other nations would recoil. They would fear more politics of confrontation, more polarization, more war. Hatred for America would escalate.
There would be no search for a new internationalism favored by Canada and other nations because, as The Rise of the Vulcans makes clear, the Vulcans' underlying philosophy is that they need not reach accommodation with anyone.
They are an odd breed, these men. They hate dictatorship, unless they're doing the dictating.

America Deserves Better # 24

2004-07-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
Just a short letter this time. I stumbled across a real clear and simple budget message at:
http://tinyurl.com/4ajmp or if the "tinyurl" doesn't work, you can cut and paste:
http://ww11.e-tractions.com/truemajority/servlet/Gamelet;jsessionid=DF6179634A347C46EA0730FF4EAD1CEF?req=BjEzO6PaM3E3tzM6bjEFtXM6B3Ef%2BWC3Q%2FmabjF9b9Z1ozMzGjEft2MzMjEFt3taB3Ef%2Ba5ZpiFkv4x%3D .
Obviously we will need more budget fixing than this to get rid of the deficit, but even these simple changes would provide a much better balance. Of course the only way we will start moving toward a better budget is to change the administration. America deserves better. Vote for a change in Nov.
All the best, Murray

America Deserves Better # 23A

2004-07-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
Overnight my outrage at the intentional CIA deception grew, until this morning I sent the following letter to my 2 Senators. I urge, implore, beg you to send a similar letter to your Senators, and to ask all of your friends and their friend etc., to do the same.
Sincerely yours, Murray

Senator Ernest Hollings July 16, 2004
Re: The Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq
Dear Senator Hollings,
So far I have only read Section III of the report, starting on page 84, in detail, but that is quite sufficient. This section deals with Iraq’s nuclear program, and is concerned mainly with the now famous aluminum tubes. The report available to me at http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/iraq/documents.html is much censored, especially in the conclusions. What I can see leads me to believe that, in the interests of bipartisan unanimity, the Committee significantly understated the real conclusions. Whitewash may be too strong a word, but compromise is certainly applicable.
The 21 conclusions in this section, (conclusions 28 through 47 of the report) use phrases like "the conclusion was not supported by the evidence, the conclusion was incorrect, the conclusion had several equally likely explanations, some intelligence was more definitive than the NIE showed, the intelligence was more indicative of a non-nuclear program". In only 3 cases did the Committee use stronger wording:
Conclusion 24: the conclusion was incorrect, contradictory and a serious lapse
Conclusion 38: CIA reporting was at a minimum misleading, and in some cases incorrect
Conclusion 41: something (blacked out) was presented only with analysis that supported CIA views.
However a careful reading of the report reveals unequivocally that, from June 2001 through July 2002 the CIA produced at least 10 "Intelligence Reports" withheld from other agencies and making the case that the tubes were for gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Throughout this period the DOE disputed the CIA conclusions. Finally in Sept. 2002 both the CIA and DIA published reports supporting the gas centrifuge theory, and these reports were the basis of the Sept 2002 NIE that supported the Congressional Resolution that empowered President Bush. It is also unmistakeably clear that these reports contained conscious and intentional lies of selective information, omissions, fabrications, distortions, and outright falsifications, in addition to doubtful interpretations. The NIE conclusions were not so much based on poor intelligence as on purposeful disintelligence.
The CIA disintelligence campaign started in April 2001 and continued at least through May 2003, which can hardly be a coincidence. There are only two likely explanations. Either the CIA analysts were Neocon plants or sympathizers that finally saw their chance to influence events, or they were sycophants that responded to undue pressure to provide the intelligence their masters sought. In either case they should be taken into custody, charged and tried. The trial will reveal the correct conclusion.
Your loyalty to your Senate colleagues must not lead you to let things rest here. You owe it to the wives and mothers of South Carolina (nay, even the 6000 plus wives, widows and mothers in the nation) with maimed or dead husbands and sons, to dump the compromise and bring this situation into the full light of public attention. It is clear that Congress and the nation were misled with intentionally falsified "information" under the guise of intelligence, with the undeniable purpose of justifying an otherwise unsupportable war. Such deception must be illegal, and must not go unchallenged. Please begin action now to uncover and punish the miscreants ultimately responsible for this outrage. In the interest of a bipartisan effort, by copy of this letter, I am asking Senator Graham to join you in this effort.
Respectfully yours,
Murray Duffin

America Deserves Better # 23

2004-07-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
By now you have all heard at least a little bit about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the evidence supporting The Bush administration's arguments for a war in Iraq. A bowdlerized version of the actual report can be found at:
http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/iraq/documents.html
The committee concluded that faulty intelligence was the problem, and that there was no evidence that the intelligence community was pressured to come up with the desired story. As the report is over 500 pages long I have not read it all, but I did read one section in detail, the section dealing with Iraq's nuclear program. When you read this section, and the conclusions at the end of the section, it is clear that, in order to reach unanimity, the committee pulled their punches. It may not be a whitewash, but the conclusions are a far cry from the actuality.
The body of the report makes it clear that the CIA analysts who prepared the intelligence reports concerning the famous aluminum tubes consciously fabricated supposed intelligence, interpreted intelligence in unlikely ways that supported the desired conclusions, reported known data selectively, reported data falsely, ignored other reports or failed to mention known reports that disputed their conclusions, lied about other data, lied about the results of their own experiments and lied about other known uses of the tubes in question. Their "National Intelligence Assessment" was a farrago of lies, distortions, half truths, selective data and knowingly improbable analysis. The reinterpretation of the data started in April 2001, and reached a peak in Sept. 2002.
With one exception the wording of the committee's conclusions gets no stronger than to state that various conclusions were wrong.
There is no way that the conclusions were wrong due to faulty intelligence or to lack of "humint". The conclusions were the result of conscious distortions, omissions and fabrications, but that is never stated. The commitee's understatements come pretty close to whitewash.
One should ask oneself why the CIA began to consciously and falsely reinterpret their intelligence starting in April 2001 if they were under no pressure to do so. Remember Paul O'Neal's input that discussions of war on Iraq started at Bush's first cabinet meeting. Do you think that is a coincidence?
Regretably the media has played along with the game rather than exposing the real meat of the report. If any of you doubt me I beg you to read the report for yourself, or at least read the section on the Nuclear Program to assure yourself that I am not exaggerating.
The administration didn't simply act on poor intelligence, they acted on intelligence that was consciously changed and falsified, and that was done so only after this administration took office. You can reach your own conclusions. I conclude that there was pressure to produce the desired intelligence, and that sycophants in the intelligence community responded to that pressure as desired. Intelligence was clearly fabricated to persuade Congress to support a war of choice, a decision they would not otherwise have made.
We cannot let such deceit continue to be the basis for national policy. America deserves better. Defeat this administration.
Yours, in shock,
Murray

America Deserves Better # 22

2004-07-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends
The pundits tell us that voters in Nov., will decide based on the economy and conditions in Iraq. Some of you may have already decided that the economy is now doing OK. For a more accurate take, you may want to read the following analysis. Let me draw your attention to one point: "The president of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers, recently told investors, "It's fair to say that a lot of the jobs being created may not be the jobs that come with benefits." Where is the growth going? No mystery: after-tax corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. have reached a level not seen since 1929."

2% of adults have lost jobs. The % employed tells us more than the % unemployed, because people no longer looking for jobs have been dropped from the unemployment statistics. 2% of adults is well over 3 million people!, and the jobs being created are lower paying and "a lot come without benefits". That is great economic performance!

Thirty years ago, corporations paid an average tax rate of about 30%. Today, in spite of rapidly rising profits, they pay about 12%. As a retired executive and investor, I am not anti-corporate, but that is ridiculous. I know from long experience that well managed corporations can carry their share and still do well for their investors. We won't take control of our country back from the big corporations unless we defeat this administration. America deserves better.

Sincerely yours, Murray

Published on Tuesday, July 6, 2004 by the New York Times
Bye-Bye, Bush Boom
by Paul Krugman

When does optimism — the Bush campaign's favorite word these days — become an inability to face facts? On Friday, President Bush insisted that a seriously disappointing jobs report, which fell far short of the pre-announcement hype, was good news: "We're witnessing steady growth, steady growth. And that's important. We don't need boom-or-bust-type growth."

But Mr. Bush has already presided over a bust. For the first time since 1932, employment is lower in the summer of a presidential election year than it was on the previous Inauguration Day. Americans badly need a boom to make up the lost ground. And we're not getting it.

When March's numbers came in much better than expected, I cautioned readers not to make too much of one good month. Similarly, we shouldn't make too much of June's disappointment. The question is whether, taking a longer perspective, the economy is performing well. And the answer is no.

If you want a single number that tells the story, it's the percentage of adults who have jobs. When Mr. Bush took office, that number stood at 64.4. By last August it had fallen to 62.2 percent. In June, the number was 62.3. That is, during Mr. Bush's first 30 months, the job situation deteriorated drastically. Last summer it stabilized, and since then it may have improved slightly. But jobs are still very scarce, with little relief in sight.

Bush campaign ads boast that 1.5 million jobs were added in the last 10 months, as if that were a remarkable achievement. It isn't. During the Clinton years, the economy added 236,000 jobs in an average month. Those 1.5 million jobs were barely enough to keep up with a growing working-age population.

In the spring, it seemed as if the pace of job growth was accelerating: in March and April, the economy added almost 700,000 jobs. But that now looks like a blip — a one-time thing, not a break in the trend. May growth was slightly below the Clinton-era average, and June's numbers — only 112,000 new jobs, and a decline in working hours — were pretty poor.

What about overall growth? After two and a half years of slow growth, real G.D.P. surged in the third quarter of 2003, growing at an annual rate of more than 8 percent. But that surge appears to have been another blip. In the first quarter of 2004, growth was down to 3.9 percent, only slightly above the Clinton-era average. Scattered signs of weakness — rising new claims for unemployment insurance, sales warnings at Target and Wal-Mart, falling numbers for new durable goods orders — have led many analysts to suspect that growth slowed further in the second quarter.

And economic growth is passing working Americans by. The average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers rose only 1.7 percent over the past year, lagging behind inflation. The president of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers, recently told investors, "It's fair to say that a lot of the jobs being created may not be the jobs that come with benefits." Where is the growth going? No mystery: after-tax corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. have reached a level not seen since 1929.

What should we be doing differently? For three years many economists have argued that the most effective job-creating policies would be increased aid to state and local governments, extended unemployment insurance and tax rebates for lower- and middle-income families. The Bush administration paid no attention — it never even gave New York all the aid Mr. Bush promised after 9/11, and it allowed extended unemployment insurance to lapse. Instead, it focused on tax cuts for the affluent, ignoring warnings that these would do little to create jobs.

After good job growth in March and April, the administration declared its approach vindicated. That was premature, to say the least. Whatever boost the economy got from the tax cuts is now behind us, and given the size of the budget deficit, another big tax cut is out of the question. It's time to change the policy mix — to rescind some of those upper-income cuts and pursue the policies we should have been following all along.

One last point: government policies could do a lot about the failure of new jobs to come with health benefits, a huge source of anxiety for many American families. John Kerry is right to make health care a central plank of his platform. I'll analyze his proposals in a future column.

America Deserves Better # 21

2004-07-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

The following speaks for itself. For the source go to http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-07.htm . See also http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Arlington_west_121003.htm

Army Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Bagdad on April 4th 2004. His younger sister Carly wrote this poem about her brother's death. Carly's poem has been posted at the Veterans for Peace memorial in Santa Barbara, California and is making quite an impact on those who have read it.

Carly's Poem
A Nation Rocked to Sleep
by Carly Sheehan June 16, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?
The torrential rains of a mother's weeping will never be done
They call him a hero, you should be glad that he's one, but
Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?

Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?
He must be brave because his boy died for another man's lies
The only grief he allows himself are long, deep sighs
Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?

Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother's grave?
They say that he died so that the flag will continue to wave
But I believe he died because they had oil to save
Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother's grave?

Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?
The leaders want to keep you numb so the pain won't be so deep
But if we the people let them continue another mother will weep
Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?

Don't let yourself be among those "rocked to sleep"! Defeat this administration. America deserves better.
Wakefully yours, Murray

America Deserves Better # 20

2004-07-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
Due to travels, and some time lost to upgrade my internet access, I have been off-line for about 4 weeks, so I will be sending 2 or 3 letters in a row. One of the more interesting events recently has been the release of a statement by "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change" News services have noted that for such apolitical national servants to issue such a statement is unprecedented in American history. That they felt so compelled to set such a precedent speaks for itself. Clearly they feel the same compulsion that has caused me to write these letters. Relative to Bush administration diplomacy, their statement fully supports the points I have been making. I hope you will find this exceptional initiative persuasive. For more information go to http://www.diplomatsforchange.com/ .

The only way to repair America's standing and influence in the world is to defeat this administration. America deserves better.
Best regards, Murray

Following are opening remarks by spokesperson Phyllis Oakley, former assistant secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, in advance of the official statement of the Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change:

"Deep concern about the current state of our nation's international relations compels us, 27 men and women who have served the United States in senior diplomatic, national security, and Military positions, to speak out and call for a fundamental change in the United States' approach to foreign policy.

Let me note that we did not seek large numbers of supporters for our statement -- we have assembled a varied and representative group of like-minded former senior career officials. Since news of the statement came out, we have been besieged by calls from friends and colleagues around the world who have offered support and encouragement. This is very gratifying.

Before reading the statement, I would add that to be involved in an act that will be seen by many as political if not partisan is for many of us a new experience. As career government officials, we have served loyally both Republican and Democratic administrations. We have not only worked overseas; we have also held positions of major responsibility in the Department of State, Department of Defense, National Security Council, and at the United Nations. For many of us, such an overt step is very hard to do and we have made our decisions after deep reflection.

We believe we have as good an understanding as any of our citizens of basic American interests. Over nearly half a century we have worked energetically in all regions of the world, often in very difficult circumstances, to build piece by piece a structure of respect and influence for the United States that has served our county very well over the last 60 years.

Today we see that structure crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the realities of the world around it. Never before have so many of us felt the need for a major change in the direction of our foreign policy.

We will be among the first to recognize that the nation currently faces unprecedented threats. We recognize too that the Bush administration is now reaching out to allies. But everything we have heard from friends abroad on every continent suggests to us that the lack of confidence in the present administration in Washington is so profound that a whole new team is needed to repair the damage. Repair it we must, we believe, as the future security and well being of the United States depends on it."

Statement of DIPLOMATS AND MILITARY COMMANDERS FOR CHANGE

The undersigned have held positions of responsibility for the planning and execution of American foreign and defense policy. Collectively, we have served every president since Harry S. Truman. Some of us are Democrats, some are Republicans or Independents, many voted for George W. Bush. But we all believe that current Administration policies have failed in the primary responsibilities of preserving national security and providing world leadership. Serious issues are at stake. We need a change.

From the outset, President George W. Bush adopted an overbearing approach to America's role in the world, relying upon military might and righteousness, insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations. Instead of building upon America's great economic and moral strength to lead other nations in a coordinated campaign to address the causes of terrorism and to stifle its resources, the Administration, motivated more by ideology than by reasoned analysis, struck out on its own. It led the United States into an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is uncertain. It justified the invasion of Iraq by manipulation of uncertain intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, and by a cynical campaign to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11. The evidence did not support this argument.

Our security has been weakened. While American airmen and women, marines, soldiers and sailors have performed gallantly, our armed forces were not prepared for military occupation and nation building. Public opinion polls throughout the world report hostility toward us. Muslim youth are turning to anti-American terrorism. Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted. No loyal American would question our ultimate right to act alone in our national interest; but responsible leadership would not turn to unilateral military action before diplomacy had been thoroughly explored.

The United States suffers from close identification with autocratic regimes in the Muslim world, and from the perception of unquestioning support for the policies and actions of the present Israeli Government. To enhance credibility with Islamic peoples we must pursue courageous, energetic and balanced efforts to establish peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and policies that encourage responsible democratic reforms.

We face profound challenges in the 21st Century: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, unequal distribution of wealth and the fruits of globalization, terrorism, environmental degradation, population growth in the developing world, HIV/AIDS, ethnic and religious confrontations. Such problems can not be resolved by military force, nor by the sole remaining superpower alone; they demand patient, coordinated global effort under the leadership of the United States.

The Bush Administration has shown that it does not grasp these circumstances of the new era, and is not able to rise to the responsibilities of world leadership in either style or substance. It is time for a change.

America deserves better # 19

2004-06-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
Following is an excerpt from the 5/31/04 issue of The New Yorker. This is a great example of how intelligently we are being prepared for another terrorist attack. One could fairly say that any other administration would do as badly, but this isn't "any other administration". This is the administration that suffered 9/11, and that touts itself as the true champion, presided over by the true leader, of the war on terror. If this administration hasn't done any better than this, two and a half years after the event, they never will. There is at least some chance that a new administration, learning from this SNAFU, would rectify some of the worst blivets. America deserves better. Replace this administration.
Regards, Murray

Homeland Security funding:
snip
Washington’s first response to the events of September llth was to recognize them as a national disaster. Politicians from both parties and from all over the country pledged to do everything in their power to help New York and other potential terrorist targets prepare for a second attack- Yet the key appropriations bill didn’t make it to the Senate floor before getting caught up in all the usual pie-slicing considerations. Lawmakers decided that forty per cent of the money would be divided equally among the states, without regard to their needs or the likelihood that they would ever be attacked. The rest of the money was left for the Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, to disburse. He, too, declined to distribute funds on the basis of risk, deciding instead to follow the politically more expedient path of making awards solely on the basis of population. Taken together, the two sets of rules have had the perverse effect of actually penalizing New York On a per-capita basis, the state currently ranks forty-ninth out of fifty in antiterror funding, while Wyoming receives $38.31 per person, New York gets $5.47.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some communities have had trouble coming up with credible uses for the windfalls they've received. Officials in Colchester, Vermont, for example, used their funds to buy a fifty-eight-thousand-dollar search-and-rescue vehicle capable of boring through concrete, to be used in case of a building collapse. The tallest building in Colchester, population eighteen thousand, has four stories. Bellevue, Washington, spent three hundred and sixteen thousand dollars to buy a bomb truck and a robot that can sniff out explosives. Last summer, when the Martha’s Vineyard Steamship Authority received nearly a million dollars to upgrade port security, the harborrnaster in the town of Oak Bluffs told the Vineyard Gazette, "Quite honestly, I don’t know what we're going to do, but you don’t turn down grant money.'

Meanwhile, a second federal program, created to correct the deficiencies of the first, has foundered on much the same shoals. Under this program, funds were specifically earmarked for 'high threat, high density areas, and initially the money was divided among seven cities. More and more cities were added to the list including such 'high threat' municipalities as Fresno, Baton Rouge, and Columbus, Ohio. Then, last year, funding for the program was cut. In the process, New York’s share of the money dropped from a hundred and forty-nine million to forty-seven million dollars.

It would probably be a mistake to suppose, on the basis of these figures, that either Congress or the Bush Administration is conspiring, in the Mayor's formulation, to 'screw New York’. The explanation has to do, more prosaically, with the same weaknesses that the 9/11 Commission identified in the city's response to the disaster: habit, inertia, and institutional short-sightedness. In this sense, it's probably good that last week’s hearings were as wrenching as they were, since the natural tendency in politics, as in all things, is to revert to routine. At the same time, until there is an infusion of new resources, it would be naive to expect much more from New York than it is already doing. Timothy Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana, wanted to know, why havn’t the F.D.N.Y. purchased helicopters for conducting rooftop rescues. Scoppetta just laughed. 'Well, where do I sign the requisition?"
-Elizabetb Kolbert. snip

America deserves better # 18

2004-05-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
After I posted letter # 18, which follows, I received a very emotional reply from one of my friends. (At least I hope she is still one of my friends.) Her note and my response follow, and then continue to the original Letter # 18.

To: Murray
Subject: Re: America deserves better # 18

I cant believe you are writing this kind of stuff!

To: M
I didn't write it, I just passed along the parts that I really agree with. I do find an imperialistic policy for America repugnant. I do believe we have lost credibility, influence and standing internationally, and indeed have been humiliated. I do believe that Bush is incompetent to be President, and that the Pentagon civilians have been incompetent in the conduct of a war we should never have been in, and worse in the aftermath. I do believe that now the world is a more dangerous place, especially for Americans. I have already contacted my 2 Senators and asked them to call for the resignations of Rumsfeld and his civilian staff. I have already said in one of my letters that Condi is incompetent for the post she occupies. I do believe that Bush has betrayed the nation's trust. I was kind of glad to see Gore expressing my feelings. Murray

Dear Friends, 5/28/04

The day before yesterday Al Gore made a very appropriate speech. I know that some of you prefer not to listen to anything Gore has to say, but given the state the present administration has brought us to, it behooves all of us to listen. The key excerpts of the speech follow.

Mr. Gore began the speech by focusing on the policy of domination which pervades the Bush Administration:

"George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world,"

"An American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does." "Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens -- sooner or later -- to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul."

"The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguably focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks."

"One of the strengths of democracy is the ability of the people to regularly demand changes in leadership and to fire a failing leader and hire a new one with the promise of hopeful change. That is the real solution to America's quagmire in Iraq. But, I am keenly aware that we have seven months and twenty five days remaining in this president's current term of office and that represents a time of dangerous vulnerability for our country because of the demonstrated incompetence and recklessness of the current administration."

He than called for the resignations of the principle authors of our failed foreign policy.

"It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq."

"We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point."

"We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense. Condoleezza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately."

And, at the end, he called for us to hold Bush accountable in November:

"I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands."
"I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable -- and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, 'We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility.'"

To read the whole speech and watch video highlights of the best moments, go to:
http://www.moveonpac.org/gore/

America deserves better. Vote this administration out of office in November,
Sincerely yours, Murray

America deserves better # 17

2004-05-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, 5/25/04

I have just stumbled (with a little help) across another interesting web site. Several times I have referred to the fascist tendencies of this administration. Now note this article at http://www.progressive.org/mcwatch04/mc051904.html. When you have finished this one read some of the others at the McCarthy Watch. Could the Bushies be running scared? Or is it that they just can't permit even the remote possibility of criticism?
The good news is that they won't win any new recruits this way.
Is this the kind of America you want? I didn't think so. Defeat this administration, as the first step in taking back the Republican party. America deserves better.

Best regards, Murray

America deserves better # 16

2004-05-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, 5/22/04
A few of you seem to have been won over to opposition to this administration, perhaps helped by my letters. (I like to think so). However, most seem to question the alternative, and I must confess I have my questions also. I can overcome my questions easily because I believe firmly that ABBC (Anyone But Bush and Cheney) is justified. That is probably not good enough for most of you. Some people who oppose Bush see Bush and Kerry as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, both committed to the idea that "we cannot fail in Iraq", and fail to see the important differences in what that means to them, and to how they would go from here. Many more have been swayed by the Bush label of "flip-flopper", evidenced mostly by the famous Yes vote on the Iraq War Resolution. The flip-flopper thing has been my biggest concern also, until now, and is what I want to deal with here.

I just came across the following piece. Note that it dates to 10 Dec. '03. I have again shortened it a lot, but kept the main message intact. It fully satisfies me on the Yes vote flip flop issue. My e-mail program doesn't seem to let me underline or italicize things, so let me clip a few comments from this article in order to highlight them:

Kerry - "I believed we needed to get the weapons inspectors back in. I believed Bush needed this resolution in order to get the U.N. to put the inspectors back in there. The only way to get the inspectors back in was to present Bush with the ability to threaten force legitimately. That's what I voted for."
My comment - There is no doubt in my mind that the reason Saddam let the inspectors back in was because we had overwhelming force sitting on his border, so this was the right decision.

Kerry - "The way Powell, Eagleberger, Scowcroft, and the others were talking at the time, I felt confident that Bush would work with the international community. I took the President at his word. We were told that any course would lead through the United Nations, and that war would be an absolute last resort. I chose to believe the President of the United States. That was a terrible mistake."
My comment - Isn't that a Hell of a note? I chose to trust the President, and that was a terrible mistake!!

The author - When Iraq opened itself to the inspectors, accepting the terms of 1441 completely, the administration was caught flat-footed, and immediately began denigrating the inspectors. The promises made to Kerry and the Senate that the administration would work with the U.N., would give the inspectors time to complete their work, that war would be an action of last resort, were broken.
My comment - We know that this observation is factually true. It is not a question of taking someone's word.

The author - Kerry nodded, bowed his head, and said, "You're right. I was wrong to trust him. I'm sorry I did." In the end, that is perhaps the greatest obstacle for Kerry to overcome, that Kerry trusted Bush.
My comment - No comment needed.

This account of a "trial" by the press illustrates two things. The main one is that this administration is totally deceitful in pursuit of their hegemonistic policy, completely characteristic of the true ideologue. The second is that the alternative is better than we may have thought.

Please read the entire edited piece below. It has the ring of honesty to it, and raises my confidence in the choice we have before us. America deserves better, and we have a clearly better alternative. Defeat this administration. Hopefully yours, Murray
The Trial of John Kerry Truthout Perspective
by William Rivers Pitt
December 10, 2003

Yet today, John Kerry teeters on the edge of total irrelevancy in the race for the White House. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean holds a double-digit lead over Kerry in New Hampshire, and is leading or surging elsewhere.

How did this happen? Kerry has all the components of a flat-out frontrunner. When did the wheels come off?

Ask virtually anyone who accounts themselves a member of the Democratic base, and they'll answer in a heartbeat. The wheels came off on October 11, 2002, the day John Kerry voted 'Yes' on George W. Bush's Iraq War Resolution. The occupation of Iraq, the mounting American casualties, the skyrocketing cost of the conflict, and the still-missing weapons of mass destruction have become a significant liability to Bush. Amazingly enough, however, the Iraq situation has been far more damaging to Kerry than to Bush.

Any politician who voted for the resolution was of no account to these people, worse than useless, an enabler of Bush's extremist agenda and not at all to be trusted. The fact that Kerry had served in Vietnam, and then become an anti-war activist, was an added twist of the knife for those working against the invasion of Iraq, a betrayal of his own history and his people.

There are but a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Time has grown short. In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge.

We sat in a circle around Kerry and grilled him for two long hours. In an age of retail politicians who avoid substance the way vampires avoid sunlight, in an age when the sitting President flounders like a gaffed fish whenever he must speak to reporters without a script, Kerry's decision to open himself to the slings and arrows of this group was bold and impressive. He was fresh from two remarkable speeches - one lambasting the PATRIOT Act, another outlining his foreign policy ideals while eviscerating the Bush record - and had his game face on. He needed it, because Eric Alterman lit into him immediately on the all-important issue of his vote for the Iraq War Resolution. The prosecution had begun.

"Senator," said Alterman, "I think you may be the most qualified candidate in the race, and perhaps also the one who best represents my own values. But there was one overriding issue facing this nation during the past four years, and Howard Dean was there when it counted, and you weren't. A lot of people feel that moment entitles him to their vote, even if you have a better record and would be a stronger candidate in November. How are you going to win back those people who you lost with your vote for this awful war?"

There it was. Your record is the best, Mr. Kerry. But you voted for the war. Explain yourself.

For over a year now, Kerry has struggled to respond to that question. His answers have seemed vague, overly nuanced and evasive. On Thursday, seated before the sharpest knives in the journalistic drawer and facing the unconcealed outrage of Alterman, the Senator from Massachusetts explained why he did what he did. The comments below reflect Kerry's answers over the course of a long conversation and debate on the matter.

"This was the hardest vote I have ever had to cast in my entire career," Kerry said. "I voted for the resolution to get the inspectors in there, period. Remember, for seven and a half years we were destroying weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In fact, we found more stuff there than we thought we would. After that came those four years when there was no intelligence available about what was happening over there. I believed we needed to get the weapons inspectors back in. I believed Bush needed this resolution in order to get the U.N. to put the inspectors back in there. The only way to get the inspectors back in was to present Bush with the ability to threaten force legitimately. That's what I voted for."

"The way Powell, Eagleberger, Scowcroft, and the others were talking at the time," continued Kerry, "I felt confident that Bush would work with the international community. I took the President at his word. We were told that any course would lead through the United Nations, and that war would be an absolute last resort. Many people I am close with, both Democrats and Republicans, who are also close to Bush told me unequivocally that no decisions had been made about the course of action. Bush hadn't yet been hijacked by Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and that whole crew. Did I think Bush was going to charge unilaterally into war? No. Did I think he would make such an incredible mess of the situation? No. Am I angry about it? You're God damned right I am. I chose to believe the President of the United States. That was a terrible mistake."

History defends this explanation. The Bush administration brought Resolution 1441 to the United Nations in early November of 2002 regarding Iraq, less than a month after the Senate vote. The words "weapons inspectors" were prominent in the resolution, and were almost certainly the reason the resolution was approved unanimously by the Security Council. Hindsight reveals that Bush's people likely believed the Hussein regime would reject the resolution because of those inspectors. When Iraq opened itself to the inspectors, accepting the terms of 1441 completely, the administration was caught flat-footed, and immediately began denigrating the inspectors while simultaneously piling combat troops up on the Iraq border. The promises made to Kerry and the Senate that the administration would work with the U.N., would give the inspectors time to complete their work, that war would be an action of last resort, were broken.

Kerry completed his answer by leaning in close to Alterman, eyes blazing, and said, "Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been President, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn't vote for me."

Pointing out Bush's mistakes is relatively simple, but what of solutions to the Iraq mess? Kerry was questioned at length on this, and gave the same answers delivered during his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on December 3: "Our best option for success is to go back to the United Nations and leave no doubt that we are prepared to put the United Nations in charge of the reconstruction and governance-building processes. I believe the prospects for success on the ground will be far greater if Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority are replaced by a UN Special Representative for Iraq."

Alterman, for one, was sold. In his MSNBC blog report on the meeting, he wrote, "It was all on the record and yet, it was remarkably open, honest and unscripted. Let's be blunt. Kerry was terrific. Once again, he demonstrated a thoughtfulness, knowledge base and value system that gives him everything, in my not-so-humble-opinion, he could need to be not just a good, but a great president."

The most revealing moment of the entire event came as it was breaking up. Kerry was slowly working towards the door when he was collared by Art Spiegelman. Though Kerry towered over him, Spiegelman appeared to grow with the intensity of his passion. "Senator," he said, "the best thing you could do is to is to just come out and say that you were wrong to trust Bush. Say that you though he would keep his promises, but that you gave him more credit than he deserved. Say that you're sorry, and then turn the debate towards what is best for the country in 2004."

Kerry nodded, bowed his head, and said, "You're right. I was wrong to trust him. I'm sorry I did." And then he was gone.
In the end, that is perhaps the greatest obstacle for Kerry to overcome, that Kerry trusted Bush, and trusted him enough to ignore Senator Robert Byrd's dire warnings of constitutional abrogation of Congressional responsibilities which was inherent in the resolution.

William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times and international best-selling author of three books - "War On Iraq," available from Context Books, "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available from Pluto Press, and "Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism," available in August from Context Books.

America deserves better # 15A

2004-05-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 5/19/04

Good news. This anti-environment, pro-big business smuggler,
anti-civil liberties, quasi-fascist administration just suffered
another defeat. Thank heavens for a sensible judiciary and for
confirmation of how misguided the administration is! Now let's
defeat them at the polls. America deserves better. Murray.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 19, 2004

GREENPEACE ACQUITTED: JUDGE FINDS GREENPEACE NOT
GUILTY IN LANDMARK FREE SPEECH CASE

Miami, FL -- The Bush administration's attempt to use an obsolete
"sailormongering" law to prosecute Greenpeace failed today when
Judge Adalberto Jordan dismissed the charges in the midst of the
trial. Shortly after the Justice Department rested its case, the judge
granted Greenpeace's motion for acquittal, ruling that there was
insufficient evidence to send the case to the jury. Greenpeace was
the first organization to be prosecuted for the free speech activities
of its supporters.

"America's tradition of free speech won a victory today but our
liberties are still not safe," said Greenpeace Executive Director John
Passacantando. "The Bush administration and its allies seem bent
on stifling our tradition of civil protest, a tradition that has made this
country stronger throughout its history. Greenpeace is grateful to
everyone who stood with us -- from former vice president Al Gore
and NAACP Chair Julian Bond to the citizens of Miami and people
around the world. We will never give up the struggle to protect our
forests, our air, and our water and to build a green and peaceful
future."

The case stems from a protest that took place several miles off the
coast of Florida in April 2002. Two Greenpeace activists peacefully
boarded a ship that was carrying illegal mahogany wood from the
Brazilian Amazon into the Port of Miami. The activists, who clearly
identified themselves as Greenpeace, intended to hang a banner
that read "President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging." The individuals
involved in this nonviolent protest were arrested, and misdemeanor
charges against them were settled later that year.

However, instead of intercepting the illegal mahogany and
prosecuting the smugglers, the Justice Department filed criminal
charges against Greenpeace on July 18, 2003. Greenpeace was
charged under an obscure 1872 law against "sailormongering,"
aimed not at protestors but at unscrupulous 19th-century innkeepers
who would attempt to lure sailors to their establishments.

Numerous leaders, legal scholars and groups publicly criticized the
prosecution, including Al Gore, Senator Patrick Leahy, the NAACP,
the ACLU of Florida, People for the American Way, the Sierra Club,
the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Miami Herald, the San
Francisco Chronicle and the Denver Post.

America deserves better # 15

2004-05-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends, 5/15/04
I expect all of you are ready for a break from Iraq and Abu Ghraib. So let's take a look at the environment and civil liberties. The administration is on the attack again. Imports of illegal timber are ok. Protesting same is not ok. And so we get a step closer to a police state. America deserves better. defeat this administration.
Best regards,

Murray

Published on Friday, May 14, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times

Ashcroft Fishes Out 1872 Law in a Bid to Scuttle Protester Rights
by Bill McKibben

In April of 2002, a cargo ship, the Jade, was steaming toward Miami
carrying a cargo of mahogany illegally cut from the Brazilian Amazon.
Two Greenpeace activists tried to clamber aboard the ship and hang a
banner that read "President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging." None of which
is unusual.

The trees of the Amazon are logged day after day, year after year,
despite a host of treaties and laws and despite the fact that scientists
agree that an intact rain forest is essential for everything from
conserving species to protecting the climate. And Greenpeace, day after
day, tries to call attention to such crimes. It pesters rich, powerful
interests about toxic dumping and outlaw whaling and a hundred other
topics that those interests would rather not be pestered about. The
Miami activists were arrested, spent a weekend in jail, pleaded guilty
and were sentenced to time served. All in a day's work.

But here's where it starts getting weird: More than a year after the
ship boarding, the Justice Department indicted Greenpeace itself.
According to the group's attorneys, it's the first time an organization
has been prosecuted for "the speech-related activities of its
supporters."

How far did the government have to stretch to make its case? The law it
cited against boarding ships about to enter ports was passed in 1872 and
aimed at the proprietors of boardinghouses who used liquor and
prostitutes to lure crews to their establishments.
The last prosecution under the "sailor-mongering" act took place in
1890. The new case could be like something straight out of "Master and
Commander."

The matter goes to trial next week in a federal district court in Miami,
and if Greenpeace loses, the organization could be fined $20,000 and
placed on probation. The money's no big deal; outraged supporters would
probably turn such a verdict into a fundraising bonanza. But the
probation would be. The group might well be prevented from engaging in
any acts of civil disobedience for years to come. If it crossed the
line, the group's officers might be jailed and its assets seized. Since
civil disobedience is what Greenpeace does best, the Justice Department
might in effect be shutting the group down.

That would be too bad, and not just for Greenpeace. The potential
precedent here — that the government can choke off protest by shutting
down those who organize it — undermines one of the most important
safety valves of our political life.

During the civil rights era, Southern sheriffs used every law they could
think of to jail protesters — loitering was a favorite charge. Imagine
some group being put on probation because it had helped organize
sit-ins. But even J. Edgar Hoover didn't try to criminalize the NAACP.
As the veteran civil rights campaigner Julian Bond said recently, "If
John Ashcroft had done this in the 1960s, black Americans would not be
voting today, eating at formerly all-white lunch counters, or sitting on
bus front seats."

As is the norm, this attack on political liberties is excused by the
need for "port safety" in the wake of 9/11. But I've watched Greenpeace
for years, and its members are the furthest thing from terrorists;
according to the group, "no Greenpeace activist has ever harmed another
individual," despite a record of direct action dating to its founding.
in 1971.

If port safety truly were the issue, the federal government would have
made far more progress toward inspecting cargo arriving by sea.
Confidence in the vigor of governmental scrutiny was not enhanced when
it managed not to find the Jade's illegal mahogany and let it sail on
from Miami. Two days later it unloaded 70 tons of the wood in
Charleston, S.C.
The real threat Greenpeace represents is that its members tell the
truth, and do it obnoxiously, out in public, where it can't be missed.

The Bush administration knows its environmental record is poor, and it
knows that hanging banners matters. (That's why the White House printed
up the "Mission Accomplished" flag for the president's May 1, 2003,
aircraft carrier photo op). To spare itself embarrassment, the
administration is willing to endanger core political freedoms that go
back to the very founding of the republic.

How far back? Dec. 16, 1773, at least, when a crew of patriots disguised
as Mohawks illegally boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped
overboard all the cargo of tea. As the raiders paraded away from the
docks, British Adm. John Montague shouted: "Well, boys, you have had a
fine pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven't you. But mind, you
have got to pay the fiddler yet."

Now 230 years later, it's Atty. Gen. Ashcroft playing the part of the
British officer, and the words are just as chilling.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is the
author of many books on the environment, including "Enough: Staying
Human in an Engineered Age" (Times Books, 2003).

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

America deserves better # 14A

2004-05-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
Upon reflection and further reading, the Abu Ghraib situation looks worse and worse, and the responsibility moves higher up. Following is a quote from one of you, with which I heartily concur.
Snip
I personally believe that we have set the stage for the abuses in Iraq with our deliberate disregard of civil liberties in this country: throwing 1200 people in jail after 9/11 with not one, as far as I know, ever charged with terrorist activities; our detention of the two Americans in the US without any access to an attorney; and even the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. They were placed there in a kind of legal limbo, so that we could call them "enemy combatants" and justify their not having the same legal rights as anyone else. I can't remember how many we have already released (at least 50), so we obviously captured innocents as well. If these people are guilty, they should have the right to be charged and tried.
Snip
And remember, it is this administration that has flaunted and formalized the disregard for civil liberties.

Following is an excerpt from Seymour Hersh's article that brought these shameful abuses to public attention.
Snip
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.
Snip

Note the charge in the last sentence. Rumsfeld was aware of systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions, but did nothing. And Bush appointed and supports Rumsfeld. Please recall letter #12. America, under this administration, has become a nation that ignores civil liberties, tortures prisoners at random, violates the Geneva Conventions at will, and wages war under false pretenses. Lady Liberty can now extinguish her beacon of freedom. I am outraged, and I hope you are too.

America deserves much much better. Make Rumsfeld resign now, and defeat this administration. Murray

America deserves better # 14

2004-05-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,
Also you might want to read another column from a conservative at http://www.counterpunch.org/ home page today. In fact there are a load of opinion pieces at Counterpunch that are well worth reading. Several of these denigrate Kerry also with references like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. On Iraq, so far, the characterization seems unfortunately apt. On most other issues like ethics, the environment, the economy, foreign relations, etc., Kerry is still a much better choice. There may be another choice soon. If conservatives in growing numbers come to see this administration as spinning out of control, I can see a "dump Bush" movement growing for the Republican Convention this summer. Now there's a happy thought. Murray

Dear friends,

When I first heard about our abuses of Iraqi prisoners, my first reaction was "How could these damn Military Police be so dumb and brutal? Why wouldn't they know that this would make America look worse, and would make the job in Iraq more difficult?" My secong reaction was that these guys should be severely punished. I also wondered how a group of "bad apples" came to be concentrated at one location.
Then last night I saw Larry King interviewing Colin Powell and I was surprised when Colin Powell raised the My Lai massacre as another example of a few bad apples bringing disrepute on the entire American army. I hadn't made that connection. The result was that I did some googling, and I found the following abbreviated version of a letter. That led me to google on "The Stanford Prison Experimsnt" Wow! What an eye-opener.
What we have done is create a group of "bad apples" from normal ordinary citizens. Yes we have people like the one that ended the My Lai massacre, and the ones that blew the whistle, that resist this degradation, but it is very likely that those who choose to be Military Police are predisposed to such a "conversion". What we have done in Iraq is feed their predisposition, and now that they have succumbed we are going to scapegoat them and punish them, and the higher-ups that engineered this situation (even if unwittingly), will make pious protests and get off free. Worse, like Colin Powell, they will probably fail to learn the lesson of My Lai, and Stanford and now Abu Ghraib.
What, you may fairly ask, has this got to do with "America deserves better"? Wouldn't any administration fall victim to the same problem under similar circumstances? Fair questions, and the answer to the second one is probably "yes". However any other administration wouldn't have gotten us blithely into this contradictory situation in the first place. Here we are trying to rescue the Iraquis and lead them to democracy, and we are doing it with soldiers who are taught to dehumanize their "enemies" so that it will be easier to kill them, - - or to torture them. But these enemies are the people we are befriending. Well uh!?
This is one more way in which this administration failed to appreciate the gravity of what they were getting into, failed utterly to realize the seriousness and risks and unintended consequences of war.
I read this weekend that we have had about 7 of our soldiers wounded for every one killed, an unprecedentedly high ratio, resulting mainly from the use of body armor. Of the wounded, we have also had an unprecedentedly high number of lost limbs, eyes etc., resulting largely from bombs and RPGs instead of bullets, and from body armor. So in addition to 750+ dead, we have about 5000 wounded, an unusually high number of whom are severely maimed. And now we have added another huge black eye for America, and a much smaller number of poor buggers who have been psychologically bent and will now be punished. And all of this because of the paradoxical, but inevitable and predictable fact that the only way we can befriend the poor Iraqi victims of repression is by making enemies of them.
Do you remember the addage about the "road to Hell being paved with good intentions"? The good intentions that Powell so sincerely protests are surely proving to be Hellish. We have no businees being in Iraq, and the longer we stay, the worse it is likely to get. But Colin Powell demonstrated clearly last night that this administration can't see the paradox, can't understand that our soldiers are trained to see and will create enemies, can't admit that this is another (but less justifiable) mistake like Viet Nam. America deserves better. Let's send these people home.
Sincerely and sadly, Murray
The Role

Another Open Letter to the Troops in Iraq
By STAN GOFF
http://www.counterpunch.org/

In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment in 3rd Special Forces.
I had a communications sergeant on my team named Ali Tehrani. His
father was an expatriate Iranian who'd married a German, and Ali spoke English, German, Spanish, and French. A year before we were sent to Haiti with the 1994 invasion, Ali had been sent to the camps constructed by the United States military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the purpose of detaining tens of thousands of Haitians. Ali had spent six months "working the camps" at Guantanamo in 1993.

When we received word of our mission to invade Haiti in 1994, he
reacted violently. His revulsion toward Haitians was visceral and
white-hot. When we talked, we fairly quickly concluded together that his aversion to Haitians had something to do with the role he had been
thrown into against the Haitians at the camps, the role of jail-boss.

The point I'm getting to is this. The antagonism that Ali
experienced as an individual toward Haitians was structured by the
institutional antagonism built into the jailer-and-jailed
relationship. Ali had internalized the external reality that he was a
prison guard and they were the prisoners. His job was to dominate, to
bend Haitians to his will, and every exercise of human agency by the
Haitians threatened that. Their very humanity--that combination of
independent consciousness and will--was structured by the prison-camp
phenomenon to be an enemy force in relation to Ali and the other
prison-keepers.

In 1971, Stanford University Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo
designed an experiment that would come to be known as the Stanford
Prison Experiment. Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend,
whereupon they were separated into "prisoners" and "guards," and
placed in a mock prison built in a Stanford basement. The prisoners
were stripped, deloused, shackled, and placed in prison clothes,
while the guards were given authoritative uniforms, sunglasses, and
batons. Long story short--within two days there was a near prison
riot, psychosomatic illness began to break out, white middle-class
kids in the role of guards became rapidly and progressively more
sadistic and arbitrary, and the two-week experiment had to be
abandoned after only six days... before someone was badly hurt or
killed.

Wikipedia says:
“Although the intent of the experiment was to examine captivity, its result has been used to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support.”

The experiment seemed to support the truism that "absolute power
corrupts absolutely." But that conclusion serves as a description,
not an explanation. It describes what happens to the individual, but
it fails to account for the role of rationalization that legitimates
the domination, and it completely fails to account for institutional
support of that domination.

When one uses the term "systemic," she is saying that the source of
this abuse is not individual moral failure, but a predictable
expression of the system and its structures.

The abuses of detainees, by US troops, by CACI International and
Titan Corporation mercenaries, and by the CIA in Iraq, is "systemic."

But in the same way that the system found an expression in the
thoughts and emotions of Ali Tehrani, in the same way that the
structure of domination and subjection pushed him to rationalize away
his shared humanity with his Haitian captives, we can now see in the
leering grins of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, who are regular people-
-like the experimental subjects in the Stanford Prison Experiment--
who quickly learned to behave as sadistic torturers. The military has
admitted that 60% of these detainees are neither combatants nor
threats.

As this is written, the US military is about to release hundreds of
detainees who fall in that category, and there will be more horror
stories coming, because it was systemic.

People were not only humiliated and forced to pose in degrading
positions with each other naked. Some were sodomized with foreign objects. It appears that some were also beaten to death during interrogation.

Now the cover stories are being spun out like webs.

We are being asked to believe that:

(1) The only abuse that occurred against anyone detained by American
forces in Iraq was photographed and reported.

(2) No abuses occurred anywhere that were not photographed or
reported.

(3) The one percent of US troops who are the "bad apples" all happen
to serve together in the same unit... the unit that is the only one
guilty, and that happened to get caught because of the photographs.

(4) The aggressive investigation now being proclaimed by everyone
from George W. Bush to CENTCOM, about abuses that were already on
record in the military (an internal investigation had already been
launched in February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept
from the public), would have happened had the photographs and story
not been aired on national television.

(5) The military was not attempting to cover up their own
investigation, and that they would have informed the public of these
abuses even had Seymour Hersh not put the whole miserable episode
into print.

(6) The military did not cover anything up in the two weeks between
the time CBS warned them that they were going to air an expose and
when they actually did air it.

(7) No one in the chain of command above Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski is responsible for the failure to halt these abuses, even
though Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the
investigation of these abuses, complete with sworn statements and
photographs, by General Taguba last February.

There has never been a Stanford Military Occupation Experiment to
complement the Stanford Prison Experiment, unless we just count the
military occupations themselves. There is a structured, systemic
antagonism between an occupying military and the people whose land
they occupy. And there will be no investigations of any of it,
because there never are, unless and until the American public is
confronted with them.

The National Command Authority and its cheerleaders cannot say out
loud... this is what we are doing, and it can't get done unless we
dehumanize the occupied. This reality, this system, will express
itself in the thoughts and emotions of you, the troops who carry it
out, because this military occupation is in a sense making a prison
of Iraq and making you, the troops, its turnkeys.

It will only be those exceptional individuals among you in the
military who refuse to surrender their humanity--no matter how little
you may understand the big picture--and who will witness. You who do
break with the system and witness are very important people,
important to history, because your refusal to surrender your own
moral integrity to the system may lead to our collective salvation by
ending this felonious occupation. The troops who filed reports about
the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were such exceptions.

What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done
in the United States is collide with the "exalted image and the
pseudo-event" of the Bush propaganda apparatus. That collision between the reality and the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide screen TV and suburban SUV's, and it shakes them out of their opiated shopper dream-state.

My Lai is what General Colin Powell was remembering when he
implemented "the Powell Doctrine" for the military, which includes a
co-opted press and a vigorous attempt to keep things like flag-draped
coffins off of those wide screen TVs.

Most of you don't remember My Lai.

On March 16, 1968, units of the Americal Division, to which Powell
was assigned as a staff officer in Chu Lai, entered a Vietnamese
village called My Lai and spent four hours raping women, burning
houses, then finally massacring men, women, and children--including
infants who dying women tried to shield with their own bullet-riddled
bodies. The massacre was stopped by a Georgia-born helicopter pilot
named Hugh Clowers Thompson who landed his chopper between the few
surviving Vietnamese and the blood-intoxicated soldiers, and ordered
his door gunners to open fire on the Americans if they failed to
stand down.

A few weeks later, General Creighton Abrams, then commanding general
in Vietnam, received a letter from a young Specialist-4 in the
Americal Division named Tom Glen. Glen's letter was forwarded from Abrams' office to the Americal Division and ended up with Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai.

Powell himself admitted war crimes in his memoir, My American
Journey, where he wrote, "I recall a phrase we used in the field,
MAM, for military-age male... If a helo spotted a peasant in black
pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot
would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was
judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in
front, but at him." Powell would also come to the defense of
Brigadier General John Donaldson who had the door gunners on his own
helicopter shoot Vietnamese for sport. Donaldson was exonerated,
naturally, in a military investigation.

Powell not only developed as a skilled cover-up artist, he would
eventually incorporate this ability to manage public perception about
war as a key element in the "Powell Doctrine," which he imposed on
the military and the press. He never forgot My Lai, and he has always
believed that exposure of My Lai and other atrocities were
responsible for the US defeat in Vietnam.

Donald Rumsfeld shares these beliefs with Colin Powell. They are both
wrong. The two phenomena that collide with this Powell-Rumsfeld
orientation were and are (1) the decision of their 'enemy' never to
quit, and (2) the inevitability that someone who is part of the
occupation force will be confronted with these contradictions
between "the exalted image and the pseudo-event" and the real
character of war--and that this someone will expose it in an attempt
to rescue his or her own humanity.

The war in Vietnam was lost by the French then the Americans because
they didn't belong there, and the resistance endeavored to do
whatever was necessary to make that point. This is also the situation
in Iraq.

So I'll leave to others the analysis of whether the troops facing
courts martial are scapegoats (they are, and they are also probably
guilty as hell), and whether or not the military is letting the
officers off with reprimands and walking papers to prevent the fire
spreading (which it is). I'll just emphasize that the war in Iraq
cannot be won. Not because of the inability of US troops to fight,
but because we don't belong there. And since that's the case (which I
firmly believe it is) every life--Iraqi, American, or otherwise--that
is lost or ruined... is wasted.

All this talk of whether Military Intelligence or the mercenaries
working for CACI International or the CIA or the MP commanders were
responsible is diversionary bullshit so we won't see how Iraq itself
has become the Stanford Military Occupation Experiment. Because if we conclude that the problem is systemic, then the only thing to do to stop this is to walk away.

Every troop that comes forward with accounts of the inhumanity of
this war--while jeopardizing his or her career--is serving to hasten
an end to this criminal enterprise. These troop/witnesses will serve to hasten an end to the suffering of Iraqi families and the suffering of the families of the occupying orces. They will serve to prevent more torture, more humiliation, more suspicion and hatred, and more lives being thrown away on this imperial folly.

Let me also add an excerpt from http://www.counterpunch.org/rejman05012004.html
Snip
Even Kimmitt admitted, "I'd like to sit here and say these are the only prisoner abuse cases we're aware of, but we know there have been other ones since we have been here in Iraq." I just don't believe soldiers do any of this on their own. But let me go beyond this and discuss what I have heard and read about part of the training our government provides our young people. The word is: DEHUMANIZATION. It happened in Vietnam. It's still happening. For a soldier to call an Iraqi a human--unacceptable. Can you even train a person to kill other humans rather haphazardly? I don't think so. But if you turn those people into gooks or ragheads, or whatever non-human assignment you can think of, the soldier is no longer murdering human beings. No, they are killing things, bugs, irrelevant living creatures. Isn't this the attitude reflected in these photos?
Snip

America deserves better # 13

2004-05-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 4/30/04

My apologies for the length of this one. I have edited out about 1/2 of the original text to make it as short as I could. This is perhaps the most serious failing of this administration that I have been made aware of yet. Just note the introductory paragraph and the last sentence.
By ignoring advice on Iraq they have made almost every choice wrong, permitted the early anarchy and looting that damaged the infrastructure and delayed getting things back to normal, as well as costing American credibility, increased the cost and lives lost so far in the transition, and certainly jeopardized long term success. Worse they forbade the military to publicize their advice because it could have been used as a reason to not start the war.
In every thing we do in life we have a choice among 4 options, - do the right thing right, do the right thing wrong, do the wrong thing right, or do the wrong thing wrong. After they had decided to do the wrong thing, they still had 2 choices, and by ignoring an abundance of very knowledgable advice they decided to do it wrong. Bush of course was not involved. He makes the big decisions and doesn't get involved in how they are carried out, - management by negligence.
In addition to the failures described in this article, we learn that Prince Bandar advised these turkeys to give the Iraqi army 3 months back pay, to secure their cooperation early on. The cost would have been $200M, or 0.1% of our now minimum cost for this debacle. That advice too was ignored.
Intelligent people can behave stupidly, and arrogant intelligent people are the ones most likely to do so. The arrogant stupidity of this administration is one of the major reasons why we have to get rid of them. America deserves better. All the best, Murray

Blind Into Baghdad

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure

BY JAMES FALLOWS.....

On a Friday afternoon last November, I met Douglas Feith in his office at the Pentagon to discuss what has happened in Iraq. Feith's title is undersecretary of defense for policy,. To opponents of the war in Iraq, Feith is one of several shadowy, Rasputinlike figures who are shaping U.S. policy. Feith offered a number of specific illustrations of what he considered underappreciated successes. Some were familiar —the oil wells weren't on fire, Iraqis didn't starve or flee—but others were less so. For instance, he described the Administration's careful effort to replace old Iraqi dinars, which carried Saddam Hussein's image ("It's interesting how important that is, and it ties into the whole issue of whether people think that Saddam might be coming back"), with a new form of currency, without causing a run on the currency.

But mainly he challenged the premise of most critics: that the Administration could have done a better job of preparing for the consequences of victory. No one contends that Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Douglas Feith, or the Administration as a whole is dumb. The wisdom of their preparations for the aftermath of military victory in Iraq is the question "The notion that there was a memo that was once written, that if we had only listened to that memo, all would be well in Iraq, is so preposterous," Feith told me.

The notion of a single memo's changing history is indeed farfetched. The idea that a substantial body of knowledge could have improved postwar prospects is not. The Administration could not have known everything about what it would find in Iraq. But it could have—and should have—done far more than it did.

Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.

All this, and much more, was laid out in detail and in writing long before the U.S. government made the final decision to attack.
The Administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against and its missteps have come at a heavy cost. And the ongoing financial, diplomatic, and human cost of the Iraq occupation is the more grievous in light of advance warnings the government had and willfully ignored..
. A military planner inside the Pentagon later told me that on September 13 his group was asked to draw up scenarios for an assault on Iraq, not just Afghanistan.

In his first State of the Union address, on January 29, 2002, President Bush said that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were an "axis of evil" that threatened world peace.
By the time of this speech efforts were afoot not simply to remove Saddam Hussein but also to imagine what Iraq would be like when he was gone. It was in keeping with a surprisingly well established U.S. government tradition of preparing for postwar duties before there was a clear idea of when fighting would begin, let alone when it would end. Before the United States entered World War II, teams at the Army War College were studying what went right and wrong when American doughboys occupied Germany after World War I. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor a School of Military Government had been created, at the University of Virginia, to plan for the occupation of both Germany and Japan. In 1995, while U.S. negotiators, led by Richard Holbrooke, were still working at the Dayton peace talks to end the war in the Balkans, World Bank representatives were on hand to arrange loans for the new regimes.
In late October of 2001, while the U.S. military was conducting its rout of the Taliban from Afghanistan, the State Department had quietly begun its planning for the aftermath of a "transition" in Iraq. At about the time of the "axis of evil" speech, working groups within the department were putting together a list of postwar jobs and topics to be considered, and possible groups of experts to work on them. Thus was born the Future of Iraq project, whose existence is by now well known, but whose findings and potential impact have rarely been reported and examined. The State Department first publicly mentioned the project in March of 2002.
Whatever may have been unrealistic or factional about these efforts, even more of what the project created was impressive. The final report consisted of thirteen volumes of recommendations on specific topics, plus a one-volume summary and overview. These I have read—and I read them several months into the occupation, when it was unfairly easy to judge how well the forecast was standing up. (Several hundred of the 2,500 pages were in Arabic, which sped up the reading process.) The report was labeled "For Official Use Only"—an administrative term that implies confidentiality but has no legal significance. The State Department held the report closely until, last fall, it agreed to congressional requests to turn over the findings.

Most of the project's judgments look good in retrospect—and virtually all reveal a touching earnestness about working out the details of reconstructing a society. For instance, one of the thickest volumes considered the corruption endemic in Iraqi life and laid out strategies for coping with it. (These included a new "Iraqi Government Code of Ethics," which began, "Honesty, integrity, and fairness are the fundamental values for the people of Iraq.") The overview volume, which appears to have been composed as a series of PowerPoint charts, said that the United States was undertaking this effort because, among other things, "detailed public planning" conveys U.S. government "seriousness" and the message that the U.S. government "wants to learn from past regime change experiences."

For their part, the Iraqi participants emphasized several points that ran through all the working groups' reports. A recurring theme was the urgency of restoring electricity and water supplies as soon as possible after regime change. The first item in the list of recommendations from the "Water, Agriculture and Environment" group read, "Fundamental importance of clean water supplies for Iraqis immediately after transition. Key to coalition/community relations." One of the groups making economic recommendations wrote, "Stressed importance of getting electrical grid up and running immediately—key to water systems, jobs. Could go a long way to determining Iraqis' attitudes toward Coalition forces."

A second theme was the need to plan carefully for the handling and demobilization of Iraq's very sizable military. On the one hand, a functioning army would be necessary for public order and, once coalition forces withdrew, for the country's defense. ("Our vision of the future is to build a democratic civil society. In order to make this vision a reality, we need to have an army that can work alongside this new society.") On the other hand, a large number of Saddam's henchmen would have to be removed. The trick would be to get rid of the leaders without needlessly alienating the ordinary troops—or leaving them without income. One group wrote, "All combatants who are included in the demobilization process must be assured by their leaders and the new government of their legal rights and that new prospects for work and education will be provided by the new system." Toward this end it laid out a series of steps the occupation authorities should take in the "disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration" process. Another group, in a paper on democratic principles, warned, "The decommissioning of hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel that [a rapid purge] implies could create social problems."

Next the working groups emphasized how disorderly Iraq would be soon after liberation, and how difficult it would be to get the country on the path to democracy—though that was where it had to go. "The removal of Saddam's regime will provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the viability of all Iraqi institutions," a paper on rebuilding civil society said. "The traumatic and disruptive events attendant to the regime change will affect all Iraqis, both Saddam's conspirators and the general populace." Another report warned more explicitly that "the period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting." In the short term the occupying forces would have to prevent disorder. In the long term, according to a report written by Kanan Makiya, they would need to recognize that "the extent of the Iraqi totalitarian state, its absolute power and control exercised from Baghdad, not to mention the terror used to enforce compliance, cannot be overestimated in their impact on the Iraqi psyche and the attendant feeling of fear, weakness, and shame." Makiya continued, "These conditions and circumstances do not provide a strong foundation on which to build new institutions and a modern nation state."

Each of the preceding themes would seem to imply a long, difficult U.S. commitment in Iraq. America should view its involvement in Iraq, the summary report said, not as it had Afghanistan, which was left to stew in lightly supervised warlordism, but as it had Germany and Japan, which were rebuilt over many years. But nearly every working group stressed one other point: the military occupation itself had to be brief. "Note: Military government idea did not go down well," one chart in the summary volume said. The "Oil and Energy" group presented a "key concept": "Iraqis do not work for American contractors; Americans are seen assisting Iraqis."
As combat slowed in Afghanistan and the teams of the Future of Iraq project continued their deliberations, the U.S. government put itself on a wartime footing. In late May the CIA had begun what would become a long series of war-game exercises, to think through the best- and worst-case scenarios after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. According to a person familiar with the process, one recurring theme in the exercises was the risk of civil disorder after the fall of Baghdad. The exercises explored how to find and secure the weapons of mass destruction that were then assumed to be in and around Baghdad, and indicated that the hardest task would be finding and protecting scientists who knew about the weapons before they could be killed by the regime as it was going down.

The CIA also considered whether a new Iraqi government could be put together through a process like the Bonn conference, which was then being used to devise a post-Taliban regime for Afghanistan. At the Bonn conference representatives of rival political and ethic groups agreed on the terms that established Hamid Karzai as the new Afghan President. The CIA believed that rivalries in Iraq were so deep, and the political culture so shallow, that a similarly quick transfer of sovereignty would only invite chaos.

Representatives from the Defense Department were among those who participated in the first of these CIA war-game sessions. When their Pentagon superiors at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) found out about this, in early summer, the representatives were reprimanded and told not to participate further. "OSD" is Washington shorthand, used frequently in discussions about the origins of Iraq war plans, and it usually refers to strong guidance from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and one of Feith's deputies, William Luti. Their displeasure over the CIA exercise was an early illustration of a view that became stronger throughout 2002: that postwar planning was an impediment to war.

Because detailed thought about the postwar situation meant facing costs and potential problems, and thus weakened the case for launching a "war of choice" (the Washington term for a war not waged in immediate self-defense), it could be seen as an "antiwar" undertaking. During the months when the Administration was making its case for the war—successfully to Congress, less so to the United Nations—it acted as if the long run should be thought about only later on.

Phebe Marr, an Iraq scholar retired from the National Defense University, told the committee that the United States "should assume that it cannot get the results it wants on the cheap" from regime change. "It must be prepared to put some troops on the ground, advisers to help create new institutions, and above all, time and effort in the future to see the project through to a satisfactory end. If the United States is not willing to do so, it had best rethink the project." Rend Rahim Francke, an Iraqi exile serving on the Future of Iraq project (and now the ambassador from Iraq to the United States), said that "the system of public security will break down, because there will be no functioning police force, no civil service, and no justice system" on the first day after the fighting. "There will be a vacuum of political authority and administrative authority," she said. "The infrastructure of vital sectors will have to be restored. An adequate police force must be trained and equipped as quickly as possible. And the economy will have to be jump-started from not only stagnation but devastation." Other witnesses discussed the need to commit U.S. troops for many years—but to begin turning constitutional authority over to the Iraqis within six months. The upshot of the hearings was an emphasis on the short-term importance of security, the medium-term challenge of maintaining control while transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis, and the long-term reality of commitments and costs. All the experts agreed that what came after the fall of Baghdad would be harder for the United States than what came before.
Before the war the Administration exercised remarkable "message discipline" about financial projections. When asked how much the war might cost, officials said that so many things were uncertain, starting with whether there would even be a war, that there was no responsible way to make an estimate. In part this reflected Rumsfeld's emphasis on the unknowability of the future. It was also politically essential, in delaying the time when the Administration had to argue that regime change in Iraq was worth a specific number of billions of dollars.

In September, Lawrence Lindsay, then the chief White House economic adviser, broke discipline. He was asked by The Wall Street Journal how much a war and its aftermath might cost. He replied that it might end up at one to two percent of the gross domestic product, which would mean $100 billion to $200 billion. Lindsay added that he thought the cost of not going to war could conceivably be greater—but that didn't placate his critics within the Administration. The Administration was further annoyed by a report a few days later from Democrats on the House Budget Committee, which estimated the cost of the war at $48 billion to $93 billion. Lindsay was widely criticized in "background" comments from Administration officials, and by the end of the year he had been forced to resign. His comment "made it clear Larry just didn't get it," an Administration official told The Washington Post when Lindsay left.

In September the United States Agency for International Development began to think in earnest about its postwar responsibilities in Iraq. It was the natural contact for nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, from the United States and other countries that were concerned with relief efforts in Iraq.
USAID's administrator, Andrew Natsios, had additional teams working on plans for Iraq. Representatives of about a dozen relief organizations and NGOs were gathering each week at USAID headquarters for routine coordination meetings. Iraq occupied more and more of their time through 2002. On October 10, one day before Congress voted to authorize the war, the meetings were recast as the Iraq Working Group.
The representatives of the NGOs would say, "We've dealt with situations like this before, and we know what to expect." The U.S. government representatives would either say nothing or else reply, No, this time it will be different.

The NGOs had experience dealing with a reality in Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. To the NGO world, these and other modern wars (like the ones in Africa) are not the exception but the new norm: brutal localized encounters that destroy the existing political order and create a need for long-term international supervision and support. Within the U.S. military almost no one welcomes this reality, but many recognize that peacekeeping, policing, and, yes, nation-building are now the expected military tasks. The military has gotten used to working alongside the NGOs—and the NGOs were ready with a checklist of things to worry about once the regime had fallen.

"Our initial messages were like those in any potential crisis situation," Mitchell said, "but the reason we were so insistent in this case was the precarious situation that already existed in Iraq. The internal infrastructure was shot, and you couldn't easily swing in resources from neighboring countries, like in the Balkans." The NGOs therefore asked, as a first step, for a presidential directive exempting them from the sanctions. They were told to expect an answer to this request by December. That deadline passed with no ruling. By early last year the NGOs felt that it was too dangerous to go to Iraq, and the Administration feared that if they went they might be used as hostages. No directive was ever issued.

The power vacuum that led to looting was disastrous. "The looting was not a surprise," Sandra Mitchell told me. "It should not have come as a surprise. Anyone who has witnessed the fall of a regime while another force is coming in on a temporary basis knows that looting is standard procedure.
And again the question arose of whether what lay ahead in Iraq would be similar to the other "small wars" of the previous decade-plus or something new. If it was similar, the NGOs had their checklists ready. These included, significantly, the obligations placed on any "occupying power" by the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was signed in 1949 and is mainly a commonsense list of duties—from protecting hospitals to minimizing postwar reprisals—that a victorious army must carry out. "But we were corrected when we raised this point," Sandra Mitchell says. "The American troops would be 'liberators' rather than 'occupiers,' so the obligations did not apply. Our point was not to pass judgment on the military action but to describe the responsibilities."

In the same mid-October week that the Senate approved the war resolution, a team from the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, began a postwar-planning exercise. Even more explicitly than the NGOs, the Army team insisted that America's military past, reaching back to its conquest of the Philippines, in 1898, would be a useful guide to its future duties in Iraq. As a rule, professional soldiers spend more time thinking and talking about history than other people do; past battles are the only real evidence about doctrine and equipment. The institute—in essence, the War College's think tank—was charged with reviewing recent occupations to help the Army "best address the requirements that will necessarily follow operational victory in a war with Iraq," as the institute's director later said in a foreword to the team's report. "As the possibility of war with Iraq looms on the horizon, it is important to look beyond the conflict to the challenges of occupying the country."

The study's principal authors were Conrad Crane, who graduated from West Point in the early 1970s and taught there as a history professor through the 1990s, and Andrew Terrill, an Army Reserve officer and a strategic-studies professor. With a team of other researchers, which included representatives from the Army and the joint staff as well as other government agencies and think tanks, they began high-speed work on a set of detailed recommendations about postwar priorities. The Army War College report was also connected to a pre-war struggle with yet another profound postwar consequence: the fight within the Pentagon, between the civilian leadership in OSD and the generals running the Army, over the size and composition of the force that would conquer Iraq.
The war games run by the Army and the Pentagon's joint staff had led to very high projected troop levels. The Army's recommendation was for an invasion force 400,000 strong, made up of as many Americans as necessary and as many allied troops as possible. "All the numbers we were coming up with were quite large," Thomas White, a retired general (and former Enron executive) who was the Secretary of the Army during the war, told me recently. But Rumsfeld's idea of the right force size was more like 75,000. The Army and the military's joint leadership moderated their requests in putting together the TPFDD, but Rumsfeld began challenging the force numbers in detail. When combat began, slightly more than 200,000 U.S. soldiers were massed around Iraq.

The longer-term problem involved what would happen after Baghdad fell, as it inevitably would. This was distinctly an Army rather than a general military concern The military's fundamental argument for building up what Rumsfeld considered a wastefully large force is that it would be even more useful after Baghdad fell than during actual combat. The first few days or weeks after the fighting, in this view, were crucial in setting long-term expectations. Civilians would see that they could expect a rapid return to order, and would behave accordingly—or they would see the opposite. This was the "shock and awe" that really mattered, in the Army's view: the ability to make clear who was in charge. "Insights from successful occupations suggest that it is best to go in real heavy and then draw down fast," Conrad Crane, of the Army War College, told me. That is, a larger force would be necessary during and immediately after the war, but might mean a much smaller occupation presence six months later.

The heart of the Army's argument was that with too few soldiers, the United States would win the war only to be trapped in an untenable position during the occupation.

The military-civilian difference finally turned on the question of which would be harder: winning the war or maintaining the peace. According to Thomas White and several others, OSD acted as if the war itself would pose the real challenge. As White put it, "The planning assumptions were that the people would realize they were liberated, they would be happy that we were there, so it would take a much smaller force to secure the peace than it did to win the war. The resistance would principally be the remnants of the Baath Party, but they would go away fairly rapidly. And, critically, if we didn't damage the infrastructure in our military operation, as we didn't, the restart of the country could be done fairly rapidly
Through the 1990s Marine General Anthony Zinni, who preceded Tommy Franks as CENTCOM commander, had done war-gaming for a possible invasion of Iraq. His exercises involved a much larger U.S. force than the one that actually attacked last year. "They were very proud that they didn't have the kind of numbers my plan had called for," Zinni told me, referring to Rumsfeld and Cheney. "The reason we had those two extra divisions was the security situation. Revenge killings, crime, chaos—this was all foreseeable." "We went in with the minimum force to accomplish the military objectives, which was a straightforward task, never really in question and then we immediately found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath. We sat there and watched people dismantle and run off with the country, basically."
THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR
There had still been few or no estimates of the war's cost from the Administration—only contentions that projections like Lawrence Lindsay's were too high. When pressed on this point, Administration officials repeatedly said that with so many uncertainties, they could not possibly estimate the cost. But early in December, just before Lindsay was forced out, The New York Review of Books published an article by William Nordhaus titled "Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War," which included carefully considered estimates. Nordhaus, an economist at Yale, had served on Jimmy Carter's Council of Economic Advisers; the article was excerpted from a much longer economic paper he had prepared. His range of estimates was enormous, depending on how long the war lasted and what its impact on the world economy proved to be. Nordhaus calculated that over the course of a decade the direct and indirect costs of the war to the United States could be as low as $121 billion or as high as $1.6 trillion. This was a more thoroughgoing approach than the congressional budget committees had taken, but it was similar in its overall outlook. Nordhaus told me recently that he thinks he should have increased all his estimates to account for the "opportunity costs" of stationing soldiers in Iraq—that is, if they are assigned to Iraq, they're not available for deployment somewhere else.

On the last day of December, Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told The New York Times that the war might cost $50 billion to $60 billion. He had to backtrack immediately, his spokesman stressing that "it is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost." The spokesman explained Daniels's mistake by saying, "The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a sixty-billion-dollar event." Daniels would leave the Administration, of his own volition, five months later.

In the immediate run-up to the war the Administration still insisted that the costs were unforeseeable.
When Administration officials stopped being vague, they started being unrealistic. On March 27, eight days into combat, members of the House Appropriations Committee asked Paul Wolfowitz for a figure. He told them that whatever it was, Iraq's oil supplies would keep it low. "There's a lot of money to pay for this," he said. "It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money.
Planning for the postwar period intensified in December. The Council on Foreign Relations, working with the Baker Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University, convened a working group on "guiding principles for U.S. post-war conflict policy in Iraq." Leslie Gelb, then the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the group would take no position for or against the war. But its report, which was prepared late in January of last year, said that "U.S. and coalition military units will need to pivot quickly from combat to peacekeeping operations in order to prevent post-conflict Iraq from descending into anarchy." The report continued, "Without an initial and broad-based commitment to law and order, the logic of score-settling and revenge-taking will reduce Iraq to chaos."

By the end of the month the War College team had assembled a draft of its report, called "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario." It was not classified, and can be found through the Army War College's Web site.

The War College report has three sections. The first is a review of twentieth-century occupations—from the major efforts in Japan and Germany to the smaller and more recent ones in Haiti, Panama, and the Balkans. The purpose of the review is to identify common situations that occupiers might face in Iraq. The discussion of Germany, for instance, includes a detailed account of how U.S. occupiers "de-Nazified" the country without totally dismantling its bureaucracy or excluding everyone who had held a position of responsibility
The second section of the report is an assessment of the specific problems likely to arise in Iraq, given its ethnic and regional tensions and the impact of decades of Baathist rule. Most Iraqis would welcome the end of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, it said. Nonetheless,
Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international force.
If these views about the risk of disorder and the short welcome that Americans would enjoy sound familiar, that is because every organization that looked seriously into the situation sounded the same note.

The last and most distinctive part of the War College report is its "Mission Matrix"—a 135-item checklist of what tasks would have to be done right after the war and by whom. About a quarter of these were "critical tasks" for which the military would have to be prepared long before it reached Baghdad: securing the borders so that foreign terrorists would not slip in (as they in fact did), locating and destroying WMD supplies, protecting religious sites, performing police and security functions, and so on. The matrix was intended to lay out a phased shift of responsibilities, over months or years, from a mainly U.S. occupation force to international organizations and, finally, to sovereign Iraqis. By the end of December copies of the War College report were being circulated throughout the Army.

Early in January the National Intelligence Council, at the CIA, ran a two-day exercise on postwar problems. Pentagon representatives were still forbidden by OSD to attend. The exercise covered issues similar to those addressed in the Future of Iraq and Army War College reports—and, indeed, to those considered by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: political reconstruction, public order, border control, humanitarian problems, finding and securing WMD.

On January 15 the humanitarian groups that had been meeting at USAID asked for a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz. They never got one. At an earlier meeting, according to a participant, they had been told, "The President has already spent an hour on the humanitarian issues."
On January 30 the International Rescue Committee, which had been participating in the weekly Iraq Working Group sessions, publicly warned that a breakdown of law and order was likely unless the victorious U.S. forces acted immediately, with martial law if necessary, to prevent it. A week later Refugees International issued a similar warning.
At the regular meeting of the Iraq Working Group on January 29, the NGO representatives discussed a recent piece of vital news. The Administration had chosen a leader for all postwar efforts in Iraq: Jay M. Garner, a retired three-star Army general who had worked successfully with the Kurds at the end of the Gulf War. The NGO representatives had no fault to find with the choice of Garner, but they were concerned, because his organization would be a subunit of the Pentagon rather than an independent operation or part of a civilian agency.
Garner assembled a team and immediately went to work. What happened to him in the next two months is the best-chronicled part of the postwar fiasco. He started from scratch, trying to familiarize himself with what the rest of the government had already done. On February 21 he convened a two-day meeting of diplomats, soldiers, academics, and development experts, who gathered at the National Defense University to discuss postwar plans. Garner had heard about the Future of Iraq project, although Rumsfeld had told him not to waste his time reading it. Nonetheless, he decided to bring its director, Thomas Warrick, onto his planning team. Garner, who clearly does not intend to be the fall guy for postwar problems in Baghdad, told me last fall that Rumsfeld had asked him to kick Warrick off his staff. In an interview with the BBC last November, Garner confirmed details of the firing that had earlier been published in Newsweek. According to Garner, Rumsfeld asked him, "Jay, have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?" "I said, 'Yes, I do.' He said, 'Well, I've got to ask you to remove him.' I said, 'I don't want to remove him; he's too valuable.' But he said, 'This came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it, and I've just got to ask you to remove Mr. Warrick.'" Newsweek's conclusion was that the man giving the instructions was Vice President Cheney.

This is the place to note that in several months of interviews I never once heard someone say "We took this step because the President indicated ..." or "The President really wanted ..." Instead I heard "Rumsfeld wanted," "Powell thought," "The Vice President pushed," "Bremer asked," and so on. One need only compare this with any discussion of foreign policy in Reagan's or Clinton's Administration—or Nixon's, or Kennedy's, or Johnson's, or most others—to sense how unusual is the absence of the President as prime mover. The other conspicuously absent figure was Condoleezza Rice, even after she was supposedly put in charge of coordinating Administration policy on Iraq, last October. It is possible that the President's confidants are so discreet that they have kept all his decisions and instructions secret. But that would run counter to the fundamental nature of bureaucratic Washington, where people cite a President's authority whenever they possibly can ("The President feels strongly about this, so ...").

. Wolfowitz offered a variety of incidental reasons why his views were so different from those he alluded to: "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq's reconstruction," and "We can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators ... [but] I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." His fundamental point was this: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."

None of the government working groups that had seriously looked into the question had simply "imagined" that occupying Iraq would be more difficult than defeating it. They had presented years' worth of experience suggesting that this would be the central reality of the undertaking. Wolfowitz either didn't notice this evidence or chose to disbelieve it. What David Halberstam said of Robert McNamara in The Best and the Brightest is true of those at OSD as well: they were brilliant, and they were fools.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE WAR
At the beginning of March, Andrew Natsios won a little-noticed but crucial battle. Because the United States had not yet officially decided whether to go to war, Natsios had not been able to persuade the Office of Management and Budget to set aside the money that USAID would need for immediate postwar efforts in Iraq. The battle was the more intense because Natsios, unlike his counterparts at the State Department, was both privately and publicly supportive of the case for war. Just before combat he was able to arrange an emergency $200 million grant from USAID to the World Food Programme. This money could be used to buy food immediately for Iraqi relief operations—and it helped to ensure that there were no postwar food shortages.
ONE WEEK BEFORE THE WAR
On March 13 humanitarian organizations had gathered at USAID headquarters for what was effectively the last meeting of the Iraq Working Group. Wendy Chamberlin, the senior USAID official present, discussed the impending war in terms that several participants noted, wrote down, and later mentioned to me. "It's going to be very quick," she said, referring to the actual war. "We're going to meet their immediate needs. We're going to turn it over to the Iraqis. And we're going to be out within the year."
AFTERWARD
On April 9 U.S. forces took Baghdad. On April 14 the Pentagon announced that most of the fighting was over. On May 1 President Bush declared that combat operations were at an end. By then looting had gone on in Baghdad for several weeks. "When the United States entered Baghdad on April 9, it entered a city largely undamaged by a carefully executed military campaign," Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, told a congressional committee in June. "However, in the three weeks following the U.S. takeover, unchecked looting effectively gutted every important public institution in the city—with the notable exception of the oil ministry." On April 11, when asked why U.S. soldiers were not stopping the looting, Donald Rumsfeld said, "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here."

This was a moment, when Rumsfeld crossed a line. His embrace of "uncertainty" became a reckless evasion of responsibility. He had only disdain for "predictions," yes, and no one could have forecast every circumstance of postwar Baghdad. But virtually everyone who had thought about the issue had warned about the risk of looting. U.S. soldiers could have prevented it—and would have, if so instructed.

The looting spread, destroying the infrastructure that had survived the war and creating the expectation of future chaos. "There is this kind of magic moment, which you can't imagine until you see it," an American civilian who was in Baghdad during the looting told me. "People are used to someone being in charge, and when they realize no one is, the fabric rips."
On May 6 the Administration announced that Bremer would be the new U.S. administrator in Iraq. Two weeks into that job Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and other parts of the Baathist security structure.

If the failure to stop the looting was a major sin of omission, sending the Iraqi soldiers home was, in the view of nearly everyone except those who made the decision, a catastrophic error of commission.
The case against wholesale dissolution of the army, rather than a selective purge at the top, was that it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day. Manpower that could have helped on security patrols became part of the security threat. Studies from the Army War College, the Future of Iraq project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to name a few, had all considered exactly this problem and suggested ways of removing the noxious leadership while retaining the ordinary troops. They had all warned strongly against disbanding the Iraqi army. The Army War College, for example, said in its report, "To tear apart the Army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society."

"This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute," Walter Slocombe—who held Feith's job, undersecretary of defense for policy, during the Clinton Administration, and who is now a security adviser on Bremer's team—told Peter Slevin, of The Washington Post, last November. He said that he had discussed the plan with Wolfowitz at least once and with Feith several times, including the day before the order was given.
Here is the hardest question: How could the Administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations? Saying that the Administration considered this a truly urgent "war of necessity" doesn't explain the indifference. Even if it feared that Iraq might give terrorists fearsome weapons at any moment, it could still have thought more carefully about the day after the war. World War II was a war of absolute necessity, and the United States still found time for detailed occupation planning.

The President must have known that however bright the scenarios, the reality of Iraq eighteen months after the war would affect his re-election. The political risk was enormous and obvious. Administration officials must have believed not only that the war was necessary but also that a successful occupation would not require any more forethought than they gave it.

It will be years before we fully understand how intelligent people convinced themselves of this.
One factor is the nature of the President himself. Leadership is always a balance between making large choices and being aware of details. George W. Bush has an obvious preference for large choices. This gave him his chance for greatness after the September 11 attacks. But his lack of curiosity about significant details may be his fatal weakness. When the decisions of the past eighteen months are assessed and judged, the Administration will be found wanting for its carelessness. Because of warnings it chose to ignore, it squandered American prestige, fortune, and lives.

America deserves better # 12

2004-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 4/24/04

The following text is an excerpt from Newsweek. It illustrates this administration's attitude to American justice as we have known it. So here we have Padilla, who is suspected of discussing or thinking about a terrorist act against America, and who is alleged to have met with "a Qaeda operative", but on whom we do not have enough evidence to charge him with anything. And so, because of a suspicion and an allegation, an American citizen is held, indefinitely, without accusation, legal representation, potential trial or other protection of law. Guilty until proved innocent? Is this our America?

And this suspension of our rights is done at the whim of one man, the President, doing whatever he feels he needs to do "to protect the country". To protect the country from what? From the embarrassment of a fair trial? Hey, if the guy is found guilty, and if it's appropriate treatment under law, let's lock him up and throw away the key. But let's not do it until he has been tried.

The implication of this approach to law is that, if an FBI agent reads my letters and alleges that I am anti-American, I can be locked up, without charge, or representation, or trial, or limit on the term of incarceration. All it takes is the allegation, no evidence necessary. Maybe it could happen to you for reading my letters.

For an interesting 30 second clip on what this means go to http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/03_large.shtml . This is not the justice I thought we had in "my country".

America deserves better. Defeat this administration. Best regards, Murray

BY MICHAEL ISIKOFF AND DANIEL KLAIDMAN

IN SEPTEMBER 2002, JUST BEFORE- the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a group of senior Bush administration officials convened for a secret videoconference to make a difficult decision: what to do with six americans suspected of conspiring with Al Q,aeda. The Yemeni-born men from Lackawanna, N.Y., were accused of training at a camp in Afghanistan, where some had met Osama bin Laden. The president's men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeldt, the answer was simple: the accused men should he locked up indefinitely as 'enemy combatants," and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial.or even to see a lawyer. Thats what authorities had done with two other Americans, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. "They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashecroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing 'material support" to Al Qaeda.

The administration hadn’t anticipated that U.S. citizens might occasionally turn up in the mix. In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates-and even shouting matches inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties. On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a President can do to protect the country.

Before long, administration officials would extend the battlefield to Chicago's O'Hare airport, where agents picked up Jose Padilla on May 8, 2002. The Muslim convert was arrested while returning home from Pakistan, where he had allegedly met with a top Qaeda operative and planned to set off a dirty bomb in the United States. He was named a material witness and appointed a lawyer. But prosecutors soon realized they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with any crime. To avoid releasing him, Bush decreed on June 9 that Padilla, too, was an enemy combatant. He was sent to a military brig in South Carolina.

At first, administration officials saw no problems with Padilla’s treatment. But as the months wore on, justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him indefinitely without counsel. Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them. But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.

Last month, as the Supreme Court arguments approached, the White House backed off slightly and allowed Padilla to speak with his lawyer but only in the presence of military handlers. Padilla wasn't even allowed to tell his lawyer how he was being treated. The administration hoped the meeting would show the court that it isn't indifferent to the rights of Americans, even those suspected of terrorism. The justices will have to decide if the concession was too little, too late.

Newsweek 04/26/04

America deserves better # 11

2004-05-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 4/15/04
One of my objections to this administration is economic irresponsibility. You
are now experiencing one of the "unintended consequences" of Bush economic
policy. In effect the high gasoline prices are a tax on gas users, and the biggest
users (relative to their household income) tend to be lower income working class people. Thus the tax cuts for the rich impose a further burden on the poor. Nice work Dubya! I wonder when the working class conservatives are going to catch on.

Since I sent this letter gas prices have again gone up. The following notes explain the 2 increases.

Phase 1
Economic Viewpoint By Robert Kuttner: The Real Reasons For Your Pain At The Pump

U.S. policies have caused the dollar to fall, leading OPEC to hike prices.
Bush is pushing for more tax breaks and regulatory waivers for domestic oil
and gas drilling. Kerry wants to invest more in advanced technologies, such as fuel
cells. Yet in all this public debate, hardly anyone is talking
about what is probably the most important reason behind the first runup in
oil prices -- the weak dollar.

Those who recall the first OPEC oil shock in 1973 will remember the central
role played by the weak greenback. In the period from 1971-73, the U.S.
ceased being able to maintain the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange
rates, with a dollar pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. Dollar devaluation
ensued, followed by floating exchange rates. For OPEC, this reduction
equaled a huge cut in revenue, because oil is priced in dollars. Since OPEC
is a cartel, it has a fair amount of pricing power. Dismayed by the lost
income and irritated at Western support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war, the OPEC nations decided, for the first time, to use that power to
extract a large oil price increase. The U.S. economy suffered accordingly.

FAST FORWARD 30 YEARS. The dollar has again lost a large part of its value
(over 40% against the euro since 2002, and more than 20% against the yen).
For oil-producing countries, this equals another enormous revenue loss, and
they are raising prices to make it up. Indeed, if oil were priced in euros,
OPEC's revenue per barrel would not have taken a hit. In addition, as in
1973, Arab nations are less than thrilled with Washington's Middle East
policies. Once again, gasoline prices are soaring.

Is it fair to blame the cheap dollar on the Administration? It is, and
here's how the dots connect. First, the Administration's tax and budget
program hasn't produced enough purchasing power for ordinary people. Despite
one month of good job growth, median wages have not kept pace with
inflation. Consumer and business debt are high. The economy also suffers
from a chronic trade imbalance that is increasingly structural. With fiscal
policy exhausted, the Federal Reserve has had to come to the rescue with
very cheap money. Extremely low interest rates, of course, yield a weaker
dollar.

That can be laid at the Administration's door for another reason. Countries
with irresponsible fiscal policies find that their currencies lose respect
in global currency markets. As budget deficits have gone skyward, confidence
in the dollar has gone down. Some foreign exporters, Toyota Motor Corp.
(TM ) for instance, choose to absorb the exchange-rate loss and take an
earnings hit rather than lose U.S. market share. Others, such as purveyors
of fine French wines, have raised dollar prices. But the oil cartel is a
special case that is able to engineer its prices -- indeed, that's the
definition of a cartel. Gasoline, unlike French wine, is a necessity with no
near substitute. Most consumers just absorb the increase because they have
to.

PS: OPEC's next logical step is to price oil in Euros and Yen, which will cause
a further collapse in the dollar. And don't blame OPEC. This administration
weakened the dollar and damaged their economies without any regard for their
problems.

Phase 2
Dear readers,

The gasoline price increases we have seen recently are not a result of oil company price gouging, and are not something that should be addressed by drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). The high prices result from 4 primary causes. The first is that world-wide oil demand is almost at production capacity. There may be 2% of slack left, all of it in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Even with Russia still raising output somewhat, non-OPEC production will probably go into irreversible decline this year, and OPEC will be only a few years behind. World economic recovery and booming energy demand in China are outstripping production increases. Second, the supply of low sulfur crude is even more critical, and most USA refineries are designed for low sulfur crude. The third reason is that no new refinery capacity has been added in the USA in nearly three decades, and with about 30 different gasoline mixes mandated by our 50 states to minimize summer air pollution, refinery capacity is max'd out. USA gasoline demand is up about 3% year on year, mainly due to growing use of fuel inefficient SUVs. The fourth reason is fears about middle-east instability causing governments to increase strategic reserves, and investors to go long. You will hear that oil company profits are up 90% and that is true. What you will not hear is that oil company profits have been dismal for several years, which is one of the reasons that no refinery capacity has been added. Even after this nice rise, profits are not excessive. No, I am not a spokesman for the oil industry.

What most people don't know is that USA oil production has been in decline since 1970, with the rate of decline slowly increasing. It's at about 4%/yr. now. We now produce only about 40% of the oil we consume, and oil imports are the single largest item in our very negative balance of payments. If you had to pay at the pump to maintain the military we keep in the middle-east to keep the supply lanes open, instead of having it buried in the defense budget, gasoline would be over $7.00/gal today.

To make things more interesting, world-wide oil production will probably be in irreversible decline before the end of this decade. The present high gasoline prices are just the first tremors of the earthquake that is coming. My personal expectation for the peak year is 2007/08, but there is no way to make a certain prediction. You SUV drivers had better start thinking about a trade-in, because the day after the world realizes that oil production has peaked, you will be driving a vehicle with zero trade-in value, regardless of how high your unpaid balance on it is.

There are people, mostly economists or politicians, who will tell you that an impending oil peak is not true and we have at least 40 years of oil left. I don't have room in this letter to give you all of the arguments why they are wrong, but you might consider a few points:
- world-wide oil discovery peaked in 1963, and has been in decline ever since, - you can't produce what you don't find
- over the last 15 years annual discovery has averaged about 1/3 of production, and was about 1/4 last year
- out of about 41,000 known oil fields worldwide, more than 20,000 are classed as insignificant. We wouldn't have found all those little ones without finding any more big ones if they were there.
- for the last 3 years the exploration costs of the oil majors have been larger than the net present value of their discoveries.
People will tell you that there is more oil in the Athabasca tarsands and the Orinoco bitumen than all of the recoverable conventional oil that has ever been discovered, and that is true. The problem is that you have to mine it instead of pumping it out of the ground through a pipe, and the production rate is less than 2% of world demand today, and will never exceed 10% of today's demand.

What does all this mean to us? Well, first, Bush is lying when he says that we would not have a problem if his energy bill had been passed 2 years ago. His energy bill focused heavily on supply side spending in America, and the supply side can't solve the problem, either domestically or internationally. North America has been thoroughly explored, and the reason his energy bill has to offer major subsidies to oil companies is because there are no economically interesting prospects for them to pursue independently. Second, Bush is lying when he says that if Congress had approved development of ANWR we would have no price problem today. ANWR has much lower reserves than the government claims, won't reach a production rate that will solve the supply problem ever, and wouldn't be in production yet if we had started 2 years ago. Bush is lying to try to preemptively shift the blame onto the Democrats for not passing his bill. Third, Bush is dead right when he refuses to drain some of the Strategic Reserve to ameliorate prices. If there is any real supply interruption, we will need that reserve. We already have oil supply instability in Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq, and growing unrest in Saudi Arabia. The SPR could only compensate a 10% shortfall in imports for 1.5 years if there were zero demand growth.

And that last point is the major reason why Bush's energy bill is wrong for America. There are some good points in the bill, but the emphasis is on the supply side and fossil fuel, when the problem can only be addressed permanently through the demand side and renewables. The main thrust of the bill is "Drain America First", and strategically that is dead wrong, just as pulling down the Strategic Reserve would be wrong. His supply side "drain America first" policy is aggravated by a demand side policy that gives subsidies to buyers of the most inefficent vehicles. That's really dumb.

The Administration has known about this problem for a long time, but doesn't want to talk about it. I can think of 3 possible reasons for their reticence:
1)they are afraid the American people can't take the truth and will panic.
2)they are helping their oil company cronies who don't want to be seen as a twilight industry (think about BP's name change).
3)they don't want to hurt big Auto's profitable SUV sales.
Probably the real reason is a mix of all three, but the approach is stupid because, sooner or later, we will all know (peak oil is becoming a topic of discussion in the media), big oil will have to redefine themselves as energy companies (a la BP), and Detroit will have to start building responsible energy efficient cars or die like the dinosaurs. Sooner is better.

We urgently need a comprehensive and responsible National Energy Policy that focuses on demand and renewables. Contrary to what Cheney and several economists would have you believe, we do not have to curtail economic activity to cut demand substantially. The economy is rife with opportunities for efficiency improvements, but that is the subject of another letter. If we act early, we can weather declining petroleum without major negatives, make the nation more efficient and competitive on the world stage, and create a multitude of jobs. If we wait until the crisis is upon us we will have economic disruption that could make the Great Depression pale in comparison. It's time to seize the initiative.

There is no way that this administration is going to present the kind of policy we need. America both needs and deserves better. Replace this administration.
Best regards, Murray

America deserves better # 10

2004-05-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, 4/11/04

A couple of you have asked what I thought about Richard Clark. I had not intended to write on this subject, but the Condoleezza Rice testimony provoked several thoughts that fit my theme. If you google on Richard Clark you will probably find the Time article that has been frequently referred to, and you may also come across Al Franken's admittedly biased version of events. Both were written long before Clark's book and testimony, but both corroborate what he has said. Personally I believe Clark is probably telling the truth in a relatively fair and unbiased way. (I sure agree with him on Iraq!). Curiously Condi's testimony also corroborated Clark, which I didn't expect after the character assassination attempts by the Bushies.

As for Condi I have very mixed feelings. On the positive side she is clearly bright, articulate, poised, charming, unflappable, and in a nice way as pugnacious as she needs to be. I was very impressed at how well prepared she was and how well she controlled the interview. On the negative side, I was disappointed at how she followed the Bush administration policy of misdirection. The least offensive thing in this regard was how skillfully she ran out the clock to minimize the questions that could be posed. That would be appropriate behaviour in an adversial situation, but wasn't the best in front of a committee that is trying to get to the bottom of how 9/11 happened, in order to prevent a similar future failure. Both her opening remarks and her answers, even to clearly sympathetic Republicans, were much longer than need be.

More important was her comment, word for word the same as Cheney's, (an obviously preset party line) the week of Clark's testimony to the effect of "What was Clark doing during the 1990s when the first WTC bombing, the East Africa bombings, the Cole bombing etc., happened?" In view of the facts that: she kept Clark on, that she spoke of him positively several times during her testimony, that during his time in office Al Qaeda was clearly identified as the enemy, as the perpetrator of the latter bombings, that at least 3 millenium plots were foiled, and that Clark recommended again and again more drastic action against Al Qaeda than either administration was willing to undertake, posing the question as she did was purely and simply an attempt to discredit one of the best people we had on the job. If she had the moral backbone that one would expect with her many positive characteristics, she would never have participated in such action. I was really sorry to see her put Bush doctrine ahead of correct behaviour.

There was one other small point that seemed to escape the attention of all the pundits. During her opening remarks she referred to "a sustained systematic campaign against the USA, starting in the 1980s with the Lebanon bombing and the Achille Lauro". Maybe it's not very important, but that is a false claim and another example of misdirection. There was no sustained or systematic campaign against the USA until Al Qaeda got their act together and pulled off the East africa bombings in 1998. The earlier events were not part of any systematic campaign, although the first WTC attack may have been linked to a nascent Al Qaeda. What these acts had in common was that they were committed by Muslims angry at the USA, and that we learned nothing from them. Why did she link them in the way she did? Probably to lessen culpability by implying that this administration inherited a decade and a half old problem that predecessors had failed to deal with. In fact Al Qaeda was clearly recognized as a threat only in 1996, and the previous administration was subjected to a huge ration of Republican abuse after the 1998 attempt to take out Bin Laden with rocket attacks, an attempt that we now know was fully justified and appropriate.

However there is a more important issue, but one that, at least in regard to Dr. Rice, I do not quite lump into my America deserves better theme. This is another point that the pundits have overlooked, but is clear to me, probably because of my corporate management background. Over and over again Condi made statements like "On July 5th I delegated the task to Clarke", "I understood that the FBI was pursuing the sleeper cells", "the country had taken steps" (note: not "I had taken steps"), "Dick Clark, the FBI director, the CIA director were shaking trees", "the CSG was the nerve centre and CSG members were in contact with their principles", "President Bush and I expected -- " etc. As early as 2000, in an interview, she had noted the need for better CIA/FBI coordination on domestic threats. She was fully aware of the dysfunction of these agencies, and we later learn that CSG members were not in touch with their principles and that the state of high alert in Washington in June-Aug of 2001 was never communicated to field offices in the FBI, INS or FAA. Clearly she had a completely "hands-off" approach, she still feels that her approach was OK, and she doesn't understand basic management, which is not surprising for an academic. In a successful corporation a senior manager that provided neither direction or control in an area of importance, and suffered a major failure would be fired. Of course her title is National Security Advisor, not director or manager. It is quite possible that her job spec. did not call for her to take charge. Her predecessor, Sandy Berger, saw it as his job to take charge, and during the millenium threat held daily meetings of the principles. The threat alert went down to field offices in all branches, and plots were foiled. Dr. Rice perceives that as luck. In business we have an expression - "Chance favors the prepared".

And that brings us back to Bush. Clearly no one was assigned specifically to take charge. The FBI was a criminal investigation organization, ill prepared to deal with domestic security. The CIA is prevented by law from domestic intelligence work. There was no equivalent of Sandy Berger filling the vacuum, and given the elevated threat perception that everyone agrees existed, there was a vacuum. Bush "expected " things to get done. In the US Navy they have a useful expression. "What gets done is what is inspected, not what is expected". No one inspected. No one saw to it that the CSG members communicated with their principles. No one saw to it that field offices were on high alert. Cheney was assigned by Bush to lead a task force in May, but had not yet held a meeting in Sept. and no followup was done. The principles held 100 meetings by 9/11 commission count, or 33 meetings by Condi's count, from Jan. to Sept. and never once discussed Al Qaeda, in spite of the fact that Tenet is said to "have had his hair on fire" during July. August saw the longest first year Presidential vacation in history, at a time when Condi claims "the President had us on highest alert". When I started these letters I said that this administration is morally bankrupt, strategically misguided and economically irresponsible. Now it is clear that they are also managerially incompetent, to the extent that they are unable to recognize their lack of competence.

Clark has said that probably nothing could have been done to prevent 9/11. Dr. Rice has strongly emphasized this assertion. I don't buy it. Given the history, and the level of alert that begged for strong top level central direction, if there had been competent management, and a top priority communicated in unmistakeable terms to field offices of all agencies, the odds are very high that the dots would have been connected and the conspiracy rolled up before the plan could be implemented. The new theme song, repeated, to my distress, by John McCain, is that "Al Qaeda was responsible". No one else was responsible. Only Richard Clark has admitted his failure and apologized. That's not good enough. This was a gross failure of basic management. I hope the next administration studies Mgmt 201 covering "Direction, Delegation, Measurement and Control". America deserves better.

Sincerely yours, Murray

America deserves better # 9

2004-05-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

I just got my next letter written for me. None of the following "I wants" for Bush et al will happen, so I hope for a new team. You can help. Defeat this administration. America deserves better. Murray

Awaking to a Dream
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for
The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11
hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not
one second. Not one story.

Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I
made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a
failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could
have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the
fact is we lacked — for the very best of reasons — people with evil
enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19
young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks
against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as
they could, for no stated reason at all.

Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me
that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the
bad guys. As my friend, the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen,
says, "That is the characteristic of our time — all the imagination
is in the hands of the evildoers."

I am so hungry for a positive surprise. I am so hungry to hear a
politician, a statesman, a business leader surprise me in a good
way. It has been so long. It's been over 10 years since Yitzhak
Rabin thrust out his hand to Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn.
Yes, yes, I know, Arafat turned out to be a fraud. But for a brief,
shining moment, an old warrior, Mr. Rabin, stepped out of himself,
his past, and all his scar tissue, and imagined something different.
It's been a long time.

I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6 a.m., fire up
my computer, call up AOL's news page and then hold my breath to see
what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing
in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going
up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More U.S. soldiers
killed in Iraq?

I so hunger to wake up and be surprised with some really good news —
by someone who totally steps out of himself or herself, imagines
something different and thrusts out a hand.

I want to wake up and read that President Bush has decided to offer
a real alternative to the stalled Kyoto Protocol to reduce global
warming. I want to wake up and read that 10,000 Palestinian mothers
marched on Hamas headquarters to demand that their sons and
daughters never again be recruited for suicide bombings. I want to
wake up and read that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited
Ariel Sharon to his home in Riyadh to personally hand him the
Abdullah peace plan and Mr. Sharon responded by freezing Israeli
settlements as a good-will gesture.

I want to wake up and read that General Motors has decided it will
no longer make gas-guzzling Hummers and President Bush has decided
to replace his limousine with an armor-plated Toyota Prius, a hybrid
car that gets over 40 miles to the gallon.

I want to wake up and read that Dick Cheney has apologized to the
U.N. and all our allies for being wrong about W.M.D. in Iraq, but
then appealed to our allies to join with the U.S. in an even more
important project — helping Iraqis build some kind of democratic
framework. I want to wake up and read that Tom DeLay called for a
tax hike on the rich in order to save Social Security and Medicare
for the next generation and to finance all our underfunded education
programs.

I want to wake up and read that Justice Antonin Scalia has recused
himself from ruling on the case involving Mr. Cheney's energy task
force when it comes before the Supreme Court — not because Mr.
Scalia did anything illegal in duck hunting with the V.P., but
because our Supreme Court is so sacred, so vital to what makes our
society special — its rule of law — that he wouldn't want to do
anything that might have even a whiff of impropriety.

I want to wake up and read that Mr. Bush has announced a Manhattan
Project to develop renewable energies that will end America's
addiction to crude oil by 2010. I want to wake up and read that Mel
Gibson just announced that his next film will be called "Moses" and
all the profits will be donated to the Holocaust Museum.

Most of all, I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked
John McCain to be his vice president, because if Mr. Kerry wins he
intends not to waste his four years avoiding America's hardest
problems — health care, deficits, energy, education — but to tackle
them, and that can only be done with a bipartisan spirit and
bipartisan team.

America deserves better # 8A

2004-05-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

This is an unplanned letter because I just received this opinion piece that is well written and reenforces letter # 8. I don't know who F. Sweet is, or what his political leanings are, but I share the concerns expressed herein.

Best regards

Murray

The Bush Administration's dangerous misuse and suppression of
government supported science is threatening the security of the
nation.
By Frederick Sweet

A group of leading American scientists, including over a dozen Nobel
Prize laureates, have made public their 46-page report, "Scientific
Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush
Administration's Misuse of Science." The highly detailed report gives
alarming examples of the Bush Administration's misuse of science that
have already cost American lives, and foretells of soon-to-arrive
national disasters directly caused by the Administration's wholesale
ideological distortion of science.

The scathing report opens with Part I: Suppression and Distortion of
Research Findings at Federal Agencies. The section headings
are: "Distorting and Suppressing Climate Change Research; Censoring
Information on Air Quality; Distorting Scientific Knowledge on
Reproductive Health Issues [Abstinence-only Education, HIV/AIDS,
Breast Cancer]; Suppressing Analysis on Airborne Bacteria;
Misrepresenting Evidence on Iraq's Aluminum Tubes; Manipulation of
Science Regarding the Endangered Species Act; Manipulating the
Scientific Process on Forest Management; OMB Rulemaking on 'Peer
Review'." This only takes the reader to page 16 of the report.

The report criticizes Bush's subversion of American science,
continuing with, Part II: Undermining the Quality and Integrity of
the Appointment Process. Here we are told the frightening details
of "Dismissal of Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Panels;
Underqualified Candidates in Health Advisory Roles; and Political
Litmus Tests on Workplace Safety Panel" to cite just a few examples.
This takes us only half way through the report.

Part II, begins with a quote: "The real issue here is that we are
allowing scientific advisory committees to be contaminated by people
who have clear bias, clear financial conflicts that will not allow
them to make unbiased scientific decisions." This was written by Dr.
Bruce Lanphear, Director of the Children's Environmental Health
Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The highly
qualified Lanphear's nomination to an advisory committee had been
scuttled by the Bush administration. His replacement was an
unqualified industrial "scientist" who was not concerned about the
dangers to children of high levels of lead and mercury.

In the report's conclusion, Part III: An Unprecedented Pattern of
Behavior, it begins, "No administration has been above inserting
politics into science from time to time. However, a considerable
number of individuals who have served in positions directly involved
in the federal government's use of scientific knowledge and expertise
have asserted that the Bush administration is, to an unprecedented
degree [emphasis added], distorting and manipulating the science
meant to assist the formation and implementation of policy.

In Part III, Dr. Marvin Goldberger -- and expert on nuclear
technology -- is quoted, poignantly. Goldberger is former president
of the California Institute of Technology who had advised both
Republican and Democratic administrations on nuclear weapons. He
compares the attitude of the Bush administration to those he has
served by stating, "Politics plays no role in scientists' search for
understanding and applications of the laws of nature. To ignore or
marginalize scientific input to policy decisions, where relevant, on
the basis of politics is to endanger our national economic and
military security."

The federal government increasingly relies on impartial researchers
for the critical role they play in gathering and analyzing
specialized data. But Bush has been working hard to make the opposite
to occur. Growing numbers of scientists, policy makers, and technical
specialists both inside and outside the government are reporting that
the Bush administration has suppressed or distorted the scientific
analyses of federal agencies to bring these results in line with
administration policy. Moreover, the experts complain that
irregularities in the appointment of scientific advisors and advisory
panels are threatening to upset the legally mandated balance of these
bodies. "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking. An Investigation into
the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science," provides the scary
details.

Our national security and public safety relies very heavily on
superior science and technology. By Bush subverting the nation's
science as a tool for corporate lobbyists and a narrow political agenda
he has created the potential to do as much harm as the terrorists we
are being trained to fear.

To read the report, Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An
Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science.

(Posted Friday, March 4, 2004)

America deserves better #8

2004-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

This letter is about the supression and distortion of scientific findings by the Bush administration. In response to numerous allegations of such behaviour, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted an investigation. A very brief summary of their findings is appended below. For much more information visit http://www.ucsusa.org/. As a result, more than 60 prominent scientists, including numerous Nobel laureates have sent a protest letter to President Bush. A press release on the subject can be found at http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release.cfm?newsID=381.
In the interests of full disclosure, I support both the UCS and the NRDC. No administration in our lifetime, and probably in the history of our country, has ever tried to distort and supress science in this way.
We have 2 issues here. One is the corruption of science by the corporate interests that "own" this administration. The other is supression of science that the administration finds contrary to its policy choices. The first is serious enough. The second is the practice of totalitarian regimes, and brings to mind science under Stalin, or thoughts of "1984" by George Orwell. Like no few of the provisions of the "Patriot Act" this administration is stepping across the border into fascism.
The freedoms we cherish can only be maintained by a vigilant citizenry. Please don't let these infringements on our freedoms continue. America deserves better. Defeat this administration.

Best regards,

Murray

FINDINGS OF THE INVESTIGATION
1. There is a well-established pattern of suppression
and distortion of scientific findings by
high-ranking Bush administration political
appointees across numerous federal agencies.
These actions have consequences for human
health, public safety, and community well-being.
Incidents involve air pollutants, heat-trapping
emissions, reproductive health, drug resistant
bacteria, endangered species, forest health, and
military intelligence.
2. There is strong documentation of a widerangeing
effort to manipulate the government’s
scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance
of advice that might run counter to the
administration’s political agenda. These actions
include: appointing underqualified individuals to
important advisory roles including childhood lead
poisoning prevention and reproductive health;
applying political litmus tests that have no bearing
on a nominee’s expertise or advisory role; appointing
a non-scientist to a senior position in the president’s
scientific advisory staff; and dismissing highly
qualified scientific advisors.
3. There is evidence that the administration
often imposes restrictions on what government
scientists can say or write about “sensitive” topics.
In this context, “sensitive” applies to issues that
might provoke opposition from the administration’s
political and ideological supporters. (Added by Murray
Specific cases where reports have been suppressed
or modified at the demand of industry lobbyists have
been documented.)
4. There is significant evidence that the scope
and scale of the manipulation, suppression,
and misrepresentation of science by the Bush
administration is unprecedented.

America deserves better #7

2004-05-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

This time I would like to ask you to accept a homework assignment. Please take a couple of hours out of your next nap or book schedule and read the articles at the following 2 urls.

Karen Kwiatkowski describes the way intelligence was manipulated at the Pentagon by the Neocons. Other intelligence agencies can probably testify in all honesty that they were not pressured to provide the desired intelligence. The Pentagon group took care of spin, filtering and emphasis to leave the desired picture in the recipients' minds. The PR effort was designed to persuade Congress, the media and the general public that war on Iraq was both just and necessary. How effective this campaign was can be measured by how well Saddam was linked to 9/11 in the minds of the public. They never said that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, but they linked him to Al Qaida until that idea was discredited, and whenever thay mentione 9/11 they mentioned Saddam. As a result, as recently as 7 months ago, 60% of Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11.

To practise a conscious and well planned campaign of disinformation designed to lead your country into an unprovoked invasion and unjust war should be grounds for some kind of punishment, and even more so if you succeed. To direct and/or condone that campaign should be equally punishable. To me, that was a program of treason. Go to:
http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/index_np.html (You will have to sit through a short ad to get a daypass for the Salon article).

The thinking of the Neocons is well analyzed in Pat Buchanan's editorial at http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html.
These people are morally corrupt and strategically dangerous, but they are shaping our foreign policy. In the book Pat is reviewing, the future path they recommend is clearly laid out. I don't think it is a path any of us want to follow. What Pat hasn't pointed out is the signatories to "The project for the New American Century" which include Cheney and Rumsfeld. Clearly Neoconthink is supported in very high places. Elsewhere, General Zinni (called a traitorby the Neocons) has said that if America suffers another successful terrorist attack while this administration is in power we will become a police state. We simply can't afford to give them another 4 years.

Defeat this administration. America deserves better.

Best regards,

Murray

America deserves better #6

2004-05-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, 3/16/04

I have told you what events impelled me to write these letters, but I have not tried to list all of the things I find wrong with this administration. You can infer from my prior letters that 2 of the major issues are the war in Iraq, and the pattern of misdirection and dishonesty. Probably the biggest issue is economic. You don't have to be an economist to know that the Bush tax-cuts are wrong-headed and will impose an unprecedented burden on our children and grandchildren, while benefiting only the richest members of our generation. However it doesn't hurt to have the view of one of the world's best economists. I agree with Akerlof that this is the worst administration that this country has ever seen.

On CNN (Lou Dobbs) last night they showed that the bottom 50% of income earners have experienced a slight tax increase over the last few years, while the top 1% have experienced a 40%+ drop. Also over the last 20 years the bottom 50% have experienced a gain in income of about 5% while the top 1% have gained 256 time as much percentage wise, ie over 1200%. Now we have Alan Greenspan telling us that the only way to reduce deficits is to cut SS benefits. Of course he meant, if we don't reimpose some of the tax cuts and don't reduce military spending, and Bush is pushing to lock in his tax cuts.

Read a top economist's view, and I think you will agree that "America deserves better". Best regards, Murray

PS: Also read the column at http://www.amconmag.com/2_16_04/feature.html. Note that this is from Pat Buchanan's magazine, so can't be ascribed to democratic propaganda. Murray

"A Form Of Looting"

"Der Spiegel", Interviews George A. Akerlof, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in
economic sciences.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Professor Akerlof, according to recent official projections, the
US federal deficit will reach $455 billion this fiscal year. That's the largest
ever in dollar terms, but according to the President's budget director, it's
still manageable. Do you agree?

George A. Akerlof: In the long term, a deficit of this magnitude is not
manageable. We are moving into the period when, beginning around 2010, baby
boomers are going to be retiring. That is going to put a severe strain on
services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. This is the time when we
should be saving.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So it would be necessary to run a budget surplus instead?

Akerlof: That would probably be impossible in the current situation. There's the
expenditure for the war in Iraq, which I consider irresponsible. But there's
also a recession and a desire to invigorate the economy through fiscal stimulus,
which is quite legitimate. That's why we actually do need a deficit in the short
term - but certainly not the type of deficit we have now.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Because it's not created by investment, but to a large extent by
cutting taxes?

Akerlof: A short-term tax benefit for the poor would actually be a reasonable
stimulus. Then, the money would almost certainly be spent. But the current and
future deficit is a lot less stimulatory than it could be. Our administration is
just throwing the money away. First, we should have fiscal stimulus that is
sharply aimed at the current downturn. But this deficit continues far into the
future, as the bulk of the tax cuts can be expected to continue indefinitely.
The Administration is giving us red ink as far as the eye can see, and these
permanent aspects outweigh the short-term stimulatory effects.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And secondly, you disagree with giving tax relief primarily to
wealthier Americans. The GOP argues that those people deserve it for working
hard.

Akerlof: The rich don't need the money and are a lot less likely to spend it -
they will primarily increase their savings. Remember that wealthier families
have done extremely well in the US in the past twenty years, whereas poorer ones
have done quite badly. So the redistributive effects of this administration's
tax policy are going in the exactly wrong direction. The worst and most
indefensible of those cuts are those in dividend taxation - this overwhelmingly
helps very wealthy people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The President claims that dividend tax reform supports the stock
market - and helps the economy as a whole to grow.

Akerlof: That's totally unrealistic. Standard formulas from growth models
suggest that that effect will be extremely small. In fact, the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) has come to a similar conclusion. So, even a sympathetic
treatment finds that this argument is simply not correct.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When campaigning for an even-larger tax cut earlier this year,
Mr. Bush promised that it would create 1.4 million jobs. Was that reasonable?

Akerlof: The tax cut will have some positive impact on job creation, although,
as I mentioned, there is very little bang for the buck. There are very negative
long-term consequences. The administration, when speaking about the budget, has
unrealistically failed to take into account a very large number of important
items. As of March 2003, the CBO estimated that the surplus for the next decade
would approximately reach one trillion dollars. But this projection assumes,
among other questionable things, that spending until 2013 is going to be
constant in real dollar terms. That has never been the case. And with the
current tax cuts, a realistic estimate would be a deficit in excess of six
trillion.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the government's just bad at doing the correct math?

Akerlof: There is a systematic reason. The government is not really telling the
truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander
Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have
here is a form of looting.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If so, why's the President still popular?

Akerlof: For some reason the American people does not yet recognize the dire
consequences of our government budgets. It's my hope that voters are going to
see how irresponsible this policy is and are going to respond in 2004 and we're
going to see a reversal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What if that doesn't happen?

Akerlof: Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face
massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can
be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're
going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the
money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting
services for the elderly. And people depend on those. It's only among the
richest 40 percent that you begin to get households who have sizeable fractions
of their own retirement income.

A likely effect of the deficits is this: If there's another recession, we won't be
able to engage in stimulatory fiscal spending to maintain full employment. Until
now, there's been a great deal of trust in the American government. Markets knew
that, if there is a current deficit, it will be repaid. The government has
wasted that resource.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which, in addition, might drive up interest rates quite
significantly?

Akerlof: The deficit is not going to have significant effects on short-term
interest rates. Rates are pretty low, and the Fed will manage to keep them that
way. In the mid term it could be a serious problem. When rates rise, the massive
debt is going to bite much more.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems that the current administration has politicised you in
an unprecedented way. During the course of this year, you have, with other
academics, signed two public declarations of protest. One against the tax cuts,
the other against waging unilateral preventive war on Iraq.

Akerlof: I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more
than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible
policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental
policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to
engage in civil disobedience.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of what kind?

Akerlof: I don't know yet. But I think it's time to protest - as much as
possible.

Der Spiegel, Interviews George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, who was named the 2001 co-winner of the

America deserves better #5

2004-05-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, 3/11/04

In my last letter, after I oversimplified Dean's "take back America" message, I received a letter from Howard Dean clarifying his meaning.

This fifth letter is mainly from one of the recipients of my other letters. It deals with one of the dangers facing our American system of government today, and is a subject I had on my list to get to. However it expresses the issue better than I ever could.

I have noted over the last 2 or 3 years that most people with a lifelong party affiliation never question that affiliation, and simply accept on faith that their party must be right. I think we now live in a time when we can no longer afford that luxury. Looking at history, the Republican party started as a third party, driven mainly by Northern Whigs who were split from their Southern brethren over the issue of slavery
It is a great paradox that the present Republican party is creating a climate that in a prior period would have prevented it's own birth. I strongly urge the traditional Republicans among us to shake off their comfortable faith and begin to look objectively at what is happening. I know that is a hard and uncomfortable thing to ask, but it is also our duty as responsible citizens. Times change, and as they do it is incumbent on all of us to periodically re-examine our stands.

The following was contributed by a friend:

I strongly support a two-party, or even better a multi-party, system. I believe that concentration in the hands of one party leads to distortion or even corruption of the political process. A healthy debate with differing views should make for better decision-making.

Unfortunately, both major political parties seem to be in crisis today. The Democrats, contrary to popular rhetoric, are beholden to much the same interests as the Republicans when it comes to business interests. Campaigns are so costly that contributions come in the form of large bundled donations from corporations and lobbyists. (The Center for Public Integrity has a new book out, “The Buying of the President, 2004” which lists major contributors to all the nominees of both parties.)

Although unions support the Democrats, their power is substantially less than the corporate interests. Evidence of this is the recent bill containing the elimination of overtime pay for an estimated 8 million people - passed with bi-partisan support.
And the Republican party of today has become an extension of big business with powerful support from extreme religious fundamentalists. The current administration is not a conservative one. They have expanded big government, have created enormous deficits that threaten the financial stability of this country, and are creating a police state in their zeal for destroying civil liberties and privacy rights. When a fervent Republican such as former Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia joins forces with the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the Patriot Act, you begin to get a flavor of the extremes of this administration.

But what is truly frightening is the Republican goal of total control of the government and the courts. If you think I am being overly alarmed, read the synopsis of an article in the Feb 2004 issue of The American Prospect. The title is “America as a One-Party State”, and it illustrates what is at stake in the next election. It’s quite long, so I’ll summarize:

If Bush is elected in 2004, we are headed for total domination by the Republican party which will be extremely difficult to reverse as the rules are becoming increasingly rigged.
1. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has such iron control over the House and uses [mduffin3] such parliamentary gimmickry that he has all but eliminated any opposition.

2. Electoral rules are making it harder to displace the incumbent party (districts are drawn to create “safe” seats – for both parties; however, the Republicans have the advantage in incumbency). In addition, the recent successful attempt to redraw Texas congressional districts would likely shift 7 seats from the Democrats to the Republicans.

3. The federal courts will be so dominated by the right that they will function as a rubber stamp for the administration.

These are some of the ways DeLay has perverted the democratic process:
* The power to write legislation has been centralized in the House under Republican leadership. In the dead of night, the Republicans under DeLay, have drastically revised bills approved by committee. Under House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before votes; but in 2003, the leadership wrote rules to declare bills as “emergency” measures 57% of the time – so that House members had only 30 minutes. Members, in many cases, did not know what they were voting for.

* Legislation is being written without allowing for floor amendments.
Using rules specifying the terms of debate, DeLay now brings virtually all major bills to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments. Any party member voting against this rule is threatened with losing committee assignments and campaign funds and can expect DeLay to sponsor a primary opponent to run against them. One recent example was the Medicare prescription drug bill. Most representatives were sympathetic to amendments allowing drugs from Canada and letting the federal government negotiate lower prices. DeLay made sure these amendments were not attached.

* Democrats are being blocked from conference committees.
After bills are passed in both Houses of Congress, they head to a conference committee to reconcile the differences. Increasingly the Democrats are being barred from attending unless they are willing to accommodate the Republicans. On the Medicare bill, Tom Daschle and Jay Rockefeller were excluded, while the conservative Democrats John Breaux and Max Baucus, were allowed in! On this bill, members had one day to study 1000 pages, much of it written from scratch in conference (by corporate interests). So much for bi-partisanship – as well as the welfare of seniors!

* Legislation is being written without hearings.
Writing new legislation in committee was almost unheard of before DeLay. Again, in the Medicare bill, major provisions sprung entirely from conference. And, the omnibus spending bill just passed includes provisions that were explicitly voted down in each house – a weakened media concentration standard, the watering down of overtime-pay protections for workers, and the delay in country of origin labeling for food products.

The 2003 House procedures state: “The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses.” As the author of this article says: “Like the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution, these rules are routinely waived.”

* Appropriations bills are being loaded with special pork.
Appropriations bills always pass as they provide the money to run the government, and there have always been modest abuses of so-called “earmarks” for pet pork-barrel projects. This practice is now rampant. Over $10 billion of these “earmarks” were added to the omnibus bill just passed. Examples include $50,000,000 for an Iowa rainforest; $1,000,000 to teach young people to play golf (sponsored by DeLay); $750,000 for a taxidermy museum in Utah.
Not only is this process wasteful, but the fact that the money is “earmarked” means it cannot be used for more important items in each governmental department. (The taxidermy museum is in the same budget as the VA-HUD bill.) For more detail (probably more than you want to know): http://www.house.gov/appropriations_democrats/PorkReport.pdf

In addition to all the above, DeLay has perfected a technique called “catch and release”. On close votes, the vote count is taken and strict party discipline is imposed to make sure that the majority has the number of votes needed to pass a bill. Depending upon the count, some members will be reeled in or let off the hook to vote “no”.

According to Michigan Republican Nick Smith, the leadership threatened to oppose his son’s campaign to succeed him unless he voted for the Medicare bill. The final roll call was actually held open for three hours into early morning so that the leadership could pressure legislators to vote for the bill. In 1987, when Speaker Jim Wright held a vote open for 15 minutes, then-Representative Dick Cheney termed the move “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power I’ve ever seen in the 10 years that I’ve been here.”

There is a lot more to this article (including the danger of an ultra-right take-over of our judiciary), but I wanted to provide a summary to let people know how the democratic process is being hijacked in Washington, D.C.

Democrats are said to be reluctant to bring this issue up as many are convinced that nobody cares about “process” issues or they fear being seen as whining losers. I personally think that Democratic voters should file suit under the 14th Amendment’s clause of “equal protection under the law”. Republican citizens should join this suit as their interests are not being represented either as much of the legislation comes directly from industry. I’m not an attorney – but something needs to be done to highlight the near dictatorial control by Tom DeLay.

To read this article in full, go to http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/2/kuttner-r.html

And to learn more about the horrible omnibus spending bill just passed, read Senator Byrd’s speech of January 21, 2004 by going to http://byrd.senate.gov, clicking on Speeches, January, and then the date.

Personally, I believe Tom Delay is one of the 2 most dangerous men in elective office in the USA today. His sole motivation is power and he is quite willing to corrupt our democratic processes to maintain it. America deserves better. Take back our system of government. Defeat this administration.
Best regards, Murray

America deserves better #4

2004-05-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 3/05/04

Those of you who have responded to my first 3 letters have been 7:1 encouraging, while a couple have implied that because I am anti-Bush, I am either pro-Clinton or anti-Republican. As I said at the beginning, my concern is not politics, it is philosophy, morality and economics. However I guess the political issue won't go away, so I will address it, but in the context of philosophy. This may be a little heavy going, so please stay with me.
Philosophically, I am primarily a conservative. When I came to the USA, political difference seemed to span a spectrum from Democrats as liberals, with quasi-socialists at the extreme left, to Republicans as conservatives with a very muted extreme right. Classical extremes of left and right, i.e. communism and fascism were enemies of American democracy, and McCarthyism was largely dead. With the extremes untenable, but an awareness of the extremes very present, the center was relatively strong, and shadings were perhaps more important than positions. As a conservative, I became a member of the Young Republicans even before I became a citizen, and I voted Republican up to 1992. Goldwater was probably a little to my right, but I saw him (and still see him) as an honorable man, worthy of support.
However, over the last 40 years much has changed. Liberalism, in the "New Deal" sense has ceased to be meaningful. Much of what was very left liberalism pre-WW2 is now a fully integrated part of our social fabric, and programs like Social Security and Medicare are not only valued even by Republicans, but are commonly referred to as entitlements.
Perhaps as a response to this shift, perhaps for reasons yet to be elucidated, in the 1980s Republicanism seemed to begin to lose it's way. For me Watergate was the beginning of a shift to untenable ground of "dirty tricks". In the late '80s, maybe with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist enemy, it seems that Republicanism had to find or invent new enemies, and the party began a shift from it's conservative roots to a kind of reactionary radicalism where anything goes, where the end does justify the means. In the early days this shift was most apparent on talk radio, starting with Rush Limbaugh and his rants filled with distortion, deception and outright lies. In 1992 the Gingrich crowd effectively hi-jacked the old Republican party, and moved it in a direction that was hard for a classical "Edmund Burke" kind of conservative like me to support.
Ever since there has been an insidious loss of moral compass growing in the party, that has made it ripe for takeover by elements like the Neo-cons, and the small amoral element of big business that I spoke of before. (Barry Goldwater must be spinning in his grave). Now we have an administration that spends significant resources to concoct distortions, deceptions and lies to denigrate what they oppose or fear, and to sell what they know Americans won't otherwise buy. And worse, the Neo-cons have hijacked foreign policy, pushing a line of American Imperialism that is contrary to the very foundation of America, and would be anathema to our founding fathers. The Neo-cons started as professed liberals, but they couldn't find fertile ground for their ideology of supremacy until they found an area of moral decay. If that makes you think of the Third Reich, the analogy is not too far-fetched, and that should give all of us pause.
Let me mention a few key principles of the old "Republicanism" that have now been largely abandoned. Alexander Hamilton noted that "a man must be far gone in Utopian speculation to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious", and it was noted in the Federalist Papers that these tendencies had to be "accommodated or curbed" (in effect by government), leading to our Constitutional "checks and balances". Burke also thought of society as "a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Our partnership with the dead means respecting tradition, evolving customs slowly, and avoiding revolutionary breaks. Our partnership with the yet to be born means conserving resources for future generations, and not mortgaging their future. In more recent times, Dwight Eisenhower warned us against the "military/industrial complex", and Richard Nixon warned against favoring the top 1 or 2 percent.
The present administration caters to the rapaciousness of a small number of large, greedy and amoral corporations; opposes any barrier to environmental rapine and resource depletion; creates deficits that mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren; passes tax cuts that grossly favor the top 1%; and has replaced the military/industrial complex with a Pentagon/Congressional/Industrial complex that even military leaders find repulsive. This is not conservatism, it is irresponsible wealthism and corporatism.
Another strange thing has happened during these years. Over a couple of decades there grew something like a fusion of the Libertarian and Conservative political movements. True Libertarian philosophy favors minimal government and maximum individual liberty coupled with responsibility, with an understanding that such liberty depends on virtue, on transcendent morality. However the marriage of conservative traditionalism and Libertarian freedom has spawned our misshapen administration, that seeks license instead of liberty, replaces virtue with professed but rarely practised religiosity, and wears the cloak of Republicanism. Thankfully, both the real conservatives and true Libertarians are becoming disillusioned, and are beginning to question their offspring.
Howard Dean has run on the slogan "Take back America", and I think he means take government control back from corporations and return it to citizens. It's time also for conservatives to say "Take back the Republican Party", and the first step will be to defeat the present administration, and clear the way for new leadership.
I'll get into more specifics in future letters.
Best regards,

Murray
PS: for a conservative, but not pro-Bush view, Republican friends should find http://www.amconmag.com/archive.html interesting.

America deserves better #3

2004-05-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, Feb 27/04

Letter 2 dealt with 2 of the events that finally pushed me to action. Here
I'll deal with the other 3.
1)Trent Lott and deception
On "Late Edition" on Sunday 11 Jan. one of Wolf Blitzer's guests was Trent
Lott. Wolf got on the subject of no WMD found in Iraq. Trent replied that
some troops (Polish I think) had just discovered a cache of artillery shells
loaded with blister agent, as an example of Saddam developing chemical
weapons. On the evening news it was noted that the shells were more than 10
years old. The "misleading" never stops.

2)The Bush plan for illegal immigrants.
I know that illegal immigration is a major problem, and you can't just
round up some 8 million people and return them to their countries of origin.
I don't have the answer, but neither does Bush. However he reveals a plan
apparently decided in the dark, no bipartisan discussions, no consultation
with learned sociologists, no input from source countries, and no way it
will work. The timing? Just before he attends The Conference of the
Americas.
The plan would call on all illegal immigrants to declare themselves, in
return for which, if they have jobs and clean records, they will get to stay
in the country legally for 3 years and may get an extension for another 3.
Then they return home, probably with the wife and kids they have brought in
or acquired. Oh yeah! How many do you think will sign up to pay taxes and
get sent back home?
The reason for the plan is that "we need these people to do jobs Americans
just won't do. Yet we see them working in hotels, restaurants and
construction, the same jobs done by Americans for better paying employers.
Pay a decent wage to everyone and Americans will do all of these jobs, but
some of Bush's big business buddies won't be happy. The plan is a cynical
way to let marginal employers exploit poor immigrants at unacceptably low
wages. Also it is a pretty inept way to try to attract Latino votes. More
deception!
The plan did not include action to effectively block further illegal
immigration. If we can't send people home after 3 years can you imagine how
many more will flood in? Did you know that 90% of the population growth in
the USA during the last 10 years was immigrants (legal and illegal) and the
"American" children they had after they got here? We no longer need, nor can
we afford the huddled masses, and we can't support the recent rate of
population growth unless we intend to become the next China. However, if
this plan were to be approved it would be another administration that would
have to deal with the consequences, so "hell, lets get the donations and the
votes now".

3)Duck gate
This one put the icing on the cake for me. Antonin Scalia is a Supreme
Court Justice, and in early Jan. the Supreme Court agreed to hear Cheney's
appeal of a lower court ruling that he had to turn over records of his
closed door meetings with energy industry executives and lobbyists, during
his chairmanship of the National Energy Policy Working Group. Then 2 weeks
later Scalia and Cheney spent a week duck hunting together at a private
reserve in Louisiana.
Maybe nothing transpired during this week together, but Cheney has lied
outright on TV to the American public on at least 3 occasions that I have
seen, and the local sheriff reported that the duck hunting was lousy.
Cheney has refused to turn over the records, even to the OMB, in spite of
the fact that Congress funded the Working Group, on the grounds that to do
so would damage the principle of executive privilege. Executive privilege is
probably necessary regarding confidential discussions that involve
intelligence and national security. There is no reason why proper
discussions of a national energy plan requested by Congress should not be
available to Congress and to the American public. Making such
non-confidential deliberations public would actually strengthen the
principle of executive privilege, properly invoked. And that begs the
question of how proper the discussions were.
Cheney's refusal to release the documents suggests that there is something
to hide, and meeting with Scalia, given the timing , is, at the least, a
further impropriety.

Enough! America deserves better, defeat this administration.
Sincerely yours,
Murray
PS: The WMD thing has now gone from "we know he has them and we know where
they are", to "we know he has the capability", to "we know he had the
intention", and now gets to "we may have destroyed them during the war or he
may have moved them (to Syria or the Bekaa Valley). Think about the
specialized labs, plant and equipment, to say nothing of the people, needed
to produce and weaponize chemical and biological agents. The safety
equipment alone is very extensive, very specialized, and very hard to
acquire. Mr. Kay's 2000+ inspectors, during more than 6 months of searching,
with unlimited access to possible informants, were unable to find a trace,
not just of the weapons, but also of the plant, equipment and people. How do
you suppose all that got destroyed or moved? How dumb do they think we are?

America deserves better #2

2004-05-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Dear friends, 2/17/04

In my last letter I noted that five events over a few days finally
pushed me to act. I would like to tell you about a couple of them.

1)Paul O'Neil, in an interview on "60 Minutes" told us that the Bush
administration were discussing the need to act on Iraq from their first
cabinet meeting, long before 9/11, and not in the context of a war on
terror. (Paul O'Neil has served 3 Republican administrations and gives the
impression of being naively honest). While that comes as no surprise to me,
it does show how deceitful this administration has been and continues to be.

The administration is dominated by two interests, both malign. The
less dangerous is a small but powerful subset of "big business", and I say that
as one who spent his career in big business. The more dangerous is a group
of ideologues described politely as the Neocons (Neoconservatives), and
pejoratively as the Chicken Hawks. Their organization is The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (http://www.newamericancentury.org/) and their think tank is The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (www.aei.org) Their ideology is projection of American supremacy and democracy through might.
The reason ideologues are dangerous, and are particularly dangerous when in power, is that ideologies always conflict with reality, and ideologues are unable to see, are literally blind to, that conflict.
Do you see the conflict in pushing democracy through a gun barrel,
or the conflict between the freedom America stands for and inflicting our
values on others by force? Key members of the PNAC include Cheney, Rumsfeldt,
Wolfowitz, and Perle. PNAC publications on the Internet show that in 1997
they were trying to convince President Clinton that Iraq "was only months
away from having nuclear weapons" and as early as 1998 were advocating armed
(and unprovoked) intervention in Iraq.
You have all heard many critics declare that this administration
"misleads" the American people. How about a little example? The day after Secretary
O'Neill's bombshell Wolf Blitzer was interviewing Richard Perle. Perle noted
that any administration has a large number of contingency plans, updates
them regularly, and Iraq was only one of ours. What he cleverly didn't note,
and I'm surprised Wolf didn't call him for it, is that Iraq was the only one
being discussed. Nice misleading response, but note, - no denial of the
O'Neill allegation.

2)That same day Wolf Blitzer noted the result of a CNN poll that said 88% of
Americans agreed that if there are no WMD the war on Iraq was not justified.
And of course there are none.
As early as July 2002 Scott Ritter was making speeches and giving
interviews stating that Iraq did not have WMD capabilities. Scott was a Chief Weapons
Inspector from 1991 until 1998. He explained quite rationally the
disposition of large amounts of chemical and biological precursors that
Rumsfeldt later told us repeatedly were not accounted for. If Ritter had
that information why didn't the "intelligence" community?
Would you have supported the war if there were no WMD, if Saddam
clearly presented no threat to the USA? Would you agree to kill 8000 or so Iraqis
without provocation because Saddam might someday present a threat to us? Do
you feel that you were misled? Are you comfortable with a government that
intentionally misleads you about something as important as justifying an
unprovoked war of aggression, already in planning well before 9/11?

Murray

America deserves better #1

2004-05-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Subject: America deserves better #1 1/21/04

Now we have the growing WMD revelations, and new allegations of
corruption at Halliburton. Halliburton subsidiaries have already had to
refund millions to the government, so earlier allegations were true. I
expect the new ones will prove so as well. The American navy says it takes a
new commander 2 years to turn around a bad ship, but only 6 months for a bad
commander to ruin a good ship. Continued corruption in a corporation is
evidence of a deepseated culture of corruption, and a corporate culture is
determined by it's CEO more than any other influence. Cheney was CEO at
Halliburton for well over 6 months. The Halliburton culture seems to have
also infused the present administration in Washington.

Dear friends,

I am writing this letter as the first step in what I hope will be a
successful campaign. I have thought about this for months, and have delayed,
mainly because my wife didn't want me getting into politics with her
friends, and it was easy to agree with her. However with the passing of time
the reasons to act accumulate. In the last 3 weeks 5 events have pushed me
strongly, and in reflecting on all of my feelings I suddenly realized this
morning that what I feel compelled to address is not a political issue at
all.
Most of our dear friends, friends of long standing, are Republicans, a few
are Democrats, and a few are fiercely committed Republicans. However all of
our friends are intelligent people of strong moral conviction,
philosophically committed to American ideals, and concerned more for the
moral and economic well-being of their children and their country than for
themselves. The issues I want to raise with you are moral, philosophical, strategic
and economic issues that we all hold in common.
I believe deeply, and after long reflection that our present administration
is philosophically misguided, morally rudderless, strategically wrong and economically
irresponsible. I believe they are doing great harm to America, both
domestically and internationally, both for the present and for the future.
Worse, they are destroying, rather than promoting, the moral, philosophical
and economic leadership that America can and should be providing to the
world. My conviction has grown to the point where I feel I have to do
something to promote a change, but I don't want to do so as a political
activist, so I have decided to try to persuade our friends that the present
administration has to go.
I will make no suggestions about what you should do. I only want to
persuade you to do whatever your conscience and convictions tell you to do,
but to do what you can to ensure that we have a change in Washington. Any of
the alternatives we face will be an improvement.
I am going to send a series of messages over the coming months,
some from me, many from other sources. The intent is clearly to persuade you
that, regardless of your political leanings, America does not need and
should not keep this administration. A wise man once said that every nation
gets the government its citizens deserve. America does not deserve what we
have, but if it persists through our inaction, then "we" deserve it.

Murray