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Saturday, December 07, 2002
Thursday, December 5
Cracking Al Qaeda
The Bush administration has attributed the deadly bomb attack in Kenya to Al Qaeda, but the White Houe -- and, hence, most of the mainstream media -- remains far more interested in the prospect of war in Iraq.
Perhaps that's because the war in Iraq -- one that is being fought on the opinion pages and the airwaves -- is going far better than the war on terror. As Robert Fisk of The Independent reports, Washignton has not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden, it has also fallen well short of cracking bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network.
"This extraordinary, grim scenario comes from an American intelligence officer just back from Afghanistan who agreed to talk to The Independent -- and to supply his own photographs of prisoners -- on condition of anonymity. His prognoses were chilling and totally at variance with the upbeat briefings of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan, he says, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off members of al-Qa'ida to avoid American-organised raids.
'We didn't catch whom we were supposed to catch,' the officer told me. 'There was an over-expectation by us that technology could do more than it did. Al-Qa'ida are very smart. They basically found out how we track them. They realised that if they communicated electronically, our Rangers would swoop on them. So they started using couriers to hand-carry notes on paper or to repeat messages from their memory and this confused our system. Our intelligence is hi-tech -- they went back to primitive methods that the Americans cannot adapt to.'"
And while Washignton seems to have underestimaed Al Qaeda, at least one terrorism expert believes the Bush team has wildly overestimated the Iraqi regime. Moreover, Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told Newsweek that the administation's supposition that Saddam Hussein is preparing to give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda is "an over-estimation of Iraqi capability and Iraqi thinking."
"What you could well see in the outbreak of war -- and it's not a question of 'if' but 'when'; I think it will probably occur before Christmas -- is that Saddam will reserve what WMD he has to use against Israel and invading armed forces. As for Al Qaeda, it doesn't really need Saddam HusseinÕs help."
In other words, Iraq is contained, and Al Qaeda remains as threatening as ever. Michael Kieschnick, for one, is dumbfounded that the White House can't grasp that simple strategic fact:
"Now, Administration spokespeople are on the talk show circuit arguing that the first week of inspections are going poorly. They eagerly wait the release by December 8 of the Iraqi list of components and processes that support weapons of mass destruction, and stand prepared to argue that the absence of a list with locations of such weapons itself constitutes a reason for the U.S. to attack.
All this even as Al Qaeda prepares to strike again, Saudi charities continue to fund radical Islamic groups, and the head of the FBI is writing memos to the staff complaining that they are not focusing on anti-terrorism.
The Bush Administration argues that there is no tradeoff between the war with Iraq and its efforts to combat terrorism. This is like suggesting that there is no tradeoff between the weight of an SUV and its gas efficiency. This emperor has no clothes and American citizens are at risk because of it. The U.S. has been offering a paltry reward of $25 million to whoever turns in Bin Laden. Let's be serious. Why not take $10 billion of the $200 billion we are willing to spend to take out Saddam, and offer it up for Bin Laden?"
Why not? Well, Salama A. Salama, writing in the Egyptian weekly Al Ahram, suggest that having bin Laden on the loose might actually serve administration purposes.
"The United States is the only beneficiary of the mystery surrounding Bin Laden's fate. Bin Laden's recordings, randomly produced and difficult to authenticate, are being used to scare off outsiders as well as Americans. Meanwhile, draconian laws are being passed in the US. Political pressures are brought on ally and foe alike. And President Bush's strategy to punish members of the so-called axis of evil proceeds unhampered.
...
Bin Laden has become the bogeyman security services use to suspend the due process of the law. Innocent people are arrested without charges and thrown in jail for months without trial. A new horizon of human rights' abuses is dawning. And yet another justification, however flimsy, is now available for repressing the Palestinians and attacking Iraq."
The Information War
Of course, the Bush administration has consistently hinted that it has hard proof of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Most pundits predict the proof will be rolled out early next week as a rejoinder to the dossier Iraq will deliver this weekend, documenting the full extent of its weapons initiatives.
Given the increasingly frenetic tenor of the Bush administration's rhetoric, Maggie O'Kane is convinced that she knows what form that proof will take. Whether there is any truth behind it, she argues, is another matter.
"There were two glaring examples of how the propaganda machine worked before the first Gulf war. First, in the final days before the war started on January 9, the Pentagon insisted that not only was Saddam Hussein not withdrawing from Kuwait - he was - but that he had 265,000 troops poised in the desert to pounce on Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs to prove it. Thus, the waverers and anti-war protesters were silenced.
We now know from declassified documents and satellite photographs taken by a Russian commercial satellite that there were no Iraqi troops poised to attack Saudi.
...
So what will the fake satellite pictures show this time: a massive chemical installation with Iraqi goblins cooking up anthrax?
Such intelligence skullduggery has always been popularly attributed to the CIA. But, as Robert Dreyfuss reports in The American Prospect, the spooks in Langley are increasingly being pushed aside, tarred by administration hawks as being too hesitant. In this administration, Dreyfuss writes, the balance of power is shifting quickly and decisively to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
"Inside the foreign-policy, defense and intelligence agencies, nearly the whole rank and file, along with many senior officials, are opposed to invading Iraq. But because the less than two dozen neoconservatives leading the war party have the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they are able to marginalize that opposition.
...
The Pentagon's campaign against the CIA is broader than just Iraq. Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has been squeezed by the military again and again. Through its control over the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other entities, the Pentagon already controls the vast bulk of America's spy budget. To consolidate that control, Rumsfeld is currently pushing to create an intelligence czar at the Pentagon whose power and influence would rival that of the CIA director's. And more and more often, the CIA's covert-operations arm finds itself dominated by the Defense Department's Special Forces units, the gung-ho soldiers who've been on the front lines in the ongoing, and apparently endless, war on terrorism."
While some skeptics may dismiss the matter as nothing more than a "bureaucratic turf battle," Dreyfuss writes that the stakes are far, far higher.
"The CIA exists to provide pure and unbiased intelligence to its chief customer, the president. George W. Bush, whose knowledge of world affairs is limited at best, probably depends more heavily than most presidents on what his aides tell him about the outside world. And there is mounting evidence that the decision to go to war is based on intelligence of doubtful veracity, which has been cooked by Pentagon hawks."
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:06 PM
Fits into the Deliuli thesis that everything is about politics and not about policy
Bush's New Political Science
When it comes to public-health appointments, the administration has its own litmus test.
Ken Silverstein
November/December 2002
As the nation's premier research center, the National Institutes of Health is supposed to be insulated from politics. The agency has long appointed respected health professionals -- regardless of their political beliefs -- to advisory councils that help direct the nation's medical research on everything from genetic disorders to the common cold. "The NIH casts a broad net and deliberately creates a diverse council that can give them input," says Steven Hayes, a University of Nevada professor who sits on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse at the NIH.
But the Bush administration has been screening candidates about their political views -- an unprecedented move intended to make sure that conservatives get seats on NIH advisory councils. In some cases, Mother Jones has learned, a White House liaison with the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has called candidates and asked detailed questions about their political leanings.
One candidate screened by the White House was William Miller, a widely respected researcher and professor at the University of New Mexico who was nominated to serve on the advisory council on drug abuse. Miller says he's never been secretive about his politics. "If somebody started digging, they wouldn't have to dig too far to find out I'm a lifelong liberal," he says. "I've never been arrested or joined the Communist Party -- I'm just what Garrison Keillor calls a 'museum quality' liberal Democrat."
That apparently was enough to trigger alarm bells at the White House. Last January 15, a liaison staffer interviewed Miller by phone. According to Miller, the staffer told him that he needed to determine whether Miller held "any views that might be embarrassing to the president." He began by asking Miller's views on drug legalization and needle exchange; when Miller responded that he was opposed to the former and in favor of the latter, the staffer replied, "You're one for two." The staffer then asked a series of questions that had no apparent relevance to Miller's qualifications to serve on the council: Did he favor capital punishment for drug kingpins? (No.) Was he opposed to abortion? (No.) Had he voted for Bush? When Miller replied that he had not, the staffer asked him to explain why he "hadn't supported the president."
Miller says he was "surprised and aghast" by the questions. After the interview ended, the staffer told Miller that he would get back to him after checking to see if his views were "acceptable." Miller never received a second call.
Several prominent conservatives had no such difficulty, however. Among those named to the drug-abuse advisory council was Robert Woodson, whose National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise provides training to faith-based organizations. The organization is heavily funded by the Bradley Foundation, which also bankrolls the Clinton-bashing American Spectator. Another member of the panel is Peggy Sapp, who sits on a drug-abuse advisory council in Florida appointed by Governor Jeb Bush. Sapp, who directs a national network of parenting organizations, is the only member of the 18-member council without an advanced degree. Several conservatives, including a college friend of the president, were also appointed to the NIH's National Mental Health Advisory Council.
Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, insists that it is accepted practice to select scientific panelists based on their politics. "Every president does it," he says. "It goes back to George Washington. I can't say that past administrations have asked the same questions, but the end result is the same -- you put people on boards that you want."
But current NIH staffers and former top officials say the political screening represents a marked departure from past practice. "That's absolutely unusual -- are you kidding?" says Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and now provost of Harvard University. "Politics should be irrelevant to science."
Others familiar with the process agree. "No one around here has ever heard about this type of questioning," says an NIH official who asked not to be identified. "I don't see how it's supposed to help further our scientific research."
The NIH's advisory councils are designed to provide the government with impartial, professional expertise on a wide range of medical research. Panel members are often asked to make recommendations on policies and funding involving controversial issues -- including aids treatment, medical marijuana, and drug testing on human subjects. Some involved in the process say that screening candidates threatens to place the president's views over scientific evidence. Miller, for example, says the White House liaison told him that his support for reducing the spread of HIV by providing clean syringes to drug addicts was a strike against him because the president is "morally opposed to needle exchange."
Not every candidate was screened, and health professionals with liberal views were appointed to NIH advisory councils. But even those who were not questioned about their politics express concern about the practice. "It sounds intimidating to the candidate -- and it's intimidating just to hear about it," says David Vlahov, who was nominated to the drug-abuse council under Clinton and approved under Bush.
For their part, some NIH staffers say that the screening has made them reluctant to consult the advisory councils. "You have to be worried about what their politics are," says one staff member. "You want to ask them their opinion, but you need to keep them at arm's length because they might be pushing a particular agenda."
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2002 The Foundation for National Progress
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:50 PM
Another Symptom of the beast slouching towards fascism in the minds of the people
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-brf-bush-threat1206dec06,0,4872756.story
Man Sentenced for 'Burning Bush' Comment
By Associated Press
December 6, 2002, 2:37 PM EST
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- A man who made a remark about a "burning Bush" during the president's March 2001 trip to Sioux Falls was sentenced Friday to 37 months in prison.
Richard Humphreys, of Portland, Ore., was convicted in September of threatening to kill or harm the president and said he plans to appeal. He has said the comment was a prophecy protected under his right to free speech.
Humphreys said he got into a barroom discussion in nearby Watertown with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard the conversation realized the president was to visit Sioux Falls the next day and told police Humphreys talked about a "burning Bush" and the possibility of someone pouring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it.
"I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush," Humphreys testified during his trial. "I had said that before and I thought it was funny."
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 4:17 PM
PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES
OF VICE PRESIDENT'S HOTEL
Posted 5 Dec 2002 06:03:48 UTC
An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was
arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for
simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where
Vice President Cheney was residing. Maginnis told
his story on Wednesday's edition of Off The Hook.
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2002/1202.html
Maginnis's morning commute took him past the
Adams Mark Hotel on Court Place. Maginnis, who
says he always carried his camera wherever he went,
snapped about 30 pictures of the hotel and the
surrounding area - which included Denver police,
Army rangers, and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who
works in information technology, frequently
photographs such subjects as corporate buildings
and communications equipment.
The following is Maginnis's account of what transpired:
As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found
himself confronted by a Denver police officer who
demanded that he hand over his film and camera.
When he refused to give up his Nikon F2, the officer
pushed him to the ground and arrested him.
After being brought to the District 1 police station
on Decatur Street, Maginnis was made to wait alone
in an interrogation room. Two hours later, a Secret
Service agent arrived, who identified himself as
Special Agent "Willse."
The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities"
made him a threat to national security, and that he
would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT
act. The Secret Service agent tried to make Maginnis admit
that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses
in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror
and mayhem."
When Maginnis refused to admit to being any sort of terrorist,
the Secret Service agent called him a "raghead collaborator"
and a "dirty pinko faggot."
After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was
allowed to make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a
lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news
desk. This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant,
who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding
cell.
Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with
no explanation. He received no copy of an arrest report, and
no receipt for his confiscated possessions. He was told
that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was
being held as evidence.
Maginnis's lawyer contacted the Denver Police Department
for an explanation of the day's events, but the police denied
ever having Maginnis - or anyone matching his description -
in custody. At press time, the Denver PD's Press Information
Office did not return telephone messages left by 2600.
The new police powers introduced by the USA-PATRIOT
act, in the name of fighting terrorism, have been frightening
in their apparent potential for abuse. Mike Maginnis's
experience on Tuesday is a poignant example of how
this abuse is beginning to occur. It suggests that a wide
range of activities which might be considered "suspicious"
could be suddenly labeled a prelude to terrorism, and be
grounds for arrest.
We will continue to post updates to this story as we learn
them.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 4:04 PM
Bush Knew?
A collection of compelling articles, which refute, or, at the very least, call into question, the assertions that Bush and his administration had no prior knowledge of events that would lead to the 9-11 tragedy.
A note about the articles.
* * *
Willie Brown got low-key early warning about air travel
September 12, 2001
For Mayor Willie Brown, the first signs that something was amiss came late Monday when he got a call from what he described as his airport security - - a full eight hours before yesterday's string of terrorist attacks -- advising him that Americans should be cautious about their air travel.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
/chronicle/archive/2001/09/12/MN229389.DTL
Is Bush A Liar - or is memory serving him badly?
Posted October 10, 2002
http://www.visualjournalism.com/Files/
reviews/bush911/pageBig.shtml
FBI Warned D.C. It Was A Target
September 25, 2002
"A Minnesota FBI agent investigating Zacarias Moussaoui testified yesterday that he notified the Secret Service weeks before Sept. 11 that a terror team might hijack a plane and 'hit the nation's capital.'"
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/57848.htm
Moussaoui Warnings Ignored
September 24, 2002
"An FBI supervisor, sounding a prophetic pre-Sept. 11 alarm, warned FBI headquarters that student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui was so dangerous he might 'take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,' a congressional investigator said in a report Tuesday."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=512&ncid
=716&e=4&u=/ap/20020924/ap_on_go_co/attacks_intelligence
America had 12 warnings of aircraft attack
September 19, 2002
"American intelligence received many more clues before the 11 September attacks than previously disclosed, that terrorists might hijack planes and turn them into weapons, a joint congressional committee was told yesterday."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/
story.jsp?story=334633
U.S. Was Aware on bin Laden Threat
September 19, 2002
"Basically, we know that bin Laden had the means and the intent to attack Americans, both at home and abroad."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=512&ncid
=716&e=5&u=/ap/20020919/ap_on_go_co/attacks_intelligence
9/11 Probers Say Agencies Failed to Heed Attack Signs
September 19, 2002
"U.S. intelligence agencies received many more indications than previously disclosed that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was planning imminent "spectacular" attacks in the summer of 2001 aimed at inflicting mass casualties."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36754-2002Sep18.html
9/11 report documents credible clues
September 18, 2002
"The U.S. intelligence community received a surprising number of credible reports of a likely terrorist attack prior to Sept. 11, including some threats to domestic targets, according to a congressional report to be unveiled today."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/809370.asp?pne=msntv
U.S. knew of 12 plots for jet attacks
September 18, 2002
"Plan to attack WTC was among warnings that preceded 9/11, panel told."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/809484.asp
Panel Presents 9/11 Intelligence
September 18, 2002
"An intelligence briefing two months before the Sept. 11 attack warned that Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites) would launch a spectacular terrorist attack against U.S. or Israeli interests, congressional investigators said Wednesday."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=542&ncid=703&
e=1&u=/ap/20020918/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/attacks_intelligence
Spy Agencies Had Pre-9/11 Threats on U.S. Soil
September 17, 2002
"U.S. intelligence agencies picked up threats of attacks inside the United States and of using airplanes as weapons during the spring and summer before last year's Sept. 11 attacks, but were more focused on the possibility of an assault overseas, a congressional source said on Tuesday."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=578&ncid
=578&e=1&u=/nm/20020917/ts_nm/attack_
congress_intelligence_dc
Ashcroft Flying High
July 26, 2001
"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001
/07/26/national/printable303601.shtml
Bush briefed on hijacking threat before September 11
May 16, 2002
"President Bush's daily intelligence briefings in the weeks leading up to the September 11 terror attacks included a warning of the possibility that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network would attempt to hijack a U.S.-based airliner, senior administration officials said Wednesday."
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/15/bush.sept.11/index.html
Revealed: The Taliban minister, the US envoy and the warning of September 11 that was ignored
September 7, 2002
"Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=331115
Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?
July 3, 2001
"A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April."
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hatfield
-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html
Bin Laden’s Relatives Evacuated From NYC
October 2, 2001
"Patrick Tyler of the New York Times is reporting from Washington: 'In the first days after the attacks on Sept. 11, the Saudi Arabian ambasador to Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from ther United States fearing they might be subjected to violence.'"
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0110/S00008.htm
Our Pearl Harbor: The latest NSA revelations suggest the 9-11 plot could have been foiled.
June 21, 2002
"Recent news that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted two messages the day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks -- messages that indicated imminent action -- obliges us to reconsider whether the airliner hijackings that led to 3,000 lost lives and $20 billion in property damage could have been foiled."
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/06/prados-j-06-21.html
Al-Qaida monitored U.S. negotiations with Taliban over oil pipeline
June 5, 2002
"A memo by military chief Mohammed Atef raises new questions about whether failed U.S. efforts to reform Afghanistan's radical regime -- and build the pipeline -- set the stage for Sept. 11."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/05/
memo/index_np.html?x
U.S. had agents inside al-Qaeda
June 4, 2002
"U.S. intelligence overheard al-Qaeda operatives discussing a major pending terrorist attack in the weeks prior to Sept. 11 and had agents inside the terror group, but the intercepts and field reports didn't specify where or when a strike might occur, according to U.S. officials. The disclosures add to a growing body of evidence to be examined in congressional hearings that open today into how the CIA, FBI and other agencies failed to seize on intelligence pointing to the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2002/06/03/cia-attacks.htm
Heads-Up To Ashcroft Proves Threat Was Known Before 9/11
June 3, 2002
"Don't let them fool you, folks: They knew.
They might have been surprised by the ferocity of the attacks, but the highest-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration knew before Sept. 11 that something terrible was going to happen soon."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/gate/archive/2002/06/03/hsorensen.DTL
Egypt Warned U.S. of a Qaeda Plot, Mubarak Asserts
June 3, 2002
"Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview on Sunday."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/national/04WARN.html
U.S. Ignored Warnings From French
May 28, 2002
"A key point in unraveling why the FBI failed to follow up leads on Al Qaeda terrorism now centers on the Bureau's contemptuously brushing aside warnings from French intelligence a few days before 9-11."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/ridgeway2.php
Whopper of the Week: Condoleezza Rice Abroad at home.
May 23, 2002
"The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas."
- White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a May 16 news briefing.
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
- Title of the CIA's Aug. 6 briefing memo to President Bush . . .
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066154
Tracking a Counterterrorism Breakdown
Timeline Shows Failure to Connect Key Clues Before Sept. 11
May 23, 2002
"Lawmakers are questioning what the administration knew and when. NPR's Mike Shuster reports on Morning Edition that government agencies had several clues that might have triggered alarms in the months before Sept. 11. But no one put them together."
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/may/timeline/index.html
U.S. was warned that Moussaoui had close ties to al-Qaida, analyst says
May 23, 2002
"Who knew what, and when? Could the FBI have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks?"
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/23/warning/index_np.html
Poppies for planes: White House hides behind veil of executive privilege
May 22, 2002
"Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger was "totally preoccupied" with the prospect of a domestic terror attack. He warned his replacement, Condoleezza Rice, "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Problem was, she didn't."
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13365
The U.S. ignored foreign warnings, too
May 21, 2002
"When the hubbub about what the White House did or didn't know before Sept. 11 dies down, Congressional or other investigators should consider the specific warnings that friendly Arab intelligence services sent to Washington in the summer of 2001."
http://www.iht.com/articles/58269.html
Bush knew of terrorist plot to hijack US planes
May 20, 2002
"George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, US government sources said yesterday."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,718312,00.html
Britain warned US to expect September 11 al-Qaeda hijackings
May 19, 2002
"Britain gave President Bush a categorical warning to expect multiple airline hijackings by the al-Qaeda network a month before the September 11 attacks which killed nearly 3000 people and triggered the international war against terrorism."
http://www.sundayherald.com/24822
U.S. planned for attack on al-Qaida
May 16, 2002
"President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/753359.asp
Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes
May 15, 2002
"The White House said tonight that President Bush had been warned by American intelligence agencies in early August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/politics/16INQU.html?
US agents told: Back off bin Ladens
November 7, 2001
"US special agents were told to back off the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals soon after George Bush became president, although that has all changed since September 11, it was reported today."
http://www.old.smh.com.au/news/0111/07/world/world100.html
Hijackers reportedly made test runs
October 11, 2001
"During a six-hour flight from Boston to Los Angeles in August, movie actor James Woods said te only passengers besides himself seated in first-class were four men who he said appeared to be Middle Eastern in origin. Woods said the four neither ate nor drank, did not read or sleep and talkedto each other in whispers.
On Sept. 12, Woods called the FBI to tell investigators about his experience. He was interviewed by agents on Sept. 13, but has had no comment."
http://www.gazettenet.com/americantragedy/10112001/7363.htm
Bush: ‘We’re At War’
September 24th, 2001
"On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/629606.asp
US 'planned attack on Taleban'
September 18, 2001
"A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/
newsid_1550000/1550366.stm
Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks
September 16, 2001
"ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent."
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$52PMOXQAAD
W5PQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2001/09/16/wcia16.xml&sShe
et=/news/2001/09/16/ixhome
Commission warned Bush
September 12, 2001
"But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year."
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/bush/index.html
Jeb Bush signs Executive Order allowing him to declare martial law in Florida...
September 7, 2001
"Based on the potential massive damage to life and property that may result from an act of terrorism at a Florida port, the necessity to protect life and property from such acts of terrorism..."
http://sun6.dms.state.fl.us/eog_new/eog/orders/
2001/september/eo2001-261-09-07-01.html
* * *
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 2:09 PM
Fate' accompli No matter what the monitors say?
December 8, 2002
Buildup Leaves U.S. Military Nearly Set to Start Attack
By ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — The United States will soon have enough heavy tanks, warships, aircraft, bombs and troops in the Persian Gulf region to enable it to begin an attack against Iraq sometime in January, senior military officials say.
About 60,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, as well as about 200 warplanes, are in or near the region. The Army alone has 9,000 soldiers, 24 Apache helicopter gunships and heavy equipment for two armored brigades in Kuwait. Equipment for a third brigade is steadily arriving on ships usually based in the Indian Ocean, and some matériel will be stored at a new $200 million logistics base, Camp Arifjan, south of Kuwait City.
By late next week, four aircraft carriers will be poised to strike Iraq on short notice, with a fifth in Southeast Asia ready to steam to the gulf in a crisis. Two of the carriers, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are heading home, but the Navy will keep their crews together about two weeks longer than the usual 30 days after arrival in case they are ordered back to the gulf.
Special Operations forces in the region are refining plans to hunt for Scud missiles and clandestine weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. About 1,000 military planners, led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, have assembled in Qatar and other gulf states for a computer-simulated exercise that begins Monday and is intended as a model for an offensive against Iraq, officials said.
Taken together, these are unmistakable signs that before long, President Bush will be in a position to order an attack to disarm Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and have it carried out within days, senior military officials said.
"The pieces are going into place that are the basic building blocks for a combination of military options," said Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who will take over the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee next month.
Or as one senior defense official put it this week, "We are rapidly getting to the point where if called upon, we'd be able to execute operations in Iraq."
The steady buildup — brought together with little fanfare by air and by ship — is intended to put increasing pressure on the Iraqi government to disarm, and perhaps to persuade Mr. Hussein's generals to defect or rebel against him.
"This is really their last chance to decide to either have a peaceful resolution, which requires giving up those weapons, or have us do it by force," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said this week in Turkey.
For now any talk of war is muted as the administration prepares to review Iraq's declaration of any weapons of mass destruction that it may possess. Officials say that the process of dealing with Iraq's disclosure — including any subsequent diplomatic discussions, further weapons inspections and possibly another United Nations resolution — could delay any attack for weeks or months.
Pentagon officials say the armed forces could attack now, if required, but several diplomatic and military steps would need to be completed before the United States could go to war on its own terms, officials said.
The administration wants to use Turkey as a major staging base for American ground troops, who would swoop into northern Iraq to protect the vast oil fields of Kurdistan and combine with allied forces pushing up from Kuwait to put the government in Baghdad in a vise.
But Turkey has balked at permitting ground forces, prompting the White House to invite Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the largest party in Turkey's new governing coalition, to meet with President Bush on Tuesday.
"We're quite comfortable with what we can do from the south," Mr. Wolfowitz said this week. "Obviously, if we are going to have significant ground forces in the north, this is the country they have to come through. There is no other option."
Britain, another vital ally, is expected to contribute several thousand armored forces, but has not yet begun to send them.
American active-duty troops could be flown in quickly aboard chartered airliners to join their equipment. But any major campaign would require activating tens of thousands of reservists, largely to help defend American military bases, power plants and transportation hubs at home against possible terrorist reprisals. Mobilizing reserve units typically takes about 30 days, but a senior defense official said the Pentagon was looking at ways to speed up the process.
The Pentagon has plans to mobilize as many as 265,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves, roughly as many as for the Persian Gulf war in 1991, if President Bush orders an attack. Senior military officials said large-scale mobilizations would not begin before January, and even then would probably be made in stages to soften the political impact.
The force in place by next month would be large enough to begin the "rolling start" of an offensive, but additional armored and air forces would have to be sent from Europe and the United States to sustain a larger attack that could mass 200,000 to 250,000 American troops.
"We'd be ready to begin strikes in a meaningful way if told to do so, but then you'd then have to have a rapid, rapid deployment of additional forces," said one senior Navy official.
Throughout the gulf region these days, there is a constant hum of military preparations. Army forces are conducting exercises in desert ranges in Kuwait that simulate territory they would roll across in Iraq.
Carrier-based jets patrolling the no-flight zone in southern Iraq carry out mock bombing runs against Iraqi airfields and military bases. Air Force engineers at Diego Garcia, a British base in the Indian Ocean, are erecting portable hangars to protect the sensitive radar-evading skin of the B-2 bombers that will soon be stationed there.
Planners are readying the heavy equipment and supplies now aboard ships at Diego Garcia that would sustain more than 17,000 marines for up to 30 days. Navy Seabees based in Spain have been dispatched to Kuwait for construction duties at two bases.
Military logistics and supply experts have been in the region for months preparing for incoming matériel. Tugboats, forklifts and other cargo-handling equipment needed to prepare ports for the arrival of tanks and other armored equipment are coming in.
In Kuwait, the Army has two brigades' worth of heavy equipment in place. A typical armored brigade set includes 88 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 88 M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 16 120 millimeter mortars, an Army spokeswoman said.
Equipment from a third brigade stored on ships at Diego Garcia is flowing in. One of the Navy's giant roll-on/roll-off cargo ships, the Watkins, disgorged a load of heavy Army equipment in July, and a sister vessel, the Watson, is on the way with equipment for an armored battalion task force, Army officials said.
Special Operations forces are planning covert missions that would be pivotal in the opening hours and days of any campaign. These operations would include destroying Scud missiles that Iraq could launch at Israel.
"We're doing everything prudent and proactive that we can without starting a war in the process," said one military official.
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 12:07 PM
Peace protests near White House growing
By Stefany Moore
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
Published 12/3/2002 3:25 PM
View printer-friendly version
WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- Finding vacant space in the grassy area across from the White House is proving to be no easy task these days, as more and more activist groups are setting up camp to protest a potential war with Iraq. But Conchita Picciotto, who has called Lafayette Park her home for the past 21 years, welcomes the company.
"It's nice to have more people around," she says.
The Pennsylvania Avenue park has long been a home to activists, some of them permanent residents, most of them temporary visitors. But as talk of war with Iraq becomes louder, the number and variety of activist groups in Lafayette Park continues to grow.
The scene near the White House is only a small part of a growing peace movement that is showing its face in a very visible, sometimes very loud way, across the nation.
As tourists make their rounds for photos at the gates of the White House, across the street protesters can be heard chanting, Buddhist monks can be seen praying and colorful signs of protest litter the sidewalk.
In the middle of the park, a women's group has staked their claim on a portion of the land. They are staging a 4-month-long vigil in opposition to war. They call themselves Code Pink, "A pre-emptive strike for peace." Many of them are members of women's groups such as National Organization for Women; others are parents and concerned citizens.
The organization maintains that the Bush administration is "squandering" money that could be used for public health or education to attack a nation that poses no immediate threat.
One of their signs reads, "Bush says Code Red; we say Code Pink." They wear buttons on their pink jackets saying, "Women For Peace."
Jodie Evans, one of the organizers, says she is worried her 18- and 21-year-old boys back home in Venice, Calif., might have to go to Iraq if there is a war.
"I'm worried about more than my children," she adds. "I'm worried about my country and about my world."
A few feet away, a group of Buddhists from Massachusetts have secured their space. Flanked by large posters with graphic photographs of Iraqi children injured in the Persian Gulf War, half a dozen men and women sit on a large blanket, quietly beating drums with sticks and praying.
Clare Carter, a Buddhist nun who wears a yellow robe over her winter clothes, says the world should be concerned about the Iraqi people, most specifically, the children. Her organization is holding a week-long vigil and fast.
"It's a humble effort," Carter says, "But it's from the heart."
By far, the most permanent fixture in Lafayette Park is Picciotto. A U.S. citizen of Spanish descent, she has spent the past 21 years of her life living there as part of a 24-hour anti-nuclear peace vigil.
Through the cold, the rain and the snow, Picciotto mans her post. Directly in front of George W. Bush's home, she remains on the sidewalk all day and all night. She keeps a plastic tarp for when it pours.
Standing at barely 4 feet 10 inches tall, she resides between two large signs with pictures of nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki above photos of mangled bodies. The large, black text reads, "Stay the course and this will happen to you."
Picciotto opposes the use of nuclear weapons, war with Iraq, and is a supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Despite the seemingly grueling lifestyle, she seems to remain jovial. She jokes with tourists as they pass by, and her face is almost always smiling beneath a scarf that covers her head.
She does acknowledge, however, that her life is, well, "difficult," she says. For example, she has to sleep sitting up because it is against U.S. Park Police regulations to lie down.
"I don't even remember what a bed feels like," she says.
Though one would assume her to be in a constant state of boredom, Picciotto always looks busy. She is sweeping the sidewalk of leaves, speaking with passersby, or feeding the hordes of pigeons that seem to follow her every move.
When she sees a stark white pigeon scurry up to her feet, she interrupts conversation to pour a handful of peanuts into a dish.
"His name is Havel," she says. "He is my pet."
Picciotto stands guard as the bird digs in, making sure to protect him from other pigeons that want a bite.
"Get away!" she shouts to the invaders.
"Everybody wants peanuts," she says with a laugh. "But I cannot give peanuts to everybody."
A nearby shelter brings Picciotto bread every couple days, and she keeps two large Gatorade bottles of water among her things. Friends and supporters come by often to bring her food or the daily newspaper.
William Sylvester, a machinist from New Mexico on vacation in Washington, stops by to chat with Picciotto about the war in Iraq and brings her a pastry with some orange juice. He says he heard about Picciotto's vigil a few years back and was looking forward to "breaking bread" with her.
"I feel compelled to at least bring some juice," Sylvester says. "I sure don't have that kind of dedication."
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 11:55 AM
December 6, 2002
Digital Robber Barons?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Bad metaphors make bad policy. Everyone talks about the "information highway." But in economic terms the telecommunications network resembles not a highway but the railroad industry of the robber-baron era — that is, before it faced effective competition from trucking. And railroads eventually faced tough regulation, for good reason: they had a lot of market power, and often abused it.
Yet the people making choices today about the future of the Internet — above all Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission — seem unaware of this history. They are full of enthusiasm for the wonders of deregulation, dismissive of concerns about market power. And meanwhile tomorrow's robber barons are fortifying their castles.
Until recently, the Internet seemed the very embodiment of the free-market ideal — a place where thousands of service providers competed, where anyone could visit any site. And the tech sector was a fertile breeding ground for libertarian ideology, with many techies asserting that they needed neither help nor regulation from Washington.
But the wide-open, competitive world of the dial-up Internet depended on the very government regulation so many Internet enthusiasts decried. Local phone service is a natural monopoly, and in an unregulated world local phone monopolies would probably insist that you use their dial-up service. The reason you have a choice is that they are required to act as common carriers, allowing independent service providers to use their lines.
A few years ago everyone expected the same story to unfold in broadband. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to create a highly competitive broadband industry. But it was a botched job; the promised competition never materialized.
For example, I personally have no choice at all: if I want broadband, the Internet service provided by my local cable company is it. I'm like a 19th-century farmer who had to ship his grain on the Union Pacific, or not at all. If I lived closer to a telephone exchange, or had a clear view of the Southern sky, I might have some alternatives. But there are only a few places in the U.S. where there is effective broadband competition.
And that's probably the way it will stay. The political will to fix the 1996 act, to create in broadband the kind of freewheeling environment that many Internet users still take for granted, has evaporated.
Last March the F.C.C. used linguistic trickery — defining cable Internet access as an "information service" rather than as telecommunications — to exempt cable companies from the requirement to act as common carriers. The commission will probably make a similar ruling on DSL service, which runs over lines owned by your local phone company. The result will be a system in which most families and businesses will have no more choice about how to reach cyberspace than a typical 19th-century farmer had about which railroad would carry his grain.
There were and are alternatives. We could have restored competition by breaking up the broadband industry, restricting local phone and cable companies to the business of selling space on their lines to independent Internet service providers. Or we could have accepted limited competition, and regulated Internet providers the way we used to regulate AT&T. But right now we seem to be heading for a system without either effective competition or regulation.
Worse yet, the F.C.C. has been steadily lifting restrictions on cross-ownership of media and communications companies. The day when a single conglomerate could own your local newspaper, several of your local TV channels, your cable company and your phone company — and offer your only route to the Internet — may not be far off.
The result of all this will probably be exorbitant access charges, but that's the least of it. Broadband providers that face neither effective competition nor regulation may well make it difficult for their customers to get access to sites outside their proprietary domain — ending the Internet as we know it. And there's a political dimension too. What happens when a few media conglomerates control not only what you can watch, but what you can download?
There's still time to rethink; a fair number of Congressmen, from both parties, have misgivings about Mr. Powell's current direction. But time is running out.
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 11:43 AM
Old Man Bush must be give them the inside dope
Carlyle expands further into UK
David Gow
Saturday December 7, 2002
The Guardian
US private equity group Carlyle yesterday made its second British acquisition in as many days with an agreed £106m offer for specialist engineering firm Firth Rixson.
The US group, which was granted a 33.8% stake in defence research company Qinetiq by the government this week, is paying 25.75p for each Firth Rixson share, a premium of 119% valuing Firth at £50m though with £56m of debt.
The Sheffield firm, which makes forged, rolled and cast components for engineering industries, especially aerospace, has been hammered by the aviation slump.
The chairman, Sir John Parker, who announced annual losses of £5.33m on Thursday, said the offer was attractive when "judged against the market risks that the Firth Rixson group faces over the short to medium term".
Firth has been hit by fewer orders as well as cancellations from groups such as Rolls-Royce and United Technologies. It has cut 150 jobs this year. Carlyle, which has 49.1% acceptances, plans to merge Firth with a small Californian firm, Forged Metals, whose chairman Robert Squier will be in charge. David Hall, Firth chief executive, will resign.
Carlyle director Robert Easton said the new entity, Forgings International, could more easily cut costs. The aerospace downturn was about halfway through a four-year cycle. "We are very comfortable with that cycle and that's why we value Firth differently from the stock market."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 11:38 AM
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
The God That Sucked
Thomas Frank
Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation will work. A product is a product, they say, and competition always works better than state control.
"I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith," said Philip J. Romero, dean of the business school at the University of Oregon and one of the architects of California's deregulation plan.
--New York Times, February 4, 2001
Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader's Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you'd be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah's Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.
But thirty-odd years of culture war have changed all that. Mention "elites" these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers. Instead they assume that what you're mad as hell about is the liberal media, or the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all bureaucrats.
For the guys down at the country club all these inverted forms of class war worked spectacularly well. This is not to say that the right-wing culture warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock 'n' roll. Shout though they might, they never quite got cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far more important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against Darwin.
For most of the duration of the thirty-year backlash, the free-market faiths of the economists and the bosses were kept discreetly in the background. To be sure, market worship was always the established church in the halls of Republican power, but in public the chant was usually States' Rights, or Down with Big Gummint, or Watch out for Commies, or Speak English Goddammit. All Power to the Markets has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.
So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to triumph, though, that eventually they forgot this. Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed up by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure that it might have been lifted from The God That Failed, that old book in which ex-Communists disavowed their former convictions, the right evidently decided in the Nineties that the time had come to tell the world about the wonders of the market.
Dinesh D'Souza, pedagogical product of the Jesuits, these days can be found swinging the censer for Mammon and thrilling to the mayhem his ruthless "god of the market" visits on the undeserving poor. George Gilder, erstwhile elder of the Christian right, is now the Thirty-Third Degree Poobah in the Temple of Telecosm, where he channels the libertarian commandments of his digital Juggernaut in the language of the angels.
A host of awesome myths attest to the power of this new god. Markets must rule, some right-wing prophets tell us, because of "globalization," because the moral weight of the entire world somehow demands it. Others bear tidings of a "New Economy," a spontaneous recombination of the DNA of social life according to which, again, markets simply must rule. The papers fill with rapturous talk of historical corners turned, of old structures abandoned, of endless booms and weightless work.
The new god makes great demands on us, and its demands must be appeased. None can be shielded from its will. The welfare of AFDC mothers must be entrusted unhesitatingly to its mercies. Workers of every description must learn its discipline, must sacrifice all to achieve flexibility, to create shareholder value. The professional, the intellectual, the manager must each shed their pride and own up to their flawed, lowly natures, must acknowledge their impotence and insensibility before its divine logic. We put our health care system in its invisible hands, and to all appearances it botches the job. Yet the faith of the believers is not shaken. We deregulate the banking industry. Deregulate the broadcasters. Deregulate electricity. Halt antitrust. Make plans to privatize Social Security and to privatize the public schools.
And to those who worry about the cost of all this, the market's disciples speak of mutual funds, of IPOs, of online trading, of early retirement. All we have to do is believe, take our little pile of treasure down to the god's house on Wall Street, and the market rewards us with riches undreamed of in human history. It gives us a Nasdaq that is the envy of the world and a 401(k) for each of us to call his own.
Then, one fine day, you check in at Ameritrade and find that your tech portfolio is off 90 percent. Your department at work has been right-sized, meaning you spend a lot more time at the office-without getting a raise. You have one kid in college to the tune of $30,000 a year, another with no health insurance because she's working as a temp. Or maybe you lost your job because they can do it cheaper in Alabama or Mexico. Your daughter's got a disease that requires $400 a month in drugs, and your COBRA insurance benefits are due to run out in two months. Or maybe you're the Mexican worker who just got a new maquiladora job. You have no electricity, no running water, no school for your children, no health care, and your wage is below subsistence level. And should you make any effort to change these conditions-say, by organizing a union not aligned with the corrupt PRI-you're likely to get blacklisted by local factory managers.
That's when it dawns on you: The market is a god that sucks. Yes, it cashed a few out at the tippy top, piled up the loot of the world at their feet, delivered shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their ten-bedroom suburban chateaux. But for the rest of us the very principles that make the market the object of D'Souza's worship, of Gilder's awestruck piety, are the forces that conspire to make life shitty in a million ways great and small. The market is the reason our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public transportation is lousy. It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across the map. It is the reason our word processing programs stink and our prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever-more arbitrary and despotic corporate regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only to the fortunate. In order for the libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the smug sleep of the true believer, the thirty millions among whom they live must join them in the dark.
But it is not enough to count the ways in which the market sucks. This is a deity of spectacular theological agility, supported by a priesthood of millions: journalists, admen, politicians, Op-Ed writers, think-tankers, cyberspace scrawlers, Sunday morning talk-show libertarians, and, of course, bosses, all of them united in the conviction that, no matter what, the market can't be held responsible. When things go wrong only we are to blame. After all, they remind us, every step in the economic process is a matter of choice. We choose Ford over Dodge and Colgate Total over Colgate Ultra-Whitening; we choose to take that temp job at Microsoft, to live in those suburbs, to watch Channel 4 rather than Channel 5. We participate in markets; we build markets; markets, in fact, are us. Markets are a straightforward expression of the popular will. Since markets are the product of our choices, we have essentially authorized whatever the market does to us. This is the world that we have made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Virtually any deed can be excused by this logic. The stock market, in recent years a scene of no small amount of deceit, misinformation, and manipulation, can be made to seem quite benign when the high priests roll up their sleeves. In October 1999, a heady time for small investors, Andy Serwer of Fortune could be heard telling the inspiring story of an investment "revolution" in which the financial power of "a few thousand white males" in New York was "being seized by Everyman and Everywoman." We the people had great, unquestionable power: Serwer's article was even illustrated with clenched fists. We had built this market, and it was rewarding us accordingly.
But these days Serwer is pondering the problem of "stock market rage" as those same Everyman investors are turned inside out by the destruction of $4 trillion of Nasdaq value. Now that the country is in the sort of situation where brokers and bankers might find themselves in deep political shit, Serwer observes that we have become quite powerless. Investors are "mad as hell," Serwer notes, but "there isn't much [they] can do about it." The explanation for this supposed impotence is, strangely, a moral one: Choice. Since those lovable little guys acted of their own free will when they invested in Lucent, PMC Sierra, and Cisco, today there is no claim they can make that deserves a hearing. What has happened is their fault and theirs alone.
The market only fails us, it seems, when we fail it-when our piety is somehow incomplete, when we don't give the market enough power, when we balk at entrusting it with our last dime. Electricity deregulation didn't work in California, the true believers chant, because the scheming elitist political class of that state betrayed the people, refusing to give them enough choice, to deregulate all the way.
Free to choose is a painfully ironic slogan for the market order. While markets do indeed sometimes provide a great array of consumer choices, the clear intention of much of the chatter about technology, "globalization," and the "New Economy" is, in fact, to deny us any choice at all. Moving from rhetoric to the world of financial politics the same logic holds true: Markets show a clear preference for the shutting down of intellectual dissent and political choice. Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that the vote-counting has been halted. Markets punish the bond prices of countries where substantial left parties still flourish. Markets reward those lands-like Bill Clinton's USA-where left parties have been triangulated into impotence. So predictably do markets celebrate the suppression of political difference that Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times columnist, has actually come up with a term for the trade-off: "the golden straitjacket." Since all alternatives to laissez-faire are now historically discredited, Friedman maintains, all countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business stance. When they do, "your economy grows and your politics shrink." The pseudodemocracy of markets replaces the real democracy of democracy; the great multinational corporations nod their approval; and the way is clear for (some) people to get fantastically rich.
Friedman has a point. Consider the case of Singapore, long the inamorata of market heavies and their press agents. As we all know by now, Singapore is an economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of decades. Singapore is the land with the most economic freedom in the world. Singapore is more comprehensively wired than anywhere else. Singapore is the best place to do business in all the earth. And as proof you need look no further than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the spanking new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the market's approval.
And what the market loves best about Singapore is what is absent: Politics. Singapore's shopping malls-heavenly landscapes of chrome and polished granite, of flashing jumbotrons and free floor shows for the kids-trump those of our own land. But politically the country is a dull monotone. Here there is little danger that opposition parties will come to power or that crusading journalists will violate the rules of what Singaporeans call "self-censorship."
So what replaces politics? What fills the blank space left when a country has sacrificed dissent on the altar of the market? In Singapore, the answer seems to be management theory. Settling down one Sunday afternoon in that country with a copy of the Straits-Times, the more or less official newspaper, I turned to the section most American newspapers reserve for book reviews and think-pieces and found instead: a profile of the management guru who co-wrote the One to One series of marketing books; a column about the urgent need to adapt to waves of workplace "change" (you know, like "outsourcing"); an enthusiastic story about the new president of PepsiCo, a native of India who reportedly studies videotapes of Michael Jordan's greatest basketball moments in order to "catch insights about the value of teamwork"; a profile of the management guru who co-wrote The Individualized Corporation ("Power to the people is [his] motto"); a profile of one of the paper's writers in which the concept of "the journalist as a brand" is the point of departure; and a review of one of those sweeping, pseudo-historical books so beloved of business readers that start out with the Neanderthals and end up affirming various contemporary management homilies about creativity and entrepreneurship.
Management theory has become so variegated in recent years that, for some, it now constitutes a perfectly viable replacement for old-fashioned intellectual life. There's so much to choose from! So many deep thinkers, so many flashy popularizers, so many schools of thought, so many bold predictions, so many controversies!
For all this vast and sparkling intellectual production, though, we hear surprisingly little about what it's like to be managed. Perhaps the reason for this is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering, dazzling theories of management seem to come down to the same ugly thing. This is the lesson that Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage jobs that she works and then describes in all their bitter detail in her new book, Nickel and Dimed. Pious chatter about "free agents" and "empowered workers" may illuminate the covers of Fast Company and Business 2.0, but what strikes one most forcefully about the world of waitresses, maids, and Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich enters is the overwhelming power of management, the intimidating array of advantages it holds in its endless war on wages. This is a place where even jobs like housecleaning have been Taylorized to extract maximum output from workers ("You know, all this was figured out with a stopwatch," Ehrenreich is told by a proud manager at a maid service), where omnipresent personality and drug tests screen out those of assertive nature, where even the lowliest of employees are overseen by professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip without remorse or relent, where workers are cautioned against "stealing time" from their employer by thinking about anything other than their immediate task, and where every bit of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile available to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay from ever impeding the upward curve of profitability. This is the real story of life under markets.
But the point where all the "New Economy" glory and promise really start to suck, where all the vaunted choice and empowerment of free markets are revealed as so many creaking stage devices, is when Ehrenreich takes on the shiniest of all the Nineties myths-productivity. With the country as close to full employment as it has ever been in 1999 and 2000, wages did not increase as much as standard economic theory held they ought. Among the devout this was cause for great rejoicing: Through a titanic national effort we had detached productivity from wages, handing the gains over to owners and shareholders instead. But this was less a "choice" that Americans consciously made than it was, as Ehrenreich makes undeniably evident, the simple triumph of the nation's managers, always encouraging employees to think of themselves as stakeholders or team members even as they unilaterally dictate every aspect of the work experience.
The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal shrine to the god that sucked: Slum housing that is only affordable if workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog buns for their meals; women in their twenties so enfeebled by this regimen that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service demands they carry about on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality tests, corporate pep rallies. Were we not so determined to worship the market and its boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might even view their desperate, spent employees as philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their well-being so that the comfortable might live even more comfortably. "They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for," she writes; "they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high."
These are the fruits of thirty years of culture war. Hell-bent to get government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to suck the joy out of life. Cuckoo to get God back in the schools, you enshrined a god of unappeasable malice. Raging against the snobs, you enthroned a rum bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits, and hang-em-high moralists. Ain't irony grand.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:58 PM
Democracy is not like Hamburger. Naomi Klein author of No Logo
Well, the customer is faced with a myriad of choices. There is a greater and greater distance between the sites of production and sites of consumption, so they have these kinds of surrogate relationships with their products, which take the form of a brand or a logo that offers them consistency. They know if they buy something with Aunt Jemima on it, or Campbell's, that it's always going to be the same, and that there will be a certain baseline level of consistency and quality. That's the logic of branding.
Branding, at its core, is this obsession with consistency and comforting images. So if you're a business person, you know that if you stay at a Holiday Inn, no matter where in the world, it's always going to be pretty much the same. But I think that the idea of country branding is actually deeply undemocratic, because the idea is to apply this same logic to come up with the few character traits for an entire people and market them.
What's particularly interesting about the attempts to rebrand the U.S. is that they hired Charlotte Beers, who is one of the most famous advertising executives -- definitely the most famous woman in advertising. She's represented clients like Sears. And Colin Powell's statement on the hiring of Charlotte Beers was, "She got me to eat Uncle Ben's rice."
When they did their focus groups and research about what the American brand stands for, they heard phrases like diversity, democracy, tolerance and so on. And so it's not just branding. But these particular brand attributes are inconsistent with the idea of democracy, because how do you mass market diversity levels? It's very difficult to do that.
They polled all of these different brand managers about what was the problem with the American brand. They found that the problem was that people had all of these different conflicting feelings about the U.S. And from a brand manager's perspective, that is the worst-case scenario for branding. You want to be able to control people's perceptions and understanding of a brand. That's what marketing is about.
But if you're thinking about the reality of these feelings, it's highly rational to have many conflicting views about the U.S. In fact, we're all capable of holding conflicting views about the U.S., because the U.S. Is not monolithic.
But then, I think that there's a broader issue with the whole approach to rebranding the U.S., which really is part of the U.S. foreign policy, particularly under the Bush administration. It comes from the school of foreign policy that if people have a problem with the U.S., you should speak loudly and more slowly about what they don't understand, instead of addressing why people are angry at the U.S.
And so, as Charlotte Beers has gone abroad, particularly in the Middle East and Arab countries, and talked to people about what their problem is with the U.S., she keeps handing them marketing slogans, and telling them again and again that the U.S. stands for freedom and democracy. And they keep getting more and more frustrated that she won't talk about U.S. Foreign policy. So it is part of a broader pattern of unwillingness to think that anybody who has a problem with the U.S. just doesn't get it, or is a bigot, or a crazed fundamentalist.
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 10:08 AM
Monday, December 02, 2002
December 2, 2002
Ex-Aide Insists White House Puts Politics Ahead of Policy
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — A former member of the Bush administration says in a magazine interview that the White House values politics over domestic policy, lacking both policy experts and an apparatus to support them, and has failed to achieve a "compassionate conservative" agenda.
John J. DiIulio Jr., a domestic affairs expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed by President Bush to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the second week of the new administration. He quit in August 2001 amid struggles with Congress and Christian conservatives over the direction of the president's plan to give more federal money to religious charities.
In an interview with Esquire magazine, Mr. DiIulio said: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
"Mayberry Machiavellis" is Mr. DiIulio's term for the political staff and most particularly Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief adviser. He describes Mr. Rove as "enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political-adviser post near the Oval Office."
Mr. DiIulio says the religious right and libertarians trust Mr. Rove "to keep Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving too far to the center or inching at all center-left."
As a result, Mr. DiIulio says, the administration has accomplished almost nothing domestically except Mr. Bush's tax cut and an education bill, which Mr. DiIulio describes as "really a Ted Kennedy bill."
"There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism," he says. What there is, he says, is "on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking."
Mr. DiIulio, a Democrat, did not directly criticize Mr. Bush in the article. A White House spokeswoman said White House advisers had not seen the article and would not comment on it.
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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:28 PM
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