Kerry aide: Bush 'flat out lied' on Iraq [Archive]

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gldstwmn

07-19-2004, 01:08 PM

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040719/ts_alt_afp/us_vote_iraq_democrats&cid=1506&ncid=2043

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Democrats stepped up attacks on George W. Bush's anti-terror policies when an official of White House candidate John Kerry's campaign said the president "flat-out lied" over the Iraq war.

Former senator Max Cleland made his remarks in a conference call to reporters with Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe as part of a party offensive ahead of this week's release of a major report sure to fuel criticism of Bush's war on terror.

Cleland, a national co-chairman of Kerry's campaign, described the Bush administration's arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, as a "pack of lies."

The former lawmaker from the southern state of Georgia defended the vote that he, Kerry and others cast in the Senate to authorize military intervention in Iraq, saying the Congress was "flat-out lied to."

Asked whether they were lied to by the intelligence services or the White House, he said emphatically: "By the president, by the vice president and by the secretary of defense."

"Now why did Bush go to war in Iraq? Because he concluded that his daddy was a failed president and one of the ways he failed was that he did not take out Saddam Hussein," Cleland said, referring to the 1991 Gulf war.

He added that Kerry, from Massachusetts, agreed with the assessment. "About a year ago John Kerry said,'The president lied, he lied to me personally,'" said Cleland, a badly wounded Vietnam war veteran.

Cleland's language went further than the draft Democratic platform expected to be adopted by the party's convention next week in Boston as a blueprint for its drive to unseat Bush in November.

"The draft says "people of good will disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq, but this much is clear: This Administration badly exaggerated its case."

But McAuliffe did not back away from Cleland's allegation of outright lying. He said only that the platform committee "did an excellent job of representing where this party stands as it relates to issues on national security."

"The platform does not get into specifics on all the different issues. ... It is a document that all Democrats can run on."

Spokesmen for the Kerry campaign did not immediately return phone calls asking whether Cleland's remarks reflected the candidate's position.

The conference call was one of a series of broadsides at Bush, orchestrated by the Kerry campaign ahead of the release Thursday of the final report prepared by a national panel investigating the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The document, following 17 staff reports already made public, was expected to be highly critical of the Bush administration for intelligence failures and other lapses surrounding the attacks.

Cleland, a member of the said the move to invade Iraq without widespread world support was "one of the great strategic errors" of US military history and actually left the country more vulnerable to terrorism.

"This country is less safe and less secure because of George Bush's decision to go to war alone and alienate the Arab and Islamic world and generate more recruits for al-Qaeda," he said.

CarneVaca

07-19-2004, 01:19 PM

Sugar

07-19-2004, 04:47 PM

Unless Kerry is ready to admit that he was wrong to vote for the war, that he shouldn't have and that, if elected, he will pull out of Iraq within six months....

But is this really a good idea at this point? I mean, I would love it if it were feasible, but isn't there a lot of security risk at this early stage? Shouldn't we at least make sure they have a stable police force?

gldstwmn

07-19-2004, 10:16 PM

Unless Kerry is ready to admit that he was wrong to vote for the war, that he shouldn't have and that, if elected, he will pull out of Iraq within six months, he and his campaign should shut the f**** up about it. He was lied to!? Well, fine. Then admit it was a bad vote and stand up for what you believe.

But, really, we all know that they're full of **** anyway. If I could find out enough information on my own that the Bushers were lying about the WMDs and all their other excuses to go into Iraq, so could U.S. senators surely.
http://www.seanrobins.com/kerry/kerry_senate_2002_10_09.htm

John F. Kerry
Senate Floor Speech
Authorization of the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq
October 9, 2002

Source: Congressional Record, pp. S10170-10175.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank my good friend from Arizona for his introduction and for his generous comments about the role that Senator Hagel and I have played.

My colleague, Senator Hagel, and I share seats on the Foreign Relations Committee. We have both followed this issue for a long period of time.

Obviously, with respect to an issue that might take Americans to war, we deserve time, and there is no more important debate to be had on the floor of the Senate. It is in the greatest traditions of this institution, and I am proud to take part in that debate now.

This is a debate that should be conducted without regard to parties, to politics, to labels. It is a debate that has to come from the gut of each and every Member, and I am confident that it does. I know for Senator Hagel, Senator McCain, and myself, when we pick up the newspapers and read about the residuals of the Vietnam war, there is a particular sensitivity because I do not think any of us feel a residual with respect to the choices we are making now.

I know for myself back in that period of time, even as I protested the war, I wrote that if my Nation was again threatened and Americans made the decision we needed to defend ourselves, I would be among the first to put on a uniform again and go and do that.

We are facing a very different world today than we have ever faced before. September 11 changed a lot, but other things have changed: Globalization, technology, a smaller planet, the difficulties of radical fundamentalism, the crosscurrents of religion and politics. We are living in an age where the dangers are different and they require a different response, different thinking, and different approaches than we have applied in the past.

Most importantly, it is a time when international institutions must rise to the occasion and seek new authority and a new measure of respect.

In approaching the question of this resolution, I wish the timing were different. I wish for the sake of the country we were not here now at this moment. There are legitimate questions about that timing. But none of the underlying realities of the threat, none of the underlying realities of the choices we face are altered because they are, in fact, the same as they were in 1991 when we discovered those weapons when the teams went in, and in 1998 when the teams were kicked out.

With respect to Saddam Hussein and the threat he presents, we must ask ourselves a simple question: Why? Why is Saddam Hussein pursuing weapons that most nations have agreed to limit or give up? Why is Saddam Hussein guilty of breaking his own cease-fire agreement with the international community? Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try, and responsible nations that have them attempt to limit their potential for disaster? Why did Saddam Hussein threaten and provoke? Why does he develop missiles that exceed allowable limits? Why did Saddam Hussein lie and deceive the inspection teams previously? Why did Saddam Hussein not account for all of the weapons of mass destruction which UNSCOM identified? Why is he seeking to develop unmanned airborne vehicles for delivery of biological agents?

Does he do all of these things because he wants to live by international standards of behavior? Because he respects international law? Because he is a nice guy underneath it all and the world should trust him?

It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it. He has already created a stunning track record of miscalculation. He miscalculated an 8-year war with Iran. He miscalculated the invasion of Kuwait. He miscalculated America's responses to it. He miscalculated the result of setting oil rigs on fire. He miscalculated the impact of sending Scuds into Israel. He miscalculated his own military might. He miscalculated the Arab world's response to his plight. He miscalculated in attempting an assassination of a former President of the United States. And he is miscalculating now America's judgments about his miscalculations.

All those miscalculations are compounded by the rest of history. A brutal, oppressive dictator, guilty of personally murdering and condoning murder and torture, grotesque violence against women, execution of political opponents, a war criminal who used chemical weapons against another nation and, of course, as we know, against his own people, the Kurds. He has diverted funds from the Oil-for-Food program, intended by the international community to go to his own people. He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel.

I mention these not because they are a cause to go to war in and of themselves, as the President previously suggested, but because they tell a lot about the threat of the weapons of mass destruction and the nature of this man. We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future. It is the total of all of these acts that provided the foundation for the world's determination in 1991 at the end of the gulf war that Saddam Hussein must:

..... unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless underinternational supervision of his chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems ..... [and] unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear weapon-usable material.

Saddam Hussein signed that agreement. Saddam Hussein is in office today because of that agreement. It is the only reason he survived in 1991. In 1991, the world collectively made a judgment that this man should not have weapons of mass destruction. And we are here today in the year 2002 with an uninspected 4-year interval during which time we know through intelligence he not only has kept them, but he continues to grow them.

I believe the record of Saddam Hussein's ruthless, reckless breach of international values and standards of behavior which is at the core of the cease-fire agreement, with no reach, no stretch, is cause enough for the world community to hold him accountable by use of force, if necessary. The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons.

He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.

The Senate worked to urge action in early 1998. I joined with Senator McCain, Senator Hagel, and other Senators, in a resolution urging the President to ``take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end his weapons of mass destruction program.'' That was 1998 that we thought we needed a more serious response.

Later in the year, Congress enacted legislation declaring Iraq in material, unacceptable breach of its disarmament obligations and urging the President to take appropriate action to bring Iraq into compliance. In fact, had we done so, President Bush could well have taken his office, backed by our sense of urgency about holding Saddam Hussein accountable and, with an international United Nations, backed a multilateral stamp of approval record on a clear demand for the disarmament of Saddam Hussein's Iraq . We could have had that and we would not be here debating this today. But the administration missed an opportunity 2 years ago and particularly a year ago after September 11. They regrettably, and even clumsily, complicated their own case. The events of September 11 created new understanding of the terrorist threat and the degree to which every nation is vulnerable.

That understanding enabled the administration to form a broad and impressive coalition against terrorism. Had the administration tried then to capitalize on this unity of spirit to build a coalition to disarm Iraq , we would not be here in the pressing days before an election, late in this year, debating this now. The administration's decision to engage on this issue now, rather than a year ago or earlier, and the manner in which it has engaged, has politicized and complicated the national debate and raised questions about the credibility of their case.
By beginning its public discourse with talk of invasion and regime change, the administration raised doubts about their bona fides on the most legitimate justification for war--that in the post-September 11 world the unrestrained threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein is unacceptable, and his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors to return was in blatant violation of the 1991 cease-fire agreement that left him in power. By casting about in an unfocused, undisciplined, overly public, internal debate for a rationale for war, the administration complicated their case, confused the American public, and compromised America's credibility in the eyes of the world community. By engaging in hasty war talk rather than focusing on the central issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the administration placed doubts in the

[Page: S10172] GPO's PDF

minds of potential allies, particularly in the Middle East, where managing the Arab street is difficult at best.
Against this disarray, it is not surprising that tough questions began to be asked and critics began to emerge.

Indeed over the course of the last 6 weeks some of the strongest and most thoughtful questioning of our Nation's Iraq policy has come from what some observers would say are unlikely sources: Senators like CHUCK HAGEL and DICK LUGAR, former Bush Administration national security experts including Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, and distinguished military voices including General Shalikashvili. They are asking the tough questions which must be answered before--and not after--you commit a nation to a course that may well lead to war. They know from their years of experience, whether on the battlefield as soldiers, in the Senate, or at the highest levels of public diplomacy, that you build the consent of the American people to sustain military confrontation by asking questions, not avoiding them. Criticism and questions do not reflect a lack of patriotism--they demonstrate the strength and core values of our American democracy. It is love of country, and it is defined by defense of those policies that protect and defend our country.

Writing in the New York Times in early September, I argued that the American people would never accept the legitimacy of this war or give their consent to it unless the administration first presented detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and proved that it had exhausted all other options to protect our national security. I laid out a series of steps that the administration must take for the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq --seek the advice and approval of Congress after laying out the evidence and making the case, and work with our allies to seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement while simultaneously offering Iraq a clear ultimatum: accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise and without condition.
Those of us who have offered questions and criticisms--and there are many in this body and beyond--can take heart in the fact that those questions and those criticisms have had an impact on the debate. They have changed how we may or may not deal with Iraq . The Bush administration began talking about Iraq by suggesting that congressional consultation and authorization for the use of force were not needed. Now they are consulting with Congress and seeking our authorization. The administration began this process walking down a path of unilateralism. Today they acknowledge that while we reserve the right to act alone, it is better to act with allies. The administration which once seemed entirely disengaged from the United Nations ultimately went to the United Nations and began building international consensus to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. The administration began this process suggesting that the United States might well go to war over Saddam Hussein's failure to return Kuwaiti property. Last week the Secretary of State and on Monday night the President made clear we would go to war only to disarm Iraq .
The administration began discussion of Iraq by almost belittling the importance of arms inspections. Today the administration has refocused their aim and made clear we are not in an arbitrary conflict with one of the world's many dictators, but a conflict with a dictator whom the international community left in power only because he agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. That is why arms inspections--and I believe ultimately Saddam's unwillingness to submit to fail-safe inspections--is absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world.

That is the way in which you make it clear to the world that we are contemplating war not for war's sake, and not to accomplish goals that don't meet international standards or muster with respect to national security, but because weapons inspections may be the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and that may be the way in which we ultimately protect ourselves.
I am pleased that the Bush administration has recognized the wisdom of shifting its approach on Iraq . That shift has made it possible, in my judgment, for the Senate to move forward with greater unity, having asked and begun to answer the questions that best defend our troops and protect our national security. The Senate can now make a determination about this resolution and, in this historic vote, help put our country and the world on a course to begin to answer one fundamental question--not whether to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, but how.

I have said publicly for years that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein pose a real and grave threat to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region. Saddam Hussein's record bears this out.

I have talked about that record. Iraq never fully accounted for the major gaps and inconsistencies in declarations provided to the inspectors of the pre-Gulf war weapons of mass destruction program, nor did the Iraq regime provide credible proof that it had completely destroyed its weapons and production infrastructure.

He has continually failed to meet the obligations imposed by the international community on Iraq at the end of the Persian Gulf the Iraqi regime provide credible proof war to declare and destroy its weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems and to forego the development of nuclear weapons. during the 7 years of weapons inspections, the Iraqi regime repeatedly frustrated the work of the UNSCOM--Special Commission--inspectors, culminating in 1998 in their ouster. Even during the period of inspections, Iraq never fully accounted for major gaps and inconsistencies in declarations provided to the inspectors of its pre-gulf war WMD programs, nor did the Iraqi regime provide credible proof that it had completely destroyed its weapons stockpiles and production infrastructure.

It is clear that in the 4 years since the UNSCOM inspectors were forced out, Saddam Hussein has continued his quest for weapons of mass destruction. According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the

150 kilometer restriction imposed by the United Nations in the ceasefire resolution. Although Iraq's chemical weapons capability was reduced during the UNSCOM inspections, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort over the last 4 years. Evidence suggests that it has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard gas, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX. Intelligence reports show that Iraq has invested more heavily in its biological weapons programs over the 4 years, with the result that all key aspects of this program--R&D, production and weaponization--are active. Most elements of the program are larger and more advanced than they were before the gulf war. Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives which could bring them to the United States homeland. Since inspectors left, the Iraqi regime has energized its missile program, probably now consisting of a few dozen Scud-type missiles with ranges of 650 to 900 kilometers that could hit Israel, Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the region. In addition, Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs, capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents, which could threaten Iraq's neighbors as well as American forces in the Persian Gulf.

Prior to the gulf war, Iraq had an advance nuclear weapons development program. Although UNSCOM and IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors learned much about Iraq's efforts in this area, Iraq has failed to provide complete information on all aspects of its program. Iraq has maintained its nuclear scientists and technicians as well as sufficient dual-use manufacturing capability to support a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Iraqi defectors who once worked for Iraq's nuclear weapons establishment have reportedly told American officials that acquiring nuclear weapons is a top priority for Saddam Hussein's regime.

According to the CIA's report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons. There
is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons. The more difficult question to answer is when Iraq could actually achieve this goal. That depends on is its ability to acquire weapons-grade fissile material. If Iraq could acquire this material from abroad, the CIA estimates that it could have a nuclear weapon within 1 year.
Absent a foreign supplier, it might be longer. There is no question that Saddam Hussein represents a threat. I have heard even my colleagues who oppose the President's resolution say we have to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. They also say we have to force the inspections. And to force the inspections, you have to be prepared to use force.

So the issue is not over the question of whether or not the threat is real, or whether or not people agree there is a threat. It is over what means we will take, and when, in order to try to eliminate it.

The reason for going to war, if we must fight, is not because Saddam Hussein has failed to deliver gulf war prisoners or Kuwaiti property. As much as we decry the way he has treated his people, regime change alone is not a sufficient reason for going to war, as desirable as it is to change the regime.

Regime change has been an American policy under the Clinton administration, and it is the current policy. I support the policy. But regime change in and of itself is not sufficient justification for going to war--particularly unilaterally--unless regime change is the only way to disarm Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction pursuant to the United Nations resolution.

As bad as he is, Saddam Hussein, the dictator, is not the cause of war. Saddam Hussein sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction is a different matter. In the wake of September 11, who among us can say, with any certainty, to anybody, that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater--a nuclear weapon--then reinvade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambitions to be the pan-Arab leader or simply to confront in the region, and once again miscalculate the response, to believe he is stronger because he has those weapons?

And while the administration has failed to provide any direct link between Iraq and the events of September 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or other in a region where weapons are the currency of trade? How do we leave that to chance?
That is why the enforcement mechanism through the United Nations and the reality of the potential of the use of force is so critical to achieve the protection of long-term interests, not just of the United States but of the world, to understand that the dynamic has changed, that we are living in a different status today, that we cannot sit by and be as complacent or even negligent about weapons of mass destruction and proliferation as we have been in the past.

The Iraqi regime's record over the decade leaves little doubt that Saddam Hussein wants to retain his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and, obviously, as we have said, grow it. These weapons represent an unacceptable threat.

I want to underscore that this administration began this debate with a resolution that granted exceedingly broad authority to the President to use force. I regret that some in the Congress rushed so quickly to support it. I would have opposed it. It gave the President the authority to use force not only to enforce all of the U.N. resolutions as a cause of war, but also to produce regime change in Iraq , and to restore international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region. It made no mention of the President's efforts at the United Nations or the need to build multilateral support for whatever course of action we ultimately would take.

I am pleased that our pressure, and the questions we have asked, and the criticisms that have been raised publicly, the debate in our democracy has pushed this administration to adopt important changes, both in language as well as in the promises that they make.

The revised White House text, which we will vote on, limits the grant of authority to the President to the use of force only with respect to Iraq . It does not empower him to use force throughout the Persian Gulf region. It authorizes the President to use Armed Forces to defend the ``national security'' of the United States--a power most of us believe he already has under the Constitution as Commander in Chief. And it empowers him to enforce all ``relevant'' Security Council resolutions related to Iraq . None of those resolutions or, for that matter, any of the other Security Council resolutions demanding Iraqi compliance with its international obligations, calls for a regime change.
In recent days, the administration has gone further. They are defining what ``relevant'' U.N. Security Council resolutions mean. When Secretary Powell testified before our committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, on September 26, he was asked what specific U.N. Security Council resolutions the United States would go to war to enforce. His response was clear: the

resolutions dealing with weapons of mass destruction and the disarmament of Iraq . In fact, when asked about compliance with other U.N. resolutions which do not deal with weapons of mass destruction, the Secretary said:

The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements.

When asked why the resolution sent by the President to Congress requested authority to enforce all the resolutions with which Iraq had not complied, the Secretary told the committee:

That's the way the resolution is currently worded, but we all know, I think, that the major problem, the offense, what the President is focused on and the danger to us and to the world are the weapons of mass destruction.

In his speech on Monday night, President Bush confirmed what Secretary Powell told the committee. In the clearest presentation to date, the President laid out a strong, comprehensive, and compelling argument why Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs are a threat to the United States and the international community. The President said:

Saddam Hussein must disarm himself, or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

This statement left no doubt that the casus belli for the United States will be Iraq's failure to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction. I would have preferred that the President agree to the approach drafted by Senators Biden and Lugar because that resolution would authorize the use of force for the explicit purpose of disarming Iraq and countering the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The Biden-Lugar resolution also acknowledges the importance of the President's efforts at the United Nations. It would require the President, before exercising the authority granted in the resolution, to send a determination to Congress that the United States tried to seek a new Security Council resolution or that the threat posed by Iraq's WMD is so great he must act absent a new resolution--a power, incidentally, that the President of the United States always has. I believe this approach would have provided greater clarity to the American people about the reason for going to war and the specific grant of authority. I think it would have been a better way to do this. But it does not change the bottom line of what we are voting for.

The administration, unwisely, in my view, rejected the Biden-Lugar approach. But, perhaps as a nod to the sponsors, it did agree to a determination requirement on the status of its efforts at the United Nations. That is now embodied in the White House text.

The President has challenged the United Nations, as he should, and as all of us in the Senate should, to enforce its own resolutions vis-a-vis Iraq . And his administration is now working aggressively with the Perm 5 members on the Security Council to reach a consensus. As he told the American people Monday night:

America wants the U.N. to be an effective organization that helps keep the peace. And that is why we are urging the Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough, immediate requirements.

Because of my concerns, and because of the need to understand, with clarity, what this resolution meant, I traveled to New York a week ago. I met with members of the Security Council and came away with a conviction that they will indeed move to enforce, that they understand the need to enforce, if Saddam Hussein does not fulfill his obligation to disarm.

And I believe they made it clear that if the United States operates through the U.N., and through the Security Council, they--all of them--will also bear responsibility for the aftermath of rebuilding Iraq and for the joint efforts to do what we need to do as a consequence of that enforcement.

I talked to Secretary General Kofi Annan at the end of last week and again felt a reiteration of the seriousness with which the United Nations takes this and that they will respond.
If the President arbitrarily walks away from this course of action--without good cause or reason--the legitimacy of any subsequent action by the United States against Iraq will be challenged by the American people and the international community. And I would vigorously oppose the President doing so.
When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region. I will vote yes because I believe it is the best way to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. And the administration, I believe, is now committed to a recognition that war must be the last option to address this threat, not the first, and that we must act in concert with allies around the globe to make the world's case against Saddam Hussein.
As the President made clear earlier this week, ``Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable.'' It means ``America speaks with one voice.''

Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.
In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.

If we do wind up going to war with Iraq , it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize ``imminent''--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has recognized a similar need to distinguish how we approach this. He has said that he believes we should move in concert with allies, and he has promised his own party that he will not do so otherwise. The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. And it is what can be done. If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed.
Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.

In voting to grant the President the authority, I am not giving him carte blanche to run roughshod over every country that poses or may pose some kind of potential threat to the United States. Every nation has the right to act preemptively, if it faces an imminent and grave threat, for its self-defense under the standards of law. The threat we face today with Iraq does not meet that test yet. I emphasize ``yet.'' Yes, it is grave because of the deadliness of Saddam Hussein's arsenal and the very high probability that he might use these weapons one day if not disarmed. But it is not imminent, and no one in the CIA, no intelligence briefing we have had suggests it is imminent. None of our intelligence reports suggest that he is about to launch an attack.
The argument for going to war against Iraq is rooted in enforcement of the international community's demand that he disarm. It is not rooted in the doctrine of preemption. Nor is the grant of authority in this resolution an acknowledgment that Congress accepts or agrees with the President's new strategic doctrine of preemption. Just the opposite. This resolution clearly limits the authority given to the President to use force in Iraq , and Iraq only, and for the specific purpose of defending the United States against the threat posed by Iraq and enforcing relevant Security Council resolutions.

The definition of purpose circumscribes the authority given to the President to the use of force to disarm Iraq because only Iraq's weapons of mass destruction meet the two criteria

laid out in this resolution.

Congressional action on this resolution is not the end of our national debate on how best to disarm Iraq . Nor does it mean we have exhausted all of our peaceful options to achieve this goal. There is much more to be done. The administration must continue its efforts to build support at the United Nations for a new, unfettered, unconditional weapons inspection regime. If we can eliminate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction through inspections, whenever, wherever, and however we want them, including in palaces--and I am highly skeptical, given the full record, given their past practices, that we can necessarily achieve that--then we have an obligation to try that as the first course of action before we expend American lives in any further effort.
American success in the Persian Gulf war was enhanced by the creation of an international coalition. Our coalition partners picked up the overwhelming burden of the cost of that war. It is imperative that the administration continue to work to multilateralize the current effort against Iraq . If the administration's initiatives at the United Nations are real and sincere, other nations are more likely to invest, to stand behind our efforts to force Iraq to disarm, be it through a new, rigorous, no-nonsense program of inspection, or if necessary, through the use of force. That is the best way to proceed.

The United States, without question, has the military power to enter this conflict unilaterally. But we do need friends. We need logistical support such as bases, command and control centers, overflight rights from allies in the region. And most importantly, we need to be able to successfully wage the war on terror simultaneously. That war on terror depends more than anything else on the sharing of intelligence. That sharing of intelligence depends more than anything else on the cooperation of countries in the region. If we disrupt that, we could disrupt the possibilities of the capacity of that war to be most effectively waged.

I believe the support from the region will come only if they are convinced of the credibility of our arguments and the legitimacy of our mission. The United Nations never has veto power over any measure the United States needs to take to protect our national security. But it is in our interest to try to act with our allies, if at all possible. And that should be because the burden of eliminating the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction should not be ours alone. It should not be the American people's alone.

If in the end these efforts fail, and if in the end we are at war, we will have an obligation, ultimately, to the Iraqi people with whom we are not at war. This is a war against a regime, mostly one man. So other nations in the region and all of us will need to help create an Iraq that is a place and a force for stability and openness in the region. That effort is going to be long term, costly, and not without difficulty, given Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions and history of domestic turbulence. In Afghanistan, the administration has given more lipservice
than resources to the rebuilding effort. We cannot allow that to happen in Iraq , and we must be prepared to stay the course over however many years it takes to do it right. The challenge is great: An administration which made nation building a dirty word needs to develop a comprehensive, Marshall-type plan, if it will meet the challenge. The President needs to give the American people a fairer and fuller, clearer understanding of the magnitude and long-term financial cost of that effort.

The international community's support will be critical because we will not be able to rebuild Iraq singlehandedly. We will lack the credibility and the expertise and the capacity.

It is clear the Senate is about to give the President the authority he has requested sometime in the next days. Whether the President will have to use that authority depends ultimately on Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein has a choice: He can continue to defy the international community, or he can fulfill his longstanding obligations to disarm. He is the person who has brought the world to this brink of confrontation.

He is the dictator who can end the stalemate simply by following the terms of the agreement which left him in power.

By standing with the President, Congress would demonstrate our Nation is united in its determination to take away that arsenal, and we are affirming the President's right and responsibility to keep the American people safe. One of the lessons I learned from fighting in a very different war, at a different time, is we need the consent of the American people for our mission to be legitimate and sustainable. I do know what it means, as does Senator Hagel, to fight in a war where that consent is lost, where allies are in short supply, where conditions are hostile, and the mission is ill-defined.

That is why I believe so strongly before one American soldier steps foot on Iraqi soil, the American people must understand completely its urgency. They need to know we put our country in the position of ultimate strength and that we have no options, short of war, to eliminate a threat we could not tolerate.

I believe the work we have begun in this Senate, by offering questions, and not blind acquiescence, has helped put our Nation on a responsible course. It has succeeded, certainly, in putting Saddam Hussein on notice that he will be held accountable; but it also has put the administration on notice we will hold them accountable for the means by which we do this. It is through constant questioning we will stay the course, and that is a course that will ultimately defend our troops and protect our national security.

President Kennedy faced a similar difficult challenge in the days of the Cuban missile crisis. He decided not to proceed, I might add, preemptively. He decided to show the evidence and proceeded through the international institutions. He said at the time:

The path we have chosen is full of hazards, as all paths are ..... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

So I believe the Senate will make it clear, and the country will make it clear, that we will not be blackmailed or extorted by these weapons, and we will not permit the United Nations--an institution we have worked hard to nurture and create--to simply be ignored by this dictator.

I yield the floor.

gldstwmn

07-19-2004, 10:54 PM

Unless Kerry is ready to admit that he was wrong to vote for the war, that he shouldn't have and that, if elected, he will pull out of Iraq within six months, he and his campaign should shut the f**** up about it.

Oh and one more thing...do enlighten us mere mortals with your utopian view of what Iraq is going to look like in June of 2005 after your temper tantrum is acquiesced. :woohoo:

gldstwmn

07-19-2004, 11:35 PM

But the burden is also clearly on the Bush Administration to do the hard work of building a broad coalition at the U.N. and the necessary work of educating America about the rationale for war.

As I have said frequently and repeat here today, the United States should never go to war because it wants to, the United States should go to war because we have to. And we don't have to until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people, absent, of course, an imminent threat requiring urgent action.

The Administration must pass this test. I believe they must take the time to do the hard work of diplomacy. They must do a better job of making their case to the American people and to the world.

I have no doubt of the outcome of war itself should it be necessary. We will win. But what matters is not just what we win but what we lose. We need to make certain that we have not unnecessarily twisted so many arms, created so many reluctant partners, abused the trust of Congress, or strained so many relations, that the longer term and more immediate vital war on terror is made more difficult. And we should be particularly concerned that we do not go alone or essentially alone if we can avoid it, because the complications and costs of post-war Iraq would be far better managed and shared with United Nation's participation. And, while American security must never be ceded to any institution or to another institution's decision, I say to the President, show respect for the process of international diplomacy because it is not only right, it can make America stronger - and show the world some appropriate patience in building a genuine coalition. Mr. President, do not rush to war.
--John Kerry Jan. 23, 2003
http://www.johnkerry.com/news/speeches/spc_2003_0123.ht...

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 07:57 AM

But is this really a good idea at this point? I mean, I would love it if it were feasible, but isn't there a lot of security risk at this early stage? Shouldn't we at least make sure they have a stable police force?

Do you seriously believe that as long as we're there the Iraqi insurgents are going to at some point stop their attacks? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam?

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 08:00 AM

Oh and one more thing...do enlighten us mere mortals with your utopian view of what Iraq is going to look like in June of 2005 after your temper tantrum is acquiesced. :woohoo:

First, you're out of your mind if you think I'm going to waste 20 minutes of my time reading Kerry's bull**** Senate testimony.

Second, my view is far from Utopian.

Third, explain to me the incongruity of being anti-war and supporting a man who had a very real hand in sending thousands of people to death. And that's just one contradiction.

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 08:02 AM

Sugar

07-20-2004, 08:39 AM

Do you seriously believe that as long as we're there the Iraqi insurgents are going to at some point stop their attacks? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam?

No, and at no point did I say that I thought they would. Obviously the US presence is not a deterrent. I'm just talking about making sure the Iraqis have the tools to deal with what will no doubt be a violent situation even after we leave.

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 08:51 AM

No, and at no point did I say that I thought they would. Obviously the US presence is not a deterrent. I'm just talking about making sure the Iraqis have the tools to deal with what will no doubt be a violent situation even after we leave.

So it comes down to a question of staying there longer and losing more American lives or pulling out before 200 of them get taken out in one shot like in Beirut 20 years ago. Why prolong this business?

gldstwmn

07-20-2004, 01:31 PM

First, you're out of your mind if you think I'm going to waste 20 minutes of my time reading Kerry's bull**** Senate testimony.

Second, my view is far from Utopian.

Third, explain to me the incongruity of being anti-war and supporting a man who had a very real hand in sending thousands of people to death. And that's just one contradiction.

Even your man Howard Dean supported Biden Lugar.

You refuse to deal in facts. If you don't want to read the speech, which refutes your bull**** statements, then I'm done with you. :)

gldstwmn

07-20-2004, 01:32 PM

So what's his excuse for voting for it?

Read the speech. It'll answer your question. :shrug:

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 02:23 PM

Read the speech. It'll answer your question. :shrug:

I've sat through enough TV appearances and read enough news reports to get acquainted with his convoluted explanations. The bottom line: Kerry made a political bet in voting for the war because he thought that's what the public wanted and he knew he'd be running for president. When Dean fueled voters' passions with his anti-war talk, Kerry started to slam the war effort. He's full of ****.

amber

07-20-2004, 02:32 PM

dissention

07-20-2004, 03:22 PM

I've sat through enough TV appearances and read enough news reports to get acquainted with his convoluted explanations. The bottom line: Kerry made a political bet in voting for the war because he thought that's what the public wanted and he knew he'd be running for president. When Dean fueled voters' passions with his anti-war talk, Kerry started to slam the war effort. He's full of ****.

Don't make me laugh. :laugh:

Dean held the same point of view as John Kerry, that the only time we should go in is when all diplomatic relations fail. I can quote the man if you'd like. He then went on to say in the months leading up to the war that if Iraq does not prove that they have no weapons, we need to go in. Also, just like Kerry, Dean said that we need to stay in Iraq now that we invaded. Only when it turned into the major f*ck up that it is did Dean change his mind and started to become the "anti-war candidate." In all actuality, he was never the "anti-war candidate," Dennis Kucinish was (and still is), along with Braun. Dean pulled the wool over the eyes of many, but he sure as hell didn't when it came to me. That's why I never supported the guy; he was the king of back-talk.

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 03:49 PM

Only when it turned into the major f*ck up that it is did Dean change his mind and started to become the "anti-war candidate." In all actuality, he was never the "anti-war candidate," Dennis Kucinish was (and still is), along with Braun. Dean pulled the wool over the eyes of many, but he sure as hell didn't when it came to me. That's why I never supported the guy; he was the king of back-talk.

He had the courage to speak up when Kerry was still tongue-tied about it.

Don't you think it's time Kerry admitted he fooked up in a major way in voting for this war? He just seems to want his cake and eat it too. It's a loser strategy, and it will keep the White House in Republican hands. Mark my words.

dissention

07-20-2004, 03:54 PM

He had the courage to speak up when Kerry was still tongue-tied about it.

Don't you think it's time Kerry admitted he fooked up in a major way in voting for this war? He just seems to want his cake and eat it too. It's a loser strategy, and it will keep the White House in Republican hands. Mark my words.

Don't you mean he had the courage to flip-flop? Oh, I forgot, only Kerry does that. ;) He did the same thing Kerry did, only in a shorter time span.

Of course I want Kerry to admit it, but I'm not his strategist or his campaign manager.

gldstwmn

07-20-2004, 05:49 PM

: Kerry made a political bet in voting for the war because he thought that's what the public wanted and he knew he'd be running for president.

That's his job.

GypsySorcerer

07-20-2004, 07:18 PM

Of course I want Kerry to admit it, but I'm not his strategist or his campaign manager.

You could become one, because Berger resigned today. :lol:

CarneVaca

07-20-2004, 07:55 PM

That's his job.

No. His job is to represent the people of Massachusetts. I bet the people of Massachusetts, considering the record of my fine home state, were mostly against the war. I am guessing.

He did the people of Massachusetts a disservice, and now he's handing them them another loser campaign.

gldstwmn

07-20-2004, 10:26 PM

No. His job is to represent the people of Massachusetts. I bet the people of Massachusetts, considering the record of my fine home state, were mostly against the war. I am guessing.

He did the people of Massachusetts a disservice, and now he's handing them them another loser campaign.

These are your words, not mine:
"Kerry made a political bet in voting for the war because he thought that's what the public wanted and he knew he'd be running for president."

So which is it? How's your cake? Are you eating too? By the way, "I'm guessing" that the moon is blue. What do you think?

gldstwmn

07-21-2004, 12:20 AM

You could become one, because Berger resigned today. :lol:

And even that's not going to be enough to get the bomb that is going to drop in a few days off of the front pages. :wavey:

CarneVaca

07-21-2004, 08:03 AM

These are your words, not mine:
"Kerry made a political bet in voting for the war because he thought that's what the public wanted and he knew he'd be running for president."

So which is it? How's your cake? Are you eating too? By the way, "I'm guessing" that the moon is blue. What do you think?

You gotta explain to me what your point is here. I said he thought that's what the public wanted. But he should have been listening to the people of Massachusetts, the people he represents, rather than playing politics. I don't see what's so hard to get about that. You are so blinded by partisanship you can't even admit your man made a HUUUUUUGE mistake in voting for a war that has killed thousands of people needlessly. Yet you are so quick to blast the Bush administration. Aren't they really partners in the killing?

A vote for Kerry is a vote for Bush.

dissention

07-21-2004, 08:22 AM

You could become one, because Berger resigned today. :lol:

I hear Susan Estrich was banging down Kerry's door this morning. :rolleyes: :laugh:

gldstwmn

07-21-2004, 09:07 PM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1264765,00.html

How has the US been spending other people's billions?

Simon Tisdall
Tuesday July 20, 2004
The Guardian

Henry Waxman is an awkward customer. For 30 years, this California congressman has probed, badgered and embarrassed US administrations of every hue.
As the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives' government reform committee, Congress's principal standing investigative panel, he is a difficult man to ignore.

Right now, Mr Waxman has a question on Iraq. In fact, he has several - and in typically robust fashion, he is demanding answers. What he wants to know is whether the Bush administration has been fiddling with Iraq's oil revenues.

He wrote to the Republican chairman of the reform committee on July 9, suggesting there was a serious case to answer. Subpoenas should be issued, he said, "to investigate potential mismanagement of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) by the United States".

The DFI was set up after last year's invasion as the depository for Iraq's multi-billion-dollar oil revenues and was administered, until June 28, by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - with notional UN oversight.

In particular, Mr Waxman is curious about "the administration's last-minute 'draw-down' of billions of dollars from the DFI for unspecified expenses" prior to last month's transfer of sovereignty. "For example, $1bn [about £550m] was withdrawn from the DFI during the last month of the CPA's existence for unspecified 'security' purposes."

The administration provided no information about how these funds would be spent, Mr Waxman says, and has yet to do so.

He is concerned about apparent attempts by the then CPA chief, Paul Bremer, to mandate and direct the spending of a further $4.6bn in Iraqi oil funds after the handover.

He is also exercised by the results of a belated audit of the DFI's accounts that concluded they were "open to fraudulent acts" and lacked "transparency". In all, the CPA earmarked more than $6bn of Iraqi funds in the last two months of its existence.

He wants to know whether CPA officials obstructed the auditors, KPMG, who were employed by the UN-created International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB).

And he also asks why the White House has "failed to comply with numerous IAMB requests [for information about] payments of approximately $1.5bn in DFI funds to Halliburton" - the Texas-based oil services company formerly headed by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Mr Waxman is not alone in asking questions. In April this year, the chairman of the IAMB, Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, wrote to Mr Bremer saying the awarding of three contracts to Halliburton without a competitive bidding process was "a source of concern". His letter appears to have had little effect.

The IAMB is now reviewing the CPA's overall conduct and must decide whether a full investigation is necessary.

Given the problems over alleged misappropriation and fraud that engulfed the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq from 1997 to 2003, and which are now under investigation, swift, rigorous action in this instance may also be deemed essential.

Officials from Congress's financial watchdog, the general accounting office, have pointed out meanwhile that while the CPA was keen to appropriate Iraqi oil revenues, it was much more reluctant to spend bilateral US aid funds.

Nearly all of the $20bn in the DFI was spent or allocated by June 28 - but only 2% of the $18.4bn promised by the US for reconstruction was actually spent. [B]According to White House figures, for example, and despite all the rhetoric about building a new Iraq, not a cent of America's own money had been spent on construction, healthcare, sanitation and water projects as of last month.
Last month, Iraq Revenue Watch, part of the Soros Foundations network, accused the CPA of "committing billions of dollars to ill-conceived projects" using Iraqi rather than US funds, effectively pre-empting budgetary decisions that should have been left to the interim Iraqi authority.

This is a charge also voiced by senior Iraqi officials in Baghdad, quoted anonymously this month by the Washington Post; and, intriguingly, by British government aid officials who reportedly blocked spending projects proposed by Mr Bremer in the dying days of the CPA. But at Westminster, only the Liberal Democrats have formally called for an investigation.

Such matters are plainly extremely sensitive as the US presidential election approaches - especially for George Bush and Mr Cheney.

In this context, two facts may be of interest: Halliburton was the largest single recipient of Iraqi oil funds during the occupation, according to the Army Corps of Engineers' figures released last month. And among US politicians, according to the Center for Public Integrity, Mr Bush has been the largest single recipient of US oil and gas industry campaign contributions since 1998 - his total stands at $1,724,579.

dissention

07-21-2004, 10:33 PM

This isn't surprising, Chris. In last weeks issue of The Nation, there was a great cover story called "The Rough Guide To Baghdad." It talked about how everything has gone to **** because of the American occupation and how Baghdad is, basically, a slum. The company that was given contracts to clean up Iraq already cashed the check over a year ago, but as of yet, they haven't done ONE THING. The economy is nonexistant because there's no water, the streets are filled with sewage, the hospitals don't have any supplies; it's awful.

I subscribe to them, so I'll be able to go get the article on theri site and post it; it's fascinating. :wavey:

dissention

07-21-2004, 10:47 PM

Here's the article. I can't link to it because you have to be a subscriber to use the site. :(

Originally published in "The Nation":

The Rough Guide to Baghdad
by Christian Parenti

A young white South African pilot leans in the cockpit doorway of a small NGO-chartered prop plane and gives his ten passengers the pre-flight pep talk: "At 10,000 above Baghdad International Airport, we will begin our descent in a spiral dive. This avoids surface-to-air missiles and ground fire, we hope. But don't worry, the maneuver is well within the technical capacities of the machine. Enjoy the flight to Baghdad."

The flight is fine--but the dive is fast, steep and scary.

Since April most roads into the capital of Iraq have been closed by sporadic combat and marauding gangs of looters. Westerners are special targets. Some elements in the resistance are said to pay $20,000 a head for hostages. The only truly open road is the heavily patrolled route north through Kurdistan to Turkey or Iran.

So now journalists fly in. It's the "safe" way to reach this politically diseased metropolis, which after fourteen months of US occupation and alleged reconstruction is tormented by a fever of violence, social breakdown, administrative anarchy and economic decline. The crisis now seems to feed on itself in an epidemiological fashion, with symptoms reinforcing root causes in a downward spiral. Lack of security--the central issue--means lack of electricity, which means no work, which means more violence, and so on. In response, Iraqis either cling to a blind faith that America will sort things out, or they turn to tradition, self-organization, Islam and armed resistance.

At the 1970s-style passenger terminal where we land, the long hallways and lounges are empty. Outside I find some Kroll security men headed to Baghdad and bum a ride. The twenty-kilometer dash from here to the city is called "RPG alley." This, despite the airport being contained within a huge US military base.

"This road is ridiculous," says the flak-jacketed Brit riding shotgun. He chambers a round in his short Heckler and Koch assault rifle. Recent ambushes have hit several convoys here. The only one that made the news ended with four more dead mercenaries from Blackwater USA, their SUV in flames. "The First Cav should have checkpoints every few clicks. And they should clear all surrounding areas," says the Brit. "I have no idea how they think this is supposed to work without a secure airport."

June was a bad month. The malady of occupation was in full recrudescence: car bombs killing scores each week, assassins culling the political class, routine but underreported sabotage. In the slums of east Baghdad--Sadr City--the newly arrived First Cavalry Division has almost nightly shootouts with Muqtada al-Sadr's Jeshi Mahdi, or Mahdi Army.

Ten days to sovereignty--the city waits. I awake, as usual, in a sweat to the sound of a rumbling boom. The big explosions are usually in the morning. This one sounds close. "Car bomb!" yells a colleague down the hall. Four of us are bivouacked in a cheap, almost empty Baghdad hotel run by a friendly but thuggish man from Falluja. The accommodations--along with our recently grown beards, dark tans, locally purchased cloths and preference for beat-up old cars--are all part of a low-tech "security strategy." If most Western journalists live in walled compounds with armed guards and still get kidnapped or shot up, we figure, do the opposite. Go local, blend in, try to pass as Iraqi, to the extent we are able.

"Abu Talat called," says my colleague. "The bomb was right by where his wife works. He's headed over. We're outta here in five minutes." At al-Rashid Street, in old Baghdad, blocks from the Central Bank of Iraq, we find the aftermath. It wasn't a car bomb, just a big IED (improvised explosive device) set to hit a money truck. But the timing was off by a few seconds--commuters took the blast instead. Four are wounded, one may have already died.

Iraqi cops and bank security men with Kalashnikovs mill around a shattered wall and some twisted metal gates, while two Arab TV crews shoot video. Thirty feet away sits a victim's shattered car. Looters are already at work stripping the salvageable parts. The cops pay no attention.

Thanks in part to police inaction, kidnapping, carjacking and murder have imposed an informal dusk-to-dawn curfew in many parts of this city. The director of the Baghdad morgue tells me that he sees an average of at least 600 unsolved murders every month, adding, "There are many more cases we don't receive." In a city of roughly 4 million, this translates into a crime rate about ten or fifteen times higher than the most violent cities in America--and this has serious economic consequences.

"Little things create big economic problems," explains Asaad Witwit, an elegant but casual Iraqi burgher, who owns four factories, three of which are currently closed. "Security is the biggest problem." We're meeting in the riverfront offices of the Iraqi Federation of Industry, a lobby group for private-sector manufacturers. Witwit is a leading board member. As we speak in English, three of his colleagues are commiserating and working the phones in fast, angry Arabic. The federation just bought a new truck-sized generator for its building, but the machine was stolen before it was even delivered. (US contractors deal with such problems by giving their mobile phone numbers to local sheiks so they can have first dibs on buying back their gear.)

Iraq's badly battered infrastructure is another problem, explains Witwit. "For example, you cannot make paint if you do not have clean water. Salts and minerals in the water ruin the paint. Or to make ice, or to can food, or process meat, you need clean water. We don't have that," he says philosophically. Behind him his colleagues rage on in Arabic about the "son of a whore" who sold them the generator and then most likely stole it back himself.

Then there are the cheap imports that have flooded the country since the US invasion. Witwit's sole working factory is a plastics plant that makes thermoses and coolers, but he has laid off most of his thirty employees because Chinese and Iranian imports are driving down prices. To upgrade and retool requires capital. "We need loan programs, investment, but the Americans do nothing. They only talk about the free market."

IIraq's social geography were reduced to political antipodes, one pole would be the fortified and manicured American-occupied Green Zone: a huge palace and office complex built by Saddam. The other pole would be the fetid, baking eastern Baghdad slum of Sadr City, also known as Al Thawra (the revolution).

To enter the Green Zone is to consume a thousand-milligram tablet of denial washed down with fresh-squeezed orange juice. The air conditioning here is superb; everyone looks happy.

David Bourne is working his laptop at the Iraqi Business Center, an empty, glass-walled subsection of the Convention Center. Bourne, wearing a crisp media-blue oxford shirt and dark slacks, exudes Ivy League confidence. He is here to do good and to do well, at once.

"When we get the business center running, local subcontractors will be able to network and learn about bidding," he explains, as if the occupation weren't already fourteen months old. "A lot of the reconstruction hasn't begun yet, and the center will facilitate capacity-building with local firms." He pauses and then adds with considered honesty: "A lot of Iraqis think it's just about who you know. But government-funded work requires competitive bidding, transparency, quality control, all that."

He won't comment on how Halliburton and Bechtel got their huge slices of the $18.5 billion reconstruction pie. But that's already a matter of public record. Bechtel got the first installment of its no-bid billion-dollar contract on April 17, 2003, after secretive dealings with the US Agency for International Development. Halliburton also had an inside track.

On the other side of a glass wall, a uniformed janitor pushes a Zamboni-like buffer across a shining expanse of floor. Iraq seems a thousand miles away.

Now unplug from the Matrix, and the temperature suddenly soars to a brutal 115 Fahrenheit. The air reeks of sewage; hot, furnace-like gusts blow grit into your eyes. An urbanized plain of misery and squalor opens before you: the hyperviolent Sadr City. The wide boulevards, laid down in the late 1950s by the optimistic planners of the Qasim regime, are now flooded for blocks at a stretch with ankle-deep pools of green, algae-rich sewage. Heaps of garbage smolder on the medians and in empty lots. Pirated electrical wires crisscross dense side streets of mud-brick homes. Small flocks of mangy goats and sheep, shepherded by women in flowing black abayas, forage in the trash.

The lumpen Shiites who live here are derided by Baghdad's more urbane Sunnis as sharugees--an insulting term meaning "easterners" but connoting ignorance and filth. Like the N-word among some African-Americans, streetwise young Shiites have defiantly appropriated sharugee for their own use.

The sewage problem in Sadr City is not merely unsightly; it is a major health threat. As the head of the local public works department, or Baladia, explained it, the sewers here were never great, but the constant backup and nauseating overflow is a new problem. First there was bomb damage and then, as garbage trucks were looted or destroyed, trash clogged the sewers. Most of the special trucks needed to clear the backed-up lines were also looted. The last four were recently commandeered by US contractors for use all over Baghdad. Bechtel has the $1.8 billion contract to rebuild Iraq's water, sewage and electrical systems. Electrical clearance work and the rebuilding of water systems is also being carried out by a company called Washington Group International. Local engineers say the firm has done next to nothing.

At Sadr City's Al Jawadir hospital the halls are crowded with worried-looking men and women. An emaciated, greenish man is wheeled by on a gurney. Here one clearly sees the social impact of the sewer problem and the general chaos of which it is a subset.

The hospital director, Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, explains that the hospital serves at least a million and a half people and sees 3,000 patients a day, but suffers for lack of adequate medicine, equipment, clean water and security. "We have to get clean water shipped in," he says. "A German NGO delivers it in a tanker truck." Typhoid is rampant, he adds, and an outbreak of hepatitis E is gathering momentum, with forty new cases a week. "The coalition promises money and supplies, but there is never enough," says the director. "I am forced to reuse needles and deny people anesthesia. We only do serious emergency surgeries."

Upstairs on one of the wards we meet a 25-year-old internist named Ali Kadhem. Like many doctors, he speaks English. His face is open and boyishly innocent, and he possesses an understated yet intense personal charisma. When he talks, the other doctors and orderlies listen and watch.

Ali says gunmen enter the hospital demanding special treatment for relatives. Two weeks ago an addict pulled a pistol on him and stole morphine. One doctor was shot right in front of the hospital by thieves. He says that since April, US troops have raided the wards on three different occasions, looking for wounded Jeshi Mahdi fighters.

"They interrogated the wounded and searched in a very rough way and tore down religious posters," says the young physician. Several wounded Mahdi men, as well as civilians, have fled the hospital in fear of the raids.

"I know that some of these people died because they hid in their homes and we could not treat them," says Ali. "We could have saved them. The cause of all these problems is the Americans. We need for them to go."

The Mahdi's fighting in Karbala and Najaf, provoked in large part by US assaults, alienated huge swaths of the mainstream Shiite community--particularly the merchant class that depends on pilgrim traffic to the holy cities. But spend a day or two in Al Thawra and it's not hard to understand why people follow Muqtada al-Sadr. He is a junior religious scholar, unlike his father, who was an ayatollah, but Muqtada's leadership is primarily political, and his following, likewise, is Shiite but religiously diverse. His power is rooted in his willingness to oppose the occupation openly, just as his martyred father opposed Saddam.

More practically, he is followed because the branches of his organization deliver a slim modicum of order and stability to a few parts of Baghdad and cities farther south. In front of the hospital a man named Uda Mohame explains the logic: "Everyone cooperates with the Jeshi Mahdi. There are no police here, no government. The Mahdi direct traffic, they fix things, they do all the work."

At the Sadr office on one of Al Thawra's main streets, I try to meet Muqtada's local representative, a 29-year-old sheik named Hassan Edhary, but he is on the run. The First Cav wants him, dead or alive. His two predecessors are already in Abu Ghraib. A few weeks ago, US tanks blew up this office. Reconstruction started the next day at dawn.

"Little boys cleaned the bricks while men rebuilt," explains a local man named Samir.

Now the walled compound, draped in black banners mourning the dead and topped with big fluttering green-and-black flags, looks as good as new. The men here are all Mahdi but they are unarmed by day. There can be no formal interviews, I am told, without the sheik's permission.

For the better part of a week I return again and again looking for Sheik Edhary, but he's still on the lam. As I am leaving the office after one failed attempt, a young Mahdi man says to me, "Look, the Americans attack us. That is why we fight. We have a right to respond."

It's late afternoon, another trip to Sadr City. One of my colleagues from the dive hotel and our translator roll out determined to find the Mahdi in action. They're out here somewhere; we've already seen a US patrol of two tanks and three armored Humvees.

On one of the slum's main thoroughfares, al-Radhewi Street, are several walls marked with a message in English. Big block letters read Vietnam Street. Farther on, a wall bears a crudely painted mural depicting a modified version of an infamous Abu Ghraib torture photo. It is the prisoner in the hood and cloak standing on a box, arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his limbs. Next to him in the mural is the Statue of Liberty, but in place of her torch she holds the lever of an electrical switch connected to the wires. Below is scrawled: The Freedom Form George Bosh. We snap photos and move on.

Then, before we find them, the Jeshi Mahdi find us. Two men in a sedan are suddenly next to us. "Pull over!" Now they are at our doors, hands on the pistols in their waistbands. "Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you photographing things?"

"Sahafee canadee, sahafee canadee!" I show them my counterfeit Canadian press pass. Our translator is talking fast, explaining that we are anti-occupation, that we are trying to show the truth. He's naming his family, naming sheiks, naming Sadr men who are old friends. The undercover Mahdi fire back questions and suggest that we get out of the car. We show them the digital photos of the graffiti and offer to erase all the shots, but we ignore their request to get out. More fast Arabic goes on. Finally the Mahdi begin to relax.

"This is called Vietnam Street because this is where we kill Americans," says one of them. "We are in a war with them. That is why we stopped you. You understand? We have to protect our people." The man in charge adjusts his pistol one more time, looks around, then says, "You can go." We thank them profusely and then hit the gas. The hard spike of adrenaline in my chest releases in a warm wash of endorphins.

The next day I head back looking for Sheik Edhary, but he's still underground. On our way a pickup truck just ahead of us abruptly reverses into our taxicab with a slam, then does a fast three-point turn over the median. Suddenly everyone is backing up and turning around fast.

"Fighting ahead. We have to go!" says Hussein, a translator, journalist and computer hacker who hangs out with our ragtag crew. The next day Al Jazeera reports "around twenty Iraqi resistance fighters" killed or wounded in clashes all over Sadr City.

At the offices of the District Advisory Council, a body "elected" in a hasty, poorly publicized, US-managed referendum, there's more evidence of war. "Sorry, man. Nobody around. We're just here to secure the building," says Staff Sgt. Josh York. The twenty-five-member DAC dispersed several weeks ago after their leader was blown away in a political hit. Now the council's compound is a small US firebase.

"They've been hitting us with RPGs every night," says Ser-geant York. "No casualties yet, but last night we took eleven RPGs, one at a time all through the night." The young soldier doesn't look nervous or afraid, just beat-down tired.

Finally Sheik Edhary surfaces; perhaps this has something to do with the Americans' new offer to allow Sadr's organization into electoral politics. (The Sadr people are still quite cagey about what they will do on that front.) Edhary grants an interview, but mostly we just sit and watch him in action, Hussein quietly translating the conversations around us.

Edhary wears a white turban and flowing robes. His beard is full but short, like Muqtada's. He is dark, intense and very handsome. I can't help thinking that Edhary looks like a cinematically improved version of the real Muqtada, who is stooped, pudgy and frowning.

A stream of supplicants files through Edhary's little office, asking for advice, money and letters. One lives in an IDP (internally displaced people) camp and has no roof. Can the organization help? Edhary says, "I don't have enough people to go investigate your claim. But if you can find a religious sheik in your area to write a letter on your behalf, then come back."

A young doctor explains that a group of medical workers has some money and wants to open a free or low-cost pharmacy to serve the people. Can the office contribute some money? The sheik leans close and plays with his string of black prayer beads as the young man talks. Finally, he tells the doctor that Hussein, our hacker pal, can help the clinic with its computers. Hussein and the doctor exchange numbers.

Then come a few high-tension cell-phone calls. Some sweaty Mahdi men rush in. They've just busted looters with four stolen trucks full of sugar. It turns out the trucks belong to a European NGO, not the government or some rich company. The sheik wants the vehicles and sugar returned, via the police, to the NGO.

"We have the trucks in storage. Can we turn them over tomorrow?" asks the rotund Mahdi man in charge of the bust. He's wearing a dirty football jersey. "I am your servant. I have given my whole life to the religion, but I really cannot do this tonight."

Someone else bends over and whispers to the sheik. Edhary looks worried. There's more whispering. Edhary leans away from the men at his desk and snaps taut a section of his black prayer beads, then counts the little glass balls. He is "asking God" for advice. An even bead count means yes; odd means no.

"No! No! Absolutely not," the sheik bounces up from the desk, his outer black robe slipping from one shoulder. He's addressing the sweaty man. "The trucks must be returned tonight. If the trucks do not move now we will be blamed. Either you do it now, or just go and don't do it at all. I will find someone else." The sheik is electric with stress but dignified.

"I am your servant, as you wish," says the Mahdi guy, but he looks pissed as he and his posse sweep out to deal with the trucks.

If there is anything like "progress" in Iraq it takes place here, under the radar, in the rubble of occupation. Sadr's followers, despite many faults, including thuggishness and misogyny, are central to creating what order there is in this ravaged ghetto.

On the last Friday before the handover I go back to Vietnam Street for a mass prayer. This time, the Jeshi Mahdi are out in full force, armed with pistols and AK-47s. Line after line of them are politely and efficiently searching a crowd of more than 10,000 people who have come to lay their prayer mats in the street, worship and hear a political sermon. The Mahdi search me several times, and I am ushered to the front, walking barefoot across the solid field of prayer mats; some are mere towels, others are intricate, colorful carpets. The sermon, by a Sadr sheik named Ous al-Khafji, attacks the occupation but calls for calm. The Mahdi have declared a cease-fire.

Under a blazing sun, with squads of men and boys spraying rose water on the congregants, the crowd chants, "Ya Allah, Ya Ali, Ya Husein," meaning with Allah, etc., then "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" At the end the worshipers all shake hands, then disperse.

Later I am granted an interview with some Mahdi fighters. They make sure I can't see where I am headed as we drive deep into the side streets of Sadr City. Our interview takes place in an abandoned shop; there are three fighters, two of whom were jailed and tortured under Saddam. They repeat the party line about wanting peace but add, "If the Americans arrest people we will strike."

One of them moves a tarp and reveals a huge 155-millimeter artillery shell and a long spool of wire. It's an IED. "If they attack, we have this rat poison, for the American rats," says the fighter pointing to the bomb. "But God willing, we will not be forced to use it." Time for me to go.

Clearly "sovereignty" remains fragmented, localized, ephemeral and mostly imaginary. Neither Iraqis nor the Americans have control. The new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, is threatening martial law. How he might impose this and how it would differ from the current methods of occupation are difficult to envision. In the new Iraq, only chaos is truly sovereign.

jwd

07-22-2004, 08:17 PM

gldstwmn:

And even that's not going to be enough to get the bomb that is going to drop in a few days off of the front pages.

YEA!, some "BOMB" that report was!! :laugh:

dissention

07-23-2004, 10:34 AM

YEA!, some "BOMB" that report was!! :laugh:

That flight manifest wasn't a bomb? The new Dulles video wasn't a bomb? The comments made at the press conference yesterday by some of the Commission members weren't bombs? The Iran allegations aren't bombs? Someone needs to pay attention. ;)

gldstwmn

07-31-2004, 08:00 PM

YEA!, some "BOMB" that report was!! :laugh:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4904237.html

Last update: July 30, 2004 at 10:07 PM
Dayton: FAA, NORAD hid 9/11 failures
Greg Gordon, Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent
July 31, 2004 DAYT0731

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged Friday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have covered up "catastrophic failures" that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hijackings.

"For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

During the hearing, leaders of the Sept. 11 commission urged Congress to promptly create a national intelligence chief to command a fragmented U.S. counterterrorism effort before Al-Qaida strikes again.

"The intelligence community is not going to get its job done unless somebody is really in charge," said the commission's vice chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. Hamilton and commission chairman Tom Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, also pressed for creation of a National Counterterrorism Center to end intelligence-sharing failures that may have enabled the Sept. 11 hijackers.

"What we're trying to do is force the sharing of information and then make one person responsible," Kean said.

The Senate committee, moving with urgency despite Congress' summer recess, gave the two leaders a warm reception in the first of 15 or more congressional hearings in coming weeks on the 40 recommendations laid out in the commission's book-length report.

"I think you stood your ground very convincingly," Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the committee's ranking Democrat, told Kean and Hamilton as the hearing concluded.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the committee chair, said she plans to hold several more hearings in hopes that the panel can adopt legislation by Oct. 1, possibly for floor consideration after the November election.

Dayton: 'NORAD lied'

During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading.

The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed.

And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- "farther than they were before they took off."

Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people."

He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth."

Asked about Dayton's allegation, a spokesman for Colorado Springs-based NORAD said, "We stand on our testimony to the commission" and declined to discuss the 2001 chronology.

Erin Utzinger, a spokeswoman for Dayton, said the senator "assumes the FAA knew of NORAD's coverup."

FAA spokeswoman Rebecca Trexler said the agency "has never and would never intentionally misrepresent or alter information. We worked very closely with the 9/11 commission and provided them with everything that was available to us."

Dayton told reporters that he skipped festivities at the Democratic National Committee Tuesday night and sat in his hotel room until 2:30 a.m. reading the commission report. After piecing together the section about the FAA and NORAD, he said, he could not fall asleep.

Dayton outraged

"I'm a strong defender of government," he said. "When government fails, it really outrages me. It just destroys peoples' trust and faith."

Using the chronology, Dayton argued that if the FAA had promptly sent a systemwide message about the hijackings, the pilot of the fourth plane seized, United Airlines Flight 93, might have been able to secure the cockpit doors and land the plane.

Passengers, including Minnesota native Tom Burnett, Jr., "could very well be alive," he said.

"This is unbelievable negligence," Dayton said. "It doesn't matter if we spend $550 billion annually on our national defense, if we reorganize our intelligence or if we restructure congressional oversight if people don't pick up the phone to call one another."

He also noted that NORAD could not find the hijacked jetliners because terrorists turned off their transponders and NORAD lacked adequate radar to locate them without that beamed signal.

Dayton said NORAD also falsely claimed that during the hijackings, it had F-16 Combat Air Patrol planes in place at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and an AWAC command ship in the air to protect the nation's capital.

Dayton, a former Minnesota state auditor, called the FAA's and NORAD's failures "the most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I've ever, under those extreme circumstances, witnessed in the public sector."

gldstwmn

07-31-2004, 08:04 PM

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/07/07_400.html

Who's in Charge Here?

What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action.

By Gail Sheehy

July 22, 2004

Unanswered Questions

The 9/11 commission’s report is a devastating indictment of the nation’s response to Al Qaeda—but perhaps not devastating enough. Observers who closely followed the commission’s hearings, including family members of the victims, believe that there are still crucial investigative trails the commission didn’t pursue far enough. Here are three of the questions they would like to see answered:

Who financed the attacks? Was the Saudi government involved?

The commission did not undertake an in-depth investigation of the hijackers’ money trail—a matter Senator Bob Graham, who chaired an earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, considered to be among its most important jobs. The commission’s staff statement on terrorist financing, published June 2004, noted that “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding.” But it added that “we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaeda.”

Graham says his inquiry found "information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States." But 27 pages of that section of the Joint Inquiry's report were censored by the Bush administration on national security grounds.

Says Graham, "My contention is that significant support was being given to all 19 [hijackers], but the FBI was not interested in answering that question for our inquiry.” Graham raises the further question: “Did [the FBI] have directions not to go there in their pursuit? If that foreign government happens to be Saudi Arabia, this would not be the only time that country got favorable treatment.”

"[T]here remains unexplained a range of highly suspicious activities involving Saudi nationals who provided support for the hijackers while they lived among us," Graham continues. "The possibility that foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia's provided support to the hijackers is one of the most serious issues surrounding 9-11, and it deserves additional investigation."

"Reasonable people may disagree over the interpretation of the available facts. I believe these questions require further investigation."

"I again call on President Bush to authorize the release of these 27 pages of the Joint Inquiry report."

Did airline managers try to cover up the hijackings—at a time when lives could still have been saved?

The commission did not pursue crucial evidence on the airlines’ response to the hijackings, including a stunning tape made by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas as the first hijacked plane, Flight 11, was being overtaken. The tape was seized by the FBI, which has insisted on keeping it secret; Mother Jones learned of its content from family members of the 9/11 airline victims who were allowed to hear it, but not to take notes or record it.

American Airlines top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m. —25 minutes before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower—that a group of men described by flight attendants as Middle Eastern had stabbed two crew members, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit. But when airline managers were discussing the hijackings, family members who heard the tape say, their response was: “Don’t spread this around. Keep it close. Let’s keep it among ourselves.”

“It was disgusting,” said one of the relatives, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. “The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place.”

Why hasn’t anyone been fired or even reprimanded for the government’s failure to prevent or effectively respond to the attacks? Where was the leadership?

The commission suggested the creation of a national antiterrorism “czar” who would coordinate intelligence on terrorist activities as well as spearhead the response to any attacks. But it sidestepped the more critical matter of accountability for past mistakes. With the exception of CIA director George Tenet, not one of the top leaders who bungled the government’s response to Al Qaeda has been forced out, and the White House has admitted to no mistakes. In our democracy, a terrorism “czar” would still take his orders from the president; no amount of bureaucratic reorganization can replace leadership from the top.

“Who’s our quarterback” in case of a future terrorist attack? “Who’s in charge?” That was the core question members of the 9-11 commission put to every government official they interviewed. “The reason that you’re hearing such a tone of urgency in our voices is because the answer to the question was almost uniform,” said commissioner Jamie Gorelick at the press conference following today’s release of the 600 page final 9-11 Commission Report. The person in charge, she said the commissioners had been told over and over again, would be the president.

“It is an impossible situation for that to remain the case,” Gorelick observed. Impossible, because the commission’s report clearly shows that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed.

Yet, even though the commission’s report paints a stark portrait of opportunities lost in defending against terrorism, many observers—especially the families of some 9/11 victims, who pushed hard for the commission’s creation—were disappointed in its failure to provide a timeline of the actions of the nation’s top leaders that morning. Such an analysis, they believe, would have shown conclusively that blame for failing to defend against the attacks goes all the way to the top.

My involvement with the families goes back almost three years to my first interviews with the four widows who became known as “the Jersey girls.” They were among the families I followed to write my book, Middletown, America. As early as April, 2003, three of the widows--Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, and Kristen Breitweiser--had been aghast to discover that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared to have effectively sat out one of the worst foreign assaults on the American homeland in the nation’s history. In what may be one of the most remarkable statements in the report, the commission concludes that “[t]he Secretary of Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning’s key events were over.”

Rumsfeld’s public testimony before the commission last March was bizarre. When Gorelick asked the Secretary of Defense what he had done to protect the nation—or even the Pentagon—during the “summer of threat” preceding the attacks, Rumsfeld replied simply that “it was a law-enforcement issue.” (So, observers were left to wonder, should the FBI be out with shoulder-launched missiles?)

“We still don’t have a full accounting of Rumsfeld’s whereabouts and knowledge on the morning of 9-11,” Gorelick acknowledged after the commission’s final public hearing. “We don’t have answers to the questions that you’re asking. But I’m going to make sure it’s nailed down,” she promised. Yet the final published report offers no further details on Rumsfeld’s inactions or the reason he was “out of the loop” (as the secretary himself put it) that morning.

The National Military Command Center (NMCC) inside the Pentagon was the nerve center of the military’s response to the attacks on 9-11. But the lead military officer that day, Brigadier General Montague Winfield, told the commission that the center had been leaderless.“For 30 minutes we couldn’t find [Secretary Rumsfeld].” Where was Rumsfeld on 9-11? I put the question to the commission's vice chair, Lee Hamilton, following the release of the report the commissioners call “the definitive account of 9-11.”

“We investigated very carefully Mr. Rumsfeld’s actions,” said Hamilton. “He was having breakfast with Congressional leaders, and they hear a plane has hit the Pentagon, and he runs out.”

“He had to have been told before the Pentagon was hit that two trade centers were hit and the country was under attack,” I suggested.

Was the commission comfortable with the fact that the country’s Secretary of Defense was not in the chain of command or present in the Pentagon’s command center until all four suicide hijacked planes were down?

“I’m not going to answer that question,” said Hamilton, and turned away. The commission did provide some detail on the movements of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but none that offers much reassurance. The report shows that nothing Bush and Cheney did or said that day had any effect on the devastation planned by 19 suicide hijackers and their lethal leader—despite warnings going back to 1996 that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network were an urgent threat to America’s national security.

When President Bush finally agreed to have a “conversation” with the 9-11 commissioners--provided it was not under oath, not recorded, and Cheney was at his side--the account the two top leaders gave was murky and unverifiable. On the crucial matter of whether fighters should be sent up to protect the nation’s capital, for example, the final report says that “the Vice President stated that he called the President to discuss the rules of engagement for ordering [air cover].” But, it continues, the two did not order air cover because it would “do no good unless pilots had instructions on whether they were authorized to shoot if the plane would not divert.” The job of issuing such instructions belonged to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

The commission’s staff report had earlier cited the legal chain of command in case of hijackings: “If a hijack was confirmed, procedure called for … the President to empower the Secretary of Defense to send up a military escort, and if necessary, give pilots shoot-down orders.” The final report confirms the same chain of command and adds this detail: “The president apparently spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld for the first time that morning shortly after 10:00”--more than an hour after the first World Trade Center tower was hit, 20 minutes after the Pentagon was attacked, and moments before Flight 93 was wrestled to the ground by passengers. And even in this brief conversation, the urgent question at hand doesn’t seem to have come up: The report states that “no one can recall the content of this conversation but it was a brief call in which the subject of the shootdown authority was not discussed.”

The President emphasized to the commissioners that he had authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft. But the final report states flatly that “there is no documentary evidence for this call.” It notes that neither Cheney’s chief of staff nor his wife Lynne, both of whom were taking notes that morning, made note of a call between the President and Vice President. Only when a military aide rushed into the White House bunker to announce--erroneously, as it turned out--that Flight 93 was 80 miles away from Washington, did Cheney apparently take it upon himself to give the order for fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane.

Don Rumsfeld is known as a take-charge kind of guy. Why was he so uncharacteristically passive in the face of terrorists who were able to kill nearly 3,000 Americans in one morning? It is impossible to answer, and now that the commission has rolled up its report, there will be no forum for follow-up questions. But it is worth noting the ideological context: For years, the secretary had focused on what he considered to be America’s most pressing national security need--and it wasn’t fighting Al Qaeda.

Even before the 2000 presidential election, Rumsfeld commissioned a “blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence” along with his future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and future-Vice President Cheney, as well as President Bush’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. The plan shows that Bush intended to take military control of Persian Gulf oil, whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power, and intended to retain control of the region even if there was no threat.

The report, written by the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century, also advocated “regime change” in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Iran. An unnamed British member of Parliament was quoted as saying of the report: “This is a blueprint for U.S. domination--a new world order of their making.” The report also complained that the changes it recommended were likely to take a long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In the summer of 2001, when security agencies were regularly warning of a catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office “sponsored a study of ancient empires—Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols—to figure out how they maintained dominance,” according to the New York Times.

Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was given information that three of the names on the airplane passenger manifests were suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The notes he composed at the time asserted that he wanted the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL. [Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” He presented the idea to Bush the next day. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke later wrote in his book Against All Enemies, “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld and [Assistant Defense Secretary] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.”

Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld set up “a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” In May, 2002, Time reported that “Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of September 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed.”

Johnny Stew

07-31-2004, 08:52 PM

A vote for Kerry is a vote for Bush.

The most ironic thing about your opinion, is that most political pundits and analysts state that Kerry is probably too liberal for his own good. While you complain he's far too conservative.

Which leads me to think that, despite popular belief, the most die-hard liberal around here isn't dissention or gldstwmn (or even myself)! :laugh: ;)

CarneVaca

07-31-2004, 09:53 PM

The most ironic thing about your opinion, is that most political pundits and analysts state that Kerry is probably too liberal for his own good. While you complain he's far too conservative.

Which leads me to think that, despite popular belief, the most die-hard liberal around here isn't dissention or gldstwmn (or even myself)! :laugh: ;)

There was a time when true liberals risked getting their asses thrown in jail for protesting a war. That was John Kerry some 30 years ago. Now he says he went too far. In my book, he's betrayed real liberals. Hell with him.

Johnny Stew

07-31-2004, 10:10 PM

There was a time when true liberals risked getting their asses thrown in jail for protesting a war. That was John Kerry some 30 years ago. Now he says he went too far. In my book, he's betrayed real liberals. Hell with him.

Read my post about Ralph Nader... where do his betrayals sit with you? Or is it ok if he just betrays the people around him and the politicians he once supported, so long as he doesn't appear to betray "the cause"? ;)

gldstwmn

07-31-2004, 11:46 PM

Read my post about Ralph Nader... where do his betrayals sit with you? Or is it ok if he just betrays the people around him and the politicians he once supported, so long as he doesn't appear to betray "the cause"? ;)

Oh but Carne doesn't support Nader you see. He doesn't support anything. He's just against whatever you happen to be for. It's a clever way to remain above reproach.

dissention

08-01-2004, 11:35 AM

Read my post about Ralph Nader... where do his betrayals sit with you? Or is it ok if he just betrays the people around him and the politicians he once supported, so long as he doesn't appear to betray "the cause"? ;)

I believe Carne is with Cobb at the moment. He must've seen the light about Nader, his egomania, and his "do anything" approach to get votes.

Johnny Stew

08-01-2004, 12:46 PM

I believe Carne is with Cobb at the moment. He must've seen the light about Nader, his egomania, and his "do anything" approach to get votes.

Yikes! I didn't realize he had changed his mind.
First Dean, then Nader, and now David Cobb... our Carne flip-flops more than John Kerry does! ;) :xoxo:

dissention

08-01-2004, 01:44 PM

Yikes! I didn't realize he had changed his mind.
First Dean, then Nader, and now David Cobb... our Carne flip-flops more than John Kerry does! ;) :xoxo:

That he does. :lol: I was shocked that he supported Dean, especially with Dean's stance on capital punishment.

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 02:49 PM

Read my post about Ralph Nader... where do his betrayals sit with you? Or is it ok if he just betrays the people around him and the politicians he once supported, so long as he doesn't appear to betray "the cause"? ;)

That's some pretty warped logic, Johnny. Nader stayed true to liberal and progressive principles all along and when he and like-minded thinkers are abandoned by the Democratic Party because they are too afraid to stand up to the fascist right, then he is a traitor for staying true to his principles!? You can't possibly believe that.

Clinton promised to change the policy on gays in the military. As soon as he took office he reversed himself when he couldn't take the pressure, and settled for that joke of a policy, "Don't ask, don't tell."

Kerry claims he supports gay unions but he's against gay marriages.

These guys want to have it both ways. They are the ones who are betraying the cause.

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 02:50 PM

Oh but Carne doesn't support Nader you see. He doesn't support anything. He's just against whatever you happen to be for. It's a clever way to remain above reproach.

If "anything" means "whatever goldstwmn believes is right," which seems to be the way you approach politics, then you are quite right.

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 02:53 PM

I believe Carne is with Cobb at the moment. He must've seen the light about Nader, his egomania, and his "do anything" approach to get votes.

I haven't made a definite switch. But I'd be careful about the "do anything" argument, considering Kerry has even gone as far as saying he shouldn't have made some of the claims he did when he was protesting Vietnam now that he's become warmonger to get himself elected.

I seem to recall before you drank the cool aid last week in Boston you were also considering voting Green.

dissention

08-01-2004, 02:54 PM

dissention

08-01-2004, 02:57 PM

I haven't made a definite switch. But I'd be careful about the "do anything" argument, considering Kerry has even gone as far as saying he shouldn't have made some of the claims he did when he was protesting Vietnam now that he's become warmonger to get himself elected.

I seem to recall before you drank the cool aid last week in Boston you were also considering voting Green.

I didn't drink the kool aid, I'm still in the same boat as you and can't decide if I should vote Cobb or Kerry. But, if you want to call my positive responses to such great patriots as Braun, Kucinich, and Sharpton "drinking the kool aid," go right ahead because I like 'em. And I like Kennedy, too. It seems to me that if someone likes anyone in the Democratic party, they're not a true liberal in your eyes. Who knows if that's how you feel or not, but that's how it comes off.

One thing I can guarantee to you, though, is that Nader will not get my vote this year or ever again. He's pitiful.

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 02:58 PM

My problem lies with his embracing the fascist right and other nutty characters to get his name on ballots.

It bothers me too. But saying he's "embraced" the right for helping him to get on the ballot is disengenuous, and you know it. He's done nothing of the sort. Perhaps if the Democrats stopped acting like fascists bastards and stopped putting up all kinds of roadblocks in every state to prevent Nader from running, this wouldn't be necessary.

Besides, perhaps you're too young to remember, but the right helping Nader is the same dirty tricks the Democrats used on Perot years ago. I don't recall the Republicans whining about having a strong third-party candidate as much as the Democrats do. It's this kind of hypocrisy and abandonment of principles that's turned me off to the War Party Lite. You like the Democrats? You can have them.

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 03:03 PM

I didn't drink the kool aid, I'm still in the same boat as you and can't decide if I should vote Cobb or Kerry. But, if you want to call my positive responses to such great patriots as Braun, Kucinich, and Sharpton "drinking the kool aid," go right ahead because I like 'em. And I like Kennedy, too. It seems to me that if someone likes anyone in the Democratic party, they're not a true liberal in your eyes. Who knows if that's how you feel or not, but that's how it comes off.

One thing I can guarantee to you, though, is that Nader will not get my vote this year or ever again. He's pitiful.

Sharpton is the only one with a set. Too bad no one really takes him seriously. Kucinich folded like a cheap suit, and that's very disappointing. Braun has class, but do you really think the party takes her seriously? Really, tell the truth.

I didn't realize you remain undecided. You were coming across as having allowed them to succeed in the brainwashing. :) Power to you, then, my friend.

dissention

08-01-2004, 03:17 PM

Sharpton is the only one with a set. Too bad no one really takes him seriously. Kucinich folded like a cheap suit, and that's very disappointing. Braun has class, but do you really think the party takes her seriously? Really, tell the truth.

I didn't realize you remain undecided. You were coming across as having allowed them to succeed in the brainwashing. :) Power to you, then, my friend.

I don't think they take Braun seriously, but I could care less if they did or not. I take her seriously and that's all that matters. I was a Braun fan from the beginning and that hasn't changed one bit.

Kucinich did fold, but I wouldn't go to the extent you would. He held out the longest and kept his integrity.

:)

CarneVaca

08-01-2004, 03:26 PM

I take her seriously and that's all that matters.

Right. Sometimes you just have to decide for yourself what is right, as opposed to falling in line because the party says so.

The tactics of the party bosses in running that convention, and how they muzzled people, were nothing short of tyrannical. Which makes Sharpton's speech that much more delightful and important.

Johnny Stew

08-01-2004, 04:28 PM

That's some pretty warped logic, Johnny. Nader stayed true to liberal and progressive principles all along and when he and like-minded thinkers are abandoned by the Democratic Party because they are too afraid to stand up to the fascist right, then he is a traitor for staying true to his principles!? You can't possibly believe that.

Clinton promised to change the policy on gays in the military. As soon as he took office he reversed himself when he couldn't take the pressure, and settled for that joke of a policy, "Don't ask, don't tell."

Kerry claims he supports gay unions but he's against gay marriages.

These guys want to have it both ways. They are the ones who are betraying the cause.

There's a difference between losing faith in a politician, and saying one thing to a friend's face while doing something else behind their back.
Nader is so intent on making himself look like the good guy, that's he's willing to bash longtime friends (even going so far as trying to ruin some careers), in order to appear as if his nose is clean.

And, again, I was not happy that Clinton wimped out on some of his promises to the gay community... but hell, that "don't ask, don't tell" policy was sure better than what we had before. Which, for the record, was nothing.

I'm also going to say right here and now that if Kerry pushes gay unions but opposes gay marriage, I'm fine with that.
What is at stake is the fact that, as of now, gay couples have NO legal recourse or rights. If our unions are recognized, we will have that.
Being allowed the right to marry would be the ultimate victory, but if the religious and conservative zealots are so hell-bent on owning the word "marriage," then fine, let them have it. I don't need a word to define my relationship anyway, just so long as I have the same rights and protections as everyone else.
It's a compromise I am willing to make.

Johnny Stew

08-01-2004, 04:35 PM

Sometimes you just have to decide for yourself what is right, as opposed to falling in line because the party says so.

And then there's going to extremes out of the fear of appearing to be a conformist. ;)

I don't vote for anyone "because the party says so," I vote for who I feel is the best man for the job.
And right now I believe that Kerry is the best man for the job. "The Job" being both as a president and as the candidate most likely to win out over Bush.

As I said before, I don't have to agree with someone's every opinion to feel that they're the best man for the job.
If I wanted someone who shared 100% of my opinions and stances, I'd have to run for office.

dissention

08-01-2004, 05:16 PM

The tactics of the party bosses in running that convention, and how they muzzled people, were nothing short of tyrannical. Which makes Sharpton's speech that much more delightful and important.

I agree. There were many people, myself included, who were at that convention and cursing McAuliffe. He's one of the biggest pr*cks you'd ever meet.

jwd

08-01-2004, 07:58 PM

Is it so illogical to think that someone wouldn't vote for either candidate (Kerry or Bush) because they felt they were equally as bad? :shrug: So be it.

Johnny Stew

08-01-2004, 10:21 PM

Is it so illogical to think that someone wouldn't vote for either candidate (Kerry or Bush) because they felt they were equally as bad? :shrug: So be it.

Joe, my friend, it is illogical to me, because Kerry hasn't even had the opportunity to do the job yet.

Johnny Stew

08-01-2004, 10:25 PM

I thought this was interesting.

Timeline Comparing The Lives Of George W. Bush & John Kerry (http://www.independent-media.tv/itemprint.cfm?fmedia_id=7073&fcategory_desc=The%20Zero%20and%20The%20Hero)

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 09:28 AM

And then there's going to extremes out of the fear of appearing to be a conformist. ;)

Fear, Johnny, is the last word you should use to characterize my position. If I were as fearful as you and the rest of the Democrats, then I surely would vote for Kerry. For, you see, I don't believe the nation is so fragile that it will crumble under four more years of Bush, as the Kerry people would have me believe.

The Democratic convention was an affront to the idea of free speech and did nothing to explain why Kerry is the better choice to get us out of the morass the Bushers got us into.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 09:30 AM

Is it so illogical to think that someone wouldn't vote for either candidate (Kerry or Bush) because they felt they were equally as bad? :shrug: So be it.

No. What's illogical, and I suspect you'll agree with me on this, is voting for a man who voted with the current administration and now is trying to position himself as being so diametrically different.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 09:33 AM

Joe, my friend, it is illogical to me, because Kerry hasn't even had the opportunity to do the job yet.

Whaaat!!!??? It's illogical to vote against Kerry because he hasn't done the job yet?

That is about one of the silliest statements anyone's ever made in regards to elections, Johnny. If it's illogical for me to vote for Kerry because he hasn't had the chance to do the job yet, then I must vote for everyone who hasn't done the job yet just to see how well they would perform. Not only is that grossly illogical and unrealistic, it would completey redefine the concept of democracy.

Very silly, Johnny. ;)

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 09:38 AM

Right. Sometimes you just have to decide for yourself what is right, as opposed to falling in line because the party says so.

The tactics of the party bosses in running that convention, and how they muzzled people, were nothing short of tyrannical. Which makes Sharpton's speech that much more delightful and important.

True, but it seems you fault anyone who is voting for Kerry and accuse them of not deciding for themselves. I think most people, like me, who are going to vote for Kerry have done just that - I decided for myself that no candidate is perfect, they all have done things I am not wild about. Kerry just represents the best shot at winning the WH and ousting W, which mostly is my goal. That is why I, being a realist and practicle person, am voting for him. I think it is erroneous to think that any satement made by voting for someone like Nader or another third party candidate who will NEVER win. I think thinking "what the hell" four more years of W may have the effect of waking America up is inaccurate. I think four more years of W will cost decades of work to advance civil rights and further belie America's credibility in the world - Kerry can restore these and he differs on W on almost all of them. I do not think four more years of W will in any way have the effect of awakening America and miraculously transforming the political parties in America. So, Kerry it is for me. Note: I am just saying why I am voting for Kerry - I am not expecting anyone to agree with me or to vote for him as well. In my statement, I am also pointing out why I think the logoc behind your conclusion that I and others are blindly following anything or anyone is incorrect :cool: I realize I am somewhat cynical in my thought that a third party candidate has no hope ever of winning - and I hate that it is that way. But, that is the reality of things, and I want W out of office - Moreover, I know you do not, but I believe in most of the things Kerry has done and those that he says he is going to do :cool: So, I submit, I am not blindly following anyone - rather, I considered my options and chose with knowledge.

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 09:44 AM

The Democratic convention was an affront to the idea of free speech and did nothing to explain why Kerry is the better choice to get
us out of the morass the Bushers got us into.

FOUL :wavey:

Please show me where anything much less the First Amend. says anyone has the right to say anything they want at a private function, which the convention was :shrug: Moreover, show me any political convention by anyone at any time that has not urged each speaker to keep a civil tone, asked them to limit themselves to certain topics, etc. :shrug: So, saying free speech, which you seemingly and erroneously ordain as an absolute in this situation, was egregiously harmed is a fallacy.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming now :cool:

P.S. Can you tell I am in a pissy mood on this Monday :laugh:

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 09:46 AM

No. What's illogical, and I suspect you'll agree with me on this, is voting for a man who voted with the current administration and now is trying to position himself as being so diametrically different.

FOUL (somewhat) - he voted to allow W to have the power to go to war, which BTW W did not need to go to war. Then, he realized the path W took with that power was erroneous and voted not to fund it. That is a contrite act IMO. But, I know I know - you think W and Kerry are the same, which is just wrong and you know it, but unexplainedly continue to espouse it - so be it :cool:

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 10:04 AM

FOUL :wavey:

Please show me where anything much less the First Amend. says anyone has the right to say anything they want at a private function, which the convention was :shrug:

You're bringing up the First Amendment, not me. Go read the post again, Jason. I can't figure out why you've had such trouble understanding what I've been writing lately. I always thought I was pretty clear.

But if you want to see First Amendment violations, I'm sure it won't be long before the protesters in Boston file suit against the city and the party for abridging their right to freely assemble and to speak.

As for other types of violations, I believe the transportation authority lost a suit right off the bat about searching people without cause.

Moreover, show me any political convention by anyone at any time that has not urged each speaker to keep a civil tone, asked them to limit themselves to certain topics, etc. :shrug: So, saying free speech, which you seemingly and erroneously ordain as an absolute in this situation, was egregiously harmed is a fallacy.

First off, you must not be familiar with the history of conventions if you think what you see today has always been in practice. This convention was merely a pageant. When conventions were really conventions, important issues were discussed, party platforms were built, and yes, people were free to speak their minds. Hell, presidential candidates were chosen at conventions. Don't believe me? Go read up on FDR.

Second, if you can point out where I suggested that free speech was an absolute that the Democrats violated, I will mail you a $100 check today.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 10:05 AM

FOUL (somewhat) - he voted to allow W to have the power to go to war, which BTW W did not need to go to war. Then, he realized the path W took with that power was erroneous and voted not to fund it. That is a contrite act IMO. But, I know I know - you think W and Kerry are the same, which is just wrong and you know it, but unexplainedly continue to espouse it - so be it :cool:

A vote for Kerry is a vote for Bush. Kerry voted for Bush's war, then he voted against funding the war.

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 10:09 AM

Second, if you can point out where I suggested that free speech was an absolute that the Democrats violated, I will mail you a $100 check today.

My address is . . . . :laugh:

I got that from your statement "[t]he Democratic convention was an affront to the idea of free speech." To me, that implies that the speakers had the rights of free speech set forth in the Const., which is what I think most people are referring to in a political debate when they assert the "idea of free speech." If that was not what you were referring to, then I stand corrected with my hat in hand saying :sorry:

:cool:

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 10:14 AM

First off, you must not be familiar with the history of conventions if you think what you see today has always been in practice. This convention was merely a pageant. When conventions were really conventions, important issues were discussed, party platforms were built, and yes, people were free to speak their minds. Hell, presidential candidates were chosen at conventions. Don't believe me? Go read up on FDR.

Touche' - but I was referring to the age of television. I should have been clearer. I do, however, wish the conventions were looser. But, the age of television and the rabid media and public and the much venerated sound bite, usually out of context, has changed that, for the worse IMO. We agree an open debate would be nice, but I am afraid that era is over and instead everything is said for the five second soundbyte.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 10:15 AM

My address is . . . . :laugh:

I got that from your statement "[t]he Democratic convention was an affront to the idea of free speech." To me, that implies that the speakers had the rights of free speech set forth in the Const., which is what I think most people are referring to in a political debate when they assert the "idea of free speech." If that was not what you were referring to, then I stand corrected with my hat in hand saying :sorry:

:cool:

Jason, trust me, when I decide to make a First Amendment argument, I will make a First Amendment argument. When I refer to the "idea" or "concept of free speech," that should clue you on whether I am making such argument, which is to say I'm not.

I have once or twice encouraged Marty to support the idea of free speech on this site, but I am well aware I have no First Amendment ground to stand on.

Be that as it may, I might be inclined to make a First Amendment argument in regards to the convention. Hell, if I were one of the speakers who'd been muzzled, I might turn around and say, "Hey, these guys abridged my right to free speech, so I'm going to sue." Wouldn't you say that would be an interesting position for the party to find itself in?

Would you as a lawyer then advise the party to argue in court that it could do whatever it wanted because it was a "private" gathering? Oh man, I'd love to see that.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 10:16 AM

Touche' - but I was referring to the age of television. I should have been clearer. I do, however, wish the conventions were looser. But, the age of television and the rabid media and public and the much venerated sound bite, usually out of context, has changed that, for the worse IMO. We agree an open debate would be nice, but I am afraid that era is over and instead everything is said for the five second soundbyte.

Agreed. Why not just end conventions then? Or call it a rally?

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 10:20 AM

I think the case law supports the general idea that the Const. mandate for free speech does not apply at a private function even if that function is quasi public (the First Amendment only prohibits the state from supressing speech). A good example is the St. Patrick's Day parade in NYC, that despite obtaining a city parade permit excludes the gay Irish from marching/speaking/expressing (I make no comment on this event and am using it solely as an example). So, I think the censures at the D convention would win the argument. Plus, what did they think Al S. was going to do. Surely they must have realized he was a loose cannon :laugh: - Lord love him :cool:

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 10:22 AM

Agreed. Why not just end conventions then? Or call it a rally?

I have often thought of this as well. I think the polls suggest the majority of the people like the idea that it is a conventionl. Plus, I guess it is still possible for the event to be where the candidate is picked, although it has not been that way for awhile now.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 10:30 AM

Surely they must have realized he was a loose cannon :laugh: - Lord love him :cool:

Exactly. I'm merely pointing out that you would be making a loser argument, even if legally correct, by insisting that the party was right to violate the concept of free speech at the convention.

Wouldn't you agree?

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 11:15 AM

Exactly. I'm merely pointing out that you would be making a loser argument, even if legally correct, by insisting that the party was right to violate the concept of free speech at the convention.

Wouldn't you agree?

I think the D or any other Party has every right to choose what is said and how it is said at their convention even if that supresses some peoples' opinions. Public perception is everything these days. Having said that, I agree it would be nice if everyone got to say what they wanted and they they wanted :shrug:

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 11:17 AM

I think the D or any other Party has every right to choose what is said and how it is said at their convention even if that supresses some peoples' opinions. Public perception is everything these days. Having said that, I agree it would be nice if everyone got to say what they wanted and they they wanted :shrug:

Precisely because public perception is everything it's a loser argument. Imagine, if you will,

"The Democrats say they want to save our democracy, but they won't even believe in the First Amendment enough, one of the main tenets of our democracy, to let people say what they believe."

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 02:06 PM

Fear, Johnny, is the last word you should use to characterize my position. If I were as fearful as you and the rest of the Democrats, then I surely would vote for Kerry. For, you see, I don't believe the nation is so fragile that it will crumble under four more years of Bush, as the Kerry people would have me believe.

I have a friend who'd sooner walk down the aisle to a song by Marilyn Manson, than have the wedding march played. When asked why, she offers no valid reason other than, "because everyone plays the wedding march."
She's what I call "self-consciously non-conformist." Her views aren't naturally non-conformist, but are rather born out of the fear that she'll LOOK like a conformist if she embraces anything that others do.

Rightly or wrongly, I see some of that in some of the things you've said regarding the Democrats. It seems that you're so hell-bent on NOT agreeing with anything the Democratic party does... or, worse, being seen as to agree with the Democratic party... that you'd rather vote for and support just about anyone else.

As I said before, the one and only thing you ever point to in regards to why you feel Kerry is "as bad as Bush," is that he voted for the War In Iraq.
Aren't there millions of other issues beyond that one tiny little thing? Why are those so easily ignored or glossed-over?

Don't get me wrong... I'm not telling you who to vote for. I'm just still baffled that you wholeheartedly believe that "Kerry is as bad as Bush," because of ONE sticking point.

And if fear isn't a problem for you... than why do you fear having a democrat in the White House? What's scarier about that for you, than having Bush in there.
Maybe you just have less to lose by having Bush in the White House for another four years, but I... and everyone like me... have a LOT to lose.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 02:16 PM

It seems that you're so hell-bent on NOT agreeing with anything the Democratic party does... or, worse, being seen as to agree with the Democratic party... that you'd rather vote for and support just about anyone else.

If that were the case, then I'd support Bush. Right? Johnny, you're no longer making sense.

As I said before, the one and only thing you ever point to in regards to why you feel Kerry is "as bad as Bush," is that he voted for the War In Iraq.
John Kerry in 1971:

"[T]here is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."

Kerry in 2004:

"I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president."

In 1971, Kerry said he hoped that in 30 years Americans would look back and appreciate the courage of vets who opposed the war as a moment when "America finally turned" away from the lies and toward justice. So far in the past 18 months he has voted for another criminal war, then voted against funding it, distanced himself from the comments he made in opposition to Vietnam and draped himself with the cynical flag of patriotism by parading the memory of a war he opposed so adamantly

Aren't there millions of other issues beyond that one tiny little thing? Why are those so easily ignored or glossed-over?

I can turn that around on you. You said ultimately you'll vote for Kerry for the one issue of gay marriage. Your words. I could go dig them up. Aren't there millions of other issues besides that one tiny little thing?

And besides, the "tiny little thing" to which you refer has left thousands and thousands of people needlessly dead. That may be a "tiny little thing" to you, but it's a huge thing to the families of the American soldiers who were killed, those who've been maimed and the many thousands of Iraqis killed and injured.

And if fear isn't a problem for you... than why do you fear having a democrat in the White House? What's scarier about that for you, than having Bush in there.

Quote me back where I've ever said that we'll be better off if Bush is reelected. I challenge you.

All I am doing is using the same rationale Kerry used in 1971: "To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in [Iraq] by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 02:56 PM

If that were the case, then I'd support Bush. Right? Johnny, you're no longer making sense.

Well, I'm giving you more credit than that. :p
It's obvious that you most likely will not be voting Republican anytime soon, so I didn't bother to include that scenario in my comments.
So no, I'm not saying that you'd rather support Bush than Kerry, just to "go the opposite way"... but it does appear that you'd rather support someone from any other party (outside of the Republican party), than be seen as supporting the Democratic party.

From everything I've read in your posts, you're far more interested in taking the Democrats to task for the things they've done that you disagree with, than taking the Republicans to task for those things and more.

I asked in another thread, and I haven't had a chance to check it yet to see if you responded... but I'm curious as to why you view it as more important to teach the Democrats a lesson, when you've already seen what the current President has done and is doing.

I can turn that around on you. You said ultimately you'll vote for Kerry for the one issue of gay marriage. Your words. I could go dig them up. Aren't there millions of other issues besides that one tiny little thing?

And besides, the "tiny little thing" to which you refer has left thousands and thousands of people needlessly dead. That may be a "tiny little thing" to you, but it's a huge thing to the families of the American soldiers who were killed, those who've been maimed and the many thousands of Iraqis killed and injured.

I knew I shouldn't have said "one tiny little thing"... I should know better by now than to give you even the tiniest opportunity to turn something around. :p

No, the War In Iraq isn't a tiny issue... not by a long shot. But you continue to maintain that Kerry would be as bad as Bush, and I don't see it.
Yes, ok, you win, I admit that it was "wrong" of him to vote for the war (though, again, I maintain that his opinion was based on what HE... and the rest of us... was mistakenly lead to believe), but that's the one and only example you continually point to in regards to him being "as bad as Bush."

One example. An important issue, yes. But ONE situation.

In regards to voting for Kerry because of gay rights, I don't recall saying that was the one and only reason, I'd vote for him... simply that it's the BIGGEST, most important reason I'll be voting for him.
The gay rights issue is but one of many examples of why I feel Bush's run in the White House must be ended (if you've paid attention, you'll see that I've also cited his poor success-rate in regards to the environment, the economy, the educational system, health-care, etc.) , but it is the biggest. For me.
Because it shows the kind of person he is... willing to take away a human being's rights.

Quote me back where I've ever said that we'll be better off if Bush is reelected. I challenge you.

You have not said we'd be better off if Bush is re-elected. I know that and you know that, and I didn't even imply that you've said that... so it's a weak challenge.

But, you have said that electing Kerry would be just the same as re-electing Bush, and I just don't see your rationale.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 03:13 PM

I asked in another thread, and I haven't had a chance to check it yet to see if you responded... but I'm curious as to why you view it as more important to teach the Democrats a lesson, when you've already seen what the current President has done and is doing.

You should check the response then.

Do you think I am alone in thinking that four more years of Bush may be what's necessary to wake up the American people? Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees Union, confided to the Washington Post's David Broder that another four years of Bush might be less damaging than the stifling of needed reform within the party and the labor movement that would occur if Kerry becomes president. He later recanted, presumably after "a couple hours of being forced to stand on a milk crate with a copy of the party platform over his head and electrodes attached to his penis Stern ... said he was 'a hundred per cent' for Kerry," as left-wing columnist Alexander Cockburn puts it.

No, the War In Iraq isn't a tiny issue... not by a long shot. But you continue to maintain that Kerry would be as bad as Bush, and I don't see it.

You should know better. ;)

And really, Johnny, we've been over this. But to help you out, besides the war thing, here's a couple more issues:

Kerry told James Hoffa of the Teamsters this spring that he wouldn't touch the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but would "drill everywhere else like never before".

In an interview with BusinessWeek (August 2nd) Kerry revealed, "I am going to bring Corporate America to the table to say: How do we make you more competitive? How do we get out of your way? Research-and-development tax credits? I'd make them permanent and larger. Manufacturing tax credits? That's a smart way to help I am 100% in favor of companies going abroad to do business."

And in May, he said this:

"I will not appoint somebody with a 5-4 court who's about to undo Roe v. Wade. I've said that before," Kerry told the Associated Press. "But that doesn't mean that if that's not the balance of the court, I wouldn't be prepared ultimately to appoint somebody to some court who has a different point of view. I've already voted for people like that. I voted for Judge [Antonin] Scalia."

Just how he reconciles someone who won't overturn Roe v. Wade with someone who holds a different view, presumably an anti-choice view, is beyond me.

And those points also address this:

But you continue to maintain that Kerry would be as bad as Bush, and I don't see it. Yes, ok, you win, I admit that it was "wrong" of him to vote for the war (though, again, I maintain that his opinion was based on what HE... and the rest of us... was mistakenly lead to believe), but that's the one and only example you continually point to in regards to him being "as bad as Bush."

But, you have said that electing Kerry would be just the same as re-electing Bush, and I just don't see your rationale.

Well, I've just given you some more examples.

Look, Johnny, you have a bad candidate. Simple as that. The Democrats are incapable of providing a real alternative. The Democratic Party is run by rubber-spined wimps who think the only votes to "get" are those undecided between voting Republican or Democrat. These chimps should be going after the young vote, the Latino vote, etc., in which case they wouldn't have to try to outdo the Republicans by draping themselvs cynically with the flag.

Do you think the Democrats are that different from the Republicans? Consider this:

Peace activists among the delegates at the DNC were not allowed to bring literature or clothing that expressed an anti-war stance. Medea Benjamin, who advocates voting for Kerry in swing states, was thrown out of the convention hall after unfurling a banner calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq. Other activists were barred from entering with headscarves that read "Delegates for Peace" and one California delegate with a flyer entitled "No War on Iraq" was prevented from bringing it onto the floor of the convention hall.

Isn't this the kind of thing that you and other supposed liberals on this site have decried when the Republicans have perpetrated it?

It's not about being a non-conformist, Brian, it's about being true to what you believe in.

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 03:35 PM

Do you think I am alone in thinking that four more years of Bush may be what's necessary to wake up the American people?

I don't see Bush's re-election as being "less damaging" in the least.
Again, maybe only to those who have less to lose. But not to me.
And I feel that if enough eyes haven't been opened by now, they're not going to be. It shouldn't take EIGHT years to open people's eyes. Four should be plenty.

Kerry may not be perfect (though I still argue that NO politician... Democrat, Republican, Green Party or what have you... will EVER be perfect), and, again, I don't agree with his every position, but I strongly feel that he'll be a damn sight better than Bush.

We CAN improve the Democratic party, and bring about those reforms that many people desire, without blocking them from holding office.
Allowing the current administration to have another four years of doing what they please, un-checked, is only going to make the situation much worse, and is only going to make it that much more difficult to improve the way things are run in this country.

And that's not "fear" talking. It's logic.

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 03:41 PM

It's not about being a non-conformist, Brian, it's about being true to what you believe in.

True in a vacuum IMO. I am a realist. I do not want four more years of W and the effect that will have on the next 20 years with the USSC. That is my main fear (yes I said fear :cool: ) if W gets reelected. The D's will not nominate anyone near as bad as anyone W has nominated. That - BTW and for those not paying attention - is why a vote for Kerry is most certainly NOT a vote for W. AND - that babble in the May quote is just that. He is pandering to the independents. He has to do that to win.

AND - all presidents must drill for oil anywhere they can. No matter what anyone says, that is the way it is. I think it sucks. But, until we have viable alternatives to fossil fuels that the public demand supports, all of the oil will be taken from the Earth. There is no way in hell the oil lobbyists will EVER let that happen. That is why I say go ahead and drill everywhere we can amd get it over with soon rather than drag it out :laugh:

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 03:41 PM

(Oops, forgot to comment on this....)

It's not about being a non-conformist, Brian, it's about being true to what you believe in.

I apologize for my misassumption. Some of your comments in various threads have come off as rather flippant, and, to me at least, you've sounded as if you're basically being contrary for the sake of being contrary.

You and I agree on a lot when it comes to politics, and I hope you know by now that I have the utmost respect for those who fight for what they believe in.
Even if I don't always agree with them, or the ways in which they fight for their beliefs.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 03:43 PM

I don't see Bush's re-election as being "less damaging" in the least.
Again, maybe only to those who have less to lose. But not to me.
And I feel that if enough eyes haven't been opened by now, they're not going to be. It shouldn't take EIGHT years to open people's eyes. Four should be plenty.

It's taken 24 years already, Brian. Do you really think Clinton was a liberal? Nafta, Welfare Act, Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Just to name a few.

We CAN improve the Democratic party, and bring about those reforms that many people desire, without blocking them from holding office.

Good luck. After 24 years, I've given up. No honest-to-goodness significant change ever comes from within. The Democrats need a jolt from outside to wake up.

And that's not "fear" talking. It's logic.

It's pragmatism, Brian. Far from logic. And in my view, it's pragmatism based on fear. But I suspect we are going to continue to disagree.

The examples in my last post should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my opposition to Kerry isn't solely based on the Iraq war, though that is the one issue that turned me against the man I was waiting for years to run for president so I could vote for him. He's a disappointment. A bad candidate. Gore revisited. After he loses, perhaps he'll find his courage to speak his mind, as Gore has, too little too late.

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 03:45 PM

Some of your comments in various threads have come off as rather flippant, and, to me at least, you've sounded as if you're basically being contrary for the sake of being contrary.

Well... do I like to play the contrarian role? Of course! ;) No need to apologize.

On Nov. 3, you, Gldstwman, Dissention, Strand, etc., will all give one another a cyber hug and move on, regardless of who wins.

Until then... :]

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 03:45 PM

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 03:54 PM

But, Carne - you are arguing the D. party should be extremist in their lineral nature. That is not what they are about. It really never has been IMO. For the last two decades or so, that is what the R party has painted them as. But, the painting does not make it so :shrug:

Jason, if you think the party of Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt was extremist, then I suppose I am arguing for the Democratic Party's return to extremism. And may I remind you that extremism lifted millons of people in this country? The Democratic Party of today is contributing to the erosion of the middle class, creating a society with room for only rich and poor.

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 04:00 PM

It's taken 24 years already, Brian. Do you really think Clinton was a liberal? Nafta, Welfare Act, Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Just to name a few.

Clinton wasn't perfect (obviously), and wasn't quite liberal enough in many cases. But his level of liberalism was still a marked contrast in regards to the 12 years of the Reagan & Bush Sr. administrations.

Now we've taken a step back. Several steps in fact.
And I'd just hate to see another four years of this.

After 24 years, I've given up. No honest-to-goodness significant change ever comes from within. The Democrats need a jolt from outside to wake up.

And I believe the change can come from within. Which is where we differ, I'm afraid.

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 04:00 PM

Jason, if you think the party of Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt was extremist, then I suppose I am arguing for the Democratic Party's return to extremism. And may I remind you that extremism lifted millons of people in this country? The Democratic Party of today is contributing to the erosion of the middle class, creating a society with room for only rich and poor.

IMO those parties were not that liberal. I am talking about your "free medical attention for all, no guns at all, and free social services for all no matter what, abortion on demand up until birth" kind of liberals. Those were not the parties of the people you mentioned. I see what you are saying, but think you are mistaken in your using liberal when I think you mean extreme liberal. In any event, our argument here is moot, because the R's are so far into the religious right, that the middle of the road D's like Clinton was seem unliberal to liberals. The R's have successfully supplanted the def. of liberal IMO.

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 04:03 PM

On Nov. 3, you, Gldstwman, Dissention, Strand, etc., will all give one another a cyber hug and move on, regardless of who wins.

Sadly, I have a sinking feeling that Bush will win come November.
I sure hope I'm wrong though.

But yeah, life will go on, and the world will keep on turning... but I'm going to be angry as angry can be, and worried that I won't have any rights left by the time he's done.

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 04:05 PM

Does that mean we cannot still have a group hug :wavey:

Johnny Stew

08-02-2004, 04:07 PM

Does that mean we cannot still have a group hug :wavey:

Only if you promise to keep your hands above the waist. :p

strandinthewind

08-02-2004, 04:12 PM

Only if you promise to keep your hands above the waist. :p

Are you speaking for the group? :cool:

gldstwmn

08-02-2004, 04:37 PM

Only if you promise to keep your hands above the waist. :p

Falls on floor. :shocked: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

CarneVaca

08-02-2004, 11:03 PM

I think we'll especially need a group hug if Dubya wins. Let's not confuse my anger at the Democrats with a perceived desire for Dubya to win.

dissention

08-03-2004, 07:54 AM

I think we'll especially need a group hug if Dubya wins. Let's not confuse my anger at the Democrats with a perceived desire for Dubya to win.

I think we'll need step ladders and rope, not hugs. :laugh:

Sugar

08-03-2004, 02:58 PM

I think we'll need step ladders and rope, not hugs. :laugh:

I was thinking clock towers and high-powered rifles... :laugh:

Johnny Stew

08-03-2004, 03:23 PM

I think we'll need step ladders and rope, not hugs. :laugh:

:laugh: :lol: :laugh: :lol: :laugh:

Jason can supply the rope... I hear he has a lot left over from his last... *ahem*... party. ;)

Johnny Stew

08-03-2004, 03:25 PM

I was thinking clock towers and high-powered rifles... :laugh:

I know I shouldn't laugh at that, but..... :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Good one! :xoxo:

strandinthewind

08-03-2004, 03:51 PM

:laugh: :lol: :laugh: :lol: :laugh:

Jason can supply the rope... I hear he has a lot left over from his last... *ahem*... party. ;)

It was a soiree - AND YES - there were ropes and pullies involved - but my last clear recollection was a large, ill dressed sensible woman with bad hair operating them - the same one that hoovered up my spinach dip, got swilled on beer, and tried to beat me up - all the year before when I was mimicing La Nicks while dancing on top of my Steinway M from the 30's. Mind you - this was at my annual Christmas Fete. I gotta calm my life down :laugh:

dissention

08-03-2004, 06:03 PM

You should check the response then.

Do you think I am alone in thinking that four more years of Bush may be what's necessary to wake up the American people? Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees Union, confided to the Washington Post's David Broder that another four years of Bush might be less damaging than the stifling of needed reform within the party and the labor movement that would occur if Kerry becomes president. He later recanted, presumably after "a couple hours of being forced to stand on a milk crate with a copy of the party platform over his head and electrodes attached to his penis Stern ... said he was 'a hundred per cent' for Kerry," as left-wing columnist Alexander Cockburn puts it.

You should know better. ;)

And really, Johnny, we've been over this. But to help you out, besides the war thing, here's a couple more issues:

Kerry told James Hoffa of the Teamsters this spring that he wouldn't touch the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but would "drill everywhere else like never before".

In an interview with BusinessWeek (August 2nd) Kerry revealed, "I am going to bring Corporate America to the table to say: How do we make you more competitive? How do we get out of your way? Research-and-development tax credits? I'd make them permanent and larger. Manufacturing tax credits? That's a smart way to help I am 100% in favor of companies going abroad to do business."

And in May, he said this:

"I will not appoint somebody with a 5-4 court who's about to undo Roe v. Wade. I've said that before," Kerry told the Associated Press. "But that doesn't mean that if that's not the balance of the court, I wouldn't be prepared ultimately to appoint somebody to some court who has a different point of view. I've already voted for people like that. I voted for Judge [Antonin] Scalia."

Just how he reconciles someone who won't overturn Roe v. Wade with someone who holds a different view, presumably an anti-choice view, is beyond me.

And those points also address this:

Well, I've just given you some more examples.

Look, Johnny, you have a bad candidate. Simple as that. The Democrats are incapable of providing a real alternative. The Democratic Party is run by rubber-spined wimps who think the only votes to "get" are those undecided between voting Republican or Democrat. These chimps should be going after the young vote, the Latino vote, etc., in which case they wouldn't have to try to outdo the Republicans by draping themselvs cynically with the flag.

Do you think the Democrats are that different from the Republicans? Consider this:

Peace activists among the delegates at the DNC were not allowed to bring literature or clothing that expressed an anti-war stance. Medea Benjamin, who advocates voting for Kerry in swing states, was thrown out of the convention hall after unfurling a banner calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq. Other activists were barred from entering with headscarves that read "Delegates for Peace" and one California delegate with a flyer entitled "No War on Iraq" was prevented from bringing it onto the floor of the convention hall.

Isn't this the kind of thing that you and other supposed liberals on this site have decried when the Republicans have perpetrated it?

It's not about being a non-conformist, Brian, it's about being true to what you believe in.

Nation subscriber? ;)

dissention

08-04-2004, 08:03 AM

Speaking of The Nation, there's a fantastic article in this weeks issue about how they could steal thie upcoming election again. Fascinating stuff. And Naomi Klein's column ("Ditch the Distraction in Chief") was great, it really summed up the general sentiment about the election.