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Thursday, February 13, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"It looks like Congress is getting the message from the American people loud and clear and that is: Stop the trifling of the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans."
Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat
RHINO HERE:
Signs of life in the left side corridors of Congress. Senator Wyden leading a charge against the mad pscho ologist Admiral John M. Poindexter's pet project T.I.A. (Total Information Awareness).
Some will remember the Admiral lying to Congress during the I.C.A. (Iran-Contra affair) about weapons sales to Iran & illegal aid to Nicaraguan rebels. He was convicted but given immunity for eventually telling the whole truth, or at least enough to get out of the jam at hand.
Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans
By ADAM CLYMER, NY Times, 2/11/03
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 - House and Senate negotiators have agreed that a Pentagon project intended to detect terrorists by monitoring Internet e-mail and commercial databases for health, financial and travel information cannot be used against Americans. The conferees also agreed to restrict further research on the program without extensive consultation with Congress.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/politics/12PRIV.html?th
There's sets of waves of uplifting web surfing at: UNITED FOR PEACE
The World Says No to War!
Mass Actions in New York City on Feb. 15
and San Francisco on Feb. 16
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/
And more signs of life. Some Senate Democrats signaling they'll filibuster a Senate vote on the nomination of Miguel Estrada for US Circuit Court of Appeals for WDC.
Estrada profile in Rhino's Blog 2/5/03.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103207/2003/02/05.html
Estrada & the filibuster profiled in John Nichols' Online Beat from The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=389
More background on Estrada from last fall's Jack Newfield article in The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021007&s=newfield
You Can Take Action - Urge your elected reps to vote no on Estrada
The Alliance for Justice manages a website with easy access to contact info on your reps & resource material on Estrada & the other shrub nominees. It's called The Independent Judiciary Site:
http://www.independentjudiciary.com/
While you're there, surf around the ALLIANCE FOR JUSTICE 's website. They've been overseeing public policy & encouraging public participation for nearly 2 decades. They currently have thousands of students & activists signing the "Subpoenas for Information" leaning on General..., oops I mean Attorney General John Ashcroft to answer some questions concerning policies that threaten Americans' civil liberties. GO A.F.J.!
http://www.allianceforjustice.org
9:34:15 AM 
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THE BOTTOM LINE is an Alternet column by John Tirman, Program Director at the Social Science Research Council and author of
"Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade."
http://www.wf.org/spoilsofwar.htm
"From its first unsettling paragraphs you are drawn into John Tirman's powerful and carefully researched indictment . . ., a brilliant interweaving of Middle East history, U.S. politics, and profit seeking in arms . . ."
- - HOWARD ZINN
9:20:45 AM
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By John Tirman, AlterNet, February 7, 2003
The verbal fight about the search for weapons in Iraq is a waste of words. This fractious debate, like the search for the weapons themselves, is a red herring, a diversion from the real reasons for war. Oddly, those who oppose the war are trapped by the inspection regime's logic every bit as much as President Bush is. In a mirror image of each other, both are beholden to the wrong standards, pretending to follow the rules, and letting more important issues slide by.
We know that Saddam Hussein produced chemical and biological weapons in the past. It is quite likely that he still has some of each. Whether or not they can be located in the next few weeks is unimportant, since Mr. Bush seems determined to go to war regardless. (The inspections, with many dozens of experts scouring the country, are like a weapons freeze, he can't do much while they're there, so if war is not pursued, it is in our interests that the inspections go on indefinitely.)
The Bush administration has become beholden to the weapons issue as the pretext for war, however, so the rationales for invading a sovereign country are spinning on that pivot. They have gone so far as to fabricate "evidence," as with the now-discredited charge that aluminum tubes found in Iraq can be used in a nuclear weapons program. Similar, wafer-thin exhibits will regularly be displayed, as they were by Secretary Powell at the United Nations on Feb. 5. This is the trap for Bush: Needing international support, he went through the United Nations process that was constructed around the matter of weapons of mass destruction. He must play by those rules or appear to be flouting allies, law and domestic opinion.
But he also is flouting longstanding U.S. foreign policy habits v namely, the notion that we cannot undertake something as grave as war without proving that the action is to protect our national security...
THE ENTIRE ARTICLE'S AT ALTERNET:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15128
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9:17:51 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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