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 Tuesday, July 23, 2002
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NYT slams Operation TIPS
Monday's NYT editorial on TIPS concludes:
The Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism tactics — secret detentions of suspects, denial of the right to trial and now citizen spying — have in common a lack of faith in democratic institutions and a free society. If TIPS is ever put into effect, the first people who should be turned in as a threat to our way of life are the Justice Department officials who thought up this most un-American of programs.
Strong words for the gray lady, as the NYT is sometimes called. I'm glad to see opposition to TIPS from all political sectors. Right wing zealot Dick Armey is even sponsoring an amendment that would ban the administration from proceeding with TIPS.
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Did Dubya's money come originally from Saudi Arabia?
I have never heard of the New York Press, so I have no way of assessing their credibility, but they ran an interesting article looking at where Bush made his money, and speculating that he may have been bailed out of Harken with Saudi Arabian money. Fascinating, if true.
Excerpts:
What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life.
But let’s speculate. An editorial on Harken in last week’s Wall Street Journal noted "interesting Saudi connections on the finance side." One of Bush’s early investors in Arbusto was James Bath, agent of Salem bin Laden (Osama’s half-brother) in the United States. (This is not proof, as certain left-wing publications have implied, that Bath’s money was the bin Ladens’ to begin with.) In the months after Bush came onto the Harken board, according to a 1999 Journal report, a Saudi financier named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought a 17 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh’s American representative Talat Othman was given a seat on the board and met with then-President Bush at the White House. And the "good news" into which now-President Bush claimed to be selling his Harken shares was an oil-exploration deal with the government of Bahrain–a total (but lucrative) flop that was arranged despite Harken’s never having done any foreign oil exploration before.
Amazing how the WSJ didn't publish any of this stuff before the election.
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Operations TIPS again
Funny and also serious column about Operation TIPS on MSNBC, which I usually try to avoid. Excerpt:
As if we don’t have enough incompetent covert operatives in the FBI and CIA, now average citizens can volunteer to be the Maxwell Smart on their block.
It is a total invasion of privacy to ask citizens to spy on one another, under the broad definition of looking out for “suspicious” activity. Let’s face it, one woman’s suspicious-looking activity is another woman concocting a homemade facial mask.
Americans are steadily being encouraged and manipulated by the administration to submit to our paranoia, suspicion and terror, even if it means spying on and ratting out our neighbors and the loss of those rights that distinguish the United States from most other countries in the world. If we allow that to happen, terrorists will have succeeded in destroying far more than the 3,000 or so people who died on Sept. 11.
Right on!
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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