Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 10:47:47 PM     Clearing the record of distortions.. Ritter's War Stephen Marshall, Manhattan,  May 26, 2004 http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc4541.html In the late summer and fall of 2002, six months before the invasion, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter hit the major networks, claiming that the Bush administration was "deliberately distorting the record in regards to weapons of mass destruction." Despite his radical position, Ritter's credentials as a U.S. Marine and fearless weapons inspector made him impossible to ignore. So he became the most visible opponent of the administration's assertion that Saddam was a threat to the United States. And, in response, the corporate media did everything in their power to assassinate his character. We decided to trace the media coverage that Ritter received during September, 2002. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 4:54:26 PM     The infighting over the new PM for Iraq is more like Gilbert and Sullivan than we would like. Too complicated to follow here. My guess is you are tracking.. Bush's five speeches make it all like a five act drama that is supposed to end with the audience going home, and Iraq being in the hands of Iraqis. I expect the fire department won't let us leave the theater, thanks to homeland security. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 4:51:49 PM     Direct.. to report http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/index-eng WASHINGTON, May 26 (UPI) -- The U.S.-led war on terror is "bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle," and has made the world more dangerous, the human rights group Amnesty International said in its latest report Wednesday. The group's 2004 report criticizes the United States and its allies, along with militant groups worldwide, for what it calls "the most sustained attack on human rights and international humanitarian law in the last 50 years." ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 2:36:45 PM     First report of Gore's speech. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/politics/26CND-GORE.html?hp ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 2:28:58 PM     Important, just like in a chess game cleaning up the pieces. Perle was a castle in this game. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&;c=Article&cid=1085523609417&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724 LONDON, England—One of the ideological architects of the Iraq war has criticized the U.S.-led occupation of the country as "a grave error." Richard Perle, until recently a powerful adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, described U.S. policy in post-war Iraq as a failure. "I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation (of Iraq) to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," said Perle, former chair of the influential Defence Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. However "the first to acknowledge..." when so many others *started* from there. He goes on to say With violent resistance to the U.S.-led occupation showing no signs of ending, Perle said the biggest mistake in post-war policy "was the failure to turn Iraq back to the Iraqis more or less immediately. "We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the end of June more or less immediately," he told BBC radio, referring to the U.S. and British plan to transfer political authority in Iraq to an interim government on June 30. If we had not been occupiers, what of the 3000 person embassy, and the military bases in US hands? Is he willing to let those go and to have let them go? What about the Iraq and Israel connection that was supposed to be importnat to him? ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 9:10:09 AM     From NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/opinion/26AJAM.html But gone is the hubris. Let's face it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, "not to make them American" is now — painfully — beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq. If some of the war's planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside. We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn't know the place. We had struggled against radical Shiism in Iran and Lebanon in recent decades, but we expected a fairly secular society in Iraq (I myself wrote in that vein at the time). Yet it turned out that the radical faith — among the Sunnis as well as the Shiites — rose to fill the void left by the collapse of the old despotism. The problem for me is that he believed that. A small amount of history reading and anthropology and a brief trip to north Africa a long time ago gave me enough to feel profoundly that the cost of the war in terms of the families of Iraq soldiers killed would leave a legacy that would come to haunt us. Given that we are already fouling up Afghanistan, how could Iraq be different? And worst, why did anyone think that Bush and his staff ever had the diplomatic skill and character to be able to enter into the world in a way that would leave us with more friends, not fewer?  It is important to realize the depth of the resistance to the war, based on understanding. the way the US treated Blitz and the other weapons inspectors was cruel and insulting. We already had the US record on Kyoto, the environment, and Florida. The US was not ready for an idealistic adventure, because we were already acting without ideals, only fading symbols, "freedom, democracy" insincerely repeated over and over. The whole approach of the US, with a few good colonels, and a symbol strategy that did not understand that using the palaces, the prisons, the failure to support the bureucracy... just deep ignorance. And the impact on the military, the military that wanted above all to avoid Vietnam: where were the lessons being remembered? ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 8:59:37 AM     A good graph on job creation. It actually looks good, but it does not correct for the increased size of the population, so the right side needs to be taken down a bit. Looking at the details is important. If the numbers stay high it should affect the political climate. But then we need to look at income and productivity. The main pages contain lots of information. http://data.bls.gov/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&;series_id=CES0000000001&output_view=net_1mth One issue: is there any political pressure that distorts these figures? ********