There were indications Thursday that some Sunnis will not so willingly cede their former place at the top. Saadi sat out the January elections. On Thursday, she said, she decided to go to polls because she had given up on everything else. Saadi was not the only convert to Iraqi democracy to cast a ballot Thursday. Anyone bothering to peruse the rest of the front page, however, might have noticed a few items that seemed tangentially related, but that, together, tell a story that is far more consequential for the next 50 years of American life.
A few days later, at the traditional commencement of the holiday season, thousands of American consumers began lining up in the dark hours of morning to be among the first to pile into Wal-Mart, hoping to re-emerge with discounted laptops and Xboxes under their arms. Wal-Mart has now inherited G. There is no question that rising labor costs hurt G. Must the company keep making Buicks and Pontiacs until the end of days, even as they recede into American lore? Many of the workers G. As it happens, G. Democrats in particular, architects of the finest legislation of the industrial age, have approached the global economy with the same inflexibility, at least since Bill Clinton left the scene.
So what if Social Security and Medicaid functioned best in a world where most workers had company pensions and health insurance and spent their entire careers with one employer? The mere suggestion that these programs might be updated for a new, more consumer-driven economy sends Democratic leaders into fits of apoplexy. Here we have the model for globalization as Republicans envision it - a world in which rugged entrepreneurialism is overly romanticized and the unskilled expendable, and where shareholder profits are the only measure of success.
Republicans have embraced the future of the global marketplace, but to them the future looks a lot like "Road Warrior. The service economy is a reality of our time, and it would be wishful to expect that its engine can sustain the middle class in the way that industry once did. It makes little sense to blame one company for the pain caused by a profound economic transformation. What would be more constructive, probably, is a total reimagination of the basic contract between government, businesses and workers - a process that Clinton tentatively put in motion but that has since stalled as both parties retreated from the vexing challenges of globalization.
Does it make sense to expect businesses to finance lavish health care plans when foreign competition is forcing companies to cut their costs? Matt Bai, who covers national politics for the magazine, is working on a book about the Democratic Party. Listen to how angry the Sunni politicians are, as they speak out in the wake of the elections, both at Bush and at the Shiites, and you get a sense of how detached the Bush administration remains from reality.
A major Sunni leader whose list the National Dialogue Council seems to be doing well, Salih Mutlak, just came on Arabic satellite television and gave a strident anti-American speech. He addressed Bush, warning him not to believe that a fair election had just occurred in Iraq, and denounced the continued US military occupation of his country.
He also lashed out at Shiite politicians. Mutlak is a secular Arab nationalist who still praises the Baath Party. By the way, the assertion Bush keeps making that the political developments in Iraq will influence the rest of the Middle East is ridiculous to anyone who actually talks to anyone from the region. Arabs mostly believe that Iraq is laboring under an oppressive foreign military occupation.
Few think the Iraqi elections are aboveboard, and few are very interested in them. In Beirut, the newspapers have been putting a short article on the elections below the fold every day since Wednesday, and that is about it. An American living in Egypt who was teaching out in the provinces in a major city told me about recently witnessing a student demonstration that included a skit. Thousands of students had come out, and some grade schoolers were there in the front row.
On the steps of an academic hall, Islamist students enacted a play about an Iraqi suicide bomber blowing up US troops, to enormous glee and applause. Of course, few wanted to give up their unions and consumer lifestyle so as to become the wards of a one-party state.
Likewise, American Imperial "democracy" strikes most Arabs as paternalistic and hypocritical, masking a police state of a sort they are all too familiar with. On Saturday, 13 Iraqis were killed in separate guerrilla attacks. They included an official of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading party in the outgoing parliament. The London-based Saudi daily says that most signs suggest that the bloc of young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr will form a major element in the new Iraqi parliament, and that other parties will seek an alliance with it.
Among the first to broach such an alliance is outgoing prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who spoke in Najaf on Saturday. As for the Sunni Arabs, they celebrated their return as a power in political life, forming processions in various cities. The leader of the Concord Front thanked the armed resistance for refraining from attacks on Sunnis who came out to vote. He is quoted as saying, "For the sake of Iraq, there is nothing impossible.
Der Tag im Überblick
We have to forget the past and we extend our hands to everybody. Observers said that the expectation is that the Kurdistan Alliance will retain the presidency and that the Sunni Arabs will be given the post of speaker of the house, but that if they want to switch places, the negotiations would be up to them. One close observer, al-Rubaie, said that the initial returns suggested that the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, would gain seats.
If the small Shiite lists join it, and if negotiations with the Kurdistan Islamic Union succeed, it would be able to form a government. The KIU is said to have gained 18 seats. He said that the Sadr bloc would play an important role in taking decisions within the Alliance, since its candidates within the United Iraqi Alliance gained more seats than any other coalition partner. Since the elections were held on a province basis, and the United Iraq Alliance ran a list in each province, on which the Sadrists and SCIRI were apportioned equal numbers of candidates, there are only two ways I can understand such an outcome--if it is being accurately reported.
One is that the Sadrists are a social movement, not a party. He seemed to assume that the UIA had won again. Jaafari said, "I am addressing our people in Mosul and Ramadi and Tikrit. I say to them that your people in Najaf, Karbala and Hillah have long waited to work with you under the dome of parliament to build a new Iraq. Iyad Allawi has left Iraq in disappointment, and his supporters are crying election fraud.
Allawi is an ex-Baathist who cooperated with the CIA in organizing Baath officers who broke with Saddam in the s for a coup against the dictator. His blunt secularism, authoritarian style, rumors of bloodthirstiness, and CIA associations make him unpopular in most of Iraq, but the Bush administration and neoconservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute kept touting him as a possible prime minister as a result of these elections!
Western reporters talking mainly to the urban middle class also got a false sense that his list might be gaining in popularity. Shiite women came out in large numbers in the middle and south of the country when the polls first opened. A majority of women in Kurdistan came out to vote, coming with whole families, spouses and children to the polling stations. But in Sunni Arab Anbar and Tikrit, women tended to stay home, and if they voted it was by sending their proxy with their husbands or fathers so that they could vote for them.
In the Shiite south, early tabulations suggest that the participation of eligible women voters was between 71 and 84 percent in Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kut, Basra, and the Shiite districts of Baghdad. Fewer women came out in heavily tribal and rural Maysan and Samawa provinces. Most women came to the polls early, though some waited until they had finished their housework and cooked the family meal. Iraqi women interviewed stressed the important role that their spouses and fathers played in pushing them to participate in the elections, and in encouraging them to vote for a particular party list.
The majority of women voted for religious parties, but a few broke ranks and voted for secular ones. Al-Hayat interviewed Um Ghufran, an employee in the municipal government of the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, who said that she had voted for a secular party because she liked its platform, as well as because she wanted to get away from the influence of religion, which had led many other women to vote for parties that did not stand for things they believe in.
Kurdish women have more freedoms than Arab Iraqi women, but they nevertheless tended to vote the same way their men did. There were a number of women on the ballot in the Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Anbar, but women were not visible at the polling stations in either place-- though they are 54 percent of the electorate in both.
In both places, the patriarch tended to go and vote on behalf of the entire family. Women did not go out both because of poor security and because of local traditions of female seclusion. Al-Hayat talked to Samiyah Khudair, a candidate in a Sunni province, who said "The absence of the female element from the polling stations is a sick phenomenon that has afflicted Iraqi society after the Occupation, as a result of the collapse of confidence among citizens of both sexes in the security situation, which can deteriorate badly at any moment despite the most stringent measures.
But just taking the Constitution and pushing it through the shredder, why that is just fine and dandy. And, it is now often forgotten, that George was looney as the day is long, too. How much more is not known? How sad that a gang of unscrupulous criminals has been allowed to subvert its basic values altogether. Is there even a single one of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights that Bush and his henchmen have not by now abrogated by royal fiat?
Because of a single attack by a few hijackers from a small terrorist organization? The thousands lost in the Revolutionary War did not deter the Founding Fathers from enshrining these rights in the Constitution! The fledgling American Republic was far more unstable and facing far more dangers when this document was passed into law than the unchallengeable hyperpower that now bestrides the globe as a behemoth.
Have we lost our minds?
Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 69)
A look back in cartoons and quotes. Newsweek Quotes of the Year Dec. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. The White House qualified the controversial remarks as a "personal observation. They all behave the same, and they all look the same. He quickly came under fire from both Republicans and Democrats. Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home? Rather was mocked for using the signoff when he experimented with it briefly in I want to find out what the noble cause is.
Lynndie England, pleading guilty at her court-martial on charges stemming from the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. The plea was rejected. President Bush later expressed support for the measure, and it passed in the House. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, OK?
A Peter Pan love story. Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was. On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular.
On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not.
The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio. Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the election?
Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment. Precipitating Iraq into a civil war by invading it.
Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered.
Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws.
Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US with most people in the lower tier , and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world. How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far?
In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight.
It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws for example against internal spying , because there would be no law to break.
It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers.
It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war remember the Maine! Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. The US is not like much of the rest of theworld: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe.
Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group.
Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers since have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base.
With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration. Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning!
John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war. Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. How to understand this?
Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together.
But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power.
In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity.
Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology Marxism to another capitalism , but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same. If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom power dispersing to top power consolidating. Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself.
If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism.
In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely.
No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds. My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are.
Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.
Power is the most ephemeral possession of them all because retaining power means exerting ever more control. Control, of course, operates according to the law of diminishing returns. The US has lasted this long, and survived and thrived because of power dispersal, not power consolidation. The loss of our moral compass is devastating. The scattering of beaurocratic talent is a huge hidden cost of the Bush plan, as is the destruction of the volunteer army both as a military entity and as a population of young people who have been required to be ruthless themselves and to be ruthlessly preyed upon by the Iraqi insurgency.
Our debts to the Chinese are a price we do not yet know the cost of, and our resistance to the idea of global warming might doom us all. And all for what? Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid called the Republican-led Congress "the most corrupt in history" on Sunday, and distanced himself from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, at the center of an escalating probe. Bush Claims New Set of Powers http: Bush hopes a surprisingly successful election will buy him some desperately needed time, and here at home, where he is resisting the first significant efforts to curtail the powers he aggressively claimed for the presidency in the days after the Sept.
die bedrohung des todes rembrandts kaltnadelstiche die drei kreuze und ecce homo german edition
The president that the nation saw Sunday night from the Oval Office - the setting from which he announced the opening moments of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq - was far more humble about the mistakes he had made over the past two and a half years. Rather than dismissing critics with a wave of the hand and an acid retort, as he often has, he asked those who opposed the invasion to help make the biggest gamble of his presidency work. But he never backed away from his insistence that, with patience, the United States will claim victory, as he has defined it. The main obstacle, he now contends, is not the insurgency or the anti-American sentiment in Iraq; it is the risk that Americans will give up too early and let terrorists believe they have intimidated "America into a policy of retreat.
Bush was also on the offensive - with a much harsher tone than he used Sunday evening - when he strode into the Roosevelt Room early Saturday and confirmed to the country that he had ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless searches within the United States in a hunt for terror suspects - a power he said belonged to him as commander in chief, and one he insisted he would continue to exercise.
As he spoke that morning, the architect of Mr. He hailed the arrival of a government "that nobody can claim lacks legitimacy," a milestone that Mr. Bush insisted could never have been achieved if he had not ordered the toppling of Saddam Hussein. It was a reaction to a fall in which the administration was repeatedly knocked back on its heels, refusing to talk specifically about reports of a network of secret prisons in which terrorism suspects are held and possibly tortured, tying itself in knots explaining how it had rewritten the rules of interrogation, and this week asserting, to considerable skepticism in Congress, that the age of terrorism justified circumventing the limitations about spying inside the United States.
Cheney was giving voice to the frustrations of an administration that, for the first time, has met real resistance to its expansion of executive authority, even from a Congress controlled by the Republican caucus. Cheney were forced to drop their major objections to an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain of Arizona, who won overwhelming Republican support for putting restrictions on C.
By Friday, several staunch Republican supporters of the president voted against the administration on an extension of the USA Patriot Act - the legislation that gave the administration broad new surveillance powers after the Sept. And partly, it is because there were so many missteps. Bush had been successful in bolstering support for his approach in Iraq.
His new tack of admitting mistakes while insisting his government has changed course and has victory in its sights, was beginning to break through, they argued.
Bush has benefited from the fact that few Democrats proved willing to join Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat, in calling for the removal of all American troops from Iraq, fearing that they would be tarred if civil war broke out or Iraq became a launching pad for terrorism. The men, five of whom were identified by name, told their lawyers that they had been arrested in various countries, most commonly in Asia and the Middle East, the rights group said.
Some recounted having been flown to Afghanistan and then driven just a few minutes from the landing strip to the prison, the rights group said, and hearing from Afghan guards that they were near Kabul. A report released by the rights group to detail the accounts said that the detainees called the place the "dark prison" or "prison of darkness," and that they said they were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap or heavy metal music blaring for weeks at a time.
One detainee, identified as Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian who grew up in Britain, told his lawyer of being "hung up" in a lightless cell for days at a time, as his legs swelled and his hands and wrists became numb. He said that loud music and "horrible ghost laughter" was blasted into the cell, and that he could hear other prisoners "knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Chris Conway, said Sunday night that it would be premature to comment because he had no details of the report. Afghan officials denied any knowledge of secret prisons in Afghanistan. The foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said that if such things existed, they should be made known to the Afghan authorities. But midlevel Afghan intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to talk to the news media, said they were aware of several places where Americans currently detain people.
One official mentioned the main military headquarters, Camp Eggers, in Kabul, and the Ariana Hotel, which is close to the presidential palace that C. Recent reports that the C. There have been other reports suggesting that the United States operated a secret detention center in Afghanistan. One emerged in the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who said he was seized at the Macedonian-Serbian border in and turned over to the C.
Masri said that he was flown to a prison and held for four months in , and that he was told by his captors and fellow prisoners that he was in Kabul. Human Rights Watch said it had identified 26 people who had been "disappeared" and were believed to be held in secret detention facilities operated by the United States. It also said that the United States may have used a center near Kabul to hold those "disappeared" detainees. The detainees said that they were held incommunicado and that they were never visited by members of the Red Cross, the report says.
A spokesman for the International Red Cross said the organization knows that the United States has detainees who are not visited by the Red Cross, but that it does not know where in the world they are. One detainee, identified in the Human Rights Watch report only as M. He was in an "underground place, very dark," in solitary confinement, where there was loud music playing continuously, the report said, and was interrogated in a room with a strobe light, and shackled to a ring in the floor.
Another detainee, Abd al-Salam Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni, told his lawyers he was kept in the dark prison chained to a wall in Three others, Hassin bin Attash, Jamil el-Banna and Bisher al-Rawi, told their lawyers that they were held at the prison in darkness, and that they were shackled and beaten, the report said.
The hangar, covered in a huge tent, has its own entrance from the airfield. Afghan airport personnel noticed Americans using the hangar, and bringing aircraft close to the hangar for off-loading until a year ago. Anyone who approached the hangar from the city side was ordered away by guards via loudspeaker, as they are at the Ariana Hotel. Another possible former detention facility is the so-called Brick Factory that lies not far from the United States air base at Bagram, on the New Bagram Road that runs from the industrial east side of the capital.
After the fall of the Taliban it became a C. A sign posted outside now says it is an Afghan military facility, but American and Afghan commanders work there together, and members for the Afghan Rapid Reaction Force of the National Security Directorate, the Afghan intelligence service, guard the entrance to the base. New mud walls, topped with razor wire, run for kilometers around it. Guards said they could not let anyone on the base and referred all questions to the Afghan National Security Directorate.
Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. It has been clear for a long time that so-called analysts at many of these think tanks are, in effect, paid to support selected policies and politicians. But it never occurred to me that the pay-for-play schemes were so blatant. But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit payments for punditry.
In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Ferrara wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana Islands. Ferrara endorsed another odd cause: Bandow did the same. I was particularly interested in that one, since a couple of years ago right-wingers accused me of having been a paid agent of the Malaysian regime.
Bandow has confessed to a "lapse of judgment" and resigned from Cato. Ferrara nor his employer believe that he did anything wrong. The president of Mr. First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear "balanced.
Second, there will be the temptation to ignore the backstory - to treat Mr. Abramoff as a rogue, unrepresentative actor. In fact, before his indictment, Mr. In both cases, the ultimate paymaster was the Republican political machine. And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? I mean the recent developments here at home, in the United States. It was an embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which, in its high-handed approach to governing, has shown no qualms about trampling the fundamental tenets of a free, open and democratic society.
But worse was to come for the president. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. Why bother with warrants? The Times article reminded me of the famous scene from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in which the character played by Humphrey Bogart asks to see the badges of a group of Mexican bandits posing as government officials.
Incredulous, one of the bandits says: Bush apparently feels the same way about warrants. He said over the weekend that he had no intention of changing his eavesdropping policy. Stubbornness is a well-known trait of this president. On Friday, the Senate blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act because of its dangerous intrusions on privacy and threats to civil liberties. The domestic eavesdropping authorized by President Bush was an important and at times emotional part of the floor debate over the Patriot Act.
Feingold worried that we were playing into the hands of terrorists by giving up such quintessentially American values as "freedom, justice and privacy. Whether they were innocent or guilty made no difference. Others were swept up in that peculiar form of justice called extraordinary rendition. If someone who is innocent gets caught in that particular hell, too bad. The inmates have been deprived of all rights. This is dangerous territory, indeed. These secret prisons are the dungeons of the 21st century. When Americans cover their hearts and pledge allegiance, this is not the kind of behavior from their government they usually have in mind.
This is not what the American flag is supposed to represent. Rise in poll complaints troubles Iraq vote monitors http: On the deadline for filing complaints, the number of alleged violations which could swing results in the seat parliament was "well into double figures", an accredited international election observer, who wished to remain anonymous, said.
In January there were only five of these "red" complaints, the observer added. Red complaints are alleged breaches serious enough to potentially hand a seat to a party or election bloc unfairly. The election commission has declined to say how many such complaints it has received, but several parties handed in dossiers listing breaches allegedly seen by their monitors.
Secular Arab parties have accused the Shia religious bloc, which dominates the current government, of intimidating voters in Baghdad and many southern cities. The Iraqi National List, headed by the former prime minister Ayad Allawi, filed more than 60 complaints yesterday. They alleged that at several polling stations policemen, national guard troops, or men from the major crimes unit were chanting for the Shia religious list, known as At the Sharqia high school in central Baghdad, which was used as a polling station, a senior election official was said to have asked voters if they were going to vote for Unless they said yes, they were not given ballot papers.
When the manager tried to stop them asking for ballot papers, they threatened to put him in a car boot and drive him away He let them in. All complaints have to be signed by a witness, which created risks, he said. Complaints from the cities of Dohuk and Kirkuk against the two large Kurdish parties are also said to be numerous. Some members are unwilling to issue judgments against major parties. Others are biased in favour of a particular party. The violations on Thursday were much bigger than in January.
Now that the elections are safely over, the government of Ibrahim Jaafari has tripled the price of gasoline and made substantial increases in the price of gas and heating oil, in contravention of its campaign promises. Hundreds of demonstrators came out in Kut and Karbala to protest the increases, which hit the poor especially hard in the winter. He is a lame duck prime minister and a new government will be formed in the coming months.
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This move may also be a sign that Jaafari will not continue as prime minister. Al-Zaman estimates that the Kurdistan Alliance will have about 50 seats in the new parliament. This is down from the 75 they had gained on Jan. This result has provoked consternation among Turkmen and Arabs, who also live in Kirkuk province in great numbers and fear that they will be joined against their will to the Kurdistan region confederacy.
A GI was killed at Fallujah. One of the suicide bombers killed a woman and injured 11 persons at the Shiite shrine neighborhood of Kadhimiyah in northeast Baghdad, in a further attempt to stir sectarian passions. Many of the targets in this spree of violence were the Iraqi police and military.
As in the old days in Chicago, [urlthe election was so democratic that even some of the dead got to vote. And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
Its "values" are the diametric opposite of virtually everything I stand for. I would like to see al-Qaeda and all the little al-Qaeda wannabes planning out the killing of innocent civilians broken up, their members arrested and put away for a very long time. I consider our FBI and CIA officials and case officers working on this problem to be great heroes in a noble struggle and I only hope my own work on understanding religious extremism is of any use to them in it. There is a vicious playfulness in Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in this regard. They consider the US to have been a bulwark of heavy-handed authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world that have summarily arrested Muslim activists, tossed them in jail without proper trials or via courts-martial , tortured them, and executed them with no due process.
They knew very well that an event like September 11 would provoke the US government to close off civil liberties for Americans, because they had seen similar things happen in the Middle Eastern countries they had tried to subvert. Part of what he was referring to was the authoritarian states, like those of Attaturk and Abdul Nasser, that were founded after the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate in Fundamentalist Muslims often [urlconsider the caliphate, a sort of equivalent of a Sunni Muslim papacy,]http: Their point of view on this matter is ahistorical and bizarre.
The caliphate had lapsed with the Mongol invasion in and the Ottoman sultans only seriously began claiming also to be caliphs around , and most Muslims did not even accept the claim, though it was popular among Muslims in colonized British India. Nor was the late Ottoman empire exactly a fount of social justice, though it had "liberal" moments of constitutionalism and parliamentarism in and in , which the Ottoman sultan-caliph Abdul Hamid II actually opposed!
A fellow academic writes: They did not let him have the book. It makes the s look like halcyon days. Consider -- an American citizen who has committed no crime is flagged for a. All this without probable cause, a search warrant or any semblance of due process. And why would our government care to know about any of this?
Because they hate our freedoms! The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times. The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as people at any given time since in this country. The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.
The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks of http: This is the second of two pieces focused on reevaluating the costs of the September 11 attacks. In the first, Shark-bit World, I took the New York Times back to the week before September 11, , time-machine style, and found a forgotten world in which the Bush administration, with its poll numbers dropping and congressional Republicans fretting, was drifting, politically challenged, and besieged -- a moment not unlike our own. But if someone in that pre-TiVo age had somehow hit pause soon after the Twin Towers came down, while the Pentagon was still smoking, when Air Force One was carrying a panicky George Bush in the wrong direction rather than towards Washington and New York to become the resolute war president of his dreams, if someone had paused everything and given us all a chance to catch our breath, what might we have noticed about the actual damage to our world?
As a start, there were those two towers and so many of the people in them and those who came to rescue them tumbling in that near-mushroom cloud of smoke into one of the greatest piles of instant rubble and powder in history. Even a few days later, glimpsed down various side streets, the vision of destruction at the World Trade Center site -- those gigantic, jagged shards of left-over building -- were I can attest more than worthy of some civilization-ending sci-fi film; of, say, the final scene in the original Planet of the Apes where the top of the off-kilter Statue of Liberty looms from the sand.
The fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania, was surely on its way to the capital to add political power to the ensemble, creating the sort of triad that human beings seem eternally attracted to. Add four expensive planes and their passengers and crews to the list. None of this -- the lives lost most of all -- was in any way minor. But there were other costs, so much harder to tabulate.
After all, Americans were not just hurt, but hurting. And the thieves had a Hollywood-inspired sense of spectacle; they were scenario producers who, with finances hardly suitable for a film noir, created the look of a large-budget extravaganza of a sort Americans had long been familiar with in which towering infernos blazed, atom bombs went off, and volcanoes erupted in urban downtowns. They managed to mix "conventional" weaponry -- airplanes that is, combustible fuel , box cutters, and mace -- into a brew that, whether by plan or simply luck, had the apocalyptic look of a weapon of mass destruction.
On the other hand, the spot where the Twin Towers collapsed was instantly and universally dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the place where an atomic test or, in the case of two Japanese cities, atomic bombs went off.
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Imagine, then, pushing that pause button just after the damage was done but before the "response" could begin; then look -- with as cool an eye as you can -- at the damage, wildly outsized compared to the group initiating it, but limited and not world-ending in the least certainly not in a week in which our President estimated that 30, Iraqis, "more or less," had already died in the war he launched. As with the most successful terror attacks, the truly outsized thing was the response provoked.
After all, a Serbian nationalist with a pistol was quite capable of assassinating an archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but not of causing World War I. Only major powers could have done that. In the endless rites that would follow as the President launched his "Global War on Terror," we would seek a variety of roles expansive enough to suit a wounded but globe-bestriding colossus. In the process, the horrific but actual scale of the damage would disappear.
It no longer mattered that the attacking group had been relatively small, limited in its means hence, four years without an al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist incident in the U. Our world has been damaged in so many ways, many still not fully apparent, and one question is: Who made us pay the price? What did they do to us and what did we do to ourselves? The Costs of an Imperial Presidency We know now that, within five hours of the moment the Pentagon was hit, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already asked his aides "to come up with plans for striking Iraq"; that within days, the President and his top officials were already considering launching the Middle Eastern war of their dreams.
We know that eight days after the attacks, the complex page Patriot Act had already been hustled over to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft; that it passed through a cowed Senate in the dead of night on October 11th, unread by at least some of our representatives, and was signed into law on October In those years, rollback -- briefly in the s the foreign policy of choice of zealous anti-Communists -- became domestic policy as well. To be rolled back was every modest breakwater against an imperial presidency that had been erected in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War; then every Great Society program of the s; and finally, someday, everything for which the Democratic New Deal had stood.
The real costs of that day came from the leeway a frightened public, a feeble Congress, and a cowed media gave a suddenly emboldened administration to set in motion an aggrandizing vision of a militarily-enforced Pax Americana, at home as well as abroad. Remember, this was the first administration to create a military command -- Northcom -- responsible only for North America. Normally, any such proposition faces a problem. There turns out to be something against which to measure the Bush response -- the nearly forgotten case of the anthrax killer or killers , known in law enforcement circles as "the Amerithrax case.
But according to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. In that same period, such stories appeared in the Washington Post. Looked at with a cool eye, this buried nightmare could be seen as the more threatening of the two attacks that year. On the other hand, the al-Qaeda strike only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack. You had to use some sci-fi-style imagining -- and perhaps your knowledge that the old Soviet Cold War weapons labs and arsenals were now ill-tended and leaking material -- to conjure up a situation in which Osama and crew might get their hands on a real version of the same.
With the anthrax killer, no sci-fi imaginings were necessary. He she, them used an actual weapon of mass destruction -- highly refined anthrax, the Ames strain that almost certainly fell out of the not-so-perfectly guarded American Cold War weapons labs. And then, after the series of postal attacks ended, the anthrax killer s remained at large not in the mountains of Afghanistan, but somewhere in the United States -- with no evidence that the supply of anthrax had been used up.
Who needs to imagine al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" here in the U. Keep in mind that visions of anthrax-like weaponry would soon mobilize a nation in fear and hysteria around orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox-inoculations and finally a war lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, drip out of the hands of Saddam Hussein and into those of terrorists heading our way.
And yet, by early , the first WMD attack in the U. Here was the stuff of a terrifying made-for-TV movie or simply a trailer for the end of the world. It should have been unforgettable. Just a week after the Twin Towers went down, the first of seven letters filled with anthrax arrived not from the distant outlands of the planet, but from Trenton, New Jersey. This first wave was sent to a potpourri of media outlets: They proclaimed, "Death to America.
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These letters emptied prime-time TV newsrooms and, for the first time since the British burned Washington in , cleared the halls of Congress while it was still in session. The cast of characters would come to include bumbling or recalcitrant FBI agents, intrepid disease investigators, amateur sleuths, heroic postal workers, a wounded child, brain-damaged survivors, TV personalities like Tom Brokaw, the top politicians of our nation, and the most secretive weapons scientists, labs, and arsenals of the Cold War.
Just to make matters more interesting, Steven Hatfill, a bioweapons expert and for some time the main as the Attorney General put it "person of interest" in the investigation, had access to the U. It should have been the case of the century. September 11, rolled around amid weeks of ceremonies and rites, interviews with survivors, and memorial articles galore, while TV shows and books poured out.
But where were the survivor interviews with those victimized by the anthrax killer s? Where were the books, the dramas, the movies, the TV shows? Within the last year, the ongoing investigation of the case has, according to the Washington Post, been significantly downsized. The number of FBI agents assigned to it has dropped from 31 to 21 and postal inspectors from 13 to 9. Many of those remaining are now said to be "in the process of taking inventory.
The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation…" It has "cold case, dead file" written all over it. When it comes to costs, according to the Post, "at least 17 post offices and public office buildings were contaminated.
It should have been unforgettable, but by some mysterious process that has yet to be considered, the attacks were, in a sense, "disappeared. But nothing in the media coverage since then has indicated anything of the sort. Germs, the Ames anthrax strain, and the anthrax killer hardly took out a tree or two. When was the last time you read a major report on the state of American biowarfare work? When was the last time you encountered a significant story about the weapons labs at Fort Dietrich in suburban Maryland where the Ames strain was evidently first researched or the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah where it was produced and tested?
How much attention has been given to recent contracts linked to Dugway that signal a desire on the part of the U. When was the last time you read an article on whether the Homeland Security Department or the Pentagon is attending to the potential dangers of the American WMD arsenal? How much attention has gone into the decrepit system for locking down Russian WMD stocks?
The odd news piece, nothing more. And while this administration spends about a billion dollars a week on its war in Iraq, it has hardly had the will or interest to raise the few billion dollars a year needed to help lock-down the Russian arsenal. If, of course, the President had chosen to launch his "war" on terror against the anthrax killers, this might have been our top priority.
Since September 11, , weapons of mass destruction have been dealt with purely as a danger from the peripheries, not as a heartland issue. In fact, the Bush administration has successfully focused all our WMD attention and fears out there, not in here. Because this administration had its eyes set on the Middle East from the beginning, it essentially chose its terror war from column A the September 11th attacks , not column B the anthrax attacks, once it became clear that they were connected not to al-Qaeda but the American arsenal. Hence our control group.
Here, for instance, is a very partial list of actions not taken by this administration in relation to the anthrax attacks: Our President never swore to get the killer s , "dead or alive. The President, Vice President, National Security Adviser, and others did not warn the public and Congress regularly of the possibility of "clouds of anthrax" being released in our major cities though this had, after a fashion, already happened even as they were issuing dire warnings about fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs that might at any time spray biological or chemical weapons over east coast cities.
Nor did he end up incarcerated in Guantanamo for years, trial-less and beyond the reach of the courts. Quite the opposite, Hatfill is suing former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department, and others for violating his constitutional rights and the New York Times for defaming him. Nor, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, was any kind of global war declared on the killer or killers, or troops deployed anywhere. In fact, no drastic actions of any sort were taken. In the wake of the attack, the post office became more careful; U. Beyond the dead and injured, the panic of the moment, and the monumental costs of cleaning up congressional offices, newsrooms, and post offices, what were the costs?
By now, bin Laden has, in fact, disappeared into something like the kind of anonymity the anthrax killer had from the beginning. Whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or the exurbs of America, the search for the perpetrators of the two greatest terrorist attacks in our history -- the Twin Terrors -- was not expanded until success was achieved, but downsized. When it came to the hunt for bin Laden, this happened way back in when the Bush administration began switching key personnel out of Afghanistan to prepare for its long-desired invasion of Iraq.
Both are now cold cases. You might think that this administration, supposedly dedicated above all else to protecting the United States from terrorism in its newly formed Homeland Security State, would have devoted resources above all else to the task of implacably hunting down these particular terrorists, wherever they might be; that dead-ends met would have only led to redoubled efforts. That would have been, if not a "war" on terrorism, then at least a police action of note.
If tomorrow, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts were somehow tossed out on their ears -- call it indictment, impeachment, or something else -- what they, not Osama bin Laden or the anthrax terrorists will have cost us, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will still be incalculable.
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