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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (258231)	5/24/2002 1:41:39 AM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Published on Tuesday, May 21, 2002 in the Boston Globe America the Fearful by James Carroll THE MORE powerful the United States becomes, the more frightened we are. Why is that? An undercurrent of hysteria has coursed through the talk out of Washington over the last week as, first, critics demanded to know whether government officials had ignored warnings of the terrorist attacks of last September and, second, the same government officials - in response? - issued a new warning of coming attacks that might be even worse. The new warning is sharp enough to generate fear but too vague to enable any defensive preparation. In airports, citizens sheepishly submit to screening measures that are still administered with such incompetence that they can only enhance uneasiness - prompting the question, Is that the point? Meanwhile, the FBI admits it has no clue about the anthrax attacks, American soldiers remain on the hunt in Afghanistan, Pentagon war planners are getting ready for Iraq, and even Cuba is said to be readying biological weapons. The war on terrorism is not the only manifestation of heightened levels of our national fear. This week Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin will sign an arms reduction treaty that includes a US-sponsored provision allowing for the indefinite mothballing of thousands of disarmed nuclear weapons. Notice this: The United States, breaking with the primordial assumption of nuclear arms control, is now saying that the overkill supply of warheads must be preserved against future threats - as yet entirely unimagined. This marks the end of the hope, long shared by conservatives and liberals alike, that human beings might eventually wean themselves of these terrible weapons altogether. In one stroke, Bush has taken us from ''reduction'' to ''storage.'' He has reversed the most positive foreign policy track of our lifetimes, and he has done it out of fear. Here is the irony: The surest way to make the world an even more dangerous place is to posit danger as the most important thing about it. This week's treaty is the clearest case in point. America's determination to preserve thousands of excess nuclear warheads means that now Russia, despite its firm preference for elimination, will certainly preserve them as well. And what will happen over time to those warheads? When the urgency of keeping such material out of the hands of rogue elements is clear, the American move away from full elimination of nukes, especially in Russia, makes no sense. But that very irrationality is the revelation. We are like a nation that has had a psychological break and is descending into rank paranoia. The destruction of the twin towers shows that there are things to be afraid of, but our government's mad responses are making us more vulnerable to such things, not less. The ''war on terrorism'' has strengthened the hand of those who hate America. The US example of ''overwhelming force'' has pushed the Middle East into the abyss and has dragged India-Pakistan to its edge. The only real protections against cross-border terrorism are international structures of criminal justice like the recently established International Criminal Court, yet an ''unsigning'' United States slaps the court down with contempt. Since September we have squandered our wealth and focus on a huge war while neglecting police work and intelligence at home and abroad. Hence the vagueness of the current warning. And how dare our government set off alarms about Cuba's putative bioterrorism project while it has done nothing to apprehend the anthrax killer? Oh, and - forgive me, just asking - where is Osama? The Bush administration's warning about Castro's interest in bioterrorism could seem blatantly timed to deflect political pressures arising from Jimmy Carter's trip to Havana. Vice President Cheney's agitated Sunday alarm about imminent terrorist attacks could seem timed to defuse last week's long overdue political offensive by Democrats. The president's rejection, in principle, of arms ''reduction'' could seem to serve his larger political and economic purpose of restoring the American war industry to its place of preeminence. The president and his closest advisers, in other words, could be cynically exaggerating threats to our national security for their narrow purposes. But it may be worse than that. The shape of their dread is useful to them in these ways, but, also, like the mentally disturbed, they seem convinced that any danger they imagine is real. Our nation is being led by men and women who are at the mercy of their fears. That they work hard to keep the American people afraid might seem to suggest that they want merely to deflect any second-guessing about the course they have set, but in fact our fear reinforces theirs. Fear has become Washington's absolute and is shaping its every response to the future. America is being led by cowards. James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company CC

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (258231)	5/24/2002 1:42:33 AM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Published on Tuesday, May 21, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times Hiding Behind a Veil of Executive Privilege? by Robert Scheer A full-scale investigation is in order as to why this nation was so poorly prepared to fend off an air piracy attack by a terrorist group that had already killed many Americans and attempted air hijackings and yet had total access to our flight schools. Unfortunately, all clues so far point to a depressingly likely conclusion: Until Sept. 11, the Bush administration was simply too distracted and/or incompetent to maintain the American pressure on Osama bin Laden begun in 1998 under President Clinton with the missile attacks on reported Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan. As Newsweek reports this week, Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger was "totally preoccupied" with the prospect of a domestic terror attack. He warned his replacement, Condoleezza Rice: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Problem was, she didn't. Despite many warnings like Berger's, including the recently revealed Central Intelligence Agency briefings last summer, the new administration treated the so-called war on drugs as more important than terrorism, and on that basis even made overtures to the Taliban leadership. Four days before the ominous CIA briefing on Aug. 6 that warned President Bush of the possibility of Al Qaeda hijackings, Christina B. Rocca, assistant secretary of State for South Asia, was sipping tea in Islamabad with the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef. She offered a mixed message that aptly characterized the administration's confused priorities. Treating the Taliban and Al Qaeda as if they were distinct entities, Rocca--in what now seems unbelievable naivete--asked the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden. Afterward, Zaeef said, "We gave Rocca our complete assurance that our soil will not be used against America and that Afghan soil will not be used for any terrorist activity." He called the meeting "very successful," adding, "The atmosphere was very cordial." He had reason to be pleased. As Associated Press reported at the time: "In recognition of the Taliban's elimination of opium [in Afghanistan], the raw material used to make heroin, the Bush administration is giving $1.5million to the United Nations Drug Control Program to finance crop substitution, Rocca said." Poppies, not terrorists, had been eliminated in Afghanistan. Five weeks later, terrorists smashed three planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While the State Department was playing footsie with the Taliban, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's Justice Department also was downshifting anti-terrorism efforts to transfer focus to violent crime and drugs, reports Newsweek. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld blocked an attempt to move $800million from his pet missile defense program into counter-terrorism. The administration simply was not focused on terrorism until it was too late. There was a blizzard of warnings leading up to Sept. 11 that was ignored. It's a poor excuse for Rice to complain that the CIA warning was "thin." Real-time coordination of intelligence information on such a high-level problem is the responsibility of the national security advisor. If Rice felt the dire CIA warning in August was incomplete, she should have demanded that the FBI and other intelligence agencies immediately brief her and the president on their full knowledge of the situation. Nor did the administration inform the country of this lapse in security until it leaked to the media eight months later. Indeed, administration spokesmen have continuously misled the public from the first days after the Sept. 11 tragedy with the claim that the president had no advance warning. We do not yet know the full extent of those warnings, and Vice President Dick Cheney is once again circling the wagons of executive privilege around the essential data. The vice president insists that it would jeopardize national security for Congress to have access to the August CIA briefing. This follows the dangerous pattern this administration has consistently pursued of denying the public and its elected representatives potentially embarrassing information, such as notes from meetings with Enron officials before that company's spectacular implosion. We already know enough about the intelligence failures before that grim September morning to raise strong suspicions that executive privilege is now being invoked to conceal enormous incompetence on the part of the executive branch. It is painful, in light of the thousands of people slain in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania as well as later in Afghanistan in retaliation, to look back at how our security was so threatened. But as horrifying as the facts may turn out to be, we as a nation have long believed that it is the truth--full, complex and unsanitized--that shall make us free. We should continue to act accordingly. Robert Scheer writes a syndicated column. Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times CC