Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6155)	9/12/2002 2:35:15 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

A nation changed - and unchanged By Derrick Z. Jackson Editorial The Boston Globe 9/11/2002 TODAY, AMERICANS are consumed with melancholy. Tomorrow, we will just consume. Today, we want the world to share in our loss and suffering. Tomorrow, we go back to exploiting the world, with questionable regard for suffering and minimal concern about the planet's degradation. Today, we will say how everything is changed forever. Tomorrow, we will defiantly demonstrate that we will not change. A year has not cured the schizophrenia exposed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The United States remains two countries at the same time. One nation is joined in the permanent loss of invulnerability. Three thousand people, mostly ordinary people, were killed almost simultaneously and instantaneously by a network of madmen who turned tools of progress into weapons of mass destruction. There are things that are changed forever. The dead. Their families. The New York skyline. No matter one's personal politics, raw grief and rage will bond every American. Take any day of the New York Times ''Portraits of Grief'' series, which gave vignettes of the victims in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the hijacked airliners. You could find someone with aspirations, hobbies, humor, skills, material passions, and spiritualities akin to your own, someone who in your own mind is as innocent as you are. The World Trade Center might have been targeted by the madmen as a symbol of heartless capitalism. But somewhere in that building, you could find someone close to your heart, close enough to chill your spine in imagining yourself in their place. We will be angry forever because a man in a beard and his heartless followers buried their lives in impenetrable dust. Because the United States happens to be Planet Earth's closest thing to a global economic and military empire, the world will be sending us its sympathies. No one wants to be seen as failing to please the king, especially after President Bush told the world right after the attacks, ''Either you're with us or you are with the terrorists.'' What is also painfully clear is that the other America, despite the traumatic evidence that it cannot insulate itself from global evil, continues to play the heartless CEO. President Bush wants the world to help round up the terrorists and wants the world to allow US soldiers to go to whichever cave we think Osama bin Laden is in. Bush wants the world to support us in a first-strike war on Iraq. Bush wants permission from the rest of the world to conduct an ''ad hoc and often unilateral pursuit'' of threats to the United States, as Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham put it this week. But we refuse to participate in the formation of a new International Criminal Court, ratified by 79 nations. We pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. We backed off on curtailing carbon dioxide emissions. We did not seriously participate in the world conference against racism. We withdrew from 30-year-old missile treaties. We just got done trying to stymie the World Summit on Sustainable Development from setting any measurable goals and timetables to cut pollution and poverty. We have watched millions of people die in genocides without barely lifting an eyelash. At around 5 percent of the world's population, we have done everything we can to keep a firm grip on the world's resources and could not care less about fouling the planet with a quarter of the greenhouse emissions. Sales of Chevrolet Suburbans last month were double those of August 2001, helping General Motors sell a record number of sport utility vehicles. Suburbans get about 13 miles per gallon of gasoline. A current major beer commercial has young adults bragging about eating too much as 2 billion people on Earth have no clean water. Sept. 11 did nothing to stop our flaunting of excess. Do not read into this in any way that our retrograde, inward policies made the 3,000 victims any less innocent than they were or that crime committed against them had the least bit of legitimacy. But the United States is playing with global fire by demanding that our dead be viewed by the world as pure innocents when we write off the thousands of innocent civilians we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade (and presumably would kill in a new war in Iraq) as mere ''collateral damage.'' It is playing with fire when we continue to rub our consumption in the world's face. Sept. 11 brought the United States into the world of unsuspected bombing and terror. The world for the most part has joined the United States in going after the terrorists. For all this asking and demanding of help, it might be a good idea for the United States to join the world. ___________________________________________________ Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 9/11/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6155)	9/12/2002 10:36:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

seattlepi.nwsource.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6155)	9/12/2002 11:41:15 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

America's war record is littered with lies September 12 2002 theage.com.au Remember Vietnam? Remember the Gulf War? Beware what you're told on Iraq, writes Kenneth Davidson. Before Australians get sucked into the Bush administration's war with Iraq on what appears the flimsiest excuses, they should remember the excuses Americans offered the world to justify their involvement in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. President Lyndon Baines Johnson got Congress to approve US military intervention in Vietnam based on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, based on the claim that North Vietnamese torpedo boats made unprovoked attacks on two US destroyers. Does anybody believe this story now? If it is true, why hasn't the US released the archives relating to the incident? After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, a group backed by the Kuwait government-in-exile hired a US public relations firm to devise a campaign to win American support for the war. The high point was the use of the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US as a star witness to a congressional hearing into the Iraq invasion. Under an assumed name, she said: "I saw Iraq soldiers come into the hospitals with guns, and go into a room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die." She later admitted she had lied. But this lie, and others, worked. So why did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait? Before the invasion, the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, said the US would not interfere. It was a reasonable expectation. Saddam was a US ally against Iran, so much so that between 1985 and 1989, dozens of biological agents were shipped to Iraq from the US under licence from the Commerce Department, despite the fact that Iraq had been reported to be engaging in chemical and possibly biological warfare against Iranians, Kurds and Shiites since the early 1980s. And Iraq had real grievance against Kuwait. According to Saddam, Kuwait had been exceeding its OPEC oil production quota and this was depressing the price of oil and Iraq's revenue, which was needed to pay for its war with Iran. Saddam believed Saudi Arabia and Kuwait owed part of Iraq's debt for its war against Iran because Iraq was protecting both these countries against Iran. And to add insult to injury, Kuwait was drilling into Iraq's share of the Rumaila oil field which straddles both countries. Saddam is a monster. Arguably the murderous concoction of ethnic and religious rivalries which constitute the population of Iraq can only be held together by a monster. The oil interests which direct US policy in the Middle East believe this. They want Saddamism without Saddam. He is no longer their man. That is why they call for "regime change". But Saddam is no religious fanatic. According to Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest: "Saddam's Ba'ath Party regime, despite its Islamic trappings, is a deeply secular and fundamentally socialist ideology. "You can think whatever you like about Saddam but he is not so foolish that he would threaten his own region's stability by financing the extreme and violent likes of al Qaeda." It is possible to imagine that a religious fanatic would be prepared to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a first strike against the US, which would invite massive retaliation that would vaporise most of the population of Iraq. But in this respect Saddam and his generals are as sane as the Russian communist leadership during the Cold War who understood the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. They are not likely to adopt a policy of mass suicide, either directly by launching WMD or indirectly by arming al Qaeda, which could conceivably use WMD irrespective of the consequences. This week's report by the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies has been used by the hawks in Whitehall and Washington as "proof" that Saddam is close to having a WMD capability, yet it contains no factual information that undermines informed opinion that Iraq is far weaker in WMD than it was before the Gulf War. So why did Saddam expel UN weapons inspectors in 1998? He didn't. The head of the inspection team, Richard Butler, ordered the inspectors to leave Baghdad in anticipation of an attack. The Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, criticised Butler for withdrawing the inspectors without seeking the permission of the UN Security Council. It has since been shown that the Iraqi charge at the time - that the weapons inspectors had been used as spies for the US - was the truth, not propaganda. According to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter: "There is no way the Iraqis are going to let in the inspectors now . . . why would they let in the inspectors to spy on them, target them more effectively and then be used to manipulate justification for war?" So far, neither George Bush nor Tony Blair have come up with any reason that could justify a first strike against Iraq - except the unstated (because it is unacceptable) reason that "regime change" would give America control of Iraq's 100 billion barrels of oil reserves. Kenneth Davidson is a staff columnist. E-mail: dissentmagazine@ozemail.com.au

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (6155)	9/12/2002 12:44:29 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Little Guy Takes the Fall While Ken Lays Low dailyenron.com <<...Last week's arrest and guilty plea by mid-level Enron executive Michael Kopper was framed as a breakthrough for federal prosecutors. With Kopper cooperating they now hope to bring charges against Kopper's former boss, Andy Fastow. After Fastow they hope to bag Enron's No. 2, Jeffery Skilling. But, that may be a reach. There are doubts already being expressed that Fastow would, or even can, provide incriminating evidence against Skilling. And, Enron's No. 1, Kenneth Lay, may be even further out of reach. "The prosecution will clearly have problems moving much farther than Fastow just on the Kopper case," said Ross Miller, co-author of the book "What Went Wrong at Enron." "It is pretty clear they've got Fastow. The key question becomes, can Fastow get them to Skilling?" The good news for Skilling and Lay is that Kopper's plea only shows that Fastow and others within the global finance group run by Fastow at Enron were out to defraud the company. Nothing in Kopper's plea points to Skilling, The Department of Justice's Enron investigation is fraught with political booby traps. The Bush administration's roster lists over 50 officials who had financial ties of one kind or another with Enron before joining the administration. And, both Enron and its former CEO, Ken Lay, had close financial, political and personal ties to President Bush. So, the case was assigned to one of the department's most political officials, Michael Chertoff. Chertoff made national headlines when served as counsel to then New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato's relentless probe of President Clinton's Whitewater land deal. Chertoff's abrasive manner and partisan vigor won him enemies on the left, and friends on the right. Chertoff "wanted to establish himself as a Republican," John Fahy, a friend, told USA Today. Having proven his conservative credentials on the Clinton probe Chertoff was handed the politically sensitive Enron investigation. In recent weeks pressure has mounted on Chertoff to show some kind of results from his investigation. The Kopper plea deal has taken some of that pressure off the department. And, the freezing of Fastow's assets last week, also reduced criticism that the DOJ was allowing Enron executives to continue living high and giving them time to hide and dissipate their ill-gotten gains. But, the two top Enron officials continue to have unfettered access to their money and other assets as the case against top officials, primarily Lay and Skilling, has yet to be made by Chertoff. The stated reason for the failure to bring charges against the two top Enron officials is that the case is "complex." "It is ironic that Chertoff, who was so sure he had a case against Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater affair is suddenly so cautious," said Mike Lux, President of American Family Voices. "The generous conclusion would be that, since he was proven wrong in Whitewater, maybe he learned not to jump to conclusions. But, I suspect like his view of Whitewater, his view of the Enron case is more politically driven than legally driven."...>>