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

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12575)	2/4/2003 6:30:45 PM
From: JHP	Respond to of 89467

WW3 ray you are in the deep end of the pool,way over your head! you crack me up . your constant whining, your worse then my grandchildren! << There's only one way that World War III will be started. That is with a debasement of the U.S. currency. It is already starting>> roflmao you are a very highly educated moron.. John

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12575)	2/5/2003 3:37:22 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

In Doubt We Trust War talk deserves skepticism, not a blank check By Benjamin R. Barber COMMENTARY The Los Angeles Times February 5, 2003 The Bush administration is releasing small pieces of intelligence in dribs and drabs to make its circumstantial case for war with Iraq. Hints were dropped in the State of the Union message, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell promises more at the Security Council today. In making the case for war, there is one thing on which President Bush and his critics agree: It's all about trust. The leaders of eight European countries who signed on to the war effort in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal and European papers last week didn't make a judgment on the evidence; they argued that history and the North Atlantic alliance demanded that Europe trust America. But if the case for war rests on trust, there are good reasons why this president, like any powerful democratic leader, needs to be distrusted. First, healthy republican democracy was founded and thrives on a fundamental distrust of power. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights enshrine that principle. In Federalist Paper 51, James Madison notes the "great importance in a republic" of guarding society "against the oppression of its rulers," while the Constitution's most impressive devices, from checks and balances to an independent judiciary, reflect distrust of concentrated power. Thomas Jefferson opposed the idea of a presidential State of the Union message, saying it reeked of a "speech from the throne." Modern-day Republicans often campaign on the premise that Americans should not trust "big government," but they quickly forget their reservations once they win big elections. Some people argue that war attenuates the case for distrust. Yet war and truth are not a good match. Presidents have manipulated, edited and at times perverted the truth -- usually, to be sure, to obtain popular and congressional support of what they believed were worthy ends. The Gulf of Tonkin affair, in which a largely fabricated story of attacks on American war vessels was employed to stampede Congress into support for a major escalation of the Vietnam War, comes to mind. Or the sinking of the battleship Maine by what may have been (but was never confirmed as) a Spanish mine in Havana Harbor in 1898, an event used by President McKinley to help bring the country into a war with Spain over its colonies. Or President Eisenhower's prevarications about the U-2 incident and President Nixon's about the Cambodia incursion. Every president believes he is being "honest" at some deeper level when misleading us to rationalize a war he thinks vital to national interests. That's his job. Ours, however, is to distrust him on crucial matters of war and peace until hard proof is on the table. Bush imagines it is enough in making the case for a preventive war against Iraq to assure the world that "we exercise power without conquest, we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers." But we must ask for more: for hard intelligence, facts contradicting the sanguine views of the inspectors and showing that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein really possesses weapons of mass destruction or has the means and the intentions to acquire them fast. We cannot accept a refusal to reveal intelligence because it may "endanger" sources. In our democracy, the need to protect intelligence sources must be trumped by the public's right to know. To have his war, the president must prove his case to the American people and show what Jefferson called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by making a public case that is more than merely inferential or circumstantial. This will be the challenge faced by Powell at the Security Council. In his State of the Union, the president referred repeatedly to the old and empty warheads found Jan. 16 as evidence of Hussein's plans to use chemical and biological agents. But in an interview last week, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said "no trace" of chemical or biological elements had been found either in the old warheads or anywhere else. Secretary Powell? Powell has suggested that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery, but Blix said his inspectors had found no evidence for such incidents. Secretary Powell? Many experts have said there is a far greater chance of Al Qaeda receiving weapons of mass destruction from the North Koreans or even the nuclear-armed Pakistanis than from Iraq. Secretary Powell? We know we cannot trust Hussein or North Korea's Kim Jong II. But total distrust of tyrants does not entail the corollary of total trust in Bush. Americans have embraced the motto "in God we trust," not "in presidents we trust." They have placed their faith in a republican form of government that questions and limits power. That is the difference between Iraq and the United States. ___________________________________________________________ Benjamin R. Barber is the author of "Jihad vs. McWorld" (Ballantine, 2002) and is completing a critical study of preventive war in an age of terrorism, due from Norton this summer. latimes.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (12575)	2/5/2003 4:34:11 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

SEC Should Probe Sale of Army Secretary's Mansion Thomas White's $13 Million Deal by JASON LEOPOLD CounterPunch January 31, 2003 counterpunch.com A lifelong Army veteran with no corporate experience takes a job at an upstart energy company, earns tens of millions of dollars in questionable stock sales before the company goes belly up and lands a powerful position working in the administration of the President of the United States. Such is the story of Army Secretary Thomas White, the former vice chairman of Enron, who proved to the nation Friday that his tenure at the disgraced energy company paid off well when he sold his Florida mansion for a staggering $13.9 million. Meanwhile, thousands of Enron investors lost billions of dollars and employees of the company lost their life savings when the company imploded a year ago in a wave of accounting scandals. But White, like other Enron executives, has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of the company's financial machinations, despite the fact that the unit he ran, Enron Energy Services, inflated the value of its energy contracts--according to dozens of former employees--and has been directly linked to the California energy crisis. Had the true value of EES' contracts been known to investors, White would not be the wealthy man that he is today and might very well be living in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C. Now White is getting ready to lead hundreds of thousands of the country's soldiers into a war with Iraq. This is a man that clearly should not be managing a multibillion military budget. Nor should he be serving in the administration of the President. Even though White testified about his work at Enron before a senate committee hearing last July, there are numerous questions about his sale of Enron stock shortly before the company collapsed that have yet to be answered. The sale of his home--where antiwar activists have recently staged protests--will only fuel speculation that White did indeed use inside information to unload the bulk of his Enron stock before the company filed what was then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. At best, the Securities and Exchange Commission should revisit that issue. White bought the beachfront property in 2000 for $6.5 million. He tore down an adjacent 2,000 square-foot home and built a 15,145 square-foot mansion and invested $10.5 million of his own money into the construction, which was completed last month. In May of 2001, White was tapped by President Bush to serve as Secretary of the Army. He sold some of his Enron shares, but not all of it as required by law. In October 2001, while the nation was still reeling from the September 11 terrorist attacks and ground troops were dismantling the Taliban government in Afghanistan, White made dozens of phone calls to his former Enron colleagues. He testified before the Senate committee that he was "concerned" about his old friends, but after those phone calls White unloaded the rest of his stock. Between May and October of 2001, White sold 405,710 shares for $14 million. Meanwhile, Enron's lower-level employees were restricted from selling their own shares. It's common knowledge that White financed his Naples home with proceeds from the sale of Enron stock. But if White was concerned that he wouldn't be able to complete his mansion and needed to know whether he should dump his shares of Enron than that is clearly a violation of the Securities and Exchange Act, which is criminal. Senate Democrats must reopen this issue and demand that White explain whether the construction of his mansion coincided with his sale of Enron stock and whether the proceeds from the October sale helped to fund the project. President Bush said in his State of the Union speech Tuesday that he would be tough on the corporate executives who commit white-collar crimes. The President should start with his own administration, particularly Secretary White. Bush may have the only presidential administration in history that has been accused of misdeeds while working in the corporate sector and have treated the most vicious corporate scandals with a mere slap on the wrist. But that's what you get when you have a bunch of ex-CEO's running the country. Jason Leopold can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com