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

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (13685)	2/28/2003 4:24:20 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bush & Co. don't care what we think By HUBERT G. LOCKE SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER Friday, February 28, 2003 Last month, I had the privilege (and pleasure -- he is a personally delightful fellow) of spending a morning with Daniel Ellsberg. Unfortunately, the name is apt to be remembered primarily by those over 40; Ellsberg was a former special assistant in the Department of Defense (during the Johnson administration) and senior staff member of the Rand Corp. who, in October 1969, secretly photocopied a 7,000-page, top secret study on U.S. decision-making regarding the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg released the purloined papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post where they were quickly dubbed "the Pentagon Papers." Ellsberg, in the words of NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr, "single-handedly changed the course of history." The Pentagon Papers initiated a series of events that led to Watergate, the collapse of the Nixon presidency and, finally, the end of the Vietnam War. Three decades later, Ellsberg tells his story in a book titled "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" (Viking Press). It makes for chilling reading, particularly in light of the present, relentless rush toward war in Iraq and the Middle East. "Secrets" ought to be required reading for every American because it is essentially the story of how reporters -- and, by extension, the American public -- were lied to by people in positions of power in the nation's capital who thought they knew what was best for America and the nation's interests. "Secrets" describes how, in the heady atmosphere of the Pentagon and the White House, loyalty to one's boss overwhelmingly took precedent over personal honesty and integrity. It details how a set of convictions developed that "it was the president's job to make foreign policy, with the advice of our bosses, not, in any serious sense, with the advice of Congress. It didn't matter that much to us what the public thought." Ellsberg tells of watching Washington's top decision-makers "secretly maneuver the country into a full-scale war with no real promise of success." He describes watching his colleagues and counterparts moving from "one crisis to another" like the circus juggler "who keeps a dozen plates spinning in the air on the ends of long, flexible poles . . . " Ellsberg concludes, "I asked myself more than once: . . . with all the simultaneous problems (whose range reflected America's post-war sense of its 'responsibilities,' its power, its entitlements) . . . can men even as brilliant and adroit as these -- and for sheer brainpower and energy, the Kennedy crew that Johnson inherited could not easily be bettered -- manage safely and wisely so many challenges at once . . . ? Can you really run the world this way?" With the war drums pounding incessantly in our ears, Ellsberg's recounting of the atmosphere in the top reaches of government during the Vietnam era takes on an alarming pertinence. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it's like "déjà vu all over again." The White House is maneuvering this country toward a full-scale war -- the only difference being that, this time, it makes no secret of the fact. The maneuvering is being done by people who believe they know what is best, not only for America but the entire world. And they are people who have amply demonstrated that they do not care what either the American public thinks -- or the rest of the world, for that matter. They are also the people who confront, in Ellsberg's words, a basketful of "simultaneous problems." Kim Jong II and his nuclear pretensions in North Korea make Saddam Hussein seem like a rank amateur. Iran announced earlier this month that it has begun to mine uranium as part of an ambitious energy program; Iran is said to be only three to five years away from developing a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is about to precipitate a constitutional crisis in the Philippines by sending 3,000 troops to help hunt down members of a terrorist organization that allegedly has ties to Osama bin Laden. The Philippine Constitution prohibits foreign troops from engaging in combat on Philippine soil. And the United States already has 200 troops stationed in Colombia where rebels are holding three Americans as hostages. (The U.S. troops, incidentally, are training Colombian troops to defend an oil pipeline owned by L.A.-based Occidental Petroleum.) No one would suggest that the current crowd in the White House could hold a candle -- when it comes to brilliance and adroitness -- to those who managed the nation's affairs during the Kennedy years. So Ellsberg's question becomes all the more critical: "Can you really run the world this way?" _____________________________________________________ Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. seattlepi.nwsource.com

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (13685)	2/28/2003 5:35:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Newsweek's Iraq Report Falls on Deaf Ears By Norman Solomon AlterNet February 27, 2003 alternet.org You gotta hand it to America's mass media: When war hangs in the balance, they sure know how to bury a story. After devoting thousands of network hours and oceans of ink to stories about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, major U.S. news outlets did little but yawn in the days after the March 3 issue of Newsweek published an exclusive report on the subject – a piece headlined "The Defector's Secrets." It's hard to imagine how any journalist on the war beat could read the article's lead without doing a double take: "Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." The article was written by Newsweek national security correspondent John Barry, who has been with the magazine since 1985. After following the Iraq weapons story for a dozen years, he draws on in-depth knowledge – in stark contrast to the stenographic approach taken by most journalists on the beat, who seem content to relay the pronouncements coming out of Washington and the United Nations. "I think the whole issue of Iraq's weaponry has become steadily more impacted and complicated over the years," Barry told me in a Feb. 26 interview. People often have trouble making sense out of the "twists and turns of the arguments." And, Barry added, what's reported as "fact" provided by the U.S. government or the U.N. is in many cases mere "supposition." Now, it's time for us to ask some loud questions about the U.S. media echo chamber. Such as: Is there anybody awake in there? Barry's potentially explosive story notes that "Kamel was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs." Making use of written documentation that Newsweek has verified as authentic, the article reports: "Kamel's revelations about the destruction of Iraq's WMD stocks were hushed up by the U.N. inspectors, sources say, for two reasons. Saddam did not know how much Kamel had revealed, and the inspectors hoped to bluff Saddam into disclosing still more. And Iraq has never shown the documentation to support Kamel's story. Still, the defector's tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist." The Newsweek story came off the press on Sunday, Feb. 23. The next day, a would-be authoritative source – the Central Intelligence Agency – explained that it just wasn't so. "It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," declared CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. For good measure, on the same day, a Reuters article quoted an unnamed "British government source" eager to contradict Newsweek's documented account of what Kamel had said. "We've checked back and he didn't say this," the source contended. "He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking." Under the unwritten rules of American media coverage, such denials tend to end the matter when the president and Congress have already decided that war is necessary. It's not as if Kamel ranks as a nobody in media circles. Journalists and U.S. officials are fond of recounting that Saddam Hussein made sure he was quickly killed after the defector returned to Iraq following six months of voluntary exile. "Until now, Kamel has best been known for exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced," media analyst Seth Ackerman points out. He adds that Newsweek's story "is particularly noteworthy because hawks in the Bush administration have frequently referred to the Kamel episode as evidence that U.N. inspectors are incapable of disarming Iraq on their own." Ackerman cites a speech Dick Cheney made last August, when the vice president said that what occurred with Kamel "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself." Accounts of Kamel's debriefing as a defector and his subsequent demise have often served to illustrate the dishonesty and brutality of Iraq's government. But now that other information has emerged about what he had to say, the fellow seems to be quite a bit less newsworthy. _____________________________________________________ Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," published by Context Books.

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (13685)	2/28/2003 7:43:07 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Europe divided over Iraq resolution BBC News Last Updated: Friday, 28 February, 2003, 12:05 GMT news.bbc.co.uk Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has said Moscow is opposed to any new United Nations Security Council resolution which would lead to war in Iraq. He indicated that Russia was ready to use its power of veto at the council if necessary. Mr Ivanov was speaking during a visit to China - another permanent member of the Security Council which has spoken out against war. Meanwhile the leaders of two of the countries sponsoring a second resolution, the UK and Spain, met in Madrid, with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair saying the authority of the UN was "on the line" over Iraq. Speaking to the BBC earlier, Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said she thought the resolution could still be achieved. 'Unhelpful' comments But Ms Palacio also described as unhelpful the tough stance taken by hawks in Washington over European unwillingness to back military action against Iraq. Blair and Aznar are backing a second UN resolution She appeared to make an attack on United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who several weeks ago described countries such as France and Germany which opposed the US position as the "old Europe". "Some sentences from some responsibles in the US Government haven't helped us within Europe and have created a bit of a resentment, and this is never a good issue," she said. However, Mr Aznar tried to play down his foreign minister's comments, saying that earlier statements he had made about defence ministers talking too much were not directed at anyone in particular. Overt threat During his Beijing visit, Mr Ivanov told reporters that his country would not support any resolution which could, directly or indirectly, open the way to resolving the Iraq crisis by force. And he made an overt threat that Russia would use its veto, if it was in the interests of "international stability". We have all the conditions to resolve this problem by political means, Mr Ivanov said, and the international community cannot lose that chance. The BBC's Jacky Rowland in Moscow says such comments - along with the sustained campaign against war by France and Germany - are intended to put the squeeze on the US as it presses for a new UN resolution. But Russia would not lightly split the Security Council on this or any other issue. That was underlined in a conversation on Thursday between President George W Bush and the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. The two men agreed to find a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis, working through the Security Council. The Russians are aware that it is best to work with the Americans through international institutions, rather than take a confrontational approach which could nudge Washington into unilateral action.

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (13685)	3/3/2003 6:56:54 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

CONNECTING THE DOTS The paradoxes of intelligence reform. by MALCOLM GLADWELL columnist The New Yorker Issue of 2003-03-10 newyorker.com <<...No one wants ambiguity. Today, the F.B.I. gives us color-coded warnings and speaks of “increased chatter” among terrorist operatives, and the information is infuriating to us because it is so vague. What does “increased chatter” mean? We want a prediction. We want to believe that the intentions of our enemies are a puzzle that intelligence services can piece together, so that a clear story emerges. But there rarely is a clear story—at least, not until afterward, when some enterprising journalist or investigative committee decides to write one...>>