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.

Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (158407)	7/8/2003 8:31:39 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

sounds good for those stock grants then, as long as they keep giving them out all is well I think yahoo or another enterprise internet company will offer internet services to business. The first thing is email, its amazing how many PCs there are in corporate america with office installed that really only need or use email. Next a simple word processor and spreadsheet, after all if you look at excel and word now, they have internet access and routing slips (send to email) built in, plus html publishing to the web.

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (158407)	7/9/2003 1:30:18 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied July 8, 2003 Robert Scheer They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document — now known to be a crude forgery — that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either. What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax. Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." What the president did not say was that the British were relying on their intelligence white paper, which was based on the same false information that Wilson and the U.S. ambassador to Niger had already debunked. "That information was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said Sunday on "Meet the Press." Although a British Parliament report released Monday exonerated the Blair government of deliberate distortion to justify invading Iraq, it urged the foreign secretary to come clean as to when British officials were first told that the Iraq-Niger allegation was based on forged documents. The report noted: "It is very odd indeed" that the British government has still not come up with any other evidence to support its contention about an Iraq-Niger connection. Nor has the U.S. administration told its public why it ignored the disclaimers from its own intelligence sources. In order to believe that our president was not lying to us, we must believe that this information did not find its way through Cheney's office to the Oval Office. In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses." In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?" Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the president told Wilson: "What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight." As Wilson observed wryly, "I guess he didn't realize that one of these days I would carry that fight against his son's administration." And that fight remains the good fight. This is not some minor dispute over a footnote to history but rather raises the possibility of one of the most egregious misrepresentations by a U.S. administration. What could be more cynical and impeachable than fabricating a threat of rogue nations or terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and using that to sell a war? "There is no greater threat that we face as a nation," Wilson told NBC, "than the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of nonstate actors or international terrorists. And if we've prosecuted a war for reasons other than that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we've done a great disservice to the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat." The world is outraged at this pattern of lies used to justify the Iraq invasion, but the U.S. public still seems numb to the dangers of government by deceit. Indeed, Nixon speechwriter William Safire this week in his column channeled the voice of his former boss to reassure Republicans that the public easily could be conned through the next election. Perhaps, and far be it for me to lecture either Safire or a reincarnated Nixon as to the ease of deceiving the electorate, but as we learned from the Nixon disgrace, lies have a way of unraveling, and the truth will out, even if it's after the next election. latimes.com

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (158407)	7/9/2003 1:47:51 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 164684

US repeats Vietnam-era arrogance By Derrick Z. Jackson, 7/9/2003 ITH ATTACKS continuing to claim the lives of US soldiers, a reporter last week asked President Bush what the White House was doing to get France, Germany, and Russia to join the American occupation of Iraq. Bush did not discuss France, Germany, or Russia. He chose to brag that he was the fastest gun in Western civilization. ''There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us,'' Bush said. ''My answer is, bring 'em on! We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. Of course we want other countries to help us ... but we've got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure.... The enemy shouldn't make any mistake about it. We will deal with them harshly if they continue to try to bring harm to the Iraqi people.'' Echoing Bush was General Tommy Franks, who just retired as the commander of the invasion of Iraq. Franks told ABC's ''Good Morning America,'' ''The fact is, wherever we find criminals, death squads, and so forth who are anxious to do damage to this country and to peace-loving countries around the world, I absolutely agree with the president of the United States: Bring 'em on!'' Such arrogance harkens back to Vietnam and the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 that Americans were ''strange liberators.'' We say we are there to liberate the people, but then we turn around and try and taunt Saddam's remnants out of the saloon so they can all show off in high noon showdowns - wild firefights that are sure to result in yet more civilian deaths. We bragged ourselves literally to death four decades ago. According to King in his speech ''A Time to Break Silence'': ''It should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.... ''As I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.... They must see Americans as strange liberators.... Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not `ready' for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.... ''The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs.... They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. ''They wander into the hospitals with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for one `Vietcong'-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them - mostly children. They wander into towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.... ''We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators! ''Now there is little left to build on - save bitterness.... If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.... ''If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.'' Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 7/9/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com