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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4423)	11/10/2003 9:15:29 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

:-) YAY It's about time. Now if only the government would read my mind, what a beautiful world this would be.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4423)	11/10/2003 9:42:27 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

I suggested over a year ago that Turkey might get fed up and invade Iraq, using the mess we'd create in Iraq as a pretext- they haven't yet, but I'm still waiting: Turkey Warns of Preemptive Action Against Rebel Kurds An official urges U.S. to take promised steps against insurgents based in northern Iraq, saying otherwise Ankara may intervene itself. By Amberin Zaman, Special to The Times ANKARA, Turkey — Reiterating demands that American forces take action against Turkish Kurd rebels in Iraq, Turkey warned that it might intervene to disarm and evict the guerrillas from their mountain strongholds in northern Iraq if the U.S. fails to do so. "The U.S. has promised to remove the terrorists. We are still waiting for America to fulfill its promise. We believe that it will," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told The Times in an interview Saturday. "But Turkey has the right to take preemptive action to defend its own security interests, just as Israel and the United States do. The U.S. government must take this issue seriously." Gul spoke a day after the U.S. and Turkey formally abandoned plans to deploy as many as 10,000 Turkish troops to Iraq to help U.S. forces restore peace. Washington withdrew its request for the Turkish contingent because of resistance from the Iraqi Governing Council, particularly its Kurdish members. Turkey and the Kurds of northern Iraq have long been adversaries; other Iraqis also were suspicious of bringing in Turks, who ruled Iraq for nearly 400 years under the Ottoman Empire. Although the Turkish forces would not have been deployed in Iraq's north, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, leaders of the two Iraqi Kurdish factions that have run northern Iraq as an autonomous area since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, accuse Turkey of seeking to undermine gains made by their regional administration. Turkey, for its part, fears that Iraq's Kurds are seeking to establish an independent state — a move that would probably refuel separatist sentiment among Turkey's own 12 million Kurds. Kurds and their role in postwar Iraq have become a source of friction between the U.S. and Turkey, who are NATO allies. In a bid to improve ties with the U.S., Turkey's parliament approved a bill last month giving the government a yearlong mandate to send troops to Iraq. In exchange, Turkey said it expected the U.S. to disarm and deport about 5,000 Turkish Kurd rebels from northern Iraq. The rebels' Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, waged a 15-year war for Kurdish independence that claimed nearly 40,000 lives. They announced a unilateral truce after the capture of their leader in 1999, but have threatened to resume their battle if attacked. The U.S. has pledged to move against the PKK, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, even though the deal for sending Turkish forces to Iraq has fallen through. "The United States is committed to eliminating all terrorist threats in Iraq, including from the PKK," a U.S. Embassy spokesman here said Sunday. But sources said Pentagon officials and the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, are blocking action against the PKK on the grounds that it would require thousands of troops that the U.S. can ill afford to spare while attacks on American forces are escalating. continued

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4423)	11/10/2003 1:58:31 PM
From: Sultan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

As Prepared for Delivery Remarks By Al Gore November 9, 2003 FREEDOM AND SECURITY Thank you, Lisa, for that warm and generous introduction. Thank you Zack, and thank you all for coming here today I want to thank the American Constitution Society for co-sponsoring today’s event, and for their hard work and dedication in defending our most basic public values. And I am especially grateful to Moveon.org, not only for co-sponsoring this event, but also for using 21st Century techniques to breathe new life into our democracy. For my part, I’m just a “recovering politician” – but I truly believe that some of the issues most important to America’s future are ones that all of us should be dealing with. And perhaps the most important of these issues is the one I want to talk about today: the true relationship between Freedom and Security. So it seems to me that the logical place to start the discussion is with an accounting of exactly what has happened to civil liberties and security since the vicious attacks against America of September 11, 2001 – and it’s important to note at the outset that the Administration and the Congress have brought about many beneficial and needed improvements to make law enforcement and intelligence community efforts more effective against potential terrorists. But a lot of other changes have taken place that a lot of people don’t know about and that come as unwelcome surprises. For example, for the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families. President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an “enemy combatant.” Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment. Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it’s almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence – because he can’t talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn’t even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as “inalienable” can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government. How do we feel about that? Is that OK? Contd.... moveon.org