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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (16448)	11/17/2003 1:12:02 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

Watched a Brilliant Book Review today on CSPAN 2 of They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967, by David Maraniss. Here's a synopsis. In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together three very different worlds of that time: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. In the literature of the Vietnam era, there are powerful books about soldiering, excellent analyses of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and many dealing with the sixties' culture of protest, but this is the first book to connect the three worlds and present them in a dramatic unity. To understand what happens to the people of this story is to understand America's anguish. In the Long Nguyen Secret Zone of Vietnam, a renowned battalion of the First Infantry Division is marching into a devastating ambush that will leave sixty-one soldiers dead and an equal number wounded. On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, students are staging an obstructive protest at the Commerce Building against recruiters for Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm and Agent Orange, that ends in a bloody confrontation with club-wielding Madison police. And in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson is dealing with pressures closing in on him from all sides and lamenting to his war council, "How are we ever going to win?" Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the story unfolds day by day, hour by hour, and at times minute by minute, with a rich cast of characters -- military officers, American and Viet Cong soldiers, chancellors, professors, students, police officers, businessmen, mime troupers, a president and his men, a future mayor and future vice president -- moving toward battles that forever shaped their lives and evoked cultural and political conflicts that reverberate still. They had one of the Student leaders on who went on to become Mayor of Madison, Wisconson for 12 years. He said his real regret was that they didn't get control of the "crazies" during the demonstrations in the 60s. He broke them into two groups. The Revolutionaries who believed that they were overturning the Government, and the ones who were just in it for the destruction. He had obviously learned a lesson from it. The man you felt sorry for was the Infantry Captain who took 61 casualties in the ambush. He recently received the DSC for the action, 36 years late. He is still trying to get medals awarded that never got acted on. He had several troopers who called in. He recently found out that the Division General had himself awarded a Silver Star for that action. He was nowhere near it.

To: KLP who wrote (16448)	11/17/2003 1:26:07 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

Andrew Sullivan agrees with you, Karen. The main media is knocking it down. Lets see if the Bloggers can give it legs. "The Drudge Report" is giving it major play. _______________________________ THIS STORY MUSTN'T DIE: What to make of the Weekly Standard's publication of a leaked memo from neocon Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, to the Senate Intelligence Committee? Well, I'm not someone used to reading classified CIA documents and being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. But reading Stephen Hayes' summary of the document, I have to say this strikes me as a Big Deal. So far, the liberal media outlets seem to have ignored this, and it didn't help that the Weekly Standard's website was down for a while. Anti-war reporter Walter Pincus, in the Washington Post, has this mention of the memo: Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith's Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter. But reading Hayes' summary, you find plenty of CIA analysis of various bits of information, and assessments of varying reliability. Maybe the analysis isn't thorough or skeptical enough for Pincus but it sure exists - and seems to baldly contradict Pincus' piece. I don't trust Pincus anyway. He's about as reliable as David Sanger at the NYT: two anti-war partisans who have regularly spun their journalism to criticize the administration's conduct of the war. His Sunday story is based on notes from Anthony Cordesman - and flagged as the number one story on AOL. Why isn't the CIA's own analysis as valid? I guess it wouldn't buttress Pincus' agenda. So let's get other skeptics to show us why the data presented is faulty. Marshall? Pollack? Klein? Hersh? Until then ... - 12:44:35 AM ... SADDAM LINKED UP WITH OSAMA: Here's my precis of Hayes' precis. The relationship between Saddam and the Islamofascists goes back a long way - right back to the fascist Egyptian Brotherhood (for a peerless account of their ideological pedigree, read Paul Berman's little masterpiece, "Terror and Liberalism"). Here's the Feith memo: 4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes. No shit. There's more: 10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required. The analysis of those events follows: The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation. Figures. These meetings strike me as far more significant than even the alleged Mohammed Atta meetings with Iraqi operatives in the run-up to September 11. They provide a far richer context for the nexus of terrorism with terrorist-sponsoring states that many anti-war advocates deny exist at all: 14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz. An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports: Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations. Then we have the smoking vial, the intelligence that a link-up between the maniacs of al Qaeda with the resources of the Baathist terror-state was real, and that it could lead to attacks more devastating than 9/11: 26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training. The analysis of this report follows. CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh's timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons." Again, all this is amazing stuff: a phenomenally important story, if true. DOING THE RIGHT THING: I cannot independently judge this material. But others can. All I know is that we shouldn't rest until the case debunking these claims has been effectively made. We need to be told: Why is this intelligence faulty? How? Has it been cherry-picked? By whom? Why? Above all, the blogosphere has to keep this story from being buried by the anti-war media establishment. The cumulative weight of all this intelligence is stunning. Even if there are some holes in it, the broad picture it paints is unsurprising. The notion that the pragmatic Saddam, who had grown closer and closer to Islamism in the 1990s, would eschew any contacts with al Qaeda has always struck me as bizarre. The alliance is a natural. More important: you're in the administration after 9/11. All sorts of intelligence like this crosses your desk. You can't confirm all of it for absolutely sure. But just as surely, you cannot ignore it. The consequences of complacency are too horrifying for words. They still are. Yet today's 20/20 critics seem eager to claim that, even after 9/11, the administration should only have acted against Saddam if it had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he was indeed in league with al Qaeda. Well, they were wrong before this report. They are triply wrong now. Thank God we have toppled Saddam. And thank God we had a president who, after so many years of complacency, weakness and denial, took the action that was vital to protect this country andrewsullivan.com

To: KLP who wrote (16448)	11/17/2003 8:31:36 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793755

11/22/63 Remembrences. Karen, My first act of rebellion. Led a walkout of history midterm by a class virtually in tears and a prof saying life must go on insisting we stay in class. About half of us walked out. I remember taking a bus home with friends about an hour later and our first thoughts were that LBJ had killed JFK to seize power. The first conspiracy theory thus expressed before JFK had even gone cold. I started smoking again, a nasty habit picked up for another 15 years or so. Sitting in front of the TV chain smoking and chain crying. End of innocence for sure and the first real dose of reality for boomer generation. Thank God for the Beatles or we would have all committed suicide that winter. Mike

To: KLP who wrote (16448)	11/17/2003 1:05:27 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793755

Our immigration system must distinguish between the benign and the dangerous, and our law enforcement resources must be dedicated to hunting the real bad guys. Guests Who Pose No Threat By John Cornyn The writer is a Republican senator from Texas. Washington Post Last month, headlines across the country announced that an orchestrated raid on Wal-Mart stores had turned up 250 undocumented immigrants employed as janitors, floor cleaners and general laborers. This type of controversy makes for good press, but the truth is these headlines only obscure the truth about the depth of our immigration problems. The Wal-Mart workers were here illegally, to be sure. But it appears that they were not here to sell drugs, nor were they here as terrorists. They were merely doing their best to grasp a small part of the American dream -- working hard to earn low wages, money that many of them saved to send home to their families, a practice that is all too common for immigrants. For example, nearly one Mexican in five regularly receives money from relatives employed in the United States. While law enforcement resources were expended hunting down the Wal-Mart workers, other risks were receiving much less attention, even though they clearly pose a much greater threat. Further examination of our immigration system reveals a litany of such overlooked outrages. An estimated 8 million to 10 million individuals are in this country illegally. The number of deportable criminals among the undocumented immigrants living in America is unknown. Social Security numbers are key pieces of information used in creating false identities. Under Social Security Administration policy, individuals are allowed to obtain 52 replacement Social Security cards every year. In fact, 69 percent of the 18 million Social Security cards issued in 2002 were replacement cards. This policy increases the potential for fraudulent use of Social Security numbers by undocumented immigrants and others. Finally, 300,000 to 400,000 individuals are on final orders of deportation from the United States -- but our government doesn't know where they are and thus cannot enforce the deportation rulings. The outrageous facts about our border security merit our attention and, more important, our action. We need to start paying attention to these 300,000-plus people running from final orders of deportation, not just 250 people mopping floors in Wal-Marts. Our immigration system must distinguish between the benign and the dangerous, and our law enforcement resources must be dedicated to hunting the real bad guys. The sheer number of potential security risks, the horrible costs of human smuggling and the enormous gap between the resources offered to border agencies and the resources needed to enforce the law have gone unaddressed by the federal government. Immigration concerns have gained even more urgency in the security-focused post-9/11 world. Yet special-interest groups still dominate the discourse, promoting their ideology over America's security and employing the potent but morally repugnant rhetoric of fear. We allow these groups to decide these issues by default at our own peril. We must acknowledge that we have done far too little to reform a system that cries out for change. The fruit of our current border policy is nothing but death, danger and denial. I am convinced that we must finally recognize the truth about our border with Mexico. Every day families, businesses and workers cross the border. They own property on both sides of the border. They marry and raise families across the border. They fill jobs that in many cases go unfilled in the United States, and they create jobs. They work and they live across national boundaries. We can no longer deny both the sheer number of undocumented immigrants in our country and the extent to which their labor makes a positive contribution to our economy. The guest worker program I have proposed in the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2003 acknowledges the vital role hard-working immigrants play in our economy and creates a comprehensive program that will serve as an important step toward reestablishing respect for our laws. It will strengthen America's homeland security, facilitate enforcement of our immigration and labor laws and protect the millions who labor today outside the protection of the law. My proposal gives undocumented immigrants an incentive to come out of the shadows, to work within the law and then to return to their homes and families with the pay and skills they acquire as guest workers in the United States. It would protect immigrants from exploitation and from violence, and guest workers would no longer have reason to fear the authorities. They would come to see the law as an ally, not an enemy. We need to spend our time chasing down the real threats to our nation -- the smugglers, drug dealers and terrorists -- not simply those merely looking for a better life for themselves and their loved ones. In the end, making scapegoats of Wal-Mart workers won't solve any of our border security or immigration problems, and it won't make our nation any more secure. Identifying, detaining and deporting real threats to our nation and our families will. washingtonpost.com