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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:09:49 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Respond to of 769667

True conservatives are against Bush because he is not a conservative. He is a radical, revolutionary.

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:12:12 AM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

President Bush promised fiscal responsibility, but instead has delivered a budget rife with profligate spending By David Tancabel \| Staff Writer \| 30 July 2003 The Republican Party took control of Congress with the 1994 Republican Contract with America on the idea that government "is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." Almost a decade later, with control of the White House, the Republicans in power have turned around and created the largest budget and deficits this county has ever seen. At a time when this country needs a sound fiscal policy, President Bush has led the path away from fiscal conservatism, and Republicans in Congress and across the country have followed. Conservatives have blindly followed Bush away from what used to be one of their pillars, low government spending and a balanced budget. During the Clinton years, federal spending as a percentage of the nation's total economic output dropped from 22% at the start of his first term to below 19% at the end of his second. Huge deficits were replaced with record surpluses while the Republican Congress kept his spending in check. Regulatory costs also declined steadily throughout Clinton's presidency, according to a study released by Americans for Tax Reform, a group that favors lower taxes. Under Bush, government spending is up 12.4% over the past three years, record deficits have returned and regulatory costs are up 8.4%. The $2.2 trillion budget is the most of any budget in United States' history. This number does not include the $74 billion spending bill already past to pay for the war in Iraq, nor does it include the further supplemental appropriations that will be needed for the increasingly expensive occupation of Iraq. It used to be the Republicans who would start an outcry on spending increases, but for now, they are content spending away, creating the big government they supposedly abhor. If the Federal Government needs to increase its spending this much, a tax cut to boost the economy is not prudent. Making sure the war and the government can be paid for is a more pertinent issue. There was also little opposition from Republicans on Bush's tax plan. A large $330 billion tax cut that, if Bush got his way, would have been closer to $750 billion. Bush now faces the largest deficits in the history of the Federal Government, estimated at $455 billion. Republicans and fiscal conservatives had believed for quite some time that a balanced budget was a good policy, but now that they have control, they believe they can do whatever they want with the public's money. Some economists agree that the tax cut will give the economy a boost, but the economic conditions are not bad enough that such a boost is needed when expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought. Blaming the higher budgets on the "war on terror" stretches credulity too. As The Economist put it, "Federal spending has increased by 18% in Mr Bush's first two years--far more than the forecasts allow for in the future. The non-military component has been rising by more than 6% a year, which makes blaming it all on the war on terror seem strange. And the forecasts do not include the costs of war in Iraq, which are unpredictable." President Bush and the self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress are showing they have no discipline when they are in control of the money. Bush and many of the Republicans have turned on their roots that won them control of Congress and are now blazing a trail back to the big government and big money that they were suppose to destroy. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:13:21 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

President Bush thinks free trade is a moral principle, if only he would act on that. By Daniel J. Cragg \| Editor-in-Chief \| 30 July 2003 The World Trade Organization (WTO), on 11 July 2003, issued a report that concluded that the "safeguard measures" created by President Bush on the imports of certain steel products are inconsistent with the WTO Safeguards Agreement, so essentially, the U.S. is in violation of international law. Bush imposed tariffs between eight and thirty percent last March, accusing foreign firms of unfair trade practices. In reality, there is a worldwide downturn in the steel market, and steel imports have actually been dropping in the three years leading up to the imposition of these tariffs. This act, which The Economist called "America's most protectionist single action for two decades," came even after Bush cited free trade as a moral principle in his National Security Strategy: "The concept of 'free trade' arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics. If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person--or a nation--to make a living." Recently in Africa, Bush promised hundreds of millions in aid to various governments on the continent. He promised a handout, instead of the "real freedom" a developing nation needs to make a living, which could be provided by the elimination of trade barriers to African agriculture and to the Brobdingnagian subsidies the Federal Government provides to American farmers. Protectionism is an intellectually defunct policy, the mantra of today's Chicken Littles. Bush appears to have signed on with free trade in theory, but he has failed to be its proponent in practice, and once again has had the temerity to disregard international law simply because it diverged from his immediate interests. Economic liberalization and free trade can do so much good while concomitantly enhancing U.S. interests abroad. George Bush supposedly thinks this, if only he would consistently act on it. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:15:27 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

The "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" are closely related, but surrendering in the former may lead to a victory in the latter By Daniel J. Cragg \| Editor-in-Chief \| 16 July 2003 Drugs fund terrorism. Everyone seems to recognize this. As early as 1994, Interpol's chief drugs officer, Iqbal Hussain Rizvi, told Reuters "Drugs have taken over as the chief means of financing terrorism." The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, recognized "The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama Bin Laden." Last November, we learned just how close the connection between drugs and terrorism is when the Justice Department discovered two plots by both Al Qaeda and a Colombian Paramilitary group (the AUC) to sell drugs for weapons. "We have learned and we have demonstrated that drug traffickers and terrorists work out of the same jungle," Asa Hutchinson, director of the Drug Enforcement Agency, told the Associated Press. "They plan in the same cave, and they train in the same desert." So, winning the "war on drugs" would be a major victory for the U.S. in the "war on terror." Unfortunately, as any conservative free-marketeer can tell you, you cannot mess with one of the most basic laws of economics -- the law of supply and demand. Appealing to the consciences of drug addicts to decrease demand, as nationally televised ads linking drugs and terror did a few months ago, seems like a waste of time and money to this editor too. It is time to recognize that the prohibition of drugs is a huge threat to U.S. national security, and that regardless of the social consequences, we must legalize drugs in order to pull the proverbial financial rug out from under all the transnational criminal, narcoterrorist, and terrorist organizations that benefit from drug prohibition. These are the organizations that pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security. They cannot be deterred by our nuclear or conventional forces. They have no territory for us to occupy, but often operate within the sovereign territory of states to weak to crack down on them. We cannot threaten the Russian Mafia militarily, but we can take away one of their most profitable businesses. If we really want to hurt those who threaten us, we must cut their funding by ending drug prohibition now. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:16:52 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Mired in a quagmire and not any safer, the aftermath of the Iraq war By Daniel J. Cragg \| Editor-in-Chief \| 4 July 2003 Last Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defensively spurned accusations that Iraq was turning into a Vietnam like quagmire. He also denied that Iraq was becoming a guerrilla war, even after one reporter cited the Defense Department's own definition of guerrilla war, "military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground indigenous forces," which seems to fit the description of what is occurring in Iraq. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, told the Washington Post that the situation in Iraq is "exactly" what a guerrilla war looks like in its early stages. So why is the Secretary so defensive about the guerrilla label -- of course, it is because of the last guerrilla conflict the U.S. was involved in, Vietnam. It goes deeper than this though. Since the end of World War II, nearly three quarters of all military conflicts have been low-intensity conflicts (LIC) (characterized by guerrilla warfare and terrorism, often they involve regular armies fighting guerrillas, terrorists, and even women and children. LICs involve mostly small arms on the part of the insurgent force). Out of all these LICs, the conventional forces lost all but one time. The one success story is the British suppression of a communist insurgency in Malaysia. This was a special case, though. The communists were part of the Chinese minority in the country, and the British promised to leave immediately after defeating the insurgency, which they did. Every single other example of LIC was a victory for the insurgent forces, from the British in India, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Syrians in Lebanon, the Cubans in Angola, the Chinese in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese in Cambodia -- the list goes on. Mr. Rumsfeld has a lot to fear from the guerrilla war label. Indeed, it would reveal the quagmire that this Administration has gotten us into. If these are Iraqis with even a modicum of popular support carrying out attacks on U.S. soldiers, the record does not bode well for the U.S. If LIC caused the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and institute democracy prematurely, the majority Shia country would very democratically elect a theocracy just like that other illiberal democracy, Iran. An Iraqi Islamic theocracy would surely make an authoritarian socialist secular state look attractive as an alternative. But we had to go in and get Saddam because he would have given WMD to al Qaeda, right? Hardly. "The often postulated scenario of a state sponsor providing unconventional weapons to a terrorist group is unlikely to materialize," former deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA Paul Pillar asserts in his book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. "The state would lose control over the material, an uncontrolled use of it by a group would serve no plausible purpose of the state, and sophisticated unconventional agents might be more traceable to their origin than the more mundane forms of assistance that sponsors usually provide to client groups." It is likely that because of the U.S. invasion, Iraqi WMD were perhaps shipped to Syria, or even Libya. So, the invasion of Iraq has led to a LIC that could at worst turn Iraq into an Islamic fundamentalist state, and at best be a persistent drain on U.S. resources that could be dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda, while it concomitantly sent WMD into who-know's hands. The U.S. may not be any safer because of the invasion, but hey, at least we got the oil, right? conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:17:55 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Calling a spade a spade: Wolfowitz, the neo-cons, and imperialism By Daniel J. Cragg \| Editor-in-Chief \| 27 June 2003 "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." John Quincy Adams During the administration of the first President Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, the then third-ranking civilian in the Defense Department, made major waves when his annual review of Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) articulated a doctrine of ensuring American preeminence at all costs and was leaked to the press. Democrats had a field day deriding the draft DPG as un-American, and an embarrassed Bush administration disowned the document, saying it had no official sanction. This document just would not go away, though. Wolfowitz continued to promote the idea of American preeminence and called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s. Both of these neo-con ideas had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism aimed at the U.S. They did not then and they do not now, but after 11 September 2001, Wolfowitz, now the Deputy Secretary of Defense, dusted off his preeminence doctrine and got the President to sign off on it. This doctrine was publicly articulated in the President's National Security Strategy published in September of2002. Bush was also convinced by the neo-cons that the U.S. should invade Iraq, and according to the Washington Post, he decided to do so on 17 September 2001, well before U.N. inspectors failed in their mission in Iraq. For Wolfowitz, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, at least terrorism against the U.S. It did not really even have to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); as he told Vanity Fair, WMD was just a "bureaucratic reason" that "everyone could agree on." Indeed, he asserted that a "huge" reason was to remove U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. The U.S. presence on "sacred" Saudi soil if often cited by Al Qaeda as one of the main grievances with the United States. Wolfowitz had also hoped for the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. Of course, the grand scheme to democratize the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, is routinely attributed to the neo-cons in the Administration. A plan to turn the Middle East into a region of democratic republics in the American tradition sounds remarkably like the avowed mission of the British Empire, "to make the world England." This is the kind of thinking that is forming our foreign policy -- not as much a concern for U.S. security and beating Al Qaeda as what Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich called, "a fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik...the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke." Certainly Saddam Hussein's human rights record could not be the cause of the war either -- the list of authoritarian regimes with human rights violations contains much worse offenders than Saddam Hussein, and he was just as much an offender when he was our ally in the 1980s. It is time to stop mincing words and call Wolfowitz and his ilk what they are -- imperialists. Some may chortle at this accusation, but the appellation fits. The Incas and Aztecs ruled their empires through subordinate tribal chiefs outside of their capitals. Rome governed its empire through hundreds of autonomous city-states and even client-kings. The threat of force is what kept the periphery in line for these empires. Now Wolfowitz has the United States doing the same thing and calling it "preeminence." Saddam Hussein's real crime, apparently, was not complying with the wishes of the U.S. government, and now the neo-cons have sent a message -- comply or else. This is a radical and dangerous upset to the Westphalian nation-state system of sovereignty. Wolfowitz wants an American Empire, but empires enrage so many. In an age when individual terrorists will decide to go to war against the U.S. and not heads of state, it shows how parlous Mr. Wolfowitz's imperial designs are. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:18:53 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

The Ashcroftonian assault on liberty presses on By Daniel J. Cragg \| Editor-in-Chief \| 24 June 2003 Last week the Justice Department scored a major victory with the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Justice Department says plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. What many do not know though, is that the Government did this the old fashioned way -- without expanded police power. He was not jailed indefinitely as an "enemy combatant." Despite this success, the Attorney General continues to propound that he can detain any U.S. citizen without due process -- that is, without formal charges, the right to a hearing or legal counsel. Whether an individual is captured in the United States or not, the Justice Department says "A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant. The court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination." In other words, the Executive Branch can detain anyone without any oversight and without any respect for a U.S. citizen's Constitutional rights. Whether John Ashcroft has exercised good judgment thus far with this new power or not is irrelevant, this power is downright un-American and is a bouleversement to U.S. civil liberties. Even the 1942 Supreme Court case that the Attorney General is basing his indefinite detentions on, which allowed military trials of German saboteurs arrested in the U.S., affirmed the defendants' right to appeal their status in federal court. The court did not allow for indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, nor did it deny them counsel. Every American should be able to see how parlous this policy is. I cannot emphasize this enough: if the designation of U.S. citizen's as enemy combatants stands, any American could be detained indefinitely on simply the Executive Branch's word. This is not a liberal caviling, but a conservative that is genuinely concerned. Former conservative Congressman Bob Barr, who currently chairs the civil liberties committee at the American Conservative Union, has even said that the government is "reaching too broadly and gaining too much power." Privacy concerns over Ashcroft's Patriot Act have caused ACLU membership to increase thirty percent since September 11, 2001, the largest increase in the organization's history. Librarians and booksellers are also rankled by the Patriot act because it eliminated the need for a court order to obtain records from libraries and booksellers. "Libraries are very local and we're hearing about this every day. People don't want the government snooping on them," Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "People understand when their rights are being thrown away and they aren't going to stand for it." Not all of the Ashcroftonian assault is terrorism related either. As reported in this week's Economist, The Justice Department is prosecuting Brett Bursey, a veteran protester, for holding up a sign saying "No War For Oil" at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Ironically, Bursey was arrested thirty-three years ago for the same thing, only then against Vietnam and Richard Nixon. That case was dropped when the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that anti-war demonstrators could not be charged with trespassing on public property. This time around, the government has decided to prosecute him under an obscure law that allows the Secret Service to deny access to places where the President is visiting. According to prosecutors, Bursey should have been in a designated "free-speech zone," which was about a half a mile from the hangar where the President landed. Bursey rightly averred that all of America was a free-speech zone. It should be noted that Bush proponents were not confined to the designated "free-speech zone." This petty persecution of an American who was simply exercising his first amendment right is yet another example of the Attorney General's assault on our most basic freedoms. New leadership is desperately needed in the Justice Department, before even more of cherished rights are taken away from us. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:19:53 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

The Patriot Act goes too far By Samuel P. Blatchley \| Managing Editor \| 24 June 2003 On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the Patriot Act, which has the cover of being a bill that will increase our ability to monitor and prevent terrorists. The bill gives the government broad authority to eavesdrop on multiple types of communications. According to the ACLU, the act covers so-called "'domestic terrorism' which could subject political organizations to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and criminal action for political advocacy." The act also gives law enforcement officers more power to conduct secret searches into personal records. Another power granted to law enforcement is the power to "investigate American citizens for criminal matters without probable cause of crime if they say it is for 'intelligence purposes.'" The bill directly threatens the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution. In essence, while aimed at protection against terrorism, the Patriot Act goes too far and encroaches on and seriously erodes rights that this country was set up to protect. Some would venture to say that these types of laws, like terrorist attacks, threaten the very principles they advertise to protect. John Ashcroft touts "Our ability to prevent another catastrophic attack on the United States would be more difficult, if not impossible, without the Patriot Act." It is very possible that the act makes the prevention of an attack easier, but on balance is this extra protection worth it in the face of such bold face constitutional violations? A report released by an investigator from the Department of Justice found that 762 immigrants detained in the year immediately following September 11, 2001, were held in unacceptable living conditions (for longer than the legally acceptable 90 days) without being properly notified as to what law they violated. These types of constitutional infringements are possible under the Patriot Act. President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are interested in extending the Patriot Act further with what has been dubbed the Patriot Act II. This second bill erodes further checks and balances on government searches that were weakened by the first act. We at Conservatives Against Bush are not against effectively protecting ourselves against terrorists, but we do not feel that protection warrants the erosion of principles that make this country so great. We value the protection of ideals like freedom of speech, the press, and religion. Without these protections and many more, the United States might become more like something that it fought to liberate in Iraq: a dictatorship with limited personal freedoms. As conservatives we believe in a limited government that does not encroach upon our personal freedoms. President Bush's Patriot Act goes too far in trying to protect against terrorism. In speeches, he constantly talks about spreading and protecting the American ideal of freedom. How can he then support and propose these Patriot Acts, which seriously threaten this very ideal? We propose that these acts erode these freedoms, and do not meet their ultimate goal of preventing terrorism. We believe these acts could have the opposite effect of causing people to become apathetic or despise the United States and its principles. We urge the repeal of the Patriot Act, and the continued protection of the ultimate American ideal of freedom, and not the Bush infringements upon it. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 11:21:02 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Bush supports racist affirmative action By Michael Kevin Johnson \| Staff Writer \| 24 June 2003 The Supreme Court today narrowly came to the decision to uphold the Michigan policy of giving minorities a slight edge in the admissions process, despite the encouragements of the Bush administration. "African-American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150," President Bush said, "not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African-American, Hispanic, or Native American." The ruling given by the Supreme Court in accordance with the Bush Administrations policy of "strongly supporting diversity" further affirms the Administration's inability to understand the issue. President Bush commented on the ruling yesterday stating, "I applaud the Supreme Court for recognizing the value of diversity on our Nation's campuses. Diversity is one of America's greatest strengths." However, the Administration does not understand that diversity is a form of racism. It cannot distinguish between people and ethnic numbers. By taking the idea that individual's ideas are shaped by their race furthers the concept that we are not a make up of our experiences, but rather a make up solely based on our genetics. A person's identity is nothing more than their ethnic heritage, according to Bush. As rational human beings we must understand that we are all different due to our experiences and that our race is as insignificant as the color of one's eyes. If we are to begin admitting people into our Universities based on race and not merit, we are merely asking these individuals to not be themselves but instead a representation of their race despite their individual experiences. In order to correct this problem we need to see people as individuals with their own unique ideas and not a representation of a certain "brand of thought." "To avoid conflict with the equal protection clause," dissented Justice Ginsburg, "a classification that denies a benefit, causes harm, or imposes a burden must not be based on race. In that sense, the Constitution is colorblind. But the Constitution is color conscious to prevent discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of past discrimination (U.S. vs. Jefferson, 1966)...Contemporary human rights documents draw just this line; they distinguish between policies of oppression and measures designed to accelerate de facto equality." It should be noted that even though Bush is not a member of any of these races, he is, however, guilty of a similar crime. It seems that throughout his early life, the President has received far more than a 20-point boost on any single exam. By simply being a member of one of the wealthy-politically-affluent and more privileged families in America he has been accepted to both Yale University for an undergraduate education and Harvard Business School for a graduate degree. But, one might ask how does someone with merely a 566 verbal, and 640 math SAT score, in conjunction with mediocre high school grades earn acceptance to such prestigious schools? The answer closely resembles an issue similar to affirmative action: nepotism. According to the Wall Street Journal Harvard accepts roughly 40% of its alumni's children, while only an average of 11% of those without such a benefit. In the end, the ruling by the Supreme Court only draws one conclusion: While public institutions will not tolerate racism, diversity will be tolerated and is encouraged. It has been shown that diversity enforces racism, which implies a direct contradiction in our government. Further it seems that while we are only allowed to benefit slightly though our ethnic heritage, those of us who are further privileged by wealth and power can benefit fully through nepotism. conservativesagainstbush.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 1:19:35 PM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

William F. Buckley Jr. -- Punishing the Dissenters -- Contracts and Iraq: A special Q&A. December 12, 2003, 11:12 a.m. Unnamed Administration spokesman: You agree, what I tell you will be completely off the record? Q: Yes. Yes, sir. But let's get right to the point: The exclusion of France, Germany, and Russia from bidding was- A: Just plain dumb. Q: Why does the Administration do things that are just plain dumb? A: The way life works in high-circle administrative life, Joe- Q: You don't need to be condescending. I've been around a long long time, looking in on White House cultures. A: I didn't mean that. I mean, what experienced people know about that culture isn't being very widely applied in this situation. What was the objective? The objective was for the Administration to pass out the word to France, Germany, and Russia-we'll call them the Dissenters-that there are unpleasant consequences to failing to side with the United States on major policy issues that have to do with national security. Q: Is that why the Pentagon used the phrase, "for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States"? Which by the way, what does that mean? That we can't let the Dissenters bid for $18 billion in prime contracts in Iraq because to do so would fail to protect essential security interests? A: You're right. That formulation was gobbledygook. The kind of thing that George Orwell would never have permitted. Look, the objective was to register U.S. displeasure with muscle behind that displeasure. There are commercial interests in the Dissenter nations that will be sore to have been excluded from the prime bidding. Q: But the order didn't rule out subcontractors from the Dissenter nations getting into rebuilding Iraq. A: That's right. The ban is only at the first level. Germany's BDI group blurted it out. Herr von Wartenberg-BDI's managing director-admitted that the only firms affected in any way are those that don't have subsidiaries in any one of the 63 countries allowed to take part in the tenders, which means, roughly speaking, nobody. Q: Well, if it's not going to have a practical economic effect, why do it? A: Satisfaction. The White House people liked the feel of a reproach. Recall JFK's dictum: Don't get mad, get even. Q: But we aren't even getting even, if you're telling it right. Not only that, we've handed the Dissenter nations an excuse to get out of the pool of countries that could help Iraq by giving up debts. Russia especially, with $8 billion owed. They've already said maybe they won't move on that, and Canada is spitting mad- A: Yes, they're angry. They'll cool off. One phone call, Bush to Ottawa, was all that took. We'll just have to leave it that a point has been registered. Are you asking me to defend what was done, step by step? I can't do that. In situations like this, there isn't clear cockpit control. The White House is sore at the Pentagon guy who let it out, but what's to be done about that, fire Rumsfeld? The U.S. can sort of back away. A series of equivocations. Like, Who is a prime bidder? Who is a subcontractor? Is there a World Trade Organization problem here? It'll blow away. Q: It's not going to blow away for Bush at the next debate of the Democratic presidential candidates. They'll team up on the theme of the Administration's incompetence. And they'll go on about economic opportunism, commercialism, favoritism. Is it true Halliburton is getting an extra buck for every gallon of gas it ships over? A: Halliburton is, for the Democrats, the gorilla, the monster, the archetype of GOP favoritism/greed/exploitation. Q: What's to be done about that? A: If this gets out, I'll know you've betrayed me. Q: If what gets out? A: My secret remedy for the Democrats . . . They should buy Halliburton. Why not? Ask Soros to buy it. Figure $10 billion, in round numbers. Q: You must be kidding. A: Just pretend you never thought of it. nationalreview.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 2:27:47 PM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush By Doug Bandow The American Conservative Monday 01 December 2003 Some liberals admit that they hate President George W. Bush. Many conservatives say they are appalled at this phenomenon. Indeed, some of them believe any criticism of the president to be akin to treason. So much for the political tone in Washington. American politics have never been for the faint-hearted. Even George Washington suffered some public abuse, and presidential campaigns involving revolutionary luminaries John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were vitriolic. After the Civil War, Republican candidates routinely waved the “bloody shirt”; one GOP stalwart denounced the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” The GOP did not treat Harry Truman with kid gloves, and Democrats never let fairness impede their attacks on Barry Goldwater in 1964. Richard Nixon was widely reviled on the Left. Some fringe partisans expressed sorrow that John Hinckley failed in his assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. And then there was Bill Clinton. Some Republicans saw him as a drug-dealing murderer whose wife killed family friend Vincent Foster. Now Jonathan Chait of the New Republic says simply, “I hate President George W. Bush.” Not one to hold back, he explains, “You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.” More concisely, charges James Traub in the New York Times Magazine, “George Bush is a craven, lazy, hypocritical nitwit.” Chait’s recent essay has triggered a spate of conservative responses. Bush is wonderful, liberals are irrational, and the whole thing is bad for America. These are rather hilarious arguments coming from conservatives. For instance, New York Times columnist David Brooks calls the phenomenon of the Bush haters a “core threat to democracy.” Yet, as Brooks acknowledges, the Clinton years were also well populated with haters. Brooks now regrets having not spoken out more clearly against the latter. Better late than never, perhaps, but his conversion looks awfully convenient, as does that of other conservative Bush defenders. Hatred of Bill Clinton never made sense. In contrast, anger was fully justified. I never understood why conservatives invested so much emotion in Clinton. He was a charming and bright but enormously flawed, highly ambitious man of few principles. That warranted criticism, not hatred. But I joined in early and often. During his first summer of discontent I urged Clinton’s critics to “pile on” as opposition mounted to his policies. Over the years there was a moral imperative to take aim in the target-rich environment: the attempted government takeover of the health-care system, the pork-barrel stimulus package, the use of jackboot tactics against critics of federal policies, the endless claims of victimization, the unjustified Kosovo war, the sale of administration access for campaign contributions, the special-interest Whitewater and cattle-futures pay-offs, the sustained efforts to cover up such abuses, and the presidential perjury in federal court proceedings. Clinton was properly impeached. He should have been removed from office. The rule of law demanded no less. Similarly, though George W. Bush is very different from Bill Clinton, hatred makes no sense. But anger is appropriate. Much of the liberal case against President Bush is barely short of silly. His election was not illegitimate. Whether or not the candidate with the most votes should win, that’s not what the U.S. Constitution says. Blame the Founders, not George W. Bush. Complaints about Bush’s fabled inarticulateness and privileged background are superficial. More worrisome are his partisan focus, demand for personal loyalty, and tendency to keep score, but these are hardly characteristics warranting hatred. The charge that he’s a crazy right-winger is beyond silly. Other than tax cuts—which have benefited the rich only because the rich paid, and still pay, most of the taxes—virtually nothing of conservative substance has happened. Government is more expansive and expensive than ever before. Jonathan Chait must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he wrote, “[I]t’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state.” Sad to say, inaugurating limited private retirement accounts is not the same as eliminating Social Security, let alone dismantling the Leviathan that has grown up in Washington. James Traub contends, “Today’s Republican Party is arguably the most extreme—the furthest from the center—of any governing majority in the nation’s history.” This is the Republican Party that has embraced as its own every liberal initiative, from Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare to Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education to Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps. This is the Republican Party preparing to enact a Medicare drug benefit that would represent the largest expansion of the welfare state in 40 years. This is the Republican Party that is increasing federal education spending as if doing so had something to do with the quality of local schools. This is the Republican Party that is increasing spending faster than during the Clinton years. Right-wing extremists? For the Left, liberal means centrist, and moderate conservative approaches fascist. Really conservative is off the spectrum. But this president deserves to be criticized. Sharply. By anyone who believes in limited, constitutional government. First, George W. Bush, despite laudable personal and family characteristics, is remarkably incurious and ill read. Gut instincts can carry even a gifted politician only so far. And a lack of knowledge leaves him vulnerable to simplistic remedies to complex problems, especially when it comes to turning America into the globe’s governess. Second, despite occasional exceptions, the Bush administration, backed by the Republican-controlled Congress, has been promoting larger government at almost every turn. Its spending policies have been irresponsible, and its trade strategies have been destructive. The president has been quite willing to sell out the national interest for perceived political gain, whether the votes sought are from seniors or farmers. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged the administration to push into law civil-liberties restrictions that should worry anyone, whether they are wielded by a Bush or a Clinton administration. The president and his aides have given imperiousness new meaning. Officials are apparently incapable of acknowledging that their pre-war assertions about Iraq’s WMD capabilities were incorrect; indeed, they resent that the president is being questioned about his administration’s claims before the war. They are unwilling to accept a role for Congress in deciding how much aid money to spend. Some of Bush’s supporters have been even worse, charging critics with a lack of patriotism. Not to genuflect at the president’s every decision is treason. In two decades of criticizing liberal politicians and positions, I have rarely endured the vitriol that was routinely spewed by conservatives when I argued against war with Iraq over the last year. Conservative papers stopped running my column; conservative Web sites removed it from their archives. That was their right, of course, but they demonstrated that it was not just the Clintons who were fair-weather friends. Third, President George W. Bush has made Woodrow Wilson the guiding spirit of Republican foreign policy. A candidate who criticized nation building is now pursuing global social engineering. The representative of a party that once criticized foreign aid is now pushing lavish U.S. social spending abroad, demanding that it be a gift rather than a loan. And the administration has advanced a doctrine of pre-emption that encourages war for allegedly humanitarian ends. Attempting to justify the Iraqi war retrospectively by pointing to Saddam Hussein’s manifold crimes, the president apparently believes he may attack any nation to advance human rights. Ironically, the Bush administration has adopted as its policy the question posed by then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright to then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell: what’s the use of having this fine military you keep talking about if we don’t use it? The negative practical consequences of this policy are all too evident. Ugly foreign governments from Iran to North Korea have an incentive to arm themselves, quickly, with WMD to deter a U.S. preventive assault. Iraq has become a magnet for terrorist attacks while becoming a long-term dependent under U.S. military occupation. Anger towards—indeed, hatred of—Washington is likely to continue growing, even in once friendly nations. It will be difficult to maintain an imperial foreign policy with a volunteer military. Liberals should identify with the Bush record. He is increasing the size and power of the U.S. government both at home and abroad. He has expanded social engineering from the American nation to the entire globe. He is lavish with dollars on both domestic and foreign programs. For this the Left hates him? The tendency to hate, really hate, opposing politicians surely is not good for American democracy. It is not rational to hate George W. Bush, just as it was not rational to hate Bill Clinton. But after spending eight years hating Clinton, conservatives who complain about the Bush-haters appear to be hypocrites. George W. Bush enjoys neither royal nor religious status that would place him beyond criticism. Whether or not he is a real conservative, he is no friend of limited, constitutional government. And for that the American people should be very, very angry. ------- Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. amconmag.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 2:38:56 PM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

In Rumsfeld’s Shop -- A senior Air Force officer watches as the neocons consolidate their Pentagon coup. December 1, 2003 issue Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative By Karen Kwiatkowski Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski recently retired from the U.S. Air Force. Her final posting was as an analyst at the Pentagon. Below is the first of three installments describing her experience there. They provide a unique view of the Department of Defense during a period of intense ideological upheaval, as the United States prepared to launch—for the first time in its history—a “preventive” war. In early May 2002, I was looking forward to retirement from the United States Air Force in about a year. I had a cushy job in the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, International Security Affairs, Sub-Saharan Africa. In the previous two years, I had published two books on African security issues and had passed my comprehensive doctoral exams at Catholic University. I was very pleased with the administration’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sub-Saharan Africa, former Marine and Senator Helms staffer Michael Westphal, and was ready to start thinking about my dissertation and my life after the military. When Mike called me in to his office, I thought I was getting a new project or perhaps that one of my many suggestions of fun things to do with Africa policy had been accepted. But the look on his face clued me in that this was going to be one of those meetings where somebody wasn’t leaving happy. After a quick rank check, I had a good idea which one it would be. There was a position in Near East South Asia (NESA) that they needed to fill right away. I wasn’t interested. They phrased the question another way: “We have been tasked to send a body over to Bill Luti. Can we send you?” I resisted—until I slowly guessed that in true bureaucratic fashion and can-do military tradition my name had already been sent over. This little soirée in Mike’s office was my farewell. I went back to my office and e-mailed a buddy in the Joint Staff. Bob wrote back, “Write down everything you see.” I didn’t do it, but these most wise words from a trusted friend proved the first of three omens I would soon receive. I showed up down the hall a few days later. It looked just like the office from which I came, newer blue cubicles, narrow hallways piled high with copy paper, newspapers, unused equipment, and precariously leaning map rolls. The same old concrete-building smell pervaded, maybe a little mustier. I was taking over the desk of a CIA loaner officer. Joe had been called back early to the agency and was hoping to go to Yemen. Before he left, he briefed me on his biggest project: ongoing negotiations with the Qatari sheiks over who was paying for improvements to Al Udeid Air Base. I was familiar with Al Udeid from my time on the Air Staff a few years before. Back then we seemed to like the Saudis, and our Saudi bases were a few hours closer to the action than Al Udeid, so the U.S. played a woo-me game. Now that we needed and wanted Al Udeid to be finished quickly and done up right, it was time for the emirs to play hard to get. Joe gave me the rundown on counterterrorism ops in Yemen and an upcoming agreement with the Bahraini monarch to extend our military-security agreement, locking in a relationship just in case those Bahraini experiments with democracy actually took off. I had an obligatory meeting with the deputy director, Paul Hulley, Navy Captain. This meeting followed a phone call in which I hadn’t been as compliant as I should have been with a Navy Captain, and since Paul had handled my bad attitude with candor and grace, I was determined to like him—and I did. I gave him my story: I was a year from retirement and, more importantly, I was in a car pool. I’d be working a 7:15 to 17:30 schedule. He was neither charmed nor impressed. He advised that I’d need to be working a lot longer than that. Then we stepped in to meet Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Bill Luti. I knew Luti had a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts and was a recently retired Navy Captain himself. At this point, I didn’t know what a neocon was or that they had already swarmed over the Pentagon, populating various hives of policy and planning like African hybrids, with the same kind of sting reflex. Luti just seemed happy to have me there as a warm body. My second omen was the super-size bottles of Tums and Tylenol Joe left in his desk. The third occurred as I was chatting with my new office mate, a career civil servant working the Egypt desk. As the conversation moved into Middle East news and politics, she mentioned that if I wanted to be successful here, I shouldn’t say anything positive about the Palestinians. In 19 years of military service, I had never heard such a politically laden warning on such an obscure topic to such an inconsequential player. I had the sense of a single click, the sound tectonic plates might make as they shift deep under the earth and lock into a new resting position—or when the trigger is pulled in a game of Russian roulette. I had never worked for neocons before, and the philosophical journey to understand what they stood for was not a trip I wanted to take. But my conversations with coworkers and some of the people I was meeting in the office opened my eyes to something strange and fascinating. Those who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite knew that something calculated had happened to NESA. Key personnel, long-time civilian professionals holding the important billets, had been replaced early in the transition. The Office Director, second in command and normally a professional civilian regional expert, was vacant. Joe McMillan had been moved to the NESA Center over at National Defense University. This was strange because in a transition the whole reason for the Office Director being a permanent civilian (occasionally military) professional is to help bring the new appointee up to speed, ensure office continuity, and act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies. To remove that continuity factor seemed contraindicated, but at the time, I didn’t realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was being brought in from a variety of outside think tanks. Another civilian replacement about which I was told was that of the long-time Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk, Larry Hanauer. Word was that he was even-handed with Israel, there had been complaints from one of his countries, and as a gesture of good will, David Schenker, fresh from the Washington Institute, was serving as the new Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk. I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon. There was a sense that politics like these might play better at the State Department or the National Security Council, not the Pentagon, where we considered ourselves objective and hard boiled. The anti-Arab orientation I perceived was only partially confirmed by things I saw. Towards the end of the summer, we welcomed to the office as a temporary special assistant to Bill Luti an Egyptian-American naval officer, Lt. (later Lt. Cmdr.) Youssef Aboul-Enein. His job wasn’t entirely clear to me, but he would research bits of data in which Bill Luti was interested and peruse Arabic-language media for quotations or events that could be used to demonize Saddam Hussein or link him to nastiness beyond his own borders and with unsavory characters. While I was still hoping to be sent back to the Africa desk, I was also angling to take the NESA North Africa desk that would be vacated in July. During this time, May through mid-July, the news in the daily briefing was focused on war planning for the Iraq invasion. Slides from a CENTCOM brief appeared on the front page of the New York Times on July 5. A few weeks later, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered an investigation into who leaked this information. The Air Force Office of Special Investigation was tasked to work with the FBI, and everyone in NESA was supposed to be interviewed. My interview, by two fresh-faced OSI investigators, occurred sometime in July. One handed me a copy of an article by William Arkin discussing Iraq-war planning published in May 2002 in the Los Angeles Times and asked if I knew Arkin. I didn’t recall the name, but when I checked I learned that he had spent time at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Apparently, Arkin had facilitated a leak six weeks before, but it hadn’t caused a fuss. I pointed out that I did know a person with major SAIS links who probably knew Arkin. They leaned forward eagerly. “Have you ever heard of Paul Wolfowitz?” They looked puzzled, so I called up the bio of the deputy secretary and showed them how he ran SAIS during most of the Clinton years. I suggested the investigation look at the answers to the cui bono question. I also told them no one in the military or at CENTCOM would leak war plans because as Rumsfeld accurately said, it gets people killed. But the politicos who were anxious to get the American people over the mental hump that the Bush administration was going to send troops to Iraq were not military and had both motive and opportunity to leak. During the summer, I assumed the duties of the North Africa desk. Part of my job was to schedule and complete two overdue bilateral meetings with longtime U.S. security partners Morocco and Tunisia. Bilateral meetings historically included a tailored regional-security briefing addressing Weapons of Mass Destruction threats and status. In planning my upcoming bilateral agendas and attendee lists, I discovered that Bill Luti had certain issues regarding the regional-security briefing, in particular with the aspects relating to WMD and terrorism. There had been an incident shortly before I arrived in which the Defense Intelligence Officer had been prohibited from giving his briefing to a particular country only hours before he was scheduled. During the summer, the brief was simply not scheduled for another important bilateral meeting. Instead, a briefing was prepared by another policy office that worked on non-proliferation issues. This briefing was not a product of the Defense Intelligence Agency or CIA but instead came from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. At the end of the summer of 2002, new space had been found upstairs on the fifth floor for an “expanded Iraq desk.” It would be called the Office of Special Plans. We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained, and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment. We were also told that one of the products of this office would be talking points that all desk officers would use verbatim in the preparation of their background documents. About that same time, my education on the history and generation of the neoconservative movement had completed its first stage. I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of “permanent revolution.” I had studied the role played by hawkish former Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Wash.) and the neoconservative drift of formerly traditional magazines like National Review and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all, but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and constitutional strictures. More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the “Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States” agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact. By August, I was morally and intellectually frustrated by my powerlessness against what increasingly appeared to be a philosophical hijacking of the Pentagon. Indeed, I had sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but perhaps we were never really expected to take it all that seriously … To be continued amconmag.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 3:32:11 PM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Troops' wish list: Straight talk from commanders, better phone and e-mail access By Jon R. Anderson, Stars and Stripes European edition, Tuesday, October 21, 2003 Blistering heat, lurking dangers and long separations are some things military leaders can do nothing about in Iraq. Troops understand this. But there are some issues leaders can address, according to troops in Iraq questioned by Stars and Stripes. Here are the most-mentioned items that troops on the ground said would improve their lives. ¶ Mid-tour leave: If there is single, tangible thing that leaders could do to improve morale, it’s the mid-tour leave policy, hundreds of troops told Stars and Stripes in interviews and in the questionnaire. “I have been away from my family for almost a year and a half,” one sergeant wrote on a questionnaire. “That is too long. I have seen my wife and kids for a total of 35 days since last year. We soldiers need a break.” The military in late September kicked off a “Rest and Recuperation” policy for exactly that reason. Troops on 12-month orders will be able to use 15 days of annual leave. ¶ Hard rotation dates: Troops want to know when they will go home. Many said they resent being left in the dark. “Even criminals know when their time is up,” said 20-year-old Spc. David Rhoten with the 926th Engineer Group at the 101st Airborne Division headquarters in Mosul. “All I want is a date. A ‘no-later-than’ date would do more for morale than anything. Right now, all we have are guesses and rumors.” ¶ Clarified mission: Since the end of major ground combat on May 1, many troops say their mission has become muddled. “We have no mission,” wrote a 33-year-old sergeant in the Army Reserve’s 459th Engineering Company at Camp Dogwood. When the unit worked with Marines during the war, it “successfully built two assault float bridges for them. We saw combat the entire time.” These days, however, it’s a different story. “For the past month or two, we have done nothing.” ¶ Beer rations: Troops asked to have what was available in past conflicts. “Soldiers are treated with little to no respect as adults — no sex, no porn, no alcohol,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Reynolds, 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion, at Blai Field in Al Kut. “In wars past, these things being accepted as normal adult activity did not stop us from successful accomplishment of the mission and actually provided for an escape.” Spc. Jonathan Colton, a 20-year-old infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Kirkuk Air Base, put it simply: “Just give me a nice cold six-pack of Corona. Then I’d fight for another six months.” ¶ Better telephone and e-mail: In some camps, phone and Internet cafes are sprouting up. In other places, troops are still frustrated. “E-mail sucks,” wrote one sergeant in Tikrit. Lance Cpl. Thang D. Pham, with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines at LSA 7, wrote: “The single thing that I think increases a unit’s morale is to be able to contact loved ones. I think the best way for that is a phone center.” A 101st Airborne Division officer in Mosul who is also a Persian Gulf War veteran compared the phone services in the two conflicts; he said phone service was better during the first war more than a decade ago. “That’s almost criminal,” he said. “There’s no excuse for how absolutely terrible our phones are.” ¶ Improved mail delivery: Most troops say mail delivery has steadily improved, but some areas still have complaints. “I’ve got 12 packages out there somewhere that I know have been sent — some of them as long as 18 weeks ago,” said Spc. Victor Ferenzi, a 1st Armored Division medic with the 1st Battalion, 37th Infantry Regiment in Baghdad. Adding insult to injury, he said, is pilfering of packages. Of those that arrive, he said, “every one of them has been ripped open and have things missing, usually batteries, CDs or magazines.” ¶ Improved Stars and Stripes delivery: “I wish we could get Stars and Stripes sooner than we do. We get them a week or two late,” wrote a 45-year-old staff sergeant from 9th Battalion, 101st Aviation in Mosul. ¶ Boots and uniforms: “We need boots,” said one 29-year-old sergeant in 4th Infantry Division. Like many troops, he was issued two sets of desert uniforms and tan combat boots. It’s not unusual to see soldiers wearing the green woodland fatigues because their desert uniforms have fallen apart from heavy use or they never received the desert fatigues. A soldier at Camp Dogwood said she was issued boots a size too large because that’s what was available. As a result, she said, she battles chronic blisters and discomfort. stripes.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 4:03:42 PM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Military Officers File Brief Against Bush's Policy in Guantanamo Published on Monday, December 1, 2003 by Knight-Ridder by Frank Davies WASHINGTON - Navy Rear Admiral Don Guter felt the Pentagon shudder when an airliner hijacked by terrorists crashed into it on Sept. 11, 2001. He helped evacuate shaken personnel and later gave the eulogy for a colleague killed that day. "I would have done anything that day, and I fully support the war on terrorism," said Guter, who served as judge advocate general, the Navy's chief legal officer, until he retired last year. Nonetheless, he's joining his predecessor and a retired Marine general with expertise on prisoner issues to challenge the Bush administration's indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at the Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Guter, Rear Adm. John Hutson and Brig. Gen. David Brahms worry that lengthy incarcerations at Guantanamo without hearings will undermine the rule of law and endanger U.S. forces. "For me it's a question of balance between security needs and due process, and I think we've lost our balance," Guter said. The trio of retired officers recently filed a Supreme Court amicus brief on behalf of 16 detainees held for almost two years. The government contends that all are enemy combatants, most captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have no legal rights, prisoner of war status or access to federal courts. Early next year, the Supreme Court will hear the case in a potentially historic clash between presidential authority and judicial oversight. "This may be one of those cases that comes along every 50 years - there's that much at stake," said Eugene Fidell, president of the nonpartisan National Institute of Military Justice. Former federal judges, diplomats and even American POWs from World War II also have filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to reconsider lower court rulings on the detainees that favored the administration. In early discussions, Guter favored holding prisoners at Guantanamo, but he thought their detention would be temporary. "We would be safe, the detainees would be safe from reprisal," Guter said. "But many of us expected some sort of hearings by now for some of these people. The crux of this is, how long can we hold people without anything? It's now two years, and that's troubling." Guter's group believes the administration and Pentagon missed a chance to provide quick hearings called for in international conventions on the treatment of prisoners to determine if the captives were probably enemy combatants. "Somehow, in the fog of war, we skipped over that," Hutson said. Instead, President Bush ordered the creation of military tribunals to try some captives. But those trials have been delayed by debate over rules and by complicated negotiations with Britain, Australia and other countries that have nationals held prisoner at Guantanamo. For two years, the Bush administration has described the detainees as "the worst of the worst" and "killers." The three former officers are skeptical, noting that 88 have been released so far from the prison camp. "We're trying to separate the goat-herders from the real terrorists, and that's not easy, but I'm not convinced they're all guilty," said Hutson, now the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H. The trio also worries that the Guantanamo precedent will make it easier for other countries, groups and warlords to hold Americans, keep them isolated and ignore the Geneva Conventions. "If we want the world to play by the rules, we have to be on the moral high ground," said Brahms, who spent 26 years in the Marines before opening a private law practice in Carlsbad, Calif. He was the Marine Corps' principal legal adviser on POW issues when the Vietnam War was ending. Brahms recalled that U.S. forces tried to follow the Geneva rules on POWs, and that gave them some leverage with North Vietnam, which was holding U.S. prisoners. "International pressure was important, and they (North Vietnam) played a little more by the rules toward the end," Brahms said. There may be an inclination in the military to go along with indefinite detentions, Guter said, but it's misplaced. "We took an oath to defend the Constitution," he said, "not the president or secretary of defense." To read the friend-of-the-court briefs mentioned in this story, go to davidhenderson.com Copyright 2003 Knight-Ridder

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 4:56:42 PM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Bush Speaks on China and Taiwan -- President Bush chooses to partly appease the Chinese and chastise Taiwan. by William Kristol, Robert Kagan, & Gary Schmitt 12/09/2003 12:00:00 AM U.S.-CHINA-TAIWAN POLICY contains a host of formulations, complications, and nuances, all of which (at least most of which!) we are happy to discuss. But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees. Here is what has happened over the last month: The government of Taiwan proceeded about its democratic business in a legal and appropriate manner that threatened no one. The government of China decided to throw a fit to see if it could take advantage of U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and North Korea to tilt U.S. policy against Taiwan. And the U.S. government decided to at least partly appease Beijing. Today, President Bush chose to chastise Taiwan because, allegedly, "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo." In fact, the referendum that President Chen plans to hold does not represent any kind of "decision unilaterally to change the status quo." Indeed, President Chen has made clear he will not seek to hold a referendum on the subject of independence. Can it really be President Bush's position that Taiwan is not permitted to hold any democratic referenda on any subjects whatsoever? Furthermore, one topic on which President Chen apparently is considering a referendum is Beijing's missile buildup vis-a-vis Taiwan. About this missile build-up, and about Beijing's threats of war against Taiwan, President Bush said not a word. The president's statement today is a mistake. Appeasement of a dictatorship simply invites further attempts at intimidation. Standing with democratic Taiwan would secure stability in East Asia. Seeming to reward Beijing's bullying will not. William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Gary Schmitt are directors of the Project for the New American Century. weeklystandard.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 5:48:01 PM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Stand by Taiwan From the December 22, 2003 issue: To avert a crisis, the president needs to revert to his core principles and make clear that the United States supports the Taiwanese democracy. by Robert Kagan and William Kristol 12/22/2003, Volume 009, Issue 15 IT WAS A SAD SPECTACLE: Sitting next to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, visiting emissary from the world's largest dictatorship, President Bush last week performed a kowtow that would have made Bill Clinton blush. Following a script dictated by Beijing, and translated into English by senior national security council official James Moriarty, the president condemned Taiwan's popularly elected president for certain unspecified "comments and actions" indicating a desire for Taiwan's independence. Moriarty then proceeded to tell reporters "on background" that what the president really meant was that he opposed Taiwan's plans to hold a referendum this coming March. The Chinese premier professed himself delighted by the administration's condemnation of Taiwan and opposition to a referendum, reminded everyone that China still reserves the right to use military force against Taiwan in the event of any "provocations," and traveled back to China gloating about the American president's gift to Beijing. Not so long ago, President Bush described China's heavily armed tyranny as a "strategic competitor" of the United States. Now the administration is soft as marshmallows, so eager to please that it endangers a democratic ally's fundamental security--and our own credibility and leadership in East Asia. Last week's misstep on Taiwan is dangerous. Fortunately, there is time to undo much of the damage. The facts in the Taiwan case are straightforward enough. Over the past few years, China has been building a vast arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles across the strait from Taiwan. At present some 496 of these missiles are ready to be launched at a moment's notice against the Taiwanese people. Chinese leaders, both military and "civilian," have repeatedly, and quite recently, warned that China is willing to use force if necessary to make Taiwan surrender its sovereignty and accept Beijing's rule. The Pentagon, both under this and the previous administration, has reported that Beijing's ability to launch a successful attack on Taiwan is increasing rapidly, while Taiwan's ability to defend itself is decreasing--and the ability of the United States effectively to intervene may be decreasing as well. Now, in response to this alarming situation, Taiwan's President Chen is proposing to hold what he calls a "defensive referendum" in March on the question of Beijing's missiles. He is hoping, and with good reason, that the Taiwanese people will vote overwhelmingly to demand that China remove these missiles and commit to a peaceful resolution of the cross-straits issue. Chen's critics in the Bush National Security Council claim that Chen is playing politics with the issue in his reelection campaign. And indeed, Chen does hope that his public position regarding China's missile threat will serve him well in the March elections--a bit the way President Bush hopes his position regarding the war on terrorism will help him next November. In both cases, the point is that the two presidents expect to be rewarded politically for faithfully expressing the majority view in their countries. And in neither case does the fact that the policy is politically popular make it illegitimate. The problem for Chen, however, is that the Chinese government has always hated the idea of a referendum in Taiwan--any referendum on any subject. For one thing, Beijing's dictators don't like expressions of democracy, either in territories they control, like Hong Kong, or in countries they want to control, like Taiwan. Beijing also fears that the more the Taiwanese people have a chance to express their views freely, the more likely that someday they will express the view that they want to be truly and officially independent. So China wants to squelch democratic expression in Taiwan as much as possible. And now, unbelievably, so do some senior officials in the Bush administration. In his background interviews with the press, Moriarty told reporters that the administration opposes any referendum on any topic. But Bush has never made such a statement, nor has any administration official in a public setting. weeklystandard.com

To: Done, gone. who wrote (508828)	12/13/2003 5:50:25 PM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 769667

Contracts for Iraq: Reverse the Pentagon's Decision by William Kristol and Robert Kagan 12/11/2003 12:00:00 AM President Bush, we suspect, is going to overrule the Pentagon's attempt to exclude from the bidding for Iraq reconstruction contracts certain countries that have opposed U.S. policy in Iraq. He might as well do it sooner rather than later, so as to minimize the diplomatic damage done by the Pentagon's heavy-handed and counterproductive action. We hold no brief for the Chirac, Schroeder, or Putin governments. We are also very much in favor of finding ways to work more closely with other governments -- such as those of Britain, Spain and Poland -- who have courageously stood with us, and who hold the promise of continuing to be more helpful to us. We have even been critical of the Bush Administration for a certain lack of imagination in finding ways to work constructively with these friendly governments. But this particular effort by the Pentagon to reward friends and punish enemies is stupid, and should be abandoned. A deviously smart American administration would have quietly distributed contracts for rebuilding Iraq as it saw fit, without any announced policy of discrimination. At the end of the day, it would be clear that opponents of American policy didn't fare too well in the bidding process. Message delivered, but with a certain subtlety. A more clever American administration would have thrown a contract or two to a couple of those opponents, to a German firm, for instance, as a way of wooing at least the business sectors in a country where many businessmen do want to strengthen ties with the United States. A truly wise American administration would have opened the bidding to all comers, regardless of their opposition to the war -- as a way of buying those countries into the Iraq effort, building a little goodwill for the future, and demonstrating to the world a little magnanimity. But instead of being smart, clever, or magnanimous, the Bush Administration has done a dumb thing. The announcement of a policy of discriminating against French, German, and Russian firms has made credible European charges of vindictive pettiness and general disregard for the opinion of even fellow liberal democracies. More important, it has made former Secretary of State James Baker's very important effort to get these countries, among others, to offer debt relief for the new government of Iraq almost impossible. This is to say nothing of other areas where we need to work with these governments. This decision is a blunder. We trust it will be reversed. weeklystandard.com