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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (2656)	2/15/2004 10:37:06 AM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

Suma, your post went right to the heart of what this thread is supposed to do: >>>Read the news from IRAQ and the posts here and still have the same opinion....< Anyone reading what's in this thread's header and anyone reading the bulk of the posts on this message board would have a very difficult time supporting the Bush-Cheney Administration. More and more, as new revelations come out, it seems that the only support for this administration comes from its hardcore political base, GOPwingers all. I firmly predict that a new emotion will sweep this country when the Gold Star Mothers, from this wrongful Iraqi War, come knocking on the doors of the White House. When this happens the media will fall very, very hard on Bush. So my message to hardcore GOPwingers? You might wish to now begin reconsidering your position of support for the Bush-Cheney Administration, the worst one our nation has ever seen.

To: Suma who wrote (2656)	2/15/2004 12:06:45 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

May 31, 2002 For Immediate Release By Atty. John J. Loftus 3560 Coquina Key Drive SE St. Petersburg, FL 33705 Ph: 727-821-5227 Fx: 727-894-1801 About the author: As a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus had an insider’s knowledge of high level intelligence operations, including obstruction of Congressional investigations. Loftus resigned from the Justice Department in 1981 to expose how the intelligence community had recruited Nazi war criminals and then concealed the files from Congressional subpoena. After appearing on an Emmy Award winning segment of 60 Minutes, Loftus has spent the next two decades writing histories of intelligence cover-ups, and serving as an unpaid lawyer helping other whistleblowers inside US intelligence. A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron. Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban negotiations. The suppressed Al Qaida document tends to support recent claims of a cover-up made by several mid-level intelligence and law enforcement figures. Their ongoing terrorist investigations appear to have been hindered during the same sensitive time period while the Enron Corporation was still negotiating with the Taliban. An inadvertent result of the Taliban pipeline cover-up was that the Taliban’s friends in Al Qaida were able to complete their last eight months of preparations for 9/11 while the Enron secrecy block was still in force. Although the latest order to block investigations allegedly resulted from Enron’s January 2002 appeal to Vice President Dick Cheney, it appears that there were at least three previous block orders, each building upon the other, stretching back for decades and involving both Republican and Democratic administrations. The first block came in the 1970’s, as a result of Congressional reaction to domestic espionage against the anti-Vietnam war movement. In a case of blatant over-reaction, the FBI placed all houses of worship and religious charities off-limits for any surveillance whatsoever unless there was independent probable cause. This meant that all Mosques and other Muslim meeting places for terrorist groups were effectively off limits until after a crime had been committed. The block order was not lifted until last week by Atty. General Ashcroft. The second block order, in force since the 1980’s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place. As the combined result of these two blocks, the Saudis were able to fund middle eastern terrorists in complete secrecy during the 1990’s through a network of Muslim charities in Virginia, Tampa and Florida. The Saudi funding network was targeted at the destruction of the State of Israel and the obstruction of the Palestinian peace process. The Saudi funding conduit has now been exposed and shut down by means of a private lawsuit, Loftus vs. Sami Al Arian, which is currently pending in Hillsborough County, Florida. The lawsuit, filed on March 20, 2002, influenced the government into raiding the Saudi charities in Herndon, Virginia, a few hours later. After filing the Al-Arian lawsuit, Attorney Loftus began to receive very detailed documents and information about a third block: a prohibition on investigations concerning the Taliban. In the early 1990’s, a consortium of American oil companies (lead by Unocal) had hired Enron to determine the profitability of building an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan so that America could have access to the Caspian Sea Basin, holding 1/8th of the worlds energy supplies. There is no doubt that these secret negotiations existed, and that they were known to Al Qaida. Loftus recently received an FBI translation of a highly classified and encrypted Al Qaida document, circa 1997-1998, which was retrieved and decrypted from a computer laptop following the Embassy bombing in Africa. The document was written by Osama Bin Laden’s military commander, Mohammed Atef, under his nom de guerre, Abu Haf, and reveals extensive knowledge of the supposedly secret pipeline negotiations, and their potential economic worth to the Taliban, Pakistan and the U.S. Former Afghanistan CIA agent Robert Baer has recently published a book charging that the cover-up of the 1990’s pipeline negotiations revealed extensive financial corruption inside the Clinton administration, and contributed to the lack of intelligence before 9/11. The Taliban negotiations temporarily collapsed in 1999 after Clinton reversed his NSC advisor’s policy, and ordered a missile strike against terrorists in Afghanistan. However, in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neill resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa. O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States. The FBI is currently investigating Loftus’ links to John O’Neill, and is also refusing FBI agent Robert Wright permission to publish his own findings about the Enron block. Loftus asserts that the Enron block, which remained in force from January 2001 until August 2001 when the pipeline deal collapsed, is the reason that none of FBI agent Rowley’s requests for investigations were ever approved. As numerous British and French authors have concluded, the information provided by European intelligence sources prior to 9/11 was so extensive, that it is no longer possible for either CIA or the FBI to assert a defense of incompetence. It is time for Congress to face the truth: In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates ignorant. The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse. john-loftus.com

To: Suma who wrote (2656)	2/15/2004 1:26:28 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

I got news for the right anyway. Ted Kennedy is becoming something of a folk hero these days for standing up to Bush when it was not necessarily politically savvy to do so. If there is such a thing as favorable ratings for congress, Kennedy is probably at his zenith right about now. Demonizing Kerry as a "massachusetts liberal" and aligning him with Kennedy as if that is some sort of evil won't work this time. Bush's term has a lot of middle ground folks rethinking the term "liberal" and whether this label is something to be ashamed of or not.

To: Suma who wrote (2656)	2/15/2004 2:34:17 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Kerry's Senate voting record could make him vulnerable By TODD S. PURDUM New York Times chron.com WASHINGTON -- The moment John Kerry began to seem like the candidate to watch in the Iowa caucuses, the campaigns of his Democratic rivals Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt swiftly used a handful of Kerry's decade-old Senate votes and statements against ethanol and agricultural subsidies to attack him as not supportive of Iowa's essential industry. Now that his opponents are moving even more aggressively to slow Kerry's rise, his 19-year voting record as the junior senator from Massachusetts could loom as his greatest political vulnerability, among Democrats and Republicans alike. The sheer length of Kerry's service means that he has built a paper trail of positions on education, the military, intelligence and other issues -- stands that might have looked one way when he took them but that resonate differently now. For example, at the end of the Cold War, Kerry advocated scaling back the CIA, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he complained about a lack of intelligence capability. In the 1980s, he opposed the death penalty for terrorists who killed Americans abroad, but he now supports the death penalty for terrorist acts. In the 1990s, he joined with Republican colleagues to sponsor proposals to end tenure for public schoolteachers and allow direct grants to religion-based charities, measures that many Democratic groups opposed. In 1997, he voted to require elderly people with higher incomes to pay a larger share of Medicare premiums. The record is susceptible to two broad strands of attack. Kerry's rival Democrats point to a series of shifting stands on issues, such as his vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. They say these are at odds with his campaign claim to be the "real deal" Democratic alternative to Bush, capable of "standing up for people and taking on powerful interests," as he says in his stump speech. "When it was popular to be a Massachusetts liberal, his voting record was that," said Jay Carson, a Dean campaign spokesman. "When it was popular to be for the Iraq war, he was for it. Now it's popular to be against it, and he's against it. This is a voting record that is a big vulnerability against Republicans in the general election. He's all over the place on this stuff." The Republicans seek to paint Kerry as voting in lock step with, or even to the left of, fellow Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, long a Republican target. "Whether it's economic policy, national security policy or social issues, John Kerry is out of sync with most voters," the Republican national chairman, Ed Gillespie, said in a speech Friday. Kerry's spokesman, David Wade, said the senator was "proud of his independence and unashamed that his resistance to orthodoxy leaves him hard to pigeonhole," adding that he had "fought a lifetime for what's right even when it's neither popular nor predictable." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Suma: The NYT wouldn't lie, would they? LOL. Well, if that doesn't do it for you, how about this one: nationalreview.com AWOL in the Fight Against George W. Bush It's all in the Kerry record. Sen. John Kerry, emerging as the favorite to win the New Hampshire primary, often tells supporters he has the courage and qualifications to stand up to George W. Bush when it counts. "I have the ability to stand up to George Bush," Kerry said as he campaigned in the last days before the Iowa caucuses. A few days earlier, Kerry said voters want a candidate who can "stand up to George Bush and his bullies." As a senator with the responsibility to cast a vote on a variety of contentious issues, Kerry has had many opportunities to square off with the president. Yet an analysis of Kerry's 2003 Senate voting record shows that he did not show up for most of the Senate's confrontations with the White House. The publication Congressional Quarterly examined 119 recorded votes held in 2003 in which the president had taken a position. CQ found that Kerry was present for just 28 percent of those votes. In contrast, Kerry's colleague from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, was present for 97 percent of the votes. When Kerry showed up, he did indeed vote against the president a significant number of times. In 2003, according to CQ, Kerry sided against the president 70 percent of the time. Kennedy, usually viewed as the gold standard of liberal orthodoxy, voted against Bush 53 percent of the time. In a larger examination of all Senate votes, CQ found that Kerry and Kennedy have compiled remarkably similar voting records — a fact that will no doubt be used by Republicans who will seek to portray Kerry as a classic Massachusetts liberal, should he win the Democratic nomination and face President Bush in November's general election. CQ found that in 2003, Kerry voted with Kennedy 93 percent of the time on roll-call votes in which both men were present. While that might seem like a lot, it was, historically, a rather low number for Kerry; who voted with Kennedy 100 percent of the time on key votes in 2001, 1999, 1998, 1993, 1992, 1989, 1988, 1987, 1986, and 1985, according to a Republican analysis of CQ's designated key votes from those years. There are other indicators that Kerry's liberalism, when he is present for votes, matches or even exceeds Kennedy's and those of other liberal icons in the Senate. For example, Kerry has earned a lifetime rating of 93 from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, which selects key votes each year and rates lawmakers according to a perfect liberal score of 100. Kerry's rating puts him in league with Kennedy, whose lifetime score is a slightly less-liberal 88, and other liberals like Vermont's Patrick Leahy, with 93, and California's Barbara Boxer, with 96. Viewed from the other side of the ideological divide, Kerry has a lifetime rating of six from the conservative American Conservative Union, which uses a similar methodology to rate lawmakers according to a perfect conservative score of 100. Kerry's rating is the same as Leahy's and New York's Charles Schumer's, although it is slightly less liberal than Kennedy's lifetime rating of three. On the issue of showing up for Senate votes, CQ found that Kerry's fellow senators running for president, John Edwards and Joseph Lieberman, also missed a significant number of votes, although far fewer than Kerry did. According to the CQ analysis, Edwards was present for 53 percent of the recorded votes in which the president took a position, while Lieberman was present for 45 percent. Most senators were present for more than 90 percent of the votes.