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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (38463)	4/8/2004 4:41:17 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793917

Maybe this one will help. Right news from the left coast. Ice and Water It's good to know that there's long-term job seciruty in being a doom-spreading anti-capitalist anti-corporate anti-American environmentalist wacko. Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the globe if emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and global warming are not reduced, scientists said...http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040407/sc_nm/environment_climate_dc_1

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (38463)	4/8/2004 6:18:29 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Kerry's timing is superb. WSJ.com AT WAR The Search for Answers Richard Clarke is wrong about Iraq. BY BOB KERREY Thursday, April 8, 2004 12:01 a.m. The 9/11 Commission's objective is to answer the following question: How--at the end of a summer of high terrorist threat--did 19 men with a few hundred thousand dollars manage to utterly defeat every single defensive mechanism we had in place that September morning and murder 3,000 innocents on American soil? The search for this answer is especially painful because these 19 men were part of al Qaeda, a radical Islamic army called to war against the United States by Osama bin Laden in August 1996 and again in February 1998--and because Sept. 11, 2001, was not their first success. On Aug. 7, 1998, six months after Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against Americans world-wide, al Qaeda terrorists attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with truck bombs, killing more than 250 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and wounding thousands more. Attempts to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and the USS The Sullivans in Yemen were prevented by a combination of skilled spycraft and good luck. But our luck did not hold. On Oct. 12, 2000, a bomb ripped through the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17 American sailors. And less than a year later, Mohamed Atta and his suicidal crew crashed civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa. I believe Chairman Tom Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will lead our commission to write a bipartisan report that will provide Americans with the clearest picture yet of how this happened. I believe they will lead the commission to produce a report that will contain specific recommendations of what we need to do to make certain that nothing like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ever happens again. As a member of the commission, authorized under federal law as a consequence of the persistence and perseverance of the families of the victims of that terrible day, I sincerely hope our efforts will meet their highest expectations. Today's appearance of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become personal and question motives instead of confronting the substance of the argument made by any individual. If we yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail. The best example of this came two weeks ago, when all the key national security officials of both the Clinton and Bush administrations, except Ms. Rice, testified under oath before the commission. This testimony came immediately after Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism director under both presidents, spoke. Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have been more terrorist attacks against the United States in the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when he went on to say that this happened because we substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war against al Qaeda. That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home. Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites. It is my view that a political victory for terrorism in Iraq is a much greater danger to us than whether or not we succeed in capturing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Victory in Iraq will embolden radical Islamists as much as our failure to recognize the original danger of their declaration of war against us. This debate becomes all the more important since the work of this commission--to examine an attack against the U.S. that occurred nearly three years ago--has been overshadowed by the events taking place in Iraq. The war there is not over. Twelve marines were killed in Ramadi Tuesday night in what has become a dramatic escalation of violence against coalition forces. I believe this escalation is taking place precisely because the country is about to be handed over to the Iraqi people to run themselves. More importantly, I believe this commission must try to provide a foundation for bipartisan agreement on what should be done in Iraq and the broader war against radical Islamists who use terror as a tactic to destroy our will. Whether you disagree with me or with Mr. Clarke, the only way for the 9/11 Commission to succeed is to confront every fact and every argument on its merits. If we do, the world will be safer. If we don't, we will have exercised our freedoms poorly. Mr. Kerrey, president of New School University in New York and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11" Commission). Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (38463)	4/8/2004 9:46:09 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Captain's Quarters - Not One Dollar to Arafat By Captain Ed on War on Terror You have to admire the chutzpah of the Palestinians. After killing three of our envoys in Gaza last year and chanting "Death to America" on any occasion they can find, they turn around and hit us up for cash: foxnews.com The Palestinians expect a large aid package from the United States and other donor countries to help rebuild the Gaza Strip after an Israeli withdrawal, the Palestinian foreign minister said Thursday. ... In the event of a Gaza withdrawal, "the Americans should be ready with the World Bank and other donors to make massive economic support for the Palestinian Authority," Shaath said in interview with Israel Radio. He did not give a sum. The Palestinians, already heavily dependent on international aid, are hoping for more money to help rebuild an economy shattered in more than three years of fighting with Israel. Shaath said the funds were needed for "relief, reconstruction, economic activities, labor and job creation, and others." Shaath was quoted as saying he is aware of American expectations that in return for the aid, the Palestinians crack down on militant groups and arrest those behind the bombing of an U.S. convoy in Gaza in October. The US has already paid our millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority since Oslo -- money that supported the same structure that runs Yasser Arafat's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a suicide-bombing terrorist apparatus that has claimed the lives of Israeli citizens by the score. This demand differs in no way from a mob protection scheme; pay us and there won't be trouble. What, you were surprised by that pizza-parlor bombing? Pay us more and we'll make sure it doesn't happen again. A bus blew up? Well, that was some other outfit; pay us more and we'll reason with them. I have an answer for that. In the words of Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II: "This is my offer: nothing. Not one dollar." As long as Arafat and his terrorist henchmen Abu Smith, Abu Jones, and Abu Whatever are in charge, you don't get one thin dime from the American taxpayer. When you hand over the people who killed our envoys, when you arrest the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, when you lock up the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and when the bombings stop in Israel and everywhere else -- then we'll talk. Until then, you get nothing. Zilch. Zippo. We should be done rewarding murderers for taking a short break.