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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (242279)	7/20/2005 3:13:47 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573720

Link to Cheney deepens ‘leak-gate’ scandal By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist \| July 19, 2005 THE NEWS that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was the second possible source in the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent to Time magazine elevates the scandal to a whole new level. It is bad enough for Karl Rove to be accused of being a leaker, since he is President Bush’s chief political strategist. But if Time’s story holds, I. Lewis Libby’s involvement represents an even more insidious abuse of power. The Bush administration is being accused of leaking the name of Valerie Plame in retribution for a New York Times op-ed article written by her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson. Wilson wrote that he never found any evidence in a 2002 trip to Africa, contrary to claims made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein was procuring uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons. Bush would invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. But Libby, Cheney, and the other influential right-wing hard-liners, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, saw their dreams come true. Back in the administration of the senior President Bush, Cheney was defense secretary and Libby and Wolfowitz were two of his aides who, after the first Gulf War left Saddam in power, drafted a document advocating ‘‘preemptive’’ war against possible threats. They said the United States should be ‘‘postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.’’ Such provocation was kept at bay when President Clinton beat Bush in 1992 and took office for eight years. But when the junior Bush became president in 2000, the hard right on foreign policy took the helm. They used the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as an excuse for invading Iraq, even though President Bush’s own 9/11 Commission found no tie between Saddam and 9/11. Libby was in the thick of whipping up fear over the thinnest of evidence. The level to which Libby and Cheney stooped to get their war was highlighted by the momentous presentation of Saddam’s ‘‘threat’’ before the United Nations Security Council by then Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell gave a presentation six weeks before the war where he said, ‘‘every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions.’’ Those assertions resulted in grudging acceptance of the war from many Democrats. Virtually all of Powell’s solid sources fell apart when the United States turned Iraq upside down, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the process. He would have looked much worse had he listened to everything Libby and Cheney tried to feed him. It was Cheney’s staff who wrote the first draft of Powell’s UN speech. It was Libby who suggested, in strategy meetings at the White House, playing up every possible, conceivable threat of Saddam — with the emphasis on the word ‘‘conceive.’’ A US News and World Report story in the summer of 2003 quoted a senior administration official as saying Libby’s presentation ‘‘was over the top and ran the gamut from Al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction. They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view.’’ Powell, according to both US News and Vanity Fair, was so irritated by Libby’s hodgepodge of unsubstantiated facts that he threw documents into the air and said, ‘‘I’m not reading this. This is bull ...’’ Libby, whose nickname is Scooter, was particularly unhappy that Powell had thrown out sections of the presentation that would have attempted to link Al Qaeda to Saddam, including a discredited report that top 9/11 Al Qaeda airline hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. According to Vanity Fair, ‘‘Cheney’s office made one last ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam and Al Qaeda and to slip the Prague story back into the speech. Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried unsuccessfully to reach [Larry] Wilkerson by phone. Powell’s staff chief, by then inside the Security Council chamber, declined to take the call. ‘Scooter,’ said one State Department aide, ‘wasn’t happy.’’’ According to Vanity Fair, Cheney himself urged Powell to go ahead and stake his national popularity on the nonexistent evidence by saying to Powell, ‘‘Your poll numbers are in the 70s. You can afford to lose a few points.’’ America and Iraq would go on to lose more than a few points. Libby may end up as a symbol of a government so driven to ignore the truth it was willing to resort to dirty tricks to stop anyone from telling it. boston.com

To: combjelly who wrote (242279)	7/20/2005 6:52:31 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1573720

Joined at the Hip By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN On the question of whether China's Cnooc oil company should be permitted by the U.S. government to purchase the U.S. oil and gas company Unocal, my view is very simple: let the market rule. Oil is fungible. It is all one global market. And if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business. Anyway, the more starved Americans are for oil, the sooner we will adopt alternatives and get off this drug once and for all. If I seem uninterested in this matter, I am. Because I do not think the important issue is who owns Unocal. The important issue is whether America and China are drifting into a dangerous confrontation over geoeconomics. How so? Well, in brief, the Chinese and U.S. economies have become totally intertwined. While we have been focused on 9/11 and Iraq, China and America have become, in economic terms, Siamese twins. You know that cheap mortgage you just got? Well, who do you think subsidized it? In many ways it was China. Americans don't save anymore, and import more than they export. Normally, a nation that did that as long and lavishly as the U.S. has would have to raise interest rates to get other countries to hold its currency. But America has not had to do that, in part because China has been willing to hold most of the dollars it has been accumulating - gained from all the goods it is selling America - despite the low interest paid on those dollars and the fact that they have been depreciating against other major currencies. How come? Call it the Tiananmen-Texas Bargain. After Tiananmen, China's leaders struck an implicit bargain with their people, argued Steven Weber, director of Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. "The bargain is that China's voters give up the right to vote, and the Chinese government guarantees China's middle class 9 percent annual economic growth. China's political stability today depends on that bargain." The Texas side of that bargain came from the Bush team. For a long time, it ignored China's undervalued currency so China could sell us lots of cheap stuff and would continue holding our devaluing dollars and helping to keep U.S. interest rates low. Our buying binge helped keep China's workers employed and its leaders in power. Their holding our depreciating dollars helped you buy a house with no money down. We've been in symbiotic relationships like this before with Western Europe and Japan during the cold war, but they were allies and democracies, so we could adjust imbalances more easily. Not so with China. We are Siamese twins, but most unlikely ones - joined at the hip, but not identical. That's a problem. Because we now need to adjust the Tiananmen-Texas bargain. So many U.S. dollars and jobs are flowing to China, it is becoming politically and economically unsustainable for the Bush team. Hedge funds have made huge speculative bets around the T-T bargain. We need China to revalue its currency upward against the dollar, so China buys more stuff from us and we buy less stuff from China. But China's foreign exchange reserves today are nearly $750 billion and heading for $1 trillion - most in U.S. Treasury notes. If China is compelled by the U.S. to revalue its currency, and effectively devalue the dollar further, Beijing will take a big hit on all of its dollar reserves - especially since most experts say the dollar has to be devalued by 30 to 40 percent against the Chinese currency to have any impact on the trade balance. That would also be likely to affect the dollar's value against other currencies and create pressure for inflation and higher interest rates in the U.S. "If the dollar falls and U.S. interest rates rise, it could cause a recession or stagflation in America," Professor Weber said. "But if the Chinese currency rises too far too fast and triggers unemployment, it could cause a revolution against the Communist Party. ... We might see our dollar policy as a market adjustment, but they could see it as an attempt at regime change." As I said, the issue is not Unocal. The real issue is that we have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy. We have both grown dependent on that relationship - the U.S. for cheap goods and cheap mortgages, and China for high employment and regime stability. We now have to adjust the bargain at the heart of that relationship. Whether we can do that delicately, without destabilizing Beijing or the global economy, could be the big geopolitical story of 2005.