Tristero

Monday, August 11, 2003

"They Want To Question My Patriotism?"  

Just in case anyone thinks opposing the Bush administration and their wars doesn't come with consequences, here's a recent roundup of horrors:

After 39 years in the Marines, including commands in Somalia and Iraq, Gen. Anthony Zinni never imagined he would be tagged "turncoat."

The epithets are not from the uniforms but the suits — "senior officers at the Pentagon," the now-retired general says from his home in Williamsburg, Va.

"They want to question my patriotism?" he demands testily...

After Zinni challenged the administration's rationale for the Iraq war last fall, he lost his job as President George W. Bush's Middle East peace envoy after 18 months...

Across the United States, hundreds of Americans have been arrested for protesting the war. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented more than 300 allegations of wrongful arrest and police brutality from demonstrators at anti-war rallies in Washington and New York...

[Actor Tim] Robbins said they were called "traitors" and "supporters of Saddam" and their public appearances at a United Way luncheon in Florida and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., this spring were cancelled in reaction to their anti-war stance.

Actor/comedian Janeane Garofalo was stalked and received death threats for opposing the war in high-profile media appearances.

MSNBC hosts asked viewers to urge MCI to fire actor and anti-war activist Danny Glover as a spokesperson — the long-distance telephone giant refused to fire him despite the ensuing hate-mail campaign — and one host, former politician Joe Scarborough, urged that anti-war protesters be arrested and charged with sedition...

The Dixie Chicks country pop group won worldwide attention for their anti-Bush comments, which were met with widespread radio station bans against playing their music...

Dozens of fans walked out of a Pearl Jam concert in Denver, Colo., last spring when lead singer Eddie Vedder hoisted a Bush mask on a microphone stand and sang, "He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer..."

Peace scholar Stephen Zunes — so-named for winning a Peace and Justice Studies Association award for leadership in promoting such scholarship — says he was recently "uninvited" to speak to the Arizona state bar association despite a six-month-old commitment.

"It's censorship" for his perceived anti-Israel views and outspoken opposition to a foreign policy that has made the U.S. a target of terrorists, says Zunes from his office at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches politics. "You'd think lawyers would be more concerned about civil liberties."

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:42 AM

WaPo On Iraq WMD Overestimation  

One of the most detailed articles yet in how the US was deceived into war with Iraq by Bush:

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.

• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.

• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.

• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."

• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:55 AM

Campaign Issue: Dying For Halliburton  

From the NY Times letter section:

American troops in Iraq face almost daily attacks from guerrilla insurgents, our soldiers continue to die, the Iraqi infrastructure deteriorates, anti-American hostility among Iraqis is on the rise, and the length of the war and its astronomical costs steadily escalate.

Yet Halliburton, the company recently headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has converted a half-billion-dollar quarterly loss a year ago into a tidy quarterly profit for the same period this year, bolstered by a monopoly on hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi rebuilding and oil contracts awarded by the Bush administration.

The war may be taking a toll on Americans, but at least it's sparking a turnaround at Halliburton.

UPDATE: And let's not forget Cheney was at the helm when Halliburton made the catastrophic deal that sent its profits south. And let's not forget that Cheney is still being paid one million dollars a year by Halliburton.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:22 AM

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Hero Watch: Brady Kiesling in WaPo  

An excellent, sympathetic portrait of the diplomat who resigned to protest Bush's Iraq war. It ends, describing a speech at Princeton:

"He talked for about 40 minutes. He spoke quietly, and his listeners stayed quiet to hear him. When he was done, they stood to applaud -- clapping and clapping, as if they knew Brady Kiesling's unlikely moment was almost over and wanted, against all odds, to see it prolonged. "

No, Mr. WaPo staff writer, Brady Kiesling's moment has only begun. Apparently, he's writing a book. I'll order it the moment it's available.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:31 PM

NY Times Understands Ashcroft  

He really must go:

The founding fathers, whose brilliant design for the federal government was based on three coequal branches, would be horrified to learn of Attorney General John Ashcroft's latest idea for improving the American justice system. Mr. Ashcroft has ordered federal prosecutors to start collecting information on federal judges who give sentences that are lighter than those suggested by federal guidelines. Critics are right when they say this has the potential to create a "blacklist" of judges who could then be subjected to intimidation...

By trying to make federal judges yield to political pressure from Washington, the Bush administration is engaging in a radical attack on our constitutional system. Even Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose conservative credentials are unassailable, has warned that collecting data on judges' sentencing practices "could amount to an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges." Mr. Ashcroft should heed these words, and abandon his dangerous war on the judicial branch.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:04 AM