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I read about this too. Check it out. It's important. Re: Turning the Tables Website 6:06:23 PM 
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Re: A Duty to the Truth Dear Friends: Joseph C. Wilson 4th was the US ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, and a career foreign service officer and ambassador for 23 years. Based on his experience with the Bush administration in the months preceding the war on Iraq, he concluded that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. He stresses that we must uncover the truth-- America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. In the search for this truth, we must be willing to question this selective use of intelligence to justify the war on Iraq. This is not political opportunism or what Bush has referred to as "revisionist history." The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers, and countless Iraqis, have already lost their lives due to our folly. We have a duty to them to find out the truth and make it known to all. __________________________ The New York Times July 6, 2003 What I Didn't Find in Africa by Joseph C. Wilson 4th WASHINGTON Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council. It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me. In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake a form of lightly processed ore by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office. After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government. In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible. The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival. I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place. Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired. (As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.) Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip. Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure. I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country. Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case. Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government. The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted. I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed. But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons. --Joseph C. Wilson 4th, United States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, is an international business consultant. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ======================================= 6:05:28 PM
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Re: New York City Flash Mobs Dear Friends: You're probably familiar with the growing phenomenon known as Flash Mobs. They're fun, sociologically intriguing, and have lots of political potential. Part performance art, part guerilla theater, the possibilities are limitless. Just think what you and your community could do.... ____________________________ Wired News July 5, 2003 Mail Mobs Materialize All Over by Leander Kahney Inexplicable "flash mobs" are starting to form all over. Begun in New York City, the gatherings are popping up in San Francisco, Minneapolis and suburban New York City, just north of the city. There also is talk of launching a similar group in London. Flash mobs are performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed. In New York, the city's finest turned out in force to block the city's third mob gathering last Wednesday evening. Set to gather at 7 p.m. at Grand Central Station for what promised to be an elaborate "mob ballet," the crowd of about 250 was greeted by a "huge" police presence, according to the Mob Project's anonymous organizer known only as Bill. Bill said the mob moved to the Grand Hyatt next door instead. The crowd walked quietly upstairs to the hotel's mezzanine and gathered shoulder-to-shoulder around the balcony. "At 7:12, we burst into thunderous, screaming applause for 15 seconds, and then dispersed, just as police cars came screaming around the corner to where we were," said Bill. "It was fabulous." In Minneapolis, a mob is planning to gather at an as-yet-undisclosed location on July 22 at 6:25 p.m., according to the group's organizer, who asked to remain anonymous. The organizer said he has created a list of ideas, scripts and potential locations for mob events, but is worried about the gatherings getting out of hand. "The problem with mob events is getting the event at a location that won't cause a problem," the organizer said. "In Minneapolis, mobs have a real bad connotation. People think about the Minnesota Gopher hockey team and the carnage that resulted from just taking part in a hockey tournament. The last thing we want to see is an unruly mob event." For the last two years, Gopher fans have rioted in Minneapolis after NCAA championship games. "As long as we keep it brief and covert, I see little problem with the event," the organizer added. The Minneapolis mob has a discussion list at Yahoo. In San Francisco, a mob event is promised in "the next few weeks," according to organizer Rob Zazueta. Zazueta, a 28-year-old Web developer who works in the city, said nearly 200 people have signed up for the mailing list. Unlike the NYC mob, which is an invite-only affair, the San Francisco mob is open to one and all. "I didn't want it to be an exclusive group," Zazueta explained. "And besides, the more the merrier." Zazueta said the nature of the gathering has not yet been decided, but he's leaning toward some kind of collaborative art project. "I don't think there's a lot of sustainability to prankish mobs," he said. "They will have to be ever-increasingly clever to get people to attend and, eventually, I think some folks might just get bored with them. This is why I'm trying to think along the lines of organizing around an action or a creative activity." Zazueta also is working on a website for groups in other cities hoping to organize their own mob projects. (The site is not yet live). "There's a real desire for something like this out there," he said. "Community has always been a big buzzword in the Web space, and I think the smart mob concept helps to bring the virtual community into real space. No matter how good our devices become at allowing us to communicate, I think we're always going to need some real face time with folks." NYC's Mob Project organizer Bill said he was pleased with the ever-growing turnout. The attraction, he said, was that the events are part social, part political, even though the gatherings are expressly apolitical. "There seems to be something inherently political about an inexplicable mob," he said. "People feel like there's nothing but order everywhere -- even crowds these days are forecast and managed -- and so they love to be a part of just one thing that nobody was expecting." Sean Savage, a 31-year-old San Francisco designer and weblogger who has followed flash mobs, said these kinds of semi-anarchic gatherings have roots that go at least as far back as the late 1970s. Savage said San Francisco groups like the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society have been staging group pranks in the city for decades, while Santa Rampage has been an annual San Francisco tradition for nearly a decade and has spread to more than 15 cities worldwide. "There's a vague, growing interest in grass-roots activity that transcends more traditional institutions," Savage said. "(They) prove people can still form ad hoc communities and make things happen that are beyond the reach of the gigantic, corrupt corporate and governmental powers that seem to dominate so much of modern life. But maybe I'm reading too much into it." Wired News © Copyright 2003, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:04:56 PM
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Re: A Rat in the Wheat Fields of Iraq Dear Friends: The war on Iraq couldn't have come at a worse time for Iraq's beleaguered farmers. Spring is harvest time in the barley and wheat fields of the Tigris River valley and planting time in the vast vegetable plantations of southern Iraq. Though the war is now over, the situation in the fields of Iraq continues to rapidly deteriorate. The banks, which provide credit and cash, have been looted, irrigation systems destroyed, road travel restricted, markets closed, warehouses, and grain silos pillaged. Even if the crops can be harvested, there's no clear way for the grain to get stored, marketed, sold ,and distributed to hungry Iraqi families. Into this dire circumstance strides Daniel Amstutz, the Bush administration's choice to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq's agricultural system. His most virulent critic has been Kevin Wilkins, Oxfam's policy director in London. "This guy is uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a war torn country," Watkins warns. "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission." And the beat goes on.... _________________________ CounterPunch July 4, 2003 The Rat in the Grain Dan Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture by Jeffrey St. Clair The war on Iraq couldn't have come at a more dire time for Iraq's beleaguered farmers. Spring is harvest time in the barley and wheat fields of the Tigris River valley and planting time in the vast vegetable plantations of southern Iraq. The war is over, but the situation in the fields of Iraq continues to rapidly deteriorate. The banks, which provide credit and cash, have been looted, irrigation systems destroyed, road travel restricted, markets closed, warehouses and grain silos pillaged. To harvest the grain before it rots in the fields Iraqi farmers need more than eight million gallons of diesel fuel to power Iraq's corroding armada of combines and harvesters. But most of the fuel depots were incinerated by US bombing strikes. There's no easy way to get the fuel that remains to the farmers who need it most and no desire to do so by the US forces of occupations. Even if the crops can be harvested, there's no clear way for the grain to get stored, marketed, sold and distributed to hungry Iraqi families. Under the Hussein regime, the crops were bought by the Baghdad government at a fixed priced and then distributed through a rationing system. This system, inefficient as it was, is gone. But nothing has taken its place. Iraqi farmers are still owed $75 million for this year's crop, with little sign that the money will ever arrive. There's speculation throughout the country that one intent of the current policy is to force many farmers off their farms and into the cities so that their lands can be taken over by favorites of Ahmed Chalabi and his US protectors. The post-Saddam Iraq will almost certainly witness a land redistribution program: more farmland going into fewer and fewer hands. Grain farmers aren't alone. As in the first Gulf War, US bombing raids targeted cattle feed lots, poultry farms, fertilizer warehouses, pumping stations, irrigation systems and pesticide factories (the closest thing the US has come to finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in the country)-the very infrastructure of Iraqi agriculture. It will take years to restore these operations. Many fields in southern Iraq lie fallow, as vegetable farmers have been unable to secure seeds for this summer's crops of melons, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and beans-all mainstays of the Iraqi diet. "We expect failures," said Abdul Aziz Nejefi, a barley farmer from Mosul, in a dispatch from the Guardian. "We never had this situation before. There is no government." Meanwhile, millions of Iraqis face starvation this summer. A UN staff report from late May paints a bleak portrait. It notes that Iraq's poultry industry has effectively been decimated. Millions of chickens perished during the war. Millions of others face starvation, since nearly of the chicken feed stored in government warehouses has been looted. Chicken and eggs are staples of the Iraqi, amounting for more than half of the animal protein consumed by the population. Many other farm animals, including sheep and goats, could be ravaged by disease, since the nation's stockpiles of veterinary medicines and vaccines have been almost totally destroyed or looted. Some 60% of Iraq's 24 million people depend totally for their food on the food ration system that was established after the Gulf War. Each week, these Iraqis could count on a "food basket" consisting of wheat flour, rice, vegetable oil, lentils beans, milk, sugar and salt. That system is now in shambles and is scorned at by US policymakers. And promised grain imports have yet to materialize. "Before there is unwarranted military technological triumphalism, let those setting out to manage the peace think mouths," says Tim Land, professor food policy at City University in London. "Grumbling stomachs are bad politics as well as disastrous for the public health. There has to be a food democracy after decades of food totalitarianism." Into this dire circumstance strides Daniel Amstutz, the Bush administration's choice to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq's agricultural system. Now an international trade lobbyist in DC with a fat roster of big ag clients, Amstutz once served as a top executive at Cargill, the food giant which controls much of the world trade in grain. During Amstutz's tenure at Cargill, the grain company went on a torrid expansion campaign. It is now the largest privately held corporation in the US and controls about 94 percent of the soybean market and more than 50 percent of the corn market in the Upper Midwest. It also has it's hands on the export market controlling 40 percent of all US corn exports, a third of all soybean exports and at least 20 percent of wheat exports. Al Krebs, who edits the Agribusiness Examiner, a vital publication on US farm policy, unearthed a 1982 questionnaire on food, politics and morality that vividly illustrates the Cargill philosophy. The Joseph Project a public policy research group sponsored by the Senate of Catholic Priests of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St.Paul, asked Cargill executives to explain the company's attitude toward hunger and famine issues. The executives responded as follows: "The assumption that there are moral priorities that are offended in serving world or domestic markets as economically and efficiently as possible rests on a confusion about economic facts. It is also a highly objectionable characterization of business's role. Before one makes moral judgments and advocates economic actions, one should understand the economic issues that are involved. "The business of making moral judgments is both hazardous and potentially irresponsible unless one is fully satisfied that all the facts and causal relationships have been explored . . . We are not in a position --- given time and other constraints --- to provide all the relevant background. Nor are we anxious to make moral judgments --- or moral defenses --- of our own." In 2000, the biggest food companies in the world, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Cenex Harvest States Co-op, DuPont and Louis Dreyfus, got together to form Pradium Inc., a kind of secret, internal grain market that offered real-time, cash commodity exchanges for grains, oilseeds and agricultural by-products as well as global information services. It also offered ways to fix price grain prices on a global scale. Amstutz served as Pradium's chairman. Amstutz is no stranger to government, either. During the first Bush administration he served as Undersecretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity programs. He was also the chief US negotiator on agricultural issues for the Uruguay Round of GATT talks, which led to the WTO. "Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda," says George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition. "He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite is true." The small farmers of the grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm price supports-all in an effort to lower grain prices for the benefit of Amstutz's cronies in the big agricultural conglomerates. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits. The contours of Amstutz's plan for Iraq are familiar: a combination of free-market shock therapy and predation by multinational corporations. Gliding over a decade of UN sanctions that have starved the nation and a war that ravaged the nation's infrastructure, Amstutz announced that the real problem facing Iraqi agriculture is, naturally, government subsidies. "Iraqi farmers have had little incentive to increase production because of price controls that have kept food very inexpensive," Amstutz announced. "With a transition to a market economy, we can see health returning to agriculture and incentives to employ good farming practices and modern techniques." The more likely scenario is that Amstutz will use destitute condition of Iraq's farmlands as a lucrative opportunity to dump cheap grain from American companies like Cargill, all of it paid for by Iraqi oil. If this scenario plays out, it will spell disaster for Iraq's struggling farmers. Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq imported more than one million metric ton per year of American wheat. Since then, however, no direct sales of American agricultural products have occurred. Amstutz is anxious to begin flooding Iraq with Cargill grain. Moreover, Iraq owes the US Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corp. $2 billion on loans that facilitated pre-1991 ag sales and nearly $2 billion in interest on the loans. Amstutz will certainly demand that those loans be recouped through oil sales. "Someone needs to warn the Iraqi people that other third world countries can already attest that the dependence Amstutz will create surely means that Iraq's sovereignty will be greatly compromised," says Naylor. And Naylor argues that cash-strapped American farmers won't see any benefits, either. "Even if there will be more exports to Iraq, this little drop in the "Amstutz perpetuates the more exports lie because his agribusiness cronies are encouraging overproduction all over the world, thus being able to sell more genetically-modified seeds and chemicals and buying ever cheaper farm commodities." Even as millions of Iraqi's face starvation under the stern hand of their food pro consul, Amstutz's appointment has excited little commentary in the US. His most virulent critic has been Kevin Wilkins, Oxfam's policy director in London. Watkins warns that Amstutz is little more than a carpetbagger seeking to advance the interests of the same food titans that his lobbying outfit in DC represents, Cargill, DuPont, Cenex and Archer Daniels Midland. "This guy is uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a war torn country," Watkins warns. "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission." Amstutz was recently spotted in Iowa, pitching his agricultural reconstruction plan to Iowa feedlot owners. He told the farmers that they stood to profit handsomely from his plan to bring modern feedlots to Iraq, those foul-smelling operations that pack thousands of cattle and hogs into tightly confined pens. "They are meat eaters," he brayed. "Iraq is not a vegetarian society." Iowa doesn't have many cattle or sheep operation. Most of the people in his audience raised hogs. And unless Amstutz has joined in a partnership with Franklin Graham to Christianize Iraq, there won't be a big market for pork products in Baghdad. © Copyright CounterPunch _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:04:30 PM
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Re: Turning the Tables Dear Friends: At last, a Total Information Awareness and snooping program on THEM. Thanks to two researchers at MIT, the tables have been turned, and citizens will now have the ability to create dossiers on government officials. In a response to the US government's Total Information Awareness program, assistant professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi and graduate student Ryan McKinley have created the Government Information Awareness (GIA) project. ''It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency,'' Csikszentmihalyi said. _____________________________ Boston Globe July 4, 2003 Website Turns Tables on Government Officials by Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials. The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy. ''It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency,'' said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab. He and graduate student Ryan McKinley created the Government Information Awareness (GIA) project as a response to the US government's Total Information Awareness program (TIA). Revealed last year, TIA seeks to track possible terrorist activity by analyzing vast amounts of information stored in government and private databases, such as credit card data. The system would use this information to analyze the actions of millions of people, in an effort to spot patterns that could indicate a terrorist threat. News of the plan outraged civil libertarians and prompted Congress to set limits on the scope of such activity. The Defense Department then renamed the program Terrorist Information Awareness, to ease public concern. But the controversy gave McKinley the idea for the GIA project. ''If total information exists,'' he said, ''really the same effort should be spent to make the same information at the leadership level at least as transparent -- in my opinion, more transparent.'' McKinley worked with Csikszentmihalyi to design the GIA system. It's partly based on technology used to create Internet indexes such as Google. Software crawls around Internet sites that store large amounts of information about politicians. These include independent political sites like opensecrets.org, as well as sites run by government agencies. McKinley created software that ferrets out the useful data from these sites, and loads it into the GIA database. The result is a one-stop research site for basic information on key officials. The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided by cable TV's C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program ''reads'' each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete rundown on all available data about that person. The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span at that moment. If there's a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress's reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking. All of the information currently on the site is available from public sources. But GIA will go one step further. Starting today, the site will allow the public to submit information about government officials, and this information will be made available to anyone visiting the site. No effort will be made to verify the accuracy of the data. This approach to Internet publishing isn't new. It resembles a method known as Wiki, in which a website is constantly amended by visitors who contribute new information. The best known Wiki site, www.wikipedia.org, is an online encyclopedia created entirely by visitors who have voluntarily written nearly 140,000 articles, on subjects ranging from astronomy to Roman mythology. Any Wikipedia user who thinks he has spotted an error or wants to add information can modify the article. Unlike at a standard encyclopedia operation, there is no central authority to edit or reject articles. The GIA approach, though, raises the possibility that people could post libelous information, or data that unreasonably compromises a person's privacy. That troubles Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology & Liberty Program of the American Civil Liberties Union. ''We think that there should be some restrictions on the publishing of personally identifiable information, whether it involves government officials or not,'' he said. But he noted that the public has a right to know some things about a politician that would be properly kept private about an ordinary citizen. For instance, voters have a right to know where a politician sends his children to school, if that politician has taken a strong stand on school vouchers. ''Do they have the right to publish every piece of data they're going to publish?'' Steinhardt asked. ''It's going to depend on what they publish.'' In any case, Steinhardt said, McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi have a First Amendment right to set up the GIA project. And he said that it's a valuable response to the government's TIA surveillance. ''I assume the point of this is, turnabout is fair play.'' On a page of the GIA website, at opengov.media.mit.edu, McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi give their answer to questions about the legitimacy of their actions. ''Is it legal?'' the site reads. ''It should be.'' --Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ================= 6:03:57 PM
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Re: A Fourth of July Treat for You Dear Friends: Here's a Fourth of July treat for you, posted by Bob Harris on This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow's blog. Watch closely, and enjoy. Have a great Fourth of July weekend, and I'll see you back Monday. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow July 02, 2003 Your First Mission for Today posted by Bob Harris 1) Pay a visit to Google. 2) Type in (without using any quotes): weapons of mass destruction 3) Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" icon. You'll see why. Just go... ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ================ 6:03:26 PM
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Re: The Bill of Rights Dear Friends: Constitutional Amendments 1-10: The Bill of Rights The following text is a transcription of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution in their original form. These amendments were ratified December 15, 1791, and form what is known as the "Bill of Rights." These are your heritage as an American citizen. They belong to you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment II A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment III No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment V No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment VI In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment VII In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment VIII Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. ___________________________________________________________________________ ____ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:02:52 PM
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Re: Happy birthday, America Dear Friends: These time-honored words are perhaps even more important today than they were 227 years ago. ___________________________________ The Declaration of Independence IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:02:21 PM
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Re: The Cost of War Dear Friends: What does a war cost? In dollars? In lives? In emotional suffering? To paraphrase the old V-8 commercial, "I could have had an education, better care for the elderly, more public services," and the list goes on and on. To see the running total for the Iraq war (over $70 billion at this writing), have a look at the Cost Of War Clock, http://www.costofwar.com. Of special mention are the pull-down menus comparing the running total for the Iraq war with how else that money could have been used for the nation and individual communities. A special tip of the Stetson to a reader who provided us with this one. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:01:54 PM
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Re: The Politics of Fear Dear Friends: Bush, rather than becoming the wise father that reassures his children during a fierce lightning storm, has sought to control his family, his nation, by threatening them with constant images of death and destruction. He personifies the sort of father that would tell his child that there really is a closet monster, and that only he can save the child from certain doom. And, only if the child obeys and does not question. Hmmm...I'd rather be an orphan. ___________________________ The American Prospect July 1, 2003 Fear Factory The Bush administration's dangerous manufacturing of post-9-11 dread by Jim McDermott Long before I was elected to Congress, I served as a U.S. Navy Medical Corps psychiatrist at the Long Beach Naval Station, home of the 7th Fleet. I treated the walking wounded of the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1970. Our brave troops, who endured lies from our leaders in addition to the usual horrors of war, suffered from fear, anger, sleep disorders and depression, among other things. These symptoms came to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. On September 11, Americans suffered a horrible trauma, and we still suffer from the psychological fallout of the terrorist attacks. The administration's calculated campaign to raise and maintain fear and anxiety in America has been an effective tool in prolonging the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by 9-11. As the Bush administration builds its military presence in the Middle East, it is upping the psychological ante here at home. The deputies of the Bush Terror Posse -- Donald Rumsfeld, Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft -- are conducting a deliberate campaign to frighten us. One facet of the campaign has, over the last 18 months, persuaded large portions of the population to rush to the stores for water, food, plastic sheeting and, of course, duct tape. The threats of impending danger are on record for the future, the administration seems to be saying. When something happens, you won't be able to say we didn't warn you. This is just the latest and most egregious step in a fear campaign designed to prepare Americans to do whatever the administration wants us to do. Here's how it works: Throw a hundred claims against the wall and poll every night to see what sticks. Leak stories that are later discredited. Get a graduate student's dissertation and plagiarize it. Lift paragraphs from a war-industry magazine. Every so often, raise the danger level to code "yellow" or "orange." Give the people a rest. Then start all over again. Mix it all up and put an official seal on it. Now it seems true, despite the skepticism of intelligence professionals. We have been inundated with fables, lies and half-truths. Remember the 33 pounds of "weapons-grade uranium" being smuggled in a taxi from Turkey to Iraq? A few days later, it turned out to be about 3 ounces of nonradioactive metal. And then there is smallpox: The administration is encouraging vaccinations, but it's only in parentheses that it adds that there is "no imminent threat" of a smallpox attack. There is no clear reason for this focus on smallpox, except to ratchet up the level of anxiety. Our leaders have worked hard to keep the anxiety level up so that the public will forget about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda (who were they again?). Instead, in Iraq, we focused on an impaired dictator of a country with a deteriorated infrastructure and a destroyed economy. This kind of tactic was described by Hermann Goering, who said at the Nuremberg trials, "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." What are the next steps? Let's look to history for a clue. In 1941 we rounded up Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. Then we offered them the opportunity to volunteer for the armed services where, because of their valor, the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated combat units in World War II. We have since paid a price in shame for indefensible actions our government took against these citizens out of suspicion and manufactured fear. And now? The Bush Terror Posse already has required 18-to-45-year-old noncitizen males from Arab and predominantly Muslim countries to register with the U.S. government. If another terrorist attack should occur, don't be surprised if Bush and Co. issue orders to round up these men and intern them. Details leaked about the proposed Patriot Act II do nothing to reassure us about the future of civil liberties for our citizens, much less for legal aliens who live here. I'm not sure how much more of this our country can take. Memories of conversations with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder haunt me. I know I'm not alone: I've talked with other veterans who have had recent flare-ups. The nightmares are coming back. Lately, I think often of FDR's admonition, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Americans may have nothing to fear but the fearmongers themselves. --Jim McDermott is a Democratic congressman from Washington State's 7th District. Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Jim McDermott, "Fear Factory The Bush administration's dangerous manufacturing of post-9-11 dread," The American Prospect Online, July 1, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:01:31 PM
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Re: Getting Ready for the 2004 Convention Dear Friends: Sharpshooters will man the rooftops. Counterterrorism agents will patrol in civilian guise. Bomb squads will case subway tunnels. At least this much will be certain when the Republican National Convention comes to Madison Square Garden next year, say two former NYPD officials who helped oversee previous conventions there. Sounds just like Grant Park and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I'll be there--wouldn't miss it for the world. Hope you will be there too. _________________________ Village Voice July 2-8, 2003 issue Activists Push Back at NYPD by Chisun Lee Sharpshooters will man the rooftops. Counterterrorism agents will patrol in civilian guise. Bomb squads will case subway tunnels. At least this much will be certain when the Republican National Convention comes to Madison Square Garden next year, say two former NYPD officials who helped oversee previous conventions there. And while he won't divulge specifics, police spokesperson Michael Collins says plans are forming more than a year in advance to ensure "the highest levels of security this city has ever seen" when President George W. Bush arrives to be renominated in September 2004. For the NYPD, in concert with the Secret Service and a slew of federal agencies, maintaining order will be a daunting challenge, and not just because of the obvious terrorism concerns. The Bush administration's policies have roused hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to some of the most heated agitation the city has seen in decades. Angry protesters have claimed police are meeting these demonstrations with new heights of repressiveness, amounting to a pattern of unfounded arrests and abuses. Now, with an eye to the near future, they are pushing back. A look at the activist scene today reveals a number of challenges that together form a multipronged effort to free the streets. New Yorkers want their right to protest to be as firmly entrenched as the police presence will be come 2004. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Fifteen activists were set to file a federal lawsuit July 1 claiming the NYPD trampled on their civil liberties at the massive February 15 anti-war demonstration near the United Nations. Accusing police of interference and abuse--including arbitrary arrests and blocked access to the rally--the complaint will seek damages and a declaration that police violated the constitutional rights of a potentially huge class of participants from the year's biggest protest. The ranks of the wronged could include "everybody who was denied access to the demonstration site that day because police were blocking off the streets," says William Goodman, former legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents the plaintiffs along with police brutality lawyer Jonathan Moore. Police refused to issue a permit for a march past the UN, citing security concerns, and instead approved a stationary rally, ultimately located at 51st Street and First Avenue. But to get there, an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 people, of all ages and backgrounds, packed First, Second, and Third avenues, inching along in the frigid cold for hours. Cops wearing riot gear, at metal barricades, in the crowd, and on horseback, tried to shift bodies en masse, mostly away from the side streets. A great many who showed up that day complained of being unable to reach the rally site. Some 300 were arrested. At minimum, Goodman argues, police robbed legions of their rights to assemble and express their views--through decisions ranging from the denial of the march permit to the handling of the crowds. Then there are the folks like plaintiff Sara Parkel, a 31-year-old freelance artist from Brooklyn, who was arrested and held overnight, although, she says, "I wasn't doing anything wrong." "I was always under the assumption that you would be arrested if you did something wrong, like threw a rock," says Parkel. "I wasn't even in the street." Knowing protesters were supposed to stay on the sidewalks, she says she was among the minority who managed to do so. But on a sidewalk on West 39th Street, "I was trapped," she says, when a small army of police pressed the throng around her against a building and began making arrests. Parkel was locked up with 13 other women in the back of a paddy wagon for approximately four hours, she says. "People were peeing in the back of the truck," because "overloaded" police ignored their pleas to use the bathroom. They also ignored her three or four requests to use the phone once at the Seventh Precinct, where she was held overnight. "Around 1:30 or two in the morning, they called us all in individually," she says, to question the arrestees about their political affiliations and views. "I grew up knowing you're supposed to be read your rights, which we weren't, and you're supposed to be allowed one phone call, which we weren't." None of the plaintiffs arrested that day was convicted. Says Goodman, "People were arrested in the hundreds, not as a method of legitimate law enforcement, but as crowd control." The 40-page complaint mentions other wrongs, including people being injured by police horses, manhandled by cops, and denied food and water for many hours. Similar charges appear in a New York Civil Liberties Union report based on a much larger number of complaints from that day, over 300. NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman knows of about 35 charges from that day that were dropped outright. Says Parkel, "The arrests were a tactic to discourage people who were talking out against our government." She signed on to the class action "to fight against intimidation." Goodman hopes the lawsuit will make the NYPD more protest-friendly by convention time. "If they get away with it once, they'll do it again," he says. But police blame the disorder of February 15 on the rally's organizers. The NYPD's Collins says leaders failed to adequately inform people how to get to the protest site and provided too few marshals to manage the crowd. Police acted well within reason, says Collins. "Thousands and thousands of people were not arrested," he points out, when asked about the legitimacy of the several hundred arrests. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- There is the possibility of another lawsuit by activists, however, which would accuse police of making questionable arrests to deal with demonstrators on yet another occasion. On the morning of April 7, about 20 people purposely risked arrest by blocking the entrance to the midtown office of the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment firm with ties to the Bush administration, to dramatize their opposition to the war in Iraq. Across the street stood some 100 protesters who sought to support those engaging in civil disobedience through lawful means. According to a number of participants, those supporters kept to the sidewalk and left a path clear for pedestrians, as instructed by the First Amendment lawyers there to advise them. Two of those lawyers told the Voice that a swarm of helmeted police--so many as to seem to outnumber the protesters--abruptly surrounded the group of supporters. Spurning the participants and lawyers, who said the crowd was willing to disperse, police reportedly would not let anyone leave and arrested approximately 80 people, ranging from teens to seniors. Mark Milano, a longtime organizer with ACT UP/NY, the direct-action AIDS activist group, says, "One of the cops said it was really a preemptive strike, that they thought the people across the street might break the law." Several arrested that day say they were questioned while in custody about their political views and associations, but they were not read their rights or permitted to speak with lawyers. They complain of being held as long as 12 hours without counsel. On the outside, one attorney, Joel Kupferman, went so far as to draft a writ of habeas corpus, get it signed by a State Supreme Court judge, and submit it to police officials to get detainees access to lawyers, who had been trying to see them all day. The NYPD's Collins said he lacked enough specific knowledge of the April 7 arrests to comment on them. But asked about the traditional practice of giving demonstrators notice and opportunity to disperse, he said, "We generally try to warn protesters that they are violating the law before arresting them. However, that can't always be done, if they're taking actions that pose an immediate risk." Activists in this case deny they were taking any such actions. Many charged on April 7 are too angry to take the administrative dismissals that are often offered to resolve minor disorderly conduct charges and vow to fight their cases in court. At least two have gone to trial so far and been acquitted. Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney Nancy Chang says the organization is seriously considering a class action suit against the city, pending the resolution of all the cases. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Still another battle to protect activists' rights targets the NYPD's use of its newly won power to investigate lawful political activity. After September 11, the department claimed it needed that power to root out potential terrorists, who might masquerade as law-abiding New Yorkers. In March 2003 a federal judge agreed to radically weaken a long-standing ban, known as the Handschu agreement, on police investigations of lawful, constitutionally protected activity--a remedy to the politically motivated FBI and police probes of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, hundreds of arrestees from various protests have reported being quizzed, some under duress, on their political views and group memberships. In April, it was revealed that a police intelligence officer had created a "demonstration debriefing form" and computer database to compile such information. Public outcry led the NYPD to destroy the forms and database. But the scandal has prompted a team of civil rights lawyers to challenge the lifting of the old ban on political probes. "That change was based on concerns about investigating terrorism," says Martin Stolar, one of the attorneys. "Now we find out they used [the new powers] on low-level First Amendment protest." The lawyers, who won the original ban on political surveillance in 1985 in an activists' class action suit against the city, want internal police investigation guidelines to be made enforceable through the courts. Political questioning "takes us back to the days of the old Red Squad, where police are keeping dossiers on noncriminal citizens," says Stolar. "If people know they'll end up in a police file, they won't participate in demonstrations." A judge is expected to rule soon. Also pending are at least 70 individual grievances that protesters made this year to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent agency that investigates NYPD misconduct. CCRB spokesperson Ray Patterson says the number of protest-related complaints is unusually high. With most, "excessive force was alleged, like use of horses." A handful of individuals have filed their own civil suits against the city on protest-related claims. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- The spate of complaints by activists may signal not necessarily that police tactics have become harsher, but that more people are being exposed to them. Unjustified arrests and rough treatment were always to be found at anti-police-brutality rallies and events like Harlem's Million Youth March, claims activist Wol-san Liem. She and some 80 members of a racially diverse group were arrested this May during three days of planned civil disobedience, dubbed Operation Homeland Resistance. In shifts, they blocked the entrance to 26 Federal Plaza, which houses immigration authorities, in an effort to highlight "the war at home" against the undocumented. "It's interesting to hear white, middle-class protesters talk about how unbelievable it is to them that they were not treated humanely. People of color daily deal with police brutality, and they resist it routinely--that's what the Diallo protests were about," she says. Indeed, the city's protester population has recently burgeoned with additions from across the political spectrum. The numbers promise a rowdier convention than the several Democratic gatherings the city has hosted in the past. "Back then, we were pretty laid-back," says Miami police chief John Timoney, who commanded NYPD operations during the 1992 Democratic convention. He notes that nothing like the September 11 attacks haunted police then, and the issues and the candidate were less controversial. There was no preemptive war on Iraq, no suspicions of political lies about weapons of mass destruction, and there was no great anxiety over losing civil liberties to a White House-led war on terrorism. The traditional convention-protest area, Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets, holds a maximum of about 5,000 bodies, says Timoney. Bush policies have propelled hundreds of thousands into city streets this year. "People are going to be as angry or angrier about the Bush administration as they are now. The fact that there is some possibility of getting rid of this guy will draw a lot of people," predicts Leslie Cagan, lead organizer of United for Peace and Justice. Accused by police of not planning its February 15 anti-war demonstration far enough in advance, UFPJ has already submitted two permit requests for a march and a rally during convention week. The NYCLU asked the police a month ago to begin negotiations for convention protest, says executive director Lieberman, and a meeting is expected as early as July. She says the NYPD's response to current criticism of its protest tactics is a key indicator. "The refusal to acknowledge mistakes will be the single biggest cause for pessimism as we move ahead." The mass arrests and political questioning have already had a chilling effect, according to some activists. Liem says immigrants, especially, find themselves weighing their desire to demonstrate against the risk of detention and even deportation, to themselves and, by association, family and friends. No one, says ACT UP/NY's Milano, should have to "be afraid just to come out to a street protest." Copyright © 2003 Village Voice Media, Inc., 36 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003 The Village Voice and Voice are registered trademarks. All rights reserved. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:01:09 PM
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Re: Echoes of Vietnam Dear Friends: Pat Holt, former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, compares of the war in Iraq to the Vietnam war. Seems like old times. _____________________________ The Christian Science Monitor July 03, 2003 edition How Iraq echoes Vietnam by Pat M. Holt WASHINGTON - This war in Iraq is beginning to look enough like Vietnam to bring back memories of those turbulent years from long ago. The Vietnam War stretched through the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Eisenhower's involvement was mostly symbolic. US military forces had a token presence and few advisers. Kennedy had a few more, but unrest was beginning to simmer. Kennedy sent Army Gen. Matthew Ridgway and civilian adviser Walt Rostow to Vietnam to report. Their separate reports disagreed so sharply that the president asked if they'd been to the same country. Quarrelsome religious sects appeared in Vietnam as well as some political violence. The prime minister of South Vietnam was assassinated shortly before Kennedy was in November 1963. Johnson came to office suddenly and devoutly wishing to get out of Vietnam but not knowing how. He feared being charged with having led the "only war America ever lost." Then came the Gulf of Tonkin incident. On Aug. 2, 1964, the US destroyer Maddox reported that it had been attacked while it was on what the Navy described as a routine patrol off the North Vietnamese coast. It was joined by the destroyer C. Turner Joy, and both ships reported further attacks Aug. 4. There was no damage to the destroyers, nor casualties to their crews, but Johnson ordered air strikes against North Vietnam. He also asked Congress for a joint resolution authorizing him to "take all necessary measure to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to repel further aggression." Congress passed the resolution, nearly unanimously, within two days. (Both Presidents Bush received similar authority before attacking Iraq in 1991 and 2003, respectively.) One reason the Vietnam resolution got heavy Democratic support was that the 1964 presidential race was shaping up between President Johnson and Sen. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Republican who was talking about "bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age." Compared with that, the Johnson response to Tonkin looked moderate. But it led to increasing troop levels, to more bombing of the North, to more casualties, draft calls, and protests on campuses. As the scope of US involvement grew, the prospects of its success diminished, and opposition increased among the public and in Congress. In the Senate, and more slowly in the House, the center of opinion shifted gradually along a scale ranging from all-out support to all-out opposition. Two events are noteworthy in influencing this shift. The first was the 1966 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam, which made opposing the war respectable. Opponents of the war were no longer only wild, long-haired college kids, but also mature, successful adults. Returning veterans began to speak out. This robbed the administration of the argument that failure to support the war was failure to support "our boys." These decorated veterans said the best way to support the troops was to bring them home. The second event was the unraveling of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. An anonymous tip led the Foreign Relations Committee to investigate that incident more thoroughly. The Maddox, it turned out, hadn't been on a routine patrol at all, but on a sensitive, deliberately provocative, intelligence mission against North Vietnam. The Johnson administration was dissembling about the attacks, just as the Bush administration has dissembled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A far-sighted member of the House had foreseen how the end would come in Vietnam when opposition was a mere wisp. "We can take one casualty per congressional district," he'd said privately. "We can maybe even take 10. But if it gets to be 100, Congress will pull the plug." That is precisely what happened. Congress eventually ended the war in 1975 by using its power of the purse, at which point there'd been more than 50,000 American deaths. But, as early as March 1968, with the American death-toll in the war nearing 20,000, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection. George W. Bush, have you noticed this? --Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:00:45 PM
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Re: Descending into the Quagmire Dear Friends: More and more, we hear the word "quagmire" being used to describe the situation in Iraq. Between May 1 (when President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over) and June 26, 57 U.S. and 8 UK military personnel have died in Iraq--more than one death every day. To this toll must be added the scores of Iraqis, both Saddamists and innocent civilians. The media are finally beginning to question what kind of war we're fighting in Iraq. "Counterinsurgency," a 1960s buzzword, has re-appeared in some reports, and some have begun to ask why a liberated people would not be happy to have The Authority among them. Given this desire to be liberated--from Saddam, from Bush, and from the present occupation--one wonders what will be the next step on Iraq's road to self-determination. ____________________________ Foreign Policy in Focus June 2003 Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire by Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.) Foreign Policy In Focus Between May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over, and June 26, 57 U.S. and eight UK military personnel have died in Iraq. That is more than one death every day. To the U.S. and UK toll must be added the sometimes tens or scores of Iraqis, both Saddamists--military, intelligence, fedayeen, non-Iraqi volunteers--and innocent civilians. Having splashed the President's declaration over their electronic and newspaper front pages and magazine covers, the media are edging ever so gingerly toward serious questioning of what kind of "war" U.S. and UK troops (the "Authority") are fighting in Iraq. "Counterinsurgency," a 1960s buzzword, has already re-appeared in some reports. The dreaded "quagmire" has also been voiced. The Pentagon denies it is doing "body counts"--although the media always seems to know the number of guerrilla dead. Can "free fire zones," "five o'clock follies" (the daily official U.S. military briefings in Saigon), and "light at the end of the tunnel" be far off? These phrases bring to mind Bernard Fall, author, chronicler, and journalist in the Vietnam War. Very early in that war--December 10, 1964--Fall delivered a lecture at the Naval War College on "The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency." Parts of his presentation seem as current today in the context of Iraq as they were in 1964 for Vietnam. For example, Fall believed that the real objective of guerrilla (or small) war methods is to advance "an ideology or a political system." The U.S. government saw fighting as the primary challenge and responded by seeking a military solution. In so doing, it misjudged the depth and extent of political action by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong--the primacy of "political, ideological, and administrative" control--and thus the true nature of their "revolutionary warfare." Moreover, in failing to properly assess the political and ideological (nationalistic) forces at work in Vietnam, the Johnson and Nixon administrations tended to mischaracterize (or ignore) the multitudinous economic and social cross-currents that were represented by those committed to the cause of Vietnam unification under Vietnamese leaders. The result was a steady build-up of U.S. personnel and equipment and the expenditures of billions of dollars, none of which brought the U.S. any nearer to the tunnel's end--but all of which added to the casualties on both sides and exponentially increased the alienation of the civilian population. Even Buddhist monks protested, with some expressing their opposition to the repressive Saigon government and the actions of its U.S. ally through self-immolation. As Fall noted, "One can do almost anything with brute force except salvage an unpopular government." History Repeating Itself The Bush administration seems headed toward committing the same mistakes of its Vietnam-era predecessors--plus a number of its own. Washington expected that the dominate Shi'ite (62%) population, long subservient to the minority Sunnis (35%), would at least welcome its "liberation" by the Western coalition forces if not assist them in ousting Saddam and his cronies. Instead, the dominant reaction has been a growing disillusionment with and sustained protests about the continuing absence of basic services--water, electricity, telephone, garbage and sewage removal, basic policing, and physical security--for all classes of Shi'ites and Sunnis under the coalition occupation. Prior to the U.S. attack in March, 2003 the Iraqi people were promised participation in a post-war effort to build a functioning interim democratic governance structure. In April, two meetings of 43 and 250 Iraqi "leaders" selected by retired General Jay Garner, the Pentagon's man-on-the-scene, were held "to advance the national dialogue among Iraqis regarding composition of an Iraqi interim authority." No decisions were made, in part because of unhappiness with the selection process and dissension about the tribal and geographical representation (there are 2,500 tribes and sub-tribes in Iraq). One prominent returned exile, Ahmad Chalabi, said: "The composition at this time looks like Noah's Ark, but that is fine at this stage." (Reuters) Within two weeks, the idea of an "interim Iraqi authority" was dead. The new top man-on-the-scene, L. Paul Bremer III, said that the security situation remained too unsettled and that additional "purging" of Saddam loyalists from the police, civil service, and political parties was needed. Bremer plans to appoint a council of 25-30 "advisers," which he will control. This reversal almost immediately sparked calls for the U.S. to leave Iraq from the more militant, competing, fundamentalist Shi'ite factions--Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr's adherents, and Abdul Karim al-Enzi's Dawa sect. (Al-Enzi caught the mood exactly: "Democracy means choosing what people want, not what the West wants.") Then, in late June, a clear signal came that the U.S. was getting closer to falling into a Vietnam-like quagmire. Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who was at first quite tolerant and even supportive of the invading troops, wrote of "great unease" concerning the length of the U.S. occupation, the failure of the U.S. to grant Iraqis self-rule, and what he saw as the biggest threat to Iraq: "the obliteration of its cultural identity." (Washington Post, June 23) As if to accentuate the Ayatollah's remarks, within 48 hours six UK military police were dead and another eight UK troops were wounded in two attacks deep in Shi'ite dominated southern Iraq. Distant Rhetoric The rhetoric from Washington seems as distant from what is happening on the ground in Iraq today as it was during the Vietnam War. The President and his representatives point to the $2.5 billion for Iraq's reconstruction in the March supplemental, of which $700 million has been committed. They trumpet the vaccination programs for Iraqi children and the expected troop augmentations of 20,000-30,000 from as many as 41 other countries to assist with security in Iraq--troops for whom, in many cases, the U.S. is footing the bill. Even with this force augmentation, the U.S. military will continue to carry the load. There are still 146,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq (plus 16,000 UK troops) and another 45,000 providing support from Kuwait. More than 210,000 National Guard and Reserves have been called up for either homeland defense, duty in the Balkans and the Sinai Desert, or the Iraq war itself, with many into their second year of continuous active duty. U.S. planners say a new Iraqi army of 40,000 will be ready in three years, a clear signal that administration assurances of being out of Iraq in two years simply will not happen. Some in Congress predict a 5- to 10-year presence. U.S. forces will also continue to bear the brunt of the casualties. In the fighting up to and including Baghdad's capture, 138 U.S. forces were killed; of the 57 who have died since May 1, 20 were killed by hostile fire (plus the UK dead noted above). Washington says the casualties are "militarily insignificant," while field commanders note a seemingly steady stream of outsiders entering Iraq for the immediate purpose of killing U.S. soldiers and a longer-range goal of building pressure in the United States for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The demonstrations by disgruntled Iraqi civilians, civil servants, and cashiered military officers seeking back pay or pensions, combined with the plethora of firearms in Iraq, have contributed to Iraqi civilian casualties as U.S. troops react to the taunts ("America is the enemy of Allah"), gunfire, and general chaos in Iraq. In Baghdad's first post-war public opinion poll, 73% said the U.S. had failed to provide adequate security in the city. (London Times, June 20) But even as they deride the lack of results, Iraqis sense that, for now, they have no option; in the same poll, only 17% want the Western troops out immediately. That figure may start to increase if U.S. troops continue to engage in "security practices" that Iraqis deem inappropriate--e.g., male soldiers "patting down" Iraqi women while looking for weapons or arresting minor children. And a surge in "Yankee go home" sentiment could be expressed in increased attacks on U.S. forces by new groups in new, often Shi'ite areas. Such opposition, armed only with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and light mortars may seem puny against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and modern aircraft with precision-guided munitions, but that is what Vietnam-era administrations thought in the 1960s and early 1970s. Between June 9 and June 22, the Pentagon logged 131 "incidents" involving U.S. troops in Iraq, including 41 attacks on U.S. compounds, 26 attacks on sentry or observation posts, and 26 on convoys. (New York Times, June 22) The next 24-hour period saw an additional 25 incidents. Moreover, not all heavy weapons in Iraq are being collected by "the Authority." The 70,000 Kurdish pesh merga will retain their tanks and artillery until their expected integration into the new Iraqi army. (Obviously, not all 70,000 can be amalgamated; those excluded could cause problems later.) A question the Bush White House and the Pentagon still have to answer is just how many U.S. military men and women will be needed to pacify and provide security in Iraq. Before the war, on February 25, 2003, then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed in post-war Iraq. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, sharply disagreed, with the latter stating that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark." But the question lingers for many in Congress, the U.S. public, and the armed forces. How Many Troops and for How Long? Traditional military doctrine estimates that a conventional army requires roughly a 10-to-1 size advantage if it is to defeat a well-equipped, well-executed, persistent insurgency. But where insurgents, while less centrally organized, are still too powerful for standard police (or where standard police do not exist), responding to and measuring against armed insurgent strength may not be the best gauge. In 1995, James Quinlivan, writing in the Army War College's quarterly, Parameters, suggested that force requirements should be based on the need for population control (to cut off support to the insurgents) and local security--that is, the need to "win hearts and minds" and therefore requires a force proportional to the population. Quinlivan describes three historical force ratio levels. The first, one to four security personnel per 1,000 population, is essentially the ratio for ordinary policing. In a military setting, the U.S. Constabulary force in post-World War II Germany was staffed at 2.2 per thousand for "enforcing public order, controlling black market transactions, and related police functions." The same ratio existed in the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992-1993), whose duties included "supervision of the cease-fire and voluntary disarmament of combatants, supervision of about 60,000 indigenous police to provide law and order, and administration of a free and fair election." But the UN had little real presence outside the main urban areas. The second force ratio is from four to ten security personnel per 1,000 population. India's campaign against militants in Punjab, viewed as quite punitive by many, was implemented at a ratio of almost 6 per 1,000 population. At the high point of the 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, whose purpose was preventing civil war and restoring "stability," Army and Marine personnel operated at a ratio of 6.6 per 1,000 population. Quinlivan's third ratio level is above ten per 1,000 population. Military examples of this level are the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s when foreign and full-time indigenous security forces operated at a ratio of 20 per 1,000 population. The same ratio pertained to the combination of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British troops in Northern Ireland for much of the period 1969-1994. Here, multiple small groups advocating separation from or continued union with Great Britain waged war on each other, and one side fought "occupying" security forces with a goal of forcing them out--conditions that are unfolding in Iraq today. Applying the average of 2.2 per 1,000 of level one to Iraq would require 52, 800 individuals. But Iraq is not a defeated, broken, devastated country like Germany. Nor is it at peace or semi-peace, where the main task is maintaining public order. It is still a country at war, a country saturated with weapons, a country that is becoming more and more restless under its "liberator." Level two ratios of 6 and 6.6 yield 144,000 and 158,400, respectively. These are comparable strength totals to what the U.S. and its allies have in Iraq today. Yet these forces seem unable to isolate Iraqi and foreign militants who have come into Iraq to fight "the Authority" and to provide both the perception and reality of public safety. Perhaps even more important is the need to avoid any hint of punitive measures that inevitably would lead to a precipitous decline in general Iraqi tolerance of foreign forces. At 10 per 1,000 population, the point of intersection between levels two and three, Quinlivan's numbers skyrocket to 240,000. (Interestingly, just in Baghdad, where the population is roughly five million, there are 55,000 troops, producing a ratio of 11 per 1,000.) Matching the British experience in Malaysia and Northern Ireland at 20 per 1,000 doubles this total to 480,000, which is the total authorized strength of the active U.S. Army. Clearly, any of these levels are impossible to sustain given the demands for and on people. Even level two ratios may be impossible, given that 5 of the Army's 10 active divisions currently are engaged in Iraq. In Iraq, as one phase of the "global war on terror," the Bush administration chose war and occupation, and must now face the consequences of its choices. Having dislodged the previous regime by force, the U.S. increasingly is caught in the quagmire of depending on force to control the Iraqi people in the name of national and regional "peace." But "peace through war" or the threat of war is a costly chimera, both for the "victor" and the loser. This truth was well understood by the 19th Century British statesman Edmund Burke, who noted that "War never leaves where it found a nation." What remains to be seen is what price will be exacted from the U.S. public--and in what condition Iraq will be in two, five, or 10 years. --Dan Smith <dan@fcnl.org> is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. army colonel and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Recommended Citation: Dan Smith, "Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire," (Silver City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, June 2003). Production Information: Writer: Dan Smith; Editor: John Gershman, IRC; Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2003. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2002 IRC and IPS. All rights reserved. ________________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 6:00:06 PM
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Re: The RFID Surveillance Chip Dear Friends: Right now, you can buy a hammer, a pair of jeans, or a razor blade with anonymity. With RFID tags, that all may be a thing of the past. Some manufacturers are planning to place these minute tags in just packaging, but others will also tag their products as well. In many cases, RFID transponders are forever part of the product, and designed to respond when they receive a signal. In a world where everything you own is 'numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked,' privacy goes out the window, betrayed by your very possessions. There is even discussion about to placing these tags into all sensitive or important documents. And, Applied Digital Solutions has designed an RFID tag - called the VeriChip - for people, designed to go under the skin. There is no law requiring a label indicating that an RFID chip is in a product. With RFID about to arrive in full force, major changes are coming, and not all of them will be positive. What will be the unintended consequences of these surveillance devices, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence? Be forewarned. _________________________________________________ The Register June 27, 2003 RFID Chips Are Here By Scott Granneman Bar codes are something most of us never think about. We go to the grocery store to buy dog food, the checkout person runs our selection over the scanner, there's an audible beep or boop, and then we're told how much money we owe. Bar codes in that sense are an invisible technology that we see all the time, but without thinking about what's in front of our eyes. Bar codes have been with us so long, and they're so ubiquitous, that its hard to remember that they're a relatively new technology that took a while to catch on. The patent for bar codes was issued in 1952. It took twenty years before a standard for bar codes was approved, but they still didn't catch on. Ten years later, only 15,000 suppliers were using bar codes. That changed in 1984. By 1987 - only three years later! - 75,000 suppliers were using bar codes. That's one heck of a growth curve. So what changed in 1984? Who, or what, caused the change? Wal-Mart. When Wal-Mart talks, suppliers listen. So when Wal-Mart said that it wanted to use bar codes as a better way to manage inventory, bar codes became de rigeur. If you didn't use bar codes, you lost Wal-Mart's business. That's a death knell for most of their suppliers. The same thing is happening today. I'm here to tell you that the bar code's days are numbered. There's a new technology in town, one that at first blush might seem insignificant to security professionals, but it's a technology that is going to be a big part of our future. And how do I know this? Pin it on Wal-Mart again; they're the big push behind this new technology. So what is it? RFID tags. RFID 101 Invented in 1969 and patented in 1973, but only now becoming commercially and technologically viable, RFID tags are essentially microchips, the tinier the better. Some are only 1/3 of a millimeter across. These chips act as transponders (transmitters/responders), always listening for a radio signal sent by transceivers, or RFID readers. When a transponder receives a certain radio query, it responds by transmitting its unique ID code, perhaps a 128-bit number, back to the transceiver. Most RFID tags don't have batteries (How could they? They're 1/3 of a millimeter!). Instead, they are powered by the radio signal that wakes them up and requests an answer. Most of these "broadcasts" are designed to be read between a few inches and several feet away, depending on the size of the antenna and the power driving the RFID tags (some are in fact powered by batteries, but due to the increased size and cost, they are not as common as the passive, non-battery-powered models). However, it is possible to increase that distance if you build a more sensitive RFID receiver. RFID chips cost up to 50 cents, but prices are dropping. Once they get to 5 cents each, it will be cost-efficient to put RFID tags in almost anything that costs more than a dollar. Who's using RFID? RFID is already in use all around us. Ever chipped your pet dog or cat with an ID tag? Or used an EZPass through a toll booth? Or paid for gas using ExxonMobils' SpeedPass? Then you've used RFID. Some uses, especially those related to security, seem like a great idea. For instance, Delta is testing RFID on some flights, tagging 40,000 customer bags in order to reduce baggage loss and make it easier to route bags if customers change their flight plans. Three seaport operators - who account for 70% of the world's port operations - agreed to deploy RFID tags to track the 17,000 containers that arrive each day at US ports. Currently, less than 2% are inspected. RFID tags will be used to track the containers and the employees handling them. The United States Department of Defense is moving into RFID in order to trace military supply shipments. During the first Gulf War, the DOD made mistakes in its supply allocation. To streamline operations, the U.S. military has placed RFID tags on 270,000 cargo containers and tracks those shipments throughout 40 countries. On a smaller level, but one that will instantly resonate with security pros, Star City Casino in Sydney, Australia placed RFID tags in 80,000 employee uniforms in order to put a stop to theft. The same idea would work well in corporate PCs, networking equipment, and handhelds. In all of these cases, RFID use seems reasonable. It is non-intrusive, and it seems to balance security and privacy. Other uses for RFID, however, may be troublesome. Visa is combining smart cards and RFID chips so people can conduct transactions without having to use cash or coins. These smart cards can also be incorporated into cell phones and other devices. Thus, you could pay for parking, buy a newspaper, or grab a soda from a vending machine without opening your wallet. This is wonderfully convenient, but the specter of targeted personal ads popping up as I walk through the mall, a la Minority Report, does not thrill me. Michelin, which manufactures 800,000 tires a day, is going to insert RFID tags into its tires. The tag will store a unique number for each tire, a number that will be associated with the car's VIN (Vehicle Identification Number). Good for Michelin, and car manufacturers, and fighting crime. Potentially bad for you. Who will assure your privacy? Do you really want your car's tires broadcasting your every move? The European Central Bank may embed RFID chips in the euro note. Ostensibly to combat counterfeiters and money-launderers, it would also enable banks to count large amounts of cash in seconds. Unfortunately, such a move would also makes it possible for governments to track the passage of cash from individual to individual. Cash is the last truly anonymous way to buy and sell. With RFID tags, that anonymity would be gone. In addition, banks would not be the only ones who could in an instant divine how much cash you were carrying; criminals can also obtain power transceivers. Several major manufacturers and retailers expect RFID tags to aid in managing the supply chain, from manufacturing to shipping to stocking store shelves, including Gillette (which purchased 500 million RFID tags for its razors), Home Depot, The Gap, Proctor & Gamble, Prada, Target, Tesco (a United Kingdom chain), and Wal-Mart. Especially Wal-Mart. The retail giant, the largest employer in America, is working with Gillette to create "smart shelves" that can alert managers and stockboys to replenish the supply of razors. More significantly, Wal-Mart intends for its top 100 suppliers to fully support RFID for inventory tracking by 2005. Wal-Mart would love to be able to point an RFID reader at any of the 1 billion sealed boxes of widgets it receives every year and instantly know exactly how many widgets it has. No unpacking, no unnecessary handling, no barcode scanners required. RFID Issues Right now, you can buy a hammer, a pair of jeans, or a razor blade with anonymity. With RFID tags, that may be a thing of the past. Some manufacturers are planning to tag just the packaging, but others will also tag their products. There is no law requiring a label indicating that an RFID chip is in a product. Once you buy your RFID-tagged jeans at The Gap with RFID-tagged money, walk out of the store wearing RFID-tagged shoes, and get into your car with its RFID-tagged tires, you could be tracked anywhere you travel. Bar codes are usually scanned at the store, but not after purchase. But RFID transponders are, in many cases, forever part of the product, and designed to respond when they receive a signal. Imagine everything you own is "numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked." Anonymity and privacy? Gone in a hailstorm of invisible communication, betrayed by your very property. But let's not stop there. Others are talking about placing RFID tags into all sensitive or important documents: "it will be practical to put them not only in paper money, but in drivers' licenses, passports, stock certificates, manuscripts, university diplomas, medical degrees and licenses, birth certificates, and any other sort of document you can think of where authenticity is paramount." In other words, those documents you're required to have, that you can't live without, will be forever tagged. Consider the human body as well. Applied Digital Solutions has designed an RFID tag - called the VeriChip - for people. Only 11 mm long, it is designed to go under the skin, where it can be read from four feet away. They sell it as a great way to keep track of children, Alzheimer's patients in danger of wandering, and anyone else with a medical disability, but it gives me the creeps. The possibilities are scary. In May, delegates to the Chinese Communist Party Congress were required to wear an RFID-equipped badge at all times so their movements could be tracked and recorded. Is there any doubt that, in a few years, those badges will be replaced by VeriChip-like devices? Surveillance is getting easier, cheaper, smaller, and ubiquitous. Sure, it's possible to destroy an RFID tag. You can crush it, puncture it, or microwave it (but be careful of fires!). You can't drown it, however, and you can't demagnetize it. And washing RFID-tagged clothes won't remove the chips, since they're specifically designed to withstand years of wearing, washing, and drying. You could remove the chip from your jeans, but you'd have to find it first. That's why Congress should require that consumers be notified about products with embedded RFID tags. We should know when we're being tagged. We should also be able to disable the chips in our own property. If it's the property of the company we work for, that's a different matter. But if it's ours, we should be able to control whether tracking is enabled. Security professionals need to realize that RFID tags are dumb devices. They listen, and they respond. Currently, they don't care who sends the signal. Anything your companies' transceiver can detect, the bad guy's transceiver can detect. So don't be lulled into a false sense of security. With RFID about to arrive in full force, don't be lulled at all. Major changes are coming, and not all of them will be positive. The law of unintended consequences is about to encounter surveillance devices smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. © SecurityFocus.com Scott Granneman is a senior consultant for Bryan Consulting Inc. in St. Louis. He specializes in Internet Services and developing Web applications for corporate, educational, and institutional clients. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:59:44 PM
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Re: Letter to Colin Powell Dear Friends: With the expiration of its July 1 deadline to cut off military aid to states supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Bush administration should end its ill-conceived campaign to weaken the court, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The American Servicemembers' Protection Act (ASPA) revokes military assistance to countries that have ratified the ICC unless they conclude a separate bilateral agreement with the United States by July 1, agreeing never to hand over U.S. personnel to the ICC. Despite a yearlong campaign by the U.S. diplomatic corps, only about 48 countries have signed such agreements so far, the majority of them small and poor countries that have not ratified the ICC treaty anyway and therefore have no obligation to transfer U.S. personnel to the court. "U.S. ambassadors have been acting like schoolyard bullies," said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice program at Human Rights Watch. _______________________________ Human Rights Watch July 1, 2003 U.S.: End Bully Tactics Against Court Letter to Colin Powell (New York, July 1, 2003) With the expiration of its July 1 deadline to cut off military aid to states supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Bush administration should end its ill-conceived campaign to weaken the court, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The American Servicemembers' Protection Act (ASPA) revokes military assistance to countries that have ratified the ICC unless they conclude a separate bilateral agreement with the United States by July 1, agreeing never to hand over U.S. personnel to the ICC. Despite a yearlong campaign by the U.S. diplomatic corps, only about 48 countries have signed such agreements so far, the majority of them small and poor countries that have not ratified the ICC treaty anyway and therefore have no obligation to transfer U.S. personnel to the court. "U.S. ambassadors have been acting like schoolyard bullies," said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice program at Human Rights Watch. "The U.S. campaign has not succeeded in undermining global support for the court. But it has succeeded in making the U.S. government look foolish and mean-spirited." The letter cites several examples of U.S. hardball tactics: * U.S. Ambassador Richard Blankenship publicly warned the Bahamas that if it did not support the U.S. position on the ICC, a significant amount of U.S. aid would be withheld, including funds for paving and lighting an airport runway. * An Assistant Secretary of State informed foreign ministers of Caribbean states that they would lose the benefits for hurricane relief and rural dentistry and veterinary programs if their governments did not sign. "U.S. officials are engaged in a worldwide campaign pressing small, vulnerable and often fragile democratic governments," said the Human Rights Watch letter, signed by executive director Kenneth Roth. "Because most ICC member states are democracies with a relatively strong commitment to the rule of law, the threatened aid cutoffs represent a sanction primarily targeting states that abide by democratic values." The exact number of countries that have signed bilateral immunity agreements is unclear, since some of the agreements are "secret." But at least 38 of them are classified as "less developed" or "least developed" countries by the United Nations Development Program index. Most of the ICC's 18 judges come from countries closely allied with the United States. Luis Moreno Ocampo, an Argentine national who was most recently the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard Law School, has recently been sworn in as the court's Chief Prosecutor. "No one really believes that Moreno Ocampo is likely to indulge in unwarranted prosecutions of American citizens," said Dicker. "It's really time for the Bush administration to wake up from its own nightmarish delirium." To read the Human Rights Watch letter, please see: http://hrw.org/press/2003/06/usa063003ltr.htm For more information on the International Criminal Court, please see: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/icc/ © Copyright 2003, Human Rights Watch 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA __ _____________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:59:07 PM
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Re: US Threatens Suspension of Aid Dear Friends: Bush has suspended military aid to nearly 50 countries because they support the International Criminal Court. This threat of suspension, contained within the American Service Members Protection Act of 2002, was passed by Congress out of disapproval for the International Criminal Court and its attempt to try war crimes and acts of genocide. The United States says it feared politically motivated prosecutions of civilian or military leaders. Now why do you suppose the US would fear such prosecutions? This sounds to me like another version of "if you don't play by my rules, I'm taking my marbles and going home." _________________________________ Reuters July 1, 2003 U.S. Bans Military Aid to Almost 50 Countries WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday declared almost 50 countries ineligible for military aid, including Colombia and six nations seeking NATO membership, because they back the International Criminal Court and have not exempted Americans from possible prosecution. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said 35 of those countries had been receiving U.S. military aid this year and, in some cases, all the money was already spent. But the ban could still be in effect when a new fiscal year starts in October. As the deadline passed for governments to sign exemption agreements or face the suspension of military aid, President Bush issued waivers for 22 countries. But those 22 did not include Colombia and the eastern European countries of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Colombia, where the government is fighting leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers, has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid, with $98 million this year. Boucher said all but $5 million of the Colombia military aid has already been spent. The $5 million is now frozen. Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch, said the suspension of aid worked against some of the Bush administration's other policy goals, such as intercepting drugs in the Caribbean and expanding NATO into eastern Europe. Of the seven eastern European countries expected to join NATO in May, only Romania has signed a deal with Washington on the ICC. ``This campaign has brought resentment and bitterness from some of the U.S. government's closest allies and comes at an extraordinary high price,'' Dicker told Reuters. Other major countries liable to the suspension of military aid are Brazil, Cambodia, Serbia and South Africa. TRAINING AND WEAPONS A U.S. official said that if countries had ratified the treaty setting up the international court and had not received a waiver, the ban on military aid would come into effect. But the threat, enshrined in the American Service Members Protection Act of 2002, does not apply to the 19 NATO members and to nine ``major non-NATO allies.'' The suspension covers international military education and training funds, or IMET, which mainly pay the cost of educating foreign officers at U.S. institutions, and foreign military funding, which pays for U.S. weapons and other aid. IMET funds usually amount to less than $1 million per country a year, but foreign military funding can run into the hundreds of millions. Congress passed the law out of disapproval of the International Criminal Court, set up to try war crimes and acts of genocide. The United States says it feared politically motivated prosecutions of civilian or military leaders. The United States had hoped that the threat to withdraw aid would lead to a last-minute rush to sign Article 98 agreements exempting U.S. personnel from transfer to the court. Altogether 44 governments have publicly acknowledged signing the agreement and at least seven others have signed secret agreements, U.S. officials say. The pace of signatures does appear to have picked up a little. About 25 governments have signed in the last four months, about half of those in the last three weeks. Copyright 2003 Reuters Ltd. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================ 5:58:43 PM
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Re: Confidence in War Effort Slips Dear Friends: Are we there yet? Peace still proves illusive in Iraq, even though the war was officially declared over two months ago. Guerrilla-style attacks against American troops continue in post-war Iraq, and anti-US protests have been renewed in Falluja, where a massive blast destroyed a mosque and killed ten Iraqis yesterday. In a sign of the growing mistrust between the occupying forces and the people they say they have liberated from a tyrannical regime, locals immediately blamed a US airstrike for the tragedy. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld continues to deride those who express concern that feel the Iraq occupation is turning into a Vietnam-style quagmire. Meanwhile, a recent CNN/USA Today poll shows that confidence in military operations in Iraq is declining among Americans. The almost daily attacks on coalition soldiers are eroding support for a long-term presence, with only 56% of American who feel things are going well, compared to 70% last month. __________________________________ USA Today July 1, 2003 Confidence in war effort slips; Bush support still strong Steady decline in view of conflict by Richard Benedetto WASHINGTON -- Confidence in the war effort in Iraq is declining as the search for weapons of mass destruction goes on and as U.S. troops continue to suffer deadly attacks, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows. Most Americans say things are going well for the United States in Iraq. But although 56% feel that way in the latest survey, 70% were satisfied a month ago and 86% on May 7, a week after President Bush declared combat largely over. The poll finds most people have confidence in the president's leadership and character, but there is erosion on those questions, too. Bush is rated as being ''honest and trustworthy'' by 65% of respondents, and 57% say he ''cares about the needs of people like you.'' Both are down 8 percentage points from a poll conducted in April. Analysts suggest that if the search for weapons drags on for months without success, if the U.S. death toll continues to mount and if former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is not found, critics will grow louder, support will drop and the public might begin calling for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. ''This bears the seeds for potential problems for the president down the road as he looks to re-election,'' said Mark Rozell, a political scientist at Catholic University of America in Washington. Nevertheless, most Americans are giving the president the benefit of the doubt. Six in 10 people say his administration did not deliberately mislead the country about evidence that Iraq had nuclear, chemical or biological weapons that posed a threat to the United States. And despite a recent rash of attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, 74% of those polled say the number of U.S. deaths since major combat ended is to be expected. Among other findings: * 69% say it is worth having U.S. troops in Iraq now. * 63% say the administration did a good job planning for a post-combat Iraq. * 53% are confident that weapons of mass destruction will be found. That's a drop of 31 percentage points since March 30. And although 48% now believe that Saddam will be killed or captured, 70% expressed confidence in the March poll. * 56% say the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over. That represents a 17-point drop since April 16, a week after the fall of Baghdad. Bush's overall job rating, a solid 61%, has been on a gradual decline from a recent high of 71% in April, shortly after U.S. troops captured Baghdad. Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the drop in the president's character ratings could come as much from his handling of the economy and other domestic issues as from perceived problems in post-combat Iraq. As people hear about severe state and local budget problems, they are worrying more about their personal situations than about Iraq, Beyle said. © Copyright 2003 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:58:22 PM
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Re: 10 Things That Aren't True Dear Friends: If you ever have trouble getting to sleep at night, try counting the lies that Bush and his gang have told us about Iraq, Saddam, and the WMD. Here are 10 to start with. Then again, that might keep you awake, or give you nightmares. _____________________________ AlterNet June 27, 2003 Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq Christopher Scheer "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." -- George Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati. There is a small somber box that appears in the New York Times every day. Titled simply "Killed in Iraq," it lists the names and military affiliations of those who most recently died on tour of duty. Wednesday's edition listed just one name: Orenthal J. Smith, age 21, of Allendale, South Carolina. The young, late O.J. Smith was almost certainly named after the legendary running back, Orenthal J. Simpson, before that dashing American hero was charged for a double-murder. Now his namesake has died in far-off Mesopotamia in a noble mission to, as our president put it on March 19, "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." Today, more than three months after Bush's stirring declaration of war and nearly two months since he declared victory, no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been found, nor any documentation of their existence, nor any sign they were deployed in the field. The mainstream press, after an astonishing two years of cowardice, is belatedly drawing attention to the unconscionable level of administrative deception. They seem surprised to find that when it comes to Iraq, the Bush administration isn't prone to the occasional lie of expediency but, in fact, almost never told the truth. What follows are just the most outrageous and significant of the dozens of outright lies uttered by Bush and his top officials over the past year in what amounts to a systematic campaign to scare the bejeezus out of everybody: LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati. FACT: This story, leaked to and breathlessly reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times, has turned out to be complete baloney. Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie." LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan. 28, 2003, in the State of the Union address. FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly." LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press." FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush. FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. In other words, by tweaking language, Tenet and Bush spun the intelligence 180 degrees to say exactly the opposite of what it suggested. LIE #5: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7. FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes. LIE #6: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAV's [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7. FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline. Furthermore, Iraq's drone-building program wasn't much more advanced than your average model plane enthusiast. And isn't a "manned aerial vehicle" just a scary way to say "plane"? LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address. FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war. LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council. FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, as previously reported on AlterNet the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks -- if they existed -- were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder. LIE #9: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press. FACT: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise. LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." -- President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003. FACT: This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts -- including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week -- have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves. So, months after the war, we are once again where we started -- with plenty of rhetoric and absolutely no proof of this "grave danger" for which O.J. Smith died. The Bush administration is now scrambling to place the blame for its lies on faulty intelligence, when in fact the intelligence was fine; it was their abuse of it that was "faulty." Rather than apologize for leading us to a preemptive war based on impossibly faulty or shamelessly distorted "intelligence" or offering his resignation, our sly madman in the White House is starting to sound more like that other O.J. Like the man who cheerfully played golf while promising to pursue "the real killers," Bush is now vowing to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes." On the terrible day of the 9/11 attacks, five hours after a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, retired Gen. Wesley Clark received a strange call from someone (he didn't name names) representing the White House position: "I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein,'" Clark told Meet the Press anchor Tim Russert. "I said, 'But -- I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence.'" And neither did we. --Christopher Scheer is the managing editor of AlterNet.org. He can be reached at feedback@alternet.org © 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:58:01 PM
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Dear Friends: Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee announced Friday plans to stage their own inquiry on the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to the al-Qaida terror network. The announcement by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's top Democrat, marked an unusual split with Chairman John Warner, R-Va., on an issue with strong political overtones ahead of next year's elections. Warner and Levin are longtime colleagues on the committee and repeatedly stress bipartisan cooperation... On Thursday, 24 House Democrats announced that would seek an independent commission to examine the Iraq intelligence. They say they want to know whether intelligence was inaccurate or whether the administration presented a distorted interpretation of the intelligence to make the case for war. ______________________________________ Associated Press June 27, 2003 Democrats Begin Probe of Prewar Intel by Ken Guggenheim, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee announced Friday plans to stage their own inquiry on the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to the al-Qaida terror network. The announcement by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's top Democrat, marked an unusual split with Chairman John Warner, R-Va., on an issue with strong political overtones ahead of next year's elections. Warner and Levin are longtime colleagues on the committee and repeatedly stress bipartisan cooperation. Democrats in both the House and Senate have been pushing for widened examinations of prewar intelligence beyond reviews already under way by both bodies' intelligence committees. Levin said he has directed Democratic staff to examine the objectivity and credibility of the intelligence and its effect on Defense Department policy decisions, military planning and operations in Iraq. He said Warner refused his request to begin such an inquiry. In a letter released by Levin, Warner said the committee should wait until the Senate Intelligence Committee has completed its review, then decide how to move ahead. Both Levin and Warner are members of the intelligence panel. The Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, will continue oversight hearings on military operations in Iraq, Warner said in the letter. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, will appear before the panel the week of July 7. He said Levin's review is "clearly your prerogative" and said his staff may work periodically with Levin's. In a statement, Warner's press secretary, John Ullyot, said the committee has held four hearings on the weapons and intelligence issues and will hold more, in addition to the Intelligence Committee review. "Sen. Levin is welcome to direct his own staff to look into these matters as well," he said. Levin and Warner will be traveling together next week to Iraq and the Middle East, along with the leaders of the Intelligence Committee and other senators. The prewar intelligence has been called into question both nationally and abroad because of the military's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Also, some evidence cited by the Bush administration has been discredited, including documents on supposed approaches to obtain uranium in Africa, which turned out to be forgeries. At a news conference in Washington, Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said Friday the failure to find the weapons was a defeat for her government, which strongly supported the war. "There is a pervasive concern when and how we will find them," Palacio said. But she said she was relaxed about the weapons search. Republicans say there is little doubt the weapons existed and accuse Democrats of questioning the intelligence and its use for political reasons. They defeated three attempts by House Democrats this week to expand the weapons inquiries as part of an intelligence bill approved early Friday. On Thursday, 24 House Democrats announced that would seek an independent commission to examine the Iraq intelligence. They say they want to know whether intelligence was inaccurate or whether the administration presented a distorted interpretation of the intelligence to make the case for war. Democrats have also questioned whether the Bush administration overstated Iraqi links to al-Qaida. A recently completed draft report by a U.N. terrorism committee on efforts to stop al-Qaida operations does not mention Iraq. The committee has seen no evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, said its chief investigator Michael Chandler. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday that the committee's mandate did not include examining Iraqi links to al-Qaida. He said the committee lacked the expertise to assess any links. In addition to the intelligence issue, Democrats and some Republicans have criticized President Bush for not speaking publicly of the long-term costs and U.S. troop commitments that will be needed in Iraq. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Bush to ask for help policing Iraq from the NATO military alliance and its member states. "I implore the president to kind of get over his feelings about the Europeans, and the French and the Germans in particular, and seek their assistance because I believe they are ready to assist. They need to be asked," Biden said. In an interview with NPR's "All Things Considered," Secretary of State Colin Powell said "a large presence of troops" will be needed for months to stabilize the country, improve security and eliminate remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and his Baathist Party. "I can't be more precise than that, because we don't know," he said. Copyright © 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ **Note: I hope you are enjoying the e-newsletter. To remove your email from the War and Peace Watch mailing list, reply to this email with "unsubscribe" written in the subject box. 5:57:37 PM
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Re: Congressional 9/11 Investigation Dear Friends: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has written a fascinating and well-researched article on the administration's near gag-order concerning the congressional investigation of September 11. Because it is quite lengthy, only the initial paragraphs will be included in the War and Peace Watch newsletter. To read the complete article, please see our web site www.warandpeacewatch.com and go to the "Articles" section. ________________________________________ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/April 2003, Volume 59, No. 2, pp. 28-37 "Slow-walked and Stonewalled" by John Prados The administration's near-gag order assured a less-than-satisfactory outcome to the congressional investigation of 9/11. From the day after September 11, 2001, when the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. took place, it was clear there would be a congressional investigation of the intelligence aspects of the disaster. Unanswered questions loomed in everyone's minds: Who were the men who had seized airliners in flight and driven them into huge buildings? How had they eluded sophisticated American security systems? And what warning, if any, had there been? It took some time to agree on the form the inquiry might take, but at length the issue was settled, and the examination was completed in December 2002. Oddly enough, given the magnitude of the attacks and the importance of learning how they could have happened, the inquiry attracted startlingly little attention. How did that happen? It is important to understand how the investigation was conducted, how it became sidetracked, and what the process can tell us, not only about the workings of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its intelligence cohorts, but also about Bush administration policy and politics. **********for more of this article, please refer to our web site www.warandpeacewatch.com and go to the "Articles" section.********** © 2003 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:56:43 PM
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Re: Cheney and the CIA Dear Friends: We're pleased to feature another article by Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst. He reports that the repeated visits made to the CIA before the war in Iraq by VP Dick Cheney were hardly business as usual. In fact, they were unprecedented. During McGovern's 27 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, he states that no vice president ever came to them for a working visit. --McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, and regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. _____________________ The Hartford Courant June 27, 2003 Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual by Ray McGovern As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit. During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters. The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table. Cheney got into the operational side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There the matter rested - until last summer, after the Bush administration made the decision for war in Iraq. Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002, claimed that Saddam Hussein had "resumed his effort to acquire nuclear weapons." At the time, CIA analysts were involved in a knock-down, drag-out argument with the Pentagon on this very point. Most of the nuclear engineers at the CIA, and virtually all scientists at U.S. government laboratories and the International Atomic Energy Agency, found no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program. But the vice president had spoken. Sad to say, those in charge of the draft National Intelligence Estimate took their cue and stated, falsely, that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." Smoke was blown about aluminum tubes sought by Iraq that, it turns out, were for conventional weapons programs. The rest amounted to things like Hussein's frequent meetings with nuclear scientists and Iraq's foot-dragging in providing information to U.N. inspectors. Not much heed was paid to the fact that Hussein's son-in-law, who supervised Iraq's nuclear program before he defected in 1995, had told interrogators that Iraq's nuclear capability - save the blueprints - had been destroyed in 1991 at his order. (Documents given to the United States this week confirm that. The Iraqi scientists who provided them added that, even though the blueprints would have given Iraq a head start, no order was given to restart the program; and even had such an order been given, Iraq would still have been years away from producing a nuclear weapon.) In sum, the evidence presented in last September's intelligence estimate fell far short of what was required to support Cheney's claim that Iraq was on the road to a nuclear weapon. Something scarier had to be produced, and quickly, if Congress was to be persuaded to authorize war. And so the decision was made to dust off the uranium-from-Niger canard. The White House calculated - correctly - that before anyone would make an issue of the fact that this key piece of "intelligence" was based on a forgery, Congress would vote yes. The war could then be waged and won. In recent weeks, administration officials have begun spreading the word that Cheney was never told the Iraq-Niger story was based on a forgery. I asked a senior official who recently served at the National Security Council if he thought that was possible. He pointed out that rigorous NSC procedures call for a very specific response to all vice presidential questions and added that "the fact that Cheney's office had originally asked that the Iraq-Niger report be checked out makes it inconceivable that his office would not have been informed of the results." Did the president himself know that the information used to secure congressional approval for war was based on a forgery? We don't know. But which would be worse - that he knew or that he didn't? --Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington. Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to: Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact: Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only.) ============================= 5:56:17 PM
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craig cline
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Last update: 6/3/2005; 8:13:47 PM .
Last update: 6/3/2005; 8:13:47 PM .
