Molly Ivins' take on "Homeland Security"

[Roughneck]

Sure, "First Human Clone," and "Lott Heads KKK," are headlines that get max ink. That's what sells papers, pumps ratings and keeps the conglomerate cash registers ringing.

But doesn't our news media have a moral responsibility to inform the public about potentially serious disasters just a sand dune away?

Except for last month's all-too-brief CNN report, followed by an equally brief Associated Press article, apparently not.

We're only weeks away from sending our troops into the poisonous caldron of Desert Storm II, where casualties could be as catastrophic as the last time our soldiers stood tall in that unforgiving desert and suffered at least 160,000 disabled and dying WIA (Wounded in Action) and 10,000 KIABGN (Killed in Action by Government Neglect).

But the injuries were for the most part self-inflicted, caused by U.S. military incompetence rather than the sort of horror-filled missiles and shells our soldiers might well run into this time around if and when we find Saddam's doomsday weapons the hard way.

Concerned members of outfits such as Soldiers for the Truth and the National Gulf War Resource Center Inc. have done everything but torch themselves into crispy critters to get this story front and center.

SFTT President Robert McMahon has contacted almost every major news outlet in America, pleading for coverage. "Maybe some parents and spouses would like to know that Iraq's Republican Guard won't be the most insidious enemy their loved ones will be facing," he wrote.

The "insidious enemy" McMahon refers to is in part the Iraqi battlefield itself, a death pit of spent radiation and bio/chem weaponry served up with a lethal cocktail of local bugs, deadly fumes and poisons that still haven't been fully identified after a decade of medical research. And then there's the enemy within, the far-from-adequate bio/chem protection and detection gear earmarked for our grunts.

According to one Pentagon report, about 130,000 troops who were downwind when U.S. Army engineers destroyed a weapons depot were exposed to low levels of sarin. Now epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley has published a footlocker full of studies suggesting there might actually be 200,000 Gulf War vets with illnesses linked to brain damage resulting from exposure to sarin-like toxins. And many vets and scientists believe other sarin exposures occurred in January 1991 when allied bombs destroyed Iraqi ammo dumps.

A recent U.S. General Accounting Office report states that "serious problems still persist" regarding the protective masks, suits and detection gear. And a December 2002 Army report states that more than half of its protective masks and nearly all of its chemical-weapons alarms are either "completely broken or not fully operational."

A Pentagon spokeswoman has counterattacked, insisting, "The Pentagon has substantially improved individual protective garments, gas masks and chemical detectors since the Gulf War."

But a line sergeant I'd trust with my life says, "The only improvement I've seen since the Gulf War is now that we have the M-40 Protective Mask instead of the M-17A1, we can change our filters without committing suicide."

Why won't the media or Congress touch this story when we could be only weeks away from destroying the lives of another generation of American heroes? Is it the prevailing attitude that war is a nasty business, but our all-volunteer force signed up for it? Or is it just that no one who could make a difference cares about what they perceive as blue-collar bio/chem fodder mainly from metropolitan slums or small-town America?

Maybe the media are displaying such a total lack of interest in whether our GI Joes and Janes will make it through Saddam's nightmare simply because most haven't served and can't identify with a fighting force made up of kids who come from poor families with nada political pull in an America that's fast becoming too much like England circa 1600, a land of serfs and the privileged who sit above the salt.

Kids who are primarily from the wrong side of the railroad tracks where the used pickup trucks are parked, who didn't go to Yale, Stanford or the other elite schools in between. The same kids who've filled body bags and been screwed over by Veterans Affairs since the Greatest Generation members were given their due during and after World War II.

And nothing's going to change until the draft calls up each and every one of America's boys and girls to defend Old Glory.

[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off here.]

© 2002 David H. Hackworth. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.

[Wildrider]

Posted on Sun, Jan. 19, 2003

A war to prevent war?
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. -- Martin Luther King Jr.

Normally, making the case for peace over war requires the brain of a gnat.

"Jaw, jaw," said Winston Churchill, "is better than war, war." There's not much historical evidence that war does anyone any good -- some rare cases of "just war" under St. Augustine's definition.

Mostly, war (A) kills a lot of people, causing hard feelings; (B) doesn't solve anything; and (C) has hideous unintended consequences that often lead to more war. "Avoid war if at all possible" is the first rule of statesmanship.

Conservatives are fond of pointing out that there are problems in this world that can't be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that can't be solved by dropping bombs on them.

We are in such a strange position here, preparing to attack a country that has neither attacked us nor threatened to attack us.

President Bush calls his new doctrine "pre-emptive war," but pre-emptive war is what Israel did in 1967, with the Egyptian army massing on its borders. It attacked first under clear threat.

John Ikenberry, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that this administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high."

Try to wrap your mind around the concept of preventive war. We tried having a war to end wars (didn't work) -- now we're having a war to prevent war?

I am perfectly well aware that there is a case to be made for taking out Saddam Hussein -- you can make it on humanitarian grounds alone. The question is whether it's riskier to leave him alone or take him out.

The oldest of all Texas dicta is: "Leave the rattlesnake alone." Those of us who spend time outdoors here not infrequently encounter snakes and sometimes have to kill them. But the rule is: You don't bother the snake, the snake won't bother you. Saddam is 68 years old and slipping.

I assume we can defeat Saddam without great cost to our side. (God forgive me if that is hubris.) The problem is what happens after we win.

The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, "Horrible three-way civil war"? And as George W. Bush himself once said, "Unrest in the Middle East causes unrest throughout the region."

Let me point out what we have already lost: enormous amounts of good will and esteem all over the world. We are the saber-rattlers here; we are the aggressors, and the world knows it.

The indifference of this administration to the opinions of the rest of the world is astonishing. After 9/11, we threw away more good will and sympathy than you can imagine by switching from the hunt for al Qaeda to this ancillary (if that) mission to get rid of Saddam.

There is no evidence connecting Iraq to al Qaeda. As Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio said in a recent speech: "Iraq has not committed any act of aggression against the United States. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for the anthrax attack on our nation. The United Nations has yet to establish that Iraq has usable weapons of mass destruction. There is no intelligence that Iraq has the ability to strike at the United States. According to the CIA, Iraq has no intention to attack America but will defend itself if attacked.

"Why, then, is our nation prepared to send 300,000 of our young men and women into house-to-house combat in the streets of Baghdad and Basra? Why is our nation prepared to spend $200 billion or more of our hard-earned tax dollars for the destruction of Iraq?"

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board, is a leading member of the small attack-Iraq-no-matter-what claque that is relentlessly pushing this war. Recently, he said bluntly in Britain that it makes no difference whether the U.N. weapons inspectors find anything or not.

Great -- we're ready to go to war on no evidence.

This war is not inevitable, and the person who can stop it is you.

Monday is Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday. People all over the country will be rallying and marching in his honor, celebrating not only his eloquent opposition to racism and poverty but his equally passionate protests against militarism.

You get more than a vote in this country. You get to speak up. Write, phone, fax and e-mail your representative, senators and the White House. Vote in the streets. Do it.

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people" -- Martin Luther King Jr.

[SanAntonioMike]

Now, see, THIS is what I meant when I said Duhbya was givin' my Texas a bad name:

www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/international/europe/24ALLI.html?pagewanted=1&todaysheadlines

[LS]

SanAntonioMike said:

Now, see, THIS is what I meant when I said Duhbya was givin' my Texas a bad name:

www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/international/europe/24ALLI.html?pagewanted=1&todaysheadlines

Well, SAM I can sympathize with ya there. This one says pretty much the same thing- only it kind of sounds like that's the way the rest of the world is looking at America (and thus, Americans as a whole)- not just Texans.

I don't agree with several of his viewpoints by a long shot, but at least he admits DuHbya and his boys are to blame for this attitude by their own actions.

www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/55075p-51584c.html

[LS]

Sept. 11's Forgotten Heroes
by Juan Gonzalez

The doctors spoke first, then Sen. Hillary Clinton and the union leaders, and finally the heroes of Ground Zero.
All were hoping the rest of the country - and especially President Bush with his speech to the nation tonight - would respond to their cry for help.

Officials at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center released yesterday the preliminary results of a massive health screening program for 3,500 Ground Zero rescue and recovery workers.

The findings were worse than anyone had imagined.

Extensive medical tests of 250 of the first 500 workers in the Mount Sinai program showed that nearly eight of 10 suffered from respiratory problems while working at Ground Zero.

And nearly half of those workers still were suffering respiratory symptoms a full year after Sept. 11.

"It's alarming," said Dr. Robin Herbert, who supervises the program at Mount Sinai's Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Worse, those results are "likely to underestimate the level of WTC symptoms," Herbert said, because most of the 500 were police officers and telecommunications workers, who were not even at the center of the rubble pile, where fires and toxic emissions were most intense.

Altogether, some 3,500 recovery workers are enrolled in the screening program out of an estimated 40,000 who worked at Ground Zero.

The health of the remaining 3,000 in the program is "likely to be at least as bad if not worse than the first group studied," said Dr. Stephen Levin, Herbert's colleague in charge of the study.

But the first $12 million provided by the federal government to conduct the Mount Sinai screening soon will run out, and Congress so far has balked at providing additional money.

Seeking $90 million

Clinton (D-N.Y.), who led the fight for the original money, wants $90 million more from Washington to continue the screening program and for long-term treatment of sick workers.

Of that, $25 million would go directly to monitor and care for firefighters who were assigned to Ground Zero.

"What the statistics show is the potential for ongoing, serious health problems," Clinton said. In war, our Army leaves no soldier behind, she said, and "we're not going to leave anyone behind here."

Clinton appealed to President Bush to "address this issue" in his State of the Union speech tonight.

Her comments were supported by several labor union leaders, including Tom Scotto, head of the police detectives association.

"Why are we here like beggars?" Scotto said. "[The $90 million] is not even the cost of one goddamn bomber that's going over to Iraq."

"I don't want to be sick," said Frank Greer, one of the Ground Zero workers who is suffering from respiratory problems. "But I also don't want to be forgotten."

Forgetting our heroes unfortunately has become routine practice in Washington.

Twenty years ago, it was the Vietnam veterans. I remember interviewing dozens of vets suffering from numerous illnesses as a result of exposure to the Agent Orange herbicide that the U.S. military used in South Vietnam.

Then came the veterans of the Persian Gulf War and Gulf War Syndrome. Each time, the politicians pinned medals on the returning heroes. Then, when they started to get sick, everyone forgot them.

Monumental sacrifice

This time, thousands willingly volunteered when our nation was attacked on Sept. 11. They worked long shifts for weeks at a time, in the most dangerous of conditions, often without days off. They became part of a miraculous rescue and recovery effort.

Now Congress and the White House seem so preoccupied with shipping a new set of heroes into another fight, this time with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, that they've already forgotten yesterday's heroes.

When he speaks to the nation tonight, Bush has a chance to prove that all his hero talk at Ground Zero wasn't just talk.

www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/55291p-51646c.html

[LS]

Probe Feds In 9/11 Jail Abuse
By GREG B. SMITH
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The Justice Department is investigating complaints that government agents abused people detained after the Sept. 11 attacks, a report revealed.
The incidents include allegations of beatings, verbal abuse and harassment at federal detention centers nationwide.

The most serious case allegedly occurred at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where dozens of detainees were held for months in isolation while agents probed terror ties.

An unidentified man said jail guards "repeatedly slammed [him] against a wall and injured three other detainees," according to a report by the department's inspector general released last week.

The Brooklyn U.S. attorney's office declined to press charges but the inspector general is investigating whether any "administrative misconduct" occurred at the jail, which is the subject of a broader probe, the report said.

None of the detainees who brought the complaints were charged with a crime.

In one case, an FBI agent told a detainee's relatives he was a terrorist. In another, Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors performed a "humiliating" search of a Muslim woman's luggage.

At the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey, guards were accused of beating an inmate. Guards at a California jail allegedly gave detainees postcards depicting a burning American flag with the notation "you are a terrorist."

[LS]

Group: Expanded Anti-Terror Legislation in Works
By Tom Brune
WASHINGTON BUREAU
February 8, 2003

Washington - The Justice Department is considering sweeping new anti-terrorism legislation that would heighten police powers and broaden domestic surveillance while expanding secrecy and stripping away citizenship of Americans who support terrorists, according to a draft made public Friday by a watchdog group.

The legislation would be a follow-up to the anti-terrorism Patriot Act enacted shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and would correct and expand many of the provisions of that law while adding new ones, according to the 120-page draft released by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity on its Web site Friday.

Its provisions include permitting subpoenas without a judge's approval for terrorism investigations and legally barring the release of information about immigration detainees, effectively ending several lawsuits challenging the government's secrecy policy. The Center for Public Integrity calls it "a bold, comprehensive sequel to the U.S.A. Patriot Act" that will give the government "broad, sweeping new powers."

Bush administration officials on Friday did not deny the authenticity of the draft, but they stressed that no final decisions have been made on any follow-up legislation.

Many ideas are being considered by Justice staff for anti-terrorism measures, Justice spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said. But, she said, "Department staff have not presented any final proposals to either the attorney general or the White House."

She added, "The department's deliberations are always undertaken with the strongest commitment to our Constitution and civil liberties."

The draft made public is marked "confidential" and titled the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003." It was apparently sent to Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). A Hastert spokesman said he knew nothing about the draft.

But Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said the administration had not given them a copy of the draft and that as recently as this week the administration had told them they were not working on a follow-up to the Patriot Act.

"The scope of this proposal is breathtaking," said a Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee staffer.

"The initial USA Patriot Act undercut many of the traditional checks and balances on government power. The new Ashcroft proposal threatens to fundamentally alter the Constitutional protections that allow us to be both safe and free," said Gregory T. Nojeim, associate director of the ACLU Washington National Office.

Among other things, it would prohibit disclosure of information regarding people detained as terrorist suspects and prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from distributing "worst-case scenario" information to the public about a nearby private company's use of chemicals.

In addition, the draft says the measure would create a DNA database of "suspected terrorists"; force suspects to prove why they should be released on bail, rather than have the prosecution prove why they should be held; and broaden the definition of "material support" of terrorists.

One of the most troubling provisions in the draft would permit the government to use Title 3 criminal wiretaps to conduct surveillance on Americans who might support terrorism, a Judiciary Committee staffer said.

Other provisions include further weakening the restraints on surveillance for foreign intelligence, providing immunity for businesses if they tell the government about their lapses in security and providing a tax break to public officials who must count their bodyguards as income. Civil libertarian David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor, said he's concerned that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass the draft legislation at a time when the country is about to attack Iraq.
www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uspatr083121314feb08,0,648543.story?coll=ny%2Dnationalnews%2Dheadlines


Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.[/b] ~ Julius Caesar

[Roughneck]

www.msnbc.com/news/902977.asp?0dm=B1APN

[Roughneck]

Well just as the war news has been manipulated, the economy has been manipulated even more, probably because percentages and interest rates are tougher to make sense of then body bags and bullets
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


moneybox Daily commentary about business and finance.


Bush's Data Dump
The administration is hiding bad economic news. Here's how.
By Russ Baker
Posted Friday, July 11, 2003, at 12:56 PM PT



Slight of hand?

The Bush administration is finally facing tough questions about its selective use of intelligence in selling war with Iraq. But Americans shouldn't just be skeptical of what the president says about WMD. They should be skeptical of what he says about GDP. In economic policy even more than in war policy, the Bushies have successfully suppressed, manipulated, and withheld evidence to serve their policy purposes.


Of course every administration likes to trumpet its good news and hide its bad, but what's remarkable about the Bush team is its willingness to stifle data that had been widely released and to politicize data that used to be nonpartisan.

The administration muzzles routine economic information that's unfavorable. Last year, for example, the administration stopped issuing a monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report, known as the Mass Layoff Statistics program, that tracked factory closings throughout the country. The cancellation was made known on Christmas Eve in a footnote to the department's final report—a document that revealed 2,150 mass layoffs in November, cashiering nearly a quarter-million workers. The administration claimed the report was a victim of budget cuts. After the Washington Post happened to catch this bit of data suppression, the BLS report was reinstated. (Interestingly, President George H.W. Bush buried these same statistics in '92, also during a period of job losses. They were revived by President Clinton.)

The Bush economic team has snuffed its own reports when they reach conclusions that don't match the administration's rosy scenarios. The administration deep-sixed a study commissioned by then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that predicts huge budget deficits well into the future. As noted by the Financial Times in late May, this survey, which asserted that the baby-boom generation's future health care and retirement costs would swamp U.S. coffers, was dropped from a 2004 budget summary published in February 2003—at the same time the White House was campaigning for a tax-cut package that critics warned would greatly expand future deficits. "The study's [analysis of future deficits] dwarfs previous estimates of the financial challenge facing Washington," wrote the FT. According to the FT, a Bush official said the study was merely a thought exercise.

The administration also muffled a customary report whose findings would have forced key corporate supporters to pay more to their employees. The annual Adverse Effect Wage Rate establishes the minimum wage that can be paid each year to about 50,000 agricultural "guest workers" in the H2A Program. From AEWR's 1987 inception until 2000, the Department of Labor released the report in February. But in 2001, DOL withheld the wage figure until August, and only published it after the Farmworker Justice Fund threatened a lawsuit. In 2002, the DOL held up the report until May, again releasing it only after the prospect of legal action. The delays helped big agricultural firms, largely in the tobacco states and the South, by allowing them to pay their field workers last year's lower wages, saving the employers millions of dollars. Among those benefiting politically were Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose state relies on several thousand guest workers in its tobacco fields and who receives large contributions from agricultural interests.

Another administration trick is playing with the length of its economic forecast periods, which puts the best possible face on bad news while exaggerating the projected benefits of its own initiatives. For example, to heighten the impression that Social Security is running out of money (thereby strengthening the case for allowing workers to divert money from the system into private retirement accounts), the administration has predicted shortfalls far in the future by relying on preposterously long forecast periods. In a superb analysis of the budget in the June Harper's, Thomas Frank noted that in 2002 the administration declared an $18 trillion shortfall in Social Security and Medicare—about five times the current national debt. Frank notes that in order to arrive at the $18 trillion figure—since Social Security is currently in surplus—the administration used a "cumulative seventy-five-year estimate [Frank's itals] based on extreme long-term projections ... ." Meanwhile, even as it relies on 75-year projections for Social Security, the same document replaces traditional 10-year budget projections with five-year ones, claiming the longer-term numbers were unreliable.

President Bush also politicized the Council of Economic Advisers, which is supposed to produce straight analysis, not administration spin. CEA staffers complained that top Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey, not even a member of the council, encouraged them to produce data supporting the president's controversial tax cut initiatives. CEA chairman Glen Hubbard also pushed staffers to find literature supporting the questionable argument that tax cuts created job growth.

On other occasions, the administration has punished economic officials who didn't follow the company line. Treasury Secretary O'Neill left the administration after, among other fits of candor, he expressed skepticism about economic figures the White House had released and suggested that the tax cut could be better used to buttress Social Security. And before Lindsey was made to take a dive, he predicted that the war in Iraq could cost upwards of $200 billion, a figure that infuriated the White House, which was selling the anti-Saddam campaign as a comparatively cheap victory.

Important economic data that casts a bad light on administration policies has been expunged from government Web sites. The Department of Labor removed a report showing the real value of the minimum wage over time, claiming it was "outdated." With no minimum wage hike since 1997, the Web site would have shown minimum-wage workers faring increasingly poorly under the Bush administration, while their real income went up under Clinton. (Some subheadings from the report: "Real Value of the Minimum Wage Continues Decline"; "Minimum Wage Falls Relative to Average Hourly Earnings"; "Minimum Wage Falls Below 2-Person Family Poverty Threshold.")

Earlier this year, a study predicting mediocre job growth from Bush's proposed $674 billion economic stimulus plan disappeared from the Council of Economic Advisers' Web site. The study forecast an average increase of only 170,000 jobs—0.1 percent of the workforce—every year through 2007. The study was pulled just after a major Jan. 7 Bush budget speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. "In the out years, by their own estimate, their plan is a job and growth killer," says Jared Bernstein, economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "Instead of doing what serious analysts would do and going to the drawing board to re-evaluate, they just took the offending document off the Web site."

Certainly, each one of these Bush team moves can be explained: administrative concerns, government paperwork reduction, outdated material, etc. Cumulatively, however, they certainly look suspect. We've seen the future, and it's been deleted.

[SanAntonioMike]

He doesn't need to hide it. I see it every day in the fact I have friends who still can't get a job, and every cent I make is spent before I can get it home, and gas prices are still averaging over $1.60, and milk is over $2 a gallon and so on and so forth...

Are people really so guillible they buy this BS? Damn, must be...

[LS]

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Treasury Department began mailing out checks worth up to $400 per child to more than 25 million middle-income households Friday, a summertime windfall from tax cuts enacted in May.

Jodi Mendoza, 38, of Portland, Ore., said she plans to use at least some of the money to buy school clothes and supplies for her three children.

``We'll probably also put some of the money away for their college,'' Mendoza said.

At the plant that prints and mails the checks, President Bush visited with other families Thursday who said they plan to spend their money on school supplies, tuition and uniforms, thus injecting some energy into a slowly recovering economy.


``First of all, purchasing school supplies means the school supply manufacturer or school supply salesman has got a little extra business,'' Bush said. ``But also, one of the things that's important in our work force is for people to continually upgrade their education, so that they can be more productive and find a better job that pays better pay.''


The checks that hit the mail beginning Friday represent an advance refund on the child tax credit increased to $1,000 this year. The first batch of roughly 8.6 million checks will return a total of $4.4 billion to taxpayers. Two more batches will be sent in August.


The checks will be sent to those who qualified for the credit in 2002. Families who had their first child in 2003 will have to wait until next spring to apply for the credit and claim their refund. Taxpayers expecting a check need not contact the Internal Revenue Service in order to get their advance payments.
___________________________________________


The above is how part of the Bushies tax cut was touted...only a lot of people are going to be in for a real rude awakening. Seems they 'forgot' to mention the 'fine print.'

My sister received her child credit tax 'rebate' last week. She claimed 3 children on her 2002 tax return- and only received a rebate for one of them. She got a letter from the IRS the day before the check arrived- informing her that the check was on it's way...
At the very bottom of the letter it then states, she would receive a rebate for each child born AFTER December 31,1986...which means only children claimed on their parents tax returns up to the age of 16 qualify. You receive nothing for any children 17 or 18, or those enrolled in college up to age 21 who still qualify as dependents.

Is there anything this administration hasn't 'fudged', outright lied about, or covered up??