Monday, September 20, 2004
The Bush Regime Is Intolerant of Dissent and Responds with Police Action.
The Republican campaign speech occured at a firehouse rally in Hamilton-New Jersey. As first lady Laura Bush was delivering the speech to a crowd of 700, Sue Niederer demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. She was wearing a T-shirt with the words "President Bush You Killed My Son" and a picture of a soldier killed in Iraq. Her son Dvorin had died in February while trying to disarm a bomb. 'The Record' of Hackensack, N.J. reported that the mother of the dead soldier was boxed in by Bush supporters yelling "Four more years!" and wielding "Bush/Cheney" signs. Though she eventually left voluntarily, she was arrested, handcuffed and put in the back of a local police van while talking to reporters. Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released. The first lady continued her speech touting the Republican spin on her husband's record on the economy, health care and the war on terror. --- (from AP article by JOHN P. McALPIN)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale.
Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency remarked: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."
He continued: "The tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi is worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. However, this is far graver than Vietnam. Then, there wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies. Our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, said: " We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world."
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. I see no exit. We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier."
W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "The anti-US insurgency is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy. The longer we stay, the more they are hostile to the US presence. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed."
Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators. And, If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," He describes the religious imagery common now: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."
Terrill said: "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (from: Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Iraqis blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility," says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose."
U.S. casualty figures keep climbing and American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends. Defense Department counts found that the highest monthly average of daily attacks on U.S. forces so far occurred this last August. Preliminary analysis also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties also took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting - a step up to phase three.
Another ominous sign is that U.S. troops simply avoid a growing number of towns. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "What we see is classic progression," says Andrew Krepinevich, author of the highly respected study "The Army and Vietnam." "What we also see is that the U.S. military is not trained or organized to fight insurgencies. That was the deliberate choice after Vietnam. Now we look to be paying the price." Americans aren't safe even on the outskirts of a city like Fallujah. Early last week a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into two U.S. Humvees north of town where seven Americans died.
As much as ordinary Iraqis may hate the insurgents, they blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. Three months ago Iraqi troops and U.S.-dominated 'multinational forces' pulled out of Samarra, and insurgents took over the place immediately. "The day the MNF left, people celebrated in the streets," says Kadhim, the Interior spokesman. "But that same day, vans arrived in town and started shooting."
......................................................................(from Flyby News)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
At a hearing to discuss the White House's requests to divert more than $3 Billion from aid to security, senators of both main parties lambasted the lack of progress on the ground.
The Republican chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, said the situation in Iraq was "exasperating for anybody to look at from any vantage point". About the administration's rosy prewar assessments that an euphoric Iraqi population would embrace democracy, he charged: "the nonsense of that is now apparent."
Referring to the lack of overall spending on aid, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, said: "It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous." He also said, "Now, that does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."
The most excoriating attack came from the Democrat Senator Joseph Biden. He said, "The president has frequently described Iraq as 'the central front of the war on terror'," he said. "Well by that definition, success in Iraq is a key standard by which to measure the war on terror. And by that measure, I think the war on terror is in trouble."
..........................................(from American Progress Action Fund)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
According to a new report, Bush has dangerously underfunded and understaffed the intelligence unit charged with tracking down al Qaeda's leader.
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush promised America he would make the hunt for al Qaeda the number one objective of his administration. However, The New York Times reports "Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks." The bin Laden unit is "stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work."
USA Today reported that the President shifted "resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq" in 2002. Specifically, Bush moved special forces tracking al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Iraq war preparations. He also left the CIA "stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan." Thus, these terrorists were allowed to regroup. According to senior intelligence officials, bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders are now directing a plot "to carry out a large-scale terror attack against the United States" from their remote hideouts somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
......................................................................(from Daily-mislead)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
REPORT SHOWS CHENEY WENT ABROAD TO ATTACK AMERICA
Vice President Cheney has regularly attacked the national security credentials of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), calling him weak on terrorism. But according to a new report, it was Cheney who actually did business with terrorist countries and traveled abroad to attack America's counter-terrorism efforts in the 1990s.
As The American Prospect documents indicate, during his time as CEO Chaney illegally oversaw Halliburton's effort to do business with both Iraq and Iran in the 1990s, despite American sanctions against them. In fact, Halliburton today admits one of its subsidiaries still "performs $30 to $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran."
On top of this outrage of evading U.S. sanctions laws against terrorist countries, Cheney actually attacked the U.S. government in a series of trips abroad. He demanding sanctions be lifted on terrorist countries so he could do business with them. In trips to Malaysia and Canada, for instance, he insisted the Clinton administration lift sanctions on Iran, despite that country being listed by the U.S. State Department as a state-sponsor of terrorism.
......................................................................(from Daily-mislead)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
GOP Spreads Lies and Fear in Mailings that Claim Liberals Will Ban Bibles. Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.
The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. "It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said.
...............................................(from AP article by WILL LESTER)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
CBS's 60 Minutes Report on Bush's National Guard Files Suspiciously Decried by Numerous Discreditors in Less than One Day.
CBS's 60 Minutes had acquired Bush's controversial TANG files and carefully verified them. They decided to report on them after the 'swift boat veterans' lie made Vietnam an issue. To their great surprise, the response was IMMEDIATE and MULTIFACETED. There was a long list of detractions and denials from so-called 'experts' suddenly and mysteriously popping up in less than a day: document experts with multiple arguments, family members of Killian's, retired TANG officers, etc.
A likely explanation for the immediacy of so many detractors is that they were previously prepped and laying in wait to discredit Bush's damaging TANG files in case they were ever exposed. Karl Rove must have been aware of these problematic files because it was reported that during the 2000 campaign they were thoroughly researched by Bush's campaign team in Texas.
Dan Rather has pointed out that the White House has never denied accusations of Bush not meeting his National Guard obligations, being AWOL in Alabama or defying a direct order from a superior officer. Similarly, Bush never denied using cocaine. This hubbub over the accuracy of the Killian files is blowing smoke to cover up Bush's National Guard infractions. If you cannot deny the facts, discredit the messenger to create doubt and confusion.
Bush has had four years to clear up the AWOL charge from the 2000 campaign, but he hasn't been able to do so. He must be the only person in the country who cannot dig up some old acquaintance from a National Guard unit, place of employment, school, church etc. All the soldiers that were in John Kerry's swift boat unit surely do remember him. Furthermore, Gary Trudeau has long offered ten grand for anyone who could remember seeing Bush at his assigned Alabama unit. So far, he has had no takers.--- (from a Buzz Flash article)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Republican campaign speech occured at a firehouse rally in Hamilton-New Jersey. As first lady Laura Bush was delivering the speech to a crowd of 700, Sue Niederer demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. She was wearing a T-shirt with the words "President Bush You Killed My Son" and a picture of a soldier killed in Iraq. Her son Dvorin had died in February while trying to disarm a bomb. 'The Record' of Hackensack, N.J. reported that the mother of the dead soldier was boxed in by Bush supporters yelling "Four more years!" and wielding "Bush/Cheney" signs. Though she eventually left voluntarily, she was arrested, handcuffed and put in the back of a local police van while talking to reporters. Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released. The first lady continued her speech touting the Republican spin on her husband's record on the economy, health care and the war on terror. --- (from AP article by JOHN P. McALPIN)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale.
Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency remarked: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."
He continued: "The tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi is worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. However, this is far graver than Vietnam. Then, there wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies. Our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, said: " We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world."
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. I see no exit. We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier."
W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "The anti-US insurgency is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy. The longer we stay, the more they are hostile to the US presence. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed."
Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators. And, If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," He describes the religious imagery common now: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."
Terrill said: "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (from: Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Iraqis blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility," says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose."
U.S. casualty figures keep climbing and American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends. Defense Department counts found that the highest monthly average of daily attacks on U.S. forces so far occurred this last August. Preliminary analysis also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties also took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting - a step up to phase three.
Another ominous sign is that U.S. troops simply avoid a growing number of towns. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "What we see is classic progression," says Andrew Krepinevich, author of the highly respected study "The Army and Vietnam." "What we also see is that the U.S. military is not trained or organized to fight insurgencies. That was the deliberate choice after Vietnam. Now we look to be paying the price." Americans aren't safe even on the outskirts of a city like Fallujah. Early last week a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into two U.S. Humvees north of town where seven Americans died.
As much as ordinary Iraqis may hate the insurgents, they blame the Americans for creating the whole mess. Three months ago Iraqi troops and U.S.-dominated 'multinational forces' pulled out of Samarra, and insurgents took over the place immediately. "The day the MNF left, people celebrated in the streets," says Kadhim, the Interior spokesman. "But that same day, vans arrived in town and started shooting."
......................................................................(from Flyby News)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
At a hearing to discuss the White House's requests to divert more than $3 Billion from aid to security, senators of both main parties lambasted the lack of progress on the ground.
The Republican chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, said the situation in Iraq was "exasperating for anybody to look at from any vantage point". About the administration's rosy prewar assessments that an euphoric Iraqi population would embrace democracy, he charged: "the nonsense of that is now apparent."
Referring to the lack of overall spending on aid, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, said: "It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous." He also said, "Now, that does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."
The most excoriating attack came from the Democrat Senator Joseph Biden. He said, "The president has frequently described Iraq as 'the central front of the war on terror'," he said. "Well by that definition, success in Iraq is a key standard by which to measure the war on terror. And by that measure, I think the war on terror is in trouble."
..........................................(from American Progress Action Fund)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
According to a new report, Bush has dangerously underfunded and understaffed the intelligence unit charged with tracking down al Qaeda's leader.
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush promised America he would make the hunt for al Qaeda the number one objective of his administration. However, The New York Times reports "Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks." The bin Laden unit is "stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work."
USA Today reported that the President shifted "resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq" in 2002. Specifically, Bush moved special forces tracking al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Iraq war preparations. He also left the CIA "stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan." Thus, these terrorists were allowed to regroup. According to senior intelligence officials, bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders are now directing a plot "to carry out a large-scale terror attack against the United States" from their remote hideouts somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
......................................................................(from Daily-mislead)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
REPORT SHOWS CHENEY WENT ABROAD TO ATTACK AMERICA
Vice President Cheney has regularly attacked the national security credentials of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), calling him weak on terrorism. But according to a new report, it was Cheney who actually did business with terrorist countries and traveled abroad to attack America's counter-terrorism efforts in the 1990s.
As The American Prospect documents indicate, during his time as CEO Chaney illegally oversaw Halliburton's effort to do business with both Iraq and Iran in the 1990s, despite American sanctions against them. In fact, Halliburton today admits one of its subsidiaries still "performs $30 to $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran."
On top of this outrage of evading U.S. sanctions laws against terrorist countries, Cheney actually attacked the U.S. government in a series of trips abroad. He demanding sanctions be lifted on terrorist countries so he could do business with them. In trips to Malaysia and Canada, for instance, he insisted the Clinton administration lift sanctions on Iran, despite that country being listed by the U.S. State Department as a state-sponsor of terrorism.
......................................................................(from Daily-mislead)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
GOP Spreads Lies and Fear in Mailings that Claim Liberals Will Ban Bibles. Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.
The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. "It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said.
...............................................(from AP article by WILL LESTER)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
CBS's 60 Minutes Report on Bush's National Guard Files Suspiciously Decried by Numerous Discreditors in Less than One Day.
CBS's 60 Minutes had acquired Bush's controversial TANG files and carefully verified them. They decided to report on them after the 'swift boat veterans' lie made Vietnam an issue. To their great surprise, the response was IMMEDIATE and MULTIFACETED. There was a long list of detractions and denials from so-called 'experts' suddenly and mysteriously popping up in less than a day: document experts with multiple arguments, family members of Killian's, retired TANG officers, etc.
A likely explanation for the immediacy of so many detractors is that they were previously prepped and laying in wait to discredit Bush's damaging TANG files in case they were ever exposed. Karl Rove must have been aware of these problematic files because it was reported that during the 2000 campaign they were thoroughly researched by Bush's campaign team in Texas.
Dan Rather has pointed out that the White House has never denied accusations of Bush not meeting his National Guard obligations, being AWOL in Alabama or defying a direct order from a superior officer. Similarly, Bush never denied using cocaine. This hubbub over the accuracy of the Killian files is blowing smoke to cover up Bush's National Guard infractions. If you cannot deny the facts, discredit the messenger to create doubt and confusion.
Bush has had four years to clear up the AWOL charge from the 2000 campaign, but he hasn't been able to do so. He must be the only person in the country who cannot dig up some old acquaintance from a National Guard unit, place of employment, school, church etc. All the soldiers that were in John Kerry's swift boat unit surely do remember him. Furthermore, Gary Trudeau has long offered ten grand for anyone who could remember seeing Bush at his assigned Alabama unit. So far, he has had no takers.--- (from a Buzz Flash article)
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