November 2003: Week Three: This Far and No Further

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Documents prove CIA masterminded 1973 Allende assassination

November 14: Thousands of recently released, formerly top secret, documents from the CIA prove that the US was heavily involved in the overthrow and assassination of democratically elected President Salvadore Allende in 1973. The release was ordered in 1999 by then-President Bill Clinton; this is the third and final batch of documents to be released. The records show that the CIA was heavily involved in attempts to prevent Allende from being elected, in destabilizing his government once he was in power, and in helping his "successor" General Augusto Pinochet consolidate power and beat back political opposition. The documents may also provide evidence that Pinochet authorized the murder of political rival Orlando Letelier, who died in a car bombing in Washington, DC in 1976. Other recently released documents prove that Manuel Contreras, one of the men convicted in 1993 for his role in the Letelier assassination, was a paid informant for the CIA. Contreras was the former head of the Chilean secret police and, next to Pinochet, one of the most feared and hated men in Chile. The CIA began its relationship with Contreras in 1974. (BBC)
November 14: Reporter Sridhar Pappu details the tremendous restrictions laid down for media representatives by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Pappu writes, "The C.P.A., according to several reporters based in Baghdad -- many of whom requested anonymity -- has severely limited access to key officials in the provisional government. In an effort to stanch the flow of reporting on small-scale terrorist activity and the resulting injuries to U.S. troops, sources said, morgues and hospitals in Baghdad have become impenetrable to reporters. Reporters have found their access to police stations cut off. When access is granted, reporters said, the CPA often assigns 'minders' to accompany them. But even the good-news stories the Bush administration has chastised the press for ignoring -- reopening schools and hospitals, building power plants and infrastructure and factories -- can be hard to get, unless you are content to rely upon a CPA-engineered press junket to do your reporting. Contractors working on rebuilding projects, sources said, have been told not to speak to journalists without prior CPA approval. The same is true for groups like the Army Corps of Engineers. And the CPA has bypassed the Baghdad bureaus of the major media outlets, pitching stories or interviews directly to local network affiliates stateside, and organizing junkets for editorial writers to show off how very far Iraq has come, leaving major-market newspapers to fight through a web of red tape even to get the news -- good or bad -- out. Following a less-than-positive story, reporters often find their phone calls go completely unanswered. There have even been charges that reporters whose work is viewed as unfavorable or unflattering to the ongoing operations in Iraq have been blackballed at the Republican Palace." A reporter says, "We saw this kind of treatment [of the press] during Saddam. And it makes me sick that my own government is doing it now."
Experienced reporters say that the CPA, staffed mainly by young Republican campaign officials and former Capital Hill bureaucrats with little experience in the media, functions more like a public-relations office for the Bush administration than a field operation for the American press in wartime. The administration and the CPA is most secretive about information regarding terrorist activity and casualties. One reporter says, "The police stations are completely shut off. You can go around to 10 police stations in Baghdad and you can't get in the door. You have to go through the CPA. They're trying to centrally control the message." Another reporter says, "Places like hospital emergency rooms and the Baghdad morgue are off-limits. To visit, you have to file a ton of paperwork. It's very similar to the old days [under Hussein]. They've made a very conscious decision not to facilitate interviews and give access to stories that are not going to be positive. It's just that simple." The CPA denies that the agency is controlling access to hospitals and police stations, and blames any problems on Iraqi personnel. The CPA also denies showing any favoritism towards reporters from particular outlets, but reporters in the field tell a different story: "They certainly have favorites. They'll return Fox News' call. They'll fall over themselves for Fox." (New York Observer)
November 14: Australian Sue Smethurst recounts her harsh treatment at a US airport because of her status as a foreign journalist. Smethurst, who writes for the Australian women's magazine New Idea, is refused entry to the United States after landing at Los Angeles International. She planned on coming to the US to interview singer Olivia Newton-John and lunch with her American agent. Smethurst is halted at check-in by an agent of the Department of Homeland Security's new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bureau; the bureau decides to terminate her visit as soon as she declares herself to be a journalist, because she lacks something called an "I-Visa," a new form of visa for foreign journalists. Smethurst is unaware of this decision for hours. She is interrogated by a team of agents, who ask her, among other things, what sort of stories she wrote, what kind of magazine New Idea is, where it is published, what its circulation is, whether it prints politically sensitive articles, when her interview would appear, and who would read it. "I laughed," Smethurst later recalls, "because we're a cross between Good Housekeeping and People magazine. The most political thing we'd likely print was Laura Bush's horoscope."
The interrogation continues: who was her father? his occupation? her mother's maiden name and occupation? what were their dates of birth, where did they live? After further waiting, Smethurst asks if there is a problem. The agent retorts, "I will tell you when there's a problem," and points to a nearby sign: Your Silence Is Appreciated. She is asked to swear to the truthfulness of her answers, is fingerprinted and photographed, and is listed as a "criminal" on her paperwork. She is then escorted under armed guard to a pay phone to make a call she hopes will clear everything up and allow her to stay in the country. Then, while conversations are occurring among her husband, editor and consul officers in LA, Smethurst's baggage is thoroughly searched and a makeup bag temporarily confiscated. She is then handcuffed and marched through the airport to another terminal, where LAX's main detention center is located. While in detention, she asks for and is refused food, even after offering to pay for it.
Ten hours after her arrival, she is finally brought "a detention meal:" an orange, a fruit box drink, and a roll so hard that she "could play golf with it." She sits under the supervision of eight armed guards; when one of the staff members sits in front of her and begins eating a takeout meal, she loses her temper. "At that stage," she says, "I just lost the plot completely and threw the roll into the bin in front of me with sheer, utter frustration." The CBP terms this a "tantrum." During her detention, she is repeatedly body-searched, and repeatedly breaks down in tears, swearing that she is no criminal and she should be allowed entry into the country. She also says one sympathetic staff member told her she'd simply had bad luck in getting the agent she did at the first customs station, since the I-Visa rule was enforced at the discretion of agents. Smethurst could have entered the country by simply declaring herself a tourist on her traveler's form -— a routine practice among reporters entering the US. Eventually, Smethurst's release is won by the Consul General's Office. The CBP has a different story of Smethurst's ordeal. "she did become abusive," says CBP spokesperson Michael Fleming. "We tried to calm her down. Handcuffing is a standard procedure because sometimes good people can do potentially violent things. It's not our intent to parade passengers on a perp walk -— Sue Smethurst is not a criminal. It's important for journalists to know to enter the US on assignment they cannot apply under the visa-waiver program. They have to do their homework."
When Smethurst returns to Melbourne, camera crews are waiting — all major Australian media outlets reported her ordeal. (The US media ignores the story entirely.) The story is treated as an example of bureaucratic arrogance run amok, because many parts of the world are still outraged by what happens at American airports to foreigners, not to mention many Americans. (Last September, the CBP at LAX detained the Australian-born wife of a US Navy sailor for five days, while also briefly denying her infant daughter food and medical attention.) Smethurst says she's received hundreds of messages from fellow Australians claiming similar treatment at the hands of US immigration officials and knows of two fellow journalists who were sent back to Australia. Smethurst says US ambassador Tom Schaeffer privately apologized to her for her treatment, but will not do so in public.
Before November 14, she and her husband had planned to return to America to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary, but, as she learned, everything's different now in America. "We decided to stay in Australia and celebrate here," she says. "There was always the chance we could have got the same customs officer if we flew to America." (Los Angeles Weekly)
November 14: Author and political gadfly Gore Vidal gives an interview to the Los Angeles Weekly, where he lambasts the USA Patriot Act I and II: "We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country —- like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged." Of the Bush administration's reception by America's Founding Fathers, whom Vidal has just written a book about, he says, "Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans -— most Americans would not think of them as citizens. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process. ...[N]obody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk." (Los Angeles Weekly)
November 14: At the funeral of Lieutenant Brian Slavenas, killed in the downing of a US Chinook helicopter, his mother blasts the Bush administration: "George Bush killed my son," says Rosemary Dietz Slavenas after the services. "I believe my son Brian died not for his country but because of our country's lack of a coherent and civilized foreign policy." (Chicago Sun-Times [cached Google copy])
November 14: The father of the youngest British soldier to die in Iraq says that Bush and Blair are meeting the families of slain Britons for his own personal and political gain. "For these people to meet families, it is only for their own gain," says retired Navy man Robert Kelly, whose son Andrew died in Basra. "They are not sympathetic towards people like me. They don't really care that my son lost his life. Tony Blair doesn't care. He doesn't care about anyone. So what does George Bush care about our families and my family? He doesn't care." Bush is meeting with families during his upcoming three-day state visit; Kelly was invited to meet with him, but declined. Another father of a lost British soldier, Reg Keys, who lost his son in July during a mob attack in the Iraqi town of Majar al-Kabir, says of Bush, "I am totally against his visit. I don't know how he has the nerve to show his face after costing the lives of 54 British soldiers for his own glory. I do not see a noble cause. I looked at my son's body and that did not seem very noble to me. He did not die for a noble cause. He was killed by a mob. Bush is supposed to be a religious man yet he went into another country and wreaked death and destruction. That doesn't seem to be the way God would want people to act. ...This visit is purely political. Mr Bush needs good images flashed back home." Keys previously challenged Blair over his son's death at a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral. Keys tells a Welsh newspaper, "He [Bush] is the man responsible for my son's death, with his gung-ho tactics of rushing off to war. ...I have not yet been given the opportunity to meet Bush but, if I had, I would walk from Wales to London -- if I could meet him face to face, look him in the eye, and not be held back. ...But somehow I don't think a meeting with Bush will happen. I think people will be handpicked. Bush thinks he has won the war by storming through Iraq in three weeks and pulling down a statue -- it's ridiculous." Keys is offended by Bush's intention to pray with bereaved families: "This is Bible-bashing Bush who thinks he has some divine power to be doing this -- it infuriates me." (The Age, Scotsman, Western Mail/IC Wales)

CPA announces it will turn over political power to an Iraqi government by June 30, 2004

November 15: Iraq's Coalitional Provisional Authority signs the Agreement on Political Process that formally mandates turning the responsibilities of governing Iraq to the Iraqi people by June 30, 2004. Paul Bremer signs for the CPA, and for the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani signs. According to the agreement, a fundamental structure of law will be drafted and approved by February 28, 2004; a "Transitional National Assembly" will be elected by May 31, 2004; the CPA will formally dissolve on June 30, 2004; and elections for a new Iraqi government will be held on December 31, 2005, when the earlier law structure will be absorbed into a new government under a new constitution and new laws. British CPA official Mark Etherington, governor of Wasit province, writes in his memoir, Revolt on the Tigris: "The shock of this [sudden announcement that the CPA would dissolve on June 30] was considerable, and I felt quite numbed by it. One could not mistake the general sense of of relief which permeated HQ's announcement of the news -- there was no appetite for remaining in Iraq among many in the CPA in Baghdad, and here at last was an exit strategy." (SourceWatch, Mark Etherington)
November 15: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warns that American troops may remain in Iraq for 2 years, or even more, even though the transition from American rule to Iraqi rule is slated to take place earlier than originally planned. The transition will involve giving real power to the 24-member Iraqi Governing Council, appointed in toto by the US, and followed next year by elections for a constituent assembly that would draft a constitution for a permanent, democratic state. Some members of the IGC want a swift withdrawal of US forces, arguing that their presence only deepens public resentment and boosts sympathy for the resistance. One of the Bush administration's primary goals is to portray the transition as an idea devised by the Iraqis themselves, and not a solution imposed on them from the US. (Independent)
November 15: The General Accounting Office finds that Army National Guard troops have been routinely denied appropriate medical care if wounded, and hundreds suffer from problems receiving standard pay and benefits. "This is not just a 'significant' rate of error; it's a virtual system meltdown of a critical support function," says Republican congressman Christopher Shays. Some of the recommendations to correct the system will take years to implement and cost millions of dollars. A few examples from the GAO report: 34 soldiers from Colorado were erroneously billed over $1.6 million in "overpayment" corrections; 4 Virginia soldiers wounded in Iraq were denied medical care because their requests for treatment were ignored; dozens of Virginia Guardsmen failed to receive their pay for weeks at a time, some for over six weeks. The Pentagon responds to the GAO report with a brief letter that reads, in part: "We are taking concrete steps to fix these problems and are seeking instances where other units and individuals may have experienced similar problems and fixing them as well." (European Stars and Stripes)
November 15: A combined Illinois-Iowa National Guard helicopter unit has complained since October 2001 that only 3 of its 14 Chinook helicopters were outfitted with even basic missile defense systems. Complaints notwithstanding, those helicopters were sent to Iraq and used in missions. "There is clearly a dispute about the information that was given from the Guard to the Army before mobilization," says Democratic Senator Richard Durbin. "I cannot understand how that unit can be activated with only three of 14 helicopters properly equipped." "We clearly reported it and showed the unit's deficiencies," says Lieutenant Colonel Alicia Tate-Nadeau of the Illinois National Guard. "The information was there for them to view." The Army accuses the unit of misrepresenting itself as combat-ready, and has had to scramble to find missile defense systems for the Chinooks. Some of the systems, when delivered, were damaged and had to be repaired for them to function. One of the 16 helicopters was shot down on November 2, causing the deaths of 16 servicemen; that helicopter had the basic missile defense system in place, but lacked the advanced system that all Army and some Guard helicopters possess. After the crash, Durbin told the media, "These guard units come in and have to take hand-me-down equipment and scavenge equipment and plead for the same kind of protection that regular Army helicopter crews have. ...This crash last Sunday proves that they're all vulnerable. They cannot be treated like second-class soldiers. They deserve to be treated like all the men and women in uniform, with the same dignity and the same protection. ...You would think as soon as those helicopters got into the war theater they would be handed the equipment they need."
Durbin told Congress, "We have given this administration every dollar they have asked for. Now they must give our soldiers what they need to be safe and successful." Military spokesmen have denied that the Guard aircraft are less than adequately equipped, but this is challenged by sources on the ground, including one servicewoman who was on board the Chinook when it was downed. One e-mail Durbin received from a Guard soldier who operates the helicopters told him that until about six weeks ago, half the aircraft did not have even the basic anti-missile equipment and did not have seat armor. "so we were essentially flying around for five months with no ASE equipment," the source reveals. Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity, a private defense and military think tank, confirms that National Guard and Reserve units typically do not receive the latest equipment. "They get the hand-me-downs, generally," he says. He believes that cost pressures are to blame. "Aircraft operating in Iraq or Afghanistan ought to have the latest version of whatever aircraft survivability equipment is available, you would just think," he continues. "We're sort of doing this on the cheap." (Copley News Service/San Diego Union-Tribune, Chicago Tribune)
November 15: Donald Rumsfeld "understands" the delay by Japan in deciding to deploy its troops alongside US and British troops in Iraq. Rumsfeld says, "Each country needs to think through these issues and make judgments that are appropriate to their circumstance and their perspective and we are completely comfortable with that. And we're confident that our friend here, friends here in Japan will make decisions that are appropriate to them and that is what we want them to do." The director general of Japan's Defense Agency, Shigeru Ishiba, hints that Japan would feel more comfortable sending troops to Iraq if they were part of a UN international force. (VOA News)
November 15: It takes a column in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald to remind Americans why the current ban on media coverage of the bodies of returning US troops to Dover Air Force Base was banned. In 1989, during the Panama conflict, then-President George Bush "did a goof-walk for the cameras of the White House press corps, to demonstrate the effect of pain he suffered in his neck" at the same time bodies were being offloaded. Several news networks juxtaposed the two films, of bodies being delivered back to US soil while the president clowned for the cameras. "Retribution was swift. The media were banned from Dover and the traditional body receival ceremonies were ended. Over time the ban came to be ignored, but in the days before this year's Iraq war, the Pentagon ordered that it be observed to the fullest. The media manipulation of this Bush's team borders on paranoia. They go to great lengths to set the scene -- carting specially produced backdrops around the country for his public appearances and even floodlighting the usually darkened Statue of Liberty for one of his New York night-time speeches. The words get the same care and attention -- death in Iraq is bad news, so he doesn't talk about it. He has met some of the families of the dead in private and they all get a letter of condolence, but he is happier talking about the grand scheme of the war on terrorism or, better still, the economy. Some Republican commentators are beginning to question the President's aloofness. But the spin from the White House, as told by one of his aides to The New York Times, is that Bush would seem insensitive if he publicly acknowledged some, but not all, the deaths. ...It is all part of the Bush Administration's ongoing war with the media: when it is not denying them access to Dover, it is attacking them for not reporting the 'good news' out of Iraq; denying reports of its own cavalier prewar predictions of finding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and of a warm welcome in Iraq; and rejecting allegations from within the intelligence community that, after Iraq, it is now deliberately exaggerating the threat from weapons of mass destruction posed by Syria, Libya and Cuba. ...While families and whole communities grieve about their losses in Iraq, he storms the country with his hand out for tens of millions of dollars in donations for his forthcoming re-election campaign. While he talks about the war dead in only the most general terms, he goes on and on about signs of economic recovery. ...The pragmatism -- some might call it cynicism -- is understandable in terms of pure political strategy because, despite all the talk about patriotism and the defense of freedom and liberty, Americans are getting sick of this war." (Sydney Morning Herald)

November 16: Two US Black Hawk helicopters are shot down by Iraqi insurgents near the northern city of Mosul. 17 Americans die in the crashes, the worst single loss of life since the start of the war. Five more soldiers are wounded and one is missing. After being subjected to ground fire, the two helicopters slam into each other in the air; both crash immediately. (Toronto Star, CNN)

Bush fights for expanded use of battlefield nuclear weapons

November 16: The Bush administration continues to push its concept of "usable" nuclear weapons and a "winnable" nuclear war, despite outrage and opposition from world leaders around the globe. The Senate included $7.5 million for research on nuclear "bunker-buster" bombs and $10.8 million to plans for nuclear "pit" facilities to produce triggers for new nuclear bombs as part of an unrelated appropriations bill; the amounts are less than requested by the administration. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, an opponent of the concepts, says, "A one-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero in New York and eject one million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air. ...By seeking to develop new nuclear weapons, the United States sends the message that nuclear weapons have a future battlefield role and utility. That is the wrong direction and, in my view, will only cause America to be placed in greater jeopardy in the future." Bush has advocated since mid-2001 the abolition of the US moratorium on underground nuclear testing. The Armed Services Committee says in a report promoting the new nuclear policies, "As seen in Afghanistan, conventional weapons are not always able to destroy underground targets. ...The United States may need nuclear earth penetrators [bunker-busters] to destroy underground facilities where rogue nations have stored chemical, biological or nuclear weapons."
Opponents of nuclear weapons disagree, saying that the idea of crossing the line between fighting a conventional and nuclear war is unthinkable, and arguing that such a move would promote, rather than deter, terrorism. "[The new policy] creates the image of 'clean' nuclear weapons," says Brice Smith of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "We can use them without all the old Cold War anxieties about total destruction. A lot of psychology is involved here and it includes the very powerful idea of being able to defeat attempts to use chemical and biological weapons against us." Most experts say that "usable nukes" will pose a tremendous environmental hazard. Bunker-busting bombs would explode close to the surface of their targets, spreading radioactivity through an explosion of dust and causing the death of tens of thousands of people if dropped on urban areas. Smith also notes that the explosions would spread deadly chemicals or bioagents, rather than destroying them. Additionally, the political fallout from threatening to use, let alone using, such weapons would be dangerous to the United States and its Western allies. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says, "Looking back over the 40 years of the Cold War, we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. In 2003, however, they run the Pentagon, and preventive war —- the Bush doctrine -— is now official policy." "What you're seeing is a thoughtless strategy being pursued under cover of the war on terrorism, by people who always wanted to do this," says arms-control expert William Arkin of Johns Hopkins University's Institute of Advanced International Studies. "Now, they're in a position to seize their chance." (Toronto Star)
November 16: Britain's former ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, says that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon ignored British warnings that the US was failing to prepare for a crumbling security situation in Iraq after the proposed ouster of Saddam Hussein, raising more questions about a lack of planning by US forces being at least partly to blame for Iraq's present security problems. The British regularly raised their concerns about how much planning was going on to secure the country after Saddam, but the issue was largely ignored. Meyer says, "One of the things that did not work out between us was a properly agreed strategy. ...I suspect that a lot of things that we were saying to the Americans when we had a number of meetings towards the end of last year on post-Saddam strategy, a lot of those things have now been shown to be right. ...I think they were consumed in the contingency planning for war. We were saying that's fine but we must be clear in our own mind what is happening afterwards. That was absolutely indispensable. The message was well taken in the State Department but it could not agree on an approach with the Defense Department and the Vice President." Meyer also reveals that Bush ignored a personal plea from Blair to delay the invasion. (Guardian)
November 16: Negotiations still go on about the route anti-war protesters in London will take to demonstrate against Bush during his visit. Organizers insist that they should be allowed to march down Whitehall and close to the Houses of Parliament; Bush's security team wants the protesters redirected much farther away, out of sight and sound of the President. (icBirmingham)

November 17: The CIA and the Pentagon have created a "task force" for "special operations" in and outside Iraq to assassinate "high-value targets:" The New York Times reports, "The new Special Operations organization is designed to act with greater speed on intelligence tips about 'high-value targets' and not be contained within the borders where American conventional forces are operating in Iraq and Afghanistan." Therefore, the assassination squad, to be formed from US Army Special Forces troops, can operate in any country it likes, whether it be other Middle East countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, and even within France, Germany, and the United States itself. The question of respecting another nation's sovreignity comes to mind, as does the legality of such assassination operations outside of Iraq. Nation Institute/AlterNet)
November 17: An article in the conservative Weekly Standard entitled "Case Closed" publishes excerpts from a secret memo dated October 27, 2003 and obtained by the magazine's writers. The memo was written by the Pentagon's Douglas Feith, the neoconservative who heads the Pentagon's alternative intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, which was tasked to produce evidence of Iraqi WMDs and proof of the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda had connections. The memo, sent to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, included a cavalcade of false and misconstrued "evidence" of those allegations. The Standard will trumpet the memo as "proof" of all the allegations trotted out by the Bush administration to justify its war on Iraq, but within days the specifics of the memo are debunked. (Frank Rich [PDF file])

Bush insists on extreme "lockdown" security measures for his trip to London

November 17: "Extraordinary" measures to ensure President Bush's safety during a three-day state visit to London are being enacted, measures more appropriate to a full-blown war zone than to the capital of the US's most trusted ally. Roads in Whitehall have been closed with concrete blockades. Overhead, a no-fly zone has been established with the RAF on standby to shoot down unidentified planes. All police leaves have been cancelled. Bush's handlers have nixed the original plan for a horse-drawn carriage ride through central London with the Queen, citing security concerns. London police are resisting requests from the Bush team to create an "exclusion zone" in central London that would prohibit citizens from getting anywhere near the Palace grounds or government buildings such as Whitehall; such a move would disrupt the daily routines of thousands of Londoners. London protesters say they fear that Bush's 200+ strong security team, which has "shoot-to-kill" orders, may overreact and open fire on protesters. Senior Metropolitan Police officials concur, saying that the US Secret Service has essentially ignored their input and has insisted on handling security their way without regard for the police's recommendations. The Met worries that if a demonstrator were to break through the "exclusion zone," the Secret Service's "rules of engagement" could interpret this as a threat to Bush and result in an agent shooting a civilian dead.
Labour MP Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons and an outspoken critic of Tony Blair and Bush, says, "I'm appalled that US Secret Service agents will have the power of 'shoot to kill' in the UK. If they act on these powers they will create mayhem. The rug should be pulled from under this trip immediately and the whole thing cancelled." Paul McBride QC warned that US agents could face criminal charges if they were to fire on civilians. "They have no special status in the UK, and if they use unreasonable force they could be charged with murder," he says. Home Secretary David Blunkett refuses to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush's entourage this week; in the case of the "accidental" shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush's protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor. Bush's handlers, saying they believe terrorists could use the protests as a venue for an assassination attempt, and claiming to have information of just such an attack planned by al-Qaeda, want all protests cancelled, the entire Tube (subway) network shut down, the use of armed US air force planes and attack helicopters to patrol London air space, the placement of battlefield weaponry to use against potential rioters, and central London to be closed down entirely; so far, the British government has refused most of the requests, though they do agree to the creation of an "exclusion zone."

One of the most startling requests to be turned down is the Bush team's desire to travel with a battlefield weapon called a 'mini-gun', which usually forms part of the mobile armory in the presidential cavalcade. It is fired from a tank and can kill dozens of people in seconds. Ministers have made clear to Washington that the firepower of the mini-gun will not be available during the state visit to Britain. In addition, the Queen has rejected Bush team requests to restructure Buckingham Palace to resist bomb and airborne assaults; a royal official observes, "They wanted blast- and bullet-proofed windows and curtains and some strengthening to the walls of the president's suite and other rooms at the palace where he would be spending time. The president's security men seem obsessed with the idea of an airborne attack on the palace. ...Her majesty takes the view that no amount of strengthening of windows and walls could protect the president in such an eventuality and that the work would cause disruption and involve discarding original fixtures and fittings." Over 5,000 Metropolitican police will be on duty during the three-day visit (later raised to 14,000). An internal memo sent to Cabinet Office staff urges staff to work from home if at possible during the presidential visit. Serious disruption would be caused by "the President Bush vehicle entourage requesting cleared secured vehicle routes around London and the security cordons creating a sterile zone around him."
Mick Napier, one of the Stop The War Coalition's Scottish organizers, condemns "the US, a British ally, for suggesting it would deploy force against British citizens. ...A peaceful demonstration by a campaign group is now faced by an armed force of the US state. This is surely a step too far for most British people. Deaths have so far been avoided in the UK. It is intolerable that the US should police the streets of Britain. There is no question of any lethal threat from the Stop The War Coalition. We simply want to ruin Bush's election chances." First Lady Laura Bush says that the British monarchy has always been "a fairy tale to the United States. Americans have always been fascinated by the monarchy and certainly the British monarchy." Bush and his entourage will dine with the Queen at a state banquet, and Bush will give a speech at Whitehall lauding the US/British alliance as well as meet with selected family members of slain British soldiers. He will also participate in a meeting about HIV/AIDS. "I travel in somewhat of a bubble," Bush tells reporters. (Daily Mirror, Guardian, Scotsman, New Zealand Herald, Sunday Herald, Guardian, Washington Times)
November 17: Bush backs out of a previously scheduled address to Britain's Parliament because he is afraid of being heckled by anti-war MPs. White House adviser Harlan Ullman says, "They [Bush's handlers] would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity. But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out." Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn says, "This is yet another slight on this country by the president of the USA. The least he could do is subject himself to questions from MPs." Colleague John McDonnell says, "Bush might be able to run from the protesters, he might be able not to see the banners. But he must not be able to hide from the anger felt across the country at this unjustified war." Another MP, Doug Henderson, says, "It not only shows he is chicken, but it is a great discourtesy." Previous world leaders, including Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Francois Mitterand, have all given speeches to the Lords and the Commons while visiting Britain. Tony Blair gave a joint address to the American Senate and Congress in July. Earlier this year, Bush was embarrassed when he was heckled by MPs in Australia. (Daily Mirror, IC Newcastle)
November 17: Italian Marco Calamai, a special counselor to the US-led Iraqi authority in the province of Dhi Qar, resigns his post, saying that the US is mismanaging reconstruction, is out of touch with Iraqis, and only fueling their anger. Calamai says that an interim authority under UN auspices is the only way Iraq will recover. He says the American-led administration, headed by L. Paul Bremer, doesn't understand Iraqi society and has muddled reconstruction projects by delaying financing; he blames its policies, in part, for last week's attack on the Italian Carabinieri barracks that killed 19 Italians, as well as 14 others. The US-led authority has created "delusion, social discontent and anger" among Iraqis and allowed terrorism to "easily take root." The attack on the barracks "is the consequence of a mistaken policy and an underevaluation of the complexity of the social structure of Iraq," he says. "There needs to be a radical change with respect to the policies taken so far by the USA." (ABC News)

Theft of Democratic computer files by Republican operatives

November 17: Dozens of computer memos exchanged between Democratic congressmen critical of Bush administration judicial nominees have apparently been stolen by someone with ties to the Republican party and leaked to the media. Democrats write Senate sergeant-at-arms Bill Pickle to ask for a probe as to how these confidential memos got into the hands of the press. "It appears that these documents...were taken without authorization and possibly illegally," writes Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, who files a complaint with the Capital police. The memos were written in 2001, and concern Democratic opposition strategies to conservative judicial nominees by the Bush administration. The memos were cited in an editorial that appeared a week ago in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. Senate aides said the Judiciary Committee's computer server has been "sequestered," and that backup tapes were placed in a safe under the control of Capitol Police. The only paper copies exist in a locked file cabinet in Durbin's office, and the only electronic copies exist on the Judiciary Committee's computer servers, supposedly in secure files. Republican spokespersons deny any complicity, but use the contents of the memos to revile the Democrats for being beholden to "liberal special interests." Republican Senator and committee chairman Orrin Hatch says, "To have one or two of the Democrats start to scream that somebody stole them [the memos]...is how they try to get around the criticism." Hatch adds that the memos may have come from a "conscience-stricken" Democratic staffer. Democrats have blocked six of Bush's most controversial and conservative judicial appointees after approving well over 160 of them. In a second letter to Pickle, Durbin and fellow Democrat Edward Kennedy ask for Pickle's assistance in securing a computer security firm to help ensure the safety of their documents. The Capital police seal off the Senate Judiciary Room and confiscate computer records after Durbin's complaint. In his letter, Durbin wrote, "[I]t appears that the documents in question were taken without authorization and possibly illegally. This constitutes a serious breach of security and calls into question the [confidentiality] of Senate internal documents in both electronic and hard copy form." (Boston Globe, The Hill)
November 17: A new background-check system launched by the FBI notifies counterterrorism agents when suspects on its watch list try to buy guns; however, regulations prohibit the agents from receiving details of the transaction, including whether the suspect actually bought the weapons. The FBI is notified if local authorities block the purchase. Officials say the result is a situation where terrorism suspects who do not complete gun purchases can be located, while successful purchasers may not be. The situation is a result of Attorney General John Ashcroft's interpretation of the Brady gun-control law. The law bars authorities from sharing information with investigators about legal gun buyers and does not forbid terrorism suspects from purchasing firearms. "Being a suspected member of a terrorist organization doesn't disqualify a person from owning a gun any more than being under investigation for a nonterrorism felony would," says a Justice Department official. Gun-control advocates said the rules endanger Americans by giving suspected terrorists an opportunity to evade scrutiny while obtaining weapons. The situation also has frustrated many law-enforcement officials who wish to monitor the whereabouts and activities of suspected terrorist operatives and their associates. "This policy is mind-boggling," says Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg. "We could have a nationwide lookout for a known terrorist within our borders, but if he obtained a weapon, the Justice Department's policy is to refuse to reveal his location to law-enforcement officials." Ashcroft has systematically interpreted gun laws to favor the widest dissemination of guns, even at the expense of tracking terrorist suspects. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ashcroft's advisers stopped the FBI from comparing a list of Sept. 11 detainees against a list of approved gun purchasers, arguing that under the Brady law, the Justice Department is prohibited from using such records for law-enforcement purposes. An al-Qaeda training manual recovered by US forces in Afghanistan includes a chapter noting the ease with which firearms can be obtained in the United States and urges followers to "obtain an assault rifle legally, preferably an AK-47 or variations, learn how to use it properly and go and practice in the areas allowed for such training." (AK-47s are banned for public ownership in the US, but numerous copycat variations are available.) (Seattle Times)
November 17: Hollinger International is examining investments that were made by Richard Perle, a director on the publisher's board and prominent Bush administration defense advisor, on behalf of the company. Perle is suspected of making investments that enriched him personally at the expense of the company. Earlier this year, Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board after he was criticized for having a $750,000 contract with Global Crossing, the bankrupt telecoms group. Global Crossing was at the time seeking to overcome Defense Department objections on its sale to Hutchison Whampoa, a Chinese-controlled company. A Defense Department investigation has already cleared Perle of any charges of conflict of interest in the Global Crossing case: "The inspector general's report confirms the integrity of the Defense Policy Board and Mr. Perle's participation," says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (MSNBC, Reuters/FindLaw)
November 17: London Mayor Ken Livingstone blasts George W. Bush on the eve of his state visit to London, calling him the "greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen." Livongstone, who is hosting a demonstration in City Hall, says that during an Easter visit to California, he called Bush's government "the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years. Some US journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction. ...I don't formally recognize George Bush because he was not officially elected. So we are organizing an alternative reception for everybody who is not George Bush." Richard Wanless, co-ordinator of the 'Sedgefield Against War' protest, concurs: "The visit is a massive security risk and for those living in the area, it jeopardizes our safety. No matter where he goes, there will be protests from London to the North-east to make sure he knows he is not welcome. To me, he is a war criminal that has illegal occupation of Iraq. To add to the insult, there are families here who lost their children to the war." The Reverend Martin King, rector of Sedgefield, adds: "A lot of people here are very angry with the way the US administration is putting itself above the law. One person in my congregation said if President Bush wanted to look around the church, he would be welcome because it is a place for sinners, but he hoped his henchmen would leave their ironware at the door. His policies are very unwelcome in the region -- I have not heard anyone voicing support for him." (Independent/Waging Peace)
November 17: Al Arabiya in Dubai broadcasts an audiotape said to have been recorded by Saddam Hussein, calling for a holy war against US occupation forces as well as against Israel. The tape also calls for the reinstatement of Hussein and the Ba'ath party leadership. (New York Times/ENorth)
November 17: Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh returns to the airwaves after five weeks of rehabilitation at an opulent Tucson, Arizona drug clinic and spa. His brother David says that Limbaugh has successfully completed the first phase of his treatment. He did not say what the next step is. Few expect Limbaugh to discuss his ongoing investigation for illicit drug purchases and money laundering, as these charges are still under investigation. (ABC, Chicago Tribune)
November 17: Left-wing author and filmmaker Michael Moore exhorts Britons to protest the upcoming state visit by President Bush. "It's up to the British people to do their job in letting the American people know the British people don't support this war," he says. He continues, "It is a photo-opportunity. With the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jacks flying in Pall Mall and the whole royal thing he is going to be treated to, this is all about trying to shore him up for next year." Moore hopes that mass protests will spoil the photo ops. "That can happen only in one way, and that's a very large physical presence in the streets of London, letting the American people know the people of Great Britain do not support this war and do not support George Bush. It has to be done in a graphic way, in a physical way; it can't just be said. It has to be done with the images that will be sent back to America because the American media will be there with Bush." (Independent/CCMEP)

November 18: Several media outlets are embarassed when they find that the Weekly Standard article on the " proven, established ties" between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein that they had endorsed or reprinted turns out to be false. Major media outlets that immediately ran with the story before waiting for a response from the Department of Defense include the New York Post, the Washington Times, and FOX News. FOX News and the Post are, like the Standard, owned by conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch; the Times is owned by conservative religious icon Sun Myung Moon. Even after the Pentagon called the report "inaccurate," the Post ran an editorial titled "Bush Was Right." After that, New York Times columnist William Safire endorsed the report, alleging that the secret memo "has gone relatively uncovered by the major media" only because it had surfaced in the Standard. (Editor & Publisher)

Bush's visit to London

November 18: President Bush arrives in London to a reception featuring all the pomp and circumstance one could wish for; Prince Charles is on hand at Heathrow Airport to welcome the American entourage, along with a large number of protesters. Lindis Percy, a 61-year old grandmother, climbs the gates of Buckingham Palace, where she stays for two hours with a banner of an upside-down US flag with the message "Elizabeth Windsor and Co -- he's not welcome" written upon it. After she climbs down, she is arrested. Fellow protester Anni Rainbow says, "she's protesting against Bush's visit. He's a bogus president and we don't want him here." Witness Stephen Beasley adds, "she seemed happy to be there. It takes courage to stand on the gates of Buckingham Palace." Before Percy's protest, London police announce that they are nearly tripling the number of police on security detail, from 5,000 to a staggering 14,000. In related news, anti-war protesters succeed in getting permission to march through central London in protest of Bush's visit. and details of Bush's meetings with families who have lost loved ones in Iraq are being worked out; Bush will not meet with any family members who might criticize his Iraqi policies. (Daily Mirror)
November 18: The Bush administration is blocking the efforts of a number of US servicemen held as POWs during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and tortured by their captors to receive monetary judgments awarded them by US courts. On July 7, District Judge Richard Roberts ordered Iraq to pay the 17 ex-POWs and their families $653 million in compensatory damages and $306 million in punitive damages; Roberts then ordered a temporary freeze on $653 million in Iraqi assets then held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as a source of money for the settlement. But the Bush administration has overriden the freeze and blocked the payout, saying that the money is needed for Iraqi reconstruction costs. Most of the money was slated by Bush for shipment to Baghdad where US soldiers are handing out the cash to Iraqi civil servants and military pensioners. One of the POWs, US airman Jeffrey Zaun, was tortured with electric cattle prods and kept handcuffed so tightly that the nerves in his hands were crushed. A second POW, Marine pilot Craig Berryman, was burned with lit cigarettes and had his bones broken during beatings with clubs, pistol barrels, and rubber hoses. Air Force pilot Dale Storr, also captured by Iraqis in 1991, said in March 2003, "I was thinking I wouldn't get out alive, and hoping they'd just kill me.... Three days in, my nose was broken, they dislocated my shoulder, busted my eardrum, I was vomiting, and I'm being kicked. ...I was screaming in agony, so miserable, in pain." Storr said the Iraqis wouldn't tell the Red Cross he was alive. "My family thought I was dead, and they had a memorial service at the squadron at the base in Saudi Arabia. ...My mother died of cancer six months after I got home; I'm sure my captivity hastened it." Storr is currently active in the Air National Guard and faces redeployment in Iraq. "It terrifies me thinking I could be a prisoner of war again," he says. "Hopefully, this whole thing will be taken care of and we'll not have to go over there, but if we do, we'll go over there and win."
Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer says, "Restricting these funds as a result of this litigation would affect adversely the ability of the United States to achieve security and stability in the region, would compromise the safety of U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians, and would be harmful to U.S. national security interests." The decision to withhold the judgment from the POWs was affirmed by a higher court; currently the administration is in court attempting to overturn the original decision that entitles the POWs to compensation. "It does surprise me a little bit that Bush is not helping," says former POW and Navy airman Jeff Fox, who is not part of the lawsuits. "It sends a very bad message that a commander in chief would place veterans and prisoners of war second behind a foreign nation." The Senate has passed a nonbinding resolution calling for the monies to be paid to the POWs; instead, the Bush administration is now attempting to find a way to use the USA Patriot Act against the POWs and their claims. (Intervention Magazine)
November 18: Federal appeals judge Barrington Parker Jr. questions the US government's right to designate American citizens "enemy combatants," saying that it would be "a sea change" in the Constitution to let the Bush administration make such a decision. Parker says that such a move may be made by the US Congress, but not the executive branch. Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement tells the judge that the urgency of the war against terrorism necessitated such moves. "Al-Qaeda made the battlefields the United States, and they've given every indication they're trying to make the United States the battlefield again," he says. But Parker retorts that giving such power to the executive branch with limited review by the courts would be "a sea change in the constitutional life of this country and...unprecedented in civilized society." The government is asking the appeals court to overturn a lower court finding that American citizen and accused al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla be allowed to meet with his lawyers and family members, and in general be given Constitutionally mandated due process to fight the designation. (Detroit Free Press)
November 18: Many American lawmakers have changed their views on Iraq after meeting with wounded soldiers. Republican congressman Bill Young voted to stop charging wounded GIs for hospital food after his wife met with a wounded soldier. Democrat John Murtha, a Bush supporter, demanded the firing of the administration officials responsible for setting Bush's Iraq policies after meeting with a wounded Marine. Republican congressman John Carter says that his meeting with wounded soldiers solidified his support for Bush's Iraq policy. In contrast, Democratic congressman Brian Baird, a clinical psychologist who has worked with veterans' rehabilitation, D-Wash., says, "When you see these horrifically injured people who fought with courage and professionalism and you ask yourself, 'Did they really have to be there?' or 'Could we have found another way?' It's a deeply troubling question." (Guardian)
November 18: Columnist William Safire notes that it didn't take long for perception of Bush's state visit to Great Britain to start going sour. "Hand-wringing diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic are saying 'it seemed like such a good idea at the time,'" Safire writes. "They are having second thoughts about this week's full-fledged state visit of a U.S. president to the United Kingdom." The invitation, issued shortly after the 9/11 attacks, seemed to be a political winner at the time, but huge protests, outcries from Londoners about the tremendous traffic snarls and the incredible security measures taken by the Bush entourage, and heavy criticism from European allies have brought pressure on Bush and Blair to cut the visit short, a decision Bush refuses to make. (New York Times/Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune)
November 18: The British daily newspaper Guardian asks 60 British lawmakers, writers, celebrities, and ordinary citizens to speak their minds to President Bush while he is in London. The paper prints a respective sample of their replies. Some are supportive, but many lambast Bush, most notably in the response from playwright Harold Pinter, who says succinctly, "I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments." Pilot Lotfi Raissi, falsely accused of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, writes of the seven months of "hell" he and his family suffered during the investigation, including five month's unjust imprisonment in Belmarsh prison. "Many people will now always think of me as a terrorist," he writes. "Because the US won't admit they were wrong and withdraw the warrant [for his arrest] I can't travel out of the UK except to visit Algeria. I can't even visit my in-laws in France. The 'war on terror' has moved on but my life and family are still in pieces."
Novelist Sebastian Faulks writes, "None of the reasons you offered for invading Iraq -- taken singly or jointly -- stood up to moral or strategic scrutiny. This was clear to even those of us well disposed towards America. We were at first puzzled ('I'm sure they know something we don't, they're just not allowed to tell us'); then, as it became apparent that you knew nothing, we became unhappy. What we hated was the way you failed to understand the inheritance of the west. It was not a birthright of absolute superiority, but it was the best thing we had; it was something that went, as Mr Blair put it, to the 'heart of our credibility as a nation.' And this credibility, for which so many millions died -- you have let it run through your hands."
A 12-year old boy, Mickey, writes: "I would just like to say how much I hate you. You have done nothing positive in your whole time as president. You are the reason for the poverty in the Middle East. You have no idea what you are doing. You're killing loads of people, and that is not excluding your own nation too. There are still lots of very poor people in America, and they are getting poorer. You keep making excuses about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but all you were in Iraq for was the oil. Saddam had been there for 30 years, so why is it only now you decided to act? You keep talking about September 11 when all you do is bomb other countries and give Israel lots of money. It is a very bad idea that you have come over here. I don't want to grow up in a country which is so influenced by you and your policies."
Writer Ronan Bennett pens, "There is no way to write this but in anger. For the dead and mutilated you have left in the wake of your shocking tread, from Afghanistan to Iraq. For the prisoners you have caged, manacled and tortured, from Bagram to Guantanamo. For your worship of the warrior. For the smart bombs you dropped from 30,000 ft and the missiles you fired from 1,000 miles. For the flesh this hateful technology has charred and for the limbs it has severed. For your threats to the sovereign nations and international bodies who oppose your ambitions. For the crass lies you told the world. For your cynical corruption of law. For your naked plundering of a conquered people's wealth. For your blank cheque to Ariel Sharon. For every signature with which you consigned a human being to the death chamber in Texas. For the super-rich friends you have so handsomely rewarded and for the poor, unemployed and marginal in your own country whose lives you continue to blight. For making the world an infinitely more dangerous place. For all these reasons, do not be fooled by the flags you will see fluttering on the Mall. Do not be fooled by the red carpets the toadies will guide you to step upon. Look about you, if your hosts will let you look, if your flunkeys dare let you peek from beneath the official shield. Look about you when you land. You will see people in their tens of thousands protesting against your visit. Do not say we are 'lucky' to live in a country that permits free speech and free assembly. Do not insult us like that. Those rights were hard won. I doubt that what you see will chasten you, still less change your mind -- you are a man of conviction, of ideological certainty, you have truly global ambitions and power to match -- but at least it should be clear to you, Mr Bush, that you are not welcome here."
Writer Polly Toynbee notes, "If you should -- by some security mistake -- catch a glimpse of the enormous demonstrations expected during your visit, do not underestimate their meaning. This is not old Europe anti-Americanism. We are by no means an anti-American nation. Apart from the left fringe and the mohican fringe, we are broadly pro-American and always have been. No, this is personal. This is about you and your neo-conservative monsters who have illegitimately captured the White House with cash and hanging chads. Tony Blair has made a catastrophic error in allying himself to you, when he could have built a social democratic alternative vision of western democracy with our European allies. Go now, don't come back, be a one-term aberration the world can forget as soon as possible."
Historian Norman Davies writes, "We British are Europeans. We belong to the "Old Europe" which destroyed itself in repeated wars. We now have many good Muslim citizens. You will lose all support if you continue to rely so heavily on military strength and pre-emptive doctrines. ...[Y]ou contrive to favour the rich, the strong, and the militarists at every step, neglecting the common good. One expects the opposite from a Christian, Biblereading president. When, one wonders, might you reach the beatitudes?"
Human rights lawyer Imrah Khan writes, "I address you, George, in your capacity as the world's leading terrorist fundamentalist. Secure in your multimillions of dollars and your helpfully reinforcing pieties, I doubt you will see any reason to be interested in what the rest of the world makes of you. Thankfully, an increasing number of Americans are beginning to see you through the eyes of the rest of the world, so your reign could be shortlived. Truthfully, George, you are a disaster. You have managed, in a few short months and years, to identify the first part of the 21st century as the time when a voracious new American empire burst upon the world. In the world outside the US, nobody believes in your calls for democracy. You stole your own election. You try to strangle democracies, like Venezuela, which do not deliver pliant regimes. And everywhere the ordinary people of the earth, the overwhelming majority, will pay the price for your corrupt adventures. Nearer your home, hundreds of men rot in Guantanamo Bay without access to justice. Thousands have 'disappeared' on the US mainland. You preside over the worst witch hunt in public life since Senator McCarthy. Poverty, unemployment, racism are all on the rise. Like most 'emperors,' you poison your homeland while trying to devour the resources of the world. We live in a world, George, where we have to live together, to find common solutions to the huge problems that afflict us. The horrific irony is that there are answers to poverty; to war, racism, disease and ignorance. You, in the name of your god and your country, are deliberately drowning out those answers in your patriotic and bellicose clamour, because as you know they imply a world without you or your kind."
Habib Rasul, whose brother is detained at Guantanamo, writes, "You have held my younger brother Shafiq at Guantanamo Bay for over two years now, along with over 600 other men. Shafiq has not been charged with any crime, let alone proven guilty, but still he was paraded like an animal in the world's media and now is being detained in the most inhumane conditions. If these people have done something wrong then give them a fair trial and start treating them like human beings. Where are their human rights? Where is the free speech and democracy that you talk about? If you're going to come here to the UK, then come and talk to ministers about Shafiq's case. ...I have no access to Shafiq at all, which is very frightening. I wrote to you about him once and I had no response at all. The last thing you said about the people in Guantanamo Bay was that they were all bad people, but do you actually know the individual background of each person? I am not anti-American. I have a lot of US friends, and when I talk to them about my brother they are embarrassed because they can't believe what their own government is doing. If you are a true Christian, and you believe in freedom of speech, democracy and liberty, then you should be treating people humanely. You come across to me as being a Christian fundamentalist who opposes Islam and anything to do with Muslims. This situation with Shafiq is not just destroying him, but my whole family. How would you feel if someone held your children in the same conditions? Our older brother passed away recently and although I've asked for the information to be given to Shafiq, this has not happened. Do the right thing and release the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Don't leave them in this legal limbo."
Oxford Warden Alan Ryan writes, "You will be greeted by vast numbers of protesters who think the invasion of Iraq was a crime, and by others who think it was not so much a crime as a mistake -- badly planned, and initiated with no idea of what the US was getting into. I wish more of the protesters were there to remind you of your atrocious record as governor of Texas, when you upheld death sentences passed by corrupt and biased courts on illiterate, incompetent and all-toofrequently innocent defendants. Many of the protesters think you are a mass murderer; you certainly have form as a serial killer."
Dame Anita Roddick, a businesswoman, writes, "You represent rank imperialism and warmongering -- neither of them American traditions or values -- so I wish you were not coming to this country. Since you are, let me warn you that millions of us here will not tolerate our government if it follows your lead. ...I wish we were welcoming, instead of you, those courageous Americans who spoke out against the war and demonstrated American values, just as you have perverted them."
Lawyer Clive A. Stafford Smith writes, "Hypocrisy is the yeast for hatred. As Hannah Arendt said, 'the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself.' On November 6, you read a prepared speech to the National Endowment for Democracy. I would suggest you also listen to what you said. Your speech advocated an open, democratic society enshrining the very values that your administration has consistently eroded in the US since you came to power. You said, 'Democracy... teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, peaceful resolution of differences.' Yet the Bush doctrine would create a pretext for preemptive attack. You said, 'Successful societies protect freedom, with a consistent impartial rule of law.' Yet you have held 680 people in Guantanamo Bay for two years without any rule of law. ...[Y]ou have argued before the Supreme Court that while Americans should have human rights, citizens of other countries should not be considered human at all. You said, 'successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military.' Yet military expenditure under your regime eclipses all else. You said, 'Successful societies...invest in the health and education of their people.' Yet your poor people suffer without healthcare, and live without education. You said that America is 'the world's most influential nation.' You're right there. As the world's most powerful leader, your hypocrisy is sadly influential. How many terrorists will your hypocrisy foment before you recognise that leadership means practising what you preach?"
Ian Jack, the editor of Granta magazine, says, "I'm glad you're here. It may do you some good to know how much you and your policies are reviled among many people in the nation that is your closest ally. Your visit will also embarrass Tony Blair, who badly needs embarrassing. For both reasons you are most welcome. Red carpets, closed streets, traffic jams, helicopter surveillance, gold dinner plates: these are a small price for us to pay. The Iraq war, as I think even you must be discovering, has made the world more dangerous rather than less."
Writer John Mortimer says, "The result of the war has been to greatly increase the powers of terrorism in the world, and to make Britain and America unpopular. You talk about bringing democracy to Iraq when you yourself weren't even democratically elected. You have done nothing about Israel. And you have condemned countless numbers of your own citizens to death via the death penalty. Go away, go home." (Guardian)
November 18: Law enforcement officials say that Rush Limbaugh may have violated money laundering laws in his attempts to purchase illegal drugs. His lawyer denies the charges. "There's no basis for these charges. He has not committed any acts of money laundering and he absolutely denies it," says lawyer Roy Black. "I can assure you -— and Rush assures the listeners to his radio station -— when we can, we will tell the story, and he will tell it himself. Everybody will see what has really gone on here." The charges stem from numerous withdrawals made by Limbaugh from his bank accounts in amounts just under $10,000; banks are required to file reports with the government on withdrawals of $10,000 or over. "That in itself is a suspicious activity: they are structuring their transaction to avoid reporting to the government, and the bank is required to file with the federal government something called a suspicious activity report," says financial crimes expert Jack Blum. On his show, Limbaugh denies the charges -- "I was not laundering money. I was withdrawing money for crying out loud" -- and alleges that he is the victim of a conspiracy to frame him: "I know where the story comes from, I know who's behind it, and I know what the purpose of the story is, and I'll be able to tell you at some point." (ABC News, CNN)
November 18: National Enquirer editor David Perel chastizes talk show host Rush Limbaugh for failing to reveal the truth about his drug addiction. On November 17, Limbaugh told his audience that "it's quite hilarious to listen to people quote the National Enquirer as the world's foremost authority. I'm here to tell you they're not, and what you know, or think you know, you don't know." Perel responds, "Now that Rush is out of rehab, it's time for him to come clean. How he continues to spin the issue in the face of overwhelming facts amazes me. He would not have put himself into rehab if the Enquirer hadn't revealed he had a drug addiction. For him to take a shot at us certainly has a ring of dishonesty to it." (Poynter Online)

November 19: In a speech on foreign affairs at London's Banqueting House, President Bush claims that the Iraqi war saved the United Nations. Otherwise, he claims, the UN would have suffered the same fate as the League of Nations, which found itself ineffectual and unable to influence the actions of its member nations. Most of his speech consists of the same justifications for the war that he has said in other venues. (Guardian)
November 19: The UN announces that it is pulling at least 30 relief workers from southern and eastern Afghanistan, in response to a series of attacks on their personnel by Taliban fighters and others and what one UN worker calls an "unacceptably dangerous security situation." It is also closing refugee reception centers in four provinces. The most recent attack came on November 16, when a carload of suspected Taliban pulled up beside a clearly marked UN vehicle and shot French relief worker Bettina Goislard to death. Two bombings of UN targets occured the same day. The UN says it will review the situation within two weeks and decide whether to return their staff workers, or make further withdrawals. (New York Times/International Herald Tribune)
November 19: A sharp-eyed Democratic Underground reader discovers that the Selective Service System is preparing to launch a new military draft by June 15, 2005. It is ordered to have a draft mechanism in place and ready to launch by March 31, 2005. To achieve this goal, it has been allocated $28 million in government funds to get the mechanism up and running. (Selective Service System)
November 19: US officials are studying a "mystery projectile" the size of a pencil eraser that was used by Iraqi insurgents to knock out an M1 Abrams tank. On August 28, an M1 was attacked outside of Baghdad by the mysterious weapon; the yellow metal round penetrated the tank's armored skirting and hull, tore through a gunner's seat back and flak jacket and then took out vital equipment, disabling the tank before burying itself in the opposite wall in a hole nearly two inches deep. The four-member crew of the 69-ton, $4.3 million Abrams survived the hit, although the gunner and the tank commander were hit by flying bits of metal. (Chicago Tribune)
November 19: The commanding officer of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, Major General Charles Swannack, says that few foreign fighters are in Iraq, and that the large majority of attacks carried out upon US forces there are by Iraqi nationals. "I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces," Swannack says. This is in direct contrast to the stories being propagated by Bush administration officials and Bush himself. His views are echoed by the commander of the 101st Airborne, Major General David Petraeus. (New York Times/Middle East Info)
November 19: The New York Times calls the Bush administration concept of "enemy combatants" and the corollary that anyone with such a designation has no rights under American jurisprudence a "sham." The unsigned op-ed reads, in part, "The administration's position makes a mockery of the Constitution and puts every American's liberty at risk. ...Of all the post-Sept. 11 denials of civil liberties, the enemy combatant doctrine is among the worst. It gives the president untrammeled authority to lock up Americans merely by asserting that they are part of a terrorist plot. In its argument to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit this week, the government insisted that military-style rules like the enemy combatant doctrine now apply to American citizens, even on American soil, because Al Qaeda has 'made the battlefield the United States.' Governments are always tempted to detain perceived enemies without charges, hold them incommunicado and deny them counsel. But the framers of the Constitution knew that if the government was allowed to act on those impulses, the result would be tyranny. That is why they built into this nation's founding document the very rights the Bush administration is intent on taking away." The op-ed calls for the New York federal appeals court currently reviewing the Jose Padilla case to strike down the concept and grant Padilla his legal rights; note that a lower court has already made the same decision, a ruling the Bush administration has simply ignored. The judge hearing the case, Rosemary Pooler, seems sympathetic: "As terrible as 9/11 was," she says, "it didn't repeal the Constitution." (New York Times)
November 19: As Bush's state visit to London begins, a British journalist reveals that he was able to get a position on the Buckingham Palace staff as a footman two months beforehand. The Daily Mirror's Ryan Parry used bogus references to get a job while the police and royal staff were preparing for Bush's visit. Parry was due to assist in serving breakfast to Bush's top aides this morning. Parry writes, "Had I been a terrorist intent on assassinating the Queen or American president George Bush, I could have done so with absolute ease. Indeed, this morning I would have been serving breakfast to key members of his government, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and US Secretary of State Colin Powell." Parry claims that no rigorous security checks were performed for his hire. Bush was welcomed by the Queen and Duke, a 41-gun salute, and blistering remarks by anti-war protesters and Parliament members. Playwright Harold Pinter compares the American administration to Nazi Germany, while MP George Galloway calls Bush a "dangerous, arrogant, foolish, bible-belted fundamentalist, right-wing warmongering fanatic president" at a peace rally. Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, says Bush is "the most unwelcome visitor to these shores since William the Conqueror." protesters are gearing up for a huge protest tomorrow in Trafalgar Square. (Independent/Axis of Logic)
November 19: Chicago entrepreneurs Sheldon and Anita Drobny sell the majority of their shares of AnShell Media to a group of investors headed by Mark Walsh, a former America Online executive and chief technology adviser to the Democratic National Committee. The Drobnys planned on launching a liberal-progressive radio network to counter what Anita Drobny calls the "monologue" of conservative talk radio shows. Walsh apparently intends to run a less partisan, more centrist radio network. Liberal humorist and writer Al Franken is still expected to have a strong connection with the new radio network. (Chicago Tribune)
November 19: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that an additional 15,000 reserves and National Guard troops should ready themselves for a year-long deployment in either Iraq or Kuwait. The Defense Department claims this is part of a long-term troop reduction strategy, as the reservists and Guard troops will replace Army and Marine units currently in place. As part of the strategy, three units of National Guard combat troops will be sent to Iraq for front-line duty, replacing combat units already stationed there. By spring, reservists will represent about 37 percent of the total force in Iraq, or 39,000 troops, compared with about 22 percent now, or 28,000 troops. General Peter Schoomaker, the new Army chief of staff, gives some surprising answers to senators who question the need for more troops; Schoomaker says that none of the commanders in Iraq said they were short of fighters. He continues by saying that the Army currently was even larger than the level authorized by Congress, owing to orders that prevent scheduled retirements and other moves during time of war or national emergency. "The United States Army today has about 20,000 more people in it than we're authorized, and that is a result of 'stop-loss, stop-move' that we've done on the active force," he says. (New York Times/Free Republic)
November 19: Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and has been in the news itself because of the shenanigans of soon-to-be-ousted Conrad Black, has an interesting skein of connections with the conservative wing of America. The board of directors includes ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Defense Policy Board member and ex-chairman Richard Perle (Perle heads Hollinger Digital, the venture capital arm, which invested $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup; Trireme's managing partner is also Richard Perle, who is one of the loudest voices for continued war and military buildups in the Pentagon); Trireme partner Gerald Hillman of Hillman Capital; Black's wife, right-wing columnist Barbara Amiel; Richard Burt, the former arms negotiator and ambassador to Germany who is also on the board of Archer Daniels Midland; ADM's former chairman, Dwayne Andreas, and director, Robert Strauss, were Hollinger directors until last year. A. Alfred Taubman was a director of Hollinger until he was charged with fixing art auction prices and went to jail. Conrad Black owns Horizon Publications and Bradford Publishing, two firms that bought smaller newspapers from the Hollinger empire at very favorable prices; Hollinger just paid $8 million for a collection of memorabilia from the estate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the subject of a new biography by Black. (Washington Post)
November 19: The Federal Elections Commission have dismissed a complaint accusing Democratic fund-raiser Denise Rich of donating campaign money and furniture to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in exchange for then-President Clinton's pardon of Rich's ex-husband, Mark Rich. The FEC made the decision in October, but only announced the decision today. The commission voted 6-0 to find no reason to believe any campaign finance laws were broken in the matter and to dismiss the complaint. The complaint was brought by conservative watchdog organization Judicial Watch. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Richard Perle admits illegality of Iraqi invasion

November 20: In a stunning admission that is roundly ignored by the American press, former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle admits that the US/British invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law. "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing," Perle tells a London audience. The Bush administration has long argued that the invasion was legal either under UN Resolution 1441 (which threatened Iraq with unnamed "severe consequences" if it did not comply with UN requirements) or because of the need for the US to defend itself. Perle says that "international law...would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone," and that was morally unacceptable. Perle goes on to blame the French for ensuring that the UN had "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein." Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which filed a lawsuit last year challenging the invasion's legality, observes, "They're just not interested in international law, are they? It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it." Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND, says that the British government "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq." Perle's views underline "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law." (Guardian)

"You ask: How do they get away with it? Because they are the most effective liars that I have seen -- and I'm a pretty old guy -- in my lifetime of covering this stuff. I interviewed Richard Nixon, for God's sake. I have never found a group of people who can lie as effectively and in as calculated and a professionally competent way as this gang. And what we tend to forget is why, in a democracy, in a way, it's easier than in an overtly totalitarian society."
-- Robert Scheer, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq

November 20: Both Bush and Blair deny that the invasion of Iraq has anything to do with the wave of terrorist attacks currently plaguing the Middle East. "Our mission in Iraq is noble and it is necessary, and no act of thugs or killers will change our resolve or alter their fate," Bush says at a joint news conference with Blair, as tens of thousands of demonstrators protest the Iraq war in central London. "We will finish the job we have begun." The two leaders speak hours after the news that two truck bombs aimed at British targets had killed at least 27 people in Istanbul hits the British media. British civilian facilities had until now escaped being targeted in the terrorist attacks that have followed those of 9/11. Blair echoes Bush's remarks, calling for attacking terrorists "wherever and whenever we can." Blair responds to a question about whether the US-British invasion of Iraq is the cause of attacks such as the one in Turkey, "What has caused the terrorist attack today in Turkey is not the president of the United States, is not the alliance between America and Britain. ...What is responsible for that terrorist attack is terrorism, are the terrorists." Earlier, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw echoes Bush officials' attempt to shift blame for the 9/11 attacks away from Bush when he says, "What people have got to remember is that September 11th happened in 2001 and not in 2003. ...It was planned under the presidency of Bill Clinton." (Washington Post)
November 20: While in London, Bush says that he may rethink the plan to reduce the number of US troops in Iraq. "We could have less troops in Iraq, we could have the same number of troops in Iraq, we could have more troops in Iraq," Bush says, and adds that the number would be whatever is "necessary to secure Iraq." White House officials quickly move to spin Bush's original statement, saying, "The president simply emphasized that what we do is going to be very dependent on what's going on on the ground, and he listens to his commanders to tell him what's going on on the ground. ...But, if anything, the discussions are in the other direction." (New York Times)
November 20: Between 150,000 and 200,000 protesters jam Trafalgar Square in London to protest President Bush's state visit and US policies towards Iraq and the environment. A huge papier-mache statue of Bush is hauled down by protesters in Trafalgar Square in protest of the Iraq war, recalling the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad towards the end of the US invasion. Vietnam veteran and antiwar activist Ron Kovic, whose story was made into the movie "Born on the Fourth of July," is the guest of honor. "This phenomenal response shows the depth of feeling of the British public towards this visit," says a spokesman for the organizing coalition of antiwar groups. Former Labour MP George Galloway tells the crowd, "This is the largest march on a midweek day that this country has ever seen -- it is absolutely overwhelming. We're speaking for the majority of people in the world who want Bush out and who want Blair out. ...Tony Blair added insult to injury by bringing this ignorant, foolish and dangerous man to these shores and I think we are speaking for the majority of the country." The Trafalgar Square protests are only the latest in a series of demonstrations around England. A number of protesters showed up at Heathrow Airport to greet the President upon his arrival with signs and chants. Over 600 protesters marched on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, mostly to protest the US failure to sign the Kyoto global warming accords.
Former environmental minister Michael Meacham tells a crowd of protesters that Bush is ignoring the biggest single challenge facing humanity. "What we resent so strongly is the selfishness of US foreign policy. Human survival depends on sharing power. What you do will affect all of us." London Mayor Ken Livingstone asks protesters to remain calm and non-violent: "You are protesting against an illegal war and occupation -- and the world will be watching you. Your right to peaceful protest will be upheld by the Greater London authority and the Metropolitan police. But you also have responsibilities to the people of London and the wider world -- there will be no place for violence of any kind in London this week." (The protests are completely non-violent.) The Guardian uses the term "Fortress London" to describe the extreme security measures taken by the Bush team to protect his safety and keep protesters out of sight. First Lady Laura Bush says, "I don't actually think the protests are near as large as everyone was predicting before we got here. ...We've seen plenty of American flags. We've seen plenty of people who were waving to us, many, many more people, in fact than we've seen protesters." (Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mirror, Agence-France Press/Yahoo! News)

Police riot during Miami protests

November 20-22: Salon profiles the Miami police oppression of protestors during the Free Trade Summit of the Americas on November 20-22. The police response to the protestors was on a scale unseen since the anti-war protests of the 1970s. Police, given specious warnings about "anarchists" bent on violence, came out in full riot gear and unleash an arsenal of crowd control measures on what is a peaceful series of protests. (The turnout is small and "demoralized," writes Mark Crispin Miller, because all attempts to secure parade permits and other legal sanctions have been thwarted by the police for weeks. Buses full of union members were not allowed to join permitted marches.) A Miami judge presiding over the cases of protesters says he saw with his own eyes "no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers" during the November demonstrations; Judge Richard Margolius, 60, will make the remarks in open court in mid-December, saying he was taken aback by what he witnessed while attending the protests. "Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes. And I have always supported the police during my entire career. ...This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community. ...I probably would have been arrested myself if it had not been for a police officer who recognized me." Margolius says he will probably recuse himself from any further cases involving the protests.
Salon writes: "Videos taken at the scene show protesters being gassed, beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and beanbags, and pepper-sprayed in the face. Retirees were held handcuffed and refused water for hours. Medics and legal observers, arrested in large numbers, say they were targeted. A female journalist, arrested during a mass roundup, was made to strip in front of a male policeman. A woman's entire breast turned purple-black after she was shot there, point-blank, with a rubber bullet." "There is a pattern developing cross-country with regards to the interaction between police and protesters," says the ACLU's Lida Rodriguez-Taseff. "That pattern sadly involves the police viewing protesters as terrorists and treating protest situations as crisis situations akin to war or combat." Democracy Now!'s Jeremy Scahill writes, "The forces fired indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed protesters." In numerous instances, protest groups were infiltrated by undercover law enforcement agents, who turn on their erstwhile comrades during the protests and attack them with a variety of weapons. Dozens of organizations and individuals are filing lawsuits and demanding investigations of the Miami police's wholesale trampling of the protesters' basic Constitutional rights. Says one Miami-Dade police officer, "Our goal was to drown you out."
The Sierra Club issues an open letter to President Bush saying, "The fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans are in jeopardy if the intimidating tactics used by the Miami police become the model for dealing with future public demonstrations." What's worse, the Miami police's performance is dubbed "a model for homeland security" by Miami mayor Manny Diaz. Officials from across the country, including members of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, show up to observe how Miami handled the demonstrators. Afterwards, the Georgia Director of Homeland Security, Bill Hitchens, says, "I certainly think this is a precursor for what we could see" at the upcoming G-8 summit. Speaking of the Miami police, he said, "We need to do much the same as they did." Rodriguez-Taseff attended a meeting prior to the summit, and was stunned to see the police openly endorse the goals of the summit. "Essentially what happened is that the police went from being the neutral protector of liberty and property and safety, which is what their job is supposed to be, to being the enforcer of a political goal of the political and business communities," she says.
Police chief John Timoney have local reporters "embed" themselves with the police; those journalists donned riot gear and, essentially, "played policeman." Other journalists who chose to cover the protests independently of the police are arrested. Dozens of people, many uninvolved with the protests, are arbitrarily detained, searched, photographed and questioned about their backgrounds and their connections to anarchism. At 4 pm, some protestors leave the sanctioned parade route to confront the police, and it is then that the police charge. The protesters claim that they did nothing to provoke the police; the police claim they were pelted with rocks, feces, and bottled urine. The truth is somewhere in between. Photojournalist Al Crespo saw some protestors "act[ing] out," but says that, in covering over 100 protests over the last six years, he's never seen a police reaction as ferocious and disproportionate as what he saw in Miami. "There's a real parallel between these kind of events and the events in major American cities after championship football and basketball games," he says. "A large number of people come out in the streets, and there's always young people who, for whatever reason, just have a need to get in a cop's face. Whether you're rooting for the Chicago Bulls or you're in Miami supposedly protesting against free trade, these kind of events always attract people who have a real need to act out some internal psychodrama, and oftentimes that's what sets something off."
Several hundred police charged the ragged line of a few dozen teenagers, laying about them with various riot-control armaments. Video taken at the scene shows a boy in shorts being knocked down, and when his friends try to pick him up, they're beaten back with wooden sticks. At one point, a young man kneels down a few feet in front of the phalanx, his hands in prayer position. Five or six police charge him with their shields, then shoot rubber bullets at him as he runs away. That, says Crespo, is what was most unusual: the police firing on people as they retreated. "...[T]hey proceeded to march down the street and chase these people, chase them for blocks," he says. "These were people trying to get away, and they kept marching and shooting." Even the most peaceful and vulnerable protesters were targeted. Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, organized a line of union peacekeepers to take everyone who wanted to avoid a confrontation with police up a hill toward the amphitheater where the march had begun. "We had hundreds of people we were trying to move up near the amphitheater. There were seniors, union members, young people, environmentalists. Every one of them made a conscious decision not to be in the stuff happening in the street." But the police followed them. "The cops came up the hill, tear-gassed us and shot people with rubber bullets. They pepper-sprayed a senior citizen in his 70s who was sitting in a chair completely away from any kind of problem, without provocation." It was, says Acuff, "a police riot."
Protester Bentley Killmon, a 71-year old retired flight navigator and engineer whose father was a police officer, says he respected the police until he joined the protest. "I respected the badge until that morning," he says. Union organizer Larry Winower says that the scene felt like a war zone even before the protesters arrived. "As you're heading down Biscayne Boulevard" -- the street where the union march took place on Thursday, and where police faced off with protesters -- "you see swarms of police in riot gear," Winawer says. "There were armored personnel vehicles, helicopters hovering at very low altitude with searchlights sweeping the area. Right away it felt like you were not in America but in some type of occupied city." Killmon was arrested when he didn't get face down in the dirt fast enough; with a number of others, he was herded into a wire pen. "I've worked with livestock before, and these were like stock pens," he remembers. After 12 hours in cuffs and seven hours without water, Killmon was processed and released. He was never charged with a crime. "I believe in social justice issues, but I'm not a screaming radical," says Winawer. Since Miami, he says, "some people have asked, 'How do you feel about law enforcement?' I feel fine about law enforcement. What happened to us was not anything resembling law enforcement. I respect the job that police have to do, but I have no respect for the job that they did." Both Winawer and Killmon are planning to join civil suits against the city. "Ben and I are living proof that civil rights are being erased in this country," Winawer says. The Miami police are unrepentant.
"Peaceful protesters in some cases made friends with the devil, knowing full well they were anarchists," says a police spokesman. "If someone says, 'I came down to protest peacefully but yes, I'm aware there are anarchists in my group and I welcomed them in,' they're certainly putting themselves in an awkward position. If anarchists are starting to cause problems and throw things at cops, just because I'm a peaceful protester, but I'm standing right next to this anarchist, that I couldn't be subject to police enforcement, I think that's naive. You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what was going on in the street, the confrontation between anarchists and police. If you chose to stay in the midst of that and then felt your First Amendment right was hurt, you're not being honest with yourself." Those comments outrage Winower. "All his statements begin with 'if,'" he says. "And I might agree with him if those things happened. But there are no ifs here. There's reality. And the reality is that I and Ben Killmon were nowhere near any other individual, period. We were arrested for doing nothing except walking where the police told us to walk in an effort to find his bus. I've never been in trouble with the law before, and I have no ax to grind with the police, but this was just wrong," Winawer adds. "And the bombast, it adds insult to injury. It's one thing to have done it. It's another thing to put your head in the sand and deny that it ever happened." The day after the protests, a few dozen police on bicycles rode by the warehouse that activists were using as a welcome center. They delivered a final message to those still around. "Bye! Don't come back here!" shouted one. Another officer gave the finger to an activist with a video camera. "Put that on your Web site," he said. "F*ck you."
Though the ACLU and many peace organizations vow to make this a national scandal, the mainstream media refuses to cover the story except in odd tidbits, usually skewed in favor of the police. Interestingly enough, the $8.5 million cost of the police action comes directly from the $87 billion federal budget for the "war on terror" in Iraq. It is very likely that the police suppression was coordinated on a federal level. (Salon, Miami Herald, Mark Crispin Miller)
November 20: The National Lawyers Guild sends a letter to Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz, complaining about the violent and repressive handling of peaceful protestors outside the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit on November 19 and 20. The Miami political leadership has called the police's handling of the protestors a "blueprint for Homeland Security." The NLG accuses the Miami police of employing "paramilitary tactics" against the protestors; their list of charges includes using "[i]ndiscriminate, excessive force against hundreds of nonviolent protesters with weapons including pepper spray, tear gas and concussion grenades, and rubber bullets; ...stopping and snatching protesters, seemingly at random, into unmarked vehicles; ...shooting protestors with rubber bullets and trapping them by police lines, resulting in major injuries. Police repeatedly refused to allow Medics into these areas to treat the injured." The police response to the protestors resulted in many injuries to protestors, some quite severe, and dozens of criminal charges being filed against protestors who resisted being brutalized by police. One protestor, who was wounded by police, says, "We were living under martial law." Another protestor says of the police, "They weren't police -- they were a paramilitary group." Other participants said that schools and most businesses were closed in the area of protesting, and that riot squads, seven helicopters, and even one tank were present at the demonstration, which they say was largely peaceful. They also describe police use of weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, batons, and riot shields to control the movements of the protesters. As is becoming increasingly commonplace, the US media all but ignores the protestors and the police brutality. (National Lawyers Guild, Ithaca Times)
November 20: Historian and author Chalmers Johnson writes of the occupation of Iraq, "It was not much of a war -- merely confirming the antiwar forces' contention that an unchallenged slaughter of Iraqis and a Mongol-like sacking of an ancient city were not necessary to deal with the menace of Saddam Hussein. But the war did leave the United States and its two Sepoy nations [allies Britain and Australia] much weaker than they had been before the war -- the Western democratic alliance was seemingly irretrievably fractured; a potentiality for British leadership of the European Union went up in smoke; Pentagon plans to make Iraq over into a client state sundered on Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish realities; and 'international law,' including the Charter of the United Nations, was grievously weakened. Why the British and Australians went along with this fiasco when they could so easily have stood for something other than might makes right remains a mystery." Johnson explains the US decision to invade Iraq as a blunt, unabashed assertion of its imperial "right" to global domination: "The US undertook its second war with Iraq with no legal justification and worldwide protests against its actions and motives, thereby bringing to an end the system of international order that existed throughout the cold war and that traces its roots back to seventeenth century doctrines of sovereignty, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and the illegitimacy of aggressive war. From the moment the United States assumed the permanent military domination of the world, it was on its own -- feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining 'order' through state terrorism and bribery, and given to megalomaniacal rhetoric and sophistries while virtually inviting the rest of the world to combine against it. The US had mounted the Napoleonic tiger and could not get off."
Johnson says that four "sorrows of empire" will inevitably be inflicted on the US: "[t]heir cumulative effect guarantees that the US will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens." Johnson is depressingly prescient. He concludes, "There is only one development that could conceivably stop this cancerous process, and that is for the people to retake control of Congress, reform it and the election laws to make it a genuine assembly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. That was, after all, the way the Vietnam War was finally brought to a halt. John le Carre, the novelist most famous for his books on the role of intelligence services in the cold war, writes, 'America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.' His view is somewhat more optimistic than mine. If it is just a period of madness, like musth in elephants, we might get over it. The US still has a strong civil society that could, at least in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. I fear, however, that the US has indeed crossed the Rubicon and that there is no way to restore Constitutional government short of a revolutionary rehabilitation of American democracy. Without root and branch reform, Nemesis awaits. She is the goddess of revenge, the punisher of pride and arrogance, and the United States is on course for a rendezvous with her." (Foreign Policy in Focus)
November 20: Columnist Maureen Dowd details just how carefully the Bush handlers "packaged" Bush's entire London trip for the voters in America. "Everything Mr. Bush did in London reinforced the idea that this was a trip made not so much to thank the British people for their friendship, but to send a message to the voters back home that he was at ease as a world leader," Dowd writes. London Mayor Ken Livingstone doesn't think that Britain should foot the bill for Bush's visit, as it was so obviously an election-year PR stunt, "...just so George Bush can use a few clips of him and the Queen in his campaign advertisements for re-election next year." (New York Times/Balochistan Post)
November 20: Columnist Jonathan Freedland writes about the dichotomy between the tranquil, tea-and-crumpets experience of the Bush entourage in London and the chaos and conflict outside the security bubble. "All is calm, inside the bubble. Outside there may be baying demonstrators, clashing with dense lines of fluorescent-yellow police. Outside, a few streets away, there may sit a House of Commons bristling with anger at a war so many millions did not want. And outside, several thousand miles away, there may be the unfinished business of that decision: an occupation which sees the loss of a British or American life almost every day. But inside the Bush bubble, all that clamour is far away. The combination of ceremony and security required for this, the first state visit ever granted to an American president, ensured that George Bush spent yesterday sealed off from any potential intrusions of nastiness. He moved in a bubble that enveloped him wherever he went, allowing him and his hosts to think only pleasant thoughts." Freedland notes that his handlers were so intent from keeping him out of public view, and vice versa, that he was ferried by limousine from the back door of Buckingham Palace to the front door. Apparently Bush was bedeviled by boredom during his visit; Freedland describes him as moving through a review of the royal guard at "breakneck speed," leaving the aged Prince Philip to nearly run to keep up. And, during a presentation of the Queen's treasured Americana collection, he brushed through them at the same pace, at one point rolling his eyes towards the ceiling in apparent, undisguised impatience. (Guardian)
November 20: Clear Channel Entertainment, the radio empire that broadcasts Rush Limbaugh's show, is pressuring employees to contribute to right-wing political causes, and promising pricey gifts for big contributors. Station executives and other employees making $100,000 and up were sent a letter requesting that they donate 1% of their salary to the company's PAC, and promised prizes such as digital cameras, crystal Tiffany vases, MP3 players and DVD home theaters. One Clear Channel executive called the letter "disgusting." (New York Daily News)
November 20: Fox News Network has been conspicuosly silent about the 9/11 commission's investigation of the terror attacks and the Bush administration's possible mishandling or foreknowledge of the attacks. One of the very few mentions of the commission was made the night before the interim report was released in July, when commentator Fred Barnes accused the commission of "whin[ing] about [not getting] the 5 million documents they asked for, and...wanted overnight." In 2002, commentator Morton Kondracke informed Fox viewers that "...I am against the national 9/11 commission for exactly the reason you, that you say, that it's a, it's a waste of time." In fact, the entire Rupert Murdoch media empire, of which Fox is a part, generally fails to mention the commission and its work. Murdoch's conservative flagship magazine, "The Weekly Standard," has written nothing about the commission. The New York Daily Post regularly downplays the commission's actions in its news section; on November 2, its op-ed page lambasted commission chairman Thomas Kean for "run[ning] amok" and "waging war on the Bush administration," while overseeing "a blatantly partisan probe that is rapidly drawing a target -- with George W. Bush in the bull's eye." (Center for American Progress)
November 20: In a truly vile offering, conservative columnist Ann Coulter attacks the various Democratic candidates for using their family tragedies as campaign trail speech material. While few could argue that criticizing politicians for politicizing their family tragedies is wrong, Coulter decides to attack the families themselves, belittling the tragedies and scorning the candidates and their families for even having suffered such losses. She attacks both Richard Gephardt and his wife for discussing the story of his son's brush with death, a story Gephardt uses for illustrating his support for national health care coverage. She mocks John Edwards for discussing his son's fatal car accident; Edwards calls the death of his son "the most important fact of my life," has founded a learning center in his son's name, and wears his son's Outward Bound pin on his lapel (Coulter writes, "He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too 'on the nose,'" and mockingly asks about Edwards distributing "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident" bumper stickers).
Coulter ridicules the death of Howard Dean's brother in Vietnam; Charlie Dean, a former McGovern campaign worker, went to Vietnam in 1974 to see for himself the status of the country, and was killed by the North Vietnamese. Coulter quite brazenly accuses the murdered Dean of being a traitor and a collaborator. After a casual swipe at Carol Moseley Braun for being black, she turns on virtually the entire field of candidates for being Jewish. In doing so, she attacks the entire Jewish culture, and all in one breath: "There's Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew.... And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering." She concludes, "The Democrats' urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum." Probably one of the filthiest pieces of writing from a nationally recognized commentator that I've ever read. (Town Hall)

November 21: US General Peter Pace says that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden has "taken himself out of the picture" and is no longer a high priority for capture or killing by American counterterrorism forces, but "[t]hat is not to say that we would not be glad to capture Osama bin Laden today or tomorrow." Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that it is more important to focus on combating groups of terror cells and resistance groups than it is to focus on a single individual. (Reuters/ABC News)
November 21: General Tommy Franks, former commander of US Central Command, says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government. Franks says that "the worst thing that could happen" is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties. If that happens, "... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy." Franks discusses the aftermath of such a attack: "It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world –- it may be in the United States of America -– that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important." In the rest of the interview, given to Cigar Aficianado magazine, Franks defends both Bush and the decision to invade Iraq. Of Bush, he says, "Probably we'll think of him in years to come as an American hero." He concludes, "It's not in the history of civilization for peace ever to reign. Never has in the history of man. ...I doubt that we'll ever have a time when the world will actually be at peace." (NewsMax)
November 21: Congress is preparing to pass new legislation extending and augmenting the original USA Patriot Act; the legislation would allow the FBI to demand records from a business or organization without the approval of a judge or grand jury, if the FBI deems it necessary for an anti-terror investigation. The FBI will be able to seize records from banks, credit unions, securities dealers, currency exchanges, travel agencies, car dealers, post offices, casinos, pawnbrokers and any other business that, according to the government, has a "high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters." Such seizures could be carried out with the approval of the judicial branch of government. Previously, only banks, credit unions, and similar financial institutions were obliged to turn over such records on the FBI's demand. The American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to the legislation, as are a curious mixture of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. An uneasy coalition of liberal, left, and right-wing groups opposes the Patriot Act, and is convinced that the law's expansion of the government's surveillance and investigatory powers threatens individual freedoms and privacy rights. " "I'm concerned about this," says Senator Richard Durbin, who tried unsuccessfully to limit the life of the new provision. "The idea of expanding the powers of government gives everyone pause except the Republican leadership." The Bush administration insists that the FBI needs these new powers to more successfully fight terrorism; opponents worry that the FBI will use these powers in non-terror situations, as it has already done with earlier provisions in the Patriot Act. (OneWorld US/Truthout)
November 21: A study of the origins of the US dead in Iraq shows that smaller and more rural areas of the country are much more likely to have soldiers come back home in body bags than larger, more urban regions. Robert Cushing, a statistical consultant and a retired University of Texas sociologist, began tracking the home counties of those who died in Iraq several months ago. Cushing found dramatic differences in casualty rates between urban and rural areas: the smaller the county's population, the higher the death rate. (Houston Chronicle/Middle East Info)
November 21: Two US Army pilots who routinely ferry high-ranking military officers around Iraq face criminal charges and possible court-martial. Their "crimes:" pointing out that the aircraft that are used to fly these officers around Iraq are defenseless and highly vulnerable to ground attack. The pilots, Chief Warrant Officers William Lovett and Robert Jones have 53 years of service between them in the active duty and Army Reserves. Jones has flown in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and Bosnia. Both pilots told National Defense Magazine their planes were not properly equipped to fly in a war zone. That interview, which appeared in the September 2003 issue of the magazine, has now led to the charges of dereliction of duty against the pilots for disclosing "vulnerabilities" of the "mission, procedures, and aircraft." "These are planes that fly around generals, they fly around VIPs," says attorney Eugene Fidell, who is representing Lovett. "He and the other people involved should not be facing a court-martial; they should be getting decorations for this." The pilots fly the VIPs around in C-12 and UC -35 aircraft, the military equivalent of a Beechcraft King Air and a Cessna Citation. There are few differences between the military and the civilian aircraft. Both are defenseless; worse, they are the only Army aircraft operating in Iraq without any equipment to warn or defend against surface-to-air missiles. "I really want the equipment for them," says Lesley Barber, whose husband flies with Lovett and Jones in Iraq. "They have a right to have it. It's like sending a foot soldier in without an armored vest or a gun. It's nuts." In June, Lovett wrote to US Representative Saxby Chambliss, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We are not equipped to operate in a combat area," Lovett wrote. "This seems to be an unnecessary risk of not only losing expensive aircraft but more importantly, losing valuable lives." The Army admits that the aircraft has no survivability equipment, but says defensive measures -- making steep descents, or spiral takeoffs -- provide adequate protection. However, the Army admits that the unit commmander has requested the installation of an anti-missile defense system for the planes. The Army says it will "take some time" to install the equipment on the aircraft. Lovett and Jones say pilots need defense systems now; as a result, they could be court-martialed. Their fellow pilots continue to fly. (ABC News)
November 21: The US is consistently shutting out local Iraqi businesses from lucrative rebuilding contracts, reserving them for the same few high-profile, high-profit American, Iraqi, or multinational corporations and setting the contract standards too high for most Iraqi companies to meet. Furthermore, many local companies accuse the Bush administration of steering contracts to a small number of large Iraqi companies that formerly had close ties to the Hussein regime. US officials deny most of the charges, and say that most Iraqis don't understand the terms of a contract. Iraqi contractor Haidar Abdel Kazem says, "[Y]ou feel it is decided before they [business contracts] are announced." (InterPress/One World Net)
November 21: Robert Scheer and Christopher Scheer, co-authors of the book The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, give an interview to the Web site Buzzflash in which he discusses the allegations in their book. "The five specific ones that the book singles out are cases where just too much information was known that what they were saying was not believable. For example -- and remember, this is not a question of 'Are there old weapons in Iraq which may be found 15 years from now?' -- the president said there's an imminent threat of deployed weapons that can be used within 45 minutes. They had to know that was a lie. There is enough intelligence data. And we knew there was no evidence. The claim on the nuclear [weapons] reconstitution had to be known as a lie. There was not a scintilla of evidence [to prove the threat]. The biggest lie of all was the connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda and 9/11. That's just the most vicious lie, and one of the most vicious lies maybe in American history. Here you have this horrible traumatic event that not only killed people in this country, but threatens our civil liberties and threatens our whole system of government because of the over-reaction to it. And you know without any evidence whatsoever -- this they knew right in that first week or two -- they kept trying to link Hussein to it. And the other two lies in terms of the cakewalk and the occupation -- again, they knew they were basing that on faulty information and so forth. So I think there are times when the word 'lie' has a certain clarity to it. It goes to intent. It goes to knowledge. And so I think it's a fair use of the language here."
Scheer discusses the apparent lack of interest in the media and the American public about the skein of lies presented by the Bush administration: "I think that there's a cynicism, and people are so divided in this country that they may not be listening that well. So the people that are upset about the Bush Administration take it as another sign that what they believe to be the case is true. And the people that are out there that are hear-no-evil, see-no-evil about the Bush Administration don't want to hear it. And I can tell you that in our book, Colin Powell comes under some scrutiny because he has gotten kind of a free ride due to the media's love of him, which we document in there, and his willingness to sort of play the good cop vs. Cheney and Rumsfeld's bad cop. But in fact, Powell is completely implicated in this whole pattern of lying. His presentation to the UN about the threat of Iraq just before the war, in which he famously refused some of the data he was fed as 'bullsh*t'...was received with rave reviews. But he went out and presented a whole bunch of new stuff that day which, in the book, we very carefully describe and pick apart: He went out and made a case for biochemical weapons labs in areas that Iraq didn't even control. He talked about different individuals that were supposedly links between al-Qaeda and Hussein. And all this stuff was just as shaky and un-backed-up by the intelligence as the stuff that had come out in the previous six months, since the marketing campaign for the war in Iraq had begun.
"And what's astonishing in reviewing the book was to find out just how little they really had. They really took a few little pieces and milked them to the extent that it was clear they didn't have much evidence at all. I mean, with a $27 billion intelligence budget, you think we could have come up with some more convincing evidence, even if it was manufactured. ...What I see that happened is they kept throwing out new bones. Those bones would get destroyed, and they'd throw out some more. They'd keep pressing forward. They'd say the truth over here, and then say a lie over there. They'd use Dick Cheney as a way to get out ideas. They wouldn't say all the time that al-Qaeda was connected to Hussein, but they would just use Hussein and al-Qaeda in sentences together, over and over and over again. They would speculate irresponsibly about what could happen -- if this, and then that, then hey, there might be nukes, and they might be in New York being blown up by terrorists. They used all those tricks." (Buzzflash)
November 21: Fundamentalist Christians inside and outside the Bush administration are cheering the collapse of the so-called "road map for peace" between Israel and the Palestinian people. They are pushing the administration to attack the Palestinians as part of its efforts to bring US-dominated "peace" to the Middle East and protect Israel, which they maintain is mandated by God for the US to support at all costs. Shortly after the October 15 attack in the Gaza Strip, in which several Americans died, the Jerusalem Prayer Team, a US-based Christian fundamentalist organization, sent an e-mail "Action Alert" that read in part: "The Bush Doctrine is being challenged by Arafat's PLO terrorist organization. If the Bush Doctrine is defeated, then the war on terrorism is lost. If Israel loses her war on terrorism, America will lose her war on terrorism. The future of America hangs in the balance." Israel's government seems to be making the same push, urging the Bush administration to view the Palestinians as another front in the war on terrorism. An alliance between US Christian fundamentalists and Israeli religious hardliners seems to be having an effect on both US and Israeli policies, as both governments seem less willing to work for a balanced peace settlement and are focusing instead on targeting the Palestinians as mere terrorists. At least some of these groups seem bent on increasing the chaos and disruption in the Middle East as part of their efforts to bring about Armageddon, their belief of the Judeo-Christian "end times" which they believe will remake the world in their vision. Columnist Maureen Farrell writes, "These days, however, the [religious right] movement's agenda appears to have become our president's vision for the country." Gene Lyons observes, "Bush's flirtation with End Times rhetoric makes some suspect that he actually perceives himself as God's instrument." Novels dealing with conservative/fundamentalist perceptions of the end times are selling briskly at Christian and secular outlets throughout America, and are reportedly favorites among Bush officials; many of the events in these books, which are often written by authors with deep connections to the "religious right" and the Bush administration, seem to be re-enacting themselves in the headlines. (Working for Change)
November 21: The Republican Party releases its first election ad of the campaign, portraying President Bush as a powerful leader against terrorist threats to the country while his Democratic opponents "are attacking the President for attacking the terrorists." RNC communication director Jim Dyke says the ad points up "the positive policies of this president and this party and present the sharp contrast in approach and also in tone" to the Democrats. "Some call for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others," says the ad, which then urges viewers to tell Congress "to support the president's policy of pre-emptive self defense." Democrats have been running election ads critical of Bush for weeks. (New York Times/Free Republic, Republican National Committee [video clip of ad])
November 21: Fox News orchestrated the 39-hour marathon talkfest by Republican senators bent on derailing a Democratic filibuster aimed at preventing four radically right-wing judicial nominees from being approved by the legislature. "Fox News has clearly become the public relations wing of the Republican Party," said Eli Pariser, international campaigns director for the left-wing MoveOn.org. The idea for the political spectacle in the Senate, nicknamed the "Justice for Judges Marathon," originated in the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard. Like Fox News, the Standard is owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Fox News anchors Brit Hume and Tony Snow pitched the idea to Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist on the October 26th broadcast of Fox News Sunday. Two weeks after Frist appeared on the show, the two-day marathon was announced. A producer for Hume's evening news show, Special Report with Brit Hume, worked directly with Frist's staff to choreograph the launch of the Republican protest as a "live opening shot" for Hume's November 12 broadcast. According to a leaked e-mail from Fox, the network reminded Frist's staff: "It is important to double efforts to get your boss to S-230 on time...Fox News Channel is really excited about this marathon and Brit Hume at 6 would love to open with all our 51 senators walking onto the floor -- the producer wants to know will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so they get it live to open Brit Hume's show? Or if not, can we give them an exact time for the walk-in start?" "The credibility of Fox's so-called commitment to 'fair and balanced' reporting has been completely shattered," says Pariser. "Brit Hume and others on his staff need to ask themselves if their job is to cover the news or make the news by orchestrating PR coups for Bush Republicans." (MoveOn)
November 21: Rush Limbaugh is demonstrably guilty of a crime called "money structuring," according to a knowledgeable political forum poster. "It is apparently abundantly documented that Rush committed a money laundering crime called 'structuring,' as described by the Money Laundering Act of 1986," writes the poster. "since the passage of that law, banks are required to file a CTR whenever you deposit or withdraw $10,000 in cash. Banks are not supposed to discuss the law with you or give you any advice on how to evade the requirement; any attempt to 'structure' your withdrawals or deposits to evade the requirement is the crime called 'structuring.' The federal government does not have to prove that you actually had involvement in any illegal enterprise; repeatedly withdrawing sums of money like $9,900 to be just under the reporting level is itself the crime of structuring. There is no doubt that Limbaugh is guilty; he admits to making '3 or 4' withdrawals in that amount, and the bank documents actually show that he made around 30 such withdrawals. The bank cooperated in helping him evade the CTR requirements and was supposedly already fined $10 million dollars. However, under the Money Laundering Act of 1986, both Limbaugh and any bank employees who assisted him in the act of 'structuring' are supposed to receive mandatory prison sentences. I no longer have the law in front of me, but if I recall correctly, the minimum is five years, no parole. The fact that they have a paper trail of his withdrawals and all the bank records, and have had this information for two years, yet still have not arrested this scumbag, are just further proof that the law does not apply to the extremist elite. I feel impelled to repeat -- there is NO necessity under the law to prove that Limbaugh exchanged the money for drugs, although it is clear that he did. There is no need to prove drug possession. No need to invoke RICO. The money laundering act of 1986 is all you need to put Limbaugh in jail today. But this requires a law enforcement officer who has the courage to enforce the law against a rich rightwing extremist...ain't gonna happen." (Bartcop Nation)

Back to November 2003 | On to November 2003: Week Four

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

November 2003:

Week Three

Documents prove CIA masterminded 1973 Allende assassination

CPA announces it will turn over political power to an Iraqi government by June 30, 2004

Bush fights for expanded use of battlefield nuclear weapons

Bush insists on extreme "lockdown" security measures for his trip to London

Theft of Democratic computer files by Republican operatives

Bush's visit to London

Richard Perle admits illegality of Iraqi invasion

Police riot during Miami protests

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