Tactics Ammunition Drudge This! Articles Archive Policy Archive Weblog Archive Cons With Cons Search This Site
An Evolution has begun. Politicalstrategy.org has officially closed down. Look for DailyNewsOnline.com to rise from the ashes, a powerful new site you won't want to miss. Click here to find out more! Click here to join the mailing list and be notified when the DailyNewsOnline is launched!
[However, Kennedy adjusted the numbers to account for undecided black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and said the runoff election currently stands in Blanco's favor. With that adjustment, Blanco would get 53 percent of the vote, compared to Jindal's 47 percent]
Republican Primary Trial Heat (among Republican voters): Cecil Underwood 30% Robin Capehart 8% Sarah Minear 8% Dan Moore 3% Monty Warner 3% Doug McKinney 2% Other 3% Undecided 43%
Democratic Primary Trial Heat (among Democratic voters): Joe Manchin 46% Darrell McGraw 11% John Perdue 5% Jim Humphreys 4% Lloyd Jackson 3% Jim Lees 3% Spike Maynard 2% Robin Davis 2% Other 1% Undecided 25%
AUSTRALIAN investigative journalist John Pilger says he has evidence the war against Iraq was based on a lie that could cost George W. Bush and Tony Blair their jobs and bring Prime Minister John Howard down with them.
A television report by Pilger aired on British screens overnight said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat.
But after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year, Pilger claimed Rice said the US "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities" to attack Iraq and claim control of its oil.
Pilger uncovered video footage of Powell in Cairo on February 24, 2001 saying, "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
Two months later, Rice reportedly said, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
Powell boasted this was because America's policy of containment and its sanctions had effectively disarmed Saddam.
Pilger claims this confirms that the decision of US President George W Bush - with the full support of British Prime Minister Blair and Howard - to wage war on Saddam because he had weapons of mass destruction was a huge deception.
Pilger interviewed several leading US government figures in Washington but said he did not ask Powell or Rice to respond to his claims.
"I think it's very serious for Howard. Howard has followed the Americans and to a lesser degree Blair almost word for word," Pilger told AAP before his program was screened on ITV tonight.
"All Howard does is say `well it's not true' and never explains himself.
"I just don't believe you can be seen to be party to such a big lie, such a big deception and endure that politically.
"It simply can't be shrugged off and that's Howard's response.
"Blair has shrugged it off but Blair is deeply damaged. It's far from over here, there's a lot that is going to happen and much of it could wash onto Howard.
"And it's unravelling in America and Bush could lose the election next year.
"I've not seen political leaders survive when they've been complicit in such an open deception for so long."
Howard last week dismissed an accusation from Opposition Leader Simon Crean that he hid a warning from British intelligence that war against Iraq would heighten the terrorist threat to Australia.
In his report, Pilger interviews Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and friend of Bush's father and ex-president, George Bush senior.
McGovern told Pilger that going to war because of weapons of mass destruction "was 95 per cent charade."
Pilger also claims that six hours after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he wanted to "hit" Iraq and allegedly said "Go Massive ... Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
He was allegedly talked down by Powell who said the American people would not accept an attack on Iraq without any evidence, so they opted to invade Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had bases.
Pilger claimed war was set in train on September 17, 2001 when Bush signed a paper directing the Pentagon to explore the military options for an attack on Iraq. - Source
The British intelligence chief responsible for a pre-war dossier on Iraq's weapons dropped a key sentence from it days before publication after prompting from Downing Street, an inquiry heard Tuesday.
He did it at the suggestion of Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the inquiry heard.
The offending sentence stated that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical and biological weapons "if he believes his regime is under threat.""
Powell argued that phrase suggested Iraq was only a threat if attacked.
The revelation that Powell ordered the sentence to be omitted raises fresh doubts over the intervention of Blair's office in the compilation of the September dossier.
The justification Blair gave for war -- Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- has come under intense scrutiny at the inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly.
Kelly killed himself in July shortly after being named as the source of a BBC radio report that claimed the dossier had been "sexed up" at the last minute at the behest of Blair's Downing Street office. His death and the inquiry has plunged Blair into the worst political crisis of his six-year tenure.
In an email to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Powell noted that the sentence "backs up the argument that there is no CBW (chemical, biological weapons) threat and we will only create one if we attack him. I think you should redraft that para (paragraph)."
Scarlett agreed to the change to what would have been the dossier's final draft before publication.
"We were prompted to look again at this by the (Powell's) memorandum," Scarlett conceded. But under tough cross-examination, he rejected the suggestion made by counsel to the BBC that Downing Street's "intervention" forced the change.
"It was not as a result of the intervention from Downing Street. It was a result of the exercise of my professional judgment," Scarlett said, adding that the change was made in line with intelligence received.
RIGHT TO INVADE?
Scarlett's evidence will do little to boost the public's trust in Blair over the Iraq war. A Guardian/ICM poll Tuesday showed that now only 38 percent of the British public believe it was right to invade Iraq.
Lord Hutton, chairing the inquiry, has said no one is immune from criticism in his final report, in which he is expected to look at how Kelly was treated by the Ministry of Defense and the government and the wider case Blair made for war.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is seen by the British media as the most likely government "fall guy" over the Kelly affair. He admitted Monday that he had approved a strategy by which his ministry would confirm Kelly's identity to any journalist who offered the correct name.
Nevertheless, he stood by his assertion that he had protected Kelly's anonymity.
Kelly's wife told the inquiry her husband felt let down and betrayed by his superiors and described his distress at being thrust into the limelight.
Explicit entries from the diaries of Blair's media chief Alastair Campbell, published Monday, referred repeatedly to the need to get the BBC's source "up" or "out" to undermine the BBC's report on Iraq.
One entry made clear getting the source out would show BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan had misrepresented Kelly's status. - Source
Has an American president ever delivered such a bafflingly impertinent speech before the General Assembly as the one George W. Bush gave this morning? Here were the world’s foreign ministers and heads of state, anxiously awaiting some sign of an American concession to realism — even the sketchiest outline of a plan to share not just the burden but the power of postwar occupation in Iraq. And Bush gave them nothing, in some ways less than nothing.
In the few seconds he devoted to that subject, he cited only three areas in which the role of the United Nations (or any other nations) should be expanded: writing an Iraqi constitution, training a new corps of civil servants, and supervising elections. None of these notions is new.
Otherwise, Bush’s message can be summarized as follows: The U.S.-led occupation authority is doing good work in Iraq; you should come help us; if you don’t, you’re on the side of the terrorists.
U.N. PLAYBACK
The speech seemed cobbled from the catchphrases of last year’s playbook, as if Bush were trying to replicate the success of his previous appearance before the General Assembly — his September 2002 speech, which roused the Security Council to warn Saddam Hussein of “serious consequences” — without showing the slightest recognition that the old words have grown stale and sour.
Bush dredged out the familiar formula — weapons of mass destruction plus terrorism equals the enemy in Iraq — forgetting, or perhaps not caring, that it didn’t persuade the United Nations back in November, when Saddam was still in power, and couldn’t hope to win backers now.
He described the guerrilla war, still ongoing, as a battle against “terrorists and holdouts of the previous regime” — ignoring a recent finding of the U.S. intelligence community that the main, and most rapidly growing, threat these days comes from ordinary Iraqis, resentful of the occupation.
He laid out the context of the battle as a contest between “those who work for peaceful change and those who adopt the methods of gangsters.” Yet it is hard to see how Bush’s pre-emptive-war doctrine fits the former category, and it’s painful to observe that many Iraqis would say the U.S. occupation — whose soldiers have pounded down so many doors in the middle of the night — fits the latter.
He acknowledged no mistakes, either in the intelligence that preceded the war or in the planning (or lack thereof) that followed it.
MOVING FORWARD
He did acknowledge that “some of the sovereign nations of this assembly disagreed” with his decision to go to war, but added that it is time to move on. “Every young democracy needs the help of friends,” he said. “All nations of goodwill should step forward and provide that support.”
He painted the United States as following the true principles of the U.N. charter, which call on all nations to “stand with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq,” as they build freedom. As for a timetable for turning over power, he said only that the process should be “neither hurried nor delayed.”
“The United States of America is committed to the U.N.,” Bush added, “by giving meaning to its ideals” — but not, apparently, by sharing authority with its constituents.
Bush spent the remainder of the speech exhorting his fellow leaders to join forces against nuclear proliferation, AIDS, and the international sex-slave trade. Such sentiments would be inoffensively bromidic in a typical address before the General Assembly. But Bush cheapened the causes by linking them with the unfinished business in Iraq. All of these issues, he said in his conclusion — Iraq, terrorism, and WMD, as well as AIDS and teen sex-slaves — require “urgent attention and moral clarity.”
FOREIGN MISGIVINGS
The rest of the world’s leaders, who had remained conspicuously silent throughout the speech, greeted its conclusion with, at best, polite applause, which is the most it deserved. By comparison, the droningly convoluted speech that followed, by French President Jacques Chirac, was a model of perspicacity.
One section of Bush’s speech is worth very serious note. “Success of a free Iraq,” he said, “will be watched and noted throughout the region.” A free and democratic Iraq would provide a shining example that could transform the Middle East, and “a transformed Middle East would benefit the entire world.”
Bush is absolutely right on this point, which is why he needs to get over his hang-ups about France, the Security Council, and the diplomatic disasters of last November, and to get serious about working out a common solution to the much bigger disaster that looms in Iraq. His speech could, and should, have signaled a new opening. Instead, it seemed to close off every option. - Source
White House officials have undermined their own government scientists' research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal. The disclosure will anger environment campaigners who claim that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being sabotaged because of President George W. Bush's links to the oil industry.
Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.
Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in Britain.
The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. 'Thanks for calling and asking for our help,' Ebell tells Cooney.
The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman. 'It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible,' Ebell wrote in the email. 'Perhaps tomorrow we will call for Whitman to be fired,' he added.
The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global warming. The revelation of the email's contents has prompted demands for an investigation to see if the White House and CEI are co-ordinating the legal attack.
'This email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official US government report on global warming dangers,' said Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, who has written to the White House asking for an inquiry.
The allegation was denied by White House officials and the CEI. 'It is absurd. We do not have a sweetheart relationship with the White House,' said Chris Horner, a lawyer and senior fellow of CEI.
However, environmentalists say the email fits a pattern of collusion between the Bush administration and conservative groups funded by the oil industry, who lobby against efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of global warming.
When Bush first came to power he withdrew the US - the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases - from the Kyoto treaty, which requires nations to limit their emissions.
Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are former oil executives; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a director of the oil firm Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans once headed an oil and gas exploration company.
'It all fits together,' said Kert Davies of Greenpeace. 'It shows that there is an effort to undermine good science. It all just smells like the oil industry. They are doing everything to allow the US to remain the world's biggest polluter.'
Other confidential documents obtained by The Observer detail White House efforts to suppress research that shows the world's climate is warming. A four-page internal EPA memo reveals that Bush's staff insisted on major amendments to the climate change section of an environmental survey of the US, published last June. One alteration indicated 'that no further changes may be made'.
The memo discusses ways of dealing with the White House editing, and warns that the section 'no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change'.
Some of the changes include deleting a summary that stated: 'Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.' Sections on the ecological effects of global warming and its impact on human health were removed. So were several sentences calling for further research on climate change.
A temperature record covering 1,000 years was also deleted, prompting the EPA memo to note: 'Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration's favoured message.'
White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as 'potentially' and 'may', leading the EPA to complain: 'Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.'
The paper then analyses what the EPA should do about the amendments and whether they should be published at all. The options range from accepting the alterations to trying to discuss them with the White House.
When the report was finally published, however, the EPA had removed the entire global warming section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible.
Former EPA climate policy adviser Jeremy Symons said morale at the agency had been devastated by the administration's tactics. He painted a picture of scientists afraid to conduct research for fear of angering their White House paymasters. 'They do good research,' he said. 'But they feel that they have a boss who does not want them to do it. And if they do it right, then they will get hit or their work will be buried.'
Symons left the EPA in April 2001 and now works for the National Wildlife Federation as head of its climate change programme. The Bush administration's attitude was clear from the beginning, he said, and a lot of people were working to ensure that the President did nothing to address global warming. - Source
As counterterrorism and foreign policy professionals and veterans of the NSC staff in the years proceeding September 11, we have heard our share of misstatements and conspiracy theories about terrorism. But nothing quite compares to Richard Miniter's book "Losing Bin Laden," which includes a number of erroneous allegations about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism record, many of which were then published in this newspaper. Let us address a few:
First, Mr. Miniter recycles old, false Sudanese claims that the Clinton White House declined access to Sudan's intelligence files on al Qaeda and that an unnamed CIA official declined an offer from Sudan in 1996 to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States.
No one should believe these allegations by Mr. Miniter's source, Fateh Erwa — a Sudanese intelligence officer known for his penchant to deceive — that there was an offer to hand bin Laden over to the United States. Certainly, no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington. Had the Sudanese been serious about offering bin Laden to the United States, they could have communicated such an offer to any number of senior Clinton administration officials. It did not happen.
Mr. Miniter also claims that Sudan repeatedly tried to provide voluminous intelligence files on bin Laden to the CIA, the FBI, and senior Clinton administration officials and would be "repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels." Absurd. In fact, it was precisely the other way around.
On multiple occasions, and in venues ranging from Addis Ababa to Virginia, Washington, New York and Khartoum, the United States aggressively pressed the Sudanese to prove their alleged commitment to cooperating on terrorism, by severing their close ties with known terrorists, arresting specific individuals and providing specific intelligence information to us. Yet, despite frequent promises of cooperation, presumably in the hopes of getting off the terrorism list and out from under U.N. sanctions, the Sudanese consistently failed to deliver.
This should come as no surprise, because Sudan in the mid-'90s was one of the most hard-core terrorist states in the world. Its fiercely militant leader, Hassan Turabi, turned Sudan into a sanctuary, training base and active supporter for a range of Islamic terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda.
That Mr. Miniter so willingly credits bogus claims from the Sudanese regime — a regime the Bush administration has rightly kept on the terrorism list, that has done nothing to bring an end to their domestic slave trade, and has only recently begun to engage seriously in international efforts to bring an end to a civil war that has killed over two million Sudanese citizens — is deeply troubling.
Another charge in the book is that President Clinton failed to retaliate immediately after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 despite the fact that responsibility for the attack was clear. Mr. Miniter cites this as part of his overall and unsubstantiated theory that Mr. Clinton "refused to wage a real war on terrorism."
When the USS Cole was hit in October 2000, al Qaeda was a prime suspect. But other terrorist groups and states which had attacked us before were also potentially responsible.
It was appropriate that Mr. Clinton wanted conclusions from his chief intelligence and law enforcement agencies before launching broad retaliatory strikes on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Definitive conclusions from the CIA and FBI on who was behind the Cole were not provided to Mr. Clinton for the remainder of his term.
Even without conclusions from the FBI and CIA on the Cole, bin Laden and his lieutenants were still hunted to the last day of Mr. Clinton's presidency for al Qaeda's 1998 attacks on our two embassies in Africa. And if the Clinton administration dropped the ball in responding to the Cole bombing, why didn't the incoming Bush administration pick it up in January, 2001?
Mr. Miniter also alleges that in the spring and summer of 1998 the Clinton administration was deadlocked over the decision to conduct a special forces mission near a bin Laden camp. Mr. Miniter suggests that the president did not want to overrule Pentagon concerns over risks because he could not "stomach sending thousands of troops into harm's way." Mr. Clinton was, in fact, ready and willing to undertake a special forces or other paramilitary assault on bin Laden, particularly after our missile attacks on bin Laden in the summer of 1998, and often pressed his senior military advisers for options. But Mr. Clinton's top military and intelligence advisers concluded that a commando raid was likely to be a failure, given the potential for detection, in the absence of reliable, predictive intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts.
Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al Qaeda. As President Bush well knows, bin Laden was and remains very good at staying hidden.
For eight years the Clinton administration fought hard to counter terrorism, and while we didn't accomplish all that we hoped, we had some important successes. The current administration faces many of the same challenges.
Confusing the American people with misinformation and distortions will not generate the support we need to come together as a nation and defeat our terrorist enemies. - Source
Roger Cressey served as National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism from 1999-2001. Gayle Smith served as special assistant to the president for African affairs from 1998-2001.
The GOP congressman whose money put the recall on the ballot urged Republicans Monday to keep Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in office if neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Tom McClintock pulls out of the race by election day.
"If two major Republicans remain on the ballot, I'd advise you to vote 'no' on the recall," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), who spent more than $1.6 million of his own money to help gather signatures to recall Davis.
"It would absolutely guarantee that (Democratic Lt. Gov.) Cruz Bustamante will be the governor, even though a majority of voters are asking for a no-tax solution" to California's budget problems, Issa told a lunchtime meeting of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
Both McClintock and Schwarzenegger have said they would not raise taxes, while Bustamante has proposed boosting taxes on the wealthiest Californians to balance the state budget.
"In every poll, more than 50 percent of voters support no-new-taxes candidates, while 34 percent support someone who will raise taxes," Issa said.
Republican leaders scrambled to explain away Issa's remarks.
"I understand what he's trying to say," said Duf Sundheim, chairman of the state Republican Party. "We can't come this far and throw it all away by having two candidates."
GOP NOT NAMING NAMES While most Republicans aren't naming names, it's clear that it's not Schwarzenegger, the Hollywood action hero who's brought his boundless star power to the race, whom they're suggesting drop out.
"Since Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only viable anti-tax candidate on the ballot," said Todd Harris, a spokesman for the actor, "my guess is that this was Congressman Issa's nice way of putting pressure on Sen. McClintock to avoid turning Sacramento over to Cruz Bustamante."
Issa said that McClintock, a strong conservative, has admitted to him that it was unlikely he could win a one-on-one race for governor.
"It's incumbent for the one who can't get to a majority to drop out," Issa said. "If Tom is still in the same position, with about half of what Arnold has, he's the one who will have to make the hard decision."
But McClintock doesn't sound like a man getting ready to bail out of the recall replacement race. In an e-mail message sent to supporters Monday, he reminded them that Republican leaders had urged Ronald Reagan to step aside in the 1966 governor's race to clear the GOP primary field for San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, a more moderate candidate.
"Reagan declined. The rest is history," McClintock wrote, urging his backers to raise $800,000 for a last-minute TV ad blitz. "Did Reagan stay in because of blind personal ambition? I think not! I believe Ronald Reagan felt it would be wrong to walk away from his principles and from those who believed as he did in those same principles."
SCHWARZENEGGER STALLED John Stoos, McClintock's deputy campaign director, said recent polls have shown the Ventura County state senator picking up ground while Schwarzenegger's effort has stalled.
"If Arnold Schwarzenegger is as strong a candidate as everyone wants us to believe, why is he spending so much time trying to get us out?" he asked.
Schwarzenegger's campaign went on the attack Monday, putting out a television ad that takes a not-very-backhanded swipe at both Bustamante and McClintock for accepting money from Indian tribes with gambling interests in the state.
Speaking directly to the camera, Schwarzenegger says in that ad that it's time for the Indian tribes to pay a fair share of their gambling revenues to the state.
"All the other major candidates take their money and pander to them," he says. "I don't play that game."
Since polls show that Bustamante and McClintock are the only other major candidates, it's no secret whom Schwarzenegger is talking about.
McClintock has been taking his own shots at Schwarzenegger, saying in the Sacramento Bee on Monday that the actor is surrounding himself with aides to former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, whom he called one of the worst governors in California's history.
DAVIS CAMP PLEASED With the skirmishing between the two GOP campaigns threatening to break out into all-out war, Issa was forced to paraphrase humorist Will Rogers.
"I'm a Republican," he told the Commonwealth Club audience. "In California, I don't belong to an organized party."
Davis' backers gleefully accepted Issa's suggestion that Republicans might have to vote against the recall.
"We're happy that Darrell Issa has come around and hope he joins us in voting 'No' on the recall," said Peter Ragone, a spokesman for the anti-recall group controlled by Davis. "We welcome him to the 'No on the Recall' campaign."
The Republicans' troubles in the replacement race are pulling attention away from the recall itself, where new polls have shown Davis picking up ground.
"I've been a lonely voice in the wind, warning that (the replacement vote) is just a popularity contest unless we win the recall vote," said David Gilliard of Rescue California, a recall group founded and financed by Issa. "We have to stop focusing on the candidates and make sure we win. But if you're a donor, you want to put your money where the glitter is."
CANDIDATE VISITS CITY COLLEGE Bustamante had problems of his own Monday, when a Sacramento court ordered him to return much of the money he has received from Indian and union interests. But as the lone Democrat in the replacement race, he has been enjoying plenty of support from fellow party members.
On Monday, the lieutenant governor toured San Francisco City College's Mission District campus with Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and talked about the need to put more money into community colleges, which he called "the superhighway of opportunity in California."
Lieberman, who's running for president, echoed Bustamante's campaign slogan, calling on voters to "Vote no the recall and yes on Bustamante.
"Get California's economy moving again by keeping Democrats in Sacramento," he said. - Source
GIVE OR TAKE a couple of nouns -- "bribery" and "fraud," to be precise -- here are the facts behind what Senator Edward Kennedy had to say last week about the mess in Iraq.The secrecy surrounding the way President Bush is spending military billions appears to have a purpose, one that has nothing to do with keeping valuable intelligence from our enemies. In addition to keeping secret the actual expenditures for specific activities, the president is also keeping secret the precise destinations of the dollars, one of which just happens to be the treasuries of other countries. One example is the "international" division of troops on the scene, nominally led by the Poles. As far as anyone can determine, not a dime of the costs associated with this division's presence in Iraq is being paid for by any of the countries participating in it. The United States is paying all the freight, and those troops would not be in Iraq -- their governments would not have sent them -- if it weren't.
Take another, more troubling example. Over the weekend, the Bush administration signed papers for an $8.5 billion package of loans and other goodies for Turkey -- the country that stiffed us on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, eliminating the possibility of an attack from the north. This package is a cousin to earlier attempts to use grants, loans, and other economic concessions to get Turkey into Iraq -- which is a dangerous idea even on its merits, given Turkey's miserable record vis a vis the Kurds.
In announcing that the package had been finalized, triggering a Turkish Cabinet meeting to consider sending forces into Iraq, Treasury Secretary John Snow denied that the package of goodies was explicitly conditioned on Turkey's joining America's band of bought-and-paid-for allies. However, he did acknowledge that it assumed Turkey's "cooperation" on Iraq matters -- a distinction too cute for hacks like me.
This raises an interesting question. Just what do you call a payment of money to a government in return for its performance of an act like sending troops to Iraq that it would not perform but for the payment of the money? Those who call it bribery may be accused of being accurate and tough but hardly inaccurate and not at all "uncivil" (to use President Bush's complaining adjective).
As Kennedy said in his Boston interview last week with the Associated Press, the diligent folks at the Congressional Budget Office have encountered nothing but roadblocks in attempting to track Bush's military money and do not accept the administration's rough estimate of the ongoing costs: nearly $4 billion a month.
Kennedy was referring to a CBO report earlier this month summarizing its efforts to get at the truth. It included this sentence: "CBO believes that the $3.9 billion figure may include some one-time costs that CBO would not incorporate in its estimate of the costs of long-term occupation."
I'm told that was in part a reference to these payments for other countries that meet all the dictionary tests of bribery.
As for the war itself, consider the facts again. The president chose March 20 as an invasion date arbitrarily, not for any reasons involving a threat to our nation that demanded an attack then, much less an attack with only Britain as a major ally. Just as arbitrarily, he chose to justify the date on the basis of supposed threats from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and "ties" to the terrorists who attacked the United States two years ago.
As the facts have unfolded in ways that make these claims, shall we say, spurious, other justifications have emerged after the fact (transforming the entire Middle East, stopping a human rights violator from his murderous ways). This is the substitution of one bill of goods with another bill of goods. The old bait-and-switch is one of the classic elements of what is called fraud with legal precision.
And lest anyone be shocked at the suggestion by Kennedy that politics was involved in all this, I invite a reading of White House guru Karl Rove's intemperate speech to the Republican National Committee early in 2002 and the subsequent use of "national security" and morphed images of Saddam Hussein to question the loyalty of Democrats in that year's ugly congressional campaigns.
Such political habits die hard -- hence Tom DeLay's reaction to Kennedy, accusing him of attacking Bush with more verve than he ever used against Saddam Hussein, or Attorney General Ashcroft's repeated equation of opposition to the Patriot Act with subversion.
Like nearly all Democrats, Kennedy is prepared to support more money for Iraq, possibly even to support something like the $87 billion Bush has requested.
The essential precondition for all this money, however, is the truth. Kennedy raised a lot of eyebrows with some tough language, but unlike the president he had the facts behind him. Instead of complaining about language, Bush would be wiser to realize that the truth about bribery and an end to the fraud would be much more productive. - Source
Last December, at his three-day God and World Peace event, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon drew a notable slate of political figures, from Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., and, perhaps most notably, James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who offered some respectful opening remarks to Moon's Unification Church faithful. Moon followed, and called for all religions to come together in support of the Bush plan for faith-based initiatives.
Coming from Moon that made perfect sense, because he already believes all religions will come together -- under him. "The separation between religion and politics," he has observed on many occasions, "is what Satan likes most." His gospel: Jesus failed because he never attained worldly power. Moon will succeed, he says, by purifying our sex-corrupted culture, and that includes cleaning up gays ("dung-eating dogs," as he calls them) and American women ("a line of prostitutes"). Jews had better repent, too. (Moon claims that the Holocaust was payback for the crucifixion of Christ: "Through the principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million Jews.") His solution is a world theocracy that will enforce proper sexual habits in order to bring about heaven on earth.
What sort of proper sexual habits? According to Moon, in order to restore blood purity, very specific practices are prescribed. Sex before marriage is out of the question, and when sexual consummation does happen, it must adhere to very specific instructions. First, a photograph of Moon must be nearby, so that everything occurs under the reverend's watchful eye. After two nights of woman-on-top sex, the couple reverse positions, whereupon the man, according to Moon, restores dominion over Eve, via the proper missionary position. Then, according to the instructions attributed to the U.C.'s American Blessed Family Department, "after the act of love, both spouses should wipe their sexual areas with the Holy Handkerchief" --referring to the church-supplied washcloth -- which must "be kept individually labeled and should never be laundered or mixed up."
Incredibly, it now appears that under the new priorities of the budding Faith Based Initiative, the federal government has given Moon disciples its imprimatur -- and funding.
Last summer, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services gave a $475,280 grant to fund Free Teens USA, an after-school celibacy club in urban New Jersey. Free Teens USA, like other Moon civic organizations, claims it has no ties to the Unification Church. But according to documents obtained by Salon under the Freedom of Information Act, the director and chief finance officer of the Free Teens USA club, as well as others listed on the group's board of directors, are former or present high-ranking Unification Church officials who omitted those leadership roles from their applications for the federal grant.
The small success of Free Teens' government funding is just a small indication of the remarkable transformation of the billionaire Moon. A man who once inspired considerable public horror in the 1970s when his church faced a congressional inquiry and battled accusations of coercive recruitment and mind control, not to mention his own criminal conviction for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice, now goes about his business generally unnoticed. (The Unification Church would not return calls for this story.) Along the way, he has been able to gain acceptance by the most powerful people in the country, surely with the help of his media mini-empire -- including the UPI wire service and the right-wing newspapers Tiempos del Mundo, in South America, and the Washington Times, which he runs at losses well into the tens of millions every year. His exorbitant spending on politicians, largely conservative, hasn't hurt either; his Washington Times foundation gave $1 million to the George H.W. Bush presidential library and has paid the former president untold amounts in speaking fees.
And Moon has also made impressive headway into the current Bush White House. Other administration officials have attended Moon events, including then-incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft, who attended Moon's Inaugural Prayer Luncheon for Unity and Renewal, just before George W. Bush took office. And perhaps more important, other former and current members of his Unification faithful have ascended to high levels of the Bush administration.
There are many other signs suggesting the Unification Church keeps close tabs on Free Teens USA as providential work for Moon. In a remarkable 2000 sermon titled "God's Tylenol", Tyler Hendricks, president of Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, praises the group, along with other Moon nonprofits, as helping to treat the "three headaches of God." For headaches No. 1 and 2 ("the disunity of Christianity" and "the scourge of Communism," respectively) Hendricks claims Moon brought God "Tylenol" in the form of his charitable, confusingly named organizations. For headache No. 3 -- youthful immorality –- Hendricks says that Moon prescribed the medicine of the Pure Love Alliance, Free Teens USA, and two other groups. Indeed, he said, alumni of the seminary that's uniting Christianity are, even now, "on the frontline for the relief of God's third headache, the decline of youth morality and the family."
In its grant application to the Department of Health, Free Teens identifies Martin Porter as the group's central figure. Porter -- who has a Ph.D. and an MBA from Century University, a correspondence school that was in California until it fled the state in the late '80s to avoid new regulations -- discloses that he was CEO of the "Tongil Trading Company" in Toronto from 1977 to 1983. But Porter was also Moon's chief lieutenant in Canada from 1977 to 1983, and his face appeared throughout Toronto on promotional posters that called him "Moon's Man in Canada," according to published church history. (Tongil, a Korean word for "unification," sold ginseng tea and vases, and it was also affiliated with Moon's fleet of tuna fishing boats.)
In the Summer 1987 issue of the Church publication Blessing Quarterly, Porter testified to a series of supernatural visions he received in 1968 that led him to Moon. "I was sitting in my car, thinking about Father and what he may be doing. I was unaware that on that particular day the Blessing would take place. Suddenly I saw little pink hearts appear in the car all around me!" he wrote. "Spiritual experiences were so common in those days, that if several days went by without one, we thought there must be something wrong."
Similarly, the application does not mention that director Richard Panzer was head of the Unification Church of Rhode Island in the 1980s, as well as the special projects director for Moon's morality lobbying group, the American Freedom Coalition.
Free Teens' directors are also solidly Unificationist -- with the notable exception of New Jersey state assemblyman and Baptist pastor Alfred E. Steele. (According to the Unification News, Steele did once introduce Moon as a leader sent by God at a 2001 revival stop in Newark organized by Free Teens director David Konn. Steele, listed as the president of Free Teens, didn't return calls for this story.)
Of Free Teens' other eight directors, at least seven are close to the Moon organization. Among them:
Director Eric Holt, at one time comptroller of the Unification Church, lists an address just down the block from Moon's secluded East Garden estate, 40 minutes north of New York City.
The working address of another director, Anthony Appia, has doubled as the offices of the Blessed Family Department, as well as Washington Times owners One Up Enterprises, the Unification Thought Institute, and dozens of other Moon religious projects -- according to various litanies of "front groups" compiled by outside observers of the church. One lists Appia's 481 Eighth Ave. address no fewer than 66 times.
David Konn is identified, in a lawsuit against the gun company Kahr Arms, as the president of Kahr's Moon-owned parent company Saeilo, whose Web site advertises "Absolute Concealed Power." (Here, Konn is shown brandishing 9 mm pistols.)
Directors William Gaigg and Bjorn Ottosson both work with Moon's jewelry company, Christian Bernard. Ottosson is also a former vice president of Moon's campus group CARP (Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles).
Panzer bristles at the idea that Free Teens -- which celebrates "Gen Xers ... rebelling against their divorced baby boomer parents and seek[ing] lasting love relationships" -- in any way encourages a lasting love relationship with the True Father of the Unification Church. He will not be made a part of a "conspiracy theory," he told Salon.
"If groups founded by Catholics receive abstinence funding, as there surely are, is that a sign the pope is infiltrating the White House with his pro-chastity beliefs and influence?" he said.
Panzer maintains that Free Teens is his idea, and his life's work.
But Free Teens was first alleged to be a Moon operation in 1995, when a Free Teens program was dropped from private Catholic and Protestant schools on Long Island. Despite the bad press, the club has enjoyed the approval of the state of the New Jersey, whose $100,000 grant in 2001 was one step along the club's journey to federal funding. The organization is based in three New Jersey cities and Westchester City, N.Y., employing about 25 people, according to its tax forms, and claims to operate in 38 states.
The group boasts a "reality centered" approach toward sex education, summed up by a fairly simple message: Don't have sex before marriage, or you will probably die.
Free Teens hosted a contest at Marshall High School, Wis., in 1999, where teens were asked to compile a top-10 list of reasons not to have sex. The winning entries, celebrated on a Unification-affiliated Web site, included "If you don't want to kick the bucket, don't knock the boot," (No. 3) and "Two words: Brighter future" (No. 1).
Similarly, the specter of death hovers over the Free Teens Web site. There are grim morality tales: "Mary" testifies -- with diction and grammar so uneven it seems scripted -- that "[m]y son has not seen his father since the day he was born and i could've prevented that had I waited until I was married. I would not give up my son for the world but i will never be able to give him the world, and every child deserves that. So if you care about your future children you will wait."
Perhaps fearful her message will be misconstrued, Mary adds: "And don't think that protection works, cause i used protection and it obviously didn't. good luck!"
Another place on the site features Magic Johnson and interprets his tale of HIV survival to mean that even the most healthy-looking sex partners might be carrying the seeds of death. It's even hinted that not even French-kissers are safe from HIV. The site also heavily spins a 2001 study from the National Institutes of Health, saying that the "U.S. Gov Now DOUBTS Condoms!" And, in a slogan reminiscent of Moon's emphasis on the “blood lineage” that binds the biblical Adam to the True Father, Free Teens implores its subjects with the message: "It's not just your body, it's your whole lineage forever."
Free Teens recommends a classroom exercise in which teenagers spit into a cup, then are asked to trade with another student and drink out of it. The lesson: Sex is even more intimate, and it should be approached with all the vigilance of drinking a warm cup of spit.
Panzer, in an e-mail interview, writes of the cup exercise, "[W]e picked up this activity at a national abstinence conference several years ago from another abstinence group that was using it." As for its success, Free Teens cites a New Jersey trial showing that teenagers who participate in their program are two-thirds more likely to agree with the statement "Sexual intercourse can cause problems for people of my age" and that one-third were making plans to abstain from sex.
The men of Free Teens are not the only ones with Moon affiliations to benefit from Bush largesse. Josette Shiner, who rose up through the Moon organization first as a Washington Times reporter and Moon disciple and later as editor of that newspaper, was named deputy trade representative earlier this year. In 1982 she told the Washington Post, "I joined the church full well knowing it is something not yet understood by society." In the 1990s, she claimed to have broken ties with Moon and to have become an Episcopalian. Her press secretary, Richard Mills, refused to comment on whether Shiner had rethought Moon's political views.
And in December of last year, Bush appointed David Caprara, a top official for Moon in Washington, to head the War on Poverty program AmeriCorps VISTA. Caprara had been director of Moon's American Family Coalition and was one of the Unification Church's top political operatives.
A former aide to Jack Kemp, Caprara founded a pro-faith policy group called the Empowerment Network. It claimed Sens. Rick Santorum and Joseph Lieberman as leaders, though their names recently disappeared from the site. (Lieberman's spokesperson told Salon the senator had never been formally affiliated with the Empowerment Network; Santorum's office didn't return calls.) The site's Resources Directory section includes links to both Free Teens USA and the Pure Love Alliance -- a now seemingly defunct, openly Moonie entity that was discovered in 2000 to be operating in 61 Chicago public schools before being shut down.
And Caprara, according to a report on another Unification-affiliated site, is involved in the "effort to reach ministers" as well as "educating political leaders" about Moon's beliefs. Asked whether Caprara is presently opening doors for Moon, AmeriCorps spokesman Sandy Scott replies: "The premise of your question is wrong, and the answer to your question is no."
Moon has managed to forge powerful relationships through a cause that trumps most concerns: politics.
In 1996, Moon praised communism for producing obedient followers "trained under totalitarianism," who are "trained to follow once an order came from above," unlike wayward Americans ("individualism is what God hates most," went his refrain in a 1987 speech). And today his business holdings include an automotive company in U.S.-sanctioned North Korea. But before the fall of the Berlin Wall he was the sworn enemy of communism, having formed an aversion to it in a prison camp of the brutal Kim Il Sung regime. Later, he would play a key role in the Iran-Contra affair when the Washington Times created a fund that contributed the first $100,000 to Oliver North's Nicaraguan Freedom Fund. His followers still take credit for it as a blow to the Reds.
Now he has found common ground with the religious right on sexual abstinence. The alliance is financial, too. In 1995, it came to light that a debt-ridden Jerry Falwell (who told Esquire in 1978 that Moon was "like the plague: he exploits boys and girls") had quietly accepted $3.5 million from Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace IWFWP) to bail out his Liberty University.
Another important Moon contact is President Bush (the father), who has spoken to Moonie-run causes abroad. The elder Bush defended his closeness with Moon strictly on philosophical grounds, telling the Post through a spokesman that "this group is about strengthening the family and that's what President and Mrs. Bush are deeply focused on."
The question is, do Bush and Moon mean the same thing when they talk about family values?
In the past, Moon has taken out full-page advertisements in newspapers, transcribing his communications with the Spirit World, where figures from Confucius to former U.S. President James Buchanan have vouched that he is, indeed, the savior of humanity. Earlier this month, a two-page testimonial in the Washington Times quoted the 36 former U.S. presidents "from the vantage point of heaven" (Moon, according to George Washington, is "the messiah").
This year, claiming instructions from the True Father himself, Unificationists announced that a new stage had begun in the raising of Cheon Il Guk ( or heaven on earth). Believing that the crucifix could be the last obstacle keeping America from accepting Moon as the messiah, they have held conferences across the country with banners reading "Tear Down the Walls/Who is Rev. Moon?" culminating in a final crucifix-burying ceremony. Moon's Family Federation for World Peace Web site describes the inspiration as a vision that the True Father first made public last year at the 20th anniversary party of his Washington Times. (The speech, in which Moon said, "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world," sent many reporters to the bar for a drink, the Post reported.)
But while Moon's anti-cross rhetoric would surely turn off many of his friends on the religious right, he remains invisible in the media. Even though his rhetoric far surpasses Louis Farrakhan's in vitriol towards Jews and gays, he goes unnoticed by groups like the ADL, whose Web site highlights the Nation of Islam as a hate group, while its only mention of Moon comes in a warning about the violent threats of extremist rabbi Meir Kahane (who in 1976 "declared war" on Moon missionaries, vowing none "would walk the street safely").
Disciples insist it is a mistake to take Moon's words literally, out of the context of the broader Divine Principle. They hasten to add that the massive archives of speeches online are hastily written translations and are trustworthy only in the original Korean.
But at his Unification.net FAQ, webmaster Damian Anderson warns of any politically correct dilution of, for example, Moon's attack on Jews.
"The fact is that the Jewish people committed a grievous sin in rejecting the Lord, and the world is today committing a grievous sin in rejecting the Lord," he writes. "I will not water down what Father said to please liberal constituencies within his own church."
Within his church, his entreaties to cherish and punish your "love organ" (with pliers if necessary, he suggested in 2001) manage to find an audience. On Blessed Children World, an online message board for kids of Unification families, there is much discussion of church beliefs. "I hate gay people," one B.C. observes. Other B.C.'s ask whether it's a sin to go to the prom and debate a church doctrine that rape victims are considered impure. "Kill yourself before you ARE raped," one posts. "Bite out your tongue and choke on your own blood if you need to. (No joke, that was in Father's speech from some time ago). Anyhow, I know it sounds totally NAZI of us to say/think/believe such things..."
That frank admission has since been deleted from a Nov. 1, 2002, message thread titled "I cannot accept rape = fall," in which other posts contend sexual purity is "worth dying for." But the sentiment, at least, seems to be supported by Moon's speeches.
"If someone is trying to invade you, you would rather kill yourself than go through the fall. At least you won't go to hell that way ... this means love comes before life," he told an audience in 1992. For at all costs, women in Moon's view must not reenact the primal wrong, the perversion Moon sees as responsible for the Fall. "There is nothing more important than the new lineage." - Source
An Evolution has begun. Politicalstrategy.org has officially closed down. Look for DailyNewsOnline.com to rise from the ashes, a powerful new site you won't want to miss. Click here to find out more! Click here to join the mailing list and be notified when the DailyNewsOnline is launched!
Sun Tzu Files 
and 
indicate whether the poll numbers are up or down from the previous poll. Incumbents are in italics. (prior results in '()')