Can The Bush Administration And The GOP Senate Sink Any Lower?

Meanwhile the Bush administration is CRYING about Newsweek who came out and ADMITTED its mistakes in covering the war. It's beyond obscene how twisted and corrupt Bush and his people are but what's even more un-American is how the GOP and its acolytes toady for them in utter disregard for the principles and ideals that are the foundation of this nation.

May 18, 2005

Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
By Times Online

George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption


George Galloway after arriving in the Senate committee room to give evidence (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)



"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph 's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph 's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor . The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday , purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq , contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain , we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq 's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad , the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq 's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq 's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

THE IDIOTS IN CHARGE OF THE ASYLUM

George Bush and the Neocoms are not IN the world, they are living in some fictionalized version based on fantasy and the past. Bush ignored reports of terrorism coming to the U.S. leading up to the Twin Towers Attack (while spending a MONTH on his ranch). Rice was set to deliver a major speech on defending America on 9/11 but did it include terrorism by sneak attack? No, it wanted billions more for missile defense and didn't say a word about Bin Laden. She's probably thanked her lucky stars every night that she never got a chance to deliver that naive speech. So, here we are. Billions flushed down the drain and the shit is hitting the fan while we are selling off our children's future.


May 16, 2005

Staying What Course?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Is there any point, now that November's election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it's important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

(You can read the whole thing at by clicking HERE.)

Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?

At this point, the echoes of Vietnam are unmistakable. Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border sound just like those from a 1960's search-and-destroy mission, body count and all. Stories filed by reporters actually with the troops suggest that the insurgents, forewarned, mostly melted away, accepting battle only where and when they chose.

Meanwhile, America's strategic position is steadily deteriorating.

Next year, reports Jane's Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a real threat.

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

So what's the plan?

The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't.

Yet it's very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we're there.

In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.

But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.

So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I'm not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.

TERRORISM GROWING UNDER BUSH, ROYAL FAMILY NOT HELPING

So, our "allies", the Saudis, are behind most of the terrorist attacks while the Royal Family are jailing reformists wanting democracy. We're going to lose big before we HAVE to get out of Iraq.

'Martyrs' In Iraq Mostly Saudis

Web Sites Track Suicide Bombings

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 15, 2005; A01

Before Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani exploded himself into an anonymous fireball, he was young and interested only in "fooling around."

Like many Saudis, he was said to have experienced a religious awakening after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and dedicated himself to Allah, inspired by "the holy attack that demolished the foolish infidel Americans and caused many young men to awaken from their deep sleep," according to a posting on a jihadist Web site.

On April 11, he died as a suicide bomber, part of a coordinated insurgent attack on a U.S. Marine base in the western Iraq city of Qaim. Just two days later, "the Martyrdom" of Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani was announced on the Internet, the latest requiem for a young Saudi man who had clamored to follow "those 19 heroes" of Sept. 11 and had found in Iraq an accessible way to die.

Hundreds of similar accounts of suicide bombers are featured on the rapidly proliferating array of Web sites run by radical Islamists, online celebrations of death that offer a wealth of information about an otherwise shadowy foe at a time when U.S. military officials say that foreign fighters constitute a growing and particularly deadly percentage of the Iraqi insurgency.

The account of Qahtani's death, like many other individual entries on the Web sites, cannot be verified. But independent experts and former government terrorism analysts who monitor the sites believe they are genuine mouthpieces for the al Qaeda-affiliated radicals who have made Iraq "a melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training group and an indoctrination center," as a recent State Department report put it. The sites hail death in Iraq as the inspiration for a new generation of terrorists in much the same way that Afghanistan attracted Muslims eager to fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Rosters of the Dead

Who are the suicide bombers of Iraq? By the radicals' account, they are an internationalist brigade of Arabs, with the largest share in the online lists from Saudi Arabia and a significant minority from other countries on Iraq's borders, such as Syria and Kuwait. The roster of the dead on just one extremist Web site reviewed by The Washington Post runs to nearly 250 names, ranging from a 13-year-old Syrian boy said to have died fighting the Americans in Fallujah to the reigning kung fu champion of Jordan, who sneaked off to wage war by telling his family he was going to a tournament.

Among the dead are students of engineering and English, the son of a Moroccan restaurateur and a smattering of Europeanized Arabs. There are also long lists of names about whom nothing more is recorded than a country of origin and the word "martyr."

Some counterterrorism officials are skeptical about relying on information from publicly available Web sites, which they say may be used for disinformation. But other observers of the jihadist Web sites view the lists of the dead "for internal purposes" more than for propaganda, as British researcher Paul Eedle put it. "These are efforts on the part of jihadis to collate deaths. It's like footballers on the Net getting a buzz out of knowing somebody's transferred from Chelsea to Liverpool." Or, as Col. Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on insurgency with the National Defense University, said, "they are targeted marketing. They are not aimed at the West."

Zarqawi Lures Attackers

Many of the Arabs, according to the postings, were drawn to fight in Iraq under the banner of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group run by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi that has taken credit for a gruesome series of beheadings, kidnappings and suicide attacks -- many of them filmed and then disseminated on the Internet in a convergence between the electronic jihad and the real-life war.

In recent days, the U.S. military in Iraq has stepped up its campaign against the Zarqawi network, launching an offensive in western Iraq in an area where foreigners are believed to be smuggled across the Syrian border and claiming to have arrested or killed nearly two dozen key Zarqawi lieutenants. At the same time, Iraq has been hit by a wave of suicide attacks causing about 400 deaths over the last two weeks, one of the deadliest periods since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

As the military has blamed much of the escalating violence on foreign fighters coming to Iraq, Zarqawi's group responded this week. "The infidels once again are claiming that foreign fighters are responsible for initiating the attacks and an increase [in foreign fighters] is the true danger," the Zarqawi media wing said in a May 10 Internet posting. But "the real danger," the posting said, is Zarqawi's overall following. And besides, it added, "who is the foreigner . . .? You are the ones who came to the land of the Muslims from your distant corrupt land."

U.S. military estimates cited by security analysts put the number of active jihadists at about 1,000, or less than 10 percent of the number of fighters in a mostly Iraqi-dominated insurgency. But military officials now say the foreigners are responsible for a higher percentage of the suicide bombings, and the online postings include few names of dead Iraqis affiliated with Zarqawi's group.

Many of the suicide bombers appear to have been novices in warfare, attracted by the relative ease of access to Iraq and the lure of quick martyrdom. "This is not al Qaeda's first team," said Hammes of the National Defense University. "These are the scrubs who could never get us in the States."

Heavy Saudi Involvement

In a paper published in March, Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on terrorism, analyzed the lists of jihadi dead. He found 154 Arabs killed over the previous six months in Iraq, 61 percent of them from Saudi Arabia, with Syrians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis together accounting for another 25 percent. He also found that 70 percent of the suicide bombers named by the Web sites were Saudi. In three cases, Paz found two brothers who carried out suicide attacks. Many of the bombers were married, well educated and in their late twenties, according to postings.

"While incomplete," Paz wrote, the data suggest "the intensive involvement of Saudi volunteers for jihad in Iraq."

In a telephone interview, Paz said his list -- assembled from monitoring a dozen Islamic extremist Web forums -- now had more than 200 names. "Many are students or from wealthy families -- the same sociological characteristics as the Sept. 11 hijackers," he said.

Saudis Dispute Numbers

The apparent predominance of Saudi fighters on the Internet lists has caused an alarmed reaction by Saudi officials, who fear a backlash from the Americans at the same time they are trying to convince the United States that they are working as allies against terrorism. While Saudi officials do not deny that Saudi citizens have taken up arms against the United States in Iraq, they argue that the long lists of Saudi dead could be a disinformation tactic or simply a recruiting tool used to lure Arab youth to Iraq by convincing them of how many others have already won a place in Paradise.

"Are there Saudis in Iraq? Yes, we know that. Absolutely. But are there the numbers being bandied about? We really don't believe so," said a Saudi official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

"The Internet sites try to recruit people -- it's the best recruitment tool," said Saudi security analyst Nawaf Obaid. Obaid, who has worked closely with the government, said he found 47 cases of Saudis who were dead or injured reported in the kingdom's newspapers, far lower than Internet totals, and had concluded the overall number of Saudi jihadis in Iraq was in the hundreds. "But young guys, they read [on the Internet] we have thousands of Saudis there and think, 'I have to go, too.' "

Evan F. Kohlmann, a researcher who monitors Islamic extremist Web sites, has compiled a list of more than 235 names of Iraqi dead gleaned from the Internet since last summer, with more than 50 percent on his tally from Saudi Arabia as well. In some cases, he found photos or videos of dead foreign fighters posted online. One Kuwaiti policeman who died was featured in a Zarqawi propaganda video called "Winds of Change," while the bloodied corpse of a Turkish al Qaeda disciple, Habib Aktas, was shown on another video celebrating his "martyrdom."

Some of the Web postings also include phone numbers so fellow Islamists can call a dead fighter's family and congratulate them. Kohlmann called several of the numbers. "I have lists and lists of foreign fighters, and it's no joke. Their sons went and blew themselves up in Iraq," he said.

Zarqawi's group has also regularly posted biographical sketches of its suicide bombers, such as that of Abu Anas Tuhami, said to have died in a suicide attack on Iraq's Election Day in January. Tuhami, a Saudi orphan raised by his grandfather, was unusually saintly, as reported in the February online communique.

Quick Path to Paradise

"O' brother, I love to sleep on the floor and I need no mattress," Tuhami was quoted as telling one fellow foreign fighter. He was to have been married in February. "Instead, he chose to be with the virgins of paradise," the announcement said. "He used to talk frequently about the virgins of paradise and their beauty, and he wished to drink a sip from the sustenance of paradise while a virgin beauty wiped his mouth."

One Web forum examined by The Post, a site first registered to an Abu Dhabi individual on Sept. 18, 2001, and believed to attract postings from al Qaeda, presents a regularly updated list of the "Arab martyrs in Iraq." The forum, at http://www.qal3ah.net/ , was used by both Paz and Kohlmann in compiling their lists; other researchers also said they regularly consulted the site, which bills itself as a sort of town hall for the jihad-inclined.

Saudis were also the leading group on this list, representing 44 percent, followed by Syrians and Iraqis at less than 15 percent each. Many of the dead appeared to be young newcomers to jihad with stories like Qahtani's, though other listings detailed the deaths of veteran fighters who came through the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, including the father of Ammar Souri, the 13-year-old said to have died during last year's fighting in Fallujah.

Biographies of Bombers

Often the entries bragged about the number of Americans killed by the "lions from the martyrs' brigade," as in the case of Ahmed Said Ghamdi, a 20-year-old Saudi who was said to have given up his medical studies in Sudan to go to Iraq and was hailed as the "hero" of a Mosul suicide bombing of a mess tent that killed 22 people.

Another list, posted in February on the forum called Masada, listed a couple dozen senior Zarqawi lieutenants who had died -- most of whose names appear on the other Web lists. Among them was Abu Mohammed Lubnani, a Lebanese who had lived in Denmark before going to fight in Iraq and whose son was also killed, and Abu Ahmad Tabuki, who had been a key figure in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets.

Biographical details are often sketchy in the online obituaries, as is the case with Qahtani, the young Saudi said to have died April 11 while attacking a U.S. Marine base in the western Iraqi city of Qaim. The account of his death located by Kohlmann on the Internet does not say whether Qahtani was driving the commandeered dump truck that barreled onto the base, wreaking havoc before exploding, or whether he was in one of two other vehicles that blew up while another group of fighters opened fire on Marines.

It gives no more identifying details than his name -- indicating he was part of a well-known Saudi tribe that also produced the al Qaeda member known as the so-called 20th hijacker, Mohamed Qahtani, who was turned away from entering the country by suspicious U.S. airport officials in August 2001.

Five other Qahtanis have been reported killed in Iraq, including Muhammed bin Aedh Ghadif Qahtani, a captain in the Saudi National Guard who allegedly used his guard identification badge to help gain entry into Iraq when he was stopped for questioning.

Saudi court sentences three reformists to jail

Saudi court sentences three reformists to jail

By Dominic Evans Sun May 15, 9:03 AM ET

A Saudi court jailed three prominent reformists on Sunday for up to nine years for trying to sow dissent and challenge the royal family, dealing a blow to tentative reforms in the absolute monarchy.

Judges at the Riyadh court, which was ringed by security forces, issued their verdict after a nine-month trial held mainly behind closed doors despite earlier promises of openness.

The court sentenced academics Ali al-Dumaini to nine years in jail, Abdullah al-Hamed to seven years and Matruk al-Faleh to six years, lawyers said. All three were arrested in March 2004 after petitioning the kingdom's rulers to move toward a constitutional monarchy and speed up political reforms.

Their arrest -- along with nine other men who were later released -- drew rare public criticism from the United States which has pushed for reform in ally Saudi Arabia since the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out by mainly Saudi hijackers.

"This is not fair," Faleh's wife Jamila al-Ukla said after the sentences. Her husband supported "the centrality of the royal family, the country and Islam," she said. "(To call for) constitutional monarchy is not a criminal issue."

Lawyer Ali Ghothami said the men would appeal the ruling.

Ghothami said the panel of three judges found that the men had "overstepped the bounds" by talking to foreign media, had ignored national interests, intended to incite people and "gave a chance to the nation's enemies to harm it."

They were also convicted of defaming officials and challenging the independence of the judiciary.

Specifically the judges cited Faleh's criticism of Saudi Arabia's education system, which he blamed for two years of violence by al Qaeda supporters, Ghothami said.

Dumaini had "incited (people) against the Wahhabi school" of Islam in Saudi Arabia, which critics blame for fostering anti-Western sentiment and militancy. Hamed had "challenged the authority of the ruler," according to the court.

SHOCK AT SENTENCES

Relatives and lawyers said they were shocked by the severity of the sentences, but some insisted it was a sign that authorities realized the reformists were a serious force.

"Today marks the legitimate birth of reform," Hamed's brother Eissa said.

Saudi Arabia held partial elections this year to municipal councils -- the first national vote in the country. But women were barred from voting, only half the council seats were open to election, and the powers of the councils themselves will be limited.

In urban centers, candidates backed by powerful and conservative religious scholars swept the board.

Most family members spent Sunday's court hearing on a Riyadh pavement after the session was closed off by the judges and security forces insisted the small group of relatives and supporters stay hundreds of meters (yards) from the court.

Hamed and Faleh had refused to submit a defense in protest that their court sessions had been held mainly behind closed doors, despite promises last year they would be heard in public.

Bush Was Drunk A Lot During Vietnam War, Never Learned From Its Lessons

Vietnam and Iraq

By H.D.S. Greenway | April 22, 2005

SPRING HAS COME again 30 times since the last April agonies of the Republic of South Vietnam. None of us who were there in that final collapse are likely to forget it: The seemingly endless columns of refugees snaking ever southward, the infectious fear that ran through the streets of Saigon, the sudden suicides, some of them in public places, the rumors and pathetic false hopes that some kind of deal would be made, that the Communists would not come after all.

The American armed forces had already left in the summer of '73. There was supposed to have been peace. But peace did not come, and 30 years of American policy was going up in smoke before our eyes.

The melodramatic evacuation instructions had already been passed out to us when the last day came. We were to listen to the armed forces radio, and if we heard a weather report saying ''105 degrees and rising," followed by 30 seconds of Bing Crosby singing ''White Christmas," we were to go to designated evacuation points around the city.

I never met anybody who had actually heard this, but when the last day came thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese mobbed the fence around the American embassy begging to be taken away to safety. When the helicopters arrived, however, there were very few places for Vietnamese. In the end, they would break through the fence and the Marines would use tear gas to disperse their erstwhile allies.

My turn to leave came just as dusk was falling in a sudden squall. As my helicopter rose over the city I could see masses of panicked people in the rain-washed streets below. Away to the north ammunition dumps were exploding in the distance. In the morning it would all be over.

As we crossed the coast in the gathering dark, like a butterfly born on an off-shore wind, I could see thousands of overcrowded boats below us drifting on the South China Sea - the flotsam left from the wreck we were leaving behind.

Today, 30 years on, we are embarked in another military action. Like Vietnam, the war in Iraq began with a falsehood. The Tonkin Gulf incident, the alleged firing upon American ships, turned out to be as bogus as weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda links would be in the present war. And in this war as it was then, there were towns that had to be destroyed in order to save them.

Back then another powerful secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, succumbed to hubris, and would later admit he knew nothing of the land of his adversary. He was warned, of course, but chose not to listen as Donald Rumsfeld refused to listen when he was offered advice by experts whom he thought to be ideologically wanting.

We cannot foresee the end of the Iraq war, but the real trouble will come, as it did in Vietnam, after American troops have left. In reality we have invaded three countries in Iraq, and war between factions would demolish all our hopes. The Kurds see us now as liberators, but will not wish to be thwarted in their hard-won autonomy. The Sunnis will probably never be reconciled to what the United States wants for them, and that leaves the Shia who will tolerate us as long as power is within their grasp, but not for long afterwards. The democracy we seek to impose may not be to our liking as the forces of militant Islam may yet win out in the end.

Long after the Vietnam War, a former American ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked some questions that we could be asking ourselves today.

''Was the United States mistaken in its determination to intervene? Was the United States engaged in an imperialist adventure far from our own shores? Or were we defending a small nation, pledged to a democratic government? Did the limitations placed on our use of military force keep us from a swift and decisive victory? Or were we engaged in a war that could not be won even with the most sophisticated and lethal weapons? Were the Vietcong freedom fighters seeking to liberate their country, or were they simply terrorists?"

Ambassador Lodge did not answer his own questions, but he did write that ''it remains true that our only sure guides to a present, which so often seems bewildering, are the lessons -- the often terrible lessons- of the past."

"Out Of The Loop" With Reality (A Bush Trait)

May 9, 2005

Stranger Than Fiction
By BOB HERBERT

When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq, the president famously replied, "There is a higher father that I appeal to."

It might have been better if Mr. Bush had stayed in closer touch with his earthly father. From the very beginning the war in Iraq has been an exercise in extreme madness, an absurd venture that would have been rich in comic possibilities except for the fact that many thousands of men, women and children have died, and tens of thousands have been crippled, burned or otherwise maimed.

The world now knows that the weapons of mass destruction were a convenient fiction. Less well known is that bumbling administration officials eagerly embraced the ravings of a foreign intelligence source known, believe it or not, as "Curveball." He helped promote the fantasy that Iraq had mobile laboratories for the manufacture of biological weapons.

The C.I.A. was warned that Curveball was as crazy as a Peter Sellers character, but the administration wanted this war in the way that a small child wants candy. Curveball's information was swallowed whole.

Amateurs and incompetents have run the war from the start, and fantasy has trumped reality at every turn. If a movie were to be made of the war, the appropriate director would be Mel Brooks. Even as the administration was listening to the likes of Curveball, it was showing the door to the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who made the mistake of speaking the plain truth to officials fluent only in self-serving gibberish.

General Shinseki said it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to pacify Iraq. That was the end of his career.

Bush & Co. sent far fewer troops into the war, and many of them were never properly trained or equipped. The results have been nightmarish. Roadside bombs have caused 70 percent of American casualties in Iraq. The military was not prepared for this tactic and has had a miserable record providing protective armor for Humvees and other vehicles carrying soldiers and marines.

So G.I.'s from the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world have been dying because their nation wouldn't give them up-to-date combat vehicles.

As for training and preparedness, the scandal at Abu Ghraib is instructive. The problems there went far beyond the photos of Lynndie England and others humiliating the Iraqis under their control. We learned last week that Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general whose reserve military police unit was in charge of the prison, had been arrested for shoplifting at a military base in Florida in 2002. The same army that's scouring Iraq for insurgents and terrorists was apparently unaware of the arrest record of the woman assigned to such a sensitive position at Abu Ghraib.

Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. It was a symptom. This is a war in which the people in charge have had no idea what they were doing. One of the recommendations of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the scandal at Abu Ghraib, was that a team be sent to Iraq to teach some of the soldiers how to run prisons. How's that for an innovative step?

The United States is now stuck with a war it should never have started. The violence continues to rage out of control. The latest fantasy out of Washington is that somehow, miraculously, Iraqi troops will be able to take over and win the war that we couldn't.

The American public is becoming fed up and with good reason. Support for the war is declining and the reputation of the military is in jeopardy. The Army has been unable to meet its recruitment goals and the search for new soldiers is becoming desperate.

Last week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, told Congress that the war in Iraq was taking a toll on the military and would make combat operations elsewhere in the world more difficult. That was hardly a comforting thought as the administration was ramping up its rhetoric about North Korea.

If President Bush had consulted with his father before launching this clownish, disastrous war, he might have gotten some advice that would have pointed him in a different direction and spared his country - and the families of the many thousands dead - a lot of grief.

British Document Confirms BUSH LIED To Go To War

They lied to us

Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

05.10.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- Meanwhile, back in Iraq. I was going to leave out of this column everything about how we got into Iraq, or whether it was wise, and or whether the infamous "they" knowingly lied to us. (Although I did plan to point out I would be nobly refraining from poking at that pus-riddled question.)

Since I believe one of our greatest strengths as Americans is shrewd practicality, I thought it was time we moved past the now unhelpful, "How did we get into his mess?" to the more utilitarian, "What the hell do we do now?"

However, I cannot let this astounding Downing Street memo go unmentioned.

On May 1, the Sunday Times of London printed a secret memo that went to the defense secretary, foreign secretary, attorney general and other high officials. It is the minutes of their meeting on Iraq with Tony Blair. The memo was written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign policy aide. It has been confirmed as legitimate and is dated July 23, 2002. I suppose the correct cliché is "smoking gun."

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. (There it is.) The NSC (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

After some paragraphs on tactical considerations, Rycroft reports, "No decisions had been taken, but he (British defense secretary) thought the most likely timing in U.S. minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the U.S. congressional elections.

"The foreign secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the U.N. weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

"The attorney general said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defense, humanitarian intervention or UNSC authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case."

There is much more in the memo, which can be found easily online. What's difficult now is placing the memo in the timeframe. Can you remember how little you knew about a war with Iraq in July 2002? Most of us who opposed the war concluded some time ago this was the way it went down. There was plenty of evidence, though nothing this direct and cold. Think of the difference it would have made if we had known all this three years ago. Now? The memo was a huge story in Britain, but is almost unreported here.

The memo does get us some forwarder. At least it finally settles this ridiculous debate about how Dear Leader Bush just wanted to bring democracy all along and we did it all for George Washington.

Enough said. What to do? Now that we're there, at least we're on the right side, not even withstanding the disgusting Ahmed Chalabi as oil minister. Unfortunately, our very support for the good guys is making it much harder for them. A tactical Catch-22. I was impressed by the premise of Reza Aslan's new book, "No God but God," which is that all of Islam is undergoing a struggle between the modernists and the traditionalists, between reformers and reactionaries.

But in Iraq, which already had a secular state, we have the additional complication of sectarian/ethnic divisions -- your Sunnis, your Shiites, your Kurds -- not to mention, the tribalism within those divisions. (Am I bitter enough to point out once again that Paul Wolfowitz said under oath, "There is no history ethnic strife in Iraq"? You bet your ass I am.)

Our most basic problem in-country is that having the U.S. of A. on your side automatically makes you about as popular as a socialist in the Texas Legislature: We are working against the guys we want to win by supporting them. This requires some serious skulling but is not, in politics, all that unusual a pickle.

There is a political solution. Like all politics, it requires a deal. What about letting the interim government make a deal with the Sunnis for us to withdraw -- as in, "You cooperate with us, and we'll get the Americans out of here for you." We can't make that deal, but the Iraqis can.

Losing hearts and minds

Losing hearts and minds

By Derrick Z. Jackson | May 13, 2005

WHEN THE Abu Ghraib prison scandal exploded a year ago, President Bush said it was ''an insult to the Iraqi people and an affront to the most basic standards of morality and decency." He said, ''These humiliating acts do not reflect our character." He also said, ''American soldiers and civilians on the ground have come to know and respect the citizens of Iraq."

Less than a week before the scandal became worldwide news, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that all was relatively well between Iraqi civilians and American occupiers.

''I don't think that we have lost their hearts and minds," Powell said. ''I think most of the Iraqi people know what we are doing and want to be part of that. . . . What we don't have are the hearts and minds of the thugs, the former regime elements, and the terrorists who have come to make trouble. . . . The Iraqi people, whose hearts and minds we have, will see that these thugs and criminals are attacking the government of the Iraqi people."

On Wednesday, National Public Radio broadcast a piece that made it appallingly clear that we have not cleaned up our character in Iraq. Humiliation remains a primary weapon. For all the soldiers who have a heart, a lot also appear to have lost their minds.

NPR reporter Philip Reeves followed American soldiers around Mosul. At one point, the soldiers decided to take over a civilian house for two hours as a surveillance post. A lieutenant said to the surprised family of the house, ''Listen to me. Let me make this really clear for you. We need to be in your house for two hours. Everybody in this house will stay here."

When the family continue to appear to be ''baffled and unhappy," another soldier stepped in and said (with obscenities bleeped out by NPR):

''Look, check this out. You tell them this. You're not [bleep] leaving. Nobody's [bleep] leaving this house. You're not using the phone. Anybody comes, they're going to [bleep] stay here. OK? You give me a [bleep] hard time, I'll turn you [bleep] guys into the commandos, and they'll [bleep] you up."

In the background, one soldier said, ''Hey don't translate that." Another soldier added, ''Yeah, don't say that." The soldier with the foul mouth said, ''That's what I tell them all the time." Again, a soldier said, ''You shouldn't say that."

Bush has boasted how ''Iraqis have laid the foundations of a free society, with hundreds of independent newspapers." The reality was a bit more totalitarian. The featured soldiers handed out a newspaper full of favorable news about the US-installed government. When they saw that two young Iraqis had ripped up the newspaper, a soldier took one aside and asked, ''Why are you ripping up the paper? Why are you ripping up the paper?"

A staff sergeant told NPR, ''When a guy tears up a paper in my face, it looks like he's disrespecting everything we're trying to do. Maybe he knows somebody. Or maybe he is somebody. But it's just blatant for him to tear it up in my face and then lie about it. It's blatant. He blatantly disrespected everything that we're trying to accomplish."

Finally a supervising soldier, playing the benevolent occupier, told the young Iraqi, ''If you tore up the paper, that's fine. If you didn't tear up the paper, that's fine. Don't tear up the papers in the future, OK?"

This is not to tear up the soldiers. They are but pawns of President Bush, who declared major combat operations over under the banner of ''Mission Accomplished" two years ago. If all that soldiers can now accomplish is curse at baffled Iraqi families and berate people in the streets for exercising what we consider the right of free speech to tear up a newspaper, then there is no mission.

In a sign of their morass, the soldiers described themselves in lowly terms far removed from the pre-invasion build-up, when Vice President Dick Cheney said ''we will be greeted as liberators." The supervising soldier in Mosul told NPR as his armored vehicle cruised the streets, ''If you look on the walls here, you can see all this graffiti. We've really taken to the streets here kind of like a gang unit would in, say, LA. It's a giant gang war, and we've got the biggest gang, so every time we see graffiti, we mark it out, we tag it with 'US Forces,' and we say, 'Hey look, this is our block.' "

Funny, when Bush told us we were liberating the Iraqi people, he said nothing about employing the Crips and Bloods.