The Bush administration tried to do the invasion on the cheap without THINKING over what they were getting into and what they were FORCING our military reserves into. This is a FAILURE of leadership that is criminal. To blame it on the soldiers instead of taking the blame is how Bush handles everything. He has never had to take responsibility for his actions. Cheney had to carry his water for him at the recent 9/11 Commission inquiry (a first in U.S. history). What a WUSSIE! We need a real man or a real woman to be president, not a coddled mommy's boy. Bush must be removed from office this November.


May 9, 2004 NY TIMES
THE MILITARY
In Abuse, a Portrayal of Ill-Prepared, Overwhelmed G.I.'s
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, May 8 — The orders that sent most of the 320th Military Police Battalion to Iraq came on Feb. 5, 2003, as part of the tide of two-week-a-year soldiers being called up from the National Guard and the Army Reserve in preparation for war.

In theory, the battalion's specialty was guarding enemy prisoners of war, a task that was expected to be a major logistical problem. In fact, an Army report said few of the 1,000 reservists of the 320th had been trained to do that, and fewer still knew how to run a prison. They were deployed so quickly from the mid-Atlantic region that there was no time to get new lessons.

"You're a person who works at McDonald's one day; the next day you're standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they're sick and half are saying they're hungry," remembered Sgt. First Class Paul Shaffer, 35, a metalworker from Pennsylvania. "We were hit with so much so fast, I don't think we were prepared."

The battalion — including insurance agents, checkout clerks, sales people and others — ultimately would follow a grim trajectory into the episodes of prisoner abuse that have shocked the nation. The soldiers found themselves in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at a time when the increasing rage of the anti-American insurgency, along with the desperation of American commanders to glean intelligence, magnified the pressures on the unit. This account of the troubled battalion is based on interviews with soldiers, their relatives, military commanders and Army reports.

Within days of the American invasion of Iraq, the 320th was in Kuwait, and the unit moved swiftly into southern Iraq, first to a prisoner of war camp overseen by British troops and then to a sprawling barbed-wire American camp in the desert. Known as Camp Bucca, the American camp was home to a legion of Iraqi prisoners.

"We were supposed to be the experts on this, but all we knew is what we learned in our summer camp," said Scott McKenzie, 38, of Clearwater, Pa., a sergeant first class who has since been discharged from the service. "We never learned how to deal with a riot, what to do when we were being assaulted."

On May 12, Mr. McKenzie, who worked in civilian life as a guard in a boot-camp style detention center, was escorting some Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca when just such a riot broke out, in what became the first incident of prisoner abuse involving the unit. At least one detainee was held down while Mr. McKenzie and two other soldiers badly beat and kicked him, according to testimony presented in a court-martial. This was done at the urging of a superior, Master Sgt. Lisa Girman, according to the testimony.

"We called it just another night in the desert," Mr. McKenzie recalled last week. He insisted that he had used no more than "the minimum force necessary to regain control of the prisoners" and that the event was "no big deal."

Mr. McKenzie, Ms. Girman and another soldier were found guilty of mistreating Iraqi detainees, and they accepted a less-than-honorable discharge in a plea bargain. A fourth soldier in the unit also was granted a less-than-honorable discharge separately. But the incident prompted no effort by the soldiers' commanders to make sure the abuse was not repeated, according to an Army investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba into the maltreatment of prisoners. The inaction was a lapse in leadership that reflected the eventual near total-breakdown of discipline in the unit.

Many members of the 320th had expected their mission to wind down once Iraqi prisoners were freed, after the declaration on May 1, 2003, that major combat operations had ended. Instead, to their considerable disappointment, the soldiers learned that they would be sent on to longer missions.

Some elements of the battalion were still coming in, including the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., which arrived in May 2003. At first the 180-member company was assigned to work with marines in the southern town of Hilla. With a specialty in law enforcement, the company was ordered to help train a reconstituted Iraqi police force in Hilla.

Under Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, most of the battalion was directed to a different destination.

With the P.O.W. facilities at Camp Bucca, the Baghdad airport and other sites still crowded, and the processing of prisoners taking time, the Army was looking for more permanent detention quarters.

Just as the occupation authorities turned to Saddam Hussein's old palaces to house the new Coalition Provisional Authority and other American headquarters around the country, they chose as the new American prison Mr. Hussein's old one at Abu Ghraib, even though it had a history of executions and torture that made the prison one of the most feared symbols of the old government.

Mr. Hussein had emptied Abu Ghraib of its occupants in October 2002, in a gesture aimed at winning popular support and possibly at stirring trouble for any American occupation. As late as June 2003, its gates were still adorned with his portrait.

Once the Army decided to reopen the 280-acre site, it did so swiftly, renovating cells, painting the walls and sweeping up broken glass and other debris left from months of looting. In July, much of the 320th Battalion was sent to Abu Ghraib. The reservists were turned into wardens of what was to become the world's largest prison run by the United States Army.

The New Wardens
A Rebellion Begins, and a Prison Reopens

At the outset of the American occupation, Abu Ghraib held only about 2,000 Iraqi prisoners, most housed in tents erected under the scorching summer sun outside the prison itself.

The inmate population grew quickly, as prisoners arrested after the war emerged as a far bigger challenge than those taken in the war.

"We were real short-handed," said Sergeant Shaffer, the metal worker from Pennsylvania, who described cases in which no more than six guards on a single shift would be in charge of 700 Iraqi prisoners. "On my compound, we were doing 16-hour days. It was a very high-stress environment."

There were also clear clashes of culture, as soldiers who had little knowledge of the Middle East found themselves frustrated by the poor conditions, the prospect of a yearlong deployment and a lack of compliance among the Iraqi prisoners.

"They don't want to listen," Sergeant Shaffer said. "We'd say we want you to line up at 9 o'clock; they'd say, `If you want us to line up at 9 o'clock, we want something in return.' It doesn't work that way."

Among the prison's new inmates, many were criminals, some of the same ones freed by Mr. Hussein. When they joined in the looting, lawlessness and other crimes, the Americans rearrested them.

But a more worrisome category of prisoners emerged from the widening insurgency in Iraq, as played out in the shootings, bombings and other attacks against American soldiers. More and more of those prisoners were filling the makeshift jails.

In addition to Abu Ghraib, they included Camp Bucca in the south; Camp Cropper, a high-value prisoner center near the Baghdad airport; and Camp Ashraf, a former camp for the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, which was being used to detain its members. The facilities were overseen by the 800th Military Police Brigade, with headquarters in Uniondale, N.Y., the 320th Battalion and the much smaller 372nd Military Police Company from Maryland.

Various Army divisions and other military units also maintained detention facilities around the country where they could hold prisoners for as long as 14 days before transferring them to other sites.

At Abu Ghraib, the prison was divided into three main subcamps. One, Camp Ganci, consisted of eight blocks of tents, each sealed off with razor wire and containing about 400 inmates in rows and rows of Army-issue canvas tents. Each tent held 25 inmates or more.

Camp Vigilant, another tent camp, was divided into four units with about 100 inmates each and was set aside for prisoners believed to have the most intelligence value.

Finally, there was the "hard site," the old prison itself, divided into seven blocks. Eventually, six were run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, for the detention of Iraqi prisoners to be tried in Iraqi courts. The seventh cellblock under American control, was divided into two parts, 1-A, set aside for "high risk" prisoners, and 1-B, on the second floor, for female prisoners.

Together, the two parts had 103 cells, running down each wall, with a long corridor down the middle. Each cell — about 6 by 10 feet — had a bunk bed and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The cells were designed to hold 206 people.

From the initial 2,000 prisoners, the population skyrocketed toward 7,000 prisoners by September as thousands more "security detainees" were rounded up by soldiers on suspicion of involvement in attacks on American troops.

In Baghdad, a three-person team headed by Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top American intelligence officer in Iraq, was in charge of reviewing the status of the security detainees as a prelude to their release. But far more Iraqis were being arrested than freed; the average stay in the prison was approaching four to six months. The 320th Battalion was stretched thin; working in temperatures that regularly exceeded 120 degrees only added to the strain.

Meanwhile, security conditions around the prison were worsening, with small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire coming into the compound almost every night. Colonel Phillabaum, the battalion commander, said that he and other officers dubbed the neighborhood around the prison "Little Mogadishu," after the Somali capital that in 1993 become a death trap for American soldiers. "The people just hated us," he said.

A Troubled Unit
Overcrowding and Prison Riots

By late in the summer of 2003, concerns about overcrowding, disciplinary problems and disturbances at American-run prisons in Iraq had reached the highest level of the military's headquarters in Baghdad. At Abu Ghraib in June, a riot broke out and eight detainees were shot, leaving one dead. Similar incidents occurred elsewhere.

But even more concern was focused on the mounting insurgency, and how little American intelligence had been gathered about it, even though thousands of Iraqis had been taken into custody. Mr. Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, were dead, killed by American soldiers in July, but the former Iraqi leader was still on the run. Major bombings in August of the United Nations headquarters and at other sites added to the level of anxiety.

While military police were in charge of American prisons in Iraq, military intelligence units were in charge of interrogations. But changes were in the works.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a business consultant and longtime reservist who had arrived in Iraq in late June to take over the 800th Military Police Brigade. "The numbers were increasing at rapid rates," she recalled in one of several television interviews this week.

"They were tagged as security detainees and they could not simply be released," she said. "They had to be interrogated, held, reviewed, and then ultimately released. I know that the interrogation, the interrogators, were under tremendous pressure."

In mid-August, a team of civilian interrogators led by Steven Stefanowicz, a former Navy petty officer and an employee of a Virginia company called CACI, began work at Abu Ghraib under a classified one-year military contract. The contract was part of a broader effort by the military to enlist Arabic linguists and other civilians in the work of questioning Iraqi detainees. CACI sent 27 interrogators to Abu Ghraib, Pentagon officials have said. Their job was to conduct interrogations in conjunction with military police and military intelligence units, according to a company memorandum.

Later that month, at the behest of senior Pentagon officials, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the two-star Army general overseeing the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was sent to Iraq. He was to review the American-led effort "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," according to the Army report by General Taguba.

Among General Miller's classified recommendations, submitted after a tour that ended Sept. 9, were that the guards at Abu Ghraib and other facilities "be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees," according to General Taguba's report.

At the end of September, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American officer in Iraq, sent his inspector general to Abu Ghraib. According to Colonel Phillabaum, the visiting officer told him, "You guys are the forgotten."

Isolated and without amenities like gyms and barbershops that were available to other troops in Iraq, morale in the 320th plummeted. Many reservists who had been sent home when their tours were complete had not been replaced, adding to the burden of the remaining guards even as the number of prisoners continued to rise.

Army doctrine calls for a military police brigade to handle about 4,000 prisoners. But a single battalion — about a third the size of a brigade — was handling 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. When battalion commanders sought to release hundreds of detainees deemed to be no threat to allied forces, they were blocked from doing so by officers in Baghdad, they have complained.

At the end of October, Colonel Phillabaum briefed General Sanchez on the deteriorating, dysfunctional conditions at Abu Ghraib. "It was a real heart-to-heart," Colonel Phillabaum said in an interview. "I told it the way it was."

Rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire were "a constant threat," General Karpinski said.

"Abu Ghraib was in the middle of a hostile fire zone," she said, adding that the unit was "mortared every night, practically." Within days of the briefing to General Sanchez, General Karpinski sent Colonel Phillabaum to Kuwait for two weeks "to give him some relief from the pressure" at the camp, General Taguba's inquiry found.

Colonel Phillabaum contends that General Karpinski was angry because his briefing reflected poorly on her command, so she began a process to reassign him to her headquarters. Colonel Phillabaum, however, returned to his post.

According to General Taguba, Colonel Phillabaum and his chain of command were part of the problem, rarely supervising their troops and failing to set basic soldiering standards for them or make them aware of the protections afforded to prisoners under the Geneva Conventions.

"Despite his proven deficiencies, as both a commander and leader," General Taguba concluded, General Karpinski allowed Colonel Phillabaum "to remain in command of her most troubled battalion guarding, by far, the largest number of detainees in the 800th M.P. Brigade."

In October 2003, the 372nd Military Police Company joined Colonel Phillabaum's battalion at Abu Ghraib.

In Hilla, they had seen little combat; in Abu Ghraib the soldiers suddenly found themselves under attack virtually every night from insurgents outside the prison.

In Hilla, the 372nd had been focusing on law enforcement. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick, one of the soldiers from western Maryland, for one, had spent six months working in operations, "manning radio's, mission board etc.," according to a journal entry he made on Jan. 24. In Abu Ghraib, however, unit members were assigned as prison guards, with responsibilities that included the so-called Tier 1 cellblock of the prison.

A few weeks later, on Nov. 19, 2003, General Sanchez made a surprising decision: he transferred formal command of Abu Ghraib to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade under Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, a 32-year military veteran whose unit, based in Wiesbaden, Germany, had been assigned to the prison as the chief interrogators since it opened. Working with Colonel Pappas was Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, who headed the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison.

General Karpinski, Colonel Phillabaum and the military police in the battalion contend that the military intelligence officers had, even before Nov. 19, essentially taken control of the prisoners in the Tier 1 cellblock and had encouraged their mistreatment. General Taguba concluded that the 372nd "was directed to change facility procedures to `set the conditions' " for interrogations.

"It was like they were in charge now; it's a military intelligence unit now," said a member of the 32Oth Battalion, Sgt. John Lamela, of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The intelligence officers' practice of wearing uniforms without insignia made it difficult for soldiers to identify the officers or even to determine which of them were military and which belonged to other agencies, including the C.I.A., whose officers periodically visited Abu Ghraib prison to participate in interrogations.

"They were in charge; it was almost like whatever his battalion wanted, his battalion got," Sergeant Lamela said of one senior intelligence officer at the prison. "He moved people out of their units so his personnel could live in their units. His personnel could walk around without proper uniforms; we as M.P.'s were not to correct them; he would say, `Let it slide.' "

Sgt. First Class Joseph Mood of Benton, Pa., had a similar view of the intelligence officers' influence. "They took over the whole base; it was their show," he said. "That was their wording. `This is our show now.' They would try to get us to keep prisoners up all night, make them stand outside, have them stand up all the time — sometimes they asked the guards to do something that was totally against what you believed in doing."

An Open Secret
Reports of Abuse Trickle Out

During the summer and fall human rights groups in Iraq say they heard repeated complaints of prisoners being roughed up or abused by their American jailers. Those were not the only breakdowns of discipline in that period.

On three days, Nov. 5, 7 and 8, detainees escaped from the prison and Camp Ganci, according to the results of military investigations that have been made public. Then, in what appears to have been the worst of the incidents, a riot broke out on Nov. 24 in Camp Ganci in which 12 detainees were shot, and 3 of them killed, after members of the military police battalion opened fire. For reasons that have not been explained, nonlethal and lethal rounds were mixed in their chambers, according to the investigation.

Also at Abu Ghraib that month, an Iraqi detainee died as he was being questioned by a C.I.A. officer and a linguist who was working as a contract employee with the agency, in an investigation still under review by the agency's inspector general. Through December and January, there were more shootings, riots and escapes. The worst abuses at Abu Ghraib took place on or around Nov. 8, according to the details of the military investigation made public so far, and principally in Cellblock 1-A, the group of cells set aside for high risk prisoners.

It was largely in that cellblock that some guards from the 372nd are accused of committing abuses that General Taguba called "sadistic, blatant and wanton" criminal acts. Prisoners were punched, slapped and kicked and forced to strip naked and form human pyramids. Some were ordered to simulate sexual acts. In some of the photographs of the abuse that have surfaced in recent days, the M.P.'s are grinning.

Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. is shown with his arms folded as he stands behind a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners; an unidentified Iraqi prisoner is seen hooded and standing on a small box, with wires attached to his body; and Pfc. Lynndie England is seen glaring down at a naked Iraqi prisoner, whom she is holding by a leash.

So far, seven enlisted soldiers from the western Maryland company face criminal charges, all from the incidents in Tier 1. But several inquiries are still under way, and the question of who was primarily responsible has still not been answered.

The report by General Taguba, though limited to the conduct of the military police, said that the general suspected much of the fault, either directly or indirectly, should be attributed to military intelligence units under Colonel Pappas and Colonel Jordan. Through a spokesman, Colonel Pappas declined to comment, and Army officials would not even say which unit Colonel Jordan is currently assigned to. General Tabuga also blamed Mr. Stefanowicz and another contractor, John Israel, neither of whom could be reached for comment.

General Taguba's inquiry also criticized commanders, including Colonel Phillabaum, for failing to supervise his troops and allowing a climate of abuse to take hold.

Colonel Phillabaum said he felt he was being made a scapegoat for the Army. "I have suffered shame and humiliation for doing the best job that anyone could have done given the resources I had to work with," he said.

Colonel Phillabaum pinned the bulk of the blame on two of of the 372nd's soldiers, Sergeant Frederick and Specialist Graner, who are both corrections officers in civilian life. Neither of the two have spoken publicly about the episode.

"These two people were really the ringleaders of this whole thing," Colonel Phillabaum said. "Everybody else followed."

They were the natural leaders in the military police company, he said, since they spoke of their work experiences.

"Taking these prisoners out of their cells and staging bizarre acts were the thoughts of a couple of demented M.P.'s who in civilian life are prison correction officers who well know such acts are prohibited," Colonel Phillabaum said.

He said the abuses that were photographed only occurred between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., times that Sergeant Frederick and Specialist Graner knew no commissioned officers would be checking in. He said the digital photos are all time-coded, and they are all taken over a couple of weeks in this brief window.

"If they thought these acts were condoned, then why were they only done a few nights between 0200 and 0400 instead of during any time between 0600 and 2400 when there were many others around?" Colonel Phillabaum asked.

Sergeant Frederick's uncle, William Lawson, said his nephew had told him the soldiers were photographing the Iraqi prisoners at the direction of military intelligence officers as an interrogation tool.

"Somebody photographed the Iraqis with the intent of using those photographs to show new prisoners that came in, `This is what can happen to you,' to loosen them up psychologically," Mr. Lawson said.

In a letter to his family last year, Sergeant Frederick wrote that military intelligence officers encouraged mistreatment like confining naked inmates for three consecutive days without toilets in damp, unventilated cells with floors 3 feet by 3 feet. Inmates were also handcuffed to cell doors and forced to wear female underpants. "We have a very high rate with our style of getting them to break," Sergeant Frederick wrote to a relative, Mimi Frederick, in an e-mail message on Dec. 18, 2003, according to a copy of the communication. "They usually end up breaking within hours."

General Karpinski has also said that she believed the military police were "coached" in their abusive actions by military intelligence officers. Neal Puckett, General Karpinski's lawyer, said the military police "took all their instructions from military intelligence interrogators, who instructed them to bring the prisoners to and away from these interrogation facilities, and sometimes perhaps to soften them up."

He suggested that the interrogators had instructed the guards to "bring them back naked this time, leave them naked tonight, don't give them any clothes. We think that escalated over a period of time until it ended up in what we see in the pictures."

A military official said Saturday that some of the photographs in the custody of military investigators, but not yet publicly disclosed, depict military working dogs snarling and intimidating Iraqi prisoners. "There are photos showing military working dogs used in a threatening manner," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said he was not aware of when or at which prison in Iraq the photos were taken.

General Karpinski has complained that the initial investigation ordered by General Sanchez was limited to the conduct of her military police brigade and did not examine in any detail the role played by military intelligence and private contractors.

Not until General Sanchez received a preliminary briefing on General Taguba's findings on March 12, which identified the intelligence officers and contractors as having possibly been primarily to blame, did he order a similar review of any wrongdoing by military intelligence officers at the prison. For reasons that remain unclear, that inquiry did not begin until April 23.

"I'd like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military intelligence personnel to turn up the heat?" General Karpinski asked.

Nearly a year ago, when her troops assumed their prison duty at Abu Ghraib, the Army made a promise. When it reopened Abu Ghraib last June, soldiers hung a sign at the gate that proclaimed: "America is a friend of all the Iraqi people."

Thom Shanker in Washington, Kate Zernike and Michael Moss in New York, Dexter Filkins and Ian Fisher in Baghdad and Patrick E. Tyler in Wiesbaden, Germany, contributed reporting for this article.




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COMMENTARY Robert Scheer

When We're the Evildoers in Iraq
With immoral U.S. leadership, is it so shocking to find torturers in the ranks?


May 4, 2004

President Bush is again refusing to take responsibility for any of the horrors happening on his watch. This time it is the abuse of Iraqi prisoners carried out by low-ranking military police working under the direct guidance of military intelligence officers and shadowy civilian mercenaries. Our president launched this war with the promise to the Iraqi people of "no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone." What went wrong?

The president has called the now-exposed pattern of violence an isolated crime performed by "a few people." Yet the Pentagon's own investigation of the incident shows that not only was the entire Abu Ghraib prison out of control, it was the MPs' immediate military superiors who "directly or indirectly" authorized "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of the prisoners as a way to break them in advance of formal interrogations.

"Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," says the report. The report, completed in March and kept secret until it was revealed on the New Yorker website Friday, also stated that a civilian contractor employed by a Virginia company called CACI "clearly knew his instructions" to the MPs called for physical abuse.

Furthermore, in a statement released Friday, Amnesty International reported that in its extensive investigations into human rights in post-invasion Iraq, it "has received frequent reports of torture or other ill treatment by coalition forces during the past year," including during interrogations, and that "virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities."

Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein's potential ties to Al Qaeda. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition prisons, even though the weapons clearly don't exist.

In this context, of course, it makes sense that U.S. interrogators would feel enormous pressure to use any means necessary to verify the absurd claims made so aggressively by the president and his Cabinet before the war. Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques clearly banned by war crimes statutes.

Yet, astonishingly, weeks after the Pentagon's own damning internal report on the torture at Abu Ghraib, and several days after CBS' "60 Minutes II" broke open the story worldwide by showing those horrific photos, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld still had not been briefed on the report, a spokesman said Sunday. Similarly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, admitted Sunday that he hadn't yet bothered to read the 53-page report filed by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, even though he had successfully requested that CBS delay its "inflammatory" broadcast. This shows far more concern for public relations than for finding out the truth.

How could it be that the top officials responsible for the military were not themselves interested in keeping abreast of the investigation — even after the story had exploded into a global scandal?

After all, an ambitious promise to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iraq became the ex post facto rationale for the invasion, once it became clear that the earlier claims of weapons of mass destruction and Hussein ties to Al Qaeda were a fraud.

So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Hussein's most infamous prison did not receive the same brand of "justice" the dictator had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.

Yes, it's great that we are still worlds away from being Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Hussein's Iraq.

We are a free society in which, it is hoped, truth eventually comes out, and thanks to what seems to be one brave whistle-blowing soldier and a responsible officer to whom he reported the torture, these crimes have come to light. Those are the acts of true heroes, and we should be proud of them.

Yet, before we go overboard in celebrating our virtues, let's admit that Americans too can be "evildoers," especially when we embrace, as the president consistently has done, the terribly dangerous idea that the ends justify the means.

The ultimate cost of a foreign policy based on blatant lies, and that equates military might with what is right, is that the brute in all of us will not inevitably lie dormant.




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Unfortunately the Bush White House suffers from Mad Cowboy Disease.


May 8, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
More Mad Cow Mischief

The federal Department of Agriculture is making it hard for anyone to feel confident that the nation is adequately protected against mad cow disease. At a time when the department should be bending over backward to reassure consumers, it keeps taking actions that suggest more concern with protecting the financial interests of the beef industry than with protecting public health.

Just a few weeks ago, the department refused to let a small private company test its cattle for mad cow disease to satisfy Japanese customers. That decision was incomprehensible, unless it was driven by a desire to protect the beef industry from pressure to conduct such tests on all 35 million cattle slaughtered annually in this country.

Now the department has been caught refusing to test a cow that collapsed at a slaughterhouse in Texas; such a collapse could be an indication of mad cow disease. The department's own inspectors at the site wanted to take a brain sample for testing but were overruled by their regional office.

Further evidence of lax regulation emerged when the department quietly expanded the range of beef products that could be imported from Canada, where mad cow disease has been detected, only to be stopped short by a lawsuit.

There is no evidence yet that mad cow disease has invaded American cattle and thus no reason for inordinate worry. The task ahead is to make sure that our herds remain free of the disease. No one can be confident if the department remains so blatantly protective of the American meat industry.



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May 8, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Mr. Rumsfeld's Defense

If Donald Rumsfeld went to Congress yesterday to explain why he should remain secretary of defense, he failed. His daylong testimony in the House and Senate has confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld fatally bungled the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

But the hearings highlighted broader issues.

Mr. Rumsfeld, the military brass and some of the lawmakers badly missed the point by talking endlessly about a few bad apples in one military unit. The despicable acts shown in those famous photos — and in videos that are being held back by the military but may still produce another round of global humiliation — were uniquely outrageous and inexcusable criminal acts. But behind them lies a detention system that treats all prisoners as terrorists regardless of their supposed offenses, and makes brutal interrogations all too common.

The hearings also gave Americans a chilling new reminder of the mess the Bush administration, particularly Mr. Rumsfeld, has made of the Iraq occupation. With their perfect sense of certainty that they were right and everyone else wrong, Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues never planned adequately for the occupation. They were unprepared to handle the 43,000-plus Iraqi prisoners they ultimately took or the armed insurgents they faced — even though disorder and resistance were widely predicted.

The destructive stress created by the administration's lack of preparation was distressingly evident yesterday, when the hearings revealed that the members of the Army Reserve military police detachment stationed at Abu Ghraib had been sent to Iraq without being trained as ordinary prison guards, much less for the nightmarish duty they would face. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon witnesses said those untrained part-time soldiers had been put under the supervision of military intelligence officers who farmed out interrogation work to private contractors. That inexplicable chain of shifted responsibility violated not just any sort of common sense, but also military rules.

Although the Army's own report said the guards had been told by intelligence officers and their consultants to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation by depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to pain and humiliation, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "cannot conceive" that they thought their actions were condoned or encouraged. When he insisted that the normal rules for handling prisoners were in effect, several senators reminded him that he had said in January 2002 that suspected terrorists were not covered by the Geneva Convention.

Mr. Rumsfeld told the senators that his remarks about ignoring the international rules on the treatment of prisoners applied only to people captured in Afghanistan, not Iraq. That was a fine distinction some of the minimally prepared guards at Abu Ghraib may not have grasped, particularly since they were never instructed on the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like most Americans, however, they had heard their commander in chief paint the war in Iraq as an antiterrorism campaign.

Mr. Rumsfeld's belated apology yesterday was nice to hear. But the secretary spent a lot of time dodging responsibility. When he was chided for not telling the public, Congress or even the president about Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that the Army had provided all the disclosure necessary last January with its inadequate press release announcing the criminal investigations. But when he was pressed on why he had not kept track of the case, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the astonishing argument that he could not have been expected to find this one case among the pile of 3,000 courts-martial initiated in the last year.

Yesterday, Senator John McCain eloquently warned that the administration must deal quickly and publicly with the investigation. "As Americans turned away from the Vietnam War, they may turn away from this one unless this issue is quickly resolved with full disclosure immediately," he said.

We strongly agree.



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Breaking News
Updated May 6, 2004

BUSH: IRAQI PRISON SCANDAL RAISES NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT KERRY’S WAR RECORD

Promises Iraqi People Vigorous New Attack Ads

Speaking to the Iraqi people last night, President Bush vowed that he would respond to the Iraqi prison scandal with a vigorous new round of campaign ads attacking Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass).

“In a democracy, it is important to have transparency, and there is no one more transparent than I am,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush promised the Iraqis that he would spare no expense in producing the new attack ads and said that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners had raised fresh questions about Sen. Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

“As you saw the abhorrent images from Abu Ghraib prison, I’m sure that you were asking yourselves the same question I was: why did John Kerry throw away his war medals?” Mr. Bush said.

The speech to the Iraqi people culminated a busy day for Mr. Bush, who earlier in the evening announced that the U.S. had invaded Michael Moore.

Mr. Bush said that the invasion of Michael Moore was “a last resort” after the filmmaker repeatedly refused to destroy copies of his latest film, Fahrenheit 911.

The invasion, which the Pentagon is calling Operation Shut His Piehole, commenced in the southern region of Michael Moore, with troops expected to reach the Oscar-winning director’s mouth in a matter of days.

But according to retired General Wesley Clark, securing Michael Moore may prove considerably more difficult than invading him.

“It’s important to remember that Michael Moore is approximately the same size as the state of Texas,” Gen. Clark said.




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What Happened to Bush's “Winning the War on Terror” Tour?

Today, The Tour Was Renamed “Yes, America Can.” President Bush mysteriously changed the name of this week’s campaign tour from the “Winning the War on Terror” tour to “Yes, America Can.” Unfortunately for President Bush, media outlets reported the original name of his tour numerous times in the past week.

This development raises several questions about the Bush-Cheney campaign:

Did President Bush have second thoughts about shamelessly exploiting the War on Terror for political gain?

Has President Bush backtracked yet again?

Did President Bush realize that his failure to address key homeland security measures continues to leave America vulnerable?

Last Week, the Bush-Cheney Campaign Proudly Promoted Its “Winning the War on Terror” Bus Tour.

Bush-Cheney Campaign Press Release, 4/30. “Today, U.S. Representative Jim Kolbe continued the Winning the War on Terror Tour at a press conference in Tucson…Today's Tucson event is one of eight events in the Winning the War on Terror Tour this week. The first was in Evendale, Ohio on Monday. Michigan, New Hampshire and Maine have also hosted Winning the War on Terror press conferences this week…Earlier today, Missouri played host to a Winning the War on Terror press conference in St. Louis that focused on the importance of the F/A-18 fighter jet. The Winning the War on Terror Tour will continue over the course of several weeks” [PR Newswire, April 30, 2004]

Bush-Cheney Campaign E-Mail, 4/27. “From a Bush-Cheney campaign e-mail: "You are invited to an online chat with" ex-NYPD commish/ex-Iraq Interim Interior Minister Bernard Kerik on 4/29. "Kerik is hosting this chat as part of the Bush-Cheney '04 Winning the War on Terror Tour…" (Hotline sources, 4/27).” [The Hotline, April 28, 2004]

“Bush-Cheney '04 Launches Winning the War on Terror Tour.” In another April release, the campaign said, “Bush-Cheney '04 today launched the Winning the War on Terror Tour…Today's kick-off events in Michigan, New Hampshire and Ohio will coincide with the release of a new ad, "Weapons," that will air in various markets and on national cable stations. Additionally, a state specific "Weapons" ad will air in 9 states. The Winning the War on Terror Tour will continue throughout the next two weeks.” [4/26/04]

******************

Media Outlets Report on Bush Plans to Exploit War on Terror for Political Gain. Associated Press, Washington Post, Hotline, CNN, AFP, Portland Press Herald, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Akron Beacon Journal, Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun are just some of the press that reported that Bush planned embark on a “Winning the War on Terror” bus tour this week.

Associated Press, 4/23. “Bush plans stops in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio the week of May 3, according to a campaign source. During his "Winning the War on Terror" tour, the president will focus on his efforts to help America fight and win the war on terror and improve the economy.” [AP, April 23, 2004]

Washington Post, 4/26. “The campaign is also staging a two-week "Winning the War on Terror Tour....” [The Washington Post, April 26, 2004]

The Hotline, 4/26. “The ad joins the "Troops-Fog" ad already running and coincides with the "Winning the War on Terror Tour" which begins with "kick-off events" in MI, NH, OH and a speech by VP Cheney on 4/26.” [The Hotline, April 26, 2004]

Associated Press, 4/26. “Bradley's remarks - along with speeches by Cheney in Missouri, Rep. Candice Miller in Michigan and Rep. Rob Portman in Ohio - launched the Bush-Cheney campaign's "Winning the War on Terror Tour."” [AP, April 26, 2004]

CNN, 4/26. “The campaign also kicks off its "Winning the War on Terror" tour...” [CNN.com, April 26, 2004]

AFP, 4/26. “Bush's Republicans unveiled a new television ad and launched a "Winning the War on Terror Tour...” [Agence France Presse, April 26, 2004]

Portland Press Herald, 4/27. “[The ad] is part of the Bush campaign's two-week "Winning the War on Terror Tour...” [Portland Press Herald (Maine), April 27, 2004]

LA Times, 4/27. “Cheney's address Monday kicked off what the Bush campaign was calling its "Winning the War on Terror Tour."” [Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2004]

The Guardian, 4/27. “Dick Cheney, the vice-president, launched the "winning the war on terror tour...” [The Guardian (London), April 27, 2004]

Associated Press, 4/27. “His latest trip to Michigan comes just days before President Bush stops Monday in Kalamazoo and possibly Niles on his "Winning the War on Terror" tour.” [AP, April 27, 2004]

Washington Post, 4/28. “Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot was in Bath, Maine, as part of a “Winning the War on Terror Tour”...” [The Washington Post, April 28, 2004]

The Hotline, 4/28. “Elkhart Truth's Wendzonka reports … It's not clear yet whether Bush will have a rally in South Bend." The visit is part of Bush's "two-week blitz" touted as the "Winning the War on Terror Tour" (4/28).” [The Hotline, April 28, 2004]

Akron Beacon Journal, 4/29. “The campaign effort, which is being labeled the ''Winning the War on Terror Tour,'' is to make stops in 17 states over the next two weeks. In Akron on Wednesday, it drew only five people, and three of those were campaign workers.” [Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio), April 29, 2004]

Chicago Tribune, 4/30. “Republicans launched the "winning the war on terror" bus tour this week...” [Chicago Tribune, April 30, 2004]

Baltimore Sun, 5/3. “Bush campaign officials have launched a "Winning the War on Terror" bus tour through the Midwest...” [The Baltimore Sun, May 3, 2004]

Posted in Election 2004 | Entry link
By Peter Daou on May 3, 2004 at 03:14 PM

Surprise! The top polluters in the nation strongly back George Bush. Here are the facts.


May 6, 2004 BUSHGREENWATCH.org

Study Finds Top Air Polluters Closely Tied to Bush Administration

The nation's top 50 polluting power plants are owned by corporations that are tightly allied with the Bush Administration both as major campaign contributors and in conducting pollution policymaking, according to a new study released yesterday. Conducted by two nonprofit, nonpartisan groups--the Environmental Integrity Project and Public Citizen--the study utilized data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

Ranking the polluters based on their emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, the report finds that sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide pollution actually increased from 2002-2003, thereby expanding risks of asthma attacks and lung ailments.

According to the report, America's Dirtiest Power Plants: Plugged into the Bush Administration, the firms cited in the study, along with their trade associations, met at least 17 times with Vice President Cheney's energy task force.

The report found that since 1999, the 30 largest utility companies owning the majority of the 89 dirtiest power plants in the study have contributed $6.6 million to the Bush presidential campaigns and the Republican National Committee. The 30 companies also hired at least 16 lobbying or law firms that have raised at least $3.4 million more for the Bush campaigns.

"It is no coincidence that a wholesale assault on the Clean Air Act is taking place today," said Eric Schaeffer, who founded EIP after resigning in early 2002 from his post as director of EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement, in protest of the administration's rollback of environmental protections. "This is a well-connected industry that is absolutely intent on preserving its 'right' to foul the air regardless of the consequences to the American people."

The study ranked the top 50 polluters for each of the three emissions (mercury, SO2, CO2). Because several companies were in the top 50 for more than one pollutant, the list totaled 89 power plants. Of those 89, some 47 have either been sued or placed under investigation by the EPA for violating the Clean Air Act's New Source Review requirement, under which plants that upgrade or expand must add expensive new clean technology.

Last August the EPA stirred a huge controversy by relaxing requirements for New Source Review, exempting many plants from the law's pollution control requirements. A federal court stayed the new rules, but as the report notes, "The result of the administration's policy, coupled with the program's current status in legal limbo, is that many of these companies have either had the cases against them undermined or simply dropped by the Bush Adminstration."

The study lists five former executives or lobbyists for the electric utility industry who have been placed in important regulatory posts in the Bush administration. One is assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, another is counsel to that office, and a third is deputy administrator of EPA. A fourth is now in charge of all government lawsuits against coal-fired power plants, and the fifth helped write national energy policy as assistant secretary at the Department of Energy.

The full report is available HERE.

The Bush Leadership Quiz


A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Patrick Clark

DO YOU HAVE THE BUSH STUFF?

If President Bush’s re-election staff has its way, this election will revolve around only one question: Can anyone hope to match the heroic 9-11 style leadership of George W. Bush?

So, does John Kerry have what it takes to protect the American people? What about you? Are you tough enough to ride with the Crawford Gang? Answer the seven questions below to find out if you are made of the same stuff as George W. Bush.

1. Pretend you're the elected President of the United States.

2. Imagine that you receive multiple warnings from long-time allies concerning a coming terrorist attack which may use hijacked airliners to attack American symbols of commerce. Do you:

a) Take a month-long vacation.

b) Keep your staff off commercial airlines.

c) Finally deal with that pesky cedar brush on your new ranch.

d) a, b, & c.

e) Contact the FBI and CIA and order them to share resources to co-ordinate a national airport security clampdown while expediting a search for known terrorists who have entered the country.

3. On August 6th, just days into your vacation, your National Security Advisor gives you a briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Do you:

a) Take the rest of the day off.

b) Go fishing on your man-made lake.

c) Take the longest Presidential vacation in thirty-two years.

d) a, b, & c.

e) Act like the elected President of the United States and return to Washington to ensure the safety of the nation.

4. Having successfully ignored countless warnings, you return from vacation. On your way to a slow-pitch photo op, you learn that an airliner has crashed into one of Twin Towers. Do you:

a) Continue to your very important photo-op at a Florida elementary school.

b) Later claim you watched the first crash on television even though that film was not shown until that evening.

c) Fail to make any connection between the crash and the near-constant terrorist warnings of the past month.

d) a, b, & c.

e) Act like the elected President of the United States by dropping the children’s book and hurrying to Air Force One to direct the country’s defense.

5. Though you’ve already shrugged off anything resembling competence, when an aide whispers in your ear that a second plane has crashed into the second tower, do you:

a) Read a book about goats to second graders for seventeen minutes while thousands burn to death.

b) Delay an order for fighters to defend the White House and the Pentagon.

c) Later claim to be in bed by ten that night, sleeping soundly while the rest of the nation sat up, dumb-struck, horrified by the human loss.

d) a, b, & c.

e) Upon hearing of the first airliner strike, immediately order fighters up to defend the second Tower and the Pentagon and, later, have the common decency not to sleep a wink.

6. In the days following the disaster, you learn that the attack was planned by a wealthy Saudi named Bin Laden and that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were also Saudis. Do you:

a) Have a friendly photo op with a Saudi business friend of your father even before you bother posing on the burning rubble of lower Manhattan.

b) Allow a private jet to collect a hundred wealthy Saudis, including fourteen Bin Laden relatives, and fly them out of the country over the protests of the FBI.

c) Round up hundreds of innocent immigrants and imprison them without trial in order to appear to be engaged.

d) a, b, & c.

e) Throw your family’s substantial business interests to the side in order to detain and question wealthy Saudis and so discover that some financed terrorists in the months before the attack.

7. It was bound to happen. Bi-partisan traitors in Congress have the audacity to push for an Independent Commission to investigate the massive intelligence and security failures that led to 9-11. Do you:

a) Grant the Commission a mere fifteen million dollars -- less than one fourth the amount spent to investigate the last President's adultery.

b) Stipulate that any testimony you give be off-the-record.

c) Announce that pressing Presidential-type duties leave you with less than an hour to spend before the Commission -- despite the fact that in the last year you’ve played over one hundred and forty hours of golf.

d) All of the above.

e) Save your country time and money by proceeding directly to a six-by-six wire suite in Guantanamo.

ANSWERS.

Welcome to the soft prejudice of dumbed-down expectations! Question one is a freebie -- just like Florida! Give yourself a bunch of points! Questions two through seven demand a little more cunning. If you answered a, b, or c, you were close.

If you answered d to all of them, congratulations! You've flunked, but those were the President's choices! You're just as much a leader as the steely-eyed rocket man himself! And you did it without oil money! FYI, if you chose e for any of the answers, you are a French toast-eating, terrorist-loving traitor.

A Patrick Clark Production



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So like his father, Bush was "out of the loop" on the abuse charges filing out of Iraq. How is it possible when the Red Cross was consistantly contacting our government over these abuses? How? Because the administration of George Bush is not about upholding American values, it's about making Halliburton billions in Iraq and giving huge tax cuts to it and all his corporate backers.


Red Cross Says Repeatedly Warned U.S. on Iraq Jail

By Richard Waddington

GENEVA (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Thursday it had repeatedly urged the United States to take "corrective action" at a Baghdad jail at the center of a scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, mandated under international treaties to visit detainees, has had regular access to Abu Ghraib prison since U.S.-led forces began using it last year, according to chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari.

"The ICRC, aware of the situation, and based on its findings, has repeatedly asked the U.S. authorities to take corrective action," she told Reuters.

Notari declined to give details of what the ICRC had seen during the visits, which take place every five to six weeks, or about its reports to the U.S. authorities.

The United Nations (news - web sites) said separately it had written to U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Governor of Iraq Paul Bremer, seeking information on human rights in Iraq over the past year.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, which has promised a report by the end of the month, said its investigators were ready to visit Baghdad for talks with coalition and Iraqi leaders.

The ICRC, which has been operating since the late 19th century, keeps a public silence about what it hears from detainees as the price for gaining access to jails in trouble spots around the world from Chechnya (news - web sites) to West Africa.

Pictures of grinning U.S. soldiers abusing naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib -- the largest prison in the country and notorious for torture under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- have sparked an international outcry.

In a bid to limit damage to the U.S. image, President Bush (news - web sites) went on two Arabic satellite television stations on Wednesday to tell an outraged Middle East that soldiers guilty of abusing Iraqi prisoners would be punished.

WANTON CRIMINAL ABUSES

The jail was also been the focus of a separate earlier probe by a U.S. general.

That report by Major-General Antonio Taguba, covering the period October-December 2003 and completed on March 3, cited incidents of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

Notari poured cold water on some U.S. media reports suggesting that the ICRC had not had access to a special wing in the jail where the abuse took place.

"To the best of our knowledge we have had access to all sectors," she said.

And she rejected a proposal from the new head of the jail, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, that the ICRC set up a permanent presence there, saying: "We are not going to be part of their organization."

The ICRC has visited thousands of prisoners under the control of U.S. and British forces, which are also being investigated after a British newspaper published pictures of a soldier apparently urinating on an Iraqi detainee.

But Notari declined to comment on what officials had seen in British-run jails.

Under the Geneva Conventions on both prisoners and the treatment of civilians in wartime, the ICRC must be allowed to interview detainees in private and on a regular basis.

On these terms, it has carried out two visits to Saddam, in U.S. custody since his capture shortly before Christmas.

"It is important that people understand our role, which is to be present and to have a dialogue with the authorities," Notari said.

But on a few occasions the Red Cross has broken its vow of silence because either the authority concerned has issued a partial account of the ICRC's findings or has simply failed to take any action after a long period.

The ICRC recently expressed mounting frustration over the situation of Afghan and other detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announcing that its concerns about conditions and treatment were not being addressed.




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Under Clinton we were CUTTING the deficit while EXPANDING the economy and jobs at the greatest rate in U.S. history. He also lobbed a Tomahawk missile at Osama (which the Repubs at the time cried was "wag the dog") and had weekly meetings on terrorism (Bush dumped these after entering office along with a three year bipartisan commission's study on national security that advocated greater terrorism protection). All Bush cares about is getting the tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America not paying attention to nor solving REAL problems as Greenspan points out below.

Federal Budget Deficit Worries Greenspan

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - America's soaring federal budget deficits represent a major obstacle to the country's long-term economic stability, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned on Thursday.

Greenspan told a banking conference that the federal budget deficit was a bigger worry to him than America's soaring trade deficit or the high level of household debt because those two problems can be corrected by market forces.

"Our fiscal prospects are, in my judgment, a significant obstacle to long-term stability because the budget deficit is not readily subject to correction by market forces that stabilize other imbalances," he said in remarks to a banking conference.

Greenspan noted that the federal deficit, estimated to climb above $500 billion this year, will amount to 4.25 percent of the total economy after being in surplus just a few years ago.

He said one of the biggest concerns was that the deficits now were occurring right before the first wave of baby boomers will begin retiring.

"We have legislated commitments to our senior citizens that, given the inevitable retirement of our huge baby-boom generation, will create significant fiscal challenges in the years ahead," Greenspan said in his remarks, which were delivered by satellite to the conference in Chicago.

Greenspan cautioned that the country should not be lulled into a false sense of security about the federal deficit just because at the moment interest rates on long-term Treasury securities remain at low levels.

He said that the dollar's foreign exchange value has remained close to the average level of the past two decades in spite of soaring trade deficits and there have been no major economic disruptions triggered by record high household debt.

"Has something fundamental happened to the U.S. economy and, by extension, U.S. banking, that enables us to disregard all the time-tested criteria of imbalance and economic danger?" Greenspan asked.

Answering his own question, the Fed chairman said, "Regrettably, the answer is no. The free lunch has still to be invented."

Greenspan said he believed market forces would provide the impetus to move the trade deficit and high household debt to more sustainable levels.

But he said his concern was that there were no market forces that would push the country to deal with the federal budget deficit.

Greenspan did not offer a solution to the budget deficit in his speech Thursday although in the past he has called on Congress to move quickly to address the looming funding difficulties in Social Security by trimming the benefits of future retirees.

Two proposals he has suggested include raising the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits and reducing annual cost of living adjustments that Social Security recipients receive.

Federal Reserve policy-makers met on Tuesday and left a key interest rate at a 46-year low but signaled that they planned to start raising rates at a moderate pace in coming months. Greenspan did not address interest rates in his prepared remarks.




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No one is running the ship. The President hasn't a clue. He has to find out info about this scandal from TV when a report on the abuses has been waiting for him at the Pentagon for month? Nobody gets fired under Bush because nobody accepts responsibility for bad news, even 9/11. There is only one solution. Throw these bums (and I'm being kind) out!


May 6, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES

Shocking and Awful
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were swanning around in black tie at the White House Correspondents' dinner on Saturday night, mingling with le hack Washington and a speckling of shiny imports, like John Kerry's former Tinseltown gal-pal Morgan Fairchild, Ben Affleck, a Victoria's Secret model who was not Gisele and several "Apprentice" alumni who were not Omarosa.

The Pentagon potentates seemed unburdened by the spreading storm kicked up by the torture pictures shown on "60 Minutes II" and about to appear in The New Yorker — the latest example of a dysfunctional and twisted occupation warped by arrogance over experience, ideology over common sense.

When a beaming Mr. Wolfowitz stopped at my table to greet an admiring Republican, I wanted to snap, "Get back to your desk, Mr. Myopia from Utopia!" Shouldn't these woolly headed warriors burn the midnight Iraqi oil — long enough for Wolfie to learn the body count for dead American troops and for Rummy to read Gen. Antonio Taguba's whole report on "horrific abuses" at Abu Ghraib?

Sure, the secretary of defense has had two months to read the report, but as he complained to Matt Lauer, it's awfully thick: "When I'm asked a question as to whether I've read the entire report, I answer honestly that I have not. It is a mountain of paper and investigative material." Goodness gracious, where is Evelyn Wood now that we need her?

Can't the hawks who dragged us into this hideous unholy war at least pay attention to a crisis of American credibility that's exposing Iraq and the world to more dangers every day? For the defense chief and the president to party two nights in a row, Friday at Rummy's house and Saturday at the Washington Hilton, is, to borrow a Rummy line, "unhelpful in a fundamental way."

President Bush also seemed in a buoyant mood on Saturday. But he might think about getting just a tad more involved so he doesn't have to first see on TV, as he clicks around between innings, the pictures sparking a huge worldwide, American-reputation-shattering military scandal. And so he doesn't keep nattering about how we had to go to war to close Iraq's torture chambers, when they are "really not shut down so much as under new management," as Jon Stewart drily put it.

Most Republicans seemed in a "party on, Garth" mood, less concerned with Humpty Dumpty Iraq or Unjolly Green Giant John Kerry than with the unfairness of a world where Jeb Bush would probably not be able to succeed his brother. "By 2008," a wistful Republican fund-raiser said, "there'll probably be Bush fatigue."

It seems nothing can make hard-core hawks criticize the war (even the request for $25 billion more). Rush Limbaugh compared the prison torture to "a college fraternity prank," like a Skull and Bones initiation.

Michael Eisner evidently also feels the Bush dynasty will survive because he is balking at distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that criticizes President Bush's 9/11 actions and ties with the Saudis, probably out of fear that Jeb will come after his Disney World tax breaks.

Senator Kerry jumped on the president yesterday for saying nothing about Crown Prince Abdullah's "outrageous anti-Semitic comments" that terrorists in Saudi Arabia get funds from "Zionists." The prince's remarks — and arrests of reformers — show that, far from transforming the Mideast into democracies that flower with love of America and Israel, the bumbling neo-cons have unleashed a rash of racism, revenge and hate.

Colin Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, tells GQ magazine that Wolfie is "a utopian" like Lenin: "You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, The Associated Press reports from London that "U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey."

And Douglas Feith, the defense under secretary who was in charge of Iraqi postwar planning and the secret unit that furnished prêt-à-porter intelligence to back up Dick Cheney's doomsday scenarios, told conservatives that the administration might set up an office to plan postwar operations for future wars.

Well, on the one hand, it would be refreshing to have a postwar plan. On the other: future wars???




_____________________________________________________________________________

Bush doesn't have the "stuff" to be the leader that is needed during these times. Come to think of it, Bush couldn't lead during the best of times.


May 6, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES

Restoring Our Honor
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago.

I know that tough interrogations are vital in a war against a merciless enemy, but outright torture, or this sexual-humiliation-for-entertainment, is abhorrent. I also know the sort of abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib prison goes on in prisons all over the Arab world every day, as it did under Saddam — without the Arab League or Al Jazeera ever saying a word about it. I know they are shameful hypocrites, but I want my country to behave better — not only because it is America, but also because the war on terrorism is a war of ideas, and to have any chance of winning we must maintain the credibility of our ideas.

We were hit on 9/11 by people who believed hateful ideas — ideas too often endorsed by some of their own spiritual leaders and educators back home. We cannot win a war of ideas against such people by ourselves. Only Arabs and Muslims can. What we could do — and this was the only legitimate rationale for this war — was try to help Iraqis create a progressive context in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world where that war of ideas could be fought out.

But it is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you. We have to restore some sense of partnership with the world if we are going to successfully partner with Iraqis.

Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page. Second, he needs to explain that we are losing in Iraq, and if we continue to lose the U.S. public will eventually demand that we quit Iraq, and it will then become Afghanistan-on-steroids, which will threaten everyone. Third, he needs to say he will be guided by the U.N. in forming the new caretaker government in Baghdad. And fourth, he needs to explain that he is ready to listen to everyone's ideas about how to expand our force in Iraq, and have it work under a new U.N. mandate, so it will have the legitimacy it needs to crush any uprisings against the interim Iraqi government and oversee elections — and then leave when appropriate. And he needs to urge them all to join in.

Let's not lose sight of something — as bad as things look in Iraq, it is not yet lost, for one big reason: America's aspirations for Iraq and those of the Iraqi silent majority, particularly Shiites and Kurds, are still aligned. We both want Iraqi self-rule and then free elections. That overlap of interests, however clouded, can still salvage something decent from this war — if the Bush team can finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.

Yes, the hour is late, but as long as there's a glimmer of hope that this Bush team will do the right thing, we must insist on it, because America's role in the world is too precious — to America and to the rest of the world — to be squandered like this.



____________________________________________________________________________

John Kerry is not a fake cowboy. He's a real leader with a realistic understanding of the world built on dealing with real people and shaped by the experiences of war.


May 6, 2004 NY TIMES

Another Vision of Iraq

Given the almost uniformly disastrous news coming out of Iraq lately, a presidential challenger might have been tempted to mark last week's anniversary of President Bush's "mission accomplished" stunt with point-scoring sound bites. To his credit, Senator John Kerry instead offered ideas for rescuing American policy in Iraq from the rapidly deteriorating military and political situation.

His handlers might wish that Mr. Kerry was better at one-liners, but we're happy to see a national figure offer a grounded, pragmatic vision of America's role in the world.

Mr. Kerry's notions of how to persuade other countries to support the United States were a real contrast with President Bush's interviews yesterday with Arab television networks approved by the White House. In responding to Muslim rage over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Mr. Bush sometimes sounded as if he was chiding angry Arabs for not appreciating the United States' good intentions.

For months, Mr. Kerry has advocated broader international oversight of Iraq's prospective interim government, a formula that might open the door to additional peacekeeping contributions and generate some real support for nation-building there. Now he has begun to elaborate on how that oversight should be structured, drawing sensible lessons from successes and failures of the recent past.

Mr. Kerry recognizes that the United Nations cannot offer any magic bullet solutions for Iraq, and that working with Secretary General Kofi Annan and his special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, cannot be a substitute for broad cooperation with all the major powers represented in the Security Council. To this end, while endorsing Mr. Brahimi's efforts to put together a transitional Iraqi government, Mr. Kerry also proposes designating an international high commissioner for Iraq whose office would be outside the barely functional, patronage-driven U.N. personnel system. That would permit the recruitment of a capable staff and create some safeguards against the kind of wholesale corruption that is alleged to have vitiated the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq.

This feature of the Kerry proposal draws on the pattern of international oversight in Bosnia. While far from perfect, Bosnia's transition has worked out a lot better than Iraq's and elicited far wider international cooperation. Mr. Kerry also invokes the Bosnia example when he suggests that the NATO alliance be directly involved in Iraqi peacekeeping operations. That could help make NATO more relevant to the post-cold-war world and would ease the burden on America's badly strained military. An American commander would still be in overall charge of security.

Mr. Kerry's ideas would have been difficult to put into effect a year ago. They would be extremely hard to carry out now, and impossible by next January, should he defeat Mr. Bush. But they at least reflect a realistic view of what the United Nations — and the United States — can and cannot do. The Bush administration, meanwhile, clings to the unworkable notion of an American-controlled transition, an idea that grows ever more out of touch with reality as the news of the revolting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison overwhelms any remaining Iraqi faith in Washington's good intentions.




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Report: White House Wrong on Medicare

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials were wrong to prevent a budget expert from giving Congress estimates of the cost of Medicare legislation, congressional researchers have concluded.

In a report made public Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said efforts to keep Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, from giving Democratic lawmakers his projections of the bill's cost — $100 billion more than the president and other officials were acknowledging — probably violated federal law.

Recent estimates set the bill's cost at more than $500 billion.

Foster testified in March that he was prevented by then-Medicare administrator Thomas Scully from turning over information over to lawmakers. Scully, in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, said he had told Foster "that I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."

Congressional researchers chided the move. "Such 'gag orders' have been expressly prohibited by federal law since 1912," Jack Maskell, a CRS attorney, wrote in the report.

The report was requested by committee Democrats after majority Republicans refused to subpoena Scully and White House adviser Doug Badger to testify about their roles in keeping cost estimates from lawmakers.

Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., the committee chairman, said he would be willing to issue subpoenas if laws had been broken.

A spokesman for Thomas did not immediately respond to requests for comment.





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Dat's it. Josh nails it.

Josh Marshall's TALKING POINTS


(May 03, 2004 -- 04:52 PM EDT)

One of the things I've found difficult about writing about Iraq in recent days is imputing some level of seriousness to the arguments of the president and his retainers who continue to press an optimistic view of what's happening in Iraq. From them, on any given day, you can still hear the argument that, notwithstanding some tough days, things are still getting better in Iraq and the key to success is sticking with it.

At the same time, I talk to, or have conversations related to me with, various foreign policy, intelligence and military experts, all of whom --- across the political spectrum --- seem to believe that things are about as bleak as they can be. On top of this, they seem uniform in the belief -- sometimes based on inference, other times based on direct knowledge -- that the White House is fresh out of ideas about what to do, and basically hasn't any idea how to proceed.

Either the president knows the situation is that bad or he (and perhaps his advisors too) is just too out of touch to have any idea what's happening. Increasingly, I think that the president is just too small-minded and vainglorious a man to come to grips with the situation.

A strong president, a good president , would put his country before his pride and throw himself into saving the situation even if it meant admitting previous mistakes and ditching past policies and advisors. But I don't think this president has the character to do that.

Making a clean sweep, firing some of his most compromised advisors, admitting some past mistakes -- not for effect, but so that those mistakes could be more thoroughly and rapidly overcome -- might well doom the president politically. But I doubt there's any question they'd be in the best interests of the country.

This president seems either disinclined to or unable to do more than preside over a drift into disaster while putting on a game face.

(Kevin Drum has an excellent post today on President Bush as the prototypical bad CEO -- Here's a snippet: "Bush styles himself a 'CEO president,' but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. They assign tasks to subordinates without making sure the subordinates are capable of doing them — but then consider the job done anyway because they've "delegated" it. They insist they want a realistic plan, but they're unwilling to do the hard work of creating one — all those market research reports are just a bunch of ivory tower nonsense anyway. They work hard — but only on subjects in their comfort zone.")

There's all this talk about what might be the best critique of the president's policies (politically and substantively), what the best alternative policies might be, and so forth. But all of that, I think, misses the point. This president is too compromised by his deceptions, his past lack of accountability and his acquiescence in failed policies, ever to correct the situation. Like C.S. Lewis's metaphor about the road to hell being easy to walk down, but the further walked, harder and harder to turn back upon, this president is just too far gone with misleading the public, covering up and indulging incompetence, and embracing venality ever to make a clean break and start retrieving the situation.
-- Josh Marshall






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IRAQ
A Country In Chaos

This past Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of President Bush's now-famous declaration that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Over the weekend, he attempted to defend the speech, claiming, ''A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein." He did not mention the original premise for war – Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. His statement also contradicted his claim six months ago that "the 'Mission Accomplished' sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished," not to be confused with his statements on the end of major combat in Iraq. April was the deadliest month of conflict since the war began and with the transfer of power a mere two months away, "the Bush administration is squeezed between quelling the insurgency and the search for any idea that reduces the chances of a violent confrontation." The administration has thus far "left the impression it was grasping at alternatives, with little sense of how" new tactics "fit into the larger strategy or of its possible pitfalls," a balancing act analysts say "will only get harder...even after an interim Iraqi government takes charge and begins to prepare for elections."

THE MISTAKES: In today's LA Times, American Progress fellow Larry Korb outlines some of the mistakes the administration did not learn from the war in Vietnam which are contributing to the ongoing chaos and struggle in Iraq. "The first, and presumably the most egregious, was to exaggerate the dangers our adversaries posed to us, something the Bush administration did in Iraq by exaggerating intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its ties to Al Qaeda." Also, "the administration failed to let Congress and the American people have a full, frank debate about the reasons for going to war or how long it would take or how much it would cost." The Bush administration "has still not explained why it was mistaken about the primary reasons for going to war." Finally, the organizational failures in Iraq have been paramount. A full year after the fall of Baghdad, "it remains unclear who is in charge of reconstruction and stabilization."

ALLEGED ABUSE: The front pages of the papers today headline the reported abuse of Iraqi prisoners inside the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to an internal military report obtained by Seymour Hersh in the most recent the New Yorker, the abuse in the prison was "systemic and illegal." Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the U.S.'s top general, acknowledged this weekend the "allegations that Iraqi prisoners were abused at a detention facility run by the Army have set back efforts to cultivate a positive image for the U.S. military in the region." The allegations underscore the larger problem of outsourcing military duties to private defense contractors, who may not adhere to the strict standards set by the military. One contractor under investigation is CACI International Inc., "an Arlington-based security firm, which supplied interrogators to assist military intelligence officers." CACI employees had "encouraged military police to abuse prisoners to 'soften them up' for questioning." A second company is also under investigation, the Titan Corp., which employed translators at the prison

REPORT COMPLETED IN FEBRUARY: The 53-page report outlining the abuse, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. This weekend, however, Myers acknowledged he had not read the internal report, saying, "It's working its way to me." In the months since the completion of the report, it appears military leaders haven't done anything in response.

IRAQI GENERAL REPLACED IN FALLUJAH: In a move indicative of the general confusion and lack of planning the United States has shown in conducting military operations in Iraq, the U.S. has backed away from turning the security of the embattled city of Fallujah over to former Iraqi General Jassim Mohammed Saleh. Marines had named Saleh, a former member of the Saddam's Republican Guard, to lead the new Fallujah Brigade. However, while U.S. commanders "said that Saleh had agreed to go after the purported foreign fighters in Fallujah, Saleh announced that none are there." According to one perplexed military official, "We've just told him he can form a brigade and take over the city. Now we're telling him that he has to step aside?" Appointed in Saleh's place was Muhammad Latif, a former intelligence officer in the Iraqi army who studied at the British Staff College for military officers. Saleh will now "help lead only one of the three battalions that will form the brigade."

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...: Newsweek reports that Ahmad Chalabi, "the longtime Pentagon favorite to become leader of a free Iraq, has never made a secret of his close ties to Iran." Those ties may have deadly repercussions for U.S. troops, however; "top Bush administration officials have been briefed on intelligence indicating that Chalabi and some of his top aides have supplied Iran with 'sensitive' information on the American occupation in Iraq." According to officials, "electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq. There are also indications that Chalabi has provided details of U.S. security operations. According to one U.S. government source, some of the information Chalabi turned over to Iran could 'get people killed.'" The Iraqi exile, who has close ties to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, has his own agenda and "may be working both sides in an effort to solidify his own power and block the advancement of rival Iraqis."

ANTIWAR EQUALS RACIST?: In one of the weirder claims to be put forth by the White House, President Bush tied anti-war sentiment to racism. Friday the president announced: "There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern...I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily—are a different color than white can self-govern." Neither President Bush nor Press Secretary Scott McClellan commented on exactly who the people are who supposedly think that. The phrase "ours" to mean "white" is also offensive, given that the Census reports a quarter of people in the United States are other than white.

CIVIL LIBERTIES
Secret Searches Skyrocket

The Justice Department conducted more than 1700 secret electronic searches approved by the secret intelligence court last year, almost double the number conducted just two years ago. The dramatic rise in clandestine electronic surveillance, most directed at phones and computers, represents a sea change in the way the government investigates crime in the United States. The number of electronic searches approved by the secret court exceeded the number approved by all regular federal and state courts combined. Of the 1727 applications for secret searches requested by the Justice Department all but three were approved by the court – and two of those were ultimately approved after changes were made in the application. The trend is disturbing because applications for secret searches can be approved on a weakened standard of "probable cause" or other traditional protections afforded to the target of a criminal investigation under the 4th Amendment. Nevertheless, the fruits of the secret surveillance "can later be used in criminal prosecutions," although "defendants in such proceedings have fewer rights to attack the basis of the searches or to obtain intercepted information." The rise in this type of activity "was a direct result of the easing of standards for intelligence-gathering that was authorized by the Patriot Act" – a bill passed hastily in the days following 9/11. (For more on the stalled policy on Guantanamo, read this American Progress column by Mark Agrast.)

AIRLINES SEND VAST AMOUNTS OF SENSITIVE PERSONAL INFO TO FBI: In 2001, some of the nation's largest airlines, including American, United and Northwest, "turned over millions of passenger records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation." The information, which in some cases included as much as a year's worth of passenger records, included "names, addresses, travel destinations and credit card numbers." But, despite the size of the request, an F.B.I. official said "there is no indication that the passenger data produced any significant evidence about the [9/11] plot or the hijackers." The quantity of information turned over by the airlines to the FBI – 6,000 CD-ROMs of digital records from Northwest Airlines alone – was revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency, said the incident "is clearly something that is going to be, at minimum, a public embarrassment" for the government and the airlines.

TWO YEARS LATER, ONLY TWO DETAINEES IN GITMO CHARGED WITH A CRIME: 600 detainees still are languishing in the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only two have been formally charged with a crime and just a handful have been permitted to see a lawyer. Many "have been in custody for two years." The detentions "have been condemned by foreign governments and human rights groups and are now being weighed by the U.S. Supreme Court." Paul W. Butler, a Defense Department official who oversaw the detentions, said, "we freely admit we're learning this as we go along." While Vice President Dick Cheney called the detainees "the worst of a very bad lot," 134 were released without ever being charged with any crime.

AS PER USUAL, HALLIBURTON PROFITS: The prison camps in Guantanamo cost the military about $118 million a year to operate. A new facility, Camp 5, will open this week, expanding the prison's capacity to 1,100. Halliburton subsidiary KBR has been awarded $110 million worth of work "to build prison cells and other facilities." The expansion is curious in light of the fact that Paul Butler said the United States is interested in transferring at least half of the 600 remaining detainees to the custody of their home countries.







SCIENCE – CUTTING RESEARCH WHILE FALLING BEHIND: According to the NYT, “In a report last month, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said the Bush administration, to live up to its pledge to halve the nation's budget deficit in the next five years, would cut research financing at 21 of 24 federal agencies — all those that do or finance science except those involved in space and national and domestic security.” These cuts threaten to further deplete scientific resources just as “the United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation,” according to several measures, including prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers published in major professional journals. Clearly the world leader less than 20 years ago, America's advances in basic science are now often rivaled or exceeded by foreign advances, a trend with “implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.”

MEDIA – CONSERVATIVE LIKE A FOX: A brand-new media watchdog group led by author David Brock, MediaMatters.org, keeps an eye on Fox News this week. They report that the conservative Fox network announced yesterday it would broadcast a show next Sunday, May 9, designed to throw an administration-friendly, positive spin on the list accomplishments so far in Iraq, a blatant attempt to counter the broadcast by Nightline last Friday of a list illustrating the human toll the U.S. is paying in the war. It's little wonder Vice President Cheney last week endorsed the Fox News Channel, calling the decidedly conservatively biased station "more accurate" than other stations. (This assertion is belied by a study done last year by the Program on International Policy [PIPA] at the University of Maryland which showed that Fox viewers were significantly more likely than viewers of other stations to hold misperceptions about the war in Iraq. The misperceptions, such as a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, had also been pushed by the Vice President, which may explain his enthusiasm for the channel.)

MILITARY – IT'S GETTING DRAFTY: According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer, "The chief of the Selective Service System has proposed registering women for the military draft and requiring that young Americans regularly inform the government about whether they have training in niche specialties needed in the armed services." The proposal also "seeks to extend the age of draft registration to 34 years old, up from 25." Although no plans are currently in place to reinstitute the draft, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have left a military stretched thin, and the armed forces are facing "critical shortages" in areas such as linguists and computer specialists.

TAXES – MOST AMERICANS HAVEN'T NOTICED A CUT: According to a University of Pennsylvania poll conducted in April "only about one in 10 said they were paying less in federal taxes this year than last because of the cuts." The results reinforced the findings of a March NYT survey which found just 22% of respondents believed Bush tax policy lowered their taxes, 46% reported no change and 25% reported higher taxes. One explanation for the results: 75% of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than income tax, which the President has ignored in favor of income tax cuts for the very wealthy.

HEALTH CARE – DRUG CARD DAY: Beginning today, millions of Medicare recipients can enroll in one of dozens of programs offering savings off retail prescription drug prices. However, according to recent reports, the discount isn't as much as seniors can find other places. "Prices for Lipitor, Celebrex and other popular brand-name medicines offered by Medicare's new drug discount cards are no better than those that consumers can find, without discounts, from online pharmacies." And the drugs are cheaper still in Canada. Also, the NYT reports, according to drug card sponsors, the official Medicare website "comparing prescription drug prices is full of inaccurate, erroneous information."



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Sun, May 02, 2004

Iraq Abuse Allegations a Headache for Bush

By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners pose a major problem for President Bush as the United States tries to put down an insurgency, win Arab hearts and quell growing doubts at home about the war.

The pictures triggered outrage in the Middle East, a development that lawmakers and the U.N. secretary-general called damaging to U.S. goals.

"This is the single most significant undermining act that's occurred in a decade in that region of the world in terms of our standing," said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. He was asked about photos showing scenes of humiliation that included Iraqi prisoners stripped naked except for hoods covering their heads and stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written in English on his skin.

"Everybody understands the phenomenal damage this accusation has caused in that part of the world," Biden said on "Fox News Sunday." "It seems to me this warrants, at a minimum, the president praising the people who turned them in and saying ... he's indignant, he is angry about it."

Bush spoke out forcefully Friday against the mistreatment. "I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," he said. Over the weekend, however, he kept silent on the matter, although he made an indirect reference to it on Saturday night.

"We count ourselves lucky that this new generation of Americans is as brave and decent as any before it," Bush told the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

Aides said Sunday they knew of no plan for Bush either to issue a fresh condemnation of the abuse or to announce additional investigations or other remedial actions.

It would be difficult for Bush to take his criticism of the episodes further. Denouncing or dismissing the alleged perpetrators would be difficult because the six U.S. soldiers who face possible courts-martial have not been convicted, one aide said. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said Sunday a court-martial has been ordered so far for only one of the six.

A senior administration official said the timing of the photos was awful for the White House. The photos were made months ago, but their publication last week came two months before the United States plans to hand some political power to Iraqis and six months before the American presidential election.

The photos hurt the U.S. efforts to win over an audience that is already deeply skeptical about U.S. intentions, this official said. Arabs and Muslims are certain to seize upon the images as proof that the American occupiers are as brutal as ousted President Saddam Hussein ( news -web sites )'s government, the senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Administration and military officials took pains to draw distinctions between Saddam's treatment of prisoners and the U.S. military's.

"Under Saddam Hussein's regime, this sort of behavior, this sort of treatment at Abu Ghraib (prison) would have been celebrated," said Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority running Iraq ( news -web sites ). In the case of the Americans' behavior, Senor promised on CNN's "Late Edition" that "whole careers will be ended."

Myers called the abuse "deplorable and appalling" but insisted the Iraqi enemies were much worse.

"They cheer every time they kill some innocent man, woman or child," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Nevertheless, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan ( news -web sites ) said he was deeply troubled by the reports.

"When it comes to these situations we have to respect international humanitarian law," he said. "I am encouraged that the U.S. government is taking it seriously and intends to discipline those involved, and I think that is extremely important because the images' going around the world has been damaging," Annan said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee ( news -web sites ), said lawmakers should open a separate inquiry.

"The first investigation, though, has to be prompt, thorough and tough by the Army, because these are despicable practices which just fuel the hatred and the wrath of those who oppose us," he said on CNN.

The photos added to a wave of other bad news that polls show is increasing public doubt about Iraq and Bush's handling of the war.

On Sunday, seven U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens wounded in two attacks in northern and western Iraq.

Bush has promised that the U.S. military will not "cut and run" in Iraq. But throngs of Iraqis celebrated what they saw as a victory in Fallujah over the weekend when U.S. Marines backed off their threatening posture around the city.



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