Wednesday, February 04, 2004
CIA's New Old Iraq File
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, October 20, 2002
Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that.
That development has triggered a fierce internal agency struggle pitting officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence.
One breeze of change came in President Bush's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. Among the terror-related items that were declassified for the speech was an agency finding that Iraq is developing "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" to deliver chemical and biological weapons on U.S. targets.
That was new stuff, delivered by a determined and effective CIA collection effort earlier this year. Agency information also allowed the president to assert (accurately) that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
That's actually old new stuff, stored in CIA files since the mid-1990s. But that intelligence was quietly buried during the Clinton years, when the need not to know very much about Iraq and terrorism was very strong....
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Here's a clip from the liner notes of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror by Laurie Mylroie, chief ideologist and intel maven of the Iraq hawks ...
Combining important new research with an insider's grasp of Beltway politics, Mylroie describes how the CIA and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction. She reveals how major elements of the case against Iraq -- including information about possible links to al Qaeda and evidence of potential Iraqi involvement in the fall 2001 anthrax attacks -- were prematurely dismissed by these agencies for cynical reasons.
Pursuing the Millennium
...The ignorance or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish fundamentalism is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question. Israel was always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly outsized military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a combination which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most extreme, theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only, Israeli-supporting superpower.
Like its Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century. Its committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body of the more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some 20 to 25 percent of the population. They, and more particularly the settlers among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to their numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and especially in relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which, beneath its secular exterior, actually shares much of their febrile, exalted outlook on the world. It is fundamentalism of a very special, ethnocentric and fiercely xenophobic kind, with beliefs and practices that are "even more extremist," says Shahak, "than those attributed to the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the most totalitarian system ever invented."
Like fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel celebrated by the American "friends of Israel" as a "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" would, most assuredly, be no more. For, in its full and perfect form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its place would elevate a stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any new-fangled, heathen concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties or human rights. It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish religious law, of which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and whose observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of citizens legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities. A monarch, chosen by the rabbis, would rule and the Knesset would be replaced by a Sanhedrin, or supreme judicial, ecclesiastic and administrative council. Men and women would be segregated in public, and "modesty" in female dress and conduct would be enforced by law. Adultery would be a capital offense, and anyone who drove on the Sabbath, or desecrated it in other ways, would be liable to death by stoning. As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of systematic discrimination against them, in which every possible crime or sin committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or adultery to robbery or fraud, would be far more heavily punished than the same crime or sin committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if, indeed, the latter were considered to be a felony at all, which it often would not be. ...
as the Strib says
...Let's be clear: The failure of the administration's evidence on Iraq's WMD is not a case of 20-20 hindsight, as some apologists for Bush assert. The president himself was flat-out wrong when he said last week that Saddam Hussein refused to "let us in." Before the war, Blix's weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq examining the specific sites and looking for the precise materials mentioned in the brief Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council. And they were finding nothing. Very few people worldwide bought the American case for war -- before the war started....
Pisces: (Feb. 19—March 20)
Most people are either part of the solution or part of the problem, but you're one of the red herrings thrown into the answer set to mislead test-takers.
Powell Says New Data May Have Affected War Decision
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he does not know whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had been told it had no stockpiles of banned weapons, even as he offered a broad defense of the Bush administration's decision to go to war. ...
...Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."...
Religion Gets Supersized at Megachurches
Ask Americans what Sundays are for, and many are likely to give you one of two answers: watching sports or going to church.
These days, a growing number of "megachurches" may satisfy both camps, providing entertainment and an uplifting message to crowds so big they rival the attendance at sporting events.
There are currently 842 megachurches -- non-Catholic churches with at least 2,000 weekly attendants -- that host an excess of three million people on any given Sunday, according to the research group Church Growth Today.
These massive holy houses attract churchgoers by the thousands with celebratory services that tout contemporary music, television screens and sermons that aren't "churchy," according to the pastor of the nation's largest church. But critics say the sin-free pep rallies don't encourage personal transformation and reflection, keystones of religion.
Instead of a pulpit, pews and a group of familiar faces found at traditional community churches, megachurches can resemble a campus.
"They are so large you can select the activity that you like," said Ken Woodward, Newsweek's contributing editor who covers religion. "If you want to lose weight Jesus' way, you can join the weight-loss program or join a basketball team ... These churches have so many people they don't just sponsor a team, they sponsor a league.
"Not everybody can afford to join a country club." ...
Monday, February 02, 2004
THE EROTIC CHURCHES
After the last orthodox Episcopal priest in our area retired, when the eunuchs and their priestesses were finally in complete control, we returned to the Evangelicals whence we came. During our years away, however, these churches had been undergoing their own changes. In the morning service on the day in which I write this we were treated to one of them. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the church with an 8-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she tastefully writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and gently beckoning gestures, begged Jesus to come fill her.
Her song had a different effect on me than I suspect she thought it might. It did, perhaps, bring me closer to Jesus, but by bringing me closer to the sinfulness of my own heart, the kind of heart that would be excited to lust by a pretty woman begging to be filled, and that would be instructed by its conscience to avert the eyes until she was done with her performance. It also made me wonder if her husband, sitting calmly by while she went through her show, was doing his duty by her, since she seemed to have a good surplus of the sort of womanly energy that husbands like to see. These, I admit, are not particularly sanctified thoughts, but I rather doubt that I was alone, and as I write am in no humor to pretend otherwise.
The song was not un-Evangelical, not foreign the tradition. It was the “In the Garden” tryst of the old hymnbooks carried into the next phase of intimacy and excitement. Jesus has been walking and talking with revivalists and telling them they are his own for many years now, and it is not surprising that, given his romantic propensities, they should be expecting him to move to the next phase of the courtship ritual. Many of Evangelicalism’s “beloved old hymns” are things that no man who is paying attention can sing, either because he isn’t a woman or a homosexual, or because he refuses to lie to God about the aroused state of his mind or resolve. These “old” hymns are largely the product of a nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminization of American culture and its religion (see Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture), of an era that has borne most of its fruit in last hundred or so years when religion in the west has become regarded by most men, and not without reason, as the domain of rampant emotion—of women, children, and of weak, unmanly men....
Would you buy a way of life from a guru?
...In 1982 a young management consultant from McKinsey & Co, Thomas J Peters, co-wrote In Search of Excellence, a relentlessly optimistic primer which celebrated America's best companies and sought to identify the secrets of their success. As the Economist noted, Peters had "a knack of saying the right thing at the right time": In Search of Excellence was published in the very week unemployment in the US reached its highest level since the 1930s, and it found a ready audience in a nation worried about declining competitiveness but sick of hearing about the Japanese miracle. (Perhaps Peters had learned from the precedent of Dale Carnegie, whose equally cheerful and vastly popular How to Win Friends and Influence People had appeared in 1936, in the depths of the Depression.) In Search of Excellence sold five million copies, and Peters used the proceeds to buy a 1,300-acre farm in Vermont, complete with cattle and llamas.
After that, the deluge: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey; The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge; The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson; Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins ... The New York Times list of non-fiction bestsellers soon became so clogged with inspirational tracts that the paper established a separate category for "Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous". In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, "you have to have a shtick of some kind". One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from "management" to "leadership", was to seek out historical analogies, though the history usually turned out to be a mere promotional gimmick rather than a serious examination of past experience. The pioneer here was Wess Roberts, whose book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1989. Described as a "fantastic" guide which "will help you make the most of your leadership potential", it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: "You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment"; "When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option."
Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors; Make It So: Leadership Lessons from "Star Trek the Next Generation"; The Heart of an Executive: Lessons on Leadership From the Life of King David; and Moses: CEO. The 10 commandments, we now learn, were the world's first mission statement. ...
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.'
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
-- Abraham Lincoln in an 1848 letter to his law partner, William H. Herndon
Send the Children of Politicians to the Front Lines?
In recent speeches, President George Bush has proclaimed his desire to spread the blessings of freedom throughout the world, emphasizing that Americans pursued this objective throughout the 20th century. As he told the National Endowment for Democracy in November: "In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty."
Yes, we have, but we have not always been successful -- and our leaders have not always displayed their willingness to sacrifice themselves for liberty. ...
...According to a study by retired University of Texas sociologist Robert Cushing, less populated rural counties in the U.S. are suffering casualties in Iraq at a higher rate than more suburban -- and presumably wealthier -- counties. "In the politically polarized America of today, there are unmistakably two planets," concluded Bill Bishop of the "Austin American-Statesman," who reported Cushing's findings. "There's the planet that watches the war on television and debates the merits of an $87 billion appropriation, and then there's the planet that sends its kids to Afghanistan and Iraq."
That disconnect is beginning to have an effect. "I noticed a long time ago that our policymakers often seem divorced from the men and women who serve in the armed forces," a woman whose brother serves in the Marines wrote in the Washington Post last January. Others with loved ones in the service are even more personal and bitter. "Would Bush be doing this if he were sending his daughters?" asked 22-year old Sally Brown, whose husband is in the Marines, shortly before the invasion of Iraq.
One of the great challenges facing a democracy -- indeed, any society -- is the connection between the military and civilian society. Any sense of inequality and inequity is bound to erode that connection. Thus, an all-volunteer military is the wisest policy. Yet it can best sustain itself when the politicians lead by example. If the political leadership does not demonstrate the courage of its convictions by risking its own flesh and blood, it cannot expect the professionals in the military to do so for long. ...
Ready for Four More Years? They Certainly Are
...Every now and then, I experience a warm surge of nostalgia for the Clinton years. Not out of affection for Billary, hell no; I consider George W. Bush a mischievous fool, but as for the Clintons… I used to read The American Spectator religiously, and though they never quite sold me on Mena or Troopergate, the accusations were far from implausible. But the things the Clintons took credit for bespoke their venality loud and clear, and I felt a sense of brotherhood with grassroots conservatives in thinking so. Suddenly, I could talk politics with my parents again. We railed against big spending, even as the rate of increase leveled off (that looks like something to brag about now). We demanded impeachment after Waco. We decried Clinton's draconian response to the Oklahoma City bombing and his l'état c'est moi mentality. We howled as he bombed his way out of political crises. And we pitied – at the time, I thought sincerely – the victims of his pointless war on Yugoslavia.
Grassroots conservatives like my folks and libertarians like me seemed to be converging on a shared skepticism about power, distrust of official narratives, and, above all, disgust for the increasing militarization of civil society. Those were the days.
Then their guy won the White House....
Sunday, February 01, 2004
US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD
Blair comes under pressure as Americans admit it was widely known that Saddam had no chemical arsenal
Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.
Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. ...
...'It was known in May,' Albright said last week, 'that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public.' ...
Christian foot soldiers battle for Bush
An increasingly polarised presidential election appears to be in the offing. One of the fault-lines is religion and, in particular, President George W Bush's evangelical faith and how that guides his political beliefs.
...Talking to Mrs Fields it is clear that the White House is all too aware of the crucial role that grassroots organisations in the south could play again in harvesting votes for the 2004 campaign.
Karl Rove, the mercurial presidential advisor who many see as the second most important man in Washington, was in Atlanta just before Christmas, addressing sympathetic evangelicals.
"It was very well received, he spoke a lot about the president's faith, and how that really does steady him, and strengthen him, during these hard times," said Mrs Fields. ...
...The Baptist church in America has a long tradition of separation between church and state, and the promotion of "religious liberty" says David Sapp, the head pastor at the Second Ponce de Leon Baptist ministry in Atlanta.
His spacious white wooden sanctuary is sandwiched between the Catholic and Episcopal cathedrals on a bend in the road that local police call "Jesus Junction".
He is convinced that the Christian Coalition is compromising the word of the gospel, in campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates.
"You look at the leaflets they have sometimes put on cars in our parking lot during services, about peoples' positions on issues. When the churches become a partisan voting bloc, we compromise our freedom," he says.
"You wind up accepting an influence on the church, that I don't think is healthy," he adds.
Friday, January 30, 2004
Returning female GIs report rapes, poor care
At least 37 allege assaults by U.S. soldiers overseas, little help afterward
Female troops serving in the Iraq war are reporting an insidious enemy in their own camps: fellow American soldiers who sexually assault them.
At least 37 female service members have sought sexual-trauma counseling and other assistance from civilian rape-crisis organizations after returning from war duty in Iraq, Kuwait and other overseas stations, The Denver Post has learned....
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Why the Evangelical Church Needs the Liberal Church
...I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals ourselves if we were to leave the PC(USA). When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other....
Sex, lies, and life on the evangelical edge
An interview with Philip Yancey, the best-selling Christian author who is surprised at how much he gets away with.....
"I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent.' Those were not words we used."
- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 1/27/04
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040127-6.html
"This is about an imminent threat."
- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030210-7.html
"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02
"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02
On January 26, 2003, CNN television asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett “is he (Saddam) an imminent threat to US interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”
“Well, of course he is,” Bartlett replied.
On May 7, 2003, a reporter asked then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer: “We went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true?”
“Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all,” the spokesman replied.
In war, some facts less factual
Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious.
MOSCOW - When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.
But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.
"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story....
...Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up – jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases – but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.
"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong.
The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified....
...More recently, in the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah.
In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die."
Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."
But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale.
Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital.
She had been coached – along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story – by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war.....
My Enemy, Myself
What brings evangelicals together is also what pulls us apart.
Two decades in evangelicalism didn't do it. Planting a church didn't do it. A master's degree from Fuller Seminary didn't do it. Years of teaching theology at evangelical schools didn't do it. It was a Saturday morning trip to the Rose Bowl that finally showed me what evangelicalism is all about.
That day a revival meeting came to my town, as The Call inaugurated a 40-day fast in Southern California. When I arrived, an estimated 20,000 people were praying, kneeling, dancing, and milling around. The news reports called them "young people," probably because reporters are used to associating church with the elderly, but they spanned at least three generations. The parked buses said they came from all over the western United States and all over the denominational map, and the faces in the crowd said they came from nearly every tribe, tongue, and nation.
On my way out, I couldn't resist visiting the three demonstrators who had caught my eye on my way in. "The Call leads to hell," their signs warned. An exasperated audience surrounded each. "Who are you?" one listener demanded. Her answer came as a pamphlet from a group called A True Church. It featured a list of the false teachers and enemies of the faith the group had come to warn us about: "Benny Hinn, Billy Graham, Bobgans [Martin and Deirdre Bobgan], Charles Spurgeon, Charles Stanley, Chuck Smith, David W. Cloud, Dr. [David] Jeremiah, the Early Church Fathers, Glen Conjurske, Greg Laurie, Jack Hayford, James Dobson, John Hagee, John MacArthur, Keith Green, Miles McPherson, Paul Chappell, Raul Ries, Steven Shoemaker, T. D. Jakes, Tony Evans, Vernon McGee, Catholicism, Central Christian, Church of Christ, COGIC, Coptic Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Laurel Glen Bible, March for Jesus, Mormonism, New Life Center, New Wine Christian Center, Promise Keepers, Seventh-day Adventists, Stine Road Baptist, Valley Baptist, Valley Bible, Weigh Down Workshop." Whew!
"How many are there in your church?" another asked.
"Thirty-five."
"What is so wrong with tens of thousands of Christians praying together?" asked someone else.
"They are ecumenical."
It hit me that day that there are two kinds of evangelicals: those who make distinctions, and those who don't. The dialectic of hospitality and separation is what brings tens of thousands into the Rose Bowl to plead for the Spirit to come, and also brings three outside it to warn them away. It is the key to who we are....
THERE IS NO TERRORIST THREAT
Ladies & gentlemen:
Following the coordinated attacks orchestrated on 9/11/2001, in which passenger aircraft were hijacked by a small group of Muslim extremists to destroy the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and to damage the Pentagon, there have been no significant terrorist attacks that have occurred in the entire United States since that time.
There have been no bombings of American nightclubs, movie theaters, grocery stores or shopping malls. There have been no assaults by gunmen on those attending NFL football games or any other sports events. There have been no significant attacks on any American citizens in any public or private sector since 9/11/2001.
In the meantime, both the northern and southern borders of the United States have remained largely undermanned and unguarded by the United States Government, allowing anyone to enter, smuggling anything from drugs to Russian-made SA-7 portable anti-aircraft missiles, to any other munitions domestic terrorists might want to obtain and use.
In point of fact, no terrorist threat exists, nor has it ever existed, in the mainland of the United States. If that were untrue, terrorists would have committed violent acts since 9/11/2001. They haven‘t happened. Not one. ...
...In truth, we had a small, coordinated band of Muslim misfits who hijacked passenger aircraft and did some damage to both buildings and killed citizens, with no back-up plan. There was no back-up plan to invade the United States, and incredibly, there was no back-up plan to continue further terrorist attacks. It was all over in one shot.
Think about that, and consider what has transpired in the aftermath to the basic liberties of every American. The terrorists won, and only because our own government led by George W. Bush, let them wag us.
We citizens are fools.
Why We'll Pay a Price for Bush's Fibs About Iraq's WMD
TV-mag journalist Diane Sawyer recently asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered, “So what's the difference?”
Those were astonishing words, even for famously indifferent George W. Bush. Impossible to know is if he let them escape out of peerless arrogance or mere ignorance; yet, using his own standard of critical analysis, what difference does it make? The frightening reality is this: Either a want in character or deficiency of intellect has produced a president capable of dragging the nation to unparalleled heights of international loathing, all the while he was without a clue or a care.
The world simply doesn't trust us any longer – a reversal of goodwill in lightening time – yet Mr. Bush pretends it's only because of some silly difference of opinion over some petty difference about what was real and what was not.
Perhaps if the president engaged the world by at least reading newspapers he could grasp the unpleasant diplomatic consequences of crying wolf. According to a front-page report in the Washington Post last week, foreign policy analysts who had sat in the president's pro-invasion corner are now in anguish over sinking, or rather sunken, U.S. credibility abroad.
Defense Advisory Board member and war hawk Kenneth Adelman, for example, complained “the foreign policy blow-back” from the administration's rhetorical hyperbole “is pretty serious.” He noted the damage done to exercising future, legitimate actions against imminent threats to national security. In effect, the Bush doctrine had one shot at proving itself justifiable, but the postwar absence of damning evidence has only served to shoot down our credibility instead. (For those egg-on-the-face conservatives who now advance the curious defense that the always-wrong Clinton administration also believed in damning evidence, try to remember this much: It didn't slap on six-shooters and go blasting its way into Baghdad, only later to say, “Oops.”) ...
...In these most perilous of times – when we most need friends to help combat vicious global threats without first feeling compelled to vet our every word – the president has complicated America 's security. And that, Mr. Bush, is “the difference.”
Iraqi whispers mull repeat of 1920s revolt
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as an omen for the future.
Iraqis remember 1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries that hang in living rooms.
Now, many say there's an uncanny similarity with today: unpopular foreign occupiers, unelected governing bodies and unhappy residents eager for self-determination. The result could be another bloody uprising.
"We are now under occupation, and the best treatment for a wound is sometimes fire," said Najah al Najafi, a Shiite cleric who joined thousands of marchers at a recent demonstration where construction workers, tribal leaders and religious scholars spoke of 1920.
The rebellion against the British marked the first time that Sunni and Shiite Muslims worked in solidarity, drawing power from tribesmen and city dwellers alike. Though Shiites, Sunnis and ethnic minorities are rivals in the new Iraq, many residents said the recent call for elections could draw disparate groups together. A smattering of Sunnis joined massive Shiite protests last week, demanding that U.S. administrators grant the wishes of the highest Shiite cleric for general elections....
'We were all wrong': former top arms hunter
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay says he's more worried about the nuclear facilities the U.S. overlooked in Iran and Libya than the lack of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"It turns out that we were all wrong, and that is most disturbing," Kay said as he testified before the Senate armed services committee Wednesday. ...
Kay Cites Evidence Of Iraq Disarming
Action Taken in '90s, Ex-Inspector Says
U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday.
The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information -- contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis -- demonstrating that Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war. ...
I Don't Owe the Military Anything
I get impassioned emails from readers who are military veterans or relatives of military veterans, saying, in essence, "You go ahead and say your terrible things. The men and women of the armed forces will continue risking their lives to defend your right to say it." These readers claim that the only reason I'm free to say the things I do, and the reason I owe the military all sorts of my money, is because the military has for 200 years defended my freedom all over the world.
I say, Hogwash!...
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish: A Warhawk Flies the Coop
I start on a personal note. I would like for the record to show that, today, I formally disavow the Republican Party as well as my past support for the Second Gulf War.
Now, let me be frank: This is something I didn't see coming a year ago. I only saw things through a prism of GOP allegiance back then. ...
..."You know, it's not that I've ever taken things for granted, but my deep appreciation for American life only really settled in on September 11th. The feeling has yet to let me go."
Well, that's great and all, but what the hell was I saying? It didn't mean anything. ...
...But I wrote a lot of stuff like that during the build-up to the Second Gulf War. I was still in a woe-is-me, post-9/11 rut back then, and I went along with the war without thinking critically or questioning a damn thing. This bothers me now because, regardless of whether I support my having supported it, I would've done well to have followed less blindly -- as a writer, as an American, as a man.
In that very same article on February 25, I wrote: "I don't want this war… anymore than the next guy." That sounded nice when I wrote it, but it wasn't exactly true. I mean, of course I wanted the war more than the next guy. I was rooting for it with thousand-word diatribes each and every Tuesday....
...Before the Second Gulf War, we heard about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. I'll say now, like I said then, that the actual weapons were secondary to the shady way in which he treated the weapons inspectors. It seemed to prove he was hiding something, and there remains the chance that he was. Either way, I enjoy the fact that he's out of power. But if his sketchiness was cause for war, what, then, can I say about Bush's own sketchiness on this issue? ...
...So did Iraq really have WMD programs? Colin Powell says "we don't know yet." And David Kay says the evidence suggests "the weapons do not exist." Both men revealed their opinions mere days after the State of the Union. Surely the president knew about them ahead of time. Why no mention of it, then? A simple "Oops," or "I'm as surprised by this as you are," would've sufficed. Instead, he treated this "credibility gap" -- as Tom Daschle might call it -- as a non-issue. Out of sight. Out of mind. What a brilliant PR move. Sort of reminds me of the time Baghdad Bob said coalition troops were nowhere near the airport, when, in fact, they had taken the airport. ...
...I am an average, everyday American. I used to be able to see the Twin Towers from atop the hill behind my home. When those buildings went down, my heart said, "Give the government free reign." No longer. ....
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Operation Desert Guard
Bush's War Record: Missing, Inaction
...What are the facts? The single best rundown on this issue was contained in an article by Walter V. Robinson of The Boston Globe on May 23, 2000. On May 28, 1968, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard's 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston and was selected for pilot training. In July of that year a board of officers said he should be commissioned as a second lieutenant; he left for six weeks of basic training and was commissioned that September 4. Then he took off for eight weeks to work on a Florida Senate campaign. Next he attended and graduated from flight school (November 25, 1968, to November 28, 1969). He trained full-time to be an F-102 pilot at Ellington, where from July 7, 1970, to April 16, 1972, he attended frequent drills and alerts.
From this point on, his record is murky. Bush's records reveal no sign he showed up for duty during his fifth year as a guardsman, according to the Globe. On May 24, 1972, Bush had moved to Alabama to work on a Senate race and received permission to serve with a reserve unit there. Headquarters ordered that he serve with a more active unit, and on September 5, 1972, he got permission to perform his Guard duty at the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery. But there is no record of his turning up, and the unit commander says he never did. From November 1972 to April 30, 1973, Bush was in Houston but didn't go to his Guard duties. In May 1973, two lieutenant colonels in charge of Bush's Houston unit were unable to rate him for the prior 12 months, claiming he had not been at the unit during that time. From May to July 1973, Bush logged 36 days on duty after special orders for active duty were issued to him. His last day in uniform was July 30, 1973, and that October 1, after beginning Harvard Business School, this weekend warrior was discharged from the Texas Air National Guard. That was eight months before his Guard tour was scheduled to expire. ...
Bush Backs Away From His Claims About Iraq Arms
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly....
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Powell '01: WMDs Not 'Significant'
Sept. 26, 2003
The debate over whether the Iraqi weapons threat was real or exaggerated by the Bush administration focused Thursday on a few words spoken more than two years ago by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
War opponents and some Congressional Democrats have pointed to a statement Powell made on Feb. 24, 2001, while meeting at Cairo's Ittihadiya Palace with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.
Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
War critics said the remark bolstered their suspicions that the administration deliberately inflated the threat Iraq posed, because Powell's depiction of Iraq in the run-up to war painted a different picture.
...
Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence on Iraq prompted him to set up secret review
Specialists removed questionable evidence about weapons from draft of secretary of state's speech to UN
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian
Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.
Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.
Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.
Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused"....
Bush 2004 Campaign Pledges To Restore Honor And Dignity To White House
BOSTON—Addressing guests at a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser, George W. Bush pledged Monday that, if re-elected in November, he and running mate Dick Cheney will "restore honor and dignity to the White House."
Above: Bush says he will "put an end to the current lack of honesty and compassion in Washington."
"After years of false statements and empty promises, it's time for big changes in Washington," Bush said. "We need a president who will finally stand up and fight against the lies and corruption. It's time to renew the faith the people once had in the White House. If elected, I pledge to usher in a new era of integrity inside the Oval Office."
Bush told the crowd that, if given the opportunity, he would work to reestablish the goodwill of the American people "from the very first hour of the very first day" of his second term....
International Justice Mission's covert ministry becomes very public
In 1999, Christianity Today covered the work of Gary Haugen and his International Justice Mission (IJM), which had then been doing case work against sexual slavery for a year. Still, what a year it had been: In 1998, the ministry had freed more than 700 people, largely through covertly infiltrating, investigating, and documenting abuses around the world.
Five years later, International Justice Mission has become a media focus, with Forbes specifically profiling the group and Dateline NBC cooperating with IJM on a major piece on Cambodia's child sex market.
But that's not all: Four weeks ago, NPR's Morning Edition gave much attention to IJM's work in a piece on the U.S. government's crackdown on American sex tourists, as does this week's New York Times Magazine cover story on sex trafficking (Times reporter Peter Landesman talked about his story yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air, and Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has also been reporting on Cambodia's sex slavery)
For a good look at the kind of work IJM does, check out the Dateline NBC report. The undercover, secret videotape work included in that report—of pimps, of victims, and of customer/rapists—along with a raid that includes the arrest of pimps and freeing of young girls, is the kind of thing that IJM is largely known for. Almost every time you hear "Dateline" in the report, mentally add, "working with IJM."
Part of Haugen's work is to go after American sex tourists, not just the pimps. And the Dateline report also includes a fine example of this: an IJM investigator caught American radiologist Jerrold Albom on video bragging about coming to Cambodia to have sex with girls as young as 14. Dateline reporters using the tape confronted Albom in Guam, and now stateside medical centers are promising that his radiology days are over. Dateline says that federal agents are investigating Albom, but no charges have been filed.
Missing from all of these reports is the faith that motivates Haugen and other IJM workers, though Dateline notes that it's a "faith-based organization" and Forbes has a brief mention of Haugen's church, adding that the "group does not preach." Haugen in fact works with proclamation missionaries to find out about cases of slavery, and sees his work as complementary to theirs.
American Christians should have the same approach to justice ministry as they do to missions, he said back in our 1999 article: "You can either go, you can send, or you can pray. … God's first step in enabling the body of Christ to seek justice for the oppressed has been to break down the isolation of the vulnerable by deploying his witness into their communities. It's fair to say that within a stone's throw of just about every victim of oppression in the world there is a Christian worker whom God has placed in the community to share the love of Jesus."
As more Americans are awakened to the horrors of the global sex trade (see also our November 2003 article on the subject), and as pressure mounts on the American government to take more action against this form of slavery, expect International Justice Mission to continue its difficult work on the front lines
New Global Survey Analyzes War and Human Rights
(London, January 26, 2004) — The invasion of Iraq ended the reign of a brutal government, but coalition leaders are wrong to characterize it as a humanitarian intervention, Human Rights Watch said in the keynote essay of its annual global survey released today....
...In the keynote essay, Roth notes that removing Saddam Hussein from power brought about the end of one of the world’s most abusive governments. But intervening militarily on the territory of a sovereign state, without its permission, is inherently dangerous and must be undertaken for humanitarian purposes in only the most extreme cases. While Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record, his worst atrocities were committed long before the intervention. At the time coalition forces invaded Iraq, there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing of the sort that would require the kind of preventive military action that should characterize true humanitarian interventions.
For a military action to be characterized as “humanitarian,” Roth argues that the motive for intervening should be primarily humanitarian; the danger of slaughter should be imminent and the scale of the killings massive; and all other options for preventing the slaughter should have been exhausted.
“The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair,” said Roth. “Saddam Hussein’s atrocities should certainly be punished, and his worst atrocities, such as the 1988 genocide against the Kurds, would have justified humanitarian intervention then. But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn’t be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past.” ...
The Girls Next Door
The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.
On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''
The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.
It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families....
Pastor Says Some Churches Seizing Christ's Lordship with 'Reinvented' Gospel
(AgapePress) - A well-known Christian author and pastor is concerned that a growing number of Evangelical ministers are watering down the gospel message in order to be "seeker sensitive."
Dr. John MacArthur says many Evangelical pastors are presenting what he calls a "reinvented designer pop gospel" in hopes of making Christianity appear more attractive or culturally relevant. The pastor of Grace Community Church in San Valley, California, says those who preach in that fashion have a weak view of the authority and power of scripture.
"I think it encompasses a weak view of the honor and the power of God and Christ," MacArthur says bluntly. "In other words, I think you're basically usurping the Lordship of Christ over His Church -- you're saying, 'I'm going to stand here and give a message that I think is better than the one that Christ gave.'" Such an attitude, he says, is "a frightening thing to think about."
MacArthur believes it is becoming harder than ever to find an Evangelical church that is not compromising the gospel. He says small churches that remain true to God's Word and do not embrace a user-friendly gospel are often viewed today as "archaic" and "unsuccessful."
"The huge crowds are drawn by lowering all the standards," he says, citing such apporaches as a "minimalist gospel," an entertainment mentality, and creation of a social environment that attracts people by promising them "the path to success" and better economic status.
"You know ... 'You'll do better in your job, your career, your family, your marriage, etc.'" he says. "Those are the kinds of things that are sold on the 'felt need' counter."...
Christian Evangelicals in Iraq: A Time-Bomb Waiting to Explode
Rene L. Gonzalez
01/25/04: (ICH) I've always had a big axe to grind with these Christian evangelicals. Ever since being accosted by one fervent follower in the hallways of a building at the University of Massachusetts and pressured to "recognize Jesus as my savior", I've had a very big distaste for their kind. These "know it all" pseudo-Christians make me sick, and I'll tell you why.
The British Telegraph newspaper recently featured an article on a supposed "war for souls" being waged by American Christian Evangelicals in Iraq. The article boiled my blood. My first reaction was, "How dare these religious nuts think they know better than Iraqis what their beliefs should be?" I thought the whole thing reflected a very ugly racism and paternalism about other people in the world and their traditions.
First of all, they're deceptive and dishonest about their agenda in Iraq. The following quote describes the nature of this deception.
-"Organising in secrecy, and emphasising their humanitarian aid work, Christian groups are pouring into the country, which is 97 per cent Muslim, bearing Arabic Bibles, videos and religious tracts designed to "save" Muslims from their "false" religion."-
The humanitarian aid work is the cover for the real agenda (which is converting Muslims to Christianity). The whole concept reveals a lot of racism, paternalism, arrogance, and ignorance....
Monday, January 26, 2004
IA: Iraq at risk of civil war
The warning, at odds with Bush's upbeat view, was delivered this week to Washington. His aides are pushing to save a transition plan.
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
Inquirer Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said yesterday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.
The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered orally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.
Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.
"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."...
Fighting words
In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush made no compelling case that he spoke the truth about Iraq last year. Nor did he apologize.
A year ago, President Bush used his State of the Union address to sound a frightening alarm about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The president told the nation that Iraq had amassed 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve gas. He also charged that Saddam Hussein's regime had sought to acquire "significant quantities" of refined uranium and special aluminum tubes whose only practical use was as part of a program to develop nuclear weapons.
And he offered a chilling warning that only one vial from those vast stockpiles of weapons could "bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."
That dire, detailed warning of a looming threat to our national security served as the Bush administration's justification for war in Iraq. Of course, no weapons of mass destruction of any kind have been found there. No anthrax. No botulinum. No VX. In fact, U.S. weapons inspectors have not even found significant evidence of programs that might eventually have led to the development of weapons. And the allegations concerning Iraq's efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program were proved to have been based on fraudulent evidence.
Yet, having staked the reputation of our government on his allegations against Iraq, President Bush hasn't even tried to explain, much less apologize for, the utter lack of evidence to support the stark charges he made a year ago. Instead, the president talked in this year's State of the Union address of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Would the nation have been so quick to support the president's call to war on the basis of vague references to Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities"?...
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Kay Departs Arms Hunt, Doubts Iraq's Stockpile
David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.
"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said. ...
Friday, January 23, 2004
MegaShepherd
Nearly a decade ago, pastor Charles Lyons of Armitage Baptist Church was preparing for a siege. Members of Armitage Baptist, a multiracial congregation in Chicago's multiethnic Logan Square neighborhood, had played a leading role in nonviolent protests at local abortion clinics. Now abortion-rights groups and activists from Queer Nation were planning a noisy reverse Operation Rescue-style protest to shut down the church's Wednesday evening prayer meeting.
Then Lyons received a call from James Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, a congregation on Chicago's far South Side. Lyons, who is white, and Meeks, who is black, met about five years earlier during a Sunday school conference and quickly become friends. They pray together regularly.
Meeks asked Lyons, "Why didn't you ask me to come over and help?" That night, Meeks canceled a Bible study for 800 people at his church, loaded seven buses with members of his congregation, including a youth choir, and drove to Armitage.
Outnumbered 10 to 1, the 100 or so protesters didn't stand a chance. Once the Salem choir started singing, "the demonstrators were done for," wrote a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. "The kids were too good and too loud."
This quick action on behalf of a friend and a good cause is one reason James Meeks has risen from being a relatively unknown South Side preacher to one of the most recognizable and powerful pastors in the city.
Other reasons? Well, he has made Salem Baptist one of the largest African American churches in Chicago. It has grown from around 3,000 members in 1997 to more than 17,000 today.
Meeks is also an Illinois state senator, representing five of the poorest communities in Illinois.
He also serves as executive vice president of the Rainbow/PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) Coalition, and is named as successor to Jesse Jackson. He is perhaps the only person welcome at both the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and at Moody Bible Institute, where he often speaks. His many ambitious plans for his church and community include delivering 30,000 Bibles to residents in the church's ZIP code.
Despite these and other accomplishments, his name mostly draws blanks from people outside of Chicago. This is odd, since it's increasingly clear that Meeks is one of the most effective megachurch pastors in the nation....
Dry Drunk Confirmed?
O'Neill's Revelations and the Mind of Bush
By KATHERINE van WORMER
...Earlier several other writers and I likened Bush’s personality characteristics to those of a person who, in AA parlance, is “dry” but whose thinking is not really sober. Grandiosity, rigidity, and intolerance of ambiguity, and a tendency to obsess about things are among the traits associated with the dry drunk. The dry drunk quits drinking, but his or her obsession with the bottle is often replaced with other obsessions. Twelve Step programs help their members modify their all-or-nothing thought patterns which associated with the disease alcoholism. “Easy does it” and “One day at a time” are among the slogans; the serenity prayer, similarly, helps persons with addictive tendencies to curb the tendency to excess.
In Bush’s irrational patterns of thought lie the clues to his single-minded obsession with Iraq. For the explanation for Bush’s vendetta against this one country, we have to look to his biography and to the meaning that Iraq held for his father.
The father-son relationship can be problematic in any family. When the father is considered a big hero, the first-born son, especially one bearing the father’s name, identity issues are common. As any chronology of George W Bush’s childhood will show, the son was set up to follow in the exact footsteps of his father. Sent away to the very New England prep school where his father’s accomplishments were still remembered, the younger Bush became better known for his pranks than athletic or academic achievements. His drinking bouts caused problems during his military service as well. (Remember that his father had been a war hero.) In college there was heavy drinking and other drug misuse, one arrest for a wild college prank and one conviction for drunken driving. A much later religious conversion turned his life around.
George W. Bush’s father set him up in business, and his father’s presidency helped him get his start in politics. His father, for all his success, experienced failure on three occasions. He was widely criticized for not finishing the job in Iraq-- for not moving the troops in to “take out” Saddam following the Gulf War victory--and he failed to get his bill to fund a NASA flight to Mars, and finally, he lost his bid for re-election.
What a unique opportunity has fallen George W Bush’s way. The prodigal son can not only prove himself to his father but he can show up his father at his own game. Remember that for his cabinet and key advisers, he chose some of the same men from his father’s regime. He chose people, furthermore, who would be favorable to a return campaign, “a crusade” against Iraq. Given his past history and tendency toward obsessiveness, the temptation to achieve heroism through a re-enactment of his father’s war clearly would have been too much for George Bush Jr. to resist. To accomplish his mission he would have to throw caution and international diplomacy to the winds, lie convincingly to the American people, threaten allies, bully members of the United Nations, but in the end he would be able to dress in full military regalia and declare “mission accomplished.” ....
Hi, I’m 21, have we met?
Trenton Starnes offers an open letter to the relevant and hip mega-churches
Dear Bill,
I’m sitting in the plush seats arranged stadium-style (they still smell new), waiting for the seeker service to begin. I know this is a state of the art media facility, designed to meet my needs as a seeker; the jumbo-trons and 80-foot speakers tell me that you are serious about this relevance thing. If this is the matinee, then can I throw less in the offering plate?
I basically know what I can expect: a rockin’ praise and worship band, Academy-nominated skits, and a non-boring, non-threatening, non-lengthy sermon with movie clips interspersed for good measure. I know that you’re aiming for relevance here; I’ll just bet you use the word relevance at least 2,349.5 times in your ministry team meetings. It’s sprinkled throughout your literature, I saw it in the name of your church, read it in the size of your has-it-own-area-code campus but I really knew you were serious about the whole relevance thing when I parked. You know, way out in lot W? I was feeling bummed about the half-mile walk to the sanctuary -- excuse me, I mean “meeting place” --when Deacon George pulled up in his urban golf cart and offered me a ride. Told me there was coffee inside (I must’ve been shivering), and not just any coffee. It was Brand Name. I mean, how many churches do that?
But I thought I should tell you, Bill… if I don’t, who will? I know nobody wants to burst your bubble or anything, so I’ll lay it on you gently. You know this whole “relevance” thing? This whole “seeker service” designed to reach as many as possible with the Gospel? Well, I’m here, and I’m watching, and I think you ought to know: you’re losing me. ...
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Infiltration of files seen as extensive
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics....
...With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives....
Evasions, Half-Truths, and the State of the Union
Can we trust this year's speech?
This time, at least, there were no blatant lies in the national-security section of the State of the Union address. The speechwriters, no doubt watched over by a hyperalert Condoleezza Rice, made sure to avoid a reprise of last year's scandal over false claims of an Iraqi hunt for yellowcake. Instead, however, the scribes piled on so many half-truths and evasions, often in disingenuous phrasings, as to erase the customary distinction between mere deceit and sheer falsehood.
Let's take them one by one....
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Couple Charged in Alleged Exorcism Death
ATLANTA - A husband and wife have been charged with murdering a 6-year-old girl whose back was broken in what police said may have been an exorcism gone wrong....
Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious
(CBS) Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President’s mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address -- despite objections from the CIA.
Traveling with the president in Africa, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Friday said that the CIA had cleared the reference to the attempted uranium purchase.
Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.
CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.
The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: “Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that’s how it was delivered.
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush said.
The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true. ...
"No one can now doubt the word of America."
That's what George W. Bush told the United States and the world public in his State of the Union address this evening. He was referring to the war in Iraq, which he defended vigorously in the speech. But this remark made it seem he was oblivious to the fact that many people around the globe believe that the war in Iraq demonstrated that Bush's word is worth nothing....
From the Top Ten Bush Lies
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." And, "[Saddam Hussein is] a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda."
These two Bush remarks go hand in hand, even though the first was said on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, and the other came during a November 7, 2002, press conference. Together they represented his argument for war: Hussein possessed actual weapons of mass destruction and at any moment could hand them to his supposed partners in al Qaeda. That is why Hussein was an immediate threat to the United States and had to be taken out quickly. But neither of these assertions were truthful. There has been much media debate over all this. But the postwar statements of Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, provide the most compelling proof. He has been conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, and he has told reporters that the intelligence on Hussein’s WMDs was full of caveats and qualifiers and based mostly on inferential or circumstantial evidence. In other words, it was not no-doubt material. He also has said that prewar intelligence reports did not contain evidence of links between Hussein and al Qaeda. The best information to date indicates that the prewar intelligence did not leave "no doubt" about WMDs and did not support Bush’s claim that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda. Bush’s primary reason for war was founded on falsehoods
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"[T]he system [of democracy] is simple, and for a while it works well enough. The shrill gloats and exultations of A, who has got something for nothing, drown out the repining of B, who has lost something that he earned. B, in fact, becomes officially disreputable, and the more he complains the more he is denounced and detested. He is moved, it appears, by a kind of selfishness which is incompatible with true democracy. He actually believes that his property is his own, to remain in his keeping until he chooses to part with it. He is told at once that his information on the point is inaccurate, and his morals more than dubious. In an ideal democracy, he learns, property is at the disposal, not of its owners, but of politicians, and the chief business of politicians is to collar it by fair means or foul, and redistribute it to those whose votes have put them in office"
-- H.L. Mencken, The Smart Set, July 1923.
A Man's (and Woman's) Home Is a Castle
The story of Anthony Bars -- the 4-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death in Indiana by foster parents with a criminal record of child abuse -- continues.
Due to media and public outrage, the caseworker who recommended removing Anthony from an earlier, loving foster parent is facing charges. Denise Moore is accused of official misconduct and of falsifying reports in an adoption proceeding: misdemeanor offenses.
Sadly, Anthony is just one in a long list of children neglected or abused by Child Protective Services in state after state. In his case, the press is still pounding on why child welfare officials never disciplined Moore for her actions and cited state confidentiality laws at almost every question asked.
Emerging scandals and conflicts in Indiana and elsewhere should not be allowed to distract from more fundamental questions: When should a third party have the terrible right to separate a child from its parents? By what right do civil servants enter your home and threaten to remove your children if you do not answer accusations of abuse -- often accusations made anonymously -- to their satisfaction?
The increased power of child welfare agencies to do so comes from legislation dating back to the Mondale Act of 1974. That act established huge financial incentives for state agencies to uncover abuse, without providing checks or balances to protect those wrongfully accused. It also virtually immunized child welfare workers and false accusers from liability....
The $45 Trillion Problem
Even if you think government budget numbers are generally not very interesting (and they do tend to blur together into an eye-glazing morass), here's a number to quicken the pulse: $45.5 trillion. That's the size of the long-term gap between the federal government's projected outlays (future spending plus current debt) and its projected revenues. Most government budget projections look only a brief distance into the future—a year, perhaps, or ten at the most. But Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, have looked further into the future and determined that, in effect, if the U.S. government were a company its owner would have to pay a rational investor $45.5 trillion to take it off his hands. To put this figure in perspective: the entire U.S. economy generated only about $10.4 trillion last year, and total household wealth is currently only about $39 trillion. ...
...The long-term imbalance between the amount of taxes that Americans are accustomed to paying and the level of government services that Americans are accustomed to receiving will not, however, be changed by any alterations in short-term projections. Under any reasonable set of assumptions about economic growth, the natural growth rate of health-care costs, and other important factors, the gap between what we expect to pay and what we expect to receive is enormous. The magnitude of this looming gap has been masked for the past several decades by a demographic blip—the Baby Boom, which for nearly forty years has provided a large base of workers who contribute payroll and income taxes while consuming relatively few government services. In 2012, however, when the first Boomers hit retirement age, the situation will begin to reverse: a large proportion of the population will begin drawing more heavily on government services, while the relative number of taxpaying workers will start to shrink. Today there are nineteen elderly for every 100 working-age Americans; by 2050 there will be thirty-five for every 100. This means trouble: in 2015 Medicare taxes will fall short of Medicare expenditures for the first time; in 2018 Social Security payments will outstrip payroll-tax revenues. In short, if we don't make policy changes soon, the government's financial situation will begin imploding within the next ten years....
I believe in conspiracies
John Laughland says the real nutters are those who believe in al-Qa’eda and weapons of mass destruction Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having been to a grammar school: both are rather socially awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally considered a rather repellent form of intellectual low-life, and their theorists rightfully the object of scorn and snobbery. Writing in the Daily Mail last week, the columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked conspiracy theories as the consequence of a special pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of a ‘descent into the irrational’. The implication is that those who oppose ‘the West’, or who think that governments are secretive and dishonest, might need psychiatric treatment.
In fact, it is the other way round. British and American foreign policy is itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide network of ‘tens of thousands of terrorists’ ‘in more than 60 countries’ (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have ‘links’ to al-Qa’eda, but we never learn quite what those ‘links’ are. According to two terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is because they do not exist. ‘In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow al-Qa’eda out of proportion,’ they write. They argue that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ was invented in the West to designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.
By the same token, the US-led invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy that Saddam Hussein was in, or might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6 used mind control to make Henri Paul crash Princess Diana’s car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under the Place de l’Alma. With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find ‘weapons of mass distraction’, as Tony Blair likes to call them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed. Indeed, London and Washington have shamelessly exploited people’s fear of the unknown to get public opinion to believe their claim that Iraq had masses of anthrax and botulism. This played on a deep and ancient seam of fear about poison conspiracies which, in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war people who continue to be branded paranoid, even though the British Prime Minister himself, his eyes staring wildly, said in September 2002, ‘Saddam has got all these weapons ...and they’re pointing at us!’
In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly reasonable to raise questions about the power of the secret services and armed forces of the world’s most powerful states, especially those of the USA....
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Call It The Divorce Belt
Holy Britney Spears!
Here's a fact I couldn't find anywhere in George W. Bush's $1.5-billion plan to prop up American marriage.
The pro-Bush red states, especially those in the rural South, have a far higher divorce rate than Al Gore's blue states.
This is the Bible Belt?
Actually, it's more like the Divorce Belt, where the pro-marriage president's staunchest supporters tend to congregate.
For this little nugget, we are indebted to the insightful research of George Barna, who is probably America's leading pollster of religious attitudes. The Barna Research Group of Ventura, Calif., has spent the past 18 years tracking various church and cultural trends.
Trends like Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) getting divorced more frequently than do atheists/agnostics (21 percent).
Forget all that family-values talk from the Religious Right.
"Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups," Barna says flatly....
Rip-off 'liberty'
To those who follow the workings of the American bureaucracy, one thing should be very clear: We the people have lost control of our government. Let me give you a stark example.
Rarely does the President sign a bill into law on a Saturday. In fact, the last time Bush did so was more than a year ago when he signed a spending bill to keep the federal government from shutting down.
But on Saturday, December 13, 2003, as Americans watched Saddam Hussein’s head being probed for lice, President Bush signed into law a bill that grants the FBI, among other intelligence agencies, expansive new powers, including the power to probe Americans’ financial records -- even if they are not suspected terrorists.
Congress passed this latest legislation around Thanksgiving. However, reportedly in order to avoid individual accountability, the Senate passed it with a voice vote....
...Why are we witnessing such end-runs around our Constitution? First, there is a dangerous mentality that permeates the upper echelon of the American government. This is the notion that the government can push through its agenda, even if it undermines basic protections of the U.S. Constitution.
Second, those who supposedly represent us have developed an unnerving tendency to approve and vote for legislation that they do not study carefully. Then there are those in Congress who are mere sycophants of the administration in power and push through the administration’s agenda without considering the fact that it is the people they represent, not the government. ...
...Finally, we the people have too often not been involved in the governmental process and have failed to protest the increasing governmental encroachment on our fundamental freedoms. We often fail to even ask the important questions. As David Martin writes in the San Antonio Current, “If these new powers are necessary to protect United States citizens, then why would the legislation not withstand the test of public debate? If the new act’s provisions are in the public interest, why use stealth in ramming them through the legislative process?”...
Scalia-Cheney Trip Raises Eyebrows
Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck hunting together at a private camp in southern Louisiana, just three weeks after the court agreed to take up the vice president's appeal in lawsuits over his handling of the administration's energy task force, the Los Angeles Times says in its Saturday editions.
While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia's ability to judge the case impartially, the newspaper pointed out. ...
Iraq soldier 'sickened' by amputation claim
A SCOTS soldier at the centre of a row over the quality of equipment supplied to British troops in Iraq last night demanded to know if his leg was amputated only because there was a lack of medical supplies.
Sergeant Albert Thomson said it "sickened" him to think this could be true and confirmed that his family have hired a lawyer to investigate the claims.
Thomson, from Whitburn in West Lothian, lost his leg after a fellow soldier in the Royal Highland Fusiliers accidentally fired a machine gun in March 2003. But MPs are now investigating claims by a whistle-blower that army doctors would not have removed his leg if they had had the appropriate surgical equipment.
The case comes only days after the widow of Sergeant Steven Roberts - a tank commander who was shot dead in Iraq days after being ordered to hand back body armour because of shortages - called for embattled Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon’s resignation over inadequate army supplies.
Thomson, 35, said: "I was just grateful to be alive after I lost my leg, but now I can’t believe this. It sickens me to think this could be true. I’m in complete shock. For the past few months I have just been trying to get on with day-to-day living." ...
Monday, January 19, 2004
Presiding Over Crisis--and Maybe Schism
The Presiding Bishop sees the denomination's current path as the only way--because it's 'truthful.'
Since last summer, Frank Griswold, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, has been in the vortex of his denomination's controversy over its election of an openly gay bishop. Yet during the church's August convention and into the fall, Griswold has remained out of the limelight.
In the last few weeks, dissident members of the church--those opposed to the church's liberal stance on homosexuality--are increasingly threatening to circumvent the bishop's authority in order to "replace" the Episcopal Church with conservative leadership. This week Griswold sat down to talk with Beliefnet. During an interview in his New York office, Griswold said he receives frequent private letters of support from bishops around the country and the world--including those who--publicly--strongly oppose the church's actions. He said "secrecy is the devil's playground," suggesting that those who want to accommodate homosexuality behind the scenes while publicly condemning it are the ones encouraging "sexual aberrance." He disputed the claim by conservatives that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams supports their actions and suggested that conservatives are fighting Griswold's proposal--to be discussed by the denomination's bishops at a March meeting--to accommodate their needs because, paradoxically, it is workable. He believes conservatives want to keep the fight going.
Griswold also admitted he believes the church will experience some sort of schism. Yet he sleeps well and stays spiritually grounded by reading the Psalms twice a day and celebrating the Eucharist. The following is an edited transcript of a 90-minute conversation....
Kissing Nonsense Goodbye
Well, I kissed dating goodbye. But it sure wasn't by choice. For the last four years, I have lived in a very conservative Midwestern town of 35,000. Jefferson City, Missouri, is a place where it's harder for a college-educated, twentysomething, professional, Christian man to find a date than it is to find a good coffeehouse or bookstore. And Starbucks and Barnes & Noble are nowhere near this town, if that tells you anything....
...In fact, if I were relying strictly on the models of relationship-building I see in Scripture, I wouldn't be courting either. I would either be waiting for God to create a wife for me out of my rib or expecting my parents to select for me a comely bride from among the other families in our subdivision. The realities of modern life no longer permit us to choose our spouses this way....
...Hsu goes on to argue convincingly that American evangelicals have all but made an idol out of the human concepts of marriage and family, thus marginalizing single Christians, who are just as complete in Christ as any married person.
The courtship books, it seems, don't begin with this premise. For instance, by stating in Choosing God's Best that "God's solution for man's aloneness is marriage, not dating," Raunikar implicitly labels singleness as something in need of a solution—in other words, a problem.
But these days it seems marriage may well be more of a problem than singleness. I have lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances near my age who either have already gone through a divorce or are in the midst of one. And the vast majority of them are committed believers who come from solidly evangelical congregations where divorce is not taken lightly.
This widespread reality doesn't jibe with the promarriage rhetoric I heard growing up in the youth group of a Southern Baptist megachurch. We were told constantly that "God has that special someone out there for you" and that "you should be preparing yourself for that person even now." My youth minister never said anything about how difficult marriage might be after we found that special someone. I can't blame him; he was too busy making sure that we would defer sex until marriage to tell us much about what came afterward.
Critics in non-Christian contexts have noted this aspect of the problem. Reflecting on the Kasses' book in The Atlantic Monthly, Peter Berkowitz articulates one of the things that has always troubled me about most Christian advice on marriage and dating: "If our anti-romantic tendencies persuade us to expect too little from marriage, our romantic tendencies seduce us into expecting too much."
In some ways, overemphasizing (and thus over-romanticizing) marriage may have created more problems among evangelicals than it has solved. Marriage is not always the solution, and singleness is not always a problem. In fact, singleness actually may be preferable to marriage in some cases. Just ask the apostle Paul....
Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility Abroad
The Bush administration's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties. ...
...The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future."...
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