Well it should. We have been here before. It was June 16, 2000 that the Governor of Texas, the Republican candidate for President reacted to the run-up of energy costs and said, “We should I think the -- we need to be working with our friends in OPEC to make sure that the price of crude oil, which doesn't rise to continue to force the price of gasoline up, particularly as the summer season comes -- is upon us." What the Republicans called the lack of an energy policy was a central theme in their drive to take over the government in 2000. Four years later it is déjà vu all over again....click here for entire article

The cost of running the trucks that carry Chinese sneakers from Long Beach to the neighborhood Wal-mart means an incremental increase in the cost of putting shoes on the growing kids. It means that the cost of a cartload of groceries has to increase to cover the increase to put the products on the shelves. It means the operating costs of straining farmers will make the narrow gap between the expense of raising a crop and the price received at the elevator will be even narrower this year. In short, a sharp increase in the cost of fuel is an increase in the cost of every commodity we need or want and consume....click here for entire article

March 29, 2004 - Do you remember last week? The White House told us that there was no record that the President had visited the Situation Room on the evening of September 12 th 2001. Richard Clarke had written that was when the President had pressed him to produce a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. The White House claimed that the President had no memory of any such conversation. The implication of the White House statements was that Clarke had made the whole thing up. It was the beginning of the Administration's campaign to paint the former Anti-Terrorism Chief as a disgruntled mal-content whose word could not be trusted. The high point of the Republican campaign - or the low point - came Friday when Majority Leader Frist dutifully stepped into the well of the Senate to accuse Clarke of perjury and call for his secret testimony to Congress be declassified so as to prove his perfidy.

Well, that was then and this is now. Things have changed since Friday. Richard Clarke joined Frist in urging the declassification of his testimony and e-mail and memoranda exchanged with policy makers as well. That was hardly the position that one would have expected a fabricator to take. Secretary of Defense retreated smartly saying, Saint Peter like, "I hardly knew the man", and then only from one or two meetings in which Clarke had nothing to say. Then Sunday, in her unsworn, pre-recorded and quite public testimony to "60 minutes" Condi Rice remembered the conversation that never was and tried to spin it away from Clarke's thesis....click here for entire article

March 27, 2004 - The United States Senate used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. It was in the United States Senate that the great issues of the day were discussed and resolved. Partisanship gave way to patriotism; confrontation became compromise when issues moved from the hot temper of the House of Representatives to the calm deliberation of the Senate. It is said when the Constitutional Convention was grappling with the construction of the Legislative Branch one delegate asked why we needed a Senate. Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied, “For the same reason a coffee cup requires a saucer – to cool the brew.”

Majority Leader William Frist broke the saucer this week when he stood in the well of the Senate to accuse Richard Clarke of perjury before the Congress. He said this:

“Second, in the August of 2002 interview I just referred to [a background briefing Mr. Clarke gave to reporters], Mr. Clarke gave a thorough account of the Bush administration's active policy against Al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke now explains away that media performance by suggesting that he was simply telling lies in an interview as a loyal administration official.

“A loyal administration official? Does Mr. Clarke understand the gravity of the issues being reviewed by the 9/11 commission and the gravity of the charges he has made? If, in the summer of 2001, he saw the threat from Al Qaeda as grave as he now says it was, and if he found the response of the administration as inadequate as he now says it was, why did he wait until the Sunday, March 21, 2004, to make his concerns known?

“There is not a single public record of Mr. Clarke making any objection whatsoever in the period leading up to or following the 9/11 attacks. No threat to resign. No public protest. No plea to the president, the Congress, or the public, to heed the advice he now says was ignored. If Mr. Clarke held his tongue because he was loyal, then shame on him for putting politics above principle. But if he has manufactured these charges for profit and political gain, he is a shame to this government.”....click here for entire article

Is that the White House line?

Excuse me – wasn’t Clarke the same anti-terrorist specialist that was hired by Ronnie Reagan, worked for George H. W. Bush, was retained by Bill Clinton and held over at the specific request of Condi Rice? It seems to me that the Bush Administration is hoisting itself on its own petard. It was, after all, Richard Clarke who was left in charge of the immediate US response to the attacks. If Clarke was not trustworthy and not very competent is it not an indictment of the Bush Administration that it chose him to coordinate things while every one else was running for undisclosed secure locations.

Yes, from the President’s point of view Richard Clarke was “unreliable”. He was unreliable because he did not sign on to the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz line that the real source of danger was from the direction of Baghdad and not Al Qaeda. From their point of view Richard Clarke’s problem was that he had spent 30 years thinking outside the box of national rivalries and definitive borders into which of the Administration was locked. His problem was that he had spent too long dealing with threats from transnational organizations that respect no borders, adhere to no nationality and operate outside of the constraints of international usage....click here for entire article

March 25, 2004 - If you are 50 years old or younger don’t count on Medicare to cover your health care needs when you reach 65. The Bush “reform” privatizing the coverage will break the system by 2019 – the year you reach retirement age. According to the Medicare Trustees’ Report it is the cost of the just passed Bush Medicare bill, opening the trust fund to the HMOs and drug manufacturers, combined with reductions in revenue that will push the system over the edge seven years earlier than previously predicted.

The Bush Administration, the drug company spokesmen, and ARRP, that backed the prescription drug benefit bill despite widespread membership dissention, have all weighed in to dispute the Trustee’s finding. HHS Secretary Thompson suggested that cost savings built into the bill will improve the picture. At the White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that it wasn’t the Bush Medicare Bill that caused the problem but soaring medical costs. Of course nobody is talking about what those soaring medical costs consist of. Is it drug costs? Is it hospital administrator’s salaries? Is it the incomes of Doctors and Nurses that are soaring? Just what is it that is soaring out of control?....click here for entire article

March 24, 2004 - Responding to a question about Richard Clarke’s book the President said, "The facts are these, George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threat to the United States of America, and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted,"

Well. Mr. President, perhaps no one told you that at 9:00 AM on September 11, 2001 terrorists would fly an airplane into the World Trade Center but you surely knew that the Continental United States was a Al Qaeda target. You were, after all, devoting your attention to constructing your new administration when the lame duck Clinton Administration picked up the Al Qaeda bomber headed for LAX foiling the Millennium plot. About the same time an alert immigration agent in Miami turned away the man some suspect was the missing twentieth hijacker. I guess nobody told you.

We know that nobody told you about the arrest of the Al Qaeda operative in Minneapolis or the FBI agent’s concerns about the number of Middle-Eastern young men taking flight lessons or the two known Al Qaeda agents living in California. Nobody told you that there had been a foiled attempt by terrorists to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower and nobody told you that the CIA had uncovered a plot to fly a bomb into Langley. Nobody told you that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing told his guards that if he had enough explosives the Twin Towers would not be standing. Nobody told you so nobody acted....click here for entire article

March 23, 2004 - There is one thing that is going unnoticed about “Against All Enemies”, the Richard Clarke book that pulls the cover off the Bush “War on Terrorism”. Anything that a former White House official published must first be vetted by the White House to insure that it does not reveal national security secrets. Clarke finished his manuscript last fall and sent it to the White House as the law required. Nothing contained in the book came as a surprise to the Administration. They had it in advance – well in advance. They knew what it contained. Only a naïve would believe that they did not note its factual assertions and plan the response that would be made when the book was finally published.

The Bush political operatives had lots of time to marshal evidence to refute the facts that Mr. Clarke asserted. But the response has not been to dispute the facts. It has been to launch a coordinated attack on the author’s credibility. The incongruous assertion by the Vice-President on the Rush Limbaugh show that Clarke was “not in the loop” is a case in point. That suggestion that Clarke was not in a position to know the facts runs smack up against the undisputed fact that while the White House was being evacuated and Dick Cheney was proceeding to an undisclosed, secure location; it was Richard Clarke that Condi Rice designated as crisis manager in charge of the US reaction. While others fled Clarke stood fast and directed the immediate response to developments as they occurred. He was surely in the loop then...click here for entire article

March 23, 2004 - Richard Clarke was not in the loop. We have that on good authority. Richard Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that yesterday. There is no faster way to spread the word to the faithful than to get on the phone and whisper the answer in Rush’s ear - the one with the implanted connection to the microphone; the one that implants the party line into those millions for whom “dittoes” replace rational thought and critical analysis. For the rest of us it is a tough pill to swallow.

Strange that the Bush Administration, believing in the proposition that the White House was the next target on September 11th, evacuated and while Dugout Dick proceeded to his undisclosed secure location and Chicken George kept reading to the class, left Richard Clarke behind in the Situation Room directing the US response to the attacks. What an awesome responsibility to drop on a disgruntled employee who, according to the Administration’s talking heads, resented being demoted from cabinet rank and was “not in the loop”....click here for entire article

March 18, 2004 - We weren’t supposed to see it. It was highly classified. Only the CIA and Pentagon had copies. Then suddenly it appeared on the nation’s television screens, broadcast by NBC, CNN coupled with a well orchestrated chorus of “Clinton’s missed chance to get Bin Laden.” Today the CIA is investigating how this top secret resource was leaked to the media.

The tape was allegedly taken by a CIA unmanned and unarmed surveillance aircraft flying over the Al Qaeda base at Tarnak Farm in Afghanistan sometime in the fall of 2000. It shows a tall white robed figure surrounded by shorter men and the speculation is that it is Osama Bin Laden. Just when it was taken was not leaked along with the top secret tape.

The interesting question is not who leaked the tape. I’m sure that the CIA will be as able to answer that question as easily as it has been able to discover who it was that told Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. The interesting question is, why was it leaked and why was it leaked now?....click here for entire article

March 15, 2004 - The Bush Administrations “War on Terror” is based upon the false premise that terrorist organizations without national roots or loyalties can be stopped by using conventional military force to invade and occupy countries in a series of wars. History teaches us a different lesson. Our client state, Israel, has proven that the application of military force has done little to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks in its markets, restaurants, nightclubs and streets. Our British cousins learned that the century long military occupation of a region of its own country could not eliminate the threat of terrorist attacks perpetrated by the IRA. Terrorism reigned as an instrument of political control across a large segment of our own nation for more than a century and still has its cells ready to erupt in violence. If we have forgotten the worst single terrorist attack that America had suffered before September 11, 2001 came at the hands of home-grown terrorists, the trial getting underway in Oklahoma will remind us.

The unfinished conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq has done little to diminish the threat of terrorist attacks. Blood has flowed in Istanbul and Bali and Casablanca and now in Madrid despite the divisions arrayed in Iraq and Afghanistan. So long as there is a significant disaffected and sympathetic population into which the terrorist can blend and out of which he can emerge to strike military force will not eliminate his depredations. In 20th Century the Germans learned that lesson in France; we learned it in Vietnam; and the Russians learned in Afghanistan. Apparently we must be taught it anew in Iraq for the 21st Century....click here for entire article

March 14, 2004 - Does it matter who detonated the 10 bombs aboard the commuter trains in Madrid? Is it really important whether the criminals who carried out the March 11th attack are Moslem or Basque? No matter who dialed the cell phones, who built the bombs, or who carried the rucksacks aboard the trains packed with passengers, the effect is the same. Millions in Europe and America board similar trains each workday morning. The economy of our Western cities depends on them; depends on them rising early; getting to the station; emerging in the city’s center; depends on them taking their places at the keyboards and monitors, in the shops and stores; in the offices and cubicles that direct our Western economies.

Whether it was ETA or Al Qaeda that attacked the Spanish economic engine by killing some of the column of worker ants that make it operate the effect is the same. Whether they board the London Underground, the Paris Metro, or the New York Subway commuters will look askance at the passenger carrying a backpack. That swarthy man standing in the station dialing a cell phone, who was he, was he calling a friend, a business associate; was he making a deal or was he triggering a bomb? The act of simply going to work has become an act of heroism. Sitting at a desk in the financial centers of our global economy is an expression of courage equal to that required to take an evening meal at a stylish restaurant in Tel Aviv or Haifa...click here for entire article

March 13, 2004 - Now let’s get this straight. A former journalist and press aid who had started spying for Iraq who also happens to be White House Chief of Staff Andy Card’s cousin, leaves a letter at Andy’s house on January 8th, 2003 telling him that she is in contact with Iraqi Intelligence and offers to serve as a conduit to Baghdad to help avert war with Iraq. Have I got that right so far?

So Andy reads his cousin’s letter and contacts the FBI. Armed with the letter to the President’s Chief of Staff from the former journalist and former press aid to several Democratic Congress people the FBI lays on a sting operation six months later to catch this fearsome spy.

So the FBI poses as – what else – agents of Libyan Intelligence. They correspond with her through the summer and fall of 2003 and get her to deposit documents in the FBI’s dead drop in Tacoma Heights, her home town. We don’t know what the documents were. I guess it doesn’t matter. She had no access to classified information and she is not charged with espionage.

What is she charged with? Well, the indictment says she is charged along with the two young sons of the Iraqis New York Liaison to the UN Inspection Team with a conspiracy to become an unregistered Iraqi agent and accepting reimbursement of her expenses to travel to Baghdad – money which she brought home in violation of US Currency restrictions..click here for entire article

March 12, 2004 - ``We remain focused in this administration on those individuals that are going through the painful period of their life without a job to make sure we have programs to assist them,''

Bill Clinton did not say that. George Bush’s Secretary of Commerce did. He said it yesterday when he was dispatched to CNBC to fend off the political flak arising from the withdrawal of the President’s nomination of the CEO of Behlen Manufacturing Co. for the newly created office of assistant secretary for manufacturing.

Anthony Raimondo was supposed to be the spearhead of a Bush Administration drive to rebuild American manufacturing that has hemorrhaged jobs since Bush took office. One sixth of the people employed in the nation’s manufacturing base have lost their jobs since the summer of 2000. 3 Million Americans have seen factories close and be rebuilt overseas. Raimondo’s nomination ran into trouble when it was revealed that Behlen was simultaneously laying off workers at its Nebraska manufacturing plant and building a plant in China. It stood the old saw on its head, “If you are part of the problem you aren’t part of the solution.” Raimondo’s justification for shipping jobs to the one remaining Communist Superpower is that he is just trying to break into the Chinese market, building steel buildings and farm equipment with Chinese steel and Chinese labor. Perhaps he will sell them at Wal-Mart. Last month it was President Bush’s economist, N. Gregory Mankiw who was telling us that shipping jobs overseas was a good thing that would have long term benefits for the economy. I guess he had been shopping at Wal-Mart...click here for entire article

March 11, 2004 - The early resolution of the Democratic Nomination gives John Kerry the opportunity to arrive at the Democratic Convention with his Vice-Presidential selection fully vetted and working on the campaign. The chances are very good that it will be John Edwards. He would bring the regional balance that the ticket needs and, if anything, has slightly better liberal credentials than the apparent nominee.

It also gives him the opportunity to introduce into American Presidential political practice a concept long part of the British political scene – a shadow government. The incumbent has always enjoyed the advantage of having a ready made team of surrogates in his Cabinet, issue specific spokesmen to deflect attacks and permit the candidate for reelection to concentrate on feel-good appeals couched in generalities. By making his cabinet selections early and announcing them at the Convention he would return an importance and sense of suspense to that quadrennial rite that it lost in the move to an all primary nominating process.

It would also reflect the reality that indeed we are not electing an individual to govern us in November, we are putting our future in the hands of an individual who will select the team who will do the business of governing in the period between the election and inauguration day. It is the selection of the cabinet that tells us how a new President’s administration will function and only after the election is over. Announcing a putative cabinet at the nominating convention would provide the electorate an opportunity to judge the process before the election takes place. It could also function as a unifying force for the opposition party...click here for entire article

March 7, 2004 - For the second time the Republican National Committee has embarked on a campaign to stifle voices opposed to Bush Administration policies by threatening the licenses of television broadcasters that air ads opposed to the President. The threat was contained in a letter signed by Jill Holtzman Vogel, RNC Chief Lawyer and addressed to 250 Television Stations across the nation. The letter claims that ads placed by Moveon.Org are illegally financed and demands that the stations decline to run them. Echoing the earlier attempt to intimidate broadcasters Ms. Vogel writes:

The threat to the broadcaster's license is implicit. Air the Moveon.org ads and the Bush Administration will move on your broadcasting license. Not since Richard Nixon's Enemies list and the use of the FBI and IRS to intimidate journalists has an administration been so blatant in its attempts to silence American voices. Stifling voices seems to be part of President Bush's vision of America . For the past year the Department of Commerce has been threatening prosecution against publishers who edit or even quote from anything written in any country subject to US economic sanctions...click here for entire article

March 5, 2004 - The truth has a way of surfacing in inconvenient ways and at the most inopportune times. This time the door was opened by a too clever by half ploy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his account of the alleged Nigerean Yellowcake. The leak to Robert Novak of the Ambassador’s wife’s role as a covert CIA agent has opened the door to a room in the labyrinthine maze of the Bush Administration’s planning of the Second Iraqi War. It is a room that all the President’s men and women would just as soon never be opened. Yet the investigation of the leak has opened it and left the door ajar.

You may recall that in a September 9, 2002 interview Andrew Card was asked why the Administration waited until the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks to start beating the war drums, the President’s Chief of Staff replied that “you don’t introduce new products in August.” No, you don’t get people’s attention at the end of summer. But Andy Card started planning the campaign to sell the Iraqi war to the American people in August so the product was ready to be introduced with the anniversary

As the investigation headed by incorruptible US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald reached into the Whitehouse to subpoena records it called for the production of all the records of a little known Bush Administration task force called the “White House Iraq Group.” Organized in the summer of 2002 WHIG was charged with the task of educating the public as to what the Administration called the “danger posed by Iraq.” According to a Washington Post article published August 10, 2003 WHIG was made up of Karl Rove, the President’s political guru; Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James Wilkinson, the White House PR team; Nicholas Calio, White House liaison with the Congress; and sometimes included Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley as well as Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I Lewis Libby...click here for entire article

March 2, 2004 - On the 17th of February Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that “"We will accept no outcome that in any way illegally attempts to remove the elected president of Haiti…We cannot buy into the proposition that the elected president must be forced out of office by thugs and those who do not respect the law,"

That remark came the same day that Louis-Jodel Chamblain led well armed commando unit in an attack on the police station in the Haitian town of Hinote. Three policemen were killed in the assault. Champlain’s troops were outfitted in camouflage battle dress complete with Kevlar helmets and vests. They were well armed with surplus US military assault rifles.

Chamblain had been a Sergeant in the Haitian Army during the period following the military coup that sent Aristide into exile in 1991. That coup was tacitly supported by the first Bush Administration. Chamblain had been a leader of the FRAPH death squads that are credited with killing up to 3,000 Aristide loyalists before the US intervention restored Aristide to office in 1994. FRAPH is widely reported to have been financed and trained by the CIA. With the 1994 restoration of democratic government Chamblain and other elements of FRAPH fled across the border to the Dominican Republic...click here for entire article

More than 100 US Marines have arrived in Haiti to join the detachment of 50 that were sent last week. A hundred or so French troops joined them today. According to media reports a naval task force led by the assault carrier Saipan is headed for the Haitian coast.

Within hours of Aristide’s departure RTF, the French radio and television service, was carrying reports of an interview with a man who described himself as the caretaker of the Presidential Palace in Port-Au-Prince. The man claimed that the Haitian President was abducted, along with his wife and the head of his security service by a detachment of US Marines who arrived by helicopter. That claim has been repeated by sources in Washington and attributed to Aristide himself. It is claimed that he has not resigned but was forcibly removed from Haiti by the United States. In a brief statement after arrival in the French speaking Central African Republic Aristide called his ouster “a blow to the forces of peace” but promised that what he called the forces of peace would rise
again as they did in 1994...click here for entire article