U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS ASSAILS BUSH ADMINISTRATION RECORD:
"In an assessment of the civil rights record of the Bush administration, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a draft report that concludes the administration has failed to exhibit leadership or define a clear focus, relegating civil rights to a low priority. "
The report, Redefining Rights in America-The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration, 2001-2004, analyzes scores of policy reports, scholarly papers, briefs and executive orders to chart the administration's responses to a broad spectrum of civil rights issues. Similar criteria have guided evaluations of previous administrations, including the civil rights review on former President Clinton released in 2000.
Some highlights of the report include:
Voting Rights: The Bush administration did not provide leadership to ensure timely passage and swift implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. As a result, Congress did not appropriate funds for election reform until almost two years into the administration.
Equal Educational Opportunity: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) does not sufficiently address unequal education, a major barrier to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students.
Affirmative Action: Instead of promoting affirmative action in federal contracting and education, the administration promotes "race neutral alternatives," in many instances not applicable and in others not overly effective at maintaining diversity.
Environmental Justice: EPA has taken few actions to ensure disparate impact of minority communities to environmental contamination.
Racial Profiling: The administration responded to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by instituting regulations that facilitate profiling rather than prevent it. Immigrants and visitors from Arab and Middle Eastern countries were subjected to increased scrutiny, including interviews, registration, and in some cases removal.
http://www.usccr.gov/press/2004/100504b.htm
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
The NYTimes > Middle East > Bomb Blasts and Suicide Attack Kill 6 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Bomb Blasts and Suicide Attack Kill 6 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq:
"Two soldiers died in the northern city of Mosul today, after a suicide driver rammed his explosives-filled vehicle into an American convoy at 2:20 p.m. One soldier was seriously wounded and two others returned to duty, the military said.
Four soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, one in the western part of the capital at about 4:40 this morning, the military said. Three others were killed late Tuesday night in eastern Baghdad, when a roadside bomb exploded in their convoy.
At least 1,075 American soldiers have died since March 2003, when the war began."
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Urban War Begins: 'It Was Real Scary'
A block away, an Iraqi family grieved, smaller than it was the day before. Omar, a 15-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched in the blood of his father, shot dead by American marines for running a roadblock here.
It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about, and just that night marines had a found a large cache of weapons stowed on a truck. As a result, the marines manning the checkpoint were under strict orders to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding.
Omar's family, 10 in all, were driving together to get out of Baghdad. They said they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that Omar's family did not understand.
Baghdad Blasts at Arms Dump Kill at Least 6
In the statement, the Central Command said, "An unknown number of individuals attacked U.S. Third Infantry Division soldiers who were guarding a cache of captured Iraqi ammunition near Baghdad this morning."
"During the attack, the assailant fired an unknown incendiary device into the cache, causing it to catch fire and explode," the statement said. "The explosion caused the destruction of the cache as well as a nearby building."
The American military is trained to obliterate its enemy with overwhelming firepower. But it is not a police force, trained to track down dangerous groups or individuals in heavily populated areas. And so, in the eyes of many Iraqis here, the American soldiers often seem impotent, unable to provide security for them or their families.
For at least a decade, the Army has worked to make itself more lethal, even though — or, perhaps, because — it has repeatedly been used in peacekeeping operations, defense analysts say. Even within the military, that strategy has caused some controversy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/middleeast/13CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"Two soldiers died in the northern city of Mosul today, after a suicide driver rammed his explosives-filled vehicle into an American convoy at 2:20 p.m. One soldier was seriously wounded and two others returned to duty, the military said.
Four soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, one in the western part of the capital at about 4:40 this morning, the military said. Three others were killed late Tuesday night in eastern Baghdad, when a roadside bomb exploded in their convoy.
At least 1,075 American soldiers have died since March 2003, when the war began."
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Urban War Begins: 'It Was Real Scary'
A block away, an Iraqi family grieved, smaller than it was the day before. Omar, a 15-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched in the blood of his father, shot dead by American marines for running a roadblock here.
It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about, and just that night marines had a found a large cache of weapons stowed on a truck. As a result, the marines manning the checkpoint were under strict orders to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding.
Omar's family, 10 in all, were driving together to get out of Baghdad. They said they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that Omar's family did not understand.
Baghdad Blasts at Arms Dump Kill at Least 6
In the statement, the Central Command said, "An unknown number of individuals attacked U.S. Third Infantry Division soldiers who were guarding a cache of captured Iraqi ammunition near Baghdad this morning."
"During the attack, the assailant fired an unknown incendiary device into the cache, causing it to catch fire and explode," the statement said. "The explosion caused the destruction of the cache as well as a nearby building."
The American military is trained to obliterate its enemy with overwhelming firepower. But it is not a police force, trained to track down dangerous groups or individuals in heavily populated areas. And so, in the eyes of many Iraqis here, the American soldiers often seem impotent, unable to provide security for them or their families.
For at least a decade, the Army has worked to make itself more lethal, even though — or, perhaps, because — it has repeatedly been used in peacekeeping operations, defense analysts say. Even within the military, that strategy has caused some controversy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/middleeast/13CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
George Bush “Girlie Man?”
George Bush “Girlie Man?”
His father was captain of the Andover baseball team. He was head cheerleader. In college he impressed his fraternity as a pledge, because, he alone, knew everyone's name. When he made his first failed run for office, he told his fellows at the republican new candidates camp that fundraising was easy, all you had to do was use your mother's christmas card gift.
A quarterback has to deal with the game as it's played, has to adjust to changes, correct mistakes. A cheerleader never admits a mistake, never has to.
Someone who actually plays he game, has to own up to the consequences of their actions. Cheerleaders just keep on cheering.
Cheerleaders think the game can't go on without them. Players know the difference between slogans and plays on the field. They know you can admit mistakes and still lead. They know you can adjust the play and win.
If “weapons of mass destruction” was the slogan, securing weapons caches and depots, was the play.
So why are equipment and materials tthat could be used to make nuclear weapons disappearing from Iraq? Entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment have been dismantled. Equipment that could help a rogue state or terrorist group make nuclear bombs. Equipment that had already been inventoried and sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Materials removed from these buildings, and from unguarded open storage areas, has turned up as far afield as the black market in the Netherlands.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The New York Times > Opinion > PAUL KRUGMAN: Checking the Facts, in Advance
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Checking the Facts, in Advance:
"Eight lies or distortions you'll hear in tomorrow's debate, and the truth about each."
Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. He talks of 1.6 million lost jobs; that's the private-sector loss, partly offset by increased government employment. But the job record is indeed awful. He talks of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq war; actual spending is only $120 billion so far. But nobody doubts that the war will cost at least another $80 billion. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.
Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry's choice of words are betraying their readers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/opinion/12krugman.html
"Eight lies or distortions you'll hear in tomorrow's debate, and the truth about each."
Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. He talks of 1.6 million lost jobs; that's the private-sector loss, partly offset by increased government employment. But the job record is indeed awful. He talks of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq war; actual spending is only $120 billion so far. But nobody doubts that the war will cost at least another $80 billion. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.
Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry's choice of words are betraying their readers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/opinion/12krugman.html
Why Do They Hate Us?
Why Do They Hate Us?:
"Israel's military said it was conducting two separate investigations into the shooting death last week of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was riddled with bullets as she walked near a military post near the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Palestinians and human rights groups have often accused the military of firing recklessly during the last four years of fighting. The military says that civilian casualties are unintentional and that investigations are held when there is evidence that soldiers acted improperly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/international/middleeast/12hamdi.html
The United States had held Mr. Yaser E. Hamdi, 24, in solitary confinement as an "enemy combatant" for much of the past three years. One condition of his release required Mr. Hamdi, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to renounce his American citizenship within a week of his arrival here.
Mr. Hamdi did not wait a week; the Saudi Interior Ministry said he had proclaimed he was no longer American as soon as he stepped off the plane about noon. Mr. Hamdi also spoke to Frank Dunham, his lawyer in Washington, after he landed, and Mr. Dunham said his client declared the moment to be "awesome."
Mr. Hamdi's release had been held up for 10 days because of an impasse between the Saudi and American governments. Saudi officials, irritated that they had not been included in negotiations over his release, insisted that he be freed without condition because he had not been charged with any crime.
In the end, State Department officials said, the Saudis accepted Mr. Hamdi's return without imposing new conditions. One senior State Department official added, "It was really just a situation of making the Saudis feel comfortable with the terms of the deal, making them understand the arrangements and know what we were requiring of him."
Shortly after arriving in Riyadh on a military contract aircraft, Mr. Hamdi took a commercial flight home to Al Jubayl, on the eastern coast. There he was being questioned by the Saudi police, said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
"It is just to get a picture of his activities in Afghanistan and to understand any violations or criminal activities, if any," General Turki said. "To us he is innocent, and we still think he is, but we are just doing our work based on our laws."
The United States had portrayed Mr. Hamdi as a dangerous man with possible links to Al Qaeda. Interviews with his lawyer and others on Monday provided a clearer picture of Mr. Hamdi's side of the story, as he recounted it.
In early 2001, he left King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia and entered Afghanistan through Pakistan. He attended a camp run by the Taliban in Kunduz Province. There, young men trained in religious activities, calisthenics and small-arms proficiency. A friend who has been in contact with Mr. Hamdi said his aim was simply to reconnect with Islam.
"His agenda was to take a sabbatical from school and try to get his head straight to live in a strict Islamic environment with other young men like himself," the friend said. "He wanted to strengthen his resolve, and he thought he would get the necessary training so that if the need ever arose for him to defend himself and his family, he would have the know-how to do so."
The United States has said Mr. Hamdi was captured with Taliban soldiers and a weapon in his hands. But Mr. Hamdi insisted to family and friends that he had no connections to Al Qaeda or terrorism.
His father, Esam, said Mr. Hamdi had called in the summer of 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had said he was ready to come home.
His friend said, "He didn't want any part of any war with the United States. He wanted to go home, but he was trapped in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the Afghan borders were closed down, and he couldn't go anywhere."
As he tried to leave the country, Mr. Hamdi said, he was captured by the Northern Alliance and taken into custody along with John Walker Lindh, the other so-called American Taliban. Mr. Hamdi said he later learned that the Northern Alliance had apparently "sold" him to American officials for $20,000.
After his capture, the United States filed no legal charges against him. He was held first at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and then in Navy brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., for nearly three years.
Scouring Iraq for Enemies, Finding Farmers and Mud
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/international/middleeast/10fighters.html?pagewanted=all&position
House-to-house raids in this dangerous swath of territory about 30 miles south of Baghdad are turning up few men of fighting age, leading American commanders to believe that insurgents are melting away ahead of troops who are trying to bring the area under Iraqi control.
At the same time, intelligence here has been sketchy, leading to nighttime raids on what appear to be no more than frightened farm families. And the rural terrain - irrigation-soaked roads that are either too narrow for armored vehicles or too weak to support their weight - partly negate the Americans' vast technological advantage.
In at least one case, the problem with the Iraqi back roads led to a disastrous eight-hour ordeal in which new armored vehicles called Strykers became mired in an irrigated field as they were chasing an insurgent who had just fired mortar shells at them. The attacker escaped. Overnight Friday, they searched two towns just east of the Euphrates River and found that they had been deserted, virtual ghost towns.
The enduring optimism of many American troops was summed up by Capt. Rob Krauer of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, who emphasized the need to train Iraqis to do the house-to-house operations in the long run. "We can win a war this way," he said.
But the day-to-day frustrations were enunciated by Specialist Anthony Ellis, sweating in the belly of a Stryker as it slipped off the side of a tiny lane and lurched to a stop, its four right tires subsiding into an irrigation ditch. "Our man slips through the cracks again," he said, disappointment in his voice.
The raids are part of an operation involving about 2,500 marines and G.I.'s and a much smaller number of Iraqi soldiers, who are trying to take back what have become "no go" areas - places where the Iraqi government and the American-led forces exercise little control - before national elections in January.
The elusiveness of the insurgents became clear early Wednesday, when a raid netted hundreds of mortar and artillery rounds and rocket-propelled grenades but no people. Soldiers later searched other buildings in the desert area and found a number of women and children. Under questioning, the women said their husbands had all died.
Several officers said drone reconnaissance aircraft had spotted as many as six men in the area just minutes before troops arrived. Colonel James, who said similar episodes had been replayed over and over, said the quick response by the presumed insurgents indicated that they had developed effective surveillance to monitor the Americans.
Just after nightfall Wednesday, another raid raised questions about the effectiveness of American intelligence here. Acting on a tip that a group of farm houses was the site of mortar launchings directed at a nearby power plant, a swarm of marines, soldiers and armored vehicles stormed into the area.
An explosive charge was used to blow open the door of one building when no one answered a knock. The building turned out to be deserted. But in an adjacent structure, the soldiers found a frightened family of eight huddled in one room.
The head of the family, a middle-aged man who said his name was Abd Jassin Hamid, stood in front of the others, who squatted in a corner. But when asked by a reporter in broken Arabic whether there were mujahedeen in the area, Mr. Hamid's son, Adnan, stepped forward and said in English, "No, no, no, no, no."
As the armed American soldiers stood about waiting for an interpreter, Adnan and his father made digging motions, indicating in pantomime that they were only farmers.
In another building a woman and six children squatted outside the front door, watching in apparent shock as the Americans, wearing night-vision goggles, trooped into their house. There was one man inside. He identified himself as Mr. Jassin and nervously showed the Americans around his house. They found one automatic rifle and a magazine of ammunition, which are allowed for personal protection.
Still, Mr. Jassin plaintively offered to explain why he had the weapon. "Ali Baba fil Iraq!" he said, meaning that there were thieves in Iraq, hardly a controvertible assertion, and that he needed the gun for protection.
The Americans indicated that they had found no reason to suspect the farmers of insurgent activity, yet they returned in force the next day to check out some of the other buildings in the complex. The family filed out of yet another house as two well-kept calves grazed in a shady pen.
Again nothing was found, and because no interpreter was available, one of the soldiers, who had a shotgun dangling from a belt outfitted with shotgun shells along with his other weaponry, struggled to find a way to say they were leaving. "All I know is 'shukran,' " he said, turning to his buddies and using the Arabic word for thank you.
It was suggested that he could say, "Ma'a salama," the traditional words for goodbye.
"I can't learn all that stuff," the soldier said, walking away and using a strong expletive.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/international/middleeast/12mideast.html
"Israel's military said it was conducting two separate investigations into the shooting death last week of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was riddled with bullets as she walked near a military post near the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
At least two unidentified soldiers have spoken to the Israeli news media, saying one of their fellow soldiers told them to hold their fire because the Palestinian had been identified as a young girl and did not appear to be an imminent threat.
But the soldiers said that the girl, Iman al-Hams, had been fatally shot and that their platoon commander then approached her body and shot her repeatedly to make sure she was dead, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported."
Palestinians and human rights groups have often accused the military of firing recklessly during the last four years of fighting. The military says that civilian casualties are unintentional and that investigations are held when there is evidence that soldiers acted improperly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/international/middleeast/12hamdi.html
The United States had held Mr. Yaser E. Hamdi, 24, in solitary confinement as an "enemy combatant" for much of the past three years. One condition of his release required Mr. Hamdi, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to renounce his American citizenship within a week of his arrival here.
Mr. Hamdi did not wait a week; the Saudi Interior Ministry said he had proclaimed he was no longer American as soon as he stepped off the plane about noon. Mr. Hamdi also spoke to Frank Dunham, his lawyer in Washington, after he landed, and Mr. Dunham said his client declared the moment to be "awesome."
Mr. Hamdi's release had been held up for 10 days because of an impasse between the Saudi and American governments. Saudi officials, irritated that they had not been included in negotiations over his release, insisted that he be freed without condition because he had not been charged with any crime.
In the end, State Department officials said, the Saudis accepted Mr. Hamdi's return without imposing new conditions. One senior State Department official added, "It was really just a situation of making the Saudis feel comfortable with the terms of the deal, making them understand the arrangements and know what we were requiring of him."
Shortly after arriving in Riyadh on a military contract aircraft, Mr. Hamdi took a commercial flight home to Al Jubayl, on the eastern coast. There he was being questioned by the Saudi police, said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
"It is just to get a picture of his activities in Afghanistan and to understand any violations or criminal activities, if any," General Turki said. "To us he is innocent, and we still think he is, but we are just doing our work based on our laws."
The United States had portrayed Mr. Hamdi as a dangerous man with possible links to Al Qaeda. Interviews with his lawyer and others on Monday provided a clearer picture of Mr. Hamdi's side of the story, as he recounted it.
In early 2001, he left King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia and entered Afghanistan through Pakistan. He attended a camp run by the Taliban in Kunduz Province. There, young men trained in religious activities, calisthenics and small-arms proficiency. A friend who has been in contact with Mr. Hamdi said his aim was simply to reconnect with Islam.
"His agenda was to take a sabbatical from school and try to get his head straight to live in a strict Islamic environment with other young men like himself," the friend said. "He wanted to strengthen his resolve, and he thought he would get the necessary training so that if the need ever arose for him to defend himself and his family, he would have the know-how to do so."
The United States has said Mr. Hamdi was captured with Taliban soldiers and a weapon in his hands. But Mr. Hamdi insisted to family and friends that he had no connections to Al Qaeda or terrorism.
His father, Esam, said Mr. Hamdi had called in the summer of 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had said he was ready to come home.
His friend said, "He didn't want any part of any war with the United States. He wanted to go home, but he was trapped in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the Afghan borders were closed down, and he couldn't go anywhere."
As he tried to leave the country, Mr. Hamdi said, he was captured by the Northern Alliance and taken into custody along with John Walker Lindh, the other so-called American Taliban. Mr. Hamdi said he later learned that the Northern Alliance had apparently "sold" him to American officials for $20,000.
After his capture, the United States filed no legal charges against him. He was held first at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and then in Navy brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., for nearly three years.
Scouring Iraq for Enemies, Finding Farmers and Mud
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/international/middleeast/10fighters.html?pagewanted=all&position
House-to-house raids in this dangerous swath of territory about 30 miles south of Baghdad are turning up few men of fighting age, leading American commanders to believe that insurgents are melting away ahead of troops who are trying to bring the area under Iraqi control.
At the same time, intelligence here has been sketchy, leading to nighttime raids on what appear to be no more than frightened farm families. And the rural terrain - irrigation-soaked roads that are either too narrow for armored vehicles or too weak to support their weight - partly negate the Americans' vast technological advantage.
In at least one case, the problem with the Iraqi back roads led to a disastrous eight-hour ordeal in which new armored vehicles called Strykers became mired in an irrigated field as they were chasing an insurgent who had just fired mortar shells at them. The attacker escaped. Overnight Friday, they searched two towns just east of the Euphrates River and found that they had been deserted, virtual ghost towns.
The enduring optimism of many American troops was summed up by Capt. Rob Krauer of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, who emphasized the need to train Iraqis to do the house-to-house operations in the long run. "We can win a war this way," he said.
But the day-to-day frustrations were enunciated by Specialist Anthony Ellis, sweating in the belly of a Stryker as it slipped off the side of a tiny lane and lurched to a stop, its four right tires subsiding into an irrigation ditch. "Our man slips through the cracks again," he said, disappointment in his voice.
The raids are part of an operation involving about 2,500 marines and G.I.'s and a much smaller number of Iraqi soldiers, who are trying to take back what have become "no go" areas - places where the Iraqi government and the American-led forces exercise little control - before national elections in January.
The elusiveness of the insurgents became clear early Wednesday, when a raid netted hundreds of mortar and artillery rounds and rocket-propelled grenades but no people. Soldiers later searched other buildings in the desert area and found a number of women and children. Under questioning, the women said their husbands had all died.
Several officers said drone reconnaissance aircraft had spotted as many as six men in the area just minutes before troops arrived. Colonel James, who said similar episodes had been replayed over and over, said the quick response by the presumed insurgents indicated that they had developed effective surveillance to monitor the Americans.
Just after nightfall Wednesday, another raid raised questions about the effectiveness of American intelligence here. Acting on a tip that a group of farm houses was the site of mortar launchings directed at a nearby power plant, a swarm of marines, soldiers and armored vehicles stormed into the area.
An explosive charge was used to blow open the door of one building when no one answered a knock. The building turned out to be deserted. But in an adjacent structure, the soldiers found a frightened family of eight huddled in one room.
The head of the family, a middle-aged man who said his name was Abd Jassin Hamid, stood in front of the others, who squatted in a corner. But when asked by a reporter in broken Arabic whether there were mujahedeen in the area, Mr. Hamid's son, Adnan, stepped forward and said in English, "No, no, no, no, no."
As the armed American soldiers stood about waiting for an interpreter, Adnan and his father made digging motions, indicating in pantomime that they were only farmers.
In another building a woman and six children squatted outside the front door, watching in apparent shock as the Americans, wearing night-vision goggles, trooped into their house. There was one man inside. He identified himself as Mr. Jassin and nervously showed the Americans around his house. They found one automatic rifle and a magazine of ammunition, which are allowed for personal protection.
Still, Mr. Jassin plaintively offered to explain why he had the weapon. "Ali Baba fil Iraq!" he said, meaning that there were thieves in Iraq, hardly a controvertible assertion, and that he needed the gun for protection.
The Americans indicated that they had found no reason to suspect the farmers of insurgent activity, yet they returned in force the next day to check out some of the other buildings in the complex. The family filed out of yet another house as two well-kept calves grazed in a shady pen.
Again nothing was found, and because no interpreter was available, one of the soldiers, who had a shotgun dangling from a belt outfitted with shotgun shells along with his other weaponry, struggled to find a way to say they were leaving. "All I know is 'shukran,' " he said, turning to his buddies and using the Arabic word for thank you.
It was suggested that he could say, "Ma'a salama," the traditional words for goodbye.
"I can't learn all that stuff," the soldier said, walking away and using a strong expletive.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/international/middleeast/12mideast.html
NYTimes > Campaign 2004 > Bush: Challenging Rest of the World With a New Order
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Bush Record: Challenging Rest of the World With a New Order:
"Jorge Castañeda, Mexico's former foreign minister, has two distinct images of George W. Bush: the charmer intent on reinventing Mexican-American ties and the chastiser impatient with Mexico as the promise of a new relationship soured."
The change came with the Sept. 11 attacks. "My sense is that Bush lost and never regained the gift he had shown for making you feel at ease," said Mr. Castañeda, who left office last year. "He became aloof, brusque, and on occasion abrasive."
The brusqueness had a clear message: the United States is at war, it needs everybody's support and that support is not negotiable. Mexico's hesitant stance at the United Nations on the war in Iraq became a source of tension. Yet Mr. Castañeda said, "I was never asked, 'What is it you need in order to be more cooperative with us? What can we do to help?' "
It is a characterization of Mr. Bush's foreign policy style often heard around the world: bullying, unreceptive, brazen. The result, critics of this administration contend, has been a disastrous loss of international support, damage to American credibility, the sullying of America's image and a devastating war that has already taken more than 1,000 American lives. In the first presidential debate, Senator John Kerry argued that only with a change of presidents could the damage be undone.…
The Nov. 2 election will see if Mr. Bush's approach to foreign policy - replete with images of courage and endurance, of moral certitudes and of generational struggle to defeat a new enemy while transforming an entire region - has proved persuasive to most Americans. It has clearly divided America's friends.
Some are enthused. "Relations between Japan and America have never been better than with Bush," said Hatsuhisa Takashima, the foreign ministry spokesman in Tokyo, where spines have been stiffened by the North Korean threat and Mr. Bush's blunt approach to terrorism. "We have more than 500 troops in Iraq because we believe the American-British action prodded Libya to disarm, sent a strong message to North Korea and showed the price of noncompliance with United Nations resolutions. Failure in Iraq is unthinkable."
But as things stand, failure, with its potentially dire consequences for American world leadership, cannot be ruled out. Mr. Bush has proved to be a gambler in foreign affairs. Revolutions can bring big rewards. They can also deliver disaster.
The story of the Bush foreign policy is one of startling change: from the promise of a "humble" approach in 2000 through the "dead or alive" search for the elusive Osama bin Laden to the articulation of a bold, pro-active doctrine summed up last month by Mr. Bush, when he told the United Nations:
"Our security is not merely founded in spheres of influence or some balance of power; the security of our world is found in advancing the rights of mankind."
In other words, less emphasis on containment - the policy of slow-squeeze that defeated communism - and more on the contagion of liberty installed, at least in Iraq, by force of arms. This is stirring stuff that resonates in Eastern Europe, where the wounds of oppression are still felt, as well as with Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister of Iraq, and many of his compatriots. But it is also the stuff of upheaval, and a policy on which the NATO alliance, long a cornerstone of American security, has been unable to agree.
"We have been worried by the absence of debate, the presentation of faits accomplis," said Javier Solana, a former NATO secretary-general and now the European Union's chief foreign affairs official.
In effect, a new spectrum of relations with Washington has emerged. At one end are estranged allies like France and Germany, angered by the war, convinced it is a losing struggle, alarmed by America's use of overwhelming power.
In the muddy middle are nations like Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, important allies whose leaders are sometimes supportive, but where many people believe Mr. Bush has ignited a war against Islam. Their reliability is uncertain.
It has not helped that the Mideast peace process has stalled and that Mr. Bush has appeared less engaged in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute than his recent predecessors.
At the other end are nations, including Poland, Italy, Britain and Japan, that have made the choice to fall in line with Mr. Bush after Sept. 11. Others, including Russia, China and Israel, have embraced the war on terror for reasons of their own.
These divisions get little airing when Mr. Bush campaigns for a second term. The rhetoric at his rallies is of an America unbowed and unrestrained. The day after the first presidential debate Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry would subject decisions on national security to vetoes "by countries like France.'' The U.N. is often derided at Republican events.
This sort of talk may bring partisan crowds to their feet, but it makes the world uneasy.
"If you want to get a cheap cheer from certain quarters in America, it seems that all you have to do is bash the U.N., or the French or the very idea that allies are entitled to have their own opinions," Chris Patten, the commissioner for external relations for the European Union, said last month. "Multilateralists, we are told, want to outsource American foreign and security policy to a bunch of garlic-chewing, cheese-eating wimps."
…the complaint often heard around the world is that from the outset the Bush administration's dismissive attitude set a pattern of take-it-or-leave-it policies that needlessly alienated friends. The Iraq war accelerated that process. Then, the acknowledgment that there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and no proven links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda cemented the view in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere that Mr. Bush governed from ideology first, facts second.
"The United States had to react strongly to Sept. 11, a fact often forgotten in Europe," said Alexandre Adler, a French foreign policy expert generally sympathetic to America. "But Bush has given the image of a warmonger without subtleties and the result is no president since Nixon, and perhaps not even then, has been so unpopular here."
Anti-Americanism has become a winning European platform. In the most recent Spanish and German elections, opposing Mr. Bush's policies proved central to both the upset victory of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the re-election of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, respectively.
But recently, Mr. Bush has been buoyed by the overwhelming re-election of a steadfast ally, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. For the past few days, Mr. Bush has crisscrossed Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado celebrating Afghanistan's first free election.
Still, anti-American hostility in the Islamic world is widespread. Last year, Mr. Powell asked Edward P. Djerejian, an experienced diplomat, to travel the world to examine the failures of American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Mr. Djerejian returned shocked at the picture of America he saw on Arab television and the absence of any effective American rebuttal. "We did not have anywhere near enough people in place with the right language skills or the right sensitivities to respond," he said.
Mr. Djerejian still believes the outcome in Iraq could be positive, but he added that a chronically unstable Iraq would "set back the key goals we said we were trying to achieve on the Arab-Israeli front, on energy security and certainly on democratizing the region."
His investigation came before the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq emerged. "The photographs shattered our reputation as the world's most admired champion of freedom and justice," said Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution. "That is grave, because without the world's trust, America cannot flourish."
So three years after Sept. 11, Mr. Bush leads a United States whose image has been tarnished, while Europeans, Asians and Latin Americans still feel far less threatened by terrorism than Americans do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/politics/campaign/12policy.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"Jorge Castañeda, Mexico's former foreign minister, has two distinct images of George W. Bush: the charmer intent on reinventing Mexican-American ties and the chastiser impatient with Mexico as the promise of a new relationship soured."
The change came with the Sept. 11 attacks. "My sense is that Bush lost and never regained the gift he had shown for making you feel at ease," said Mr. Castañeda, who left office last year. "He became aloof, brusque, and on occasion abrasive."
The brusqueness had a clear message: the United States is at war, it needs everybody's support and that support is not negotiable. Mexico's hesitant stance at the United Nations on the war in Iraq became a source of tension. Yet Mr. Castañeda said, "I was never asked, 'What is it you need in order to be more cooperative with us? What can we do to help?' "
It is a characterization of Mr. Bush's foreign policy style often heard around the world: bullying, unreceptive, brazen. The result, critics of this administration contend, has been a disastrous loss of international support, damage to American credibility, the sullying of America's image and a devastating war that has already taken more than 1,000 American lives. In the first presidential debate, Senator John Kerry argued that only with a change of presidents could the damage be undone.…
The Nov. 2 election will see if Mr. Bush's approach to foreign policy - replete with images of courage and endurance, of moral certitudes and of generational struggle to defeat a new enemy while transforming an entire region - has proved persuasive to most Americans. It has clearly divided America's friends.
Some are enthused. "Relations between Japan and America have never been better than with Bush," said Hatsuhisa Takashima, the foreign ministry spokesman in Tokyo, where spines have been stiffened by the North Korean threat and Mr. Bush's blunt approach to terrorism. "We have more than 500 troops in Iraq because we believe the American-British action prodded Libya to disarm, sent a strong message to North Korea and showed the price of noncompliance with United Nations resolutions. Failure in Iraq is unthinkable."
But as things stand, failure, with its potentially dire consequences for American world leadership, cannot be ruled out. Mr. Bush has proved to be a gambler in foreign affairs. Revolutions can bring big rewards. They can also deliver disaster.
The story of the Bush foreign policy is one of startling change: from the promise of a "humble" approach in 2000 through the "dead or alive" search for the elusive Osama bin Laden to the articulation of a bold, pro-active doctrine summed up last month by Mr. Bush, when he told the United Nations:
"Our security is not merely founded in spheres of influence or some balance of power; the security of our world is found in advancing the rights of mankind."
In other words, less emphasis on containment - the policy of slow-squeeze that defeated communism - and more on the contagion of liberty installed, at least in Iraq, by force of arms. This is stirring stuff that resonates in Eastern Europe, where the wounds of oppression are still felt, as well as with Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister of Iraq, and many of his compatriots. But it is also the stuff of upheaval, and a policy on which the NATO alliance, long a cornerstone of American security, has been unable to agree.
"We have been worried by the absence of debate, the presentation of faits accomplis," said Javier Solana, a former NATO secretary-general and now the European Union's chief foreign affairs official.
In effect, a new spectrum of relations with Washington has emerged. At one end are estranged allies like France and Germany, angered by the war, convinced it is a losing struggle, alarmed by America's use of overwhelming power.
In the muddy middle are nations like Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, important allies whose leaders are sometimes supportive, but where many people believe Mr. Bush has ignited a war against Islam. Their reliability is uncertain.
It has not helped that the Mideast peace process has stalled and that Mr. Bush has appeared less engaged in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute than his recent predecessors.
At the other end are nations, including Poland, Italy, Britain and Japan, that have made the choice to fall in line with Mr. Bush after Sept. 11. Others, including Russia, China and Israel, have embraced the war on terror for reasons of their own.
These divisions get little airing when Mr. Bush campaigns for a second term. The rhetoric at his rallies is of an America unbowed and unrestrained. The day after the first presidential debate Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry would subject decisions on national security to vetoes "by countries like France.'' The U.N. is often derided at Republican events.
This sort of talk may bring partisan crowds to their feet, but it makes the world uneasy.
"If you want to get a cheap cheer from certain quarters in America, it seems that all you have to do is bash the U.N., or the French or the very idea that allies are entitled to have their own opinions," Chris Patten, the commissioner for external relations for the European Union, said last month. "Multilateralists, we are told, want to outsource American foreign and security policy to a bunch of garlic-chewing, cheese-eating wimps."
…the complaint often heard around the world is that from the outset the Bush administration's dismissive attitude set a pattern of take-it-or-leave-it policies that needlessly alienated friends. The Iraq war accelerated that process. Then, the acknowledgment that there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and no proven links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda cemented the view in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere that Mr. Bush governed from ideology first, facts second.
"The United States had to react strongly to Sept. 11, a fact often forgotten in Europe," said Alexandre Adler, a French foreign policy expert generally sympathetic to America. "But Bush has given the image of a warmonger without subtleties and the result is no president since Nixon, and perhaps not even then, has been so unpopular here."
Anti-Americanism has become a winning European platform. In the most recent Spanish and German elections, opposing Mr. Bush's policies proved central to both the upset victory of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the re-election of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, respectively.
But recently, Mr. Bush has been buoyed by the overwhelming re-election of a steadfast ally, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. For the past few days, Mr. Bush has crisscrossed Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado celebrating Afghanistan's first free election.
Still, anti-American hostility in the Islamic world is widespread. Last year, Mr. Powell asked Edward P. Djerejian, an experienced diplomat, to travel the world to examine the failures of American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Mr. Djerejian returned shocked at the picture of America he saw on Arab television and the absence of any effective American rebuttal. "We did not have anywhere near enough people in place with the right language skills or the right sensitivities to respond," he said.
Mr. Djerejian still believes the outcome in Iraq could be positive, but he added that a chronically unstable Iraq would "set back the key goals we said we were trying to achieve on the Arab-Israeli front, on energy security and certainly on democratizing the region."
His investigation came before the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq emerged. "The photographs shattered our reputation as the world's most admired champion of freedom and justice," said Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution. "That is grave, because without the world's trust, America cannot flourish."
So three years after Sept. 11, Mr. Bush leads a United States whose image has been tarnished, while Europeans, Asians and Latin Americans still feel far less threatened by terrorism than Americans do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/politics/campaign/12policy.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Monday, October 11, 2004
"We all have said 'Ooh, that was a dumb decision, here's what I have to do to fix it."
We all have said 'Ooh, that was a dumb decision, here's what I have to do to fix it.:
"'I'm no more near a decision now than I was this time yesterday,' said Linda Grabel, a 63-year-old legal secretary who asked Mr. Bush at the end of the debate whether he could name 'three instances where you realized you made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it.'"
She said it appeared that Mr. Bush misunderstood her question and believed she was talking about the Iraq war when she was, in fact, speaking far more generally.
"We all have said 'Ooh, that was a dumb decision, here's what I have to do to fix it,' " she added. "I wanted to know: Give me some of those decisions, what were they, and how did you fix them?"
After a month in which much of the debate between the two men has been driven by Iraq, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry spoke extensively about the domestic issues that Democrats had once hoped would form the undergirding of the campaign.
The two men repeatedly clashed over health care, a central issue for Mr. Kerry, who has proposed a major expansion of health coverage through subsidies to employers and enrolling more children and low-income adults in the public programs. Mr. Bush asserted that the program would inevitably lead to higher taxes, asking, scornfully: "He says he's going to have a novel health care plan. You know what it is? The federal government's going to run it. It is the largest increase in federal government health care ever.''
Mr. Kerry, whose plan does not involve a federal takeover of health care, replied: "Labels don't mean anything. What means something is, do you have a plan?"
Until sometime early in the summer, President Bush and his advisers sporadically wrestled with a fundamental choice: Was it smarter to go into the final months of the election campaign confessing to considerable error in decisions leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and in early calculations about how best to occupy the country? Or would the president - "not a man given to backward-looking introspection," as one close aide put it - be better off conceding only the smallest errors of judgment, and focusing the electorate on the hope of a bright future for Iraq and the whole Middle East?
Mr. Bush chose the second option. To choose otherwise, one of Mr. Bush's advisers said the other day, would be "to give John Kerry the opening he was waiting for."
But now, in the final 23 days of the campaign, that decision has come to look far riskier than it did in the flush of handing Iraq back to Iraqis. Win or lose, when the history of the 2004 Bush campaign is written, it may turn out that the bet about how to talk about the war will prove pivotal. Mr. Bush held his bet through the presidential debate Friday, declining a questioner's invitation to describe any mistake he had made.
The bet was a mix of political and military calculation, of Mr. Bush's own temperament, and of what proved to be an overly optimistic projection of what Iraq would look like in early October.
By Friday, aides at the White House were talking about the decision in the way Silicon Valley engineers talk about a piece of technology that didn't roll out as planned.
In June, just before reluctantly appointing a commission to investigate what had gone wrong with the intelligence about Mr. Hussein's weaponry, Mr. Bush chose not to issue a mea culpa of his own. "We discussed it, but no one could quite figure out the words," a senior adviser said. "How do you do that, without seeming to undercut the troops who are out there every day? Do you say, 'if we had known he had no stockpiles, we wouldn't have invaded?' I don't think so, and it's not something that the president believes."
The closest Mr. Bush came to conceding having made any mistake was when he used the word "miscalculation" in an interview with The New York Times in late August. But even then, he said he was referring only to having misjudged the speed with which Iraqi forces would collapse, which he said allowed Mr. Hussein's sympathizers to melt into cities and towns and fight another day.
Back in June, it also looked as if the situation in Iraq would look better by autumn. The Iraqis would be racing toward elections, the calculation went, and the American military forces, in support of a new Iraqi force, would be coming up with plans to root out the insurgency. In fact, White House officials say, in the first days of July they were hoping to issue new orders to American troops that would eliminate all-American patrols on the streets, thus significantly reducing casualties and making it clear that Iraqis were providing their own security.
"It never happened," one senior official said, "because the Iraqis were not ready."
The American military may be getting ready for such measures now, but perhaps not in time for Election Day. Rather, American casualties have risen every month since early summer, a fact that softened the political ground for the new questions about how prepared Mr. Bush was for the realities of Iraq. And that ended up obscuring, at least for the moment, Mr. Bush's punch line that "Senator Kerry has a strategy for retreat, and I have a strategy for victory."
Mr. Bush's decision to hang tough has echoes of the strategy used by another president from Texas.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/weekinreview/10sang.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/campaign/09debate.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"'I'm no more near a decision now than I was this time yesterday,' said Linda Grabel, a 63-year-old legal secretary who asked Mr. Bush at the end of the debate whether he could name 'three instances where you realized you made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it.'"
She said it appeared that Mr. Bush misunderstood her question and believed she was talking about the Iraq war when she was, in fact, speaking far more generally.
"We all have said 'Ooh, that was a dumb decision, here's what I have to do to fix it,' " she added. "I wanted to know: Give me some of those decisions, what were they, and how did you fix them?"
After a month in which much of the debate between the two men has been driven by Iraq, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry spoke extensively about the domestic issues that Democrats had once hoped would form the undergirding of the campaign.
The two men repeatedly clashed over health care, a central issue for Mr. Kerry, who has proposed a major expansion of health coverage through subsidies to employers and enrolling more children and low-income adults in the public programs. Mr. Bush asserted that the program would inevitably lead to higher taxes, asking, scornfully: "He says he's going to have a novel health care plan. You know what it is? The federal government's going to run it. It is the largest increase in federal government health care ever.''
Mr. Kerry, whose plan does not involve a federal takeover of health care, replied: "Labels don't mean anything. What means something is, do you have a plan?"
Until sometime early in the summer, President Bush and his advisers sporadically wrestled with a fundamental choice: Was it smarter to go into the final months of the election campaign confessing to considerable error in decisions leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and in early calculations about how best to occupy the country? Or would the president - "not a man given to backward-looking introspection," as one close aide put it - be better off conceding only the smallest errors of judgment, and focusing the electorate on the hope of a bright future for Iraq and the whole Middle East?
Mr. Bush chose the second option. To choose otherwise, one of Mr. Bush's advisers said the other day, would be "to give John Kerry the opening he was waiting for."
But now, in the final 23 days of the campaign, that decision has come to look far riskier than it did in the flush of handing Iraq back to Iraqis. Win or lose, when the history of the 2004 Bush campaign is written, it may turn out that the bet about how to talk about the war will prove pivotal. Mr. Bush held his bet through the presidential debate Friday, declining a questioner's invitation to describe any mistake he had made.
The bet was a mix of political and military calculation, of Mr. Bush's own temperament, and of what proved to be an overly optimistic projection of what Iraq would look like in early October.
By Friday, aides at the White House were talking about the decision in the way Silicon Valley engineers talk about a piece of technology that didn't roll out as planned.
In June, just before reluctantly appointing a commission to investigate what had gone wrong with the intelligence about Mr. Hussein's weaponry, Mr. Bush chose not to issue a mea culpa of his own. "We discussed it, but no one could quite figure out the words," a senior adviser said. "How do you do that, without seeming to undercut the troops who are out there every day? Do you say, 'if we had known he had no stockpiles, we wouldn't have invaded?' I don't think so, and it's not something that the president believes."
The closest Mr. Bush came to conceding having made any mistake was when he used the word "miscalculation" in an interview with The New York Times in late August. But even then, he said he was referring only to having misjudged the speed with which Iraqi forces would collapse, which he said allowed Mr. Hussein's sympathizers to melt into cities and towns and fight another day.
Back in June, it also looked as if the situation in Iraq would look better by autumn. The Iraqis would be racing toward elections, the calculation went, and the American military forces, in support of a new Iraqi force, would be coming up with plans to root out the insurgency. In fact, White House officials say, in the first days of July they were hoping to issue new orders to American troops that would eliminate all-American patrols on the streets, thus significantly reducing casualties and making it clear that Iraqis were providing their own security.
"It never happened," one senior official said, "because the Iraqis were not ready."
The American military may be getting ready for such measures now, but perhaps not in time for Election Day. Rather, American casualties have risen every month since early summer, a fact that softened the political ground for the new questions about how prepared Mr. Bush was for the realities of Iraq. And that ended up obscuring, at least for the moment, Mr. Bush's punch line that "Senator Kerry has a strategy for retreat, and I have a strategy for victory."
Mr. Bush's decision to hang tough has echoes of the strategy used by another president from Texas.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/weekinreview/10sang.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/campaign/09debate.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The NYTimes > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Walking a Beat With Officer Muhammed
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Walking a Beat With Officer Muhammed:
"After almost eight weeks at the academy, Mr. Muhammed had learned the basics of law enforcement: how to handcuff prisoners and search cars, how to properly detain a suspect, the fundamentals of Iraqi law. 'But what surprised me totally,' he told me through a translator, as his fellow cadets nodded in wondrous agreement, 'was this whole concept of human rights!'
A few days later, Officer Muhammed was sent out with a pistol to protect and serve in a city under constant attack from car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades."
"That's a standard of training Americans would never accept," said Gerald F. Burke, a retired Massachusetts State Police major who spent more than a year as an adviser to Baghdad police commanders. "It's a standard the Iraqis wouldn't accept if they didn't have to. Really, it's just an excuse for us to be able to say, 'Hey, we tried.' ''
So even if Mr. Bush's numbers are correct, to claim 125,000 Iraqis will be "fully trained" for the Iraqi Army, National Guard, police and security services by year's end is to redefine the term so far downward as to be meaningless. Adnan Muhammed, in fact, is among the best trained police officers, one of only about 8,000 raw recruits who completed the full eight-week academy course. Thousands more were simply handed a badge and blue shirt on their first day.
The blame does not lie with Mr. Burke or the other civilians and American soldiers running the academies and advising Iraqi commanders. Rather, the Iraqi security forces are in such dreary shape for the same reason the rest of the country is a spiraling disaster: the Bush administration ignored the advice of its own people and tried to do the job on the cheap.
Mr. Burke was one of a half-dozen experts sent to Iraq by the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, a Justice Department group, in May 2003 to figure out how to build a credible police force. The program sent other experts to assess prisons, courts and the rest of the criminal justice system.
The group's first and most critical recommendation was to bring in 6,000 international police advisers - civilians who would work in the stations and on the streets with Iraqi officers. It's a reasonable number for a nation of 25 million, based on data from the program's efforts in dozens of other war-torn countries. Yet more than a year later - with conditions having deteriorated so horrifically that the advisers could only travel in heavily armed convoys - there were still fewer than 500 outside experts.
It's part of a broader pattern of half-steps and shortcuts. Officer Muhammed's academy program was initially scheduled to be 16 weeks, still dangerously minimal (a Massachusetts state trooper, by comparison, is trained for nearly six months before he's allowed to patrol the turnpike, where he'll probably never be attacked with a roadside bomb). Yet American officials, in a rush to improve the numbers of cops on the street, ordered the curriculum cut in half. Given that every lecture, question and answer has to be translated from English into Arabic and back again, Mr. Burke said the Iraqi recruits are being let loose into a war zone with the equivalent of roughly four weeks of instruction.
And that may be a generous estimate, considering that Iraqis begin with little, if any, understanding of how law enforcement is supposed to function in a democracy. They might have seen a bootlegged "Dirty Harry'' movie or a few pirated TV shows, but the only flesh-and-blood police officers they've ever known were Saddam Hussein's.
Under the Baathist regime, the police were at best lazy extortionists and at worst outright criminals. Corruption was endemic; even good officers took cash "tips" from the citizenry to supplement their poverty-level wages. A tempering legacy is that they were outranked by at least 13 other security agencies, so they were a relatively minor source of terror.
Thousands of those former officers, though, are back on the job - only with a lot more authority. "Now," one grinning colonel told me, "we are the only ones." Some 32,000 have been put through a three-week reprogramming course. These lessons are also taught through translators, and some seem more intended to satisfy political constituencies abroad than to improve Iraq. Case in point: a two-hour seminar on domestic violence seems futile in a country were honor killings are common and, in some cases, legal. One police major I met dismissed that short lecture and the rest of the course-work: "Your system," he told me, "will not work in our country."
Of course, right now the lack of law-enforcement training might not be so important, because the Iraqi police aren't being used for what they've ostensibly been trained for, anyway. "We're not even asking them to protect the public," said Mr. Burke. "We're asking them to protect the new regime. We're not sending them out to walk a beat - we're sending them into Najaf and Samarra and Sadr City. We're sending them into a combat role."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11flynn.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"After almost eight weeks at the academy, Mr. Muhammed had learned the basics of law enforcement: how to handcuff prisoners and search cars, how to properly detain a suspect, the fundamentals of Iraqi law. 'But what surprised me totally,' he told me through a translator, as his fellow cadets nodded in wondrous agreement, 'was this whole concept of human rights!'
A few days later, Officer Muhammed was sent out with a pistol to protect and serve in a city under constant attack from car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades."
"That's a standard of training Americans would never accept," said Gerald F. Burke, a retired Massachusetts State Police major who spent more than a year as an adviser to Baghdad police commanders. "It's a standard the Iraqis wouldn't accept if they didn't have to. Really, it's just an excuse for us to be able to say, 'Hey, we tried.' ''
So even if Mr. Bush's numbers are correct, to claim 125,000 Iraqis will be "fully trained" for the Iraqi Army, National Guard, police and security services by year's end is to redefine the term so far downward as to be meaningless. Adnan Muhammed, in fact, is among the best trained police officers, one of only about 8,000 raw recruits who completed the full eight-week academy course. Thousands more were simply handed a badge and blue shirt on their first day.
The blame does not lie with Mr. Burke or the other civilians and American soldiers running the academies and advising Iraqi commanders. Rather, the Iraqi security forces are in such dreary shape for the same reason the rest of the country is a spiraling disaster: the Bush administration ignored the advice of its own people and tried to do the job on the cheap.
Mr. Burke was one of a half-dozen experts sent to Iraq by the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, a Justice Department group, in May 2003 to figure out how to build a credible police force. The program sent other experts to assess prisons, courts and the rest of the criminal justice system.
The group's first and most critical recommendation was to bring in 6,000 international police advisers - civilians who would work in the stations and on the streets with Iraqi officers. It's a reasonable number for a nation of 25 million, based on data from the program's efforts in dozens of other war-torn countries. Yet more than a year later - with conditions having deteriorated so horrifically that the advisers could only travel in heavily armed convoys - there were still fewer than 500 outside experts.
It's part of a broader pattern of half-steps and shortcuts. Officer Muhammed's academy program was initially scheduled to be 16 weeks, still dangerously minimal (a Massachusetts state trooper, by comparison, is trained for nearly six months before he's allowed to patrol the turnpike, where he'll probably never be attacked with a roadside bomb). Yet American officials, in a rush to improve the numbers of cops on the street, ordered the curriculum cut in half. Given that every lecture, question and answer has to be translated from English into Arabic and back again, Mr. Burke said the Iraqi recruits are being let loose into a war zone with the equivalent of roughly four weeks of instruction.
And that may be a generous estimate, considering that Iraqis begin with little, if any, understanding of how law enforcement is supposed to function in a democracy. They might have seen a bootlegged "Dirty Harry'' movie or a few pirated TV shows, but the only flesh-and-blood police officers they've ever known were Saddam Hussein's.
Under the Baathist regime, the police were at best lazy extortionists and at worst outright criminals. Corruption was endemic; even good officers took cash "tips" from the citizenry to supplement their poverty-level wages. A tempering legacy is that they were outranked by at least 13 other security agencies, so they were a relatively minor source of terror.
Thousands of those former officers, though, are back on the job - only with a lot more authority. "Now," one grinning colonel told me, "we are the only ones." Some 32,000 have been put through a three-week reprogramming course. These lessons are also taught through translators, and some seem more intended to satisfy political constituencies abroad than to improve Iraq. Case in point: a two-hour seminar on domestic violence seems futile in a country were honor killings are common and, in some cases, legal. One police major I met dismissed that short lecture and the rest of the course-work: "Your system," he told me, "will not work in our country."
Of course, right now the lack of law-enforcement training might not be so important, because the Iraqi police aren't being used for what they've ostensibly been trained for, anyway. "We're not even asking them to protect the public," said Mr. Burke. "We're asking them to protect the new regime. We're not sending them out to walk a beat - we're sending them into Najaf and Samarra and Sadr City. We're sending them into a combat role."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11flynn.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist BOB HERBERT: Webs of Illusion
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist BOB HERBERT: Webs of Illusion:
"The problem for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good news to tout.
So the president and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good."
The double talk reached a fever pitch last week after the release of two devastating reports - the comprehensive report by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, which destroyed any remaining doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; and the Labor Department's dismal employment report for September, which heightened concerns about the strength of the economic recovery and left Mr. Bush with the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to stand for re-election with fewer people working than at the beginning of his term.
Mr. Bush turned the findings of the Duelfer report upside down and inside out, telling crowds at campaign rallies that it proved Saddam Hussein had been "a gathering threat." It didn't matter that the report, ordered by the president himself, showed just the opposite. The truth would not have been helpful to the president. So with a brazenness and sleight of hand usually associated with three-card-monte players, he pulled a fast one on his cheering listeners.
Vice President Cheney had an equally peculiar response to the report, which said Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990's. Referring to the president's decision to launch the war, Mr. Cheney said, "To delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."
The September jobs report, released on the same day as Mr. Bush's second debate with Senator John Kerry, was deeply disappointing to the White House. Just 96,000 jobs were created, not even enough to keep up with the monthly expansion of the working-age population.
The somber findings forced the president's spin machine into overdrive. Reality, once again, was shoved aside. The administration's upbeat public response to the Labor Department report was described in The Times as follows: "The White House hailed it as evidence of continued employment expansion, saying that it validated Mr. Bush's strategy of pursuing tax cuts to support a recovery from the 2001 economic downturn."
In the president's parallel universe, things are always fine.
In “1984” Orwell called it Newspeak, we've come to use one of his other terms &ldquodoublespeak”
Mr. Bush sold his tax cuts as a mighty force for job creation. They weren't. The Times article that reported the sunny White House response to the disappointing job creation figures also said: "In September, an estimated 62.3 percent of the working-age population was employed, two full percentage points below the level at the beginning of the recession in March 2001. That difference represents over 4.5 million people without work."
Hyperbole is part of every politician's portfolio. But on the most serious matters facing the country, Mr. Bush's administration has often gone beyond hyperbole to deliberate misrepresentations that undermine the very idea of an informed electorate. If unpleasant realities are not acknowledged by the officials occupying the highest offices in the land, there is no chance that the full resources of the government and the people will be marshaled to meet those challenges.
I think it goes along with the docrine of infallibility of the (p)resident.
Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!
Two plus two is four, except when the state says it's five.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html
"The problem for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good news to tout.
So the president and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good."
The double talk reached a fever pitch last week after the release of two devastating reports - the comprehensive report by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, which destroyed any remaining doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; and the Labor Department's dismal employment report for September, which heightened concerns about the strength of the economic recovery and left Mr. Bush with the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to stand for re-election with fewer people working than at the beginning of his term.
Mr. Bush turned the findings of the Duelfer report upside down and inside out, telling crowds at campaign rallies that it proved Saddam Hussein had been "a gathering threat." It didn't matter that the report, ordered by the president himself, showed just the opposite. The truth would not have been helpful to the president. So with a brazenness and sleight of hand usually associated with three-card-monte players, he pulled a fast one on his cheering listeners.
Vice President Cheney had an equally peculiar response to the report, which said Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990's. Referring to the president's decision to launch the war, Mr. Cheney said, "To delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."
The September jobs report, released on the same day as Mr. Bush's second debate with Senator John Kerry, was deeply disappointing to the White House. Just 96,000 jobs were created, not even enough to keep up with the monthly expansion of the working-age population.
The somber findings forced the president's spin machine into overdrive. Reality, once again, was shoved aside. The administration's upbeat public response to the Labor Department report was described in The Times as follows: "The White House hailed it as evidence of continued employment expansion, saying that it validated Mr. Bush's strategy of pursuing tax cuts to support a recovery from the 2001 economic downturn."
In the president's parallel universe, things are always fine.
In “1984” Orwell called it Newspeak, we've come to use one of his other terms &ldquodoublespeak”
Mr. Bush sold his tax cuts as a mighty force for job creation. They weren't. The Times article that reported the sunny White House response to the disappointing job creation figures also said: "In September, an estimated 62.3 percent of the working-age population was employed, two full percentage points below the level at the beginning of the recession in March 2001. That difference represents over 4.5 million people without work."
Hyperbole is part of every politician's portfolio. But on the most serious matters facing the country, Mr. Bush's administration has often gone beyond hyperbole to deliberate misrepresentations that undermine the very idea of an informed electorate. If unpleasant realities are not acknowledged by the officials occupying the highest offices in the land, there is no chance that the full resources of the government and the people will be marshaled to meet those challenges.
I think it goes along with the docrine of infallibility of the (p)resident.
Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!
Two plus two is four, except when the state says it's five.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html
NYTimes > Campaign 2004 > Among Black Voters, a Fervor to Make Their Ballots Count
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Voters: Among Black Voters, a Fervor to Make Their Ballots Count:
"No matter whom she ends up choosing - maybe Senator John Kerry, said Mrs. Charlotte Marshall, or perhaps President Bush, to untangle his Iraqi knot - she will work Election Day as a poll watcher. 'What happened in 2000 got me into it,' she said."
Like Mrs. Marshall, many African-Americans are speaking about the fundamental act of voting this year with rekindled fervor, throwing a high-wattage backlight behind the issues and personalities of the campaign. The disqualified ballots, excluded voters and contentious ending of the 2000 election - when black precincts in Florida had votes rejected at three times the rate of white precincts - have formed a galvanizing memory. "We feel betrayed," said Rod Owens, 22, a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. "We're looking for revenge."
Mr. Owens, active in a young Democrats group on his campus, put the matter more bluntly than most, but the determination to vote and make it count appears to cross boundaries of age, class and geography. African-Americans, for four decades the most reliable reservoir of Democratic support in presidential elections, now are also part of a torrent of new voter registrations in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and elsewhere.
[Aware of how essential black voters' turnout is for his campaign, Mr. Kerry attended services yesterday at two black churches in Florida. With the Revs. Jesse L. Jackson and Al Sharpton at his side, he told worshipers at his second stop, a Baptist church in Miami, that he had a team of lawyers, led by African-Americans, poised to respond to any charges of disenfranchisement. "We have an unfinished march in this nation," he said, invoking the civil rights struggle.]
Here in Jacksonville, as the Oct. 4 registration deadline approached, new voters in black neighborhoods were signing up at a pace two-thirds faster than in 2000. In Philadelphia, election officials report the greatest surge of registrations in 21 years, resulting in more than 70,000 new voters added to the rolls since April, with growth heaviest in African-American sections. In Ohio, new registrations in Democratic strongholds, many of them African-American areas, have increased 250 percent over 2000.
In interviews here in north Florida, in southwest Philadelphia and elsewhere, at bus stops, on porches, in sleek law offices, some two dozen African-American voters spoke about the broad band of issues that define their personal stakes in this campaign: the war in Iraq and what it means to a son or grandson in the military; the economy and how it shapes a bricklayer's week; the tax code and its effect on an independent businessman's prospects; and the seats of aging Supreme Court justices, watched warily by a generation of business executives, many of whom began their climb to prosperity in a society freshly opened by the federal bench.
"I have a son with the military, in a combat-ready unit," Mrs. Marshall said. "I'm scared to death every day. I'm disappointed about the Bush program. I was all for it when he said we were going to fight terror. But they know for a fact where that 9/11 attack originated, and it wasn't Iraq. If they had concentrated all that effort in Afghanistan, maybe by now they would have him, that other fool" - meaning Osama bin Laden.
The voters interviewed - habitual Democrats, for the most part - spoke about John Kerry with polite reserve, as if he were a distant cousin, more rumor, so far, than actual family relation. "I guess he's all right, but he's no Bill Clinton, downright homey-like," said Eddie West, a maintenance worker with the Salvation Army in Jacksonville.
Black voter participation has been increasing in recent presidential elections, and 57 percent of eligible black voters turned out in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. In 2000, Mr. Bush received one vote from African-Americans for every nine cast for Al Gore, the lowest share for any Republican since 1964, according to exit polls.
Both Mr. Bush and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, have pledged to do better, and Republican officials are emphasizing home ownership and business opportunities before black audiences.
While both parties maintain they hope for a heavy vote from African-Americans, Democrats say history shows that would be to their benefit.
Over the last 15 years or so, a rising black middle class has dispersed from cities into integrated suburbs, creating a demand for political messages that reflect the diverse circumstances of African-Americans.
During a town hall meeting with Mr. Kerry in Jacksonville last month, Robert and Anna Lee sat impassively in the rear, offering mild applause, not rising to join ovations. Even so, both Lees said they had no reluctance about supporting Mr. Kerry, who is seen by some as stiff and distant.
"Would I want to go have coffee with him?" Mr. Lee said, shrugging. "That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I'm just not satisfied where I see us going on the international scene."
The Lees moved to Florida from Michigan after Mr. Lee retired from the Internal Revenue Service. Mrs. Lee said she was astounded by Florida's problems in the 2000 election. "It seemed to have affected our people more," she said.
When Mr. Kerry took questions, the Rev. James Sampson, a Baptist minister, spoke of what many in his community perceived to be a feeble effort in north Florida by Mr. Gore's camp in the recount of 2000. About 27,000 votes were disqualified in Duval County, many from black neighborhoods in Jacksonville.
"Will you fight till every vote in Florida is counted?" Mr. Sampson asked.
"I will fight," Mr. Kerry said, "until the last dog dies." The crowd roared.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/politics/campaign/11voters.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"No matter whom she ends up choosing - maybe Senator John Kerry, said Mrs. Charlotte Marshall, or perhaps President Bush, to untangle his Iraqi knot - she will work Election Day as a poll watcher. 'What happened in 2000 got me into it,' she said."
Like Mrs. Marshall, many African-Americans are speaking about the fundamental act of voting this year with rekindled fervor, throwing a high-wattage backlight behind the issues and personalities of the campaign. The disqualified ballots, excluded voters and contentious ending of the 2000 election - when black precincts in Florida had votes rejected at three times the rate of white precincts - have formed a galvanizing memory. "We feel betrayed," said Rod Owens, 22, a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. "We're looking for revenge."
Mr. Owens, active in a young Democrats group on his campus, put the matter more bluntly than most, but the determination to vote and make it count appears to cross boundaries of age, class and geography. African-Americans, for four decades the most reliable reservoir of Democratic support in presidential elections, now are also part of a torrent of new voter registrations in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and elsewhere.
[Aware of how essential black voters' turnout is for his campaign, Mr. Kerry attended services yesterday at two black churches in Florida. With the Revs. Jesse L. Jackson and Al Sharpton at his side, he told worshipers at his second stop, a Baptist church in Miami, that he had a team of lawyers, led by African-Americans, poised to respond to any charges of disenfranchisement. "We have an unfinished march in this nation," he said, invoking the civil rights struggle.]
Here in Jacksonville, as the Oct. 4 registration deadline approached, new voters in black neighborhoods were signing up at a pace two-thirds faster than in 2000. In Philadelphia, election officials report the greatest surge of registrations in 21 years, resulting in more than 70,000 new voters added to the rolls since April, with growth heaviest in African-American sections. In Ohio, new registrations in Democratic strongholds, many of them African-American areas, have increased 250 percent over 2000.
In interviews here in north Florida, in southwest Philadelphia and elsewhere, at bus stops, on porches, in sleek law offices, some two dozen African-American voters spoke about the broad band of issues that define their personal stakes in this campaign: the war in Iraq and what it means to a son or grandson in the military; the economy and how it shapes a bricklayer's week; the tax code and its effect on an independent businessman's prospects; and the seats of aging Supreme Court justices, watched warily by a generation of business executives, many of whom began their climb to prosperity in a society freshly opened by the federal bench.
"I have a son with the military, in a combat-ready unit," Mrs. Marshall said. "I'm scared to death every day. I'm disappointed about the Bush program. I was all for it when he said we were going to fight terror. But they know for a fact where that 9/11 attack originated, and it wasn't Iraq. If they had concentrated all that effort in Afghanistan, maybe by now they would have him, that other fool" - meaning Osama bin Laden.
The voters interviewed - habitual Democrats, for the most part - spoke about John Kerry with polite reserve, as if he were a distant cousin, more rumor, so far, than actual family relation. "I guess he's all right, but he's no Bill Clinton, downright homey-like," said Eddie West, a maintenance worker with the Salvation Army in Jacksonville.
Black voter participation has been increasing in recent presidential elections, and 57 percent of eligible black voters turned out in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. In 2000, Mr. Bush received one vote from African-Americans for every nine cast for Al Gore, the lowest share for any Republican since 1964, according to exit polls.
Both Mr. Bush and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, have pledged to do better, and Republican officials are emphasizing home ownership and business opportunities before black audiences.
While both parties maintain they hope for a heavy vote from African-Americans, Democrats say history shows that would be to their benefit.
Over the last 15 years or so, a rising black middle class has dispersed from cities into integrated suburbs, creating a demand for political messages that reflect the diverse circumstances of African-Americans.
During a town hall meeting with Mr. Kerry in Jacksonville last month, Robert and Anna Lee sat impassively in the rear, offering mild applause, not rising to join ovations. Even so, both Lees said they had no reluctance about supporting Mr. Kerry, who is seen by some as stiff and distant.
"Would I want to go have coffee with him?" Mr. Lee said, shrugging. "That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I'm just not satisfied where I see us going on the international scene."
The Lees moved to Florida from Michigan after Mr. Lee retired from the Internal Revenue Service. Mrs. Lee said she was astounded by Florida's problems in the 2000 election. "It seemed to have affected our people more," she said.
When Mr. Kerry took questions, the Rev. James Sampson, a Baptist minister, spoke of what many in his community perceived to be a feeble effort in north Florida by Mr. Gore's camp in the recount of 2000. About 27,000 votes were disqualified in Duval County, many from black neighborhoods in Jacksonville.
"Will you fight till every vote in Florida is counted?" Mr. Sampson asked.
"I will fight," Mr. Kerry said, "until the last dog dies." The crowd roared.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/politics/campaign/11voters.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Hitting back at Sinclair
http://66.39.111.188/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.cgi?action=Read&BID=1&TID=8239&SID=15
http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2004/10/
hitting_back_at.html
Here's an Action Alert from Democratic Talk Radio for those who want to do something about Sinclair Broadcasting's misuse of the public airwaves to engage in a partisan political attack against Sen. John Kerry.
Courtesy of New Media Musings,
http://66.39.111.188/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.cgi?action=Read&BID=1&TID=8239&SID=15
http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2004/10/
hitting_back_at.html
Sunday, October 10, 2004
The New York Times > National > The Candidates: So Alike, Rivals Make It Personal
The New York Times > National > The Candidates: So Alike, Rivals Make It Personal:
"Ticking off a list of other political rivalries, another Democratic operative who has advised Mr. Kerry noted what made this one unusual. 'Johnson and Kennedy, it was class,' he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the personal nature of the subject. 'Clinton and Bush - that was class. But these guys are the same class.'"
Yet, he continued, within their class, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry filled very different, even antagonistic roles growing up. "These are guys who sat at different tables of the lunchroom," he said.
Mr. Bush was the prodigal son, Mr. Kerry the dutiful one. Mr. Bush was a prankster and a mediocre student. Mr. Kerry was earnest, idealistic, and a little lonely, a striver whose palpable ambition alienated some.
At Andover, his boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Bush was head cheerleader. At St. Paul's, his boarding school in New Hampshire, Mr. Kerry helped found a political club to debate current events.
Both men are of aristocratic stock. But within the elite, where subtle gradations of background take on particular force, Mr. Kerry was an insider's outsider. Unlike the Bushes, who were Protestant, the Kerrys were Catholic and they were not wealthy.
It turns out that the boy is father not only to the man, but also to the debating tactic.
Whether he is attacking over Iraq or taxes, the common thread of Mr. Bush's critique is that Mr. Kerry has failed to make the grade in the prep-school ethos, drummed into generations of boys with Rudyard Kipling's poem "If": he lacks character. He is all ambition, no core.
"I don't see how you can lead this country in a time of war, in a time of uncertainty if you change your mind because of politics," Mr. Bush said Friday night, as he did at the first debate, on Sept. 30 in Coral Gables, Fla.
And whether the subject is Iraq or taxes, Mr. Kerry's critique also boils down to a basic accusation that has dogged Mr. Bush since he was a young man: that he lacks judgment and wisdom - in a word, maturity. "I would have used that authority wisely," Mr. Kerry said Friday night, referring to the Senate's authorization of the use of force in Iraq.
In each debate, Mr. Kerry has twisted the knife by invoking Mr. Bush's father, the 41st president, implying that the son does not measure up. Call it the Oedipus hex: Mr. Kerry's aides regard it as their most effective way of undermining Mr. Bush on the subject of Iraq.
"The president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad, beyond Basra," Mr. Kerry said in Coral Gables. "And the reason he didn't is he said, he wrote in his book because there was no viable exit strategy." In the same answer, Mr. Kerry noted that he had been in combat, an experience, he did not need to mention, shared by the 41st president but not his son.
"I know what it's like to go out on one of those missions where you don't know what's around the corner," Mr. Kerry said.
A.I., When I was at Andover, I met a lot of people like Bush, and a lot of people like Kerry.
There were two mottos, “Finis Origine Pendet” – the end depends on the beginning, and, “Non Sibi” – not for yourself. The people like Bush interpreted the first motto as justification of their priviledges. The people like Kerry thought it meant preparation and work determined your destiny.
The people like Bush, tended to avoid talking about the other motto. I'm not sure they really understood it. It's not hereditary, his father was the youngest navy pilot in WWII, and carried out his last bombing mission in a airplane on fire. He knew about duty, volunteering, and showing up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/national/10memo.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"Ticking off a list of other political rivalries, another Democratic operative who has advised Mr. Kerry noted what made this one unusual. 'Johnson and Kennedy, it was class,' he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the personal nature of the subject. 'Clinton and Bush - that was class. But these guys are the same class.'"
Yet, he continued, within their class, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry filled very different, even antagonistic roles growing up. "These are guys who sat at different tables of the lunchroom," he said.
Mr. Bush was the prodigal son, Mr. Kerry the dutiful one. Mr. Bush was a prankster and a mediocre student. Mr. Kerry was earnest, idealistic, and a little lonely, a striver whose palpable ambition alienated some.
At Andover, his boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Bush was head cheerleader. At St. Paul's, his boarding school in New Hampshire, Mr. Kerry helped found a political club to debate current events.
Both men are of aristocratic stock. But within the elite, where subtle gradations of background take on particular force, Mr. Kerry was an insider's outsider. Unlike the Bushes, who were Protestant, the Kerrys were Catholic and they were not wealthy.
It turns out that the boy is father not only to the man, but also to the debating tactic.
Whether he is attacking over Iraq or taxes, the common thread of Mr. Bush's critique is that Mr. Kerry has failed to make the grade in the prep-school ethos, drummed into generations of boys with Rudyard Kipling's poem "If": he lacks character. He is all ambition, no core.
"I don't see how you can lead this country in a time of war, in a time of uncertainty if you change your mind because of politics," Mr. Bush said Friday night, as he did at the first debate, on Sept. 30 in Coral Gables, Fla.
And whether the subject is Iraq or taxes, Mr. Kerry's critique also boils down to a basic accusation that has dogged Mr. Bush since he was a young man: that he lacks judgment and wisdom - in a word, maturity. "I would have used that authority wisely," Mr. Kerry said Friday night, referring to the Senate's authorization of the use of force in Iraq.
In each debate, Mr. Kerry has twisted the knife by invoking Mr. Bush's father, the 41st president, implying that the son does not measure up. Call it the Oedipus hex: Mr. Kerry's aides regard it as their most effective way of undermining Mr. Bush on the subject of Iraq.
"The president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad, beyond Basra," Mr. Kerry said in Coral Gables. "And the reason he didn't is he said, he wrote in his book because there was no viable exit strategy." In the same answer, Mr. Kerry noted that he had been in combat, an experience, he did not need to mention, shared by the 41st president but not his son.
"I know what it's like to go out on one of those missions where you don't know what's around the corner," Mr. Kerry said.
A.I., When I was at Andover, I met a lot of people like Bush, and a lot of people like Kerry.
There were two mottos, “Finis Origine Pendet” – the end depends on the beginning, and, “Non Sibi” – not for yourself. The people like Bush interpreted the first motto as justification of their priviledges. The people like Kerry thought it meant preparation and work determined your destiny.
The people like Bush, tended to avoid talking about the other motto. I'm not sure they really understood it. It's not hereditary, his father was the youngest navy pilot in WWII, and carried out his last bombing mission in a airplane on fire. He knew about duty, volunteering, and showing up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/national/10memo.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Saturday, October 09, 2004
The NYTimes > Abu Ghraib: Inmates Were Reportedly Kept Off Books to Speed Transfer
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Abu Ghraib: Inmates Were Reportedly Kept Off Books to Speed Transfer:
"The actions of the Central Intelligence Agency in keeping inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq off official rosters appeared to have been intended to speed their transfer to sites outside Iraq, where they would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the former commander of the joint interrogation center at the prison has told Army investigators."
The allegation by Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, in testimony in February, was included in hundreds of pages of secret documents released Friday by the Center for Public Integrity. Colonel Jordan said the approach had been authorized under an unwritten agreement between the C.I.A. and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison. The center said it had obtained the documents from a journalist, Osha Gray Davidson, a contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.
Two Army generals told Congress last month that at the C.I.A.'s request, Army jailers had failed to register dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib in order to hide them from Red Cross inspectors. But Colonel Jordan said in his testimony that the C.I.A.'s purpose had been to avoid anything that might have slowed moving them.
"They would not put them in the regular detainee process where you get fingerprinted, cause once a detainee did that, you're kinda in there three to six to eight months," Colonel Jordan said in his testimony, in Camp Doha, Kuwait, on Feb. 21.
He went on to use an abbreviation for "other government agency," a term used in military circles to refer to the C.I.A.: "The O.G.A. folks wanted to be able to pull somebody in 24, 48, 72 hours if they had to get 'em to Gitmo, do what have you."
In the past, American officials have insisted that no prisoners from Iraq were ever transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is known as Gitmo. They have acknowledged two cases in which prisoners captured were transferred out of Iraq and then returned, but they have declined to comment on whether there might have been others.
The United States has said all prisoners captured in Iraq were covered under the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners held by the United States in Guantánamo and some other facilities, including those in Afghanistan and some secret locations, have not been granted the same protection.
A C.I.A. spokesman would not comment on Colonel Jordan's remarks, and a lawyer for Colonel Jordan also declined comment.
Colonel Jordan, an Army reservist, is among the military intelligence officers identified by Army investigators as sharing in responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
An Army report by Gen. Paul J. Kern and others criticized Colonel Pappas in particular for failing to challenge the C.I.A. practice of keeping detainees off the books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09abuse.html
"The actions of the Central Intelligence Agency in keeping inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq off official rosters appeared to have been intended to speed their transfer to sites outside Iraq, where they would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the former commander of the joint interrogation center at the prison has told Army investigators."
The allegation by Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, in testimony in February, was included in hundreds of pages of secret documents released Friday by the Center for Public Integrity. Colonel Jordan said the approach had been authorized under an unwritten agreement between the C.I.A. and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison. The center said it had obtained the documents from a journalist, Osha Gray Davidson, a contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.
Two Army generals told Congress last month that at the C.I.A.'s request, Army jailers had failed to register dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib in order to hide them from Red Cross inspectors. But Colonel Jordan said in his testimony that the C.I.A.'s purpose had been to avoid anything that might have slowed moving them.
"They would not put them in the regular detainee process where you get fingerprinted, cause once a detainee did that, you're kinda in there three to six to eight months," Colonel Jordan said in his testimony, in Camp Doha, Kuwait, on Feb. 21.
He went on to use an abbreviation for "other government agency," a term used in military circles to refer to the C.I.A.: "The O.G.A. folks wanted to be able to pull somebody in 24, 48, 72 hours if they had to get 'em to Gitmo, do what have you."
In the past, American officials have insisted that no prisoners from Iraq were ever transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is known as Gitmo. They have acknowledged two cases in which prisoners captured were transferred out of Iraq and then returned, but they have declined to comment on whether there might have been others.
The United States has said all prisoners captured in Iraq were covered under the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners held by the United States in Guantánamo and some other facilities, including those in Afghanistan and some secret locations, have not been granted the same protection.
A C.I.A. spokesman would not comment on Colonel Jordan's remarks, and a lawyer for Colonel Jordan also declined comment.
Colonel Jordan, an Army reservist, is among the military intelligence officers identified by Army investigators as sharing in responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
An Army report by Gen. Paul J. Kern and others criticized Colonel Pappas in particular for failing to challenge the C.I.A. practice of keeping detainees off the books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/international/middleeast/09abuse.html
Friday, October 08, 2004
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Working for a Pittance
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Working for a Pittance:
"Coming next week are the results of a new study that shows - here at home - how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The White House, as deep in denial about the economy as it is about Iraq, insists that things are fine - despite the embarrassing fact that President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during his four years in office."
The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, will show that 9.2 million working families in the United States - one out of every four - earn wages that are so low they are barely able to survive financially.
"Our data is very solid and shows that this is a much bigger problem than most people imagine," said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report, which is to be formally released on Tuesday. The report found that there are 20 million children in these low-income working families.
For the purposes of the study, any family in which at least one person was employed was considered a working family. Very wealthy families were included.
The median income for a family of four in the U.S. is $62,732. According to the study, a family of four earning less than $36,784 is considered low-income. A family of four earning less than $18,392 is considered poor. The 9.2 million struggling families cited by the report fell into one of the latter two categories. And those families have one-third of all the children in American working families.
Not surprisingly, the problem for millions of families is that they have jobs that pay very low wages and provide no benefits. "Consider the motel housekeeper, the retail clerk at the hardware store or the coffee shop cook," the report said. "If they have children, chances are good that their families are living on an income too low to provide for their basic needs."
Neither politicians nor the media put much of a spotlight on families that are struggling economically. According to the study, one in five workers are in occupations where the median wage is less than $8.84 an hour, which is a poverty-level wage for a family of four. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is not even sufficient to keep a family of three out of poverty.
Families with that kind of income are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. Any misfortune might push them over the edge - an illness, an automobile breakdown, even something as seemingly minor as a flooded basement.
For the families in these lower-income brackets, life is often a harrowing day-to-day struggle to pay for the bare necessities. According to federal government statistics, the median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment in major metropolitan markets is more than $8,000. The annual cost of food for a low-income family of four is nearly $4,000. Utility bills are nearly $2,000. Transportation costs are about $1,500. And then there are costs for child care, health care and clothing.
You do the math. How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?
(A lot of those families are going to get a shock this winter as price increases for crude oil get translated into big jumps in home heating bills.)
The economy relies heavily on the services provided by low-wage workers but, as the report notes, "our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/opinion/08herbert1.html
"Coming next week are the results of a new study that shows - here at home - how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The White House, as deep in denial about the economy as it is about Iraq, insists that things are fine - despite the embarrassing fact that President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during his four years in office."
The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, will show that 9.2 million working families in the United States - one out of every four - earn wages that are so low they are barely able to survive financially.
"Our data is very solid and shows that this is a much bigger problem than most people imagine," said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report, which is to be formally released on Tuesday. The report found that there are 20 million children in these low-income working families.
For the purposes of the study, any family in which at least one person was employed was considered a working family. Very wealthy families were included.
The median income for a family of four in the U.S. is $62,732. According to the study, a family of four earning less than $36,784 is considered low-income. A family of four earning less than $18,392 is considered poor. The 9.2 million struggling families cited by the report fell into one of the latter two categories. And those families have one-third of all the children in American working families.
Not surprisingly, the problem for millions of families is that they have jobs that pay very low wages and provide no benefits. "Consider the motel housekeeper, the retail clerk at the hardware store or the coffee shop cook," the report said. "If they have children, chances are good that their families are living on an income too low to provide for their basic needs."
Neither politicians nor the media put much of a spotlight on families that are struggling economically. According to the study, one in five workers are in occupations where the median wage is less than $8.84 an hour, which is a poverty-level wage for a family of four. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is not even sufficient to keep a family of three out of poverty.
Families with that kind of income are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. Any misfortune might push them over the edge - an illness, an automobile breakdown, even something as seemingly minor as a flooded basement.
For the families in these lower-income brackets, life is often a harrowing day-to-day struggle to pay for the bare necessities. According to federal government statistics, the median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment in major metropolitan markets is more than $8,000. The annual cost of food for a low-income family of four is nearly $4,000. Utility bills are nearly $2,000. Transportation costs are about $1,500. And then there are costs for child care, health care and clothing.
You do the math. How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?
(A lot of those families are going to get a shock this winter as price increases for crude oil get translated into big jumps in home heating bills.)
The economy relies heavily on the services provided by low-wage workers but, as the report notes, "our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/opinion/08herbert1.html
Hard Working George
Hard Working George:
"A One Minute Synopsis of Bush's Debate Rhetoric in QuickTime®"
Sit down, grasp the arms or seat of your chair, otherwise, you may find yourself rolling on the floor, laughing.
http://simsadler.com/
"A One Minute Synopsis of Bush's Debate Rhetoric in QuickTime®"
Sit down, grasp the arms or seat of your chair, otherwise, you may find yourself rolling on the floor, laughing.
http://simsadler.com/
The NYTimes > On the Campaign Trail: Arms Report Spurs Bitter Bush-Kerry Exchange
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > On the Trail: Arms Report Spurs Bitter Bush-Kerry Exchange:
"Speaking to reporters in Englewood, Colo., Mr. Kerry said that 'this week has provided definitive evidence' for why Mr. Bush should not be re-elected. The president, Mr. Kerry said, was 'not being straight with Americans.'
Both the speed and the heat of the exchanges paved the way for the second presidential debate, to be held Friday night in St. Louis. Perhaps more important, they underscored how both candidates have staked their electoral fates to how voters judge them on Iraq, even as the debates nominally turn to questions of the economy and domestic policy."
Mr. Kerry had said: "Regime change in and of itself is not sufficient justification for going to war, particularly unilaterally, unless regime change is the only way to disarm Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction pursuant to the United Nations resolution. As bad as he is, Saddam Hussein, the dictator, is not the cause of war."
For Mr. Kerry, who has struggled throughout his two-year quest for the presidency to defend himself against charges that his voting record on the war was one of vacillation, the Duelfer report and Mr. Bremer's comments have provided the opportunity to attempt to refocus the debate on Mr. Bush's rationale for going to war, and his competence in executing the occupation.
On Thursday Mr. Kerry described Saddam Hussein as an enemy the Bush administration had "aggrandized and fictionalized," and he warned that if Mr. Bush does not recognize the severity of problems in Iraq, the violence in the Middle East will escalate. "If the president just does more of the same every day and it continues to deteriorate, I may be handed Lebanon, figuratively speaking," Mr. Kerry said, a reference to the civil wars that racked that country for many years.
Standing on a grassy lawn with the snow-topped Rockies in the distance, he said, "My fellow Americans, you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact."
"Ambassador Bremer finally said what John Edwards and I have been saying for months," Mr. Kerry continued, referring to an acknowledgment this week by the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority about shortcomings of the American military operation in Iraq. "President Bush's decision to send in too few troops, without thinking about what would happen after the initial fighting was over, has left our troops more vulnerable, left the situation on the ground in chaos and made the mission in Iraq much more difficult to accomplish."
Mr. Kerry says that the pre-war intelligence was a reason to press for further inspections and pressure on Mr. Hussein, and that the vote to authorize war was part of that pressure. But he faults Mr. Bush for acting before that process had a chance to work.
Mr. Kerry also responded Thursday to a statement by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, that the Pentagon, not the White House, was responsible for determining troop deployment. He noted that Ms. Rice works in the White House, "the place that used to have a sign that said 'The Buck Stops Here.' "
"For President Bush, it's always someone else's fault - denial, and blaming someone else," he declared. "It is wrong for this administration to blame our military leaders, particularly when our military leaders gave him the advice that he didn't follow. The truth is, the responsibility lies with the commander in chief."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/campaign/08trail.html?pagewanted=all&position=
"Speaking to reporters in Englewood, Colo., Mr. Kerry said that 'this week has provided definitive evidence' for why Mr. Bush should not be re-elected. The president, Mr. Kerry said, was 'not being straight with Americans.'
Both the speed and the heat of the exchanges paved the way for the second presidential debate, to be held Friday night in St. Louis. Perhaps more important, they underscored how both candidates have staked their electoral fates to how voters judge them on Iraq, even as the debates nominally turn to questions of the economy and domestic policy."
Mr. Kerry had said: "Regime change in and of itself is not sufficient justification for going to war, particularly unilaterally, unless regime change is the only way to disarm Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction pursuant to the United Nations resolution. As bad as he is, Saddam Hussein, the dictator, is not the cause of war."
For Mr. Kerry, who has struggled throughout his two-year quest for the presidency to defend himself against charges that his voting record on the war was one of vacillation, the Duelfer report and Mr. Bremer's comments have provided the opportunity to attempt to refocus the debate on Mr. Bush's rationale for going to war, and his competence in executing the occupation.
On Thursday Mr. Kerry described Saddam Hussein as an enemy the Bush administration had "aggrandized and fictionalized," and he warned that if Mr. Bush does not recognize the severity of problems in Iraq, the violence in the Middle East will escalate. "If the president just does more of the same every day and it continues to deteriorate, I may be handed Lebanon, figuratively speaking," Mr. Kerry said, a reference to the civil wars that racked that country for many years.
Standing on a grassy lawn with the snow-topped Rockies in the distance, he said, "My fellow Americans, you don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact."
"Ambassador Bremer finally said what John Edwards and I have been saying for months," Mr. Kerry continued, referring to an acknowledgment this week by the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority about shortcomings of the American military operation in Iraq. "President Bush's decision to send in too few troops, without thinking about what would happen after the initial fighting was over, has left our troops more vulnerable, left the situation on the ground in chaos and made the mission in Iraq much more difficult to accomplish."
Mr. Kerry says that the pre-war intelligence was a reason to press for further inspections and pressure on Mr. Hussein, and that the vote to authorize war was part of that pressure. But he faults Mr. Bush for acting before that process had a chance to work.
Mr. Kerry also responded Thursday to a statement by Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, that the Pentagon, not the White House, was responsible for determining troop deployment. He noted that Ms. Rice works in the White House, "the place that used to have a sign that said 'The Buck Stops Here.' "
"For President Bush, it's always someone else's fault - denial, and blaming someone else," he declared. "It is wrong for this administration to blame our military leaders, particularly when our military leaders gave him the advice that he didn't follow. The truth is, the responsibility lies with the commander in chief."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/campaign/08trail.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Accessory Before the Fact
Accessory Before the Fact
When you claim that a preemptive war is
necessary because the enemy has weapons of
mass destruction. The logical, indeed the only,
thing to do when you've deposed that enemy,
is to immediately sieze and control his
ammunition dumps and weapon centers, to
sieze and guard all buildings that might have
information about hidden weapons, for the
safety of your own forces.
When you never had plans to do so, you're either totally incompetent,
or your proclaimed cause was never anything but a pretext.
I'm afraid with this administration, we have evidence that both of
these are true.
They really expected a people who had a history of western occupation
was going to greet them with flowers, and their actions showed that
WMD, weapons of mass distruction weren't important enough to secure,
conventional weapons weren't important, order wasn't important. Oil,
and only oil was important.
Failure to secure those conventional arms, in a country
that virtually was an ammo dump, makes George W. Bush,
Donald Rumsfeld, and others accessories before the fact to
the murder of our servicepeople by improvised devices
from those same weapons caches. Makes them accessories
to the maiming of tens of thousands of our own, and
uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis.
There is no other explanation for the extraordinary,
willful refusal to do the things necessary for the troops
safety. Remember, they thought they were going to pay
for the war and occupation with Iraqs own oil. But, even
in a best case scenario, if Iraqis had greeted us with
flowers, as in the liberation of Paris, there would have
still been Baathists and members of the Republican
Guard who would have known were the weapons were,
and would have been prepared to use them on our troops.
The only acceptable explanation for not immediately securing the
caches we knew of, for not siezing the information needed to find the
rest, is the knowledge that WMD weren't there, coupled with
incompetence that ignored the minor threat of conventional
explosives because the major threat of chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons was a sham.
When you claim that a preemptive war is
necessary because the enemy has weapons of
mass destruction. The logical, indeed the only,
thing to do when you've deposed that enemy,
is to immediately sieze and control his
ammunition dumps and weapon centers, to
sieze and guard all buildings that might have
information about hidden weapons, for the
safety of your own forces.
When you never had plans to do so, you're either totally incompetent,
or your proclaimed cause was never anything but a pretext.
I'm afraid with this administration, we have evidence that both of
these are true.
They really expected a people who had a history of western occupation
was going to greet them with flowers, and their actions showed that
WMD, weapons of mass distruction weren't important enough to secure,
conventional weapons weren't important, order wasn't important. Oil,
and only oil was important.
Failure to secure those conventional arms, in a country
that virtually was an ammo dump, makes George W. Bush,
Donald Rumsfeld, and others accessories before the fact to
the murder of our servicepeople by improvised devices
from those same weapons caches. Makes them accessories
to the maiming of tens of thousands of our own, and
uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis.
There is no other explanation for the extraordinary,
willful refusal to do the things necessary for the troops
safety. Remember, they thought they were going to pay
for the war and occupation with Iraqs own oil. But, even
in a best case scenario, if Iraqis had greeted us with
flowers, as in the liberation of Paris, there would have
still been Baathists and members of the Republican
Guard who would have known were the weapons were,
and would have been prepared to use them on our troops.
The only acceptable explanation for not immediately securing the
caches we knew of, for not siezing the information needed to find the
rest, is the knowledge that WMD weren't there, coupled with
incompetence that ignored the minor threat of conventional
explosives because the major threat of chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons was a sham.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Bush Doesn't Believe in America
Bush Doesn't Believe in America
If he did, he'd know freedom doesn't make us weak.
He'd know that bin Laden can't destroy America, but Americans can.
Bin Laden can't touch our liberties.
He could only dream of doing the damage of the PATRIOT act, or any number of executive orders.
Tyranny thrives in darkness, not light.
Those who fear truth and light are the tyrants allies, fear and terror.
new research suggests that it is the politically informed partisan voter who is most susceptible to persuasion by fear and anxiety. Voters who are truly undecided, many political scientists argue, are not so much torn between the candidates as tuned out, and they do not feel strongly enough about issues to be swayed by threatening messages.
"If the campaigns want to shake out more support, win over these voters, fear is one way they can do to it," said Dr. Ted Brader, a University of Michigan political scientist who studies political advertisements, "but the dollars may be better spent on ads that rally support among their own base."
Although campaign consultants have long known that scare tactics can win votes, it is only recently that psychologists and political scientists have devised studies to find out whose votes they win, and why. Some researchers have sifted through nationwide polling data, before and after elections, looking for relationships between anxiety levels and changes in voting behavior.
Others have conducted experiments comparing the effects of commercials not only on people's opinions but on how they actually engage political issues and assess candidates. The study of emotion, said Dr. Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan, "has become all the rage in political science."
In studies, Dr. Brader and other researchers have found that advertisements using fear worked best among the "sophisticated" voters, who surveys showed tended to be partisan and well informed.
"The conventional wisdom is that politicians use these kinds of ads to prey on the uninformed masses," Dr. Brader said. "I found that that could not be less true."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/science/05fear.html?pagewanted=all&position
The former top American administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, has told private audiences that the United States did not send enough troops to Iraq to establish security after driving Saddam Hussein from power.
In a speech on Monday to an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Va., Mr. Bremer said: "We never had enough troops on the ground" to stop the widespread looting immediately after the fall of Baghdad and the lawlessness and insurrection that followed. The group released portions of his remarks after the speech.
In a Sept. 16 appearance at DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that "the single most important change — the one thing that would have improved the situation — would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He said that he raised his concerns a number of times within the administration, but that he should have been even more insistent.
His remarks were posted on the DePauw Web site, but received little attention until today when they appeared in The Washington Post, along with remarks from his West Virginia speech. Mr. Bremer could not be reached for comment this afternoon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/campaign/05CND-BREM.html
If he did, he'd know freedom doesn't make us weak.
He'd know that bin Laden can't destroy America, but Americans can.
Bin Laden can't touch our liberties.
He could only dream of doing the damage of the PATRIOT act, or any number of executive orders.
Tyranny thrives in darkness, not light.
Those who fear truth and light are the tyrants allies, fear and terror.
new research suggests that it is the politically informed partisan voter who is most susceptible to persuasion by fear and anxiety. Voters who are truly undecided, many political scientists argue, are not so much torn between the candidates as tuned out, and they do not feel strongly enough about issues to be swayed by threatening messages.
"If the campaigns want to shake out more support, win over these voters, fear is one way they can do to it," said Dr. Ted Brader, a University of Michigan political scientist who studies political advertisements, "but the dollars may be better spent on ads that rally support among their own base."
Although campaign consultants have long known that scare tactics can win votes, it is only recently that psychologists and political scientists have devised studies to find out whose votes they win, and why. Some researchers have sifted through nationwide polling data, before and after elections, looking for relationships between anxiety levels and changes in voting behavior.
Others have conducted experiments comparing the effects of commercials not only on people's opinions but on how they actually engage political issues and assess candidates. The study of emotion, said Dr. Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan, "has become all the rage in political science."
In studies, Dr. Brader and other researchers have found that advertisements using fear worked best among the "sophisticated" voters, who surveys showed tended to be partisan and well informed.
"The conventional wisdom is that politicians use these kinds of ads to prey on the uninformed masses," Dr. Brader said. "I found that that could not be less true."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/science/05fear.html?pagewanted=all&position
The former top American administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, has told private audiences that the United States did not send enough troops to Iraq to establish security after driving Saddam Hussein from power.
In a speech on Monday to an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Va., Mr. Bremer said: "We never had enough troops on the ground" to stop the widespread looting immediately after the fall of Baghdad and the lawlessness and insurrection that followed. The group released portions of his remarks after the speech.
In a Sept. 16 appearance at DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that "the single most important change — the one thing that would have improved the situation — would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He said that he raised his concerns a number of times within the administration, but that he should have been even more insistent.
His remarks were posted on the DePauw Web site, but received little attention until today when they appeared in The Washington Post, along with remarks from his West Virginia speech. Mr. Bremer could not be reached for comment this afternoon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/campaign/05CND-BREM.html
The New York Times > Opinion > By PAUL KRUGMAN: The Falling Scales
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Falling Scales:
"Last week President Bush found himself defending his record on national security without his usual protective cocoon of loyalty-tested audiences and cowed reporters. And the sound you heard was the scales' falling from millions of eyes.
Trying to undo the damage, Mr. Bush is now telling those loyalty-tested audiences that Senator John Kerry's use of the phrase 'global test' means that he 'would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.' He's lying, of course, as anyone can confirm by looking at what Mr. Kerry actually said. But it may still work - Mr. Bush's pre-debate rise in the polls is testimony to the effectiveness of smear tactics.
Still, something important happened on Thursday. Style probably mattered most: viewers were shocked by the contrast between Mr. Bush's manufactured image as a strong, resolute leader and his whiny, petulant behavior in the debate. But Mr. Bush would have lost even more badly if post-debate coverage had focused on substance."
Here's one underreported example: So far, Mr. Bush has paid no political price for his shameful penny-pinching on domestic security and his refusal to provide effective protection for America's ports and chemical plants. As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic: "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal. Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story."
But Mr. Kerry raised the issue, describing how the administration has failed to protect us against terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush's response? "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises."
Oh, yes we do. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, Mr. Bush's tax cuts, with their strong tilt toward the wealthy, are responsible for more than $270 billion of the 2004 budget deficit. Increased spending on homeland security accounts for only $20 billion. That shows the true priorities of the self-proclaimed "war president." Later, Mr. Bush, perhaps realizing his mistake, asserted, "Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America." But he had already conceded that he isn't.
He's not even protecting our soldiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05krugman.html
"Last week President Bush found himself defending his record on national security without his usual protective cocoon of loyalty-tested audiences and cowed reporters. And the sound you heard was the scales' falling from millions of eyes.
Trying to undo the damage, Mr. Bush is now telling those loyalty-tested audiences that Senator John Kerry's use of the phrase 'global test' means that he 'would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.' He's lying, of course, as anyone can confirm by looking at what Mr. Kerry actually said. But it may still work - Mr. Bush's pre-debate rise in the polls is testimony to the effectiveness of smear tactics.
Still, something important happened on Thursday. Style probably mattered most: viewers were shocked by the contrast between Mr. Bush's manufactured image as a strong, resolute leader and his whiny, petulant behavior in the debate. But Mr. Bush would have lost even more badly if post-debate coverage had focused on substance."
Here's one underreported example: So far, Mr. Bush has paid no political price for his shameful penny-pinching on domestic security and his refusal to provide effective protection for America's ports and chemical plants. As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic: "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal. Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story."
But Mr. Kerry raised the issue, describing how the administration has failed to protect us against terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush's response? "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises."
Oh, yes we do. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, Mr. Bush's tax cuts, with their strong tilt toward the wealthy, are responsible for more than $270 billion of the 2004 budget deficit. Increased spending on homeland security accounts for only $20 billion. That shows the true priorities of the self-proclaimed "war president." Later, Mr. Bush, perhaps realizing his mistake, asserted, "Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America." But he had already conceded that he isn't.
He's not even protecting our soldiers.
Not only is he sending them into harm's way, he's responsible directly for over 1000 dead, and 20,000 maimed. Responsible, because, he not only ignored General Shinseki's advice, but forced him out of the military. Responsible, because the weapons caches, and ammo dumps, were not and could not be secured. Responsible, because Oil and the Oil Ministry were more important than soldiers lives. Responsible, because for the insurgents, this was the gift that keeps on giving, carbombs and improvised explosive devices.
Being president is hard.
But it's not as hard as coming home, blind, missing alimb or limbs. It's not as hard as being brain damaged. (Maybe it is being brain damaged.) It sure isn't as hard as coming home in a coffin.
Yesterday, Former head of the Provisional Authority Paul Bremer admitted, that we didn't deploy enough troops to secure Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. Which is why the ammo dumps weren't secured. Every soldier and civilian killed by a carbomb or improvised device, has died because this administration, and yes this President, thought that the Oil Ministry was, not just more important but the only thing they had to secure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05krugman.html
Monday, October 04, 2004
The New York Times > Opinion > Making Votes Count: More Troubles for Diebold
The New York Times > Opinion > Making Votes Count: More Troubles for Diebold:
"Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to send a cease-and-desist letter while knowing that the claim of copyright infringement is false. The court held that Diebold knew that its e-mail messages 'discussing possible technical problems' with its voting machines were not copyrighted, but went ahead anyway."
The story began early last year when someone - it is unclear who - posted internal Diebold e-mail messages on the Internet that discussed flaws in the company's electronic voting machines. Two students from Swarthmore College then posted those messages on various Web sites. Diebold sent out a flurry of cease-and-desist letters claiming that the postings violated its copyrights. The students sued, charging that Diebold knowingly misrepresented its rights under copyright law.
The case raises more questions about Diebold's honesty and its commitment to transparency.
Last month, California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, joined a false-claims suit against Diebold charging it with lying to the state about the security of its voting systems. Now, a federal court has ruled that Diebold made knowing misrepresentations to get damaging information about its machines' security off the Internet.
The Tyranny of Copyright?:
"Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing. "
Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/opinion/04mon3.html
"Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to send a cease-and-desist letter while knowing that the claim of copyright infringement is false. The court held that Diebold knew that its e-mail messages 'discussing possible technical problems' with its voting machines were not copyrighted, but went ahead anyway."
The story began early last year when someone - it is unclear who - posted internal Diebold e-mail messages on the Internet that discussed flaws in the company's electronic voting machines. Two students from Swarthmore College then posted those messages on various Web sites. Diebold sent out a flurry of cease-and-desist letters claiming that the postings violated its copyrights. The students sued, charging that Diebold knowingly misrepresented its rights under copyright law.
The case raises more questions about Diebold's honesty and its commitment to transparency.
Last month, California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, joined a false-claims suit against Diebold charging it with lying to the state about the security of its voting systems. Now, a federal court has ruled that Diebold made knowing misrepresentations to get damaging information about its machines' security off the Internet.
The Tyranny of Copyright?:
"Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing. "
Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/opinion/04mon3.html
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