United States News Digest

Don't Blame Mother Nature: Flood Protection Unfunded for Years

June 19 (EIRNS)—Today, in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, millions of acres of farmland, and untold numbers of homes have been washed away by flood waters, which will result in multibillion dollar losses to the economy. Yet, in every proposed annual budget of the Bush-Cheney Administration since 2001, there have been fewer dollars than required just to maintain the critical aging flood-protection system, i.e., levees, locks, dams, etc., while funds for new construction stood at nearly zero.

In 2004, EIR reported that Bush's FY2005 budget for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers represented "the fourth year in a row" in which he asked for less than the previous year's funding level. "In fiscal 2001, the Corps budget was almost $4.7 billion. In fiscal 2005, the White House" asked for under $4 billion or a 15% decline from the year before. Making matters worse, Congress failed year after year to pass authorizing legislation for inland waterways infrastructure projects. Not until August-September 2007 did Congress send Bush a veto-proof $14 billion bill for the Corps. Bush vetoed it as his budget balancers at the Office of Management and Budget deemed it "wasteful spending."

Fortunately, in November 2007, the House and Senate overrode the veto, making the Water Resources and Development Act of 2007 law. While too late for today's flood victims in the Midwest, WRDA 2007 includes about $2 billion for improvements and restoration on the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway System. The locks to be upgraded on these are each more than 70 years old. Also included in the WRDA 2007 bill is funding for all forms of flood protection, including the 48 levees in the area.

U.S. General: Bush Administration Committed War Crimes

June 18 (EIRNS)—"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration committed war crimes," declared retired U.S. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, in the preface to a 121-page report issued today by the Physicians for Human Rights, which documented beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and sodomy of 11 former detainees held at U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, Cuba. "The only question is whether those who ordered will be held to account," Taguba added.

Taguba conducted the first official investigation of the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal in 2004. "This report," Taguba wrote regarding the Physicians report, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander in Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."

Two days of clinical evaluation of the former prisoners by the doctors' group, "found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering whether it was scars from brutal beatings or nightmares of sexual humiliations that they endured," said Dr. Allen Keller of New York University.

The report follows the explosive June 17 hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which disclosed that top Pentagon civilian officials—not military personnel as the Pentagon previously said—began collecting information on torture techniques in the Summer of 2002. The documents also show, as previously known, that top military lawyers opposed the use of methods they regarded as illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions. As EIR has reported, the Pentagon took methods used for training U.S. military personnel to resist torture (known as SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) and used those methods, including waterboarding, on prisoners held at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Soros/Dean Operatives Foment Splits in Democratic Party

June 16 (EIRNS)—A public exchange of e-mails on a prominent Texas Democratic website adds to the evidence that there is a deliberate effort, orchestrated by the gameplayers running Sen. Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, to create divisions in the Democratic Party, that will cause it to self-destruct before the national convention in August.

David Van Os, a populist/progressive, who was the Democratic Party candidate for Texas attorney general in 2006, and who joined in a challenge to the corporate hierarchy in the state Democratic Party at last week's state convention in Austin, by running against incumbent party chair Boyd Richie, wrote that the decision by the Obama campaign to back Richie's reelection was an example of the worst kind of politics as usual. It was "utterly hypocritical," he wrote, echoing a preconvention posting on LaRouchePAC, "for the campaign of 'change' to load the dice against democracy in the Texas Democratic Party with the cynical manipulation displayed in giving Obama delegates the wink and nod in support of Richie's reelection. The Democratic leadership sanctimoniously talks about voter disenfranchisement but it does not apply common principles of democracy to their own supposed democracy inside the party. All the high-tech 'netroots' methodology, vaunted 'grassroots' techniques, and 'progressive issue' platitudes in the world are wasted if they are used to promote continuation of the culture of deception, sycophancy and hypocrisy. It is this culture that drives people away from voting Democratic...."

In response to this e-mail, Obama convention coordinator Glen Maxey (who had run against Richie, along with LPAC's Kesha Rogers and Charlie Urbina Jones at the '06 convention, but had since made his peace with this crew) wrote that the "Obama sellout" as Van Os called it, left him "as shocked and as angry as you." He said that he was "cut out by Ron Kirk," former Dallas mayor and top Texas operative for Obama.

This pattern of arrogant dismissal of not only the concerns of supporters of Clinton, but even loyal backers of Obama, was evident in the behavior of key national operatives of the Obama campaign in this weekend's Washington State Democratic Convention, and the executive board meeting of the California Democratic Party in San Francisco.

Lyndon LaRouche commented that this pattern confirms his earlier statements, that the vicious attacks on Clinton during the primary campaign were not intended to elect Obama, but only to drive her out of the race, and prevent the emergence of an FDR-style Democratic Party platform aimed at defending the interests of those in the lower 80% of family-income brackets.

Obama Aides Back 'Preventive War' Against Iran

June 16 (EIRNS)—A new "Clean Break"-type offensive against Iran is under study right now at the neocon swamp, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and has just been endorsed by Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers Anthony Lake and Susan Rice. LaRouche PAC has been warning for the last month about Anthony Lake's partnership on preventive war with George Shultz at Princeton University, and now the danger of Obama's support for Dick Cheney's war against Iran, possibly this year, is surfacing.

WINEP has just released its report: "The Last Resort: Consequences of Preventive Military Action against Iran," which in its brief introduction, uses the term "preventive military action" seven times. Shultz has been fond of pointing out that "preventive war" is not "preemptive war." Preventive war happens when there is no immediate perceived threat; the threat can be years down the line; or something that is not even in preparation. According to Shultz, it is a war to eliminate a potential capability. That is what WINEP is advocating; and the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz says the plan has the support of both Obama's aides Lake and Rice, and two of John McCain's top advisers, Vin Weber (former Congressman and one of Cheney's closest friends), and James Woolsey.

WINEP says the study "does not advocate military action against Iran's nuclear program. The time is not right for such a decision and diplomacy continues to offer at least a modest prospect of success.... Nevertheless, sometime soon—perhaps later this year, perhaps within a few years—the time for such a decision might come."