UNITED STATES NEWS DIGEST
Congressional Resolution Gives Bush Broader Powers Than His Father Had in Desert Storm
The "Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq" resolution passed by the U.S. Congress last week provides the following features:
The Congress supports the President to "(1) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq ... and (2) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.
"The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq".
When the President avails himself of such force, "the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq...."
President Bush is also required to submit to Congress a report every 60 days on matters relevant to the resolution.
As the Washington Post noted, the elder President Bush was required to inform the Congress that diplomatic efforts had failed, whereas the younger merely has to inform Congress within 48 hours of having started the war. Also, whereas in 1991 the resolution tied military action to specific UN resolutions, this one refers to "all relevant" resolutions. And the clause on defending U.S. national security is "deliberately vague," the paper said.
George Orwell in Washington
In an Oct. 13 New York Times column called "Texan on the Tigris," columnist Maureen Dowd writes from Washington: "This has always been a place where people say the opposite of what they mean. But last week, the capital soared to ominous new Orwellian heights." Some of her examples:
"Senator Hillary Clinton voted to let the President use force in Iraq because she didn't want the President to use force in Iraq....
"The Democrats were desperate to put the war behind them, so they put the war in front of them. They didn't want to seem weak, so they made the President stronger, which makes them weaker....
"Tom Daschle, Dianne Feinstein and other doubters came around on Thursday to the view that Iraq is an urgent threat, after the CIA Director, George Tenet, sent Congress a memo on Monday saying that Iraq is not an urgent threat...."
Byrd Invoked Constitution Against Bush's War Drive
At the conclusion of the intense debate, and the vote by the U.S. Senate and Congress to give President Bush the unfettered power to launch war against Iraq, 84-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) denounced the action as a tragic mistake.
Byrd's oratorical skills were on display on Oct. 4, when debate began in earnest in the Senate on the resolution to give President Bush authority to use military force against Iraq. In debate with John Warner (R-Va.), one of the resolution's sponsors, and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), and later in colloquy with Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Byrd made clear the Constitutional issues involved. He slammed House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), without naming him, for joining with the White House in a deal on the House Resolution.
The focus of Byrd's tour de force was on the dangers of putting the war-making powers delegated to Congress by the Constitution, into the hands of one man. He quoted James Madison on that point, saying, "The trust and temptation are too great for any one man." He added that the debate is not really about Iraq, but rather on "this new Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes. There is nothing in this Constitution about preemptive strikes. Yet ... we are about to vote to put the imprimatur of the Congress on that doctrine."
Byrd developed his point using the language of the resolution, which grants the President authority "to use all means that he determines to be appropriate in order to enforce the United Nations Security Council Resolutions, ... defend the national security of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region." Byrd said, "What a broad grant of naked power. To whom? One person, the President of the United States. This Constitution itself refutes it, refutes this resolution right on its face."
Byrd called it "another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution," and expressed his regret for having voted for the original 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which vastly intensified the U.S. war in Vietnam.
In response to Byrd's demand to know "what is new" with respect to Iraq, Warner could only say that, in fact, the Bush Administration has presented very little that is new. "I am urging the Administration," he said, "to try and share more information with the Congress."
Senator Kennedy, meanwhile, rejected what he characterized as a call for "21st-century American imperialism." He spoke as follows in the Senate debate:
"...We face no more serious decision in our democracy than whether or not to go to war. The American people deserve to fully understand all of the implications of such a decision....
"On Sept. 20, the Administration unveiled its new National Security Strategy. This document addresses the new realities of our age, particularly the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist networks armed with the agendas of fanatics. The Strategy claims that these new threats are so novel and so dangerous that we should 'not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.'
"In the discussion over the past few months about Iraq, the Administration often uses the terms 'preemptive' and 'preventive' interchangeably. In the realm of international relations, these two terms have long had very different meanings.
"Traditionally, 'preemptive' action refers to times when states react to an imminent threat of attack. For example, when Egyptian and Syrian forces mobilized on Israel's borders in 1967, the threat was obvious and immediate, and Israel felt justified in preemptively attacking those forces. The global community is generally tolerant of such actions, since no nation should have to suffer a certain first strike before it has the legitimacy to respond.
"By contrast, 'preventive' military action refers to strikes that target a country before it has developed a capability that could someday become threatening. Preventive attacks have generally been condemned. For example, the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a preventive strike by Japan, because the Japanese were seeking to block a planned military build-up by the United States in the Pacific.
"The coldly premeditated nature of preventive attacks and preventive wars makes them anathema to well-established international principles against aggression. Pearl Harbor has been rightfully recorded in history as an act of dishonorable treachery.
"Historically, the United States has condemned the idea of preventive war, because it violates basic international rules against aggression. But at times in our history, preventive war has been seriously advocated as a policy option.
"In the early days of the Cold War, some U.S. military and civilian experts advocated a preventive war against the Soviet Union. They proposed a devastating first strike to prevent the Soviet Union from developing a threatening nuclear capability. At the time, they said the uniquely destructive power of nuclear weapons required us to rethink traditional international rules.
"The first round of that debate ended in 1950, when President Truman ruled out a preventive strike, stating that such actions were not consistent with our American tradition. He said, 'You don't "prevent" anything by war ... except peace.' Instead of a surprise first strike, the nation dedicated itself to the strategy of deterrence and containment, which successfully kept the peace during the long and frequently difficult years of the Cold War.
"Arguments for preventive war resurfaced again when the Eisenhower Administration took power in 1953, but President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles soon decided firmly against it. President Eisenhower emphasized that even if we were to win such a war, we would face the vast burdens of occupation and reconstruction that would come with it.
"The argument that the United States should take preventive military action, in the absence of an imminent attack, resurfaced in 1962, when we learned that the Soviet Union would soon have the ability to launch missiles from Cuba against our country. Many military officers urged President Kennedy to approve a preventive attack to destroy this capability before it became operational. Robert Kennedy, like Harry Truman, felt that this kind of first strike was not consistent with American values. He said that a proposed surprise first strike against Cuba would be a 'Pearl Harbor in reverse.'
"For 175 years, [he said] we have not been that kind of country.
"That view prevailed. A middle ground was found and peace was preserved....
"Now, the Bush Administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq. But what the Administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior....
"The [National Security Strategy] document openly contemplates preventive attacks against groups or states, even absent the threat of imminent attack. It legitimizes this kind of first-strike option, and it elevates it to the status of a core security doctrine. Disregarding norms of international behavior, the Bush strategy asserts that the United States should be exempt from the rules we expect other nations to obey.
"I strongly oppose any such extreme doctrine, and I'm sure that many others do as well. Earlier generations of Americans rejected preventive war on the grounds of both morality and practicality, and our generation must do so as well. We can deal with Iraq without resorting to this extreme....
"The Administration's doctrine is a call for 21st-century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept. It is the antithesis of all that America has worked so hard to achieve in international relations since the end of World War II...."
Also speaking strongly against war last week was Gen. Anthony Zinni, a close associate of Secretary of State Colin Powell and the President's own Middle East envoy.
Zinni said that a war on Iraq is not on his list of priorities for the Mideast; Iraq is deterrable and containable, he said, and in his view, the first priority is to achieve a Middle East peace. Second is to support the reform movement in Iran. Then comes making sure the Afghanistan campaign is successful, and finally, patching up strained relations with our allies.
Daschle Killed Byrd Filibuster of Iraq War Resolution
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) blocked the anti-war filibuster in the Senate. In a day of intense debates, in which a few lone voices continued the fight against George W. Bush's imperial war policy, Tom Daschle joined the McCain-Lieberman traitors by pushing through a vote that limited the debate. Daschle took this measure in order to stop the filibuster by senior Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Daschle's blocking the filibuster passed by a vote of 75-25.
Daschle took this action, despite the fact that a week earlier, he had been excluded from the White House meeting with Congressional "leaders." Instead of Daschle, Bush brought in Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.).
Science Magazines Buzz Over Malaria, Silent on Need for DDT Spraying
The current issue of Science, the official weekly of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, features more than 100 pages on mosquitoes and malaria, and the anti-malaria potential of vaccines and genetic engineering, but ignores the simple fact that if DDT spraying of houses in Africa and other malaria-infested areas were to take place now, it would kill mosquitoes and save millions of people a year from this deadly and debilitating disease. Some 300 to 500 million new cases of malaria emerge every year, and 1 to 2 million deaths. One child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
This week's Science centers on a map of the genome sequence of Anopheles gambia, the major mosquito carrier of malaria, while this week's Nature (the leading British science magazine) features the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the major malaria parasite.
Among the articles in Science is a Viewpoint by anti-malaria advocate Jeffrey Sachsthe same Harvard University boy wonder whose privatization schemes have killed off entire economies. Sachs is now working for the Earth Institute at Columbia University (as well as being a Special Adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and chairman of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health). His Science article, titled "A New Global Effort to Control Malaria," begins with a pious statement: "The time has come to resurrect a worldwide effort to control malaria, following decades of neglect during which the disease has resurged in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and other endemic regions."
Sachs laments that eradication is no longer possible, then notes that global efforts from the 1940s to 1970s "virtually eliminated malaria transmission in the subtropics," but bypassed Africa, which is where 90% of malaria deaths now occur. "Impoverished Africans were not on the geopolitical radar screen," he says. As for the guts of his proposed campaign, it rests on the promise of future development of vaccines, drug treatment, genetic engineering of mosquitoes, and so on.
The fall issue of 21st Century Science will have a devastating answer to this propaganda campaign for leaving the mosquito alone. The cover will feature a picture of senior entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards in a field of flowers, eating a spoonful of harmless DDT, under the headline "DDT: The Real Story." Edwards argues that research potential is nice, but if only a fraction of the research dollars were spent on using DDT to kill mosquitoes, it would immediately save millions of lives.
Waste, Profiteering Destroying U.S. Health-Care System
Waste and profiteering are destroying our health-care system, writes Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. In an op-ed in the Oct. 13 New York Times, Angell shows how health care funds are diverted to overhead and profit: private insurers skim 25% off the top of premiums for administrative costs, marketing and profits; then the remainder goes through insurance brokers, lawyers, consultants, billing agencies, etc., all of which take a cut, so that as much as half the health-care dollar never reaches the doctors and hospitalswho themselves face high overhead costs in dealing with multiple insurers.
Angell advocates creation of a national, single-payer system, which would be tantamount to expanding Medicare to the entire population. She says that Medicare is by far the most efficient part of our health system, with its overhead costs being less than 3%, while it covers virtually everyone over the age of 65.
Falwell's Equation of Muhammed with Terrorism Causes Bloody Battles in Bombay
Televangelist Jerry Falwell's remarks that the Prophet Muhammed was a "terrorist," sparked riots between Hindus and Muslims in Sholapur (225 miles south of the regional capital of the Maharashtra state Bombay), India. Falwell's statements were aired on a CBS "Sixty Minutes" program on Oct. 5.
As a result of these remarks being played in India, Muslims rioted, and in the mob scene that followed, Hindus and Muslims were attacking each other with knives and stones during a general strike called by some Muslims to protest Falwell's remarks. Police trying to calm the riots fired shots, with the result that five people were killed and 47 were injured.
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