United States News Digest
Advisory Team Warns Iraq Stabilization Window Is About Three Months
U.S. Army General John Abizaid, Commander of Centcom, and the Iraq war and occupation, announced this weekin contradiction to the prior repeated claims by Iraq Viceroy Paul Bremer, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldthat the U.S. forces are facing a full-scale "guerrilla war."
At the same time, a DOD advisory team, commissioned by Rumsfeld, says that the U.S. has three months to establish security and advance reconstruction of Iraq. The findings were released July 17 in a report called "Iraq's Post-Conflict Reconstruction: A Field Review and Recommendations," by the Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission. Rumsfeld sent a task force of five members to Iraq, in order to weigh the situation. Their report states: "The next three months are crucial to turning around the security situation, which is volatile in key parts of the country," and adds that the United States must also be ready "to stay the course in Iraq for several years."
Two of the members of the team were affiliated with the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which issued the following statement on July 18: "With Iraqi expectations and frustrations on the rise, the window for cooperation with the United States is closing rapidly. If the Iraqis do not see progress on delivering security, basic services, political involvement and economic activity, the security situation will likely worsen and U.S. efforts and credibility will falter. While the United States and its allies have proven their ability to succeed in key areas, significant challenges lie ahead."
The task force was headed by Paul Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Its four other members were: Robert Orr, vice president and director of the Council on Foreign Relations D.C. office; Frederick Barton, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University; Johana Mendelson-Forman, senior program officer at the UN Foundation; and, Bathsheba Crocker, a CFR International Affairs Fellow, currently at CSIS.
War, Looming 'Cheneygate' Fray Nerves of GOP
The House of Representatives verged on a physical brawl today over the Republicans' repeated abuse of the rules in running the House. Based only on short sections heard on C-Span, a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee blew up when the Republican chairman gavelled a discussion closed "without objection"without allowing a Democrat to voice his objection. A shouting match with "wimp" and "fruitcake" ensued, with the chairman declaring a physical threat and calling the police.
A subsequent floor discussion saw the Democrats expressing total outrage at the repeated refusal to follow the rulesthe disallowing of Democratic debate, amendments and suchwith the current event seen as just another of many, many cases. A number of speakers cited Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-Texas) call to the Department of Homeland Security to track down the Texas Democratic state legislators who had left a legislative session, thereby preventing a quorum from being present.
The majority Republicans were declared un-American and dictatorial, with readings of the Constitution and the Jefferson Rules book. A leading black Democrat (who may have been the person in the Committee meeting) said on the floor that he had stood up to Bull Connor and other tyrants, went to jail in civil disobedience, but never believed that he'd be threatened by police for carrying out his elected duties in the Congress.
Ballistic Missile Defense Programs Won't Work
The American Physical Society released a 400-page report July 15, the result of a three-year study, evaluating the effectiveness of the technologies under development for defense against ballistic missiles in their boost phase.
The conclusion reached is that both systems being developed by the U.S.either space-based interceptors or the Airborne Lasercould not defend against solid-fuelled missiles in their boost phase, due to their short burn-time. Even liquid-fuelled missiles, which have a somewhat longer burn-time, could only be hit if the interceptors were based close to potential flight paths, the study found. (It is preferable to disarm a ballistic missile early, in its boost phase, before it releases multiple warheads, and/or decoys.) The study did not consider space-based directed-energy systems, promoted in Lyndon LaRouche's beam weapons defense program, the only efficient counter to missiles in boost phase.
On July 11, the Pentagon itself slowed down the space-based interceptor program that President Bush announced in December would be deployed in 2005, delaying it to until at least 2008, due to technical problems. Appropriations Committees in both Houses of Congress have slashed by half or more the Administration's request for $301 million to develop boost-phase interceptors, which were under development, because of problems in the ground-based midcourse interceptor program.
Grassroots Opposition Grows to USA Patriot Act
Communities throughout the U.S. are resorting to political guerrilla warfare tactics to circumvent the draconian measures of John Ashcroft's "PATRIOT Act," which was passed just six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont have approved resolutions calling for the act's repeal, as have 134 cities and counties. In Berkeley, Calif., the public library director purges all records of returned books each day and erases the list of websites visited on the library's terminals, to prevent the Justice Department from obtaining the information. In Portland, Ore., officials declined to cooperate with Federal agents serving secret warrants, and in Arcata, Calif., the City Council passed an ordinance in April barring city workers from enforcing the act. "People are finally getting it, that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are being threatened," says the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
Investigation Over Forged Intelligence on Iraq Compared to Pentagon Papers
Who knew what, when? is the question being asked repeatedly by investigative reporters, and now the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, and prominent individuals in Australia. The investigation of the lies used to hype an Iraq war is just beginning, as evidenced by the following summary of some of the major coverage this week:
On July 13 The London Independent published an article called "20 Lies About the War," by Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker, who write, "Falsehoods ranging from exaggeration to plain untruth were used.... More lies are being used in the aftermath." Rangwala is the person who exposed the plagiarism hoax by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in February 2003. The article not only names the lies, but names who said them, and what the truth is. The lies they cite are:
1. Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks; 2. Iraq and al-Qaeda were working together; 3. Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a "reconstituted" nuclear weapons program; 4. Iraq was trying to import aluminum tubes to develop nuclear weapons; 5. Iraq still had vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons from the first Gulf War; 6. Iraq retained up to 20 missiles which could carry chemical or biological warheads, with a range which would threaten British forces in Cyprus; 7. Saddam Hussein had the wherewithal to develop smallpox; 8. U.S. and British claims were supported by the inspectors; 9. Previous weapons inspections had failed; 10. Iraq was obstructing the inspectors; 11; Iraq could deploy its weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes; 12. The "dodgy dossier"; 13. War would be easy; 14. Umm Qasr; 15. Basra rebellion; 16. The "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch; 17. Troops would face chemical and biological weapons; 18. Interrogation of scientists would yield the location of WMD; 19. Iraq's oil money would go to Iraqis; 20. WMD were found.
In the U.S., syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer says there is a mood like that around the "Pentagon Papers" in Washington, and as in 1971, "It is only the beginning." She reviews Cheney's role in the Niger "yellow cake" affair, and notes how many times the information that Iraq was procuring uranium from Africa in massive quantities, was repeated, even after Ambassador Joe Wilson debunked the information.
See this week's InDepth for report from Congress.
Congress Cuts Funding for Mini-Nuclear Weapons
In an important development, on July 14, the Energy Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee cut more than $50 billion from the Administration's requested $68 billion appropriation for research on a new generation of nuclear weapons. The subcommittee chairman, Ohio Republican David Hobson, said, "Before we go blindly into new areas, we have to think about where we are, and what we are doing with what we've got. I did what I thought was the responsible thing to do, and my committee concurred."
EIW and Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche exposed the program as a pet project of the neo-conservative utopians in the Administration who see these weapons as a "first strike" capability, in line with the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Strategy document of September 2002, which set the U.S. on a course of a succession of preventive wars, beginning with Iraq.
Administration supporters of the new-weapons research were caught by surprise, and will try to reverse the committee's action on the House floor next week.
The money had been authorized by the House and Senate earlier this year, after both chambers voted to ease a decade-old ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons.
In the Senate, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and others seized on the House action, and urged the Senate to follow suit.
Senate Moves To Kill DOD Surveillance Plan
Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee are reportedly acting together to prohibit all spending for a proposed vast Department of Defense computerized scheme for surveillance of the U.S. population. The Pentagon's notorious Terrorism Information Awareness program (formerly "Total Information Awareness") would not be allowed even a research phase, under amendments now going through the committee.
The project, housed in the Pentagon, and run by convicted Iran-Contra perjurer former Adm. John Poindexter, was to have included the tracking of all credit card transactions in the U.S., in order to "prevent terrorism."
CIA Makes Preemptive Attack on Chickenhawk Bolton's Lies About Syria
On Monday, July 14, neo-conservative warmonger Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton was supposed to testify on WMD in Syriabut the CIA prepared a 35-40-page report before his testimony, discrediting everything he was planning to say. Instead, Bolton's testimony is now postponed till September, reported a Knight-Ridder story in the Miami Herald of July 15.
Bolton is already under suspicion for reporting a completely lying report in May 2002, claiming that Cuba has extensive chemical and bio weapons. Recently, a State Department intelligence expert, Christian Westerman, told a closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee meeting that Bolton's exaggerations were not supported "by intelligence data."
Greenspan Refuses To Recognize Manufacturing's Importance To U.S. Economy
The lunatic Federal Reserve chairman, on July 15 in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, refused to heed the call for the Bush Administration to "seize the responsibility to recognize manufacturing's importance to the economy," given the previous day by the president of the Association of Manufacturing Technology. Alan Greenspan babbled that an economy is measured on the basis of money, rather than on physical productionthe basis of the American System of political economy. Moreover, he claimed, manufactured goods could be gotten from foreign nations.
Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-Mass) noted that the manufacturing sector has suffered two-thirds of the U.S. job losses during the past three years. He asked if it were unimportant for the U.S. to have manufacturing jobs to have a successful economy. And he asked, what would be the minimum number of manufacturing jobs without destroying the economy's ability to create wealth?
Greenspan replied: "Whether value is created by taking raw materials and fabricating them into something consumers want, or value is created by various different services which consumers want, presumably should not make any significant difference so far as standards of living are concerned, because the income ... is there. If there is no concern about access to foreign producers of manufactured goods, then I think you can argue it does not really matter whether or not you produce them, or not."
Later, Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-Ill) cited the warning by the National Association of Manufacturers, on June 10, that the manufacturing collapse is reaching a point of no return, which would virtually assure a decline in U.S. living standards. Greenspin responded, "I think it is incorrect," because jobs would be created in the services sector.
Greenspan Is Grilled by U.S. Senate
Excerpts from Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's semi-annual monetary report to the Senate Banking Committee, reflect the importance of Lyndon LaRouche's impact in exposing Greenspan's "bubble economics," and LaRouche's plan for implementing a bankruptcy reorganization and infrastructure-vectored economic recovery, under the name of the New Bretton Woods. Greenspan's credibility is shot, as indicated in the grilling he got from the Senate:
* Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md): "Unlike Chairman Greenspan's statement that he finds the [employment] situation mixed, I find it very negative." "[H]ave we all fallen into the trap of believing that there's a mythical recovery which is just around the corner? I mean, in all three of these years now [2001-03], the Fed has really been off the mark on its projections, overly optimistic consistently." It appears "we have a more serious economic situation on our hands than is being generally acknowledged or admitted to."
* Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn): "[T]his is such a growing concern to me about what's happening here when you look at the job loss, the businesses that are going out of business ... Someone's got to respond to this. We need some ideas on how to respond to this.... [I]s it a matter of concern to you?"
* Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ): "But I don't understand what is different in the policy mix we have today," versus that of 2001 and 2002, "that gives us so great a confidence that this is all going to work as well as everybody projects it is."
* Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD): "[O]ne begins to suspect that reports of an imminent recovery are assuming a bit more juice than we really have."
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