In this issue:

Rumsfeld's Purge of Military Follows Hitler, LaRouche Says

Cheney's Halliburton a Nest of Conflict of Interest

Perle Under Investigation Again As Feds Probe Global Crossing Buyout

It's the Economy...Again! Sen. Kennedy Exposes Public Health Cut to the Bone

State Funding to Public Health Labs Cuts to Extend to 2004

Poll Shows Americans Reject Unilateralism

From Volume 2, Issue Number 18 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published May 5, 2003

United States News Digest

Rumsfeld's Purge of Military Follows Hitler, LaRouche Says

Leading Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, said recently that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "follows Hitler in the purge of the military." Rumsfeld, and his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual leader of the cabal of Straussian fascists (politely known as "neo-conservatives") in the Administration, fired Army Secretary Thomas White on April 28, and are now trying to ram through a fascist reorganization of the Defense Department that removes all civil-service protection from Defense Department personnel—replacing it with an arbitrary system, that will allow the Wolfowitz cabal to pack the Defense Department, and its vital intelligence agencies, with their ideological allies.

LaRouche likens this move to the Nazi Notverordnung (emergency laws)—enacted after the Reichstag Fire, an incident staged by the Nazis to justify a dictatorship. The Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal is similarly ramming through their laws under the banner of "national security" in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

On April 30, the Washington Post reported that, "At a 31/2-hour hearing, Republicans and Democrats alike criticized David S.C. Chu, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, over the handling of proposed legislation.... Defense officials quietly submitted the 205-page bill two weeks ago during the congressional recess and are now trying to fast-track it through the armed services committees in the House and the Senate, lawmakers said." Opposition is mounting to this railroading of the bill that would all but eliminate Congressional oversight as well. Hearings before the Government Reform Committee are now planned for next week, because of questions that were raised by members of both parties. Representative Jo Ann Davis (R-Va.) challenged the use of the term "national security" to justify any actions, without Rumsfeld ever defining what they mean by that term. On the Democratic side, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) called the bill a "blank check." Hearings and a "mark up" (preparation for a vote) was scheduled for May 1, but now has been moved to May 6.

Opposition was also voiced by organized labor. At subcommittee hearings of the Government Reform Committee, Bobby L. Harnage, Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), spoke against the Defense Department fascist reorganization plan, in testimony to the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization. Excerpts follow: "[O]ur union represents ... 200,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense.... AFGE strongly opposes this legislation on the grounds that it erases decades of social progress in employment standards, punishes a workforce that has just made a crucial and extraordinary contribution to our victory in Operation Enduring Freedom, and takes away from Congress and affected employees the opportunity they now possess to have a voice in crafting and approving the personnel and other systems of the Department of Defense. Today, no one owns the Department of Defense. It is a public institution, supported by U.S. taxpayers and administered by a Secretary of Defense appointed by an elected President, and overseen and regulated by the U.S. Congress. If this legislation is enacted, each individual Secretary of Defense, in cooperation with each President, will effectively own the Department of Defense as if it were a private concern. The Congress will have relinquished its oversight and legislative role with regard to approximately 654,000 government personnel." Harnage added that "DoD's 'shock and awe' strategy, designed to stun and confuse its opponents, has been wrongly applied to the legislative arena in this proposal.... We are at a loss to identify a serious or true rationale for this legislation...."

Cheney's Halliburton a Nest of Conflict of Interest

On Sunday, April 27, CBS TV's popular news magazine, "60 Minutes" presented evidence of a real conflict of interest dealing with Dick Cheney's former firm of Halliburton (which gives the Vice President a hefty annual payment as part of the $20 bonus he received when he left the firm to accept the nomination of Vice President). The show also revealed conflicts about the "Chickenhawks" on the Defense Policy Board. According to 60 Minutes, the Pentagon hired Halliburton, before the first shots fired in Iraq, through a classified contract placed through the Army Corps of Engineers with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR). But the relationship goes back a decade.

Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) revealed to CBS that in 1992, then Defense Secretary Cheney, commissioned the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to do a classified study on whether much of the U.S. volunteer army's logistics should be "privatized." Of course, Lewis said, Halliburton agreed "and over the next eight years Kellogg, Brown & Root and another company got 2,700 contracts worth billions of dollars." Halliburton vice president for government lobbying is Army Maj. Gen. Chuck Dominy (ret.), whose last assignment was Commander of the Army Corps of Engineers. As EIRNS has reported, in 1991, then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Straussian Paul Wolfowitz propagated the Defense Policy Guidance for "perpetual war," which was shot down by President George H.W. Bush. Dominy described Halliburton's work as: "You help build base camps. You provide goods, laundry, power, sewage, all the kinds of things that keep an army in place in a field operation. Among the areas where Halliburton has carried out such functions are Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, the Caucasus, and now Iraq.

On May 1, new revelations about Halliburton's role in the Cheney/Chickenhawk Iraq war were covered in the Washington Post. It said that under nominal subcontract from the Army Corps of Engineers, Halliburton Industries' subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), is supposed to be reconstructing the southern oil field in Iraq (formerly run by the Iraqi South Oil Co.) that had produced 60% of Iraq's petroleum products. This facility was bombed by U.S.-U.K. forces, who also stood by and watched as it was pillaged and armed gunmen still roamed its fields looking for loot.

KBR has so far only restored operation of three of 102 production areas in southern Iraq, that are producing 150-175,000 barrels per day. That is less than half of what the country requires for its basic needs for gasoline, cooking fuel, and electricity. Frequent black-outs still afflict nearly every town, and due to the lack of electricity, the whole water and sewer infrastructure has broken down. This spells the potential for massive outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria, as happened after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Army Corps of Engineers Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, who clearly knows that Dick Cheney had been the former Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, has betrayed a "manana" attitude, by stating that in 9-12 weeks, Iraq would be producing about 800,000 barrels per day — approximately one-third of the pre-Second Gulf War production. Meanwhile, it is unknown how many Iraqis may suffer, or die, because of the continuing blackouts, lack of sanitation, etc.

Mohammed Mohee, an instrument technician, told the Post reporter that: "KBR just comes and gives orders, but they don't do anything. They don't give us anything to work with. This is our oil. This is our city, our company. Our country. We want to clear away the damage and move forward. We have no tools, no instruments, no spare parts. They do nothing. They just look and leave." Five minutes after Mohee had confronted a KBR employee, a combined unit of six U.S. and U.K. soldiers arrived to check his identification and interrogate him.

Meanwhile, the chief technician at a storage tank across the road reported that during the massive looting of any metal that could be stolen from the field, "The British troops here did absolutely nothing. They watched with their own eyes as thieves arrived and took away everything ... [stating] we're here for fighting. This is not our job."

Another Iraqi official said of the British troops occupying his office: "They allow all of the looters to destroy all of our equipment and even now they are sitting in our offices. They said they brought freedom for us. Where is freedom?"

Perle Under Investigation Again As Feds Probe Global Crossing Buyout

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency grouping managed by the Treasury Department, started a formal investigation April 28 into the proposed sale of the bankrupt telecommunications company Global Crossing to Hutchison Whampoa in Hong Kong and Singapore Technologies Telemedia. The CFIUS probe will take up to 45 days and is to result in a recommendation to the White House for action on whether to approve the sale, reported an article in the New York Times by Edward Wong on April 30. At issue for the Bush Administration: the implications of foreign ownership of significant U.S. telecommunications capabilities involving national defense. Attacks against Rumsfeld adviser and neo-conservative ideologue Richard Perle came to a head over the public disclosure that Global Crossing was paying him $725,000 to lobby the Pentagon to approve the sale, forcing him to resign as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Now Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, reportedly will propose that the Committee ask the Defense Department to turn over financial statements showing additional details on Perle's role. If he can't get the Republican-controlled Committee to take this action, Conyers reportedly will ask the General Accounting Office to pursue the documents.

It's the Economy...Again! Sen. Kennedy Exposes Public Health Cut to the Bone

In testimony to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (the HELP committee), on April 29, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) revealed a study by his staff that shows that U.S. public health infrastructure has been cut to the bone by budget cuts, and deficits, and there is no excess capacity to deal with SARS. In his survey of health departments nationally, Kennedy gave the following devastating picture of the lack of health infrastructure to deal with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS):

New Orleans Public Health Department Director Kevin Stevens: "We have very few resources, and should we have a SARS outbreak we are very poorly prepared."

Los Angeles Department of Health and Services (California) said that they have about 2000 people die every month from unexplained pneumonia. We have dealt with SARS to the detriment of other diseases. Philadelphia—there is no city-owned hospital; the health department has no funds to set up a quarantine facility of its own. It would have to rely on hard-pressed independent hospitals to house SARS patients in isolation.

Seattle has only limited facilities to isolate contagious patients. That city is already facing the highest number of TB cases it has seen in 30 years. They have only two full-time infectious disease physicians.

On the fiscal crisis facing hospitals, Kennedy said, that "the worst is yet to come." "Although hospitals have received $500 million for bioterrorism preparedness this year, these funds are dwarfed by cuts in other areas," he told the committee.

Graduate medical education lost $750 million, Medicaid, the federal/state program that provides health care coverage for the indigent and disabled, was slashed by $1.3 billion. Recommended increases that were not funded, Kennedy said, took $420 million from hospitals. "The result—even with additional funds from bioterrorism grants—is that hospitals lost $1.9 billion last year. And the worst is yet to come this year."

At the same hearings, Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers of Disease Control, confirmed the collapse of public health facilities, and said that we "are only as strong as our weakest link." She testified that SARS has taught us 1) that emerging infectious diseases are a fact of life; 2) that the whole public health system has to be intact; and 3) the importance of the continuity of public health with health care delivery system. "We've got to have both capacities, a viable and vibrant and robust medical care system with informed clinicians, but also beds and surge capacity and training. That has to be immediately linked to public health research to identify what is the best way to do all this."

State Funding to Public Health Labs Cuts to Extend to 2004

State funding to public health labs was cut for 2003, and further cuts are expected in 2004, according to new survey by the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). In a recent survey on bioterrorism preparedness, APHL found that 30 state public health laboratories faced cuts in 2003; 19 of these had cuts in multiple programs. Some 33 laboratories expected cuts in 2004. 53% of local public health agencies say smallpox and bioterrorism planning are taking away from other public health services, causing reduction in influenza surveillance and cuts in other virology activities. Now, with the SARS crisis, states, like Massachusetts, for example, need hundreds of thousands of more dollars to test tissue samples for SARS.

Poll Shows Americans Reject Unilateralism

Journalist Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, on April 30, reports that new surveys show that much of the U.S. public is more in tune with the views of "Old Europe," than the neo-cons around Rumsfeld. Lobe has opposed the neo-conservatives behind the Iraq war, and has written exposes on the long-standing plans by the Wolfowitz/Cheney/Perle cabal to launch war on Iraq and other Arab states.

Lobe reports that the survey, conducted from April 18-22, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, polled 865 randomly chosen respondents with the following results:

Three out of four said they believe the Iraq war was right. Two-thirds agreed that the "US plays the role of world policeman more than it should"; only 12% agreed that "the US should continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems."

Asked what role the US should play in the world: only 12% favored the US in a pre-eminent position; 76% said, "The US should do its share in efforts to solve international problems with other countries"; 11% said the US should "withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems." Support for a "pre-eminent" US role has fallen from 17% since a June 2002 poll.

88% said the US should have sought UN Security Council authorization for military action; 66% said the US should not draw the lesson that it should feel more free to use force in the future without UN authorization; while 57%-67% said the UN, not the U.S., should lead in dealing with alleged threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

57% disagreed, 38% agreed, that the US "has the right or even the responsibility to overthrow dictatorships."

Two out of three respondents rejected pressuring Middle Eastern governments, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, to become democratic.

Respondents were equally split on whether the US or UN should temporarily govern Iraq; 54% prefer a UN police force; 57% believe the UN should direct relief and reconstruction efforts. 25% said the US shouldn't spend money rebuilding Iraq when there are so many problems at home; nearly 75% said "it would be unwise and immoral for the US to overthrow the Iraqi government and then just leave."

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