United States News Digest
Kerry Calls Phony Jobs Surge 'Welcome News'
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate John Kerry issued a short statement April 3, accepting the faked unemployment figures released by the Bush Administration last week at face value. "I hope it continues," he said, calling the alleged increase of about 300,000 jobs "welcome news." He added, however: "For too many families, living through the worst job recovery since the Great Depression has been, and continues to be, far too painful." Then, in his radio response to the Bush Saturday morning radio show, Kerry ignored the report, and Bush's manic euphoria, altogether, speaking only about his "plan" to use taxes to "bring the jobs home."
Bush Confidante Karen Hughes Coming Back
Bush confidante Karen Hughes is coming back on the job, much to the relief of the President's staff. Although she'll remain in Austin, where she has lived since her 2002 resignation as Presidential counsellor, Hughes will be "stepping up her engagement" with the Bush reelection campaign, according to the March 28 New York Times. In reality, she never left, as she is in constant contact with Bush, speaking to him several times a week. Her return now is heralded by the beginning of her six-week tour to promote her new autobiography, Ten Minutes from Normal, which describes Bush in glowing terms. Hughes estimates that by August, she'll be travelling full-time with Bush, and stay with him until election day in November.
Perhaps appropriately, according to the New York Post, Hughes is known as "Nurse Ratched," the character from 1960s-era dark comedy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who keeps the inmates in the asylum under control. Bush trusts Hughes "like almost no one else on his staff," the Times reports, so much so that there is some nervousness that her return might create conflict with political adviser Karl Rove, and lead to internal disputes about strategy and "message."
Censored Report: U.S. Unprepared for Bio-Terror Attack
A forum held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in December 2001, concluded that the October 2001 anthrax attacks "revealed weaknesses in almost every aspect of U.S. bio-preparedness and response." It exposed deficiencies in public-health infrastructure, and laboratory, forensic, and diagnostic capabilities and showed the need for better planning for local distribution of medication and provision of treatment for mass casualty events, among other things. It calls for recapitalization of the U.S. public health infrastructure, which, the report notes, the U.S. invested very little in during the 1990s. It also notes that this underinvestment resulted in public-health departments maintaining the minimum workforce needed to do the maximum work, combined with the adoption of just-in-time service delivery in the private sector. The rest of that discussion, however, is redacted, like several other sections of report, on the demand of the Defense Department, which participated in the December 2001 forum and sat on the report for two years because, according to a statement issued on March 26 by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the study could circumvent DOD "rules and practices established to prevent the spread of information associated with WMD."
The DOD's claim is ridiculed by participants in the forum, because it was held in an unclassified setting. Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, who released the redacted version of the report, told the March 29 New York Times that "Refusing to disclose the lessons learned from the anthrax crisis is self-defeating in that it impedes the learning process."
Border Vigilantes Out To Catch and Kill Mexicans
A vigilante group calling itself the "American Border Patrol" announced that it would launch its first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), dubbed "The Border Hawk," during the March 27-28 weekend, to detect illegals crossing the border. American Border Patrol works with other anti-immigrant vigilante groups, such as "Ranch Rescue," which claim to be financing the purchase of equipment to aid their in self-appointed task of guarding the border, El Norte of Mexico reported March 24.
Ray Borane, leader of Ranch Rescue, is quoted: "This is no joke, nor a game. We have reports that Mexican soldiers have made incursions into some areas of the United States near the border, in which they have committed robberies and abuses. There are accusations that they raped a family in November." Therefore, he warned: "The order is lethal. The next time that we see a Mexican soldier in our territory: two shots to the chest and one to the head."
Private Security Firms Hiring Away Special Forces Troops
Experienced members of the U.S. military's special operations forces are being lured to private security firms by promises of $100,000 to $200,000 annual salaries, two to three times what they make in the military. The CIA also apparently pays pretty well, as the Pentagon's top official for special operations policy, Thomas W. O'Connell, told a House committee, earlier this month. O'Connell said that intergovernmental poaching "is starting to become a significant problem."
The departure of troops from the special forces so concerned the head of Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan D. Brown, that he convened an unusual meeting of his top commanders in Washington to discuss the problem of retention. "The kind of people we are training today ... are very attractive to those kinds of civilian private industries that provide security services both at home and abroad," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, in March. The manager of the Baghdad office of a British security firm told the March 30 New York Times, "Any people with special operations backgrounds are in high demand right now."
Pentagon Cancels Test of Internet Voting
Amid growing opposition to computerized votingcatalyzed by Lyndon LaRouche's Presidential campaignthe Pentagon announced March 30 that it has decided to drop its $22-million pilot plan to test Internet voting for 100,000 U.S. military personnel and civilians living overseas.
In February, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had already decided not to allow Internet ballots to be counted in the November Presidential election, but had said the program would be conducted on an experimental basis. Now, the Pentagon has scrapped the experiment. "[R]ight now we're not going to do it," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood.
The cancellation comes as the program, which had been set up to run in 50 counties in seven states, was being tested for certification.
World Court: U.S. Must Provide Review for Death Row Mexicans
The International Court of Justice ruled March 31, that the United States must provide "meaningful review" of the cases of 51 Mexicans on U.S. Death Row, because U.S. failure to inform the Mexicans of their right to counsel from Mexican consular officials during their trials, violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, and therefore international law. The presiding judge said the review of the cases of the 49 Mexicans who have not yet exhausted the normal appeals process, could be included as part of that appeals process, but requested that the U.S. should make an exception, and review the cases of the three who have finished the appeals process one last time. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case of one of those three last November, so it remains to be seen what the Scalia-dominated court will decide. The government of Mexico brought the case before the ICJ in January 2003.
Kerry Seen Losing Momentum
According to an article in the April 1 New York Times, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is being criticized by a number of Democrats for having failed to intervene in the hot situation created by the Clarke attack on President Bush. Some are comparing him to Michael Dukakis, who allegedly undermined his campaign by taking a time-out in his campaign against George Bush the elder. A knowledgeable Washington source provided EIR with a similar evaluation this week, saying that between his vacation and his recent shoulder surgery, Kerry has missed a terrific opportunity to go after the President. This source attributed Kerry's lack of aggressivity, at least in part, to the fact that his campaign is currently being run by the DNC and the so-called 527 Committees, those fundraising groups largely controlled by George Soros, like MoveOn.org.
What's clear from the media is that Kerry is committing precisely the error Lyndon LaRouche warned him against, by concentrating on "raising money" and hobnobbing with the big-bucks operativesat a time when a mobilization of the lower 80% of family-income brackets is absolutely crucial to defeating the Cheney-Bush Administration, and reversing the depression.
GOP Files Suit Against Dem Soft-Money Committees
The Bush campaign and the Republican Party on March 31 filed charges accusing the Kerry campaign and seven "independent" organizations of conducting a criminal conspiracy to inject large amounts of "soft money" into the 2004 election.
The suit addresses the "527," or "soft money" committees, permitted under the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law; these can raise unlimited amounts of funds from big donors, and run political ads, so long as they are independent of the campaign.
The problem not addressed by the lawsuit is that George Soros and other banking interests have by this means taken control over the Kerry campaign. These funding conduits (known as "527" committees after the IRS Code which permits their existence) have put up about $20 million this month to counter $41.8 million in Bush campaign television ads. Kerry only had $5.8 million in media funds for his own campaign in March. They have become known as the "shadow Democratic Party."
One of the committees, MoveOn PAC, was asked by former White House counterrorism adviser Richard Clarke to stop running an ad which uses his criticism of the Bush Administration's anti-terrorism program, but MoveOn has refused.
Daschle Threatens To Block All Judicial Nominations
The partisan war in the Senate over judicial nominations got hotter on March 26, when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) vowed to block all of the Bush Administration's pending judicial nominations unless the White House promises not to make any more recess appointments. The two recess appointments that President Bush has made so far, Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering, Sr., and Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, had been blocked in the Senate by Democratic filibusters. Daschle reportedly had the nearly unanimous support of the Democratic caucus to issue the threat, after he tried to take up the matter with Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn), who refused to make any promises.
Daschle told reporters on March 30, "We will not be able to move on the confirmation of judges until we are given the assurance that they will not recess-appoint future judges, especially judges that have been rejected by the Senate." He charged that such a practice is "an abuse of the institutional prerogatives of the Senate and we just can't accept that."
Frist responded by accusing the Democrats of partisan obstructionism. He said that most of the 22 nominations that are pending are for positions where there are judicial emergencies, where caseloads are stacked up very high. He complained that the Democrats, in demanding that the President "needs to give up that Constitutional right to make recess appointments" before any of the 22 nominations can be moved, is practicing nothing but "clear-cut obstruction" which "can't be tolerated."
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