Month: April 2005

Tim Brazeal has announced that refunds of contributions to save Star Trek: Enterprise will soon be on the way. Paramount has apparently reiterated their earlier statement that it will not accept fan money and that the decision to end Enterprise is final.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi did not help himself with voters by allying himself with American President George Bush on the invasion of Iraq. When an Italian journalist being driven out of captivity was fired upon, and an intelligence agent who had negotiated her release was killed, and the agent was elevated to the status of a national hero, one had to wonder how Berlusconi would do in the next elections. The crisis arose quickly. Not so surprisingly, Berlusconi’s party took a drubbing in regional elections. As the Independent explains, “[t]he crisis was precipitated on Friday by the two parties, the UDC (Democratic Union of the Centre, a rump of the old Christian Democrats) and the New Italian Socialist Party, which pulled out of the government after Mr Berlusconi had refused to make drastic changes to his cabinet and programme following the disastrous showing of his own party, Forza Italia, in regional elections two weeks ago. Of the 13 regions up for grabs, his party managed to win only two.”

The next I caught was in a newsletter from Deutschewelle, which said:

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has reportedly agreed to temporarily resign and receive a new mandate from President Carlo Ciampi to form a new government. This comes after he reached a deal with rebel ministers of the Christian Democrat UDC party to rejoin a new centre-right government and avoid snap elections. The crisis began on Friday when four UDC ministers resigned demanding sweeping policy changes after the coalition suffered heavy losses in regional elections. The move left the government of the verge of collapse with observers predicting that Berlusconi would lose if a new general election were to be held now.

Only it hasn’t worked out that way:

There’s confusion over the state of the Italian government. This, after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi failed to resign during a meeting with President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Berlusconi had been expected to step down and then seek to form a new government. But after their meeting, President Ciampi said Berlusconi should go back to parliament to see how much support he still had. Earlier reports suggested that Berlusconi had reached a deal with rebel ministers of the UDC party to join a new centre-right government and avoid fresh elections. The crisis began last Friday when four UDC ministers resigned. They were demanding major policy changes, after the coalition suffered heavy losses in recent regional elections.

According to the Independent, this attracted fire “from Piero Fassino, the leader of the Democratic Party of the Left, the biggest opposition party, who spoke of ‘a crisis that is being transformed into an indecent farce…. With his behaviour, the premier is making a mockery of his coalition, the institutions and the whole country at once,’ he said.”

Of course you’d expect me to claim the courts are too conservative. But Donald G. Savage, writing in the Los Angeles Times, points out that, “Ninety-four of the 162 active judges now on the U.S. Court of Appeals were chosen by Republican presidents. On 10 of the 13 circuit courts, Republican appointees have a clear majority. And, since 1976, at least seven of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court have been filled by Republican appointees.”

So why should anyone care about President Bush’s ten beleaguered nominees? The difference is that no Republican administration prior to the younger Bush has been so evangelical. Even the strongly ideological and rabidly anti-communist Ronald Reagan–with Central American savagery and the Iran-Contra scandal to his credit–looks moderate next to Bush. As Ron Reagan (the former President’s son) put it, his father’s “Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts.” Jon Margolis wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

For a revolutionary, Reagan was a pragmatist who always governed more moderately than he orated. He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” but adhered to the arms control treaties it signed and negotiated another. He proclaimed that “government is the problem” but did not reduce its size or impact. He pushed through the biggest tax cut in history in 1981, then quietly allowed his aides to negotiate a large tax increase in 1982. He assailed abortion but did nothing to alter its legal status. He signed an executive order to inventory public land for possible sale to private interests but signed several wilderness bills.

Not so, Bush:

His political heirs, led by Bush, are more consistent ideologues. Bush, who lost the popular vote in 2000, lacks the electoral mandate Reagan got with his 51 percent majority in 1980. But armed with the congressional dominance Reagan never had, Bush has pursued his conservative agenda with more single-minded fervor than Reagan did in his first term, or even after he won 59 percent of the vote and 49 states in 1984.

Bush has abrogated international treaties, launched a war opposed by important U.S. allies, started construction of the anti-missile system Reagan envisioned, cut taxes more often than Reagan and used his executive authority to weaken protections for workers and the environment. He has even proposed measures Reagan never dared espouse as president, such as semi-privatization of Medicare and Social Security.

Judges are appointed for life. Savage thinks these appointments won’t tip the balance much, but the motivations behind these nominations are much more strongly ideological, and they will act to preserve an existing imbalance.

According to a story in the International Herald Tribune, Catholics are challenging the church’s prohibition on condoms.

John Paul said that the focus of his papacy was the poor, the outcast, the sick – urging the world, just this past February, “to use every means available to put an end to this scourge” of AIDS.

But because of his no-condoms policy, AIDS activists will remember him as a man who did not live up to this message.

The Catholic Church’s prohibition might be seen as genocidal in sub-Saharan Africa, where 26.6 million people are infected. Nearly 90 million could be infected within the next 20 years.

This story doesn’t offer nearly as much ammunition for opponents of the Bush administration as it seems to. According to Jonathan S. Landay, writing for Knight-Ridder, “The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.” This story apparently first appeared in the Counterterrorism Blog where Larry C. Johnson writes, “For Secretary of State Rice these numbers are a disaster. It is tough to argue we are winning the war on terrorism when the numbers in the official Government report will show the largest number of incidents ever recorded since the State Department started reporting on terrorist incidents.”

But Johnson continues: “In the Secretary’s defense, however, the sharp jump in numbers has more to do with a change in methodology of counting rather that an actual surge in Islamic extremist activity. In fact, if you take time to parse the numbers, the actual scope of terrorism by Islamic extremists in 2004 appeared to decline relative to the attacks during 2003 (except for Iraq). Rather than run from the numbers the State Department and the Intelligence Community should seize the opportunity to really get their hands around the issue and provide Congress and the American people with a clear, apolitical assessment about the reality of the terrorist threat we face.”

I’m not surprised that terrorism is okay when the victims are “our enemies.” It’s just that sometimes the hypocrisy is so bald. The following comes from the ANSWER Coalition:

Tell Bush & Congress: NO asylum for Luis Posada Carriles
Saturday, April 16, 2005

Urgent Alert – Take Action Now! Stop the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from gaining asylum in the United States – Support Venezuela and Cuba’s demands on Bush to extradite the murderer Luis Posada to Venezuela

Urgent Alert – Take Action Now!

Stop the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles
from gaining asylum in the United States

Support Venezuela and Cuba’s demands on Bush
to extradite the murderer Luis Posada to Venezuela.

Tell George W. Bush and Congress:
No asylum for the fascist criminal in the United States!

The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition has set-up an easy-to-use way to send Bush and Congress a message. Use the link below to tell them: “No safe-haven for the terrorist Posada in the U.S.”

On April 12 Luis Posada Carriles, the notorious anti-Cuba terrorist and killer, appealed for asylum in the United States through his attorneys in Miami. The planner of terrorist acts that have killed dozens of Cubans and other people, Posada was in hiding in Central America for the last seven months after being prematurely released from jail by Panama’s right-wing puppet president Mireya Moscoso at the behest of the Bush administration.

Posada was convicted in Panama after being caught in November 2000 with 33 pounds of C-4 explosives intended for assassinating Cuban President Fidel Castro. Now, the U.S. government is entertaining inviting this man, who poses such a great and vicious danger, to receive safe haven from prosecution in the United States.

Undoubtedly assisted by the U.S. government to enter the United States, Posada has been in Miami since the end of March. His three other conspirators, Pedro Remón, Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo and Guillermo Novo Sampol, were also pardoned in Panama and flew into Miami last August. They are implicated in several murders in the United States, including the 1976 Washington DC car-bombing that killed Chilean Orlando Letelier and American Ronnie Moffitt.

Posada was a CIA agent in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and possibly to the present. He was trained in explosives and sabotage at the notorious School of the Americas in the CIA’s “Operation 40” for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

What are some of his other crimes? Posada and his accomplice Orlando Bosch were the masterminds of the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 on October 6, 1976 that killed 73 people. Posada and Bosch plotted the crime from Venezuela.

The Justice Department moved to deport Bosch from the United States in 1989. In the deportation order, U.S. Asst. Attorney General Joseph D. Whitley said: “For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence. … His actions have been those of a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims.”

These words hold true for Posada, his partner-in-crime.

However, Bush Sr. overrode the deportation order in 1990. Bosch lives in Miami.

Posada bragged to the New York Times in an interview (July 12 & 13, 1998) that he directed the 1997 bombings of Havana hotels. A 32-year-old Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo, was killed at the Copacabana hotel.

These are only some of the shocking crimes carried out against the Cuban and other peoples.

While in Venezuela in the 1970s, Posada oversaw the killing of Venezuelan leftists as head of the Intelligence and Prevention Services Division (DISIP) of the national police. In the 1980s Posada commanded the supply of munitions to the Nicaraguan contras from the CIA’s Ilopango airbase in El Salvador.

Today, the presence of Posada, Bosch and other terrorists in Miami is proof that the U.S. government is fully behind the terror attacks on Cuba.

Since the 1959 Cuban revolution, more than 3,400 Cuban people have died by violent attacks perpetrated on the island by anti-Cuban paramilitary groups that operate freely in Miami.

It is time for justice for the victims of Posada’s crimes. Peace-loving people in the U.S. and all who believe in justice must make it clear that Posada is not welcome here, and we must demand that this government reject his asylum claim.

The fact that the Bush Administration and the CIA are clearing the way for Posada to take up residence in the U.S. is evidence of the extreme hypocrisy and outright lie of Bush’s so-called “war on terror.” They have engaged in a calculated and cynical manipulation of the term to claim to be fighting against “terrorism” when in truth, they are waging a political war for conquest and empire.

We urge all A.N.S.W.E.R. supporters to send a letter to Bush and Congress now to say:

1. No asylum for Posada
2. Honor the extradition demand of Venezuela

A.N.S.W.E.R. has set up an easy-to-use mechanism to facilitate sending a quick email to George W. Bush and the Congressional Representative in your District and Senators in your state with your demands. Several members, including William Delahunt (D-MA) and Jim McDermott (D-WA), have protested Posada’s asylum petition.

We have provided a sample letter, but you can customize your message to get your point across. Please take a moment now, by clicking here to send a message to Bush and Congress.

Countering one of the evangelical accusations against Michael Schiavo, a state report–ordered released by Judge George Greer who presided over the case and ordered Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube disconnected–found no evidence that she “was denied rehabilitation, neglected or otherwise abused.” The autopsy results are unlikely to settle the issue of whether Terri Schiavo was in a minimally conscious state–as her family claimed–or a persistent vegetative state–as her husband claimed.

According to a story in the Washington Post, “Michael D. Griffin, President Bush’s nominee to become the new NASA administrator, told senators at his confirmation hearing yesterday that he would reassess the agency’s decision to cancel a space shuttle mission to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is training civilians either to defend their country against a predicted U.S. invasion or to form “a virtual private army at the service of the president, designed less to defend the nation than to tighten his domestic controls.” Which is it? There’s no way to know for sure, but a unilateralist U.S. foreign policy, accusations of U.S. involvement in the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, and the expressed Bush administration policy towards Chávez, certainly offer Chávez an excuse to do whichever it is he is doing.

According to the Independent, the Pentagon thinks the military situation in Iraq has improved sufficiently, that it can consider a partial withdrawal of “up to a third of its forces.” That would presumably ease the pressure to impose a draft.

But amid the cheery news comes a warning. According to John Pike, “director of the Washington-based think tank GlobalSecurity.Org,” “The question is whether this is simply a lull and whether, once they have regrouped, it will be back to business as usual. That could very well be the case.”

The violence against Americans and Iraqi government officials has dropped, and the Pentagon claims progress in training Iraqi forces. But the Indendent notes that a considerable amount of violence is directed at Iraqis, that oil production in the north of the country is still hampered by insurgent attacks, and that about 48% of Iraqis are still unemployed.

Meanwhile, Salon.com reports well over 1 million soldiers have been deployed since the 9/11 attacks, “approximately one-third the number of troops ever stationed in or around Vietnam during 15 years of that conflict.” And of those, “one-third have gone more than once.”

The data sheds new light on how all-consuming the post-9/11 wars have been for the U.S. military, and suggests a particular strain on U.S. ground forces. An increasing number of military experts believe those forces — the Army and Marines — are months away from being overtaxed to the point of serious dysfunction. The situation in Iraq must continue to stabilize. If it doesn’t, and the Bush administration continues to both reject the idea of a draft and rebuff efforts to permanently increase the size of the Army and Marines, U.S. ground forces will break down to a point not seen since just after Vietnam.

“Unless things start to improve, we will start to see a serious problem in six to nine months,” said Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps three-star general and a former Marine Corps deputy chief of staff under Ronald Reagan. “I think they [the Pentagon] are betting that things are going to get better. But that could be a miscalculation,” said Trainor. “This crowd has been pretty good at miscalculating.”

Pike believes the reserves are already broken. “[M]ilitary experts said the tempo of the Iraq war will eventually erode the Army and the Marine Corps into a state of disrepair similar to that after Vietnam, when discipline, morale and readiness were considered by some historians to be the worst ever. The Army was recovering from a war in which troops had killed their superior officers. Drugs were rampant. Some units in Vietnam had refused to fight. That took a decade to fix as the military moved away from the draft to an all-volunteer force in 1973 and began to purge officers who were performing poorly.”