Month: May 2005

Visiting Latvia, President Bush said of the Yalta agreement that divided Europe following World War II, “‘Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable,’ the president said, opening a four-nation trip to mark the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. ‘Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable.'” Putin, on the other hand, “issued an absurd statement that could have come straight from the Soviet files, insisting that the Soviet Union was “invited” into the Baltic states in 1939. He has also defiantly emphasised the Soviet aspect of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ — the roles played by Stalin and communist ideology, which appeal to a nationalist and nostalgic Russian population.”

Bush was to head to the Netherlands Saturday night for a ceremony near Maastricht on Sunday. In a television interview, Bush “thanked the country for its help in Iraq.” But “[c]urrent polls show about two-thirds of Dutch don’t approve of the job Bush has done as U.S. president. About half say the Dutch should not have participated in the coalition.” In Amsterdam, protesters reminded us who was who in more modern times, carrying signs declaring Bush a war criminal and a terrorist.

[Updated] The BBC, This is London, and the Independent are all reporting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has won a third term as prime minister, with Labour winning, but with a much smaller majority. According to the Independent,”Tony Blair saw his majority cut sharply today as Labour was hit by a Tory revival and a protest vote over the Iraq war. The party was still heading for a third successive general election victory for the first time in its history, but suffered a string of surprise defeats…. The early results showed that many people who voted Labour in 1997 and 2001 had deserted the party to give Mr Blair a ‘bloody nose’ over the Iraq war, which became the dominant issue in the second half of the election campaign.” Greg Palast explains in an e-mail column, dated 4 May, “The British vote only for their local Member of Parliament. The MPs, in turn, pick the PM. If a carpenter in Nottingham doesn’t like Prime Minister Blair (not all dislike him, some detest him), the only darn thing they can do about it is vote against their local MP, in this case, the lovely Alan Simpson, a Labour Party stalwart who himself would rather kiss a toad than cuddle with Tony. Therefore, the majority of the Queen’s subjects — deathly afraid of the return of Margaret Thatcher’s vampirical Tory spawn — holds their noses, vote for their local Labour MP and pray that an act of God will save their happy isle.” The Los Angeles Times cited a more conservative view, saying “‘There is no alternative (alas),’ reads the cover of the election-week edition of the Economist magazine, over a picture of a smiling, somewhat vacant-looking Blair.”

Palast may be right. According to the Independent, “Defeated Labour candidates were quick to blame Mr Blair’s unpopularity and the war for their demise. Bob Marshall-Andrews, conceding defeat in Medway, Kent, said: ‘It is impossible not to draw the conclusion that the war and the Prime Minister have caused a serious haemorrhage in Labour votes.’ He called for a change of leadership ‘sooner rather than later’.” An article in This is London said Blair’s “vote was cut by five points to a mere 36.3 per cent, the lowest share ever recorded by a winning party. Mr Blair immediately promised he had “listened and learned” from the verdict.” His majority was cut “from 160 to about 66” seats in parliament.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, acknowledged that Labour had suffered a protest vote. He said: “I promise that we will listen and learn so that we can serve our country and our community even better in the years to come.”

Although Mr Blair set to enter the history books, the sharp drop in his majority will raise a question-mark over whether he can remain in Downing Street for anything like the “full term” he wishes to serve before standing down. He will face calls from within the party for an early handover of power to Mr Brown, whose allies believe Labour would have suffered bigger losses if the Chancellor had not played a pivotal role in the campaign.

The Conservative Party picked up some seats as some voters switched from Labour to the Liberal Democrats. According to This is London:

• Mr Howard’s share of the national vote was a dismal 33.2 per cent – barely improved from the 2001 election. He picked up 36 seats with a paper swing of around 3.3 per cent, although this seemed mainly due to Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats.
• Charles Kennedy had a good night, achieving a 22.6 per cent share mainly at Labour’s expense and gaining around 11 seats. But his gains were massively below expectations, and poor against the Tories.

Rebecca Traister writes in Salon.com that the Family Research Council believes “giving the [human papilloma virus] vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” She cites an article in New Scientist where Debora MacKenzie explains:

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

This virus is the leading cause of cervical cancer, deaths from which “could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries.” So much for “right to life.”

IMPEACHMENT TIME: “FACTS WERE FIXED.”
Special to BuzzFlash
Thursday, May 5, 2005
By Greg Palast

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has “IMPEACH HIM” written all over it.

The top-level government memo marked “SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL,” dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Read that again: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed….”

For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, “Isn’t this grounds for impeachment?” — vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What’s needed is a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

And if this ain’t it, nothing is.

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob’s schemes never cost so many lives.

Here’s more. “Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

Really? But Mr. Bush told us, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the
+President, “After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons.”

We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.

Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, “beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.” Mission accomplished.

You should parse the entire memo — posted on my website — and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch.

Now sharp readers may note they didn’t see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn’t. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.

It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair’s political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party’s members in Parliament.)

But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush’s fabrication of a casus belli as some “British” elections story. Apparently, our President’s fraud isn’t “news fit to print.”

My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that’s a story for “over there.”

The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica’s affections. And the US media could print nothing else.

Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.

My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what’s good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What’s bad about Americans is that it’s so easy to do.

———–
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read the memo in its entirety at www.GregPalast.com

You may reproduce this report without fee but with attribution.

Media requests: contact(at)gregpalast.com

It appears the “861 evidence” will be tested in court. The folks at 861.info claim is that the income tax legally does not apply to income earned within the country. Trial is set for 11 July 2005.

From the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University:

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
–SLIS Dean and Rudy Professor of Information Science Blaise Cronin, reprinted from SLIS Network spring 2005.

Wonder how many blogs this’ll show up on?

For those of us who are amused that Sts. Peter and Paul Church in the North Beach district of San Francisco is at 666 Filbert, the joke is over. No, it’s not because the church is moving. According to a story in the National Post, “A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.” So we’ll also have to find another way to villify Ronald Wilson Reagan — each of his names has six letters, hence 666.

Dr. [Ellen] Aitken, [a professor of early Christian history at McGill University] said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has reversed course in which, according to a story in the Miami Herald, undeterred by their failure in the Terri Schiavo case, the state government in Florida “provoked similar passions over the roles of government and courts in questions involving privacy and preservation of life,” by preventing a “13-year-old Palm Beach County foster child” from obtaining an abortion, despite a ruling from Palm Beach Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez. Department of Children & Families West Palm Beach spokeswoman, Marilyn Munoz, cited state law which prohibits the department from consenting to an abortion. The department had already opposed the young woman’s request to obtain an abortion, and was appealing.

Today, according to a story in the New York Times:

“Look, if the judge has ruled, it’s time to move on,” Governor Bush said. “It’s a tragedy that a 13-year-old child would be in a vulnerable position where she could be made pregnant, and it’s a tragedy her baby will be lost. There’s no good news in this at all.”

The next time you cuss out a Georgia driver for not being able to see, you might just be right. A story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that “House Bill 501 also dramatically reduces the requirement for drivers’ eye exams. The legislation, which takes effect July 1, was a key piece of [Gov. Sonny] Perdue’s agenda intended to reduce chronically long lines at metro Atlanta license sites…. Some experts have questioned whether safety might be compromised by ending regular eye exams. Perdue told reporters the exam was rudimentary. ‘Several other states had no eye exams from the time you got your license until age 65,’ he said. ‘I have no problem with what we came up with.'”

According to a story by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent, “there were 15,527 attacks on coalition forces, largely American, from July 2004 to late March 2005. Some 2,404 attacks took place in Baghdad from 1 November to 12 March.” Both these timeframes include the run up to the election held at the end of January, and the Bush Administration has been hoping that the election–and the formation of a government since–would improve matters. However, “[t]he bombings in the past week underline that the insurgents have lost none of their ability to carry out attacks, almost always without regard for civilian casualties, all over Iraq. In the three months since the elections on 30 January there was a drop in American losses which led to official optimism that the guerrilla war was on the wane.” Supposedly, the insurgents are seeking “direct talks with the US, a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces and the right to rebuild the Baath party.”