Folks,

Once again, the Onion nails it. (Anybody see the similar spoof on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show a couple days back?)

The Onion - Orange Alert Sirens

Folks,

Here’s a sad/funny commentary on White House briefings. The press couldn’t contain themselves. Ari was visibly flushed.

–C

Go to about 30:15 if
you just want to jump right to it:

http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/edrive/iraq022503_whpb.rm

———————
A
BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

BuzzFlash Note: Although we didn’t see this
occur, we have received
three separate reader accounts indicating that the
White House press
corps finally laughed at the absurdity of Ari Fleischer’s
lies, at least
once.

The following is the account from one of our
BuzzFlash e-mail reporters
about the White House news briefing on Tuesday,
February 25:

* * *

ON CSPAN — WH press conference with Ari ended
just now. It’s grim.
Not much new but a reiteration of the “Saddam must
disarm” and
some hints that Saddam and other top Iraqi leaders might be
assassinated
if GW gives the executive decree.

Then one tidbit floated
up. A reporter asked about a French report that
says Bush is offering a
bundle of concessions (and I think she actually
said ‘buying votes’) to
Mexico and Colombia, granting worker amnesty
and so on. Ari tap-danced. Then
she (the reporter) started to press the
issue by saying “they (the French)
are quoting two US State Dept.
Diplomats that Bush intends to give work
permits to Colombia and Mexico.”

WOW. WOW…. Ari just drew himself up
with imperious indignation and said
something like “you’re implying that the
President is buying the votes of
other nations and that’s just not a
consideration” or words to that effect.

And guess what happened? The
whole press corps, normally sheep, broke
out in laughter… sweet, derisive
laughter. They kept on laughing as
Ari turned on his heels and strode out.
Sheesh.

Go down to White House Press Briefing (02/25/2003) and click on
the
video. After it buffers, play from about 28 minutes forward for
context,
30 minutes forward to watch Press laugh at Ari’s BIG FAT GOP
LIE.

http://www.c-span.org/

http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/edrive/iraq022503_whpb.rm

*
* *

Addtional Reader Note:

Here is the excerpt from today’s WH
Press Briefing transcript posted
at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030225-9.html#18
to add
to the discussion about him being laughed out of the room.

A
BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Folks,

John Perry Barlow is an American icon, a true patriot, and a believer in privacy and personal rights. I always enjoy his take on current affairs I think you will too. Here’s one of his newsletters.

–C ^

<(o)>

/_ _\
———> B a R L o W F R i e N D Z —–>

<A continuing series of occasional outbursts to about 1172 of my
dearest friends. Please let me know if you’d rather not receive it.
But you’ll miss some great parties…

I do try to keep this list to actual friends - I mean folks who might
bail me out of jail. Some of what I report here is too personal to
be of general interest. Nevertheless, please feel free to post or
forward anything you think merits wider distribution.

Finally, if this broadcast feels impersonal, I hope you will remember
that individual responses generally elicit personal replies. And even
if I’m sometimes too swamped to write back, I delight in hearing from
you.>
——————————> ——————-> ——–>

1. Sputter, Mutter, Howl…
2. Could They Possibly Be Right?
4. Gilberto Gil and Brazil.

———————->> ——————–>>>> ——>

THE SILENCE OF THE SPAMS

Ok.

Once again, I’m starting to get messages from you BarlowFriendz
inquiring into the state of my health or wondering if you’ve been
dropped from the list. It’s strangely heartening, your assumption
that if I’m not spamming at you, there must be something wrong.

Your concerns appear to have been sharpened by contemporary events.
I’ve read so far about ten different versions of the following: "Why
are you being so quiet? Surely you have something to say about what’s
going on at the moment..?"

Well, actually, no. Not exactly. I’ve been in outrage overload for
weeks. I’m finding it hard to express myself these days with anything
more articulate than gesticulations and sputterings. Lately I’ve been
mute as Congress.

(Actually, not everyone in Congress has lost his voice. Senator
Robert Byrd recently gave a speech too historic to earn notice in any
mass medium but which has been so widely circulated on the Internet
that I’ll spare you the receipt of yet another copy. If you haven’t
read it, you may find it at:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/webreturn/?url=http://byrd%2Esenate%2Ego
v

It contains this utterly true line: "I truly must question the
judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked
military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is ‘in the
highest moral traditions of our country’".)

Of course one wonders what purpose might be served by saying anything.

An estimated eleven million people marched all over the planet this
weekend. (Check them out http://www.hyperreal.org/~dana/.) While this
out-pouring, unprecedented in the history of civilization, managed
for the first time to draw acknowledgements from Bush and Blair, they
were dismissive at best. (Blair elevated non sequitur to surreal art
form when he said that the million plus protestors in London were
fewer in number than people killed over the years by Saddam Hussein.)

I have been dumb-struck by the Administration’s sublime arrogance,
their mythic hubris, their utterly un-entitled entitlement. What
could I say that might detail their brutal expedience more boldly
than their own actions? Mouth open, jawing thin air, eyes wide and
staring, I’ve kept quiet.

Meanwhile, under conditions of "Orange" Alert, our streets now
contain more machine gun-toting heavies per capita than I ever saw in
East Germany, the wildly arbitrary TSA is randomly searching cars
without probable cause as they enter airports, the Justice Department
is introducing an even more unconstitutional addendum to the USA
PATRIOT Act, and the predictions I made to you on the afternoon of
September 11, 2001 are being realized more dreadfully than even I
believed they could be.

Still. It is morally useful to remember that, no matter how certain,
one might be wrong. If I am to condemn the Emperor’s smug certitude,
I must be mindful of my own. Thus, I’ve been attempting, in the back
of my mind, to make a case for the Administration’s behavior.

—————————–>>>!!
—————————-@@@——————————–>>>>>>>>

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney
was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events
raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

With this in mind, I’ve given some thought lately to how all this
might look to the Vice President (who is, I remain convinced, as much
the real architect of American policy as he was while Gerald Ford’s
Chief of Staff or George the First’s Secretary of Defense).

As I’ve mentioned, I once knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get
elected to his first public office as Wyoming’s lone congressman. I
conspired with him on the right side of environmental issues. Working
closely together, we were instrumental in closing down a copper
smelter in Douglas, Arizona the grandfathered effluents of which were
causing acid rain in Wyoming’s Wind River mountains. We were densely
interactive allies in creating the Wyoming Wilderness Act. He used to
go fishing on my ranch. We were friends.

With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the
smartest man I’ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he
will take you on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in
your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the
ideologue he appears at this distance. I believe he is personally
indifferent to greed. In the final analysis, this may simply be about
oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it that way. I am relatively certain
that he is acting in the service of principles to which he has
devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that is unimpeded by sentiment
or other emotional overhead.

Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the
moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there
is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition,
myself included, has not asked out loud. It’s not an easy question to
answer, but neither is it a question to ignore.

Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have
prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest
habit.

The more common of these has been symmetrical balance of power. This
is what kept another world war from breaking out between 1945 and
1990. The Cold War was the ultimate Mexican stand-off, and though
many died around its hot edges - in Viet Nam, Korea, and countless
more obscure venues - it was a comparatively peaceful period.
Certainly, the global body count was much lower in the second half of
the Twentieth Century than it was in the first half. Unthinkable
calamity threatened throughout, but it did not occur.

The other means by which long terms of peace - or, more accurately,
non-war - have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a
single ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the
Pax Romana, a "world" peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180
AD. I grant that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They
crucified dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets,
and generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus
Himself. But war, of the sort that racked the Greeks, Persians,
Babylonians, and indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar,
did not occur. The Romans had decided it was bad for business. They
were in a military position to make that opinion stick.

(There was a minority view of the Pax Romanum, well stated at its
height by Tacitus: "To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things
they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it
peace." It would be well to keep that admonition in mind now.)

There are other, more benign, examples of lengthily imposed peace.
One could argue that the near absence of major international wars in
the Western Hemisphere results from the overwhelming presence of the
United States which, while hardly a dream neighbor, has at least
stopped most of the New World wars that it didn’t start. The Ottoman
Empire had a pretty good run, about 700 years, after drawing its
borders in blood. The Pharoahs kept the peace, at least along the
Nile, for over 2800 years until Alexander the Great showed up.

If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the
latter doesn’t necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be
made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in
the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist
peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other.

It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability
can be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one
that terrified us into peace during the Cold War. Europe, old and
new, is furious with the United States at the moment (if my
unscientific polls while there in January are at all accurate), but
they are a very long way from confronting us with any military threat
we’d find credible.

I’m pretty sure that, soon enough, hatred of our Great Satanic selves
will provide the Islamic World with a unity they have lacked since
the Prophet’s son-in-law twisted off and started Shi’ism. But beyond
their demonstrated capacity to turn us into a nation of chickenshits
and control freaks, I can’t imagine them erecting a pacifying balance
force against our appalling might.

I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations
through in vastly greater detail than I’m providing here and has
reached these following conclusions: first, that it is in the best
interests of humanity that the United States impose a fearful peace
upon the world and, second, that the best way to begin that epoch
would be to establish dominion over the Middle East through the
American Protectorate of Iraq. In other words, it’s not about oil,
it’s about power and peace.

Well, alright. It is about oil, I guess, but only in the sense that
the primary goal of the American Peace is to guarantee the Global
Corporations reliable access to *all* natural resources. wherever
they may lie. The multinationals are Cheney’s real constituents,
regardless of their stock in trade or their putative country of
origin. He knows, as the Romans did, that war is bad for business.
But what’s more important is that he also knows that business is bad
for war. He knows, for example, there there has never been a war
between two countries that harbored McDonald’s franchises.

I actually think it’s possible that, however counter-intuitive and
risky his methods for getting it, what Dick Cheney really wants is
peace. Though much has been made of his connection to Halliburton and
the rest of the Ol Bidness, he is not acting in the service of
personal greed. He is a man of principle. He is acting in the service
of intentions that are to him as noble as mine are to me - and not
entirely different.

How can this be? Return with me now to the last time I was convinced
he was insanely endangering life on earth. This was back in the early
1983 when Dick Cheney was, at least by appearances, a mere
congressman. He was also Congressional point man for the deployment
of the MX missile system in our mutual home state of Wyoming. (The MX
was also called the "Peacemaker," a moniker I took at the time to be
the darkest of ironies.)

The MX was, and indeed still is, a Very Scary Thing. A single MX
missile could hit each of 10 different targets, hundreds of miles
apart, with about 600 kilotons of explosive force. For purposes of
comparison, Hiroshima was flattened by a 17 kiloton nuclear blast.
Thus, each of the MX’s warheads could glaze over an area 35 times
larger than the original Ground Zero. Furthermore, 100 MX missiles
were to lie beneath the Wyoming plains, Doomsday on the Range.

Any one of the 6000 MX warheads would probably incinerate just about
every living thing in Moscow. But Cheney’s plan - cooked up with
Brent Scowcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and other familiar
suspects - was not about targeting cities, as had been the accepted
practice of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The MX was to be
aimed instead at the other side’s missile emplacements.

The problem with this "counter-force strategy, " as it was called,
was that it was essentially a first-strike policy. The MX was to be
placed in highly vulnerable Minuteman silos. In the event of a Soviet
first strike, all of the Peacemakers would have been easily wiped
out. Thus, they were either to be launched preemptively or they were
set to "launch on warning." The MX was to be either an offensive
weapon or the automated hair-trigger was to be pulled on all hundred
of them within a very few minutes after the first Soviet missile
broke our radar horizon .

In either case, the logic behind it appeared to call for fighting and
winning a nuclear war. Meanwhile, President Reagan was bellowing
about "the Evil Empire" and issuing many statements that seemed to
consider Armageddon a plausible option.

I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill during the winter of ‘81-’82. I
lobbied over a hundred Congressmen and Senators against a policy that
seemed to me the craziest thing that human beings had ever proposed.
The only member of Congress who knew more about it than I did was
Dick Cheney.

Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one
of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an
hour listening to us argue about "circular errors probable" and "MIRV
decoys" and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were
leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day,
turned to me and said, "I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous
person I’ve ever seen up here." At that point, I agreed with her.

What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used
to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when
their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho.
Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would
start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as
though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low
regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.

As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of
Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as
a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision
of implacable, irrational, lethality that the Soviet leaders would
decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation.

It worked. While I think that rock ‘n’ roll and the systemic failures
of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism
as did Dick’s mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didn’t
look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and
Reagan’s terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging
psychological rather than nuclear warfare.

I’m starting to wonder if were aren’t watching something like the
same strategy again. In other words, it’s possible Cheney and company
are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the
Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I’m right
about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any
more than the MX missile did.

First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his
country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that,
they want to convince the Iraqi people that it’s safer to attempt his
overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American
ground troops.

Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet
that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad
thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to
use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity
than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words,
they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate
weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed
with either.

By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted
by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and
the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism
will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access
to McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Network, all "news" will come
through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by
Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac.

If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would
prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I’d been in charge back
in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still
be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they
actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method.
Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble
reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas.
We’ll probably know which it’s going to be sometime in the next
fortnight.

By then, I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart of
darkness and closer to the heart itself.

————————–>>>>>——————————- -> ->
-> ->!!!

MINISTER GIL AND SWEET BRAZIL

For the the last year or so, I’ve felt a growing intuition that
Brazil was beckoning me. Of course, in some senses, Brazil is always
calling to those who love music, dance, the sensual pleasures, and
open-heartedness. But this seemed more directed than that. With
increasing frequency, I found myself meeting Brazilians who became
immediately significant players in my life. It cropped up in my
dreams.

By last fall, I had decided that it was about time for me to return
to Brazil, and I started looking for a pretext, since I rarely go
anywhere these days without what appears to be a reason and.
generally, an airline ticket that someone else has paid for. By New
Year’s, my inner voices were muttering so much soft Portuguese that I
had about concluded that that I would be forced to go there simply
because I wanted to, and on my own dime at that.

Then, in early January, I got a phone call from my old friend Julian
Dibbell who wanted to know if I would be willing to meet with the
newly appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture. I was headed to Cannes
the following week to speak at a music industry conference called
Midem. (This is truly the Trade Show of the Living Dead, but never
mind that…)

Apparently, the Minister, a musician and political hero named
Gilberto Gil, had read some of my writings on the economics of
expression, had seen that I was going to be at Midem, where he was
also appearing, and wanted to know if we could get together and talk.

I am now embarrassed to confess that, when Julian called me, I knew
next to nothing about this remarkable man or his remarkable work or
his remarkable life. Still, he was from Brazil, to which I’m
favorably disposed, and he was an official to the new Lula
government, to which I’m also favorably disposed. I told Julian I
would be happy to talk with him.

A few days later I found myself sitting in the bar of the Hotel
Majestic in Cannes, surrounded by a Fear-and-Loathing welter of music
biz bottom-feeders, looking for the arrival of an official entourage.
When Gil did appear, he was immediately obvious, but not because he
came in force. In fact, the most notable thing about him at first was
that he seemed like the least self-important person in the room.
That, and a kind of light…

A slight black man with short dreads, he arrived alone and dressed in
casual hip. I had not seen a picture of him, but I felt like I knew
him at once. Indeed, I felt like I had always known him. If Gilberto
Gil were a woman, I would say it was love at first sight.

We talked for about an hour and half, rarely losing eye contact. He
seemed to me a vastly improved version of myself, a sort of black,
Brazilian Barlow, more talented, wise, and accomplished, but saddled
with none of my vices.

We found that we agreed in great and simple completeness on a number
of important matters. We agree that music - indeed, all of human
creation - is an ecosystem that deserves more thoughtful stewardship
than it’s getting. We admire the works of Frank Zappa, Andre
Malreaux, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, and Teilhard de Chardin (among
many, more obscure, others). We believe there is One Love. We believe
that fear is the only problem. We think that the economics of
creativity may be very different from the economics of manufacturing.

We believe that there is a great conflict underway between large
institutions, most notably corporations, and human beings. We believe
that the moment has come round when the human beings must find ways
to influence the behavior of these global creatures so they serve
human rather than institutional objectives. We believe that, just as
the United States has become the capital of Leviathan, so might
Brazil become the capital of that which is simple and human.

We believe that there is more reason for optimism than ever. We
believe, along with Emerson, that, when it gets dark like this, it’s
easier to see the stars.

We believe in common many things, including a few I’m not sure I’ve
ever discussed with anyone. We were both interested in extending the
conversation. He wanted to know when I could come to Brazil and I
told him I’d work on clearing out my calendar in March.

Gil has led an astonishing life. I love his music, now that I’m
becoming familiar with it, and has formed it out of of a huge stew of
musical forms and traditions. In Brazil, I now learn, he is the Pele
of song. He has created music with a broad variety of folks, ranging
from Jimmy Cliff to the Incredible String Band.

He has also been a notable dissident and political activist. Along
with his best friend, Caetano Veloso (also a song-writing superstar),
he was imprisoned and exiled by the Generals during the late 60’s. He
has been tireless in his defense of the downtrodden but is not a
conventional leftist, any more than I am.

Gil is a deeply spiritual guy, though not apparently religious in the
usual sense. He is an intellectual without the post-Modern rhetorical
garbage that has has made the learned discourse of our generation so
wearisome. He is Marx without Lenin. (Or maybe with Lennon.) He is
Gandhi with a guitar. He is a very cool dude.

Given all this, I was delighted indeed when I got an invitation a
couple of weeks ago to come to Brazil and spend ten days around
Carnival traveling around the country with Gil and the former French
Minister of Culture Jack Lang, himself a pretty interesting fellow.

I can’t think of a better way to get myself out of this winter of our
discontent, and I’m now in New York trying to horse myself together
for what could be a fairly lengthy summer tour. My return ticket is
for March 13, but I don’t really have to be back in the United States
until the latter part of March.

I feel like I’m diving off into the next phase of my life. I’m
jazzed, I’m grateful, and I’m a little apprehensive.

I expect you’ll hear more from me as this adventure unfolds.

Light and Hope,

Barlow

–
*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Call me anywhere, anytime: 800/654-4322

Fax me anywhere, anytime: 603/215-1529

Current Cell Phone: 917/863-2037 (AT&T)

Alternative (Inactive) Cell Phone: 646/286-8176 (GSM)

**************************************************************

Barlow in Meatspace Now: New York City (Until 2/24) 212/965-1991

(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Rio de Janeiro (2/24-26) ->
Salvador de Bahia (2/26-3/1) -> Recife (3/1-2) -> Salvador (3/2-3) ->
Rio de Janeiro (3/3-4) -> Salvador (3/4-7) -> Sao Paulo (3/7-8) ->
Salvador (3/8-?) -> Brazil… -> New York City (3/19-25) -> San
Francisco (3/25-26) -> San Jose (3/27-28) -> Orlando (3/29-31) …

**************************************************************

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of
state and corporate power.

– Benito Mussolini

_______________________________________________
BarlowFriendz mailing list
BarlowFriendz@eff.org
https://owl.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/barlowfriendz

Folks,



Not only are we not seeing any sort of hue and cry about the

administration’s connections to Enron, and letting those rapacious

fraudmongerers actually write our national energy policy…not only are we

seeing a total absence of any dogged special prosecutors, or serious

Congressional inquiries…but the one investigation that DID manage to get

under way just threw up its hands and gave up. See below.



Add one more knock against Congressional Democrats: they’ve got no guts.

Where is their Kenneth Starr?



After all the recent depressing news, I thought it was about time for some

humor. This isn’t fair, but it’s a howl all the same:



Fake State of the Union



–C





Congress Watchdog Won’t Appeal Cheney Case

11 minutes ago  Add Politics - Reuters to My Yahoo!





By Susan Cornwell



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a major victory for the White House, the

investigative arm of Congress said on Friday it was giving up its courtroom

battle to get records of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force.



The decision by the General Accounting Office (news - web sites) not to

appeal a federal judge’s earlier dismissal of its case ended a fierce fight

over congressional access to information held by the executive branch.





But the GAO climbdown does not necessarily protect the White House energy

papers forever. Private groups — including environmentalists who say they

were shut out of official energy policy deliberations — are still seeking

those documents in court.





Comptroller General David Walker, head of the GAO, sued the White House last

year to try to force the release of the names of energy industry executives

and lobbyists that Cheney and aides consulted in developing Bush

administration energy policy in 2001.





The lawsuit was dismissed on Dec. 9 by U.S. District Judge John Bates. While

Walker was still convinced of the merits of the case, he had decided that to

take the case to federal appeals court “would require investment of

significant time and resources over several years,” a GAO statement said on

Friday.





Meanwhile groups ranging across the political spectrum from the Sierra Club

(news - web sites) to Judicial Watch are also suing and “this information

will be made available to GAO if they are successful in their cases,” the

GAO statement added.





White House officials, who had argued that the GAO had overstepped its

bounds, said the outcome vindicates their position. Spokeswoman Claire

Buchan said the result “ensures the important principle of the president and

the vice president being able to receive unvarnished advice.”





The Justice Department (news - web sites) also praised the result.





“Allowing the GAO to sue the Vice President would improperly interfere with

the President’s ability to formulate the best possible policies for the

American people,” spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said in a statement.





DEMOCRATS SEE ‘NEED FOR MORE SUNSHINE’





Democratic lawmakers, who had suspected energy industry influence on the

White House energy policy and urged the GAO to go to court, said the outcome

was a blow against accountability.





“This is a tremendous setback for open government,” said Rep. Henry Waxman

of California.





Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said that he would have preferred the GAO to

keep fighting. “Reasonable people cannot differ on the need for more

sunshine on this administration’s actions,” he said.





The Bush administration announced an energy policy in May 2001 that called

for more oil and gas drilling and a revival of nuclear power. The policy

later bogged down in Congress.





Environmentalists cried foul when the policy was announced, saying they had

not been consulted, while they believed that Bush campaign supporters from

the energy industry had been.





The White House last year acknowledged that Cheney and members of the energy

task force met several times with representatives of Enron, the former

energy trader that collapsed in an accounting scandal. Enron had been a

major contributor to Bush political campaigns.





The lawsuits filed by private groups have forced the release of task force

records from agencies such as the Energy Department, but not from the White

House.





BATES SAID GAO LACKED STANDING



Judge Bates had said Walker lacked standing to bring the case because

neither house of Congress nor a congressional committee had authorized the

pleadings or issued a subpoena for the information.



The GAO statement argued that Bates erred on that point. It said two Senate

committee chairmen and two subcommittee chairmen had asked the congressional

agency to pursue the matter before Walker filed suit nearly a year ago.



Although Walker dropped his court battle, he said the result did not remove

the GAO’s right to sue again. The Bush administration should still “do the

right thing” and disclose the information, he said.



“We hope that GAO is never again put in the position of having to resort to

the courts to obtain information that Congress needs to perform its

constitutional duties, but we will be prepared to do so in the future if

necessary,” Walker said.

Folks,
This is so well said, I won’t say anything
else.
–C

---

Opinion

January 15,
2003
The United States of America has gone mad
John le
Carre

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but
this
is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the
Bay
of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than
the
Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin
Laden could have
hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the
freedoms
that have made America the envy of the world are being
systematically
eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested
corporate
interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be
ringing
out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the
East
Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden
struck, but it was
he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta
would still
be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be
elected
in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of
the
already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor,
the
ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international
treaties.
They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in
its
continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden
conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies
are riding high.
Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are
told. The US defence budget
has been raised by another $60 billion to
around $360 billion. A splendid new
generation of nuclear weapons is in
the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy.
Quite what war 88 per cent of
Americans think they are supporting is a lot
less clear. A war for how
long, please? At what cost in American lives? At
what cost to the
American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost - because most of
those 88 per
cent are thoroughly decent and humane people - in Iraqi
lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger
from bin
Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations
conjuring
tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that
one
in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack
on
the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely
being
misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance
and
fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and
his
fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are
not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with
the enemy. Which is
odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would
love to see Saddam’s downfall
- just not on Bush’s terms and not by his
methods. And not under the banner
of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American
troops into battle is
perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal
war-to-be. Bush has
an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political
opinions. God
appointed America to save the world in any way that suits
America. God
appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern
policy,
and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic,
b)
anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has
pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are
equal in His sight,
if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers
one President, one
ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor
of Florida and the
ex-Governor of Texas.

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84:
senior executive,
Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90:
senior
executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000:
chief
executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice,
1991-2000:
senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an
oil
tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling
associations
affects the integrity of God’s work.

In 1993, while
ex-President George Bush was visiting the
ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait
to receive thanks for liberating
them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA
believes that “somebody” was
Saddam. Hence Bush Jr’s cry: “That man tried to
kill my Daddy.” But
it’s still not personal, this war. It’s still necessary.
It’s still
God’s work. It’s still about bringing freedom and democracy
to
oppressed Iraqi people.

To be a member of the team you must also
believe in Absolute Good and
Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from
his friends, family
and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush
won’t tell us is
the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is
not an Axis
of Evil - but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune
is to
sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and
who
helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who
doesn’t,
won’t.

If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his
citizens to his
heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day - think Saudi
Arabia,
think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think
Egypt.

Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours,
and
none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,
if
he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the
stuff
Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is
at
stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the
economic
imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need
to
demonstrate its military power to all of us - to Europe and Russia
and
China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East;
to
show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by
America
abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s
part in all this is
that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could
steer it. He
can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth
voice. Now
I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t
get
out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked
himself
against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay
a
glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as
our
Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate
simply
shrugs and looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of
personal
survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and
an
improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in
his
holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest
cowboy
rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the
boys?

Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag
us
into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever
been
there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no
more
democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the
UN.
By doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and
the
Middle East for decades to come. He will have helped to
provoke
unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos
in
the Middle East. Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign
policy.

There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in
without UN
approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the
special
relationship.

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his
head prefect’s
sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real
anxieties
about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is
how
he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial
assault
on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig
leaf
of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot,
and
because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and
Camp
David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

“But will we win,
Daddy?”

“Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in
bed.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly
impatient and may
decide not to vote for him.”

“But will people be
killed, Daddy?”

“Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign
people.”

“Can I watch it on television?”

“Only if Mr Bush says you
can.”

“And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will
do
anything horrid any more?”

“Hush child, and go to
sleep.”

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his
local
supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is
also
Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished
shopping.


The author has also contributed to an openDemocracy debate
on Iraq at
www.openDemocracy.net

Folks,

I thought this was
very interesting. There are some great quotes in here, including many
from military men who think that attacking Iraq is going to be another Vietnam
boondoggle (let’s not forget, we now know that the incident that legitimized our
going into Vietnam in the first place was one manufactured by the US govt in
order to create a pretext!).

Marines and Michiganders - Notable quotes from military and the press against the war.

And we already know that the intelligence reports
on Iraq from the CIA have become politicized. The administration simply doesn’t
want to hear it if it doesn’t fit their agenda, not even from the CIA. The one
that stuck out for me was this:

“…analysts at the Central Intelligence
Agency have complianed that senior administration officials have exaggerated the
significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its
possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for
war…At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some investigators said they were
baffled by the Bush adminstration’s insistence on a solid link between Iraq and
Osama bin Laden’s network. “We’ve been looking at this hard for more than a year
and you know what, we just don’t think it’s there,” a government official
said.”
The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/international/middleeast/02INTE.html?pagewanted=1

And, I guess I might as well say it: every time
I’ve seen these guys, from Bush to Rumsfeld to Powell to Fleischer to Tony
Blair, making their allusions to connections between bin Laden and Hussein, my
gut feeling has been that they’re floating balloons to see if anything will
work. The words are always couched in ambiguous, speculative terms, designed to
suggest substance without really having any. They’ve been saying they have hard
evidence for at least six months now, yet we’ve seen only the barest of threads.
For perspective, one might wonder why, if we’re going to such lengths to find a
connection between Hussein and bin Laden, we are apparently ignoring the
multitude of public facts that show that bin Laden and most of Al Quaeda came
from, and were supported by, the Saudis! And then one might wonder: well, is
this really about terrorism then? 

We’ll see what the weapons inspectors
say. But mark my words: if the Bush administration doesn’t get their pretext
then, they will not hesitate to manufacture one, or say to hell with it, we’ve
got his violations of UN resolutions on record, and we’re going in. I don’t
think there’s any serious question left that we’re going into Iraq. The only
real question left is about saving face. Will they be able to round up
sufficient participation from other countries to call their actions just,
or will our hegemony be exposed for what it truly is?

–C

Oh, isn’t this nice. (Maybe
you have seen this story already, as it’s from mid-December, but it was new
to me.)