News of the Month

September 13, 2003

Well, you all know that the illegal war in Iraq has turned into another Vietnam. The soldiers over there – reservists, mostly, yanked out of their jobs for a “short” stay in Iraq, have been told that their term of service over there is 1 year: and we’re real sorry about that, folks. Here’s yet another situation where having a flight-suit-in-chief instead of a real President, having a man who deserted from military service instead of taking his turn along with the rest of us, is going to bite us on the fanny. Our Resident Tush has just gutted the armed forces reserves of this country. There are going to be mass resignations from the Army Reserve, the National Guard, all of the reserve forces when those mismanaged reservists get home later this year.

And, of course, we support our troops … don’t we? Don’t we? We protect them, and reward them, and generally thank them for being over there in the noble cause of … of … I was about to say “freedom,” but even I’m not that cynical. What’s the truth? A report from the American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGVWA) says:

“Nearly half of the 697,000 Gulf War I Veterans are now ill and … over 200,000 of those servicemen/women have requested disability, but have received no adequate diagnosis or treatment, from either the Department of Defense or Veteran’s Affairs. Though there have been over 125 studies done by the government at the cost of over $300,000,000 to the taxpayer, we still have no answers as to what caused so many of our soldiers to become ill.

“The AGWVA is now again asking questions, this time, about the newest ‘mystery illness’ to hit the military. After being pressured by a few independent news reporters who have not permitted this ‘mystery’ to continue unabated, the DoD recently has been forced to announce the ‘mystery’ deaths of Gulf War II soldiers, and that at least 100 other men and women have become ill. Again, however, there were no adequate answers, but only that the ‘mystery illness’ diagnosis had reared its ugly head again.”

Why do you suppose that is? A story in the London Express might give us some insight:

“Soldiers and civilians in Iraq face a health time bomb after dangerously high levels of radiation were measured around Baghdad. Levels between 1,000 and 1,900 times higher than normal were recorded at four sites around the Iraqi capital where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used across wide areas. Experts estimate that Britain and the US used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armour-piercing shells made of DU during attacks on Iraqi forces. That figure eclipses the 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War. Unlike that largely desert-based conflict, most of the rounds fired in March and April were in heavily residential areas.

“If inhaled, the material can attack the body, causing cancers, chronic illness, long-term disabilities, and genetic birth defects…. Veterans of the first Gulf War believe that DU exposure has played a role in leaving more than 5,000 of them chronically ill and almost 600 dead in England – US figures are more like 2,000 dead, (and) 250,000 on disability of one sort or another).”

You heard, I guess, that less than a year after Resident Tush told the UN to take a flyin’ because they wouldn’t approve his little expedition in imperialism, he’s gone to them now demanding that they provide money and cannon-fodder to support our stupidity. France and Germany have already told him exactly which orifice to stick it into, and the whole UN can’t be far behind. Even Tony Blair, Georgie’s virtual lap dog through all this, is balking at sending more Britons over there to die. What kind of arrogance; what kind of plain, unbridled egomania must our royal emperor have – but then, we’ve already read you the opinions of several experts who believe little Prince Georgie’s egomania is so extreme it can be classed as insanity.

We talked about Resident Tush’s distain for the people in our military forces a couple of months ago, but it hasn’t stopped. This month the Secretary of Labor, on direct orders from Georgie’s corporate puppeteers, announced a huge expansion in the class of workers who will be exempt from the wage-hour laws. That means a whole lot more of you can be forced by your employers to work longer hours, and have the privilege of not getting paid for it! The TV talking heads say that worker productivity is up – all that means is that more product comes out at the end of each day; never mind how many hours the workers had to stay on the job to make that productivity happen. So how does this tie in to Resident Tush’s disrespect for the people in our military? One of the categories of workers his Labor Secretary exempted from the wage-hour laws was people who learned their skill in the military! If you learned your skill in the military, then your Führer wants your employer to be able to force you to work 10 to 12-hour days, and only be paid for 8 of those hours. Sweet, eh? For the corporations.

But there’s a follow-up – the US Senate, by a 54-45 vote (which included some Republicans), passed an amendment blocking those proposed changes. Resident Tush has promised to veto any version of the bill that doesn’t gut workers’ rights. We’ll see what happens.

And then we had that big power outage in the northeast. What happened? Well, obviously, something broke. But that’s not what really happened. Here’s part of a news analysis from the Buzzflash web site:

“In June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation’s power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Supporters of the amendment pointed to studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades as proof that their legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) should pass.

“Unfortunately, the Bush Administration lobbied against it, and the Republicans voted it down three separate times: first on a straight party line in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, then on a straight party line the U.S. House Rules Committee, and finally on a party line on the floor of the full House.

“As AP reported at the time, the amendment ... would have doubled the bill’s money for energy assistance for the poor to $600 and provided $350 million to support loans to improve the capacity of transmission grids. … Spotlighting the high political stakes, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-MO, took the unusual step of issuing a written statement about the committee’s energy votes. He said President Bush and Republicans are ‘committed to helping the Big Energy special interests’ and accused them of obstruction.”

Greg Palast had this to say about it, in his article “Dim Bulb in the White House”:

“I can tell you all about the ne’er-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters – the Niagara Mohawk Power Company (NiMo) – some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, NiMo built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State’s electricity ratepayers.

“To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

“And that’s why, if you’re in the Northeast, you’re reading this by candlelight tonight. Here’s what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to eliminate the rules. They called it ‘deregulation.’ ”

Not the kind of deregulation the Libertarian Party supports, but the kind in which a government, bought, paid for, and in the pocket of the corporate greed-heads (Jim Hightower’s phrase), steps aside and lets its corporate masters run roughshod over the welfare of the people and the state.

“Californians have found the solution to (their) deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called (Enron) a pack of “pirates” – and now he’ll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

“So where’s the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there’s no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.”

And finally, I have something so important that I want to present to you that I don’t have time to tell you about a lot of things I’d planned to – for example, how Bush’s tissue-paper house of lies about the Iraq war is becoming more and more obvious as time goes on. This one is so important that I want to stop here, for just a second, and make sure you’re really listening. (Not that you normally don’t listen, the rest of the show, but even that popcorn isn’t as important as this one.)

I’m going to read from an article in the newspaper The Guardian of Great Britain, written by Michael Meacher, a Member of Parliament and Britain’s Environmental Minister for the 6 years between 1997 and 2003:

“Massive attention has now been given – and rightly so – to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

“We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush’s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

“The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says ‘while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’ ”

So far it’s sounding like just what I said I wasn’t going to discuss – the lies about why we went to war in Iraq. But wait; he has more to say:

“First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad (Israeli intelligence) experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

“It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that ‘al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.’

“Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20^th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission. But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers.

“All of this makes it all the more astonishing – on the war on terrorism perspective – that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews air force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft. It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

“Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: ‘The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.’ ”

There’s a lot more to the article, including sources for many of his assertions and an analysis of why our corpornment bosses allowed 9/11 to happen – mainly, but not exclusively, to maintain the US’s dominance of the world oil supply. The entire article is available through my web site; go to the site, www.tom-davis.org, and select the “Liberty and Justice for All” link in the left frame; scroll down to the September 2003 listing, and look for the link in the rightmost paragraph for this month.