Smearing Blix: Wolfowitz ordered CIA to investigate UN weapons inspector

Cursor links to this Global Research report on more Bush shenanigans involving the selling of war with Iraq:

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was so eager to see the United States launch a preemptive strike against Iraq in early 2002, that he ordered the CIA to investigate the past work of Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, who in February 2002, was asked to lead a team of U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, in an attempt to undermine the scientist.

The unusual move by Wolfowitz underscores the steps the Bush administration was willing to take a year before the U.S. invaded Iraq to manipulate and or exaggerate intelligence information to support it’s claims that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States and that the only solution to quell the problem was the use of military force.

Full text here.

The power of linguistics

Looking into George Bush's use of "dependency-creating language," Renana Brooks points out how the president slyly uses language as a political tool. From the use of empty language (words so abstract they're nearly impossible to oppose) to personalizing (distracting an audience from content by focusing on the speaker's personality), he's got an arsenal of strategies. Perhaps the scariest: negative framework:

A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of "learned helplessness," showed that people's motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing.

Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate.

Read it all.

"I'd rather teach peace."

Coleman McCarthy is truly one of my heroes. A former Washington Post columnist and founder of the Center for Teaching Peace, he's made it his life's mission to see that conflict resolution gets equal time as the study of war in America's classrooms. Excerpts from an interview in Hope magazine:

You can send a group of pacifists to a scene of conflict, and a certain number are killed or wounded. What's society's judgment? "The damned idiots!" Send in an army loaded with weapons and a certain number are killed or wounded. What's the judgment? "That's war, no problem." The double standard persists.

* * *

...U.S foreign policy is based on the "izes": theorize, demonize, victimize, and rationalize. Bush theorized about Iraq's threat, he demonized Saddam Hussein, he victimized Iraqis at the other end of the bombing runs, and then rationalized it as the way to peace.

Two types of violence exist: hot and cold. Hot is felt, visceral, visual, obscenely cruel, immediate, and well-reported by the media: the World Trade Center, the Columbine High School massacre, the sniper attacks in Washington. Cold violence is unfelt, distant, out of sight, and generally ignored by the media: the 40,000 people who die of hunger-related or preventable diseases every day. Executions on death row. The 12 million animals killed every day for food. But how can we be selective about violence? The victims are dead either way. Yet selectivity prevails. On September 11, September 12, September 13 -- and all days since, 40,000 people died of hunger and preventable diseases. Why so little attention to that violence?

* * *

George W. Bush is not the problem. Nor is the high-spending Congress that oils the war machine. I'm the problem. I need to figure out how to be a better husband, a better father, a better writer, a better teacher. And all of us need to figure out what our commitments are, and do more to fulfill them. On one of his good days, Gandhi had it right: "If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed--but hate these things in yourself, not in another." Tolstoy--with whom Gandhi exchanged many letters--had the same thought: "Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing themselves."

How to feed Africa

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and aren't fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

If it wasn't such a serious topic, it'd almost be funny: George W. Bush blames the European Union's ban on genetically modified foods for starvation in Africa. But critics believe his hyperbolic point of view, proffered at the EU summit this week, reveals a focus not on the horror of African hunger, but on a global biotech market that will grow to $2 trillion by 2010--a market that the US controls by a margin of two to one. "He can only have been informed by the multinationals, the Monsantos of this world, to make a statement that displays as much ignorance as that," said Patrick Holden of the environmental group Soil Association."It is nonsense. Even serious experts on GM crops will concede there is no evidence that GM foodstuff can make any greater contribution to feeding the world than existing agricultural science." One such expert, Aaron deGrassi of the University of Sussex, UK, conducted a study called, "Genetically Modified Crops and Sustainable Poverty Alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Assessment of Current Evidence." Tracking GM sweet potatoes and maize in Kenya and GM cotton in South Africa, the study concluded that Holden is correct. One news report summarizes the conclusions, "The answer to Africa's poverty and food shortage problems does not lie in biotechnology," adding:

The findings reveal that GM crops do not offer any answers to soil fertility, resistance to genes by pests among other problems faced by the farmers of the three crops. It also clear that biotechnology is not the answer to corruption, declining commodity prices, inequality in land distribution and ownership, income disparities, and armed conflicts which are some of the major cause of poverty/hunger in Africa.

According to Diet for a Small Planetauthor Frances Moore Lappe, the question isn't whether the world has enough food, it's why the food doesn't get to those who need it. Consider: "For every human being on the planet, the world produces two pounds of grain per day--roughly 3,000 calories, and that's without even counting all the beans, potatoes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables we eat, too. This is clearly enough for all of us to thrive; yet nearly one in six of us still goes hungry."

While the majority of Americans don't want genetically modified foods (according to a new study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 55% of Americans--and a European high 89% of the French--believe GM fruits and vegetables are bad), it turns out neither do people in Africa: during a food shortage in Zambia last year, the country refused thousands of tons of genetically modified maize and opted to wait for a shipment of non-GM goods instead. "We are not going to accept GM food until there is world consensus on its safety for human consumption," said Zambia's Commerce, Trade and Industry Minister Dipak Patel. Offering evidence that hunger in African can be solved without GM solutions, Zambia's president announced last week that this year the country expects to nearly double last year's 600,000 tons of grain production.

While around half the world's population--some 35 countries including Japan, China, Australia, and Saudi Arabia--prohibit genetically modified foods, the Bush administration has filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization seeking to force the European Union to drop their ban on genetically modified foods. As Amadou Kanoute of the African office of Consumers International said on Tuesday, "How can one country decide for another country without taking into account the opinion of the other country's people?"

Download a copy of "Genetically Modified Crops and Sustainable Poverty Alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Assessment of Current Evidence," published by Third World Network-Africa, here.

Q.

As the word "quagmire" re-enters the headlines, nearly dormant since Vietnam, Alternet's Jim Lobe assesses the situation in Iraq: a USA Today headline on Thursday reported "U.S. Troops May Be In Iraq for 10 Years: Defense officials reportedly seek up to 54 billion dollars a year." Morale is tanking (a sergeant stationed in Iraq told the Washington Post, "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"). The number of troops still in Iraq--150,000, with some 30,000 more provided by coalition partners on the way--is fast approaching the 200,000-troop estimate pooh-poohed as "wildly off the mark" by Paul Wolfowitz when predicted by former army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki. Soldiers are still being killed at a rate of one every two days, despite the fact that Bush has proclaimed the war over.

Lobe asks: "So why are we in this handbasket? Is it the result of grave errors of judgment or part of a neoconservative master plan?"

More on Kerry

Hmm, perhaps a bit of clarification is in order. Lest it seem like I'm a big John Kerry booster, let me just say: I'm not. I will be if he's the Democratic nominee facing off against Bush, and if no amazing third-party candidate enters the race. I'd prefer Howard Dean's backbone or Dennis Kucinich's progressive innovation over another Al Gore, but, when it comes down to Election Day, I'll be voting for whoever has the best shot at ousting Bush. And perhaps Kerry/Clark could do it. Perhaps.

Still, I realize that, posting something touting Kerry's Purple Hearts (which say little about his abilities to govern) right before the MoveOn primaries might seem like, well, bias. So I'd direct you, again, to the Boston Globe's comprehensive series, which includes Kerry's voting record, some of the controversies surrounding his antiwar (and pro-war: he supported the most recent Gulf War) activities, and his climbing of the political ladder. Read it, then decide for yourself.

For other viewpoints, particularly on Kerry's recent war views, see Noam Chomsky's 1998 ZNet article:

Senator John Kerry added that it would be "legitimate" for the U.S. to invade Iraq outright if Saddam "remains obdurate and in violation of the United Nations resolutions, and in a position of threat to the world community," whether the Security Council so determines or not. Such unilateral U.S. action would be "within the framework of international law," as Kerry conceives it. A liberal dove who reached national prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War, Kerry explained that his current stand was consistent with his earlier views. Vietnam taught him that the force should be used only if the objective is "achievable and it meets the needs of your country." Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was therefore wrong for only one reason: it was not "achievable," as matters turned out.

Or read the letter from a Veterans for Peace activist to Kerry after his vote to support George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

(Thanks, Heather.)

Vote Today!

John Kerry + Wesley Clark?

While I lean more toward Rep. Dennis Kucinich's unabashed liberalism or Gov. Howard Dean's chutzpah, I'm intrigued by Joe Conason's Democratic dream ticket: John Kerry and Wesley Clark. To counter Karl Rove's campaign strategy of casting Bush as a strong "wartime" president, this ticket would pair two progressives who are also highly decorated veterans. Kerry won five Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, then went on to join Vietnam Veterans for Peace; Clark graduated first in his class at West Point, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and ended his military career as the four-star supreme allied commander of NATO. Bush, as you might recall, decided not to complete his Vietnam-era tour with the Texas Air National Guard. While Kerry is a bit difficult to pin down (see the Boston Globe's excellent series on the Massachusetts senator), Clark seems to make good sense:

In an interview with The American Prospect magazine last March, he articulated an outlook that would serve the Democrats well. "Terrorism is a multilateral problem," he told Michael Tomasky. "You cannot defeat it in one nation. You need international police work, teamwork, international harmonization of laws against terror. You act unilaterally, you lose the commitment of your allies to make it work. That’s the one thing that will kill you in the war on terrorism." To him, America represents "the embodiment of the Enlightenment," which calls for "a foreign policy of generosity, humility, engagement, and of course force where it is needed. But as a last resort."

Don't forget, MoveOn's online Democratic primary starts tomorrow and lasts 48 hours. Learn about the candidates, then register for free to vote.

Bove jailed

Jose Bove, the French farmer who became a figurehead of the anti-globalization movement when he helped dismantle a McDonald's in protest, has been arrested for destroying genetically modified crops. Eighty cops stormed Bove's home in France to haul him off to serve a 10-month sentence.

My Day of Meats

The same day I finished Ruth Ozeki's fascinating Fast Food Nation-style novel My Year of Meats (complete with gory scenes of beef slaughter run amok, a 5-year old girl whose perfectly mature breasts are the result of livestock hormones, and the preemptive use of antibiotics on healthy chickens--surprisingly profound and entertainingly written), I picked up Frances Moore Lappe's new book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. "To get just one calorie of food energy from steak, we burn 54 irreplaceable fossil-fuel calories," she writes, "so producing one pound of steak--providing less than 1,000 calories--uses up 45,000 fossil fuel calories." It was also that day when none other than McDonald's offered yet another reason to give up factory-farmed meat: antibiotics used in meat production can lower the effectiveness of antibiotic use in humans. Currently an estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs in the United States are given to healthy pigs, cows and chickens to promote growth and prevent disease. The AP reports on McDonald's new policy about buying meat treated with antibiotics:

Under the four-page policy, McDonald's is telling its direct suppliers - which provide most of its poultry and 20 percent of all its meat - to phase out the use of antibiotics that promote growth in animals by the end of 2004. They will be asked to submit annual certifications testifying they are complying and face periodic audits.

Indirect suppliers, those providing beef and pork, also are being encouraged to stop the practice or risk losing business clout with one of the world's largest meat buyers. McDonald's said those seeking preferred status will have to certify compliance and maintain records of their antibiotic use.

The new policy does not prohibit the use of antibiotics to treat sick animals.

Kudos to McDonald's, but, regardless, I'm switching to grass-fed, or none at all.

For related resources, visit Ruth Ozeki's excellent links page or the Organic Consumers Association website.

WorldCom in Iraq

According to Molly Ivins, perpetrating the worst accounting fraud in American history doesn't disqualify you from cashing in on the great Iraqi gold rush. Just like Halliburton (accused of bribery in Nigeria), WorldCom is there.

With a track record like this...

Time for a recap:

1. Al-Qaeda is still active, and Osama bin Laden is allegedly still alive.

2. So is Saddam.

3. The weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found in Iraq, and

4. Afghanistan is incredibly unstable, some say on the brink of anarchy, with skirmishes continuing (seven rockets were fired recently at a US base).

5. American GIs continue to die in Iraq, while

6. living conditions worsen for its citizens.

7. And North Korea is still flailing about trying to get attention for its nuclear arms program.

With this kind of track record, what's the Bush administration doing picking a fight with Iran? Does the US have the knowhow, not to mention the budget and public support, to knock yet another Islamic country off its hinges?

Dumb as a rock?

Don Wright's editorial cartoon.

The truth about Cynthia McKinney

Greg Palast seeks out the truth about former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who lost her re-election bid when NPR, The New York Times, and others quoted her as saying the Bush administration may have known about the September 11 attacks beforehand. Problem is, she never said anything of the sort.

But wait, there's more to the story than that.

* * *
UPDATE 6/20: Transcripts of a speech given by Rep. McKinney to the Congressional Black Caucus in September 2002 reveal what McKinney did say:

And after I've asked the tough questions, here's what we now know:

* That President Bush was warned that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and crash them into buildings in the US;
* That in the weeks prior to September 11, 24-hour fighter cover was placed over the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas;
* That in the weeks prior to September 11, Attorney General Ashcroft stopped flying commercial aircraft and instead flew Government aircraft;
* That the US received numerous high level warnings from a wide range of foreign intelligence services warning of impending hijackings and terrorist attacks;
* That a number of FBI agents were pleading with their superiors to conduct intensive investigations into the suspicious activities of various men in US flight schools;
* That in the days prior to September 11, highly suspicious stock market activity in aviation and insurance stocks took place indicating that certain well-placed people had advance knowledge of the attacks.

And now this week we learn that the FBI had an informant living with two of the actual 9-1-1 hijackers. All of this has become public knowledge since I asked the simple question: What did the Bush Administration know and when did it know it.

(Thanks for the link, dear reader whose e-mail I accidentally deleted.)

Brilliant author, bumbling dad

Reading The New York Times magazine this weekend, it was nice--after reading about how video games are turning our kids into cyborgs--to find excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 journal entries. Reading his charming account of a bumbling stint as the solo parent of a 5-year-old while his wife was away reminded me that, in lots of ways, kids haven't changed all that much:

Thursday, July 31: At about 6 o'clock, I looked over the edge of my bed, and saw that Julian was awake, peeping sideways at me out of his eyes, with a subdued laugh in them. So we got up; and first I bathed him, and then myself; and afterward I proposed to curl his hair. I forgot to say that I attempted the same thing the morning before last, and succeeded miraculously ill; indeed, it was such a failure that the old boy burst into a laugh at the first hint of repeating the attempt. However, I persisted, and screwed his hair round a stick, till I almost screwed it out of his head; he all the time squealing and laughing, between pain and merriment. He endeavored to tell me how his mother proceeded; but his instructions were not very clear, and only entangled the business so much the more. But, now that his hair is dry, it does not look so badly as might have been expected.

Free Suu Kyi or lose aid

Japan threatened today to cut aid to Burma unless the country's ruling junta frees the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Right on.

Kids, spam, and porn

From Wired News:

Four out of five children receive inappropriate spam e-mail touting get-rich-quick schemes, and almost half receive spam linking to pornographic materials, according to a study released Monday by an Internet security company.

A substantial number of the 1,000 children ages 7 to 18 interviewed for the survey by Symantec said they felt "uncomfortable and offended when seeing improper e-mail content."

"Parents need to educate their children about the dangers of spam and how they can avoid being exposed to offensive content or becoming innocent victims of online fraud," said Steve Cullen, Symantec's senior vice president for consumer products. One in five children opened and read spam, the study found, and more than half of them checked e-mail without parental oversight.

Among the other findings in the survey:
• 80 percent of the respondents said they are bombarded by sweepstakes messages.
• 62 percent received spam touting dating services.
• 47 percent received e-mails with links to pornographic websites.
• 34 percent have felt uncomfortable receiving spam.

Fishy

Despite a net worth of $1.5 million, Republican senator Richard Lugar paid no income tax last year. (Via BuzzFlash.)

Marjorie Kelly: From Greed to Grace

Encompassing themes from Enron-style greed (and its alternatives) to women's spirituality, author-editor Valerie Andrews interviews Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics magazine and author of The Divine Right of Capital.

Andrews: Most of us dream of making the world a better place, yet we also have to pay the mortgage. Can we address our material and spiritual needs in a single breath? For example, coins originally had pictures of the gods engraved on them. They were viewed as talismans of good fortune and representatives of good faith. How can we reclaim a view of money as a sacred element in our lives?

Kelly: Money is a kind of a talisman -- when it comes to you, you can make anything you choose from it. It's like a wish that's magically granted, and the first question is, "What are you going to do with it?" Of course we need to be aware that money has its own rules, and these must be heeded. But how different would our lives be if we could get rid of our fear of scarcity and think of its potential to unite us?

We mistakenly believe that if we pile up enough money we'll be safe forever. Yet in that pursuit, we end up making everyone else unsafe. What do you think the CEO of Enron was trying to do? He was trying to shore up his own domain and in the process, he destabilized the entire stock market. This notion that we can exist apart from community, insulating ourselves with money, is sad and also very dangerous.

Read the full interview.

(Thanks, John K.)

Cousins on a free society

"What is the eternal and ultimate problem of a free society? It is the problem of the individual who thinks that one man cannot possibly make a difference in the destiny of that society. It is the problem of the individual who doesn't really understand the nature of a free society or what is required to make it work. It is the problem of the individual who has no comprehension of the multiplying power of single but sovereign units. It is the problem of the individual who regards the act of pulling a single lever in a voting booth in numerical terms rather than historical terms. It is the problem of the individual who has no real awareness of the millions of bricks that had to be put into place, one by one, over many centuries, in order for him to dwell in the penthouse of freedom. Nor does he see any special obligation to those who continue building the structure or to those who will have to live in it after him, for better or worse. It is the problem of the individual who recognizes no direct relationship between himself and the decisions made by government in his name. Therefore, he feels no special obligation to dig hard for the information necessary to an understanding of the issues leading to those decisions. In short, freedom's main problem is the problem of the individual who takes himself lightly historically."

--Norman Cousins (1915-1990)