Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US begins building treaty-breaching germ war defence centre
US begins building treaty-breaching germ war defence centre Julian Borger in Washington Monday July 31, 2006 The Guardian Construction work has begun near Washington on a vast germ warfare laboratory intended to help protect the US against an attack with biological weapon, but critics say the laboratory's work will violate international law and its extreme secrecy will exacerbate a biological arms race. The National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Centre (NBACC), due to be completed in 2008, will house heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists simulate potential terrorist attacks.
To do so, the centre will have to produce and stockpile the world's most lethal bacteria and viruses, which is forbidden by the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Three years before that treaty was agreed, President Richard Nixon halted the production of US biological weapons at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The same military base is the site for the new $128m (£70m), 160,000 sq ft laboratory.
The green light for its construction was given after the September 11 attacks, which coincided with a series of still-unsolved anthrax incidents that killed five people. The department of homeland security, which will run the centre, says its work is necessary to protect the country. "All the programmes we do are defensive in nature," Maureen McCarthy, director of homeland security research and development, told the Washington Post. "Our job is to ensure that the civilian population of the country is protected, and that we know what the threats are."
The biological weapons convention stipulates that the signatories must not "develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain" biological weapons, and does not distinguish between offensive and defensive intentions.
A presentation given by Lieutenant Colonel George Korch said the NBACC would be used to apply "red team operational scenarios and capabilities" - military jargon for simulating enemy attacks.
Some analysts say the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the project will heighten suspicions of US intentions and accelerate work on similar facilities around the world.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
George W. Bush 2000 for President - Son of President Bush
ush was at least complicit in World Trade Center attack
The single thing that sticks out in my mind about the World Trade Center attack is the fact that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept those commercial jets. Those planes were in the air for over an hour after being hijacked - yet no interceptors we scrambled to stop them.
I used to live in Springfield Missouri. And a few years ago a famous golfer named Payne Stewart was killed in a plane crash. He was from Springfield - so this story had a greater local impact. What happened was that his plane - a small private jet with less than 10 people on board took off from Florida. Shortly after takeoff the plane went off course and failed to respond by radio. Within minutes fighter jets were scrambled and intercepted the plane. They observed frost on the inside of the window indicating a loss of cabin pressure - and that everyone was probably dead. The plane was on autopilot and flew for several hours before running out of fuel and crashing in South Dakota. What I clearly remember was being impressed with how fast that plane was intercepted.
On September 11th there were 4 commercial jets hijacked. All went off course - turned off their transponders - and refused to answer the radio. There was no doubt on the ground that 4 commercial jets we hijacked - yet no intercepter were scrambled - even though these planes were in the air for over an hour. It is standard operating procedure to scramble jets to see wqhat is going on. It doesn't take an order from the President to do this. But someone made an order to stand down and stopped the interceptors. Whoever gave that order is part of a government plot to allow the 9-11 tragedy to occur. I'm not prepared to say we were behind it. But we let it happen. And I have no doubts about that.
The single thing that sticks out in my mind about the World Trade Center attack is the fact that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept those commercial jets. Those planes were in the air for over an hour after being hijacked - yet no interceptors we scrambled to stop them.
I used to live in Springfield Missouri. And a few years ago a famous golfer named Payne Stewart was killed in a plane crash. He was from Springfield - so this story had a greater local impact. What happened was that his plane - a small private jet with less than 10 people on board took off from Florida. Shortly after takeoff the plane went off course and failed to respond by radio. Within minutes fighter jets were scrambled and intercepted the plane. They observed frost on the inside of the window indicating a loss of cabin pressure - and that everyone was probably dead. The plane was on autopilot and flew for several hours before running out of fuel and crashing in South Dakota. What I clearly remember was being impressed with how fast that plane was intercepted.
On September 11th there were 4 commercial jets hijacked. All went off course - turned off their transponders - and refused to answer the radio. There was no doubt on the ground that 4 commercial jets we hijacked - yet no intercepter were scrambled - even though these planes were in the air for over an hour. It is standard operating procedure to scramble jets to see wqhat is going on. It doesn't take an order from the President to do this. But someone made an order to stand down and stopped the interceptors. Whoever gave that order is part of a government plot to allow the 9-11 tragedy to occur. I'm not prepared to say we were behind it. But we let it happen. And I have no doubts about that.
Camp Casey III and Iraq
Monday, July 31st, 2006
Camp Casey III and Iraq
By Cindy Sheehan
After BushCo's stooge, Nouri al-Maliki was in America last week thanking soldiers for their sacrifices in helping the USA kill and oppress his very own people and thanking Congress for giving George a blank check to spend how he sees fit to kill and oppress the Iraqi people, almost 4,000 of our soldiers in Alaska's 172nd Stryker Brigade were shown how much they are appreciated by having their enlistments extended another 120 days.
I saw the Angel of Death in the skin of Donald Rumsfeld say, while he was busy rushing in or out of the Pentagon (it doesn't really matter), that it is "unfortunate" that the soldiers have to remain in Iraq. I think it is unfortunate for our troops and for the innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan that Donald Rumsfeld has to remain as the Secretary of War.
I can't imagine how disappointed the families and the soldiers must feel. The 172nd has been in the violent Anbar Province for almost a year and I am sure they and their families were starting to really look forward to their homecoming. I can imagine that there are more than a few mothers out there who were allowing themselves to start breathing again. I am sure mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, children, aunts and uncles, and extended friends and family were already planning coming home parties and anticipating the enormous hugs and overwhelming sense of relief that would accompany their soldiers home, too. Now the 172nd will be redeployed to Baghdad to be right smack dab in the middle of sectarian violence and back in the thick of things. Four more months of heat, spiders the size of puppies, MREs, anxiety and peril; as their Secretary of War and Commander in Chief drive around DC in cushy air-conditioned and up-armored SUVs and also get to sleep in comfy beds, cozy in the fact that the sacrifices of our children and their families are guaranteeing Exxon and other war bandits billions of dollars in profits.
Right-wing people who support the killing of innocent men, women, and children, are trying to stir up crap about my land purchase in Crawford, Tx to run Camp Casey. The worst thing that I have heard a Crawford resident say is that I am a "dumb Democrat." The crap that NEEDS to be stirred up in Crawford is that George and Co have the nerve to go on vacation when our soldiers can't get home after serving in the vile mess that BushCo created. Instead of working for peace and stability in the region, our continued presence there is encouraging and causing the violence. Our troops need to be removed---not increased.
Recent polls showed that 72% or our troops wanted to start coming home by the end of this year and 83% of the Iraqi people want the occupation to end. Those numbers are significant if only for the fact that they are probably low---soldiers and occupied peoples have never felt at liberty, or even secure to share their feelings with the oppressors.
To this end of creating a peace plan that the Iraqi people want and can feel comfortable and secure with (it is, after all, their country), a contingent of peace activists, including myself, will travel to Amman, Jordan to meet with Iraqi Parliamentarians who don't parrot what BushCo wants them to say and would actually like coalition forces to be removed from their country. It is an historic and significant step in this abominable and shameful episode of our history. The meeting is also highly significant since our State Department has been transformed into an adjunct of the War Department and is headed by the Deputy Secretary of War: Condi Rice. We have no diplomats in our country: just war mongers who can clear brush, shop for shoes, and laugh at gullible Americans all the way to the bank while they are depositing their war profits.
We will be meeting with the Iraqi representatives in Amman on August 4th, and many of us will return to Camp Casey in Crawford on August 6th to outline the plan and present a way that Americans and Iraqis can work together to end the killing on both sides of the conflict. August 6th is also a very meaningful date for me because it is the same day, one year ago, that I originally sat in the ditch with other peace mongers and we were eventually joined by thousands of peace mongers from all over the world.
On that day, we will ask to meet with George again to brief him on our meeting with real Iraqis who live, work, and raise their families outside of the Green Zone and outside of the influence of DC. Due to past performance, I don't think he will meet with us, (not very neighborly) but I am sure he will know that we are there and we have an Iraqi driven plan when his only plan is to kill more people because so many have already been killed---which is what "stay the course" and "honor the sacrifices of the fallen" really mean. George is so comfortable cutting and running from Crawford when he feels threatened by the truth, I wish he would cut our soldiers loose from the nightmare of occupation and allow Iraqis to run their own country.
Please come to Camp Casey this year, or donate to help promote peace for our time and our world. Since George has rescheduled his summer to avoid us, we will reschedule our summer to not allow him the pleasure of having a leisurely vacation while the Middle East is burning because of his policies.
If we can't count on our leaders to solve conflicts non-violently, then we must count on ourselves.
We need to get busy putting peace into practice. This is the time to do it and Camp Casey is the place where it will get done.
The Camp Casey dates have been changed to accommodate George's schedule and will be August 6th to September 2nd. Please go to the Gold Star Families for Peace website to stay posted on future exciting developments for Camp Casey III this summer.
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and currently on Day 27 of the Troops Home Fast.
Camp Casey III and Iraq
By Cindy Sheehan
After BushCo's stooge, Nouri al-Maliki was in America last week thanking soldiers for their sacrifices in helping the USA kill and oppress his very own people and thanking Congress for giving George a blank check to spend how he sees fit to kill and oppress the Iraqi people, almost 4,000 of our soldiers in Alaska's 172nd Stryker Brigade were shown how much they are appreciated by having their enlistments extended another 120 days.
I saw the Angel of Death in the skin of Donald Rumsfeld say, while he was busy rushing in or out of the Pentagon (it doesn't really matter), that it is "unfortunate" that the soldiers have to remain in Iraq. I think it is unfortunate for our troops and for the innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan that Donald Rumsfeld has to remain as the Secretary of War.
I can't imagine how disappointed the families and the soldiers must feel. The 172nd has been in the violent Anbar Province for almost a year and I am sure they and their families were starting to really look forward to their homecoming. I can imagine that there are more than a few mothers out there who were allowing themselves to start breathing again. I am sure mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, children, aunts and uncles, and extended friends and family were already planning coming home parties and anticipating the enormous hugs and overwhelming sense of relief that would accompany their soldiers home, too. Now the 172nd will be redeployed to Baghdad to be right smack dab in the middle of sectarian violence and back in the thick of things. Four more months of heat, spiders the size of puppies, MREs, anxiety and peril; as their Secretary of War and Commander in Chief drive around DC in cushy air-conditioned and up-armored SUVs and also get to sleep in comfy beds, cozy in the fact that the sacrifices of our children and their families are guaranteeing Exxon and other war bandits billions of dollars in profits.
Right-wing people who support the killing of innocent men, women, and children, are trying to stir up crap about my land purchase in Crawford, Tx to run Camp Casey. The worst thing that I have heard a Crawford resident say is that I am a "dumb Democrat." The crap that NEEDS to be stirred up in Crawford is that George and Co have the nerve to go on vacation when our soldiers can't get home after serving in the vile mess that BushCo created. Instead of working for peace and stability in the region, our continued presence there is encouraging and causing the violence. Our troops need to be removed---not increased.
Recent polls showed that 72% or our troops wanted to start coming home by the end of this year and 83% of the Iraqi people want the occupation to end. Those numbers are significant if only for the fact that they are probably low---soldiers and occupied peoples have never felt at liberty, or even secure to share their feelings with the oppressors.
To this end of creating a peace plan that the Iraqi people want and can feel comfortable and secure with (it is, after all, their country), a contingent of peace activists, including myself, will travel to Amman, Jordan to meet with Iraqi Parliamentarians who don't parrot what BushCo wants them to say and would actually like coalition forces to be removed from their country. It is an historic and significant step in this abominable and shameful episode of our history. The meeting is also highly significant since our State Department has been transformed into an adjunct of the War Department and is headed by the Deputy Secretary of War: Condi Rice. We have no diplomats in our country: just war mongers who can clear brush, shop for shoes, and laugh at gullible Americans all the way to the bank while they are depositing their war profits.
We will be meeting with the Iraqi representatives in Amman on August 4th, and many of us will return to Camp Casey in Crawford on August 6th to outline the plan and present a way that Americans and Iraqis can work together to end the killing on both sides of the conflict. August 6th is also a very meaningful date for me because it is the same day, one year ago, that I originally sat in the ditch with other peace mongers and we were eventually joined by thousands of peace mongers from all over the world.
On that day, we will ask to meet with George again to brief him on our meeting with real Iraqis who live, work, and raise their families outside of the Green Zone and outside of the influence of DC. Due to past performance, I don't think he will meet with us, (not very neighborly) but I am sure he will know that we are there and we have an Iraqi driven plan when his only plan is to kill more people because so many have already been killed---which is what "stay the course" and "honor the sacrifices of the fallen" really mean. George is so comfortable cutting and running from Crawford when he feels threatened by the truth, I wish he would cut our soldiers loose from the nightmare of occupation and allow Iraqis to run their own country.
Please come to Camp Casey this year, or donate to help promote peace for our time and our world. Since George has rescheduled his summer to avoid us, we will reschedule our summer to not allow him the pleasure of having a leisurely vacation while the Middle East is burning because of his policies.
If we can't count on our leaders to solve conflicts non-violently, then we must count on ourselves.
We need to get busy putting peace into practice. This is the time to do it and Camp Casey is the place where it will get done.
The Camp Casey dates have been changed to accommodate George's schedule and will be August 6th to September 2nd. Please go to the Gold Star Families for Peace website to stay posted on future exciting developments for Camp Casey III this summer.
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and currently on Day 27 of the Troops Home Fast.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Monday, June 26, 2006
IOL: Bush under fire by 9/11 conspiracy theorists
Bush under fire by 9/11 conspiracy theorists
June 26 2006 at 08:31AM
Los Angeles - They wore T-shirts that read: What Really Happened?, snapped up DVDs titled 9/11: The Great Illusion, and cheered as physicists, philosophers and terrorism experts decried the official version of the September 11 attacks that shook the United States to its core.
About 1 200 people gathered at a Los Angeles hotel at the weekend for what organisers billed as the largest conference on the plethora of conspiracy theories that see the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York as, at best, official negligence, and at worst an orchestrated US attempt to incite world war.
"There are so many prominent people who are incredibly well respected and who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an inside job," syndicated radio talkshow host Alex Jones told a news conference.
"There are hundreds of smoking guns that people need to be made aware of," said Jones, calling for the impeachment of President George Bush and charging that the mainstream media had been slow to cover the growing movement of 9/11 sceptics.
'9/11 was an inside job'
The 9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda conference comprised two days of seminars, video presentations and talks by groups including Scholars for 9/11 Truth, www.infowars.com and an appearance by actor Charlie Sheen.
Most are convinced the US military command "stood down" on the day of the attack, that the hijackers were trained at US military bases, and that the World Trade Centre towers collapsed because of a series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by two hijacked planes.
Suggested motives range from expected benefits for US arms and oil conglomerates to revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by the US.
The theories, derided by critics as wild and far-fetched, have mostly been confined to the Internet, talk radio and the alternative press. But an August 2004 Zogby opinion poll revealed that 49 percent of New York residents believed US leaders knew in advance of the attacks and failed to act.
The 9/11 Commission, set up in 2002, cited government intelligence lapses in the failure to prevent the attacks, which killed about 3 000 people.
'Wild and far-fetched'
A 10 000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology held that jet-fuel fires weakened the structure of the Twin Towers and led to their collapse.
Sheen, star of the TV sitcom Two And A Half Men, provoked a media storm in March by calling in interviews for an independent investigation.
Sheen "brings the movement some legitimacy," said a Los Angeles student attending the conference, who gave his name as Rico.
Webster Tarpley, author of 911 Synthetic Terror; Made in USA, said the attacks were an example of "state-sponsored, false-flag terrorism" designed by rogue CIA elements "to start the war of civilisations".
Tarpley said Washington was "gripped by war psychosis" and had used terror as a pretext to turn the US into a police state. - Reuters
June 26 2006 at 08:31AM
Los Angeles - They wore T-shirts that read: What Really Happened?, snapped up DVDs titled 9/11: The Great Illusion, and cheered as physicists, philosophers and terrorism experts decried the official version of the September 11 attacks that shook the United States to its core.
About 1 200 people gathered at a Los Angeles hotel at the weekend for what organisers billed as the largest conference on the plethora of conspiracy theories that see the 2001 attacks on Washington and New York as, at best, official negligence, and at worst an orchestrated US attempt to incite world war.
"There are so many prominent people who are incredibly well respected and who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an inside job," syndicated radio talkshow host Alex Jones told a news conference.
"There are hundreds of smoking guns that people need to be made aware of," said Jones, calling for the impeachment of President George Bush and charging that the mainstream media had been slow to cover the growing movement of 9/11 sceptics.
'9/11 was an inside job'
The 9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda conference comprised two days of seminars, video presentations and talks by groups including Scholars for 9/11 Truth, www.infowars.com and an appearance by actor Charlie Sheen.
Most are convinced the US military command "stood down" on the day of the attack, that the hijackers were trained at US military bases, and that the World Trade Centre towers collapsed because of a series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by two hijacked planes.
Suggested motives range from expected benefits for US arms and oil conglomerates to revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by the US.
The theories, derided by critics as wild and far-fetched, have mostly been confined to the Internet, talk radio and the alternative press. But an August 2004 Zogby opinion poll revealed that 49 percent of New York residents believed US leaders knew in advance of the attacks and failed to act.
The 9/11 Commission, set up in 2002, cited government intelligence lapses in the failure to prevent the attacks, which killed about 3 000 people.
'Wild and far-fetched'
A 10 000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology held that jet-fuel fires weakened the structure of the Twin Towers and led to their collapse.
Sheen, star of the TV sitcom Two And A Half Men, provoked a media storm in March by calling in interviews for an independent investigation.
Sheen "brings the movement some legitimacy," said a Los Angeles student attending the conference, who gave his name as Rico.
Webster Tarpley, author of 911 Synthetic Terror; Made in USA, said the attacks were an example of "state-sponsored, false-flag terrorism" designed by rogue CIA elements "to start the war of civilisations".
Tarpley said Washington was "gripped by war psychosis" and had used terror as a pretext to turn the US into a police state. - Reuters
The Impeachment Project
he Impeachment Project:
If you feel George W. Bush should be impeached, paint a sign that says "Impeach." and post it in a public place. Details at: http://theimpeachproject.com
Send pictures to: freewayblogger@yahoo.com
The right to post political speech on public property is absolutely guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution. We really need to start using it.
If you feel your country or its democracy is in peril, it's not only your right to speak out, it's your duty as a citizen.
When the founding fathers gave us the right to free political expression, they did it for a reason: so we could Sound The Alarm if we felt our nation was in peril.
It is.
FUN FACT!
If everyone in this country who felt President Bush should be impeached put up a sign, there'd be over 85 million signs.
Send your pictures to:
freewayblogger@yahoo.com
If you feel George W. Bush should be impeached, paint a sign that says "Impeach." and post it in a public place. Details at: http://theimpeachproject.com
Send pictures to: freewayblogger@yahoo.com
The right to post political speech on public property is absolutely guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution. We really need to start using it.
If you feel your country or its democracy is in peril, it's not only your right to speak out, it's your duty as a citizen.
When the founding fathers gave us the right to free political expression, they did it for a reason: so we could Sound The Alarm if we felt our nation was in peril.
It is.
FUN FACT!
If everyone in this country who felt President Bush should be impeached put up a sign, there'd be over 85 million signs.
Send your pictures to:
freewayblogger@yahoo.com
Gold Star Famillies For Peace�:�Camp Casey August 16th-Sept 2nd 2006
Camp Casey August 16th-Sept 2nd 2006
Cindy Sheehan and Gold Star Families for Peace will be returning to Crawford Tx. President Bush has still not satisfactorily answered our question, "What Noble Cause did our loved ones die for?" One year later we are still in the quagmire that is Iraq. As of this writing 2497 of our brave and noble military men and women have died for this Noble Cause. Join us at Camp Casey and show the President that we will not accept one more death be it American or Iraqi.
Camp Casey is run soley through donations and volunteers. We need help to make this summer as successful as last year. Please donate
Camp Casey ettiquette and General info
Camp Casey Calendar of events
Crawford Texas Weather report
List of things to bring
This list will be updated frequently. Please check back.
Previous Camp Casey Photos
Crawford Peace House website
Visit the Crawford Peace House for more info.
Cindy Sheehan and Gold Star Families for Peace will be returning to Crawford Tx. President Bush has still not satisfactorily answered our question, "What Noble Cause did our loved ones die for?" One year later we are still in the quagmire that is Iraq. As of this writing 2497 of our brave and noble military men and women have died for this Noble Cause. Join us at Camp Casey and show the President that we will not accept one more death be it American or Iraqi.
Camp Casey is run soley through donations and volunteers. We need help to make this summer as successful as last year. Please donate
Camp Casey ettiquette and General info
Camp Casey Calendar of events
Crawford Texas Weather report
List of things to bring
This list will be updated frequently. Please check back.
Previous Camp Casey Photos
Crawford Peace House website
Visit the Crawford Peace House for more info.
Warnings on WMD Fabricator''Were Ignored
June 25th, 2006 3:20 pm
Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
By Joby Warrick / Washington Post
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.
Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech. Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."
The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.
"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. "I didn't know the name Curveball until months afterward."
Curveball's role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Drumheller's first-hand accounts add new detail about the CIA's embrace of a source whose credibility was already unraveling.
More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.
But in the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his family, the Iraqi supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of President Saddam Hussein's long-rumored WMD programs.
Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.
The German intelligence agency BND faithfully passed Curveball's stories to the Americans. Over time, the informant generated more than 100 intelligence reports on secret Iraqi weapons programs -- the only such reports from an informant claiming to have visited and worked in mobile labs. Other informants, also later discredited, had claimed indirect knowledge of mobile labs.
In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats. Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.
The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment, Drumheller recalled. "He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,' " Drumheller said, recounting the conversation with the official, whom he declined to name. "He said: 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.' "
When Drumheller relayed the warning to his superiors in October 2002, it sparked what he described as "a series of the most contentious meetings I've ever seen" in three decades of government work.
Although no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications.
"People were cursing. These guys were absolutely, violently committed to it," Drumheller said. "They would say to us, 'You're not scientists, you don't understand.' "
In January 2003, Drumheller received a new request from CIA headquarters to contact the German intelligence service about Curveball. This time, Drumheller recalled, the U.S. spy agency had three questions:
Could a U.S. official refer to Curveball's mobile lab accounts in an upcoming political speech?
Could the Germans guarantee that Curveball would stand by his account?
Could German intelligence verify Curveball's claims?
The reply from Berlin, as Drumheller recalls it, was less than encouraging: There are no guarantees.
"They said, 'We have never been able to verify his claims,' " Drumheller recalled. "And that was all sent up to Tenet's office."
When Drumheller listened to Bush's speech several days later, he was astonished to hear the mobile labs described in detail.
"Boom, there it was," he said.
A few days later, Drumheller was handed a draft of another key speech on Iraq: Powell's remarks to the U.N. Security Council accusing Hussein of reconstituting his WMD programs. This time, the speech included an obvious reference to Curveball -- an unnamed "chemical engineer" who worked in one of the labs -- as well as detailed drawings of mobile labs inspired by Curveball's descriptions.
Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.
McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was "the only tangible source" for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.
Portions of Drumheller's account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.
In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission's report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.
"If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech," McLaughlin said in the statement.
In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary's U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was present during the briefings.
"Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of the mobile labs," Wilkerson said. The drawings were constructed from Curveball's accounts.
But the CIA officials were persuasive. Wilkerson said the two men described the evidence on the mobile labs as exceptionally strong, based on multiple sources whose stories were independently corroborated.
"They said: 'This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can't doubt this one,' " Wilkerson said.
On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech. Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.
"I said: 'Hey, boss, you're not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,' " Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.
Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.
The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N. Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons program.
Tenet, responding to questions about Drumheller's accounts, provided to The Post a statement he had given in response to the Silberman-Robb Commission report in which he said he didn't learn of the problems with Curveball until much later. He did not recall talking to Drumheller about Curveball, and said it was "simply wrong" for anyone to imply that he knew about the problems with Curveball's credibility.
"Nobody came forward to say there is a serious problem with Curveball or that we have been told by the foreign representative of the service handling him that there are worries that he is a 'fabricator,' " Tenet said in his statement.
In late summer 2003, seven months after the U.N. speech, Tenet called Powell to say that the Curveball story had fallen apart, Wilkerson said. The call amounted to an admission that all of the CIA's claims Powell used in his speech about Iraqi weapons were wrong.
"They had hung on for a long time, but finally Tenet called Powell to say, 'We don't have that one, either,' " Wilkerson recalled. "The mobile labs were the last thing to go."
Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report
Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
By Joby Warrick / Washington Post
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.
Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech. Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."
The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.
"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. "I didn't know the name Curveball until months afterward."
Curveball's role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Drumheller's first-hand accounts add new detail about the CIA's embrace of a source whose credibility was already unraveling.
More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.
But in the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his family, the Iraqi supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of President Saddam Hussein's long-rumored WMD programs.
Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.
The German intelligence agency BND faithfully passed Curveball's stories to the Americans. Over time, the informant generated more than 100 intelligence reports on secret Iraqi weapons programs -- the only such reports from an informant claiming to have visited and worked in mobile labs. Other informants, also later discredited, had claimed indirect knowledge of mobile labs.
In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats. Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.
The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment, Drumheller recalled. "He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,' " Drumheller said, recounting the conversation with the official, whom he declined to name. "He said: 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.' "
When Drumheller relayed the warning to his superiors in October 2002, it sparked what he described as "a series of the most contentious meetings I've ever seen" in three decades of government work.
Although no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications.
"People were cursing. These guys were absolutely, violently committed to it," Drumheller said. "They would say to us, 'You're not scientists, you don't understand.' "
In January 2003, Drumheller received a new request from CIA headquarters to contact the German intelligence service about Curveball. This time, Drumheller recalled, the U.S. spy agency had three questions:
Could a U.S. official refer to Curveball's mobile lab accounts in an upcoming political speech?
Could the Germans guarantee that Curveball would stand by his account?
Could German intelligence verify Curveball's claims?
The reply from Berlin, as Drumheller recalls it, was less than encouraging: There are no guarantees.
"They said, 'We have never been able to verify his claims,' " Drumheller recalled. "And that was all sent up to Tenet's office."
When Drumheller listened to Bush's speech several days later, he was astonished to hear the mobile labs described in detail.
"Boom, there it was," he said.
A few days later, Drumheller was handed a draft of another key speech on Iraq: Powell's remarks to the U.N. Security Council accusing Hussein of reconstituting his WMD programs. This time, the speech included an obvious reference to Curveball -- an unnamed "chemical engineer" who worked in one of the labs -- as well as detailed drawings of mobile labs inspired by Curveball's descriptions.
Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.
McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was "the only tangible source" for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.
Portions of Drumheller's account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.
In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission's report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.
"If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech," McLaughlin said in the statement.
In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary's U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was present during the briefings.
"Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of the mobile labs," Wilkerson said. The drawings were constructed from Curveball's accounts.
But the CIA officials were persuasive. Wilkerson said the two men described the evidence on the mobile labs as exceptionally strong, based on multiple sources whose stories were independently corroborated.
"They said: 'This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can't doubt this one,' " Wilkerson said.
On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech. Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.
"I said: 'Hey, boss, you're not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,' " Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.
Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.
The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N. Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons program.
Tenet, responding to questions about Drumheller's accounts, provided to The Post a statement he had given in response to the Silberman-Robb Commission report in which he said he didn't learn of the problems with Curveball until much later. He did not recall talking to Drumheller about Curveball, and said it was "simply wrong" for anyone to imply that he knew about the problems with Curveball's credibility.
"Nobody came forward to say there is a serious problem with Curveball or that we have been told by the foreign representative of the service handling him that there are worries that he is a 'fabricator,' " Tenet said in his statement.
In late summer 2003, seven months after the U.N. speech, Tenet called Powell to say that the Curveball story had fallen apart, Wilkerson said. The call amounted to an admission that all of the CIA's claims Powell used in his speech about Iraqi weapons were wrong.
"They had hung on for a long time, but finally Tenet called Powell to say, 'We don't have that one, either,' " Wilkerson recalled. "The mobile labs were the last thing to go."
Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
George W. Bush - Terrorist in the White House - Main Page
George W. Bush - Terrorist in the White House - Main Page: "George W. Bush - Terrorist in the White House
America Is No Longer a Democratic Nation:
Zionists Have Seized Control During The 2000 ELECTION COUP D' ETAT, Installed Puppet Regime
9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB
WOW! NYC TRUTH GROUP UNVEILS SHOCKING BANNER AT WTC Posted By: billym [On 9/11 while W was reading about Goats, his father was in the situation room at the White House directing covert ops that saw Mossad agents remote control planes into the WTC and set off controlled demolitions there. -ed.]
Condoleeza Rice Warned Willie Brown Not To Fly On 9/11 PDF
Government Insider Says Bush Authorized 911 Attacks PDF From Thomas Buyea 9-17-4
Pattern of Megalomania by Schuyler Ebbets
When is George W. Bush going to go on trial for his crimes? -ed.
Austria's Haider says Bush is a war criminal PDF Sat Jun 17, 2006 [That's being too kind. Actually, he is clearly a terrorist. -ed.]
Chavez: Imprison 'genocidal' Bush PDF By: CNN on: 15.05.2006 [All in favor say Aye. The Ayes have it. -ed.]"
America Is No Longer a Democratic Nation:
Zionists Have Seized Control During The 2000 ELECTION COUP D' ETAT, Installed Puppet Regime
9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB
WOW! NYC TRUTH GROUP UNVEILS SHOCKING BANNER AT WTC Posted By: billym [On 9/11 while W was reading about Goats, his father was in the situation room at the White House directing covert ops that saw Mossad agents remote control planes into the WTC and set off controlled demolitions there. -ed.]
Condoleeza Rice Warned Willie Brown Not To Fly On 9/11 PDF
Government Insider Says Bush Authorized 911 Attacks PDF From Thomas Buyea 9-17-4
Pattern of Megalomania by Schuyler Ebbets
When is George W. Bush going to go on trial for his crimes? -ed.
Austria's Haider says Bush is a war criminal PDF Sat Jun 17, 2006 [That's being too kind. Actually, he is clearly a terrorist. -ed.]
Chavez: Imprison 'genocidal' Bush PDF By: CNN on: 15.05.2006 [All in favor say Aye. The Ayes have it. -ed.]"
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Bush the 'biggest terrorist in the world today'. 16/05/2006. ABC News Online
Bush the 'biggest terrorist in the world today'. 16/05/2006. ABC News Online: "Bush the 'biggest terrorist in the world today'
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has reacted angrily to new United States sanctions on his country.
The US has banned arms sales and technology transfers to Venezuela, because it says Mr Chavez's Government has failed to cooperate in the US-led war on terrorism.
Speaking on a private visit to London, the Venezuelan leader has thrown the accusation back at his accusers, calling the US an irrational empire and President George W Bush 'the biggest terrorist in the world today'.
'For that you would have to punish the Government of the United States which is practising terrorism,' he said.
'It's bombing whole towns, civilian populations, killing innocent people and women and children in Iraq.'
Mr Bush's administration has had thorny relations with the leftist Venezuelan President, whose country is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, at 1.5 million barrels per day.
The US Government has charged Mr Chavez's Government with restricting the freedom of the press and harassing the Opposition, while Mr Chavez frequently criticises Mr Bush for the Iraq war and has openly called the US leader a 'coward' and a 'murderer'.
The sanctions announced on Monday ratcheted up US moves to isolate Venezuela in the military sphere.
In January, Washington had intervened to prohibit the sale of US arms or military technology to Venezuela by third countries, such as Spain and Brazil.
In recent months the United States has grown increasingly vocal in its opposition to Mr Chavez and his Government.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has cited Venezuela as the region's biggest problem and has called on US allies to mount a united front in dealing with it."
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has reacted angrily to new United States sanctions on his country.
The US has banned arms sales and technology transfers to Venezuela, because it says Mr Chavez's Government has failed to cooperate in the US-led war on terrorism.
Speaking on a private visit to London, the Venezuelan leader has thrown the accusation back at his accusers, calling the US an irrational empire and President George W Bush 'the biggest terrorist in the world today'.
'For that you would have to punish the Government of the United States which is practising terrorism,' he said.
'It's bombing whole towns, civilian populations, killing innocent people and women and children in Iraq.'
Mr Bush's administration has had thorny relations with the leftist Venezuelan President, whose country is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, at 1.5 million barrels per day.
The US Government has charged Mr Chavez's Government with restricting the freedom of the press and harassing the Opposition, while Mr Chavez frequently criticises Mr Bush for the Iraq war and has openly called the US leader a 'coward' and a 'murderer'.
The sanctions announced on Monday ratcheted up US moves to isolate Venezuela in the military sphere.
In January, Washington had intervened to prohibit the sale of US arms or military technology to Venezuela by third countries, such as Spain and Brazil.
In recent months the United States has grown increasingly vocal in its opposition to Mr Chavez and his Government.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has cited Venezuela as the region's biggest problem and has called on US allies to mount a united front in dealing with it."
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Thank You Stephen Colbert.
Thank You Stephen Colbert.: "Thank You.
April 30th, 2006
“…This is a battle that can’t really be won — you either got it Saturday night (or Sunday morning, or whenever your life was made a little brighter by viewing Colbert’s performance) or you didn’t. Personally, I’m enjoying watching apologists for the status quo wear themselves out explaining why Colbert wasn’t funny. It’s extending the reach of his performance by days without either side breaking character — the mighty Colbert or the clueless, self-important media elite he was satirizing. For those who think the media shamed itself by rolling over for this administration, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colbert’s skit is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Stephen Colbert!”
-Joan Walsh, Salon Magazine
Colbert Speaks Truth to Power at the White House Correspondents Dinner
60798 Thank Yo"
April 30th, 2006
“…This is a battle that can’t really be won — you either got it Saturday night (or Sunday morning, or whenever your life was made a little brighter by viewing Colbert’s performance) or you didn’t. Personally, I’m enjoying watching apologists for the status quo wear themselves out explaining why Colbert wasn’t funny. It’s extending the reach of his performance by days without either side breaking character — the mighty Colbert or the clueless, self-important media elite he was satirizing. For those who think the media shamed itself by rolling over for this administration, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colbert’s skit is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Stephen Colbert!”
-Joan Walsh, Salon Magazine
Colbert Speaks Truth to Power at the White House Correspondents Dinner
60798 Thank Yo"
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Gen. Hayden is a Liar
Bush Watch Home: "Gen. Hayden is a Liar, and Implies Bush Is One, Too, Says NYT : 'The hearing produced important — and disquieting — news about President Bush's decision to spy on Americans without a warrant....The National Security Agency's domestic surveillance, which General Hayden ran while he led the agency, loomed over the proceedings. General Hayden could not explain coherently why he testified in 2002 that he had no authority to listen to Americans' phone calls without a warrant, when the president had already given him that authority....General Hayden's appearance also made it clear that the one warrantless spying operation Mr. Bush has acknowledged — listening to calls between the United States and other countries — is not the only one. And he testified that he did not, as Mr. Bush has said, design the N.S.A. operation, which violates the 28-year-old legal requirement for a warrant for any domestic wiretapping....The hearing drove home again that the spying is being conducted outside the constitutional system of checks and balances....Attorney General Alberto Gonzales enthusiastically subscribes to Mr. Bush's imperial vision of the presidency, as well as the president's disregard for the balance of powers. Mr. Gonzales's department recently quashed an investigation by its ethics office into the conduct of the Justice Department officials who approved the spying program....The issue is whether [collecting intelligence] will be done legally, and whether Congress will step up to this challenge of its duties and powers. General Hayden's hearing did not provide much hope on either front.'
Observed: Friday May 19"
Observed: Friday May 19"
Bush Watch Home
Bush Watch Home: "Bush Sec. of Treasury Caught in a Lie About Tanking Economy, says Krugman (excerpt): [The falling dollar, the weakening housing market, and the high cost of gas may usher in the end of the Bush spin economy.] 'On May 10 the White House issued a press release titled 'Setting the Record Straight: The New York Times Continues to Ignore America's Economic Progress.' The release attacked The Times for asserting that paychecks weren't keeping up with fixed costs like medical care and gasoline. The White House declared, 'But average hourly earnings have risen 3.8 percent over the past 12 months, their largest increase in nearly five years.'
'On Wednesday Treasury Secretary John Snow repeated that boast before a House committee. However, Representative Barney Frank was ready. He asked whether the number was adjusted for inflation; after flailing about, Mr. Snow admitted, sheepishly, that it wasn't. In fact, nearly all of the wage increase was negated by higher prices. Meanwhile, the return of economic gravity poses a definite threat to U.S. economic growth. After all, growth over the past three years was driven mainly by a housing boom and rapid growth in consumer spending. People were able to buy houses, even though housing prices rose much faster than incomes, because foreign purchases of U.S. debt kept interest rates low. People were able to keep spending, even though wages didn't keep up with inflation, because mortgage refinancing let them turn the rising value of their houses into ready cash.
'As I summarized it awhile back, we became a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China. Now that game seems to be coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a living — in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace imports with domestic production. And adjusting to that new way of making a living will take time.'"
'On Wednesday Treasury Secretary John Snow repeated that boast before a House committee. However, Representative Barney Frank was ready. He asked whether the number was adjusted for inflation; after flailing about, Mr. Snow admitted, sheepishly, that it wasn't. In fact, nearly all of the wage increase was negated by higher prices. Meanwhile, the return of economic gravity poses a definite threat to U.S. economic growth. After all, growth over the past three years was driven mainly by a housing boom and rapid growth in consumer spending. People were able to buy houses, even though housing prices rose much faster than incomes, because foreign purchases of U.S. debt kept interest rates low. People were able to keep spending, even though wages didn't keep up with inflation, because mortgage refinancing let them turn the rising value of their houses into ready cash.
'As I summarized it awhile back, we became a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China. Now that game seems to be coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a living — in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace imports with domestic production. And adjusting to that new way of making a living will take time.'"
Bush's Tax Cuts
Bush Watch Home: "Monday May 22
Bush's Tax Cuts To Wealthy Have Not Helped The Economy, Explains Krugman:
Alan Gertler, Reno, Nev.: I'm a scientist, not an economist, so I'm fairly naive when it comes to what drives the economy.
My question is this: Have the tax cuts stimulated the economy as claimed (which I don't believe given the past cases of Reagan and Bush senior), or has it been the willingness of the government to continue massive spending by increasing our debt that has led to the growth of the economy?
Paul Krugman: It's actually neither.
About the Bush tax cuts: the tax cuts of 2001 evidently didn't do the job; these days, the Bush people talk about the economy as if history began in the middle of 2003, after their SECOND wave of tax cuts. But while the economy did start growing, finally, in 2003, the growth wasn't at all of the form you'd expect if tax cuts were responsible. The main tax cuts were on dividends and capital gains; supposedly this would make it easier for businesses to raise funds and invest. But business investment hasn't been the main driver of growth; in fact, businesses have been sitting on huge piles of earnings, reluctant to invest. Instead, the big driver was housing construction and consumer spending. So what really happened? Low interest rates led to a housing boom that eventually turned into a housing bubble. High house prices made people feel richer, and they could borrow against the increased value of their homes, feeding consumer spending. Tax cuts had nothing to do with it."
Bush's Tax Cuts To Wealthy Have Not Helped The Economy, Explains Krugman:
Alan Gertler, Reno, Nev.: I'm a scientist, not an economist, so I'm fairly naive when it comes to what drives the economy.
My question is this: Have the tax cuts stimulated the economy as claimed (which I don't believe given the past cases of Reagan and Bush senior), or has it been the willingness of the government to continue massive spending by increasing our debt that has led to the growth of the economy?
Paul Krugman: It's actually neither.
About the Bush tax cuts: the tax cuts of 2001 evidently didn't do the job; these days, the Bush people talk about the economy as if history began in the middle of 2003, after their SECOND wave of tax cuts. But while the economy did start growing, finally, in 2003, the growth wasn't at all of the form you'd expect if tax cuts were responsible. The main tax cuts were on dividends and capital gains; supposedly this would make it easier for businesses to raise funds and invest. But business investment hasn't been the main driver of growth; in fact, businesses have been sitting on huge piles of earnings, reluctant to invest. Instead, the big driver was housing construction and consumer spending. So what really happened? Low interest rates led to a housing boom that eventually turned into a housing bubble. High house prices made people feel richer, and they could borrow against the increased value of their homes, feeding consumer spending. Tax cuts had nothing to do with it."
Mike Malloy on Bush
Mike Malloy: "He says he talks to God; is he insane? He says God tells him to invade countries and kill people by the thousands; is he insane? He is the worst political leader in US history; is he insane? This morning, President Chucklenuts was interviewed by NBC’s David Gregory on the Today Show. Gregory asked Bush why so many people disapprove of the job he’s doing. Bush brushed aside the public’s concern about his policies and insisted that nearly 70 percent of Americans are simply “unsettled.” Here’s the exchange:
GREGORY: Let me ask you about your leadership. In the most recent survey, your disapproval rating is now one point lower than Richard Nixon’s before he resigned the presidency. You are laughing.
BUSH: I’m not laughing –
GREGORY: Why? Why do you think that is?
BUSH: Because we’re at war, and war unsettles people. Listen, we got a great economy. We’ve added 5.2 million jobs in the last two and a half years. People are unsettled.
GREGORY: But, they’re not just unsettled, sir. They disapprove of the job you’re doing.
BUSH: That’s unsettled.
MALLOY: No, you’re insane.
"
GREGORY: Let me ask you about your leadership. In the most recent survey, your disapproval rating is now one point lower than Richard Nixon’s before he resigned the presidency. You are laughing.
BUSH: I’m not laughing –
GREGORY: Why? Why do you think that is?
BUSH: Because we’re at war, and war unsettles people. Listen, we got a great economy. We’ve added 5.2 million jobs in the last two and a half years. People are unsettled.
GREGORY: But, they’re not just unsettled, sir. They disapprove of the job you’re doing.
BUSH: That’s unsettled.
MALLOY: No, you’re insane.
"
The Writings of Greg Palast
The Writings of Greg Palast: "SPIES AND LIES: STEAL YOUR DATA, STEAL YOUR VOTE
Drum Major Blog
Thursday May 18, 2006
By Greg Palast
There are kooks and cranks and crazies among you who think that George Bush lost the 2004 election. For example, there's an audio blog going around with TV star Larry David reading a story called,'Kerry Won,' a chapter in a book called, Armed Madhouse. I know, because I wrote it.
How you go about jerry-rigging a democracy has a lot to do with two other, seemingly unrelated stories, in the news this week: illegal surveillance of our phone records and the new border war against immigrants.
The glue between these three stories -- elections manipulation, War on Terror and War on Immigration -- is a four letter: data.
ELECTIONS: I'm an investigative reporter for BBC TV. In that job, in November 2000, I discovered that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush knocked tens of thousands of African-Americans off Florida voter rolls -- thereby handing the Presidency to Brother George. The key to the vote heist was a database of supposed 'felons' whose registration was 'purged.' They were innocent, but hey, that's the data game for you. One man's abuse of data bases is another man's inauguration.
On to 2004: Same game, new data bases and more purges. But there was a new twist, 'caging lists' which I discovered within Republican Party files (how I got them, well, read the book). These were lists of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Black folk (and a few Jewish voters) -- i.e. Democrats -- whom the Republican Party secretly planned to challenge on election day. They did. It's illegal, but hey, when you steal the Presidency you get the Justice Department as a bonus and that means you control the civil rights enforcement cops. It's the perfect crime.
The challenges, by the way, were based on 'suspicions' about a voters' proper address. We went through the confidential sheets and found, for example, Randall Prausa, one of a large group of African-American soldiers whose addresses became 'suspect' because they were shipped overseas.
But you can't keep using data to bend elections without more data. Hence, the War on Terror, while thin on hunting terrorists, is fat with contracts to hunt for your data profile, from your finances to your voting reco...[ Click here for full article ]"
Drum Major Blog
Thursday May 18, 2006
By Greg Palast
There are kooks and cranks and crazies among you who think that George Bush lost the 2004 election. For example, there's an audio blog going around with TV star Larry David reading a story called,'Kerry Won,' a chapter in a book called, Armed Madhouse. I know, because I wrote it.
How you go about jerry-rigging a democracy has a lot to do with two other, seemingly unrelated stories, in the news this week: illegal surveillance of our phone records and the new border war against immigrants.
The glue between these three stories -- elections manipulation, War on Terror and War on Immigration -- is a four letter: data.
ELECTIONS: I'm an investigative reporter for BBC TV. In that job, in November 2000, I discovered that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush knocked tens of thousands of African-Americans off Florida voter rolls -- thereby handing the Presidency to Brother George. The key to the vote heist was a database of supposed 'felons' whose registration was 'purged.' They were innocent, but hey, that's the data game for you. One man's abuse of data bases is another man's inauguration.
On to 2004: Same game, new data bases and more purges. But there was a new twist, 'caging lists' which I discovered within Republican Party files (how I got them, well, read the book). These were lists of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Black folk (and a few Jewish voters) -- i.e. Democrats -- whom the Republican Party secretly planned to challenge on election day. They did. It's illegal, but hey, when you steal the Presidency you get the Justice Department as a bonus and that means you control the civil rights enforcement cops. It's the perfect crime.
The challenges, by the way, were based on 'suspicions' about a voters' proper address. We went through the confidential sheets and found, for example, Randall Prausa, one of a large group of African-American soldiers whose addresses became 'suspect' because they were shipped overseas.
But you can't keep using data to bend elections without more data. Hence, the War on Terror, while thin on hunting terrorists, is fat with contracts to hunt for your data profile, from your finances to your voting reco...[ Click here for full article ]"
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