Disclaimer: This is the voice of a VERY angry and unabashed LIBERAL. You have been warned. (By proceding past this point you agree to shut up about opinions you disagree with. If I want to hear from right-wing nut jobs, all I have to do is turn on the radio.)
Aug. 30, 2006 | 8:34 p.m. ET
Feeling morally, intellectually confused?
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.
Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.
It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.
That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s -- questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.
It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.
It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.
It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.
The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.
That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.
Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.
His government, absolute -- and exclusive -- in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.
It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today’s Omniscient ones.
That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.
And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.
Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.
But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.
And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we -- as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.
But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.
The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”
As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.
This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.
But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”
Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”
And so good night, and good luck.
Comments? Email KOlbermann@msnbc.com
By MARTIN FOREMAN
First published Nov. 12, 2005
Several weeks ago, a ground-breaking study on religious belief and social well-being was published in the Journal of Religion & Society. Comparing 18 prosperous democracies from the U.S. to New Zealand, author Gregory S Paul quietly demolished the myth that faith strengthens society.
Drawing on a wide range of studies to cross-match faith – measured by belief in God and acceptance of evolution – with homicide and sexual behavior, Paul found that secular societies have lower rates of violence and teenage pregnancy than societies where many people profess belief in God.
Top of the class, in both atheism and good behavior, come the Japanese. Over eighty percent accept evolution and fewer than ten percent are certain that God exists. Despite its size – over a hundred million people – Japan is one of the least crime-prone countries in the world. It also has the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy of any developed nation.
(Teenage pregnancy has less tragic consequences than violence but it is usually unwanted, and it is frequently associated with deprivation among both mothers and children. In general, it is a Bad Thing.)
Next in line are the Norwegians, British, Germans and Dutch. At least sixty percent accept evolution as a fact and fewer than one in three are convinced that there is a deity. There is little teenage pregnancy , although the Brits, with over 40 pregnancies per 1,000 girls a year, do twice as badly as the others. Homicide rates are also low -- around 1-2 victims per 100,000 people a year.
At the other end of the scale comes America. Over 50 percent of Americans believe in God, and only 40 percent accept some form of evolution (many believe it had a helping hand from the Deity). The U.S. has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy and homicide rates are at least five times greater than in Europe and ten times higher than in Japan.
All this information points to a strong correlation between faith and antisocial behavior -- a correlation so strong that there is good reason to suppose that religious belief does more harm than good.
At first glance that is a preposterous suggestion, given that religions preach non-violence and sexual restraint. However, close inspection reveals a different story. Faith tends to weaken rather than strengthen people’s ability to participate in society. That makes it less likely they will respect social customs and laws.
All believers learn that God holds them responsible for their actions. So far so good, but for many, belief absolves them of all other responsibilities. Consciously or subconsciously, those who are "born again" or "chosen" have diminished respect for others who do not share their sect or their faith. Convinced that only the Bible offers "truth", they lose their intellectual curiosity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in but themselves.
The more people prioritize themselves rather than those around them, the weaker society becomes and the greater the likelihood of antisocial behavior. Hence gun laws which encourage Americans to see each other not as fellow human beings who deserve protection, but as potential aggressors who deserve to die. And hence a health care system which looks after the wealthy rather than the ill.
As for sex… Faith encourages ignorance rather than responsible behavior. In other countries, sex education includes contraception, reducing the risk of unwanted pregnancies. Such an approach recognizes that young people have the right to make their own choices and helps them make decisions that benefit society as a whole. In America faith-driven abstinence programs deny them that right -- "As a Christian I will only help you if you do what I say". The result is soaring rates of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
Abstinence programs rest on the same weak intellectual foundation as creationism and intelligent design. Faith discourages unprejudiced analysis. Reasoning is subverted to rationalization that supports rather than questions assumptions. The result is a self-contained system that maintains an internal logic, no matter how absurd to outside observers.
The constitutional wall that theoretically separates church and state is irrelevant. Religion has overwhelmed the nation to permeate all public discussion. Look no further than Gary Bauer, a man who in any other western nation would be dismissed as a fanatic and who in America is interviewed deferentially on prime time television.
Despite all its fine words, religion has brought in its wake little more than violence, prejudice and sexual disease. True morality is found elsewhere. As UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot concluded in his review of Gregory Paul’s study, "if you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist."
I might express that another way. The flip side of Monbiot's argument is that God would be an atheist...
Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006. An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis H. Lapham.
A country is not only what it does—it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky
HARPER'S MAGAZINE PRESENTS
On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.
“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn't know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.
A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:
“I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”
Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635—not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.
* * *
That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to “kill my Dad,” he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts”; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the “best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not”) that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to “see if Saddam did this.” Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that “when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”
By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein's acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn't convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, “What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.”
The Conyers report doesn't return to the President's focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out.” At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it's only a question of when. The vice president doesn't bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn't possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam's connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; “even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts...” A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing “the intelligence and the facts...around the policy.” The American enthusiasm for regime change, “undimmed” in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.
Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs “legal justification” for the maneuver—something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification “currently exists.” Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the “wrong-footing” of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don't exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]
Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to “wrong-foot” Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam's monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]
By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase “mushroom cloud” and prepares a White Paper describing the “grave and gathering danger” posed by Iraq's nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold—to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]
* * *
The Conyers report doesn't lack for further instances of the administration's misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President's impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child's tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?
* * *
The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Notes
1. The report borrows from hundreds of open sources that have become a matter of public record—newspaper accounts, television broadcasts (Frontline, Meet the Press, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, etc.), magazine articles (in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books), sworn testimony in both the Senate and House of Representatives, books written by, among others, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Richard A. Clarke, James Mann, Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, David Corn, James Bamford, Hans Blix, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Joseph Wilson. As the congressman had said, “Everything in plain sight; it isn't as if we don't know.” [Back]
2. In January of 1998 the neoconservative Washington think tank The Project for the New American Century (which counts among its founding members Dick Cheney) sent a letter to Bill Clinton demanding “the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power” with a strong-minded “willingness to undertake military action.” Together with Rumsfeld, six of the other seventeen signatories became members of the Bush's first administration—Elliott Abrams (now George W. Bush's deputy national security advisor), Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005), John Bolton (now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005), Robert Zoellick (now deputy secretary of state). President Clinton responded to the request by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, for which Congress appropriated $97 million for various clandestine operations inside the borders of Iraq. Two years later, in September 2000, The Project for the New American Century issued a document noting that the “unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification” for the presence of the substantial American force in the Persian Gulf. [Back]
3. In a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes, Paul O'Neill, present in the meeting as the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, remembered being surprised by the degree of certainty: “From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.... It was all about finding a way to do it.” [Back]
4. As early as September 20, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, drafted a memo suggesting that in retaliation for the September 11 attacks the United States should consider hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, or perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. [Back]
5. Abstracts of the notes and memoranda, known collectively as “The Downing Street Minutes,” were published in the Sunday Times (London) in May 2005; their authenticity was undisputed by the British government. [Back]
6. The work didn't go unnoticed by people in the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department accustomed to making distinctions between a well-dressed rumor and a naked lie. In the spring of 2004, talking to a reporter from Vanity Fair, Greg Thielmann, the State Department officer responsible for assessing the threats of nuclear proliferation, said, “The American public was seriously misled. The Administration twisted, distorted and simplified intelligence in a way that led Americans to seriously misunderstand the nature of the Iraq threat. I'm not sure I can think of a worse act against the people in a democracy than a President distorting critical classified information.” [Back]
7. The Group counted among its copywriters Karl Rove, senior political strategist, Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. [Back]
8. Card later told the New York Times that “from a marketing point of view...you don't introduce new products in August.” [Back]
This is The Case for Impeachment by Lewis H. Lapham, published Monday, February 27, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
By Rob Borsellino
Mon Feb 13, 7:12 AM ET
I remember when Jesus Christ was about religion.
That goes back to when he was caring and compassionate all the time, not
just during the political campaign season.
He used to bring people together and give them hope. He wouldn't have
his people get in your face and tell you to fight gay rights or you'll
burn in hell. That's not what he was about. That's not the Jesus who
made folks such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson rich and famous. He
was a different guy from the 21st-century American Jesus Christ.
When I recently visited Sicily, Italy, the old Jesus was all over the
place. His statue was on the counter at the restaurant and the coffee
house. His image was on the wall at the clothing store and in the hotel
lobby. And there was a huge painting of him on the side of an apartment
building.
Sometimes he was with his mom and dad, and sometimes he was sitting with
his pals - the apostles. Mostly he was hanging from the cross. Whatever
he was up to, it was all about religion.
It was interesting because I didn't go to Sicily looking for a religious
experience. I went looking for what's left of my family. My grandfather
and his brother came to the United States in 1904 and left behind their
parents and two sisters. The sisters had kids, grandkids, great
grandkids.
I never met any of those people, and I knew nothing about Sicily except
the obvious - pizza and the Mafia. My wife thought it was time to
connect. She made some calls and let the family know we were coming.
We landed in Palermo, got our bags and were met by my cousin Peppino
Rizzuti, who was holding a handwritten sign with my name on it.
He was there with three other cousins. They hooked us up with more
family and spent the next seven days driving us all over the island and
stuffing us with mozzarella, prosciutto, olives and about 50 kinds of
pasta.
My cousin Maria made the sign of the cross before she ate. My cousin
Antonio's car had a figurine of a saint on the dashboard. My cousin Gian
Marco had a beautiful cross hanging from his neck.
But nobody was going on about God, Jesus and religion. It didn't come
up. I saw all that and was reminded that you can be a decent person - a
good son, husband and father - and still oppose the war in
Iraq. You can be a caring, thoughtful member of your community and still
question whether Justice
Samuel Alito should have been confirmed. Jesus won't get mad at you.
Several times during the week, I thought about telling my family what's
happened to Jesus in the United States - how he's been kidnapped by
politicians and preachers who decide what he does and doesn't think.
They speak for him, and it doesn't always make sense.
They say Jesus is "pro life," but he doesn't seem to have a problem with
the death penalty. And he thinks stem cell research - something that
would save lives - is no different from murdering babies. They say he's
the embodiment of kindness, love, decency and compassion. But he hates
gays, lesbians and Muslims. And he's not too crazy about Buddhists,
Hindus and the rest. Jews? He can put up with them if he has to.
The Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka claims to
speak for Jesus and goes around the country talking about how "
AIDS cures fags." Pat Robertson says it would be a good idea if the
United States killed the president of Venezuela. It would be a lot
cheaper than starting another war.
All week I went over that stuff in my head and decided not to mention
any of it to the family.
It would make America look ridiculous.
Rob Borsellino is a columnist for The Des Moines Register and author of
So I'm talkin' to this guy ...
A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man's social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation ..acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power, if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed.
To that end they rested the structure of our central government on the system of checks and balances
... The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Justice Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965)
What will it take for American evangelicals to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world.
Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, is the author of ''The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today.''
By Jaime O'Neill
Sometimes the people who still fervently support George W. Bush seem just plain stupid, and other times it seems they must be dishonest and even malevolent, harboring a hatred for their country that allows them to support misguided ideas and private agendas over the public good. In more reasonable moods, I want to believe that the Bush supporters are just like me in simply wanting what is best for the country safety, security, fairness and a commitment to a government that observes the principles upon which our nation was founded. When I'm thinking that way, I assume we don't disagree on goals and objectives, just on the most effective way to achieve those goals and objectives.
It's hard to keep that thought, though, when the lies keep piling up higher and deeper, and when so much of the energy of Bush supporters goes into evading reality. Is it really possible for there to be an honest difference of opinion about the calamitous Bush decision to invade Iraq? No weapons of mass destruction there, as we were told there were. No link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, as we were told there was, and as we continue to be urged to believe by deceptive administration rhetoric. Almost no likelihood that a stable democracy will be possible in an Iraq rent by ethnic feuds and anti-democratic traditions. Billions upon billions of dollars squandered in Iraq, and billions more stolen by corrupt U.S. contractors. Meanwhile, the Homeland Security entity Bush created has shown itself to be yet another huge government boondoggle, and utterly witless in responding to a national emergency.
Beyond that, we have the shameful spectacle of Americans who call themselves patriots urging a forfeiture of our rights and liberties as U.S. citizens the rights to due process and the protections devised by the founding fathers to guard against abuses of power.
And beyond that, we have breaches of national security in the outing of a CIA agent for no better reason than spite. We have the staffing of all kinds of highly paid and important government jobs with incompetent administration cronies and partners in crime. We have repeated and massive failures of imagination. No one could have imagined a) people flying planes into U.S. skyscrapers, b) a storm of the magnitude of Katrina, or c) a Palestinian militant group like Hamas winning elections in Palestine these being just a few of the things Condoleezza Rice has said the administration couldn't imagine.
Beyond all of that, we have the growing gap between rich and poor, the exportation of American jobs by the hundreds of thousands, the wasteful and exploitive health care system that continues to bankrupt American industries, the packing of the Supreme Court with judges confirmed despite their stonewalling before the congressional oversight committees charged with vetting them before they assumed lifetime appointments. We have been unable or unwilling to secure our borders. We have seen corruption on an unprecedented scale and massive neglect of dozens of urgent national needs. Science has been disregarded whenever it runs afoul of the profit motive, and we have a foreign policy no one, least of all the people in charge of it, seems to understand.
Our actions in Iraq have fueled the most extreme anti-Western views throughout the Islamic world, and the entire Middle East is less stable than it was when the Bush bunch took office.
Meanwhile, we build for our children and grandchildren a legacy of international hatred, plus a huge debt burden as the Bush administration spends and spends as though there is no tomorrow.
We've squandered our good name and our moral authority in the world as we've watched Rumsfeld and Cheney and other spokesmen for our nation argue to justify torture in the interest of our safety.
At a time when it was absolutely essential that the world know unequivocally just who the good guys were, Bush and Co. have sullied the image of America all over the globe, drawing a portrait of a nation that behaves with arrogance, defies world opinion, ignores planetary environmental concerns, and treats other nations with disdain.
All of this harm has come to our nation and to its image, and still a cluster of supporters insist on tarring anyone who might question this ruinous administration. One of the ignorant nimrods who regularly write to this paper to call me a Marxist argues that those who disagree with the president are delighted to see America fail, that people like me take pleasure in anything that gives comfort to our enemies. He argues that people who question the reckless use of the military are "pacifist military haters." There is no truth to such baseless and childish nonsense, but he seems to think it sounds persuasive, or perhaps he thinks it's a kind of logical argument.
That's one of the reasons it's difficult not to think some of these Bush supporters are just willfully stupid.
These people grow more tiresome as they have less and less with which to argue. Their recourse, it seems, is to tag people they disagree with by calling them "leftists" and "liberals," as if those words cancel out all arguments. These people exploit the nation's soldiers to bolster their arguments.
They claim to support the troops, but you never hear a peep from them about cuts to the Veterans Affairs budget or the shameful number of avoidable deaths and injuries suffered by our soldiers because the Bush administration still has not provided frontline troops with the kind of armored vehicles that could have saved them from many of those deaths and injuries.
But to people who are either stupid or malevolent, hatred of those they would label as "liberals" trumps love of country every time and blinds them to the harm being done to our security, our heritage and our well-being.
***
Jaime O'Neill is a widely published freelance writer.
February 12, 2006
Two important items today -- an article from the Times and a Dana Milbank column in the Post – highlight the growing (both in terms of numbers and importance) opposition among Republicans to the Administration's illegal eavesdropping program. And yet, as described by Milbank's column, the most blindly loyal Bush followers remain steadfastly intolerant of any criticisms of the Leader.
In that regard, it is noteworthy how true conservative believer Bob Barr -- whose conservative credentials include serving as House Manager of the Clinton Impeachment and being the primary sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act -- was treated like an evil traitor at the Conservative Political Action Conference held this weekend all because he is critical of The President's violations of FISA.
Conservatism in some circles really has morphed into The Cult of George Bush, which is why any criticism of the Leader -- even when the criticism is based on conservative principles -- is deemed to be blasphemous to the Cause. This excerpt from Milbank’s column really tells you all you need to know about what "conservativsm" has come to mean in certain circles:
Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes."
But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.
For them, even to be subjected to the idea that "Bush is off course" is traumatic and wrong. Such an opinion has no place at a "conservative" event, where only praise and reverence of the Commander-in-Chief is appropriate. One sees this time and again: "conservatism" these days very rarely has anything to do with actual conservative principles of government and has come to be distorted shorthand for "George Bush follower."
The more one agrees with and praises the Commander-in-Chief, the more "conservative" one is, even when his actions aren't even remotely "conservative." That really is the definition of a creepy cult of personality, and it has consumed a large segment of the Republican Party.
--Posted by Glenn Greenwald
February 12, 2006
See, we have a duty. The job of the President is to confront problems, not to pass them on to future Presidents and future generations. –GWB
I have a duty to nominate well-qualified men and women to the federal judiciary. I have done just that, and I will continue to do so. –GWB
We have a duty for future generations. We have a duty to leave this world more peaceful. We have a duty to reform the institutions that are old and tired. That's our duty. –GWB
I have a duty as the president to define problems facing our nation and to call upon people to act. –GWB
I have a duty to protect the Executive Branch from legislative encroachment. I mean, for example, when the GAO demands documents from us, we're not going to give them to them. –GWB
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
February 9, 2006
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" ~ Gandhi.~
So what would Jesus do?
I've spent the past hour looking at children caught up in war. This war, past wars. Wars old an new. And I've seen Moya's face and Moiya's tears in each and every one of them.
I look at the fundamentalists climbing into bed with agents of the same Military/Industrial Complex that Eisenhower so presciently warned us about. I listen to the loud media preachers claiming “God is pro war” (Falwell) and calling His destruction down on those who oppose their power grab (Robertson). I see the pulpits being used to marshal political action in order to push agendas and disenfranchise those who are ‘sinners” and watch pickets waving signs asserting that "God Hates Fags" And all this on behalf of a man who taught his followers to ‘Judge not” All on behalf of a man who taught that the things of this world and the things of God are to have no truck with one another. All this on behalf of a guy who claimed that God was about faith, hope and love.. but that love was the most important of the three.
And I wonder how a well-meaning people can have so tragically lost their way. Yes, they have gained access to the halls of power.. but in doing so have departed so far from the precepts of the Christ as to have made themselves unrecognizable as his followers. There is, simply put, no longer any Christ left in them, no matter how often they may use His name or claim His authority. The gentle, generous, inclusive tao of Jesus has been commandeered by the loud, the angry, the violent, and the vain. It is as though followers of Gandhi were suddenly and surreally to claim that mass political assassinations and car bombings fit neatly into the Mahatma’s teachings.
And I wonder what He would say about it, that fellow who once pointed out “What profits it a man to gain the whole world if he lose his soul?”
I wonder.
September 12, 2005
from www.andrfewsullivan.com
THE FOREIGN POLICY COST: Like that of central banks, the power of militaries is often more effective when it has acquired a fearsome reputation of being effective and powerful. Sometimes, as Machiavelli noted, the reputation for ferocity is more important than the capacity to deliver it - and makes actual exercise of it superfluous. What the response to Katrina has done is make the U.S. super-power look a lot less credible, a lot less fearsome, a lot less capable. Ditto, of course, with regard to the inept conduct of the war in Iraq. Just as this administration has squandered America's fiscal reputation, it has also put a dent in perception of its military effectiveness. That only emboldens enemies, makes deterrence harder and makes more conflict likelier. Richard N. Haass elaborates in Slate.
September 12, 2005
From the BBC:
Survival of the fittest?
A POINT OF VIEW
By Harold Evans
After so many years of Social Darwinism, Hurricane Katrina could reawaken the American people's appetite for compassion in government.
It takes a lot to shake America to the core - 9/11 did it four years ago this weekend; the war in Iraq still has not.
It's 70 years since the satirist Eric Linklater noted in his novel Don Juan that life in America was spread over so vast an area that any number of strange and sinister interludes could be enacted without upsetting the national equilibrium.
Hurricane Katrina is one of those rare interludes which has upset the national equilibrium. While 9/11 made Americans angry, the fate of New Orleans has gone beyond that. In varying degrees the whole population is angry, ashamed, and fearful.
Angry at the incompetence and buck-passing between inept local, state and federal authorities; ashamed at those relentlessly recycled pictures of the abandoned black underclass; and fearful to see that the country is still unprepared to cope with a major terrorist attack.
There will be hell to pay for Katrina.
In my view, it is likely to have as traumatic an impact on American political life as the Great Depression of the 1930s. That catastrophe ushered in two decades of Democratic presidents - but even more, it reversed America's entrenched dedication to laissez faire Social Darwinism, a philosophy embraced by both major parties for 150 years.
Natural selection
Social Darwinism was a doctrine of individualism invented in England by the 19th Century philosopher Herbert Spencer, a friend of Charles Darwin's. It was Spencer who first coined the famous phrase "the survival of the fittest" and he did so nine years before the great man himself published his Origin of Species.
I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering
President Grover Cleveland, 1877
Social Darwinism never infiltrated politics as much in Britain as it did in America where it was brilliantly propagated by a Yale polemicist named William Graham Sumner.
Interventions by government to regulate housing, public health, factories, and so on, were wrong, he argued, because they impeded individual enterprise that alone created wealth. My mind, said the steelmaster Andrew Carnegie, was illuminated in a flash by Sumner's theorem that mankind progresses through the "ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong".
Politicians of all colours agreed. It was a Democratic president - Grover Cleveland - who epitomized the philosophy in a memorable decision in 1877. Asked to release $10,000 of surplus seed for drought-stricken farmers in Texas, he declared: "I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering... The lesson should constantly be enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."
BBC NEWS: AUDIO
Hear A Point of View in the BBC Radio Player
The attitude has never entirely disappeared and probably never will. Its appeal is not only to the economically powerful with a central faith in the sanctity of the marketplace, but also to the romantic ideals of Jeffersonian individualism.
America has long been entranced by stories of fortunes made by hard work and perseverance without help from government. More tellingly many of them come true, truer in America than anywhere else. It is just that they are not the whole story. When people fail it leaves, exposed as a raw nerve, the question of moral duty in a civilized society.
So Social Darwinism has remained in the American psyche, sometimes submerged in the current, sometimes coming to the surface like a log in a fast-flowing river. Cleveland's sentiments might have popped up any time in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan's teleprompter. His remark that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" was an echo of Cleveland and many presidencies thereafter.
The log came clearly into view again when turbulence in the wake of 9/11 led to the re-election of George W Bush. His instinct for low taxes and small government has been neatly encapsulated by the evangelical tax cutter Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Judgement day
My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans. The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties. They are too kindly a people. They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.
Before Katrina, America's greatest natural disaster was another Mississippi flood - that of 1927 - which made half a million homeless. At the time Republican President Calvin Coolidge refused even to recall Congress to vote emergency money. He was so inactive that when Dorothy Parker, a few years later, was told he was dead, she asked, "How do they know?"
Two hundred people had drowned in the 1920s before the federal government intervened. It did so in the person of the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Only three died after Hoover got involved. He waded in - literally up to his knees in floodwater - galvanizing everyone in six endangered states.
His vigour standing on the tottering levee amid the raging floods helped to win him the Republican nomination and then the presidency. He was called "the great engineer".
So why then is Hoover almost a dirty word in the history books? It is because faced with a bigger challenge than the floods - the Great Depression with 13 million out of work - he refused to recognise the responsibility of government to relieve individual suffering.
He believed that economic depressions, like natural disasters, were acts of God that must run their course. He expected voluntary acts of compassion by business and good neighbours would be enough, as they mostly had been in his humanitarian work in World War I. But the Depression affected so many millions it was too big and complex for that.
So slow was Hoover to respond that the shanty towns of the unemployed became known as Hoovervilles. He refused to believe that anyone was starving.
Of the men selling apples in the streets, the symbol of the depression, he said, "many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." It was not a joke. He had a tin ear, rather like George Bush.
When GW belatedly visited the flooded region, he reminisced about his good-time days in New Orleans. His intentions were good but his off-the-cuff remark was as unfortunate as his rhapsody to the homeless about how the former Republican majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was going to build a "fantastic new house". Brother can you spare a dime?
And Bush, like Hoover, has found it hard to confront reality. He has said nobody expected the levees to break - thereby flying in the fact of scores of predictions in official reports, science journals and newspapers.
Back in the 30s, clinging to the log of Social Darwinism did not save Hoover. He was swept away by a riptide of anger and fear like that which may threaten the Republican ascendancy today.
In 1932 Hoover lost both his reputation and the presidency in a landslide to his Democratic challenger Franklin Roosevelt. The New Deal FDR ushered in - signing 15 bills in his first 100 days - almost drove a stake through the heart of Social Darwinism. Never before had government so directly shored up the lives of individual Americans at every social level and class.
It was the foundation of a welfare state - a ringing reaffirmation of America's commitment to huddled masses yearning to share in the great American Dream.
Published: 2005/09/09 15:02:50 GMT
© BBC MMV
September 12, 2005
Believe the evidence or not, you NEED read these:
Why Did The Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse
and this, from POAC:
They Let it Happen
Tj Templeton
Originally written March 12, 2005
Let's face it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put the evidence together. They Let it happen. 9-11 was not only preventable, but allowed to happen.
Let me begin by asking a question: If you were President of the United States on September 11th, would you initiate an investigation to determine what security lapses had occurred to allow such a tragedy to unfold? Of course you would. The only reason you would try to prevent an investigation is if you had something to hide. If your house was broken into and your family murdered, would you ask the police to not investigate and try to block the investigation? NO. Unless you were somehow involved. How could anyone not wish to investigate what had allowed the 9-11 attacks to transpire?
This is exactly what George W Bush did. The Bush administration tried to prevent the formation of the 9-11 committee.(1) Why would the president not feel it was necessary to investigate this? George W. Bush tried to prevent the 9-11 investigation from happening. When that fight was lost Bush tried to appoint Henry Kissinger to head the commission. After worldwide howls of outrage and plenty of conflicts of interest questions about Kissinger, Kissinger was replaced by Thomas Kean. Bush then took steps at every turn to hinder the investigators.(2) At times, Bush even prevented the committee from having access to their own notes.(3) He even tried to prevent his National Security Advisor from testifying. When he finally relented on that, he tried to prevent her from being required to testify under oath.(4) Why would you ever set standards for ones testimony to not include the promise to tell the truth unless the truth would somehow be damaging to your official story? Finally, Condoleeza Rice did testify under oath. Of course, we know how much that oath means to this administration. President Bush has appointed several people to prominent government positions who have already proven their willingness to lie to Congress. Appointing convicted felons to government offices is bad. Appointing convicted felons guilty of lying to Congress (5) is to spit in the face of the American people and a blatant display of the disregard this administration has for our very democracy, Congress, Constitution, and the rule of law.
Of course, not everyone who testified was required to swear to tell the truth. Similar to the hemming and hawing over getting Rice to testify, George Bush and Dick Cheney were quite a pair. First they said they wouldn't testify. Eventually they gave in and agreed to testify only under certain conditions: only in secret, only in the company of each other, and (of course) without swearing to tell the truth. only in secret, only in the company of each other, and (of course) without swearing to tell the truth. (6) Word was never released if George was actually sitting on Dick's lap, but I have my suspicions. Is this the behavior of two men who have nothing to hide and have the best interest of the country at heart?
When George Bush was appointed to the Presidency, one of his first acts was to demote and reassign the man that President Clinton had promoted to a cabinet level position as terrorism czar. Under the Clinton presidency, this man, Richard Clarke, held weekly cabinet level meetings specifically on the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Those meetings we subsequently cancelled and Dick Cheney himself has been quoted as saying "Richard Clarke was kept "out of the loop".
Shortly before her performance for the 9-11 commission, (7) Rice wrote a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post (8) that said "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration,". However, a January 25, 2001 memo penned by Richard Clarke (9) clearly states "We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network" "We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network" (9.5). Under oath, testifying before the 9-11 Commission, Condoleeza Rice claimed "...no one could have imagined planes being used a weapons..." (page 12) (10). We had a reference to the August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States". Rice referred to this as an "historical document'. We were led to believe that this was the only warning. It comes out now, that she was lying. Lying 52 times (11) over. It has now been learned that Condi didn't disclose that they had, in fact, received 52 warnings (12) in the months leading up to September 11th. Yes, Condi lied under oath to a Congressional commission. With our knowledge of this administration's penchant for people willing to lie to Congress, it comes as no surprise that this National Security advisor who lied to Congress and oversaw the worst lapse of national security in the history of this country would now be promoted to Secretary of state.
So here we have an administration trying to prevent an investigation, stonewalling the investigators once the committee is formed against their best efforts, and outright lying under oath about having received 52 separate and specific warnings. What more could you possibly need?
How about a document signed by all of the people appointed to the top levels of the Whitehouse and Pentagon stating their agenda for invading and controlling the Middle east and their need for some sort of terrorist attack in order to facilitate the public support needed for such an agenda? Well, we have that too.
The Project for the New American Century was established in 1997 by Robert Kagan and William Kristol and funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil and weapons and defense industries. Calling themselves, "Neoconservatives" this small group of ideologues penned a Statement of Principles (13) outlining their plan for a New American Century wherein the United States, as the world's lone superpower would use its military might to topple regimes in the middle East and elsewhere that were unfriendly to U.S. corporate interests. On their website you can read their document Rebuilding America’s Defenses(14) ( .pdf format ). According to this document (page 52). "The process of transformation," the plan said, "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." American Free Press asked Christopher Maletz, asst. director of the PNAC about what was meant by the "need for a new Pearl Harbor" According to this document (page 52). "The process of transformation," the plan said, "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." American Free Press asked Christopher Maletz, asst. director of the PNAC about what was meant by the "need for a new Pearl Harbor" (15): "They needed more money to up the defense budget for raises, new arms, and future capabilities," Maletz said. "Without some disaster or catastrophic event," neither the politicians nor the military would have approved. The first leg of the PNAC imperialistic agenda was to secure the oil supply of the Middle East. (16) for the invasion of Iraq. Who belongs to this neoconservative think tank?
Dick Cheney Vice President
Donald Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz Deputy Secretary of Defense
Elliott Abrams Deputy Secretary of state
William J. Bennett Presidential speech writer
Jeb Bush Governor of Florida
I. Lewis Libby Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs.
Aaron Friedberg Vice President Cheney’s deputy National Security advisor
Frank Gaffney Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
Fred C. Ikle Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
Eliot A. Cohen Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
Henry S. Rowen Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
Paula Dobriansky Undersecretary of State
So here we have the top levels of the Whitehouse and Pentagon appointed by a President who displays a blatant disregard for Congress and the rule of law, who belong to a powerful and well funded organization who's agenda centers around the necessity of a "new Pearl Harbor" to fulfill their agenda, letting our defenses down in the face of 52 warnings of an impending terrorist attack, lying about it before Congress and the American people. If this doesn't exemplify every bit of evidence you would need to assume that the 9-11 attacks were allowed to occur, I don't know what else you could possibly need.
On a personal note, I don't believe that The Bush administration had knowledge of just how bad the destruction of 9-11 would be. I believe that they probably assumed that the attacks of 9-11 would be more on the level of the attack on the USS Cole. I don't have any reason to believe this, but I need to believe it. Just as many people need to believe that the Bush administration wouldn't consider the loss of human life as the cost of doing business. Unfortunately, by our observations of the invasion of Iraq and the coup in Haiti, (17) we know that is not the case.
(1) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/15/attack/main509096.shtml
(2) http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/911attack.html
(3) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A64628-2004Jan30¬Found=true
(4) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/rice-m30.shtml
(5) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/bushco/bushcontra.htm
(6) http://www.voicesofsept11.org/911ic/archive/0404.php
(7) http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/002112.php
(8) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/condi_art.htm
(9) http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12216311^401,00.html
(9.5)
(10) http://firstpeoplescentury.net/Rice01.htm
(11) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1480093,00.html
(12) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/52_warnings.htm
(13) http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
(14) http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
(15) http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/America_Pearl_Harbored/america_pearl_harbored.html
(16) http://www.channel4.com/news/2003/special_reports/pnacletter.html
(17) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/aristide.htm
See also: September 11 hijackers were being carefully watched more than a year before the attacks
On a lighter note: The following posters can be found on the website Project for the Old American Century
I also recommend Crooks and Liars as a source of counter information to the right wing drivel spewed out by the networks.
Other fun reads (if ya can't beat 'em you might as well laugh at 'em):
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