WorldNetDaily: New Bible translation promotes fornication

"A brand-new translation of the Bible – praised by Britain's archbishop of Canterbury, that nation’s senior Christian voice – flatly contradicts traditional core Christian beliefs on sex and morality.
Titled "Good as New," the new Bible is translated by former Baptist minister John Henson for the "One" organization, to produce what the group calls a "new, fresh and adventurous" translation of the Christian scriptures.
The 104th archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams – leader of the Church of England – describes it is a book of "extraordinary power," but admitted many would be startled by its content.
"Instead of condemning fornicators, adulterers and 'abusers of themselves with mankind'," says Ruth Gledhill, the London Times religious affairs correspondent, "the new version of his first letter to Corinth has St. Paul advising Christians not to go without sex for too long in case they get 'frustrated.'"
"The new version, which Dr. Williams says he hopes will spread 'in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike', turns St. Paul's strictures against fornication on their head," adds the Times.
The One organization that produced the new Bible translation is dedicated to "establish[ing] peace, justice, dignity and rights for all." It is also focused on "sustainable use of the earth's resources," challenging "oppression, injustice, exclusion and discrimination" as well as accepting "one another, valuing their diversity and experience."
According to Ekklesia, a London-based "theological think tank" that supports the "One" translation:

The translation is pioneering in its accessibility, and changes the original Greek and Hebrew nomenclature into modern nicknames. St. Peter becomes "Rocky," Mary Magdalene becomes "Maggie," Aaron becomes "Ron," Andronicus becomes "Andy" and Barabbas becomes "Barry.". . .

Here, according to the London Times, are a few sample passages:

Mark 1:4

Authorized version: "John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins."

New: "John, nicknamed 'The Dipper,' was 'The Voice.' He was in the desert, inviting people to be dipped, to show they were determined to change their ways and wanted to be forgiven."

Mark 1:10-11

Authorized version: "And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from the heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

New: "As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God's spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, 'That's my boy! You're doing fine!'"

Matthew 23:25

Authorized version: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

New version: "Take a running jump, Holy Joes, humbugs!"

Matthew 26:69-70

Authorized version: "Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, 'Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee.' But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest."

New: "Meanwhile Rocky was still sitting in the courtyard. A woman came up to him and said: 'Haven't I seen you with Jesus, the hero from Galilee?" Rocky shook his head and said: 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about!'"

1 Corinthians 7:1-2

KJV: "Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband."

New: "Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offences. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner."

1 Corinthians 7:8-7

KJV: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn."

New: "If you know you have strong needs, get yourself a partner. Better than being frustrated." "

From the archives: Thomas Jefferson on public debt

"At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams, and the gulls of that size entered bonâ fide into it. But the art and mystery of banks is a wonderful improvement on that. It is established on the principle that "private debts are a public blessing "; that the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States.
  Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or want property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a given proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent. interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt when it shall be called for.
  But let us look at this principle in its original form, and its copy will then be equally understood. "A public debt is a public blessing." That our debt was juggled from forty-three to eighty millions, and funded at that amount, according to this opinion a great public blessing, because the evidences of it could be vested in commerce, and thus converted into active capital, and then the more the debt was made to be, the more active capital was created. That is to say, the creditors could now employ in commerce the money due them from the public, and make from it an annual profit of five per cent., or four millions of dollars. But observe, that the public were at the same time paying on it an interest of exactly the same amount of four millions of dollars. Where, then, is the gain to either party, which makes it a public blessing?
  There is no change in the state of things, but of persons only. A has a debt due to him from the public, of which he holds their certificate as evidence, and on which he is receiving an annual interest. He wishes, however, to have the money itself, and to go into business with it. B has an equal sum of money in business, but wishes now to retire, and live on the interest. He therefore gives it to A in exchange for A's certificates of public stock. Now, then, A has the money to employ in business, which B so employed before. B has the money on interest to live on, which A lived on before; and the public pays the interest to B which they paid to A before. Here is no new creation of capital, no additional money employed, nor even a change in the employment of a single dollar. The only change is of place between A and B in which we discover no creation of capital, nor public blessing.
  Suppose, again, the public to owe nothing. Then A not having lent his money to the public, would be in possession of it himself, and would go into business without the previous operation of selling stock. Here, again, the same quantity of capital is employed as in the former case, though no public debt exists. In neither case is there any creation of active capital, nor other difference than that there is a public debt in the first case, and none in the last; and we may safely ask which of the two situations is most truly a public blessing? If, then, a public debt be no public blessing, we may pronounce, à fortiori, that a private one cannot be so. If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent. on it.
  As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air as the Morris notes did. We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of "a public debt being a public blessing," and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper."

Wired: The Humanoid Race: Machines are getting more and more like the rest of us. A piece-by-piece guide to the globe's most advanced bots.

Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us.

(click title for link to pix & specs)

BelfastTelegraph: 'UFO' is spotted in skies

"TWO men working high up a radio mast in Co Monaghan believe they have spied a top-secret inter-planetary craft flying toward Belfast.
Miles Johnston, of the Irish UFO Research Centre, and Dublin-based rigger Terry Malone claim the delta-winged craft traversed the sky at ultrasonic speed, taking just a few seconds to reach the horizon.
"I am convinced it was a man-made advanced space craft - we had a good long look at it in a clear blue sky," Mr Johnston said.
Mr Malone confirmed the object was "absolutely enormous".
"It was huge, high, and travelling at some speed," he said.
"I've seen B52s going over and you can hear them buzzing, but there was not a sound from this thing. And it was gone in an instant." "

Reuters: US Imposes New Limits On Scientists

"The U.S. government is making it harder for scientists to speak to their global colleagues and restricting who can attend an upcoming major AIDS conference, a congressman charged on Thursday.
  Rep. Henry Waxman said he has a letter showing that the Health and Human Services Department has imposed new limits on who may speak to the World Health Organization.
  Under the new policy, WHO must ask HHS for permission to speak to scientists and must allow HHS to choose who will respond.
  "This policy is unprecedented. For the first time political appointees will routinely be able to keep the top experts in their field from responding to WHO requests for guidance on international health issues," the California Democrat wrote in a letter to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson.
  "This is a raw attempt to exert political control over scientists and scientific evidence in the area of international health," Waxman wrote.
  "Under the new policy the administration will be able to refuse to provide any experts whenever it wishes to stall international progress on controversial topics." "

AP: World Is Turning To Dust - UN

"The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says.
  One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert - an area the size of Indiana - since the 1950s.
  This week the United Nations marks the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed at stopping the phenomenon. Despite the efforts, the trend seems to be picking up speed - doubling its pace since the 1970s.
  "It's a creeping catastrophe," said Michel Smitall, a spokesman for the U.N. secretariat that oversees the 1994 accord. "Entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable."
  Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame. But global warming is taking its toll, too.
  The United Nations is holding a ceremony in Bonn, Germany, on Thursday to mark World Day to Combat Desertification, and will hold a meeting in Brazil this month to take stock of the problem.
  The warning comes as a controversial movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" is whipping up interest in climate change, and as rivers and lakes dry up in the American West, giving Americans a taste of what's to come elsewhere.
  The United Nations says:
 
- From the mid-1990s to 2000, 1,374 square miles have turned into deserts each year - an area about the size of Rhode Island. That's up from 840 square miles in the 1980s, and 624 square miles during the 1970s.
- By 2025, two-thirds of arable land in Africa will disappear, along with one-third of Asia's and one-fifth of South America's.
- Some 135 million people - equivalent to the populations of France and Germany combined - are at risk of being displaced.
 
Most at risk are dry regions on the edges of deserts - places like sub-Saharan Africa or the Gobi Desert in China, where people are already struggling to eke out a living from the land.
  As populations expand, those regions have become more stressed. Trees are cut for firewood, grasslands are overgrazed, fields are over-farmed and lose their nutrients, water becomes scarcer and dirtier.
  Technology can make the problem worse. In parts of Australia, irrigation systems are pumping up salty water and slowly poisoning farms. In Saudi Arabia, herdsmen can use water trucks instead of taking their animals from oasis to oasis - but by staying in one place, the herds are getting bigger and eating all the grass.
  In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, coastal resorts are swallowing up water that once moistened the wilderness. Many farmers in those countries still flood their fields instead of using more miserly "drip irrigation," and the resulting shortages are slowly baking the life out of the land.
  The result is a patchy "rash" of dead areas, rather than an easy-to-see expansion of existing deserts, scientists say. These areas have their good times and bad times as the weather changes. But in general, they are getting bigger and worse-off.
  "It's not as dramatic as a flood or a big disaster like an earthquake," said Richard Thomas of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Aleppo, Syria. "There are some bright spots and hot spots. But overall, there is a trend toward increasing degradation."
  The trend is speeding up, but it has been going on for centuries, scientists say. Fossilized pollen and seeds, along with ancient tools like grinding stones, show that much of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa were once green. The Sahara itself was a savanna, and rock paintings show giraffes, elephants and cows once lived there.
  Global warming contributes to the problem, making many dry areas drier, scientists say. In the last century, average temperatures have risen over 1 degree Fahrenheit worldwide, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
  As for the American Southwest, it is too early to tell whether its six-year drought could turn to something more permanent. But scientists note that reservoir levels are dropping as cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas expand.
  "In some respects you may have greener vegetation showing up in people's yards, but you may be using water that was destined for the natural environment," said Stuart Marsh of the University of Arizona's Office of Arid Lands Studies. "That might have an effect on the biodiversity surrounding that city."
  The Global Change Research Program says global warming could eventually make the Southwest wetter - but it will also cause more extreme weather, meaning harsher droughts that could kill vegetation. Now, the Southwest drought has become so severe that even the sagebrush is dying.
  "The lack of water and the overuse of water, that is going to be a threat to the United States," Thomas said. "In other parts of the world, the problem is poverty that causes people to overuse the land. Most of these ecological systems have tipping points, and once you go past them, things go downhill." "

The Independent Institute: Since 9/11, Federal Spending Under Bush

(click title for link to chart)

Truthout: William Rivers Pitt: Thank You, Michael Moore

"The light at the end of the tunnel could be the bulb in a film projector."
- Jeanette Castillo

    Screens in Bartlett, Chattanooga, Jackson, Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee will be showing it. Screens in Layton and West Jordan, Utah will be showing it. If you find yourself in Leawood, Merriam, Shawnee or Wichita, Kansas, you can see it. The same goes for Centerville, Fairfax and Abington, Virginia. If you happen to be in Akron, Bexley, Dublin or Elyria, Ohio, you're all set. Hoover, Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama will not be left out.
    Laramie, Wyoming? It's there. Bozeman, Montana? Indeed. Should you call home Grand Island, Lincoln or Omaha, Nebraska, you have not been forgotten. The largest mall in the country, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, will have it in its theater. If you are a soldier at Camp Lejune or Fort Bragg, about to be shipped to Iraq, you can see it in nearby Fayetteville, North Carolina.
    These towns, large and small, along with towns large and small from sea to shining sea and straight through the American heartland, will begin screening Michael Moore's documentary, 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' beginning at 12:01a.m. Friday morning, the 25th of June, 2004. For the majority of people who will see this movie, in those towns large and small, the experience will be nothing short of a mind-bomb.
    The Who once sang about how the hypnotized never lie, but as we have seen, people hypnotized by television and deliberately enforced fear can certainly support a war, and a President, which are fundamentally at odds with basic American decency. In fact, people hypnotized by television and deliberately enforced fear will feed themselves into the meat grinder with "God Bless America" on their lips.
    Michael Moore's film will snap that hypnosis, but good. Those Americans who believed what their President told them because they saw it on the TV will, after less than two hours in their local theater, look at both their television and their President with doubt and loathing when they walk from the darkness into the bright light of day. There are millions of Americans who believed what they were told - about 9/11, about Iraq, about George W. Bush himself - who will come into that bright light with the realization that they have been lied to.
    Speaking personally, none of the data in this film surprised me. Having spent every day of the last three years working to expose as many Americans as possible to the truth of the man they call President, Mr. Moore was unlikely to explode any shells across my bow. The connections between Bush, the Saudis, the Carlyle Group and the 9/11 attacks were there. The connections between Cheney and Halliburton were there. The connections between Enron, Unocal, natural gas pipelines, the war in Afghanistan and a little-known country called Turkmenistan were there. I enjoyed the fact that Moore showed off unredacted copies of Bush's military service record, allowing us to see the parts of those documents which had been blacked out. I found no fact, no assertion in this film to question or doubt. I have done my homework, and as was made painfully clear, Michael Moore did his.
    Most Americans don't know about this stuff, and seeing it fully documented and meticulously researched on the big screen will be, to say the least, revelatory. Yes, Virginia, there are billions of dollars to be made off this Iraq war for Bush's friends. The second door on the left is the recruiting office. Sign on the line that is dotted, and be the first kid on your block to die for the benefit of Carlyle's stock options. Be sure to save your pennies beforehand, however, because the Army will dock your pay for the days you are dead. It's policy, you see.
    Mr. Moore put two daggers into me with this film, the first of which had to do with American soldiers. Trooper after trooper spoke frankly for Moore's camera, condemning both the war and the people who thrust them into it. Several scenes graphically explained what happens to a soldier's body when it is caught in an explosion. The result is ruinous, and the cries of the wounded and the dying will ring in my ears forever.
    The most wrenching scenes in the film center around a woman named Lila, who loves her country, loves her flag, and above all loves her children whom she actively persuaded to join the armed services. We learn that Lila has a son in Iraq, and because of that, she despises those protesting the invasion. We find out later that her son was killed in Karbala on April 2nd, when his Blackhawk helicopter was shot down. We watch her read her son's last letter home, in which he rages against Bush and the war. We last see Lila standing at the gates of the White House, tears boiling from her eyes, as she discovers her true enemy, the one who took her baby from her.
    The other dagger Moore put into me came during his montage of the media coverage of the war. Journalist after journalist is shown rhapsodizing Bush, his administration and the war. Each and every one of them carried forth that which we now know to be bald-faced lies: That Iraq had WMDs, that Iraq was a threat, that we had to go, and that everything is fine. It was a slideshow of the nonsense Americans have been spoon-fed for far too long.
    If you doubt this, Sidney Blumenthal's aggressive and effective actual journalism, as found in his most recent report titled 'Reality is Unraveling for Bush,' should help you along. "Most of the media was on the bandwagon or intimidated," writes Blumenthal. "Cheney himself called the president of the corporation that owned one of the networks to complain about an errant commentator. Political aides directed by Karl Rove ceaselessly called editors and producers with veiled threats about access that was not granted in any case. The press would not bite the hand that would not feed it."
    With a single stroke, Michael Moore has undone three years of poor, slanted, biased, factually bereft, compromised television journalism. This, in the end, is the final greatness of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' Not only will Americans get a sense of the depth of the deception they have endured, but 'journalists' all across the country will be forced to endure the humiliation they so richly deserve.
    I was privileged to see this film in the company of three groups - Military Families Speak Out, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Veterans for Peace - which have stood against this disastrous war from day one. Many in the theater had family in Iraq, or had lost family in Iraq, or had lost family on 9/11 and seen their beloved dead used as an excuse for unwarranted war, and there was not a dry eye in the house.
    'Fahrenheit 9/11' is not a victory for anyone. We the People should have known better, We the People should have been given the facts before sending 851 of our children to die. We the People have been betrayed, by our leaders and by a media that profited, and profits still, from the daily sale of lies. This film drove that horrid fact home with a mallet, and it hurt.
    I was reminded, as I filed out with this company of heroes, of a portion of Shakespeare's rendition of Henry's speech before Agincourt:

He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'

    Many of us were not hypnotized. Millions of us took to the streets in this country and around the world, to try and stop this madness before it was unleashed. The people in that theater with me had done this, had never stopped doing this, though their President and their media named them traitor. They were right. They were right. They were right.
    Michael Moore has unleashed a wolf within Mr. Bush's fences. There is no getting around it. Perhaps, now that it is far too late, we as a nation will wake up. On the day of that awakening, those of us who never stopped standing, never stopped marching, learned to live without sleep, learned to live in a nation that scorned truth for televised fantasy, those patriots I was with tonight in that theater can pause for breath. We can sit upon the grass on a bright day, strip our sleeves, and show our scars."

Disinfopedia: Everything you wanted to know about John Negroponte (but were afraid to ask).

(click title to access table of contents & external links)

Interview w/Noam Chomsky on John Negroponte's Career From the Death Squads of Honduras to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

"John Negroponte was sworn in as the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq on Wednesday. We hear from MIT Professor Noam Chomsky on Negroponte's time in Honduras. As ambassador, he played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras.

(click title to access full transcript or video @ democracynow.org)

BostonPhoenix: Ashcroft’s big con

False confessions, coerced pleas, show trials — the Justice Department’s reliance on Soviet-style tactics has turned the war on terror into a Potemkin village
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"BOSTON IS HOME to the Ponzi scheme, named after the notorious swindler Charles Ponzi who, in 1919, amassed a fortune by fooling investors tempted by reliable returns. The plan worked this way: by delivering regular payouts from "earnings," Ponzi established a track record that attracted ever more investors. The catch was that investors were not paid with profits on anything real, but out of funds invested by later investors. And later investors were paid from investments made by those who followed them. And so on. It was an ingenious façade until the music stopped — which was, of course, inevitable.
Ponzi ended up doing time in federal prison, and yet Attorney General John Ashcroft — the man who today is in charge of guarding against such criminal maneuvers — seems to be something of a Ponzi schemer himself. Only this time what is at stake is not the hard-earned cash of hapless investors, but our national security.
On June 14, Ashcroft unveiled the federal indictment of Nuradin M. Abdi, a 32-year-old Somali citizen living in Ohio who was charged in a conspiracy to bomb an unidentified shopping mall in Columbus; if convicted, he could face 55 years in prison. Although the indictment itself was mostly boilerplate, the prosecutors’ motion to deny bail contained all kinds of damning detail about Abdi’s comings and goings between Canada and Ethiopia, and his training in "radio usage, guns, guerrilla warfare, bombs [for] violent Jihadi conflicts overseas and any activity his al Qaeda co-conspirators might ask him to perform here in the United States."
Well, this may or may not be true. We have no way of knowing, now or in the future, because there has not been and likely never will be a trial. And even if Abdi were to plead guilty and "admit" all these facts, we could not have any confidence in their truth. Why? Because one of Abdi’s alleged co-conspirators was none other than Iyman Faris, a former Ohio truck driver who was more or less forced to plead guilty last year to planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. For that crime, Faris was sentenced, in October 2003, to a prison term of 20 years. A public trial was not an option for Faris; his choice was either to plead guilty or be detained indefinitely, incommunicado, as an "enemy combatant." Under such circumstances, any information he may have provided implicating Abdi must be considered dubious at best.
To an observer unfamiliar with Faris’s unusual situation, the case against Abdi sounds pretty straightforward, typical of cases involving state witnesses: in an effort to reduce his long prison sentence, Faris must have ratted on his former partner-in-crime to federal investigators and then to a grand jury, resulting in Abdi’s indictment. Justice prevailed, and useful intelligence is making us safer.
But is it? Even if Faris were simply a convict hoping to gain a reduced sentence, he would still have all the credibility problems we normally associate with rewarded witnesses — who, as Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz often says, "are taught not only how to sing, but also how to compose." However, Faris is not just an ordinary convict, much less an ordinary witness; he’s not even an ordinary rewarded witness. As Carl Takei and I explained in this column back in March (see "Crossing the Threshold," News and Features, March 5), Faris falls into a special category of individuals who are the victims of a prosecutorial ruse reminiscent of the Stalinist show trials described by Arthur Koestler in his powerful novel Darkness at Noon. There, we said: "In ... Darkness at Noon ... the protagonist is accused of crimes against the state and is given a choice by his jailers. If he signs a confession and admits wrongdoing, he will receive a public trial. But if he refuses to cooperate, his case will be dealt with ‘administratively’ and out of sight. This two-track justice system, in which problem cases were whisked from view and dealt with in secret while public trials merely paraded the coerced guilt of the ‘accused,’ converted the Soviet Union’s justice system into an appalling masquerade."
And, indeed, Faris, a naturalized US citizen of Kashmiri birth, was the victim of just such a masquerade. He was secretly arrested in March 2003, charged with plotting to destroy the famous bridge, and held incommunicado for two months. Then he was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: he could either plead guilty and cooperate with the FBI, or President Bush and the Department of Defense would declare him an "enemy combatant." Once so declared, his criminal case would be terminated without trial, and he would be held incommunicado indefinitely, without access to legal counsel. Rather than fall into such a purgatory, Faris agreed to plead guilty, sign a statement of "facts," and be sentenced to 20 years. It was a long sentence, but a 20-year tunnel with light at the end of it was better than the alternative.
Faris told FBI interrogators that the signed statement of "facts" they were going to present to the sentencing judge was a fabrication. During his public sentencing hearing in October of last year, he interrupted the proceedings to insist, again, that he’d been pressured by prosecutors and agents to sign the false statement of facts. Faris’s frantic pleas went unheeded by the sentencing judge, who went along with the program. So did Faris’s lawyer, former federal prosecutor J. Frederick Sinclair, who cooperated with the feds to draft the plea agreement in which Faris waived every single right, including the right to appeal or even to obtain his case records. Faris then began serving his sentence.
So it should come as no surprise that, half a year later, Faris’s name has popped up as a co-conspirator in yet another plot, this time with another alleged member of Al Qaeda, Nuradin M. Abdi. Thanks to the extreme secrecy surrounding these cases, we cannot be certain that Abdi was indicted based on whatever it was that Faris, under continued pressure by the feds, told his interrogators. And, after all, the pressure on Faris was not the usual one applied to "turned" witnesses, in which the defendant is sentenced, and then sings and composes to get a reduction; instead, the pressure was on him to sing and compose merely to be allowed to plead guilty and get the 20 years, rather than fall into the "enemy combatant" mire.
A hint of the relationship between Faris’s Kafkaesque dilemma and Abdi’s indictment is provided by the Washington Post’s June 15 report that "prosecutors have spent the past six months building a criminal case against [Abdi]," according to unnamed "officials." Faris was sentenced on October 29, and it is quite possible that he told a tale about Abdi just around the time he was desperately seeking to avoid designation as an enemy combatant. And, of course, we have no idea what other harsh methods federal interrogators may have used to win Faris’s cooperation, now that, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, we understand the repertoire of persuasive techniques in their arsenal (see "Advice of Counsel: Torture Is Okay," This Just In, June 18).
Let’s be very clear about why the Justice Department has developed this ruse for circumventing the courts: a trial jury, once aware of these circumstances, would never believe a word of Faris’s testimony against Abdi, but if the pattern established in the Faris case is any guide — and it almost certainly is — the Abdi case will never go to trial. Given that there’s no sign of substantial corroborating evidence from reliable sources other than Faris, even a novice lawyer could probably get Abdi acquitted by any moderately fair-minded jury — but without a trial, that won’t make any difference.
Abdi almost certainly will face the same Hobson’s choice earlier presented to Faris: he can either plead guilty or, if he insists on going to trial, President Bush will prevent such a trial by designating him an enemy combatant, meaning he will be turned over to indefinite military custody and held incommunicado. Then, of course, he will get no visits from relatives, friends, or lawyers. I’d wager that Abdi’s case will follow this pattern and end just as Faris’s did, with a Soviet-style show-trial plea of guilty. And then the cycle can begin over again.
See the emerging picture? It’s an endless series of faux prosecutions in which defendants are threatened to "cooperate" and plead guilty, or face indefinite incommunicado imprisonment, with all the physical and psychological terrors that accompany finding oneself in a bottomless legal pit. Like a Ponzi scheme, the structure of these prosecutions resembles a pyramid: defendants are pressured to testify against other friends, associates, and cohorts, who are then indicted regardless of whether the testimony, given under enormous pressure, would ever stand up in a real trial — and, in fact, it never will have to stand up at a real trial. Those new defendants are then, in turn, subjected to the same pressures. None of the "evidence" ever gets to be heard and evaluated by a jury of honest Americans, but the march of prosecutions and guilty pleas rolls onward, and the Bush administration’s war on terror is palmed off on the public as a huge success.
This is one helluva way to run a war on terror. After all, Ashcroft was certainly right when he warned, as he did at the June 14 press conference announcing the Abdi indictment, that "we know our enemies will go to great lengths to lie in wait and to achieve the death and destruction they desire." But what’s really scary is that if these kinds of show trials — the law-enforcement and judicial equivalents of Ponzi schemes — are what Ashcroft & Company are doing to protect the nation, then we are likely in worse trouble than even the pessimists among us imagine, for we have no reasonable assurance that we are capturing and imprisoning the right people. It’s all a great public-relations front for the FBI and the Departments of Justice and Defense. In the end the testimony and the intelligence they’ve gathered by such means add up to little more than, in Macbeth’s words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "

Charley Reese: White House Counting on Public Apathy

"You know, of course, that the alleged handover of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30 is a phony-baloney public-relations stunt. The armed forces will remain in the country. A U.S. embassy with 1,000 employees will open. In other words, it will be a continued occupation with an Iraqi face. 
What the White House hopes will happen is that the American media, once Iraqis are allegedly in charge, will lose interest in Iraq, and American casualties, which shall surely continue, will be relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers and barely mentioned by the television talk-show crowd. 
This might work, because the American media are notoriously xenophobic and show little interest whatsoever in any country other than our own. That's why Americans as a whole are notoriously ignorant of the world. It's simply impossible to develop knowledge about what's going on in most countries of the world from reading American newspapers and watching television. 
It's ironic that as communications technology has exploded, intelligent content has shrunk. That's because most corporate moguls simply don't want to go to the expense of stationing permanent foreign correspondents in most parts of the world. If some disaster occurs, they can always buy footage from a local unit or, on rare occasions, fly their pretty faces over for a quickie report. 
The information age produces largely static. We can all find out more than we want to know about Hollywood and its actors and actresses (I refuse to allow feminists to dictate my language), but information about the rest of the world is hard to come by. Even the nuts and bolts of our government are not well-reported these days. Ask yourself if you know exactly what your own congressional official is doing based on reading your local newspaper. I'll bet you don't. 
It's sad to say, but the American media are undermining the foundation of self-government. The Founding Fathers believed that the common people could govern themselves – provided they were given the facts on which to make their judgments. You are lucky if you live somewhere with a newspaper that makes an honest attempt to give you those facts. In my opinion, the best newspapers in America today are in the small to medium-size cities where editors and reporters haven't succumbed to sensationalism and celebrity worship. 
Unfortunately, most of the day-to-day business of America, whether government or private, is not sensational, sexy or scandal-ridden. A lot of it is downright dull. Yet people need to know what is going on. They need to know when their government is doing things right as well as when their government does things wrong. I share the Founding Fathers' faith that if the people are given the facts, they will, in the long run, make the right decisions. 
Unfortunately, television seems intent on turning Americans into adrenaline junkies. The world is, in fact, a whole lot less dangerous and violent than you would think from watching television and movies. It's still true, for example, that most police officers graduate from the academy and retire with their gold watch without ever once firing their gun at another human being. 
Let's hope the White House scheme to take Iraq off the front pages won't work and that the American press, such as we are, will continue to report on Iraq as long as American troops remain there."

Irish Independent: Carole did us a service by dishing up an Irish grilling for George

"ON Thursday night, RTE's Washington correspondent Carole Coleman infuriated a lot of viewers with her frequent interruptions of President George Bush in her White House interview with him.
Disrespectful, some thought. Unprofessional, others argued. 
I didn't see it that way. 
Yes, RTE current affairs interviewers - Miriam O'Callaghan is a prime culprit - can often irritate with querulous and counterproductive interruptions of politicians who've hardly begun to respond to the questions just put to them, but Ms Coleman's interview should be viewed in a different light. 
Here, after all, was the most powerful politician on the planet, whose decisions have been so globally momentous, and seem likely to continue to be, as to deserve the most rigid scrutiny. This they don't receive from the mainstream American media, who enjoy an extraordinary - and mostly extraordinarily unhealthy - relationship with the White House. 
In Britain, when Tony Blair or Gordon Brown goes on BBC2's 'Newsnight', he knows he's not going to be treated with kid gloves, especially when Jeremy Paxman or Kirsty Wark is in the interviewing chair. 
In Ireland over the years, our politicians have similarly had to brace themselves for interviews with Brian Farrell and Olivia O'Leary. 
But in the US, both the print and broadcasting media approach their political leaders with a deference that's often indistinguishable from obsequiousness, and that's the antithesis of what journalism should be. 
You only have to consider the craven line of the once-admirable 'New York Times' in its buying into this US administration's justifications for a pre-emptive war in Iraq to see how far American journalism has fallen. 
Because of this, the US administration knows it will get a meek acceptance from the American media of whatever it chooses to say. 
And so, an American president can happily agree to a television interview secure in the knowledge that he won't be asked any really hard questions - and even if he is, they'll be couched so timidly that he can swat them away with a retreat into prepared rhetoric. 
Carole Coleman cut right through that cosy assumption, and in a manner that clearly unsettled President Bush, who had probably assumed he'd be treated with sycophantic Irish blarney and could therefore dish out whatever platitudes he wished to utter. 
Certainly I've never seen him so rattled on television or so testy, the folksy, good old boy mask that he's perfected over the years suddenly slipping and hinting at a less benign personality behind it. 
"Let me finish!" he seethed more than once as she questioned his spiel about the world being a safer place because of his decision to invade Iraq or about his stance on the Middle East.So fair dues to her for her tenacity, which was politely combative rather than needlessly rude and which I thought was a service to viewers, who were confronted by a George Bush they'd never seen before - the same George Bush, let us not forget, who may well have our lives in his hands. 
Doesn't that merit a few hard questions? And even interruptions?"

Robyn Blumner: An unaccountable Ashcroft endangers the safety of the nation

"This week, I turn my column over to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose opening remarks during the oversight hearing with Attorney General John Ashcroft on June 8 succinctly lays out the case as to why Ashcroft is among the worst attorney generals in modern history. The statement below is substantially abridged. My comments are in italic.
   
    Welcome, Mr. Attorney General. It is good to have you back before the committee. . . . It has been a long time since our last oversight hearing with you. Fifteen months have passed since your last, brief appearance in March last year.
    Mr. Attorney General, I must speak frankly about an issue that has emerged as a basic problem during your tenure. There are two words that succinctly sum up the Justice Department's accountability and its cooperation with congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words are "sparse," and "grudging." Even those of us who have served through several presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it comes to responsiveness.
    Just days ago we learned of Justice Department involvement in devising legal arguments to minimize our obligations under such U.S. laws and international agreements as the convention on torture. Yet a letter I wrote to you last November, well before most of these abuses came to light, went unanswered for months, and when we are lucky enough to get responses, the premium is on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get are worth much more than the paper they are printed on. We often learn more about what's really happening in the Justice Department in the press than we do from you.
    In the 1,000 days since the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, we have learned little from our Justice Department. We know this:
    * The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down because the prosecution refuses to let the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody.
    * A German court acquitted two 9-11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government refused to provide evidence for the cases.
    * Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9-11 attacks did not have such knowledge; the Department retracted your statement, and then you had to apologize to the court for violating a gag order in the case.
    * The man you claimed was about to explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States had no such intention or capability, and because he has been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted.
    * U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been imprisoned as material witnesses for chunks of time -- with an "Oops, I'm sorry" when a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match turns out to be 100 percent wrong.
    * Noncitizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges and, in some cases, physically abused.
    * Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and likely given strength and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies.
    * Your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria, who was tortured.
    * Documents have been classified, unclassified and reclassified to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons.
    * Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism.
    * The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how high depends on who, in the administration, is talking and what audience they are addressing.
    We need checks and balances. There is much that has gone wrong that your administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability.
    During Ashcroft's testimony, he was asked to provide the committee with copies of the memorandums that had just emerged providing legal justifications for the use of torture. Ashcroft refused, even though they were widely available on the Internet.
    Here is part of Leahy's response:
    If government agencies have rationalized the use of torture, that would seem to go to the heart of what we are investigating. It is inexcusable to read about such memos in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times and then to have them denied to the Senate by the executive branch.
    Hiding these documents from view is the sign of a cover-up, not of cooper- ation.
    For years, Ashcroft's Justice Department has refused to answer many of the questions put to it by Congress relative to the way the USA Patriot Act has been implemented and other potential areas of abuse. Leahy's withering assessment was not just partisan jockeying, it was an evaluation born of frustration over the way the department's functioning has been distorted by an unresponsive, unaccountable and irresponsible leader."

Naomi Klein: The multibillion robbery the US calls reconstruction

"Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the $18.4bn in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet. Sure, electricity is below pre-war levels, the streets are rivers of sewage and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted the British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from "assassination, kidnapping, injury and" - get this - "embarrassment". I don't know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack, but embarrassment? I'd say mission already accomplished. The people in charge of rebuilding Iraq can't be embarrassed, because, clearly, they have no shame.
In the run-up to the June 30 underhand (sorry, I can't bring myself to call it a "handover"), US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The state department has taken $184m earmarked for drinking water projects and moved it to the budget for the lavish new US embassy in Saddam Hussein's former palace. Short of $1bn for the embassy, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul". In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by the consumer group Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea, nausea and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water.
If the occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of embarrassment, they might be a little sheepish about having spent only $3.2bn of the $18.4bn Congress allotted - the reason the reconstruction is so disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said the money would be spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better idea: parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it as leverage. With $15bn outstanding, how likely are Iraq's politicians to refuse US demands for military bases and economic "reforms"?
Unwilling to let go of their own money, the shameless ones have had no qualms about dipping into funds belonging to Iraqis. After losing the fight to keep control of Iraq's oil money after the underhand, occupation authorities grabbed $2.5bn of those revenues and are now spending the money on projects that are supposedly already covered by American tax dollars.
But then, if financial scandals made you blush, the entire reconstruction of Iraq would be pretty mortifying. From the start, its architects rejected the idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis to reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological experiment in privatisation. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly from the US, to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed and efficiency.
Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans, Europeans and south Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction itself became a prime target.
The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army, building elaborate fortresses in the green zone - the walled-in city within a city that houses the occupation authority in Baghdad - and surrounding themselves with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the latest estimates, security costs are eating up 25% of reconstruction contracts - money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or telephone exchanges.
Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors in Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30% of payroll. That means many companies are spending half their budgets arming and insuring themselves against the people they are supposedly in Iraq to help. And, according to Charles Adwan of Transparency International, quoted on US National Public Radio's Marketplace programme, "at least 20% of US spending in Iraq is lost to corruption". How much is actually left over for reconstruction? Don't do the maths.
Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like overcharging, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for fear of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond the latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the road because they don't carry spare tyres. Private contractors are also accused of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the Centre for Constitutional Rights alleges that Titan Corporation and CACI International conspired to "humiliate, torture and abuse persons" in order to increase demand for their "interrogation services".
And then there's Aegis, the company being paid $293m to save the PMO from embarrassment. It turns out that Aegis's CEO, Tim Spicer, has a bit of an embarrassing past himself. In the 90s, he helped to put down rebels and stage a military coup in Papua New Guinea, as well as hatching a plan to break an arms embargo in Sierra Leone.
If Iraq's occupiers were capable of feeling shame, they might have responded by imposing tough new regulations. Instead, Senate Republicans have just defeated an attempt to bar private contractors from interrogating prisoners and also voted down a proposal to impose stiffer penalties on contractors who overcharge. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to get immunity from prosecution for US contractors in Iraq and has requested the exemption from the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi.
It seems likely that Allawi will agree, since he is, after all, a kind of US contractor himself. A former CIA spy, he is already threatening to declare martial law, while his defence minister says of resistance fighters: "We will cut off their hands, and we will behead them." In a final feat of outsourcing, Iraqi governance has been subcontracted to even more brutal surrogates. Is this embarrassing, after an invasion to overthrow a dictatorship? Not at all; this is what the occupiers call "sovereignty". The Aegis guys can relax - embarrassment is not going to be an issue."

TheNation: Big Blow to Big Media

"More than a year after the Federal Communications Commission narrowly endorsed a radical rewrite of media ownership laws in a manner that would have strengthened the hand of media conglomerates, a US appeals court has determined that the FCC went too far.
In one of the most significant setbacks for the Bush Administration's campaign to rewrite regulations to favor big business, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia rejected the rationale the FCC used to ease media ownership limits and ordered the commission to revisit the issue with an eye toward protecting, rather than undermining, the public interest in diverse ownership or local and national media. . . .
"This is a major victory in preventing a handful of huge corporations from controlling what the American people see, hear and read," declared US Representative Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, a leading Congressional advocate for media reform. "It also vindicates the millions of Americans from across the political spectrum who spoke out and contacted the FCC on this issue. The law unequivocally stands with the public values of localism, diversity and competition in the media, and that's what the court maintained."
Before the FCC voted by a 3-2 margin on June 2, 2003, to endorse the rule changes, groups ranging from Common Cause and MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association and the Traditional Values Coalition raised concerns about the determination of FCC chair Michael Powell and his two Republican allies on the commission to implement rule changes that would make it dramatically easier for a handful of large media corporations to control the vast majority of print and broadcast communications at the local and national levels. Groups representing print and broadcast journalists, including the Newspaper Guild, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, were also outspoken in their criticism of the proposed rule changes.
After the commission voted for them, public outcry led to votes in the US House and Senate for different measures to override some or all of the FCC decisions regarding the rules. But pressure from the Bush Administration, and moves by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) to block necessary votes, have so far prevented the reconciliation of the House and Senate stances.
By blocking Congressional action that could resolve the issue, Bush and DeLay have placed themselves in direct opposition to clearly expressed public sentiments.
More than two million Americans have contacted the FCC and members of Congress demanding retention of limits on media monopoly at the local level and controls on consolidation of broadcast media ownership nationally. And they now have the courts on their side."

Ring of steel welcome for Bush

"A quiet corner of rural Ireland was encased in a steel cage tonight as military helicopters patrolled the skies above thousands of troops.
The normally tranquil Dromoland Castle in Co Clare became a fort as US President George W Bush touched down at the nearby Shannon Airport. Anti-war protesters who gathered outside lines of more than 2,000 troops and heavy armour. All routes to Shannon Airport and the luxurious castle grounds were sealed off and police officers paced roadsides keeping a watchful eye that no-one strayed into unapproved areas, while camouflaged army vehicles waited in the bushes.
Local people simply gazed on in amazement as the largest security operation in the history of the State swung into action and transformed their peaceful neighbourhoods into something not unlike a war film set. The surreal atmosphere was compounded by the location of chemical toilets like those used at music festivals at road junctions to accommodate the needs of hundreds of troops and garda officers patrolling the remote countryside.
Previous American presidents had received a warm welcome to Ireland but Mr Bush was kept well away from the people of Shannon, the majority of whom were firmly against his visit.
Conor Creegan, of Shannon town, said: “The locals are disgusted, our life has been disrupted for several weeks now.”
Fiona Wheeler, another local who had been issued with a special security pass to allow her access to her home, said she was disgusted by the “over-the-top” security arrangements.
“In my recollection the last place people had to carry passes was under Apartheid in South Africa,” she said. “There are gardaí behind every bollard and every pillar.This huge expense is sinful, Shannon does not have an ambulance service but millions of euro are being spent to protect just this one man.”
Naval ships patrolled the Shannon River and estuary, while specialist decontamination units and bomb disposal teams were on standby to deal with a possible chemical or biological attack. But the only visible threat to the quiet countryside were noisy protesters who had set up a colourful peace camp outside the security cordon.
The demonstrators, who had travelled from all over Ireland, were undeterred by their lack of sleep the previous night due to supportive motorists blowing their horns as they passed.
Lisa McKee, a protester who had travelled more than 200 miles from Belfast, said there was a relaxed atmosphere in the camp, despite the nearby presence of water canons and riot police.
“We don’t anticipate any violence but I think they will use water cannons,” she said as the sun blazed down.
Roads across Clare, which is known as the banner county, were bedecked with banners declaring opposition to President Bush’s visit.
Liz Curry of the Dublin Grassroots Network said it was clear everyone in the area was opposed to Mr Bush’s arrival.
“We are also trying to highlight the continuous use of Shannon Airport by US troops,” she said.
Local ethnic food shops, health stores and supermarkets donated food to the protesters to ensure they were prepared for their march to police lines in the general vicinity of the airport.
Caoimhe Butterly, who spent eight months in Iraq last year, said it was ironic that President Bush’s meeting with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern tomorrow was taking place on the international day to commemorate the victims of torture.
“I think Bush should be indicted rather than invited,” she said.
Peace campaigner and former Army commandant Ed Horgan was one of three protesters arrested while on a boat in the Shannon estuary this afternoon.
But campaigners insisted the blow would not deter them.
As they prepared for their hike to the nearby airport, gardaí raided the camp and burst hundreds of balloons they had intended to release into the air with messages attached. “We will not be deflated,” said one defiant protester.
And with that they were off to meet the most powerful man in the world with an untraditional Irish welcome."

Fahrenheit 9/11: A Conservative Critique

"I just returned from viewing Fahrenheit 9/11 here in Appleton, WI. I went to the 1:30 PM showing, which was – astonishingly – sold out. The crowd was overwhelmingly white and middle-class (this IS Wisconsin, remember), ranging in age from early teens to retirees. The people were polite, friendly, well-mannered (something we shouldn't take for granted on the part of contemporary theater crowds). There was tumultuous applause at the end, punctuated by a moment of reflective silence as we read the dedication card invoking those murdered by terrorists on 9/11, and those murdered through state terrorism in the aftermath.
The film itself very much reflects its creator: It's shaggy, flabby, occasionally witty, and frequently infuriating. It will have a HUGE impact because Moore – his facile leftist economics notwithstanding – has nailed his case against the Bush regime flush to the plank. It will be all but impossible for anybody who sits still and watches this film to view Bush the Lesser as anything other than a petty, spiteful, dim-witted, bloody-handed little fool – and the figurehead of a murderous power elite. This explains why the Bu'ushists are threatening to go Abu Ghraib on Moore: They're busted.
The most powerful moments in the film are those that humanize U.S. troops, several of whom are shown on-screen criticizing the regime. A major arc of the film is devoted to a Flint, Michigan housewife from a military family whose son, just prior to being killed in Iraq, wrote a letter condemning "George 'I wanna be like my Daddy' Bush" for staging this useless, unjust war. Moore himself, who narrates the film (and makes himself too much a part of the story, incidentally) observes that the largest immorality of this entire enterprise is the actions of a dishonest president lying our country into war and forcing decent young men (and women) to do immoral things.
It should be pointed out as well that the film – despite being lambasted as an exercise in unalloyed Bush-bashing – doesn't spare Democrats who acquiesced in Bush the Lesser's power grabs and his criminal war against Iraq. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle comes off particularly poorly, which in his case merely requires a recording device of some kind.
An interesting encounter immediately after seeing the film underscores its fundamentally non-partisan nature. Some poor schlep had positioned himself outside the theater with a clipboard soliciting signatures on a nominating position for a would-be Democrat congressional candidate. A couple of people seized the petition and started to sign. Impertinent sort that I am, I asked, "What's this fellow's position on the war?"
The scribbling stopped, and several sets of eyes focused intently on the hapless volunteer. "Well, um, ah, he thinks we should do something," he began, stammeringly. "Ah, he just thinks we should be more careful." On hearing this, a lady looked at her husband, who had signed the petition, and snapped, "Scratch off your name." I told the volunteer that I'm what most people would regard as an "ultra-conservative – not just a `conservative' – but if your guy came out against the war I'd vote for him, and knock on doors." "Well, I can't really address all the details of his positions," the increasingly flustered guy responded. "Just let him know what I said," I suggested, telling him that there are a lot of people who have the same point of view.
I chatted with several other people as they left the theater, all of them roughly my age (early 40s) and of similar economic and cultural background. Each of them indicated that he or she would urge friends to see the film – which means that it will have "legs" even if the GOP and FEC were to choke off advertising somehow.
There were no screaming Bolsheviks (one viewer had an anti-animal rights T-shirt) or marijuana-scented bohemians in the crowd. This wasn't the sort of crowd you'd see at a Phish concert, or storming McDonald's at an anti-WTO rally. There were Wal-Mart customers, people who probably listen to country music (even Toby Keith), and even vote Republican. And they were PISSED – quietly, but palpably. A would-be political prisoner Martha Stewart would say, that's a good thing. And well overdue."

Rex Reed: Moore’s Magic: 9/11 Electrifies

"Michael Moore leaves no turn unstoned. There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that reveal more about the cynicism, greed and ineptitude in the U.S. government than you will ever learn from any sound bite on the right-wing late-night cable-channel blabfests, but one will stay with me forever. Forget about the "official" reports from the White House about the activities of George W. Bush on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, insisting he learned about the Al Qaeda attacks while meeting with Florida pre-schoolers and quickly dashed from the room to save the country. The truth, it is now revealed, is that he was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center before he even entered the schoolroom, and he decided to continue with his photo-op anyway. There he is on camera when Andrew Card informs him of the second plane and utters the fatal words, "We’re under attack!"—but he continues to read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes, his eyes sliding sideways in his puzzled face, like a moron looking for a bathroom, until his staff insists that he leave. (He stayed for another half hour.) If nothing else, that defining moment says volumes about what we can expect from the President of the U.S. in the center of a supreme, history-altering crisis: He’s just clueless.
There are other moments that will impact some viewers and polarize others. So many, in fact, that you watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with disbelief, and leave shaking with rage. Sometimes sarcastic, always funny, Mr. Moore is armed with facts, and he presents them accurately and succinctly. The controversial filmmaker stated on the Today show that White House mouthpieces have denounced the film as "outrageously false" without seeing it, and right-wing Republicans have charged Mr. Moore with staging a "left-wing conspiracy" to influence the forthcoming election. Well, duh. For years, reactionary conservatives have been famous for staging right-wing conspiracies of their own to disgrace and discredit elected Democratic public officials. Maybe this is payback time. Whatever it is, everyone should see Fahrenheit 9/11 first—before debating the issues. The purpose of any documentary is to influence opinion. But instead of the customarily droning voice that comments on the action and tells you what to think, this one asks tough, logical questions, gets rational answers, and never loses its entertainment value.
Mr. Moore, who has tackled corporate greed (Roger & Me) and gun control (Bowling for Columbine), now feels driven and obligated to strip the façade from a swaggering, bow-legged, grammatically challenged bully and a cabinet that is beginning to look more like the Third Reich every day. He accuses them of lying about their motivations for declaring war against Iraq, a country that never threatened America in the first place, killing thousands of innocent civilians in retaliation for the acts of 9/11 aggression, although not one of the terrorists was from Iraq, and killing more than 800 of our own American kids (all from ethnic or working-class families). Nobody denies that Saddam Hussein was a monster, but not the Iraqi women and children who have been "saved" from one villain only to be burned and shot and maimed for life without arms and legs by villains in a different uniform. At the same time, Mr. Moore shows Mr. Bush justifying American atrocities against Saddam Hussein by actually saying to the camera, "He tried to kill my daddy." Like his daddy, he knows he might also get kicked out of the White House after serving only one term. Still, he pursues a war that is losing the "hearts and minds" of even the boys who fight it (the interviews with our soldiers on the front lines will make you weep) while earning the U.S. unprecedented heights of global hatred and distrust, even from long-standing allies. And he does it on the golf course, ignoring the pressing domestic issues of health care, education, Social Security, unemployment and the economy while instructing frustrated reporters to watch his next drive. (In his first eight months in office, he was on vacation 42 percent of the time.) Meanwhile the current occupants of the White House, bolstered by an irresponsible press that has never bothered to ask the right questions, have courted public support by hammering home the kind of fear and born-again religious ideology that keep people subservient and paralyzed. Mr. Moore is saying that in the lineup of fear factors, terrorists and sinners may have replaced Communists and beatniks, but if you keep the people frightened enough, the bully always wins.
The movie begins with the awesome night in 2000 when the U. S. Supreme Court decided the election, not the American voters, then unveils footage that was never reported on TV of the Bush inauguration limousine being pelted with raw eggs. Instead of the traditional walk to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he was so afraid to leave the car that he became the first President in history who was forced to sneak into the White House through a back door.
It was downhill from there, and Mr. Moore has obtained amazing film to illustrate the graphic two-hour slam-dunk that follows. In the wimpy reportage that has dominated the media for four years, very few journalists have bothered to investigate the shroud of secrecy surrounding the Bush Presidency that keeps the people ignorant, to write about it, to explain it. Mr. Moore does it with wit and cleverness. There’s no doubt that he would do anything to prevent a Bush re-election, but there is no conjecture here. No embellishment. He doesn’t need any. Dubya & Co. are easy targets: Mr. Moore simply turns on his cameras and lets them hang themselves. He proves the $1.5 billion in profits the Bush clan has made from oil interests of the family of Osama bin Laden, the real perpetrator of the 9/11 disaster, then asks why, when all aircraft were grounded after 9/11, the White House allowed several planes to fly around the country picking up the bin Laden family and protectively escorting 142 Saudis out of the country without interrogation, overruling the protests of the F.B.I. You can say, "Yes, but his family has denounced Osama, so what’s the problem?" The problem is that the Bushes, père et fils, were in business with his family at the same time that Osama was under surveillance as a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist and neglected to make a full disclosure.
Mr. Moore also reveals Dubya’s military records, blotting out the name of a fellow pilot whose flight status was suspended for refusing to take a physical exam. The friend Bush was trying to protect turns out to be James R. Bath, who both managed the U.S. financial investments of the bin Laden regime and bankrolled the various oil interests of the Bush brigade. Cut to Dubya, arrogantly stating: "Access is power." Then, when he was investigated by the S.E.C., the man who got Bush out of hot water, Robert W. Jordan, was later appointed ambassador to—you guessed it—Saudi Arabia. The ironies pile up like body bags.
Now that the merde has hit the oscillator, so to speak, Mr. Moore charges that the Bush administration is still trying to hide evidence of its own stupidity by censoring 28 pages of the independent report by the 9/11 commission. If you don’t gasp at the sight of Mr. Bush dining with the Saudi ambassador with part of the Pentagon in flames in the background, this movie is not for you. No need to talk about the President welcoming the Taliban to the State Department, knowing they were harboring the man who bombed the U.S.S. Cole. No need to go into the plans to build an underground pipeline through Afghanistan pumping money into a company owned by Vice President Dick Cheney. Alarmingly, it’s all gone unreported by an irresponsible press corps. With $860 billion currently invested by the Saudis in American business, no wonder our tax money pays for a six-man detail to protect the Saudi ambassador in Washington. But why does it take Michael Moore to tell us? This is all very dispiriting. But unless you’ve lost your sense of humor completely, you’ve just gotta laugh when Mr. Moore intercuts Mr. Bush’s tough talk from cowboy movies with actual footage of the corny cowboys in those movies saying exactly the same things.
I’ve hardly scratched the surface of this electrifying documentary. Mr. Moore even cruises through Washington reading from a loudspeaker the idiotic USA PATRIOT Act—hastily passed by Congress without ever reading it—and chronicling the lunacy it has inspired: groups and individuals harassed by cops for holding private club meetings, a woman who was refused admittance to an airplane because she was carrying breast milk. All diversionary tactics, says Mr. Moore, to distract the American people from viewing the corpses sent home from Iraq for funerals that have never once been attended by President George W. Bush, or debunking the myth of "weapons of mass destruction." People of all ages are shown voicing doubts about the kids who have died in a questionable war with no end in sight, and for what? Bush says, "Defending freedom." This movie says, "Making money." And talk about imbalance. Fact: Out of 535 members of Congress, only one has a child serving in Iraq. One of the most telling scenes in Fahrenheit 9/11 is Michael Moore, standing outside the U.S. Senate with a microphone, trying to convince members of Congress to enlist their own children for the war. Not a single Senator or Representative is willing to send his own children into harm’s way. This is one of the few scenes in which the director appears at length. One of the things that makes this movie better and more convincing than his previous films is the way Mr. Moore stays mostly in the background, compiling facts and letting the evidence speak for itself.
The Cannes cognoscenti and the limousine liberals have already declared Fahrenheit 9/11 the blockbuster documentary of the year. Who knows how it will play in Punkin Crick? I think it should be required viewing for every American, but as usual, I fear the people who could learn the most from the issues it raises will avoid it like a fund-raiser for free abortions. Mr. Moore’s opponents will label it ideologically fueled partisan agitprop, which it is, but any visionary who tries to cultivate change is destined to harvest adversaries. With his usual fury channeled and under control, Mr. Moore sets out to prick, probe and sound a wake-up call in an emotionally charged election year where the truth has been buried six feet under, and succeeds with humor and bite. The result is undeniably galvanizing, immensely watchable and damned good filmmaking. If it convinces one nonvoter to think, it will serve a purpose. The saddest and most infuriating thing I learned from Fahrenheit 9/11 is not the political hackwork, but the reality of what a lightweight the President is in the context of American history. George W. Bush may be the first President of the U.S. who has brainwashed himself."

'Fahrenheit 9/11' tops Friday box office on only 868 screens

(click title for link to stats @ boxofficemojo.com)

[Visalia, CA] Moviegoers swayed by 'Fahrenheit 9/11'

Could the weekend premiere of the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" influence the outcome of November's presidential elections?
It appears to be so for several moviegoers who attended screenings on Friday of controversial documentary director Michael Moore's latest film.
Moore's film, rated R for profanity and disturbing images, is a biting critique of the Bush administration's reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Visalia resident Mike Lo-rah went to a 2 p.m. screening. Lorah, 28, said he considers himself a conservative Republican but the film has convinced him not to vote for President Bush.
"I'd have to say that I agree with the message that was made in the film, even with me being a Republican," Lorah said. "This would probably be the first time I don't vote for a Republican, but I don't think John Kerry's any better.". . .
"I think every responsible adult should watch this movie so they can make up their own mind about what's going on in this country," Visalia resident Buddy Jones said.
"It was excellent, Paul Garcia of Visalia said. "It told the truth about why we went to war."
Ed Bergtholdt of Springville called the film "compulsory viewing."
"It's a crime how we got involved in this immoral war," he said.
Nancy Dowd of Visalia said she was originally concerned the movie would be too violent.
"But it's not a violent movie," she said. "It makes you think about what's going on and realize that the war is harming a lot of people."
Melinda Lumpkin, Dowd's daughter, said she was shocked to learn in the film that President Bush's family had done business in the past with Osama bin Laden and his family. She also said she's no longer supportive of the president or any of his family.
"I have a brother-in-law who's a Marine," she said. "It's scary. There is no reason for this. No reason."
Three Rivers resident Bruce Keller said his wife cried during the film.
"It was a very sad movie," he said. "It was a great piece of art about the horrors of war."

Conspiracy or incompetence? 911 Commission Coverup: The Media Repeats A Story Full Of Lies

"After pledging to ask the hard questions concerning the failure of US air defenses on Sept. 11, the commission charged with belatedly investigating those events ignored inconsistent, sometimes nonsensical testimony. The 10- member panel also failed to ask about diverting exercises carried out that morning, why FL 93 came down in two places, or why the interceptors launched by the Air Force flew at a fraction of their top speeds. No one, it seems, wants to go near proof of treason rivaling America,s first Pearl Harbor. As a 911 investigator who authored Stand Down and All Fall Down, I have appended my commentary to the following "news stories. -WT

Air Defenses Faltered on 9/11, Panel Finds
By Dan Eggen and William Branigin
Washington Post
6-17-4
 
The chief of U.S. air defenses testified today that if his command had been notified immediately of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings and ordered to intervene, U.S. fighter jets would have been able to shoot down all four of the airliners.
Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that had the Federal Aviation Administration conveyed word of the hijackings as soon it knew of them, "yes, we could shoot down the airplanes."
[In fact, the FAA did not have to wait to confirm and relay word of "hijackings. Regulations followed routinely at least once a week at the time saw FAA controllers calling for fighters on ready alert, or already aloft in the vicinity, to escort commercial planes that had lost radio or transponder contact. At least one Boston Center FAA controller says word of lost communications with FL 11was passed to the military immediately. WT]
The chairman and vice chairman of the commission later expressed surprise about Eberhart's claim.
According to the commission's new staff report, Vice President Cheney did not issue orders to shoot down hostile aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, until long after the last hijacked airliner had already crashed, and that the order was never passed along to military fighter pilots searching for errant aircraft that morning.
The commission staff concluded that NORAD had received notice of the hijacking nine minutes before Flight 77 hit the North Tower.
"The nine minutes notice was the most the military would receive that morning of any of the four hijackings," the report says.
[If that is the case, they could not have been watching there own radar screens. And they must have been the only Americans that morning not watching network news or answering calls from worried spouses.
As for official channels, the commission heard that a pair of F-15s were "wheels up out of Massachusetts as Tower 1 was struck more than 150 miles away. Air National Guard head, Maj. Gen. Paul Weaver later confirmed an official NORAD news release, stating, "The F-15 pilots flew ''like a scalded ape, topping 500 mph but were unable to catch up to the airliner. (St. Augustine Times Sept16/01; NORAD news release Sept18/01)
Airliners fly at 500 mph. An F-15 can fly almost four-times faster. Utilizing only 27% of available thrust, both F-15,s were eight minutes/71 miles away when FL 175 struck the South Tower (Christian Science Monitor Mar8/02)
Launched per regulations as soon as radio and transponder contact was lost with Flight 11, with both sets of throttles hammered to the stops the fastest fighters on Earth would have intercepted Flight 11 over the Hudson River at least six minutes from Manhattan. (Boston Globe Sept15/01)
Even launching as late as they did - on the FAA,s first officially acknowledged phone call to NORAD at 8:40 - the Mach 2.5 fighters could have reached FL 175 before it reached the World Trade Center.
One minute after the Otis-based F-15s were airborne, at 9:24, NORAD was informed by the FAA of a possible hijacking onboard FL 77. NORAD ordered Langley, VA F-16s to scramble. The "Fighting Falcon has a top speed of 1500 mph. But NORAD confirms the jets did not go to full power using afterburners. At 9:40, FL 77 flew into the Pentagon. It took the 1,500 mph-capable Langley fighters 12 minutes to cover the 130 miles. They could have made it in seven. The commission never asked who ordered the interceptors to fly so slowly. WT]

(continuing with the Washington Post story:}

The report also documents a succession of mistakes, wrong assumptions and puzzling errors made on the morning of Sept. 11 by air defense and aviation employees, who often did not communicate with each other when they should have and frequently seemed unsure of how to respond.
Panel investigators also tersely conclude that authorities with NORAD repeatedly misinformed the commission in testimony last fall about its scrambling of fighters from Langley Air Force Base just north of Hampton, Va. NORAD officials indicated at the time that the jets were responding to either United 93 or American Airlines 77, which struck the Pentagon.
In fact, they were chasing "a phantom aircraft," American 11, which had already struck the World Trade Center. [So why did they fly to Washington DC instead of NYC? WT]
American Airlines FL 77, which was hijacked after taking off from Dulles International Airport, flew undetected by anyone for 36 minutes as it turned and headed back east toward the Pentagon.
[If the most sophisticated radars on the planet couldn,t spot a jetliner, how could Flight Explorer - a company selling FAA real-time flight tracking data - follow Flights 11, 175 and 77 from take-off to final impacts? WT]
The FAA never asked for any military assistance or notified the military about either Flight 77 or United Airlines Flight 93 before they crashed.
[At 9:16 the FAA notified NORAD that United Airlines Flight 93 had been hijacked. At 9:24 the FAA told NORAD that American Airlines flight 77 might be hijacked and appeared headed toward Washington. Standard procedures would have launched interceptors immediately. WT]
Nor did the FAA's command center issue an order to implement cockpit security measures in other planes that were in flight or on the ground after the hijackings became known.
None of the jetliners likely could have been intercepted given the time available.
[Absolutely not true see above, and FL 93 which follows. WT]
Time to respond might have been lengthened if the status of the flights had been communicated more quickly to and among military and Federal Aviation Administration officials.
A telephone conversation occurred between the two leaders shortly before 10:10 a.m. or 10:15 a.m. in which Bush authorized Cheney to order jet pilots to shoot down hostile aircraft.
Within a few minutes, Cheney issued the first shoot-down order, based on reports from the Secret Service of an aircraft - United 93 - headed toward Washington. But the reports were based on trajectory estimates; Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m.
[At 9:22 an earthquake monitor in southern Pennsylvania picked up a sonic boom caused by a supersonic jet, 60 miles from Shanksville. At 9:58 a flight controller manning a radarscope in New Hampshire watched a pursuing F-16 from the 180th Fighter Wing out of Toledo, Ohio line up to take the shot. "An F-16 fighter closely pursued United Airlines Flight 93, he explained. "The F-16 made 360-degree turns to remain close to the commercial jet. He must,ve seen the whole thing. (Telegraph Sept13/01) One of Fl 93,s exploded engines indicative of a hit by a heat-seeking air-to-air missile - landed 8 miles from the main crash site. WT]
The vice president issued a similar order at around 10:30 a.m. in response to another report of a hijacked plane. "Eventually," the report notes, "the shelter received word that the alleged hijacker five miles away had been a Medevac helicopter."
Cheney's general shoot-down orders were issued to NORAD at 10:31 a.m., but clear instructions were never passed along to pilots in the air. The only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to 'ID type and tail.' "
The Langley pilots were also never told why they were scrambled or that hijacked commercial airliners were a threat.
Cheney mistakenly informed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. fighters had shot down a couple of hijacked aircraft on his orders.
While Bush was seated in a classroom of second-graders, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. whispered to him, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," the report says.
"The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis," the 29-page document continues. Bush saw the phones and pagers of reporters starting to ring as they stood behind the children in the classroom and "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening," the report says.
[Following standing orders, the Secret Service should have whisked him from the room instantly. Bush was told of the first WTC crash at his hotel in front of television news reporters before leaving for the school. WT]
"All witnesses agreed that the president strongly wanted to return to Washington and only grudgingly agreed to go elsewhere," the report says.
Commission member John F. Lehman, a Republican former secretary of the Navy, said that "there was considerable breakdown in command and control" on Sept. 11 in the air defense effort.
[The commission never looked at "Operation Vigilant Guardian and other air defense/airliner crash drills taking place that morning, which misdirected air defenders and sowed confusion in the minds of key commanders. Who ordered those exercise? -WT]
Lehman pointed to "very identifiable" failures by FAA headquarters on the day of the terrorist attacks, including the failure of the agency to issue a broad early notification of multiple hijackings and to notify the military of that Flight 93 was heading toward Washington.
[In fact, the military shares the same FAA radars and could see the developing situation for themselves - as they did during the golfer Payne incident and similar aerial incidents. -WT]
"I think [FAA] headquarters blew it," said commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and senator from Nebraska.
[I think the commission blew it. The record shows that America,s air defenses were deliberately stood down. The FAA did a terrific job getting 4,500 airliners safely on the ground. WT]
--------------------------------------------

Cheney Authorized Shooting Down Planes
 By Dana Milbank
 Washington Post June18/04

The report portrays the vice president taking command from his bunker while Bush, who was in Florida, communicated with the White House in a series of phone calls, and occasionally had trouble getting through.
[According to insiders, extensive communications including extra phone lines are always installed ahead of time at Presidential venues. WT]
Cheney told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call. [Cheney] issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who had joined Cheney [on 911], told the commission that she heard the vice president discuss the rules of engagement for fighter jets over Washington with Bush.
Told - erroneously, as it turned out - that a presumably hijacked aircraft was 80 miles from Washington, Cheney decided "in about the time it takes a batter to swing" to authorize fighter jets scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., to engage it.
[The commission says the Langley F-16s were chasing Flight 11, which had long since crashed. NORAD says the Langley jets were cruising north to "defend the Pentagon from Flight 77. Cheney says he ordered the same planes to engage Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. Say what? WT]
Only later did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten suggest that Cheney call Bush once more to confirm the engagement order. Logs in Cheney's bunker and on Air Force One confirm conversations at 10:18 and 10:20, respectively.
[Just before Fl 93 was shot down. WT]
Rumsfeld replied: "We can't confirm that. We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it."
The Langley fighter jets sent to circle Washington never received the shoot-down order. It was passed down the chain of command, but commanders of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's northeast sector did not give it to the pilots.
"While leaders believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to 'take out' hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to 'ID type and tail.' "
["Pilots plural. At least two Langley jets, each carrying one pilot, were launched. An earlier report carried on this website of the Otis F-15s being asked to ID Flight 11 as it closed on Manhattan could have mistaken the Langley order. WT]
By 10:45 other fighter jets would be circling Washington, and these had clear authority to shoot down planes, the commission determined. They were sent from Andrews Air Force Base by the commander of the 113th Wing of the Air National Guard, in consultation with the Secret Service, which relayed instructions that an agent said were from Cheney.
That arrangement was "outside the military chain of command," Bush and Cheney told the commission they were unaware that fighters had been scrambled from Andrews.
[The Andrews alert jets were routinely launched to escort out-of-communications aircraft straying toward DC "No Fly zones. On Sept. 11, existing doctrine says they should have been launched immediately and a CAP (Combat Air Patrol) placed over the capitol at least an hour earlier. Except Rumsfeld had changed the rules for notifying and scrambling fighters two months before. WT]
Cheney would give the order to engage twice - at news that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was approaching Washington, and at what turned out to be a Medevac helicopter, the commission determined. Neither aircraft was engaged.
Communications with Washington were so poor that Bush, who told the commission he was "deeply dissatisfied" with the technical problems, at one point resorted to using a cell phone on the way to Air Force One. Bush's motorcade took a wrong turn on the way to the airport and had to reverse.
Bush and Cheney spoke again at 9:45, while Bush was on the tarmac aboard Air Force One. By that time, both towers of the World Trade Center were aflame and the Pentagon had been hit. [With the nation under attack, Air Force One took off air without fighter escort. WT]
"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush told Cheney, according to the commission report. "I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war . . . somebody's going to pay."

The commission's final report is due next month, on the eve of the Democratic convention."

Guardian: Moonie leader 'crowned' in US senate

"The United States senate was used for a bizarre ritual in which the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification church, was "crowned" and declared himself the messiah in the presence of more than a dozen Republican and Democratic members of Congress, it was reported on Wednesday.
"Emperors, kings and presidents ... have declared to all heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's saviour, messiah, returning Lord and true parent," the 85-year-old Korean "Moonie" cult leader told several hundred guests at the meeting in one of the Senate's office buildings on March 23, according to the Washington Post.
He also claimed endorsement from Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who had all been reformed and reborn through his church's teachings -- an idiosyncratic version of Christianity which rejects the use of the cross as a symbol and denounces homosexuals as "dirty dung-eating dogs".
An account of the ceremony was first published by a Washington investigative journalist, John Gorenfeld.
According to a transcript of the event, Moon declared: "I am God's ambassador, sent to Earth with his full authority. I am sent to accomplish his command to save the world's six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created."
The glittering event in the Senate's Dirksen building reflected Moon's extraordinary influence in US politics. He owns the conservative newspaper the Washington Times and the US news agency United Press International.
His fiercely conservative attitudes towards homosexuality and pre-marital sex have won him the endorsement of leading Republicans, including the president's father, George Bush, and John Ashcroft, the attorney general, who participated in one of Moon's "prayer luncheons" days before the president's inauguration in January 2001.
Leading black Democrats also played a prominent role in the March ceremony.
An Illinois congressman, Danny Davis, wore white gloves and carried a purple cushion bearing a medieval-style "international crown of peace", which was placed on Moon's head, at an event at which 100 Americans from 50 states were also given lesser "national" and "state" peace awards.
The event was an "innocent ceremony," Davis told The Guardian. "It was a banquet to give out awards. I didn't have any way of knowing Reverend Moon would say he was the messiah, or whatever he said."
Davis acknowledged that "three or four individuals directly related to Reverend Moon" took part in a fund-raiser for his primary campaign in Illinois earlier this year, but said small sums of money were involved.
Other members of Congress who attended the event said they had been fooled into going by being told only that people from their constituencies would be honoured at the ceremony.
A spokesperson for a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Mark Dayton, said: "We fell victim to it. We were duped."
It was unclear who gave permission for the Senate office building to be used.
During the ceremony Moon invoked the blessing of all America's past presidents. He also claimed to have communed with other big names in history.
He told his audience: "The five great saints and other leaders in the spirit world, including communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."
It is not the first time he has claimed posthumous backing. His followers recently took out a two-page advertisement in the Washington Times to run a testimonial to him, quoting 36 former presidents "from the vantage point of heaven"."

From the archives: Robert Parry: Rev. Moon, the Bushes & Donald Rumsfeld

"George W. Bush’s choice of Donald Rumsfeld to be U.S. defense secretary could put an unintended spotlight on the role of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon – a Bush family benefactor – in funneling millions of dollars to communist North Korea in the 1990s as it was developing a missile and nuclear weapons program.
In 1998, Rumsfeld headed a special commission, appointed by the Republican-controlled Congress, that warned that North Korea had made substantial progress during the decade in building missiles that could pose a potential nuclear threat to Japan and parts of the United States.
"The extraordinary level of resources North Korea and Iran are now devoting to developing their own ballistic missile capabilities poses a substantial and immediate danger to the U.S., its vital interests and its allies," said the report by Rumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.
"North Korea maintains an active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] program, including a nuclear weapon program. It is known that North Korea diverted material in the late 1980s for at least one or possibly two weapons," the report said.
Rumsfeld’s alarming assessment of North Korea’s war-making capabilities now is being cited by Republicans as a justification for investing billions of taxpayer dollars in an anti-missile defense system favored by Bush and Rumsfeld.
Yet, during the early-to-mid 1990s, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was monitoring a series of clandestine payments from Sun Myung Moon's organization to the North Korean communist leaders who were overseeing the country's military strategies.
According to DIA documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Moon’s payments to North Korean leaders included a $3 million “birthday present” to current communist leader Kim Jong Il and offshore payments amounting to “several tens of million dollars” to the previous communist dictator, Kim Il Sung.
The alleged payments – and broader Moon-North Korean business deals reported by the DIA – came at a time of a strict U.S. government ban on financial transactions between North Korea and any U.S. person or entity, to keep hard currency out of North Korea's hands.
Legal experts say that ban would have applied to Moon given his status as a permanent U.S. resident, even though he maintains South Korean citizenship.

Bush Speeches

While negotiating those business deals with North Korea in the 1990s, Moon’s organization also hired former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush to give speeches at Moon-sponsored events.
During one Moon-sponsored speech in Argentina in November 1996, former President Bush declared, “I want to salute Reverend Moon,” whom Bush praised as “the man with the vision.”
The father of the incoming U.S. president has refused to divulge how much Moon’s organization paid for these speeches which were delivered in the United States, Asia and South America.
Some press estimates have put the fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though one former leader of Moon’s Unification Church told me that the organization had earmarked $10 million for the former president.
Ex-President Bush’s pro-Moon speeches came at a time, too, when Moon – now 80 – was expressing intensely anti-American views. In the mid-1990s, Moon denounced the United States as “Satan’s harvest” and condemned American women as having descended from a “line of prostitutes.”
In a speech to his followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed to liquidate American individuality, declaring that his movement would “swallow entire America.” Moon said Americans who insisted on “their privacy and extreme individualism … will be digested.”
Beyond these anti-Americanism diatribes, other questions have arisen about how Moon finances his religious-business-political empire. Evidence has existed back to the 1970s indicating that Moon’s organization has engaged in money-laundering operations and has associated with right-wing organized-crime figures in Asia and Latin America.
One of Moon's key early backers was Ryoichi Sasakawa, a leader of Japan's Yakuza organized crime family, according to the authoritative book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan & Alec Dubro.
In 1998, Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, added first-hand testimony about one of Moon's money-laundering methods when she described how cash was smuggled illegally through U.S. Customs. Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash” carried into the United States from overseas, she wrote in her book, In the Shadows of the Moons.

Checkered Past

To many Americans, Moon is perhaps best known as a 1970s cult leader who allegedly brainwashed young recruits into joining his Unification Church and then paired up his followers in mass marriages where Moon would preside wearing lavish costumes and crowns.
But Moon also understood the importance of political clout. In 1978, a congressional investigation identified Moon as a part of a covert influence-buying scheme aimed at American institutions and run by the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a charge that Moon denied.
In 1982, Moon was convicted of tax fraud and served an 18-month sentence in federal prison. Nevertheless, his political influence grew when he launched The Washington Times, also in 1982. 
In the years that followed, Moon developed a reputation for financing all-expense-paid international conferences for conservative politicians, prominent journalists and influential academics.
Moon’s conservative newspaper grew in importance in Washington through the 1980s and early 1990s, as it staunchly supported Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, President Bush expressed his gratitude to Moon’s newspaper by inviting its editor, Wesley Pruden, to a private White House lunch “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.” [Washington Times, May 17, 1992]

Moving North

At about the same time as that lunch, Moon was beginning another initiative – establishing a business foothold in North Korea. The DIA, the Pentagon agency responsible for monitoring possible military threats to the United States, started keeping tabs on these developments.
Though historically an ardent anticommunist, Moon negotiated a sweeping business deal with Kim Il Sung, the longtime communist leader, the DIA documents said. The two men met face-to-face in North Korea from Nov. 30 to Dec. 8, 1991.
“These talks took place secretly, without the knowledge of the South Korean government,” the DIA wrote on Feb. 2, 1994. “In the original deal with Kim [Il Sung], Moon paid several tens of million dollars as a down-payment into an overseas account,” the DIA said in another cable dated Aug. 14, 1994.
The DIA said Moon's organization also delivered money to Kim Il Sung's son and successor, Kim Jong Il.
“In 1993, the Unification Church sold a piece of property located in Pennsylvania,” the DIA reported on Sept. 9, 1994. “The profit on the sale, approximately $3 million was sent through a bank in China to the Hong Kong branch of the KS [South Korean] company ‘Samsung Group.’ The money was later presented to Kim Jung Il [Kim Jong Il] as a birthday present.”
After Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 and his succession by his son, Kim Jong Il, Moon dispatched his longtime aide, Bo Hi Pak, to ensure that the business deals were still on track with Kim Jong Il “and his coterie,” the DIA reported.
“If necessary, Moon authorized Pak to deposit a second payment for Kim Jong Il,” the DIA wrote.
As described by the DIA, Moon's deal with North Korea called for construction of a hotel complex in Pyongyang as well as a new Holy Land at the site of Moon’s birth in North Korea.
“There was an agreement regarding economic cooperation for the reconstruction of KN's [North Korea's] economy which included establishment of a joint venture to develop tourism at Kimkangsan, KN [North Korea]; investment in the Tumangang River Development; and investment to construct the light industry base at Wonsan, KN. It is believed that during their meeting Mun [Moon] donated 450 billion yen to KN,” one DIA report said.
In late 1991, the Japanese yen traded at about 130 yen to the U.S. dollar, meaning Moon's investment would have been about $3.5 billion, if the DIA information is correct.
Pak's Response
Contacted in Seoul, South Korea, Bo Hi Pak, a former publisher of The Washington Times, acknowledged that Moon met with North Korean officials and negotiated business deals with them in the early 1990s.
But Bo Hi Pak denied that payments were made to individual North Korean leaders and called “absolutely untrue” the DIA's description of the $3 million land sale benefiting Kim Jong Il. Bo Hi Pak also said the North Korean business investments were structured through South Korean entities.
“Rev. Moon is not doing this in his own name,” said Pak.
Pak said he did go to North Korea in 1994, after Kim Il Sung’s death, but only to express “condolences” to Kim Jong Il on behalf of Moon and his wife. Pak denied that another purpose of the trip was to pass money to Kim Jong Il or to his associates.
In the phone interview, Bo Hi Pak also denied that Moon’s investments ever approached $3.5 billion. Pak did not give a total figure for the investments, but said the initial phase of an automobile factory was in the range of $3 million to $6 million.
The DIA depicted Moon's business plans in North Korea as much grander, however. The DIA valued the agreement for hotels in Pyongyang and the resort in Kumgang-san, alone, at $500 million. The plans also called for creation of a kind of Vatican City covering Moon's birthplace.
“In consideration of Mun's [Moon's] economic cooperation, Kim [Il Sung] granted Mun a 99-year lease on a 9 square kilometer parcel of land located in Chongchu, Pyonganpukto, KN. Chongchu is Mun's birthplace and the property will be used as a center for the Unification Church. It is being referred to as the Holy Land by Unification Church believers and Mun [h]as been granted extraterritoriality during the life of the lease.”
North Korean officials clearly valued their relationship with Moon, granting him small but symbolic favors. Four months after Moon's 1991 meeting with Kim Il Sung, the communist dictator granted a rare interview to editors from Moon's Washington Times.
In February 2000, on Moon's 80th birthday, Kim Jong Il sent Moon a gift of rare wild ginseng, an aromatic root used medicinally, Reuters reported.

Legal Issues

Because of the long-term U.S. embargo against North Korea – eased only last year – Moon’s alleged payments to the communist leaders raise potential legal issues for Moon, a South Korean citizen who is a U.S. permanent resident alien.
 “Nobody in the United States was supposed to be providing funding to anybody in North Korea, period, under the Treasury (Department's) sanction regime,” said Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state handling international crime.
The U.S. embargo of North Korea dates back to the Korean War. With a few exceptions for humanitarian goods, the embargo barred trade and financial dealings between North Korea and “all U.S. citizens and permanent residents wherever they are located, … and all branches, subsidiaries and controlled affiliates of U.S. organizations throughout the world.”
Moon became a permanent resident of the United States in 1973, according to Justice Department records. Bo Hi Pak said Moon has kept his “green card” status. Moon maintains a residence near Tarrytown, north of New York City, and controls dozens of affiliated U.S. companies.
Direct payments to foreign leaders in connection with business deals also could prompt questions about possible violations of the U.S. Corrupt Practices Act, a prohibition against overseas bribery.

Political Fallout

Today, however, the potential political fallout might be a greater concern than any legal action, especially once George W. Bush assumes the presidency.
For the past two years, Republicans have used Rumsfeld's report to club President Clinton and Vice President Gore for alleged softness toward a recalcitrant communist enemy.
In 1999, a House Republican task force followed up the work of Rumsfeld's commission and declared that North Korea and its missile program had emerged as a nuclear threat to Japan and possibly the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
"This threat has advanced considerably over the past five years, particularly with the enhancement of North Korea's missile capabilities," said the Republican task force. "Unlike five years ago, North Korea can now strike the United States with a missile that could deliver high explosive, chemical, biological, or possibly nuclear weapons."
Ironically, Moon's newspaper joined in laying the blame for North Korea's progress at the feet of the Clinton-Gore administration.
"To its list of missed opportunities, the Clinton-Gore administration can now add the abdication of responsibility for national security," a Washington Times editorial stated on Sept. 5, 2000.
Not surprisingly the Times did not mention that its founder and financial backer, Sun Myung Moon, had lent a hand to North Korea by agreeing to multi-million-dollar business deals and allegedly putting millions of dollars in the personal accounts of the leaders masterminding the strategic weapons development.
Equally unsurprising, former President George H.W. Bush and his about-to-be-president son have never explained the family's financial involvement with Rev. Moon, a messianic leader who has vowed to build a movement powerful enough to eliminate all individuality and freedom in the United States.
Those questions also aren't likely to come up at the confirmation hearings for Donald Rumsfeld, who believes that the United States must now pursue an expensive missile shield  to counter the threat posed by North Korea."

Robert Parry is a veteran investigative reporter, who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.