Saturday, January 10, 2004
It was the plan all along
The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
Interesting.
posted by chris at 7:44 PM
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Friday, January 09, 2004
Powell admits the obvious
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.
Who wants to say, "I told you so?"
posted by chris at 1:59 PM
From the party of "small government"
President Bush will announce plans next week to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon and to set a goal of eventually sending Americans to Mars, administration sources said last night.
The sources said Bush will announce a new "human exploration" agenda in Washington on Wednesday, six days ahead of the final State of the Union address of his term and just as his reelection campaign moves from the planning stage to its public phase.
An hugely expensive proposal ($800 million) at a time when our deficit is the largest it's ever been and a project that won't actually take place for TEN YEARS, well after Bush is out of office. Can you say "campaign ploy?"
Or maybe "gift to the aeronautics industry?"
Sources said Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all existing programs that do not support the new effort. Further details about the plan and the space agency's revised budget will be announced in NASA briefings next week and when the president delivers his FY 2005 budget to Congress.
posted by chris at 9:41 AM
Problems with salmon
Farm-raised salmon, a growing staple of American diets, contains significantly higher concentrations of PCBs, dioxin and other cancer-causing contaminants than salmon caught in the wild, and should be eaten infrequently, according to a new study of commercial fish sold in North America, South America and Europe.
The study, using Environmental Protection Agency health guidelines, concluded that although consumers can safely eat four to eight meals of wild salmon a month, consumption of more than one eight-ounce portion of farmed salmon a month in most cases poses an "unacceptable cancer risk."
Food and Drug Administration and fishing industry officials immediately took issue with the findings. They said the contaminant levels in salmon have declined by 90 percent since the 1970s, and that the remaining threat -- when balanced against the high protein and cardiovascular health benefits of eating salmon -- do not warrant shunning the food.
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The study found that salmon contamination varied by geography. Store-bought samples from Frankfurt, Edinburgh, Paris, London and Oslo were generally the most contaminated, while samples from stores in New Orleans and Denver were the least. Cities including Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle ranked somewhere in the middle, and their residents were advised to eat farmed salmon no more than once or twice a month.
EPA guidelines say that if a person eats fish twice a week, it should contain no more than 4 to 6 parts per billion of PCBs. The study found that PCB levels in farmed salmon sold in the United States and Canada averaged about five times that amount: 30 parts per billion. On average, farmed salmon had concentrations of health-threatening contaminants 10 times as high as those found in wild salmon.
More.
posted by chris at 9:31 AM
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
Lie to 'em, then screw 'em
Late last year, President Bush promised retirees that "if there's a Medicare reform bill signed by me, corporations have no intention to dump retirees [from their existing drug coverage]...What we're talking about is trust." The White House and its congressional allies backed up Bush's assertion by claiming the bill included a special tax subsidy to "encourage employers' to retain prescription-drug coverage" for their retirees' and not to cut them off.2
But just three months after Bush's pledge, the Wall Street Journal now reports that the White House quietly added "a little-noticed provision" to the bill that allows companies to severely reduce - or almost completely terminate - their retirees' drug coverage "without losing out on the new subsidy." In other words, the president did not just break his promise to sign a bill that prevents seniors from losing their existing drug coverage. He actually acted to reward companies who cut off their retirees with a lavish new tax break.
The provision was no mere oversight by the president. The major backers of the provision were Lucent Technologies, General Motors, Dow Chemical and SBC Communications - all major campaign contributors to the president. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, executives from those companies have donated almost $140,000 in hard money and $2.5 million in soft money to Bush and his party since 2000.
Here.
posted by chris at 5:09 PM
See, it's only okay if WE do it
First the administration declared that it would photograph and fingerprint all foreign visitors (with the exception of 27 lucky countries) coming into the United States. In retaliation, Brazil said they would do the same. Now, the US has the audacity to complain:
The U.S. State Department has changed its stance on a new Brazilian security process for U.S. citizens entering the South American nation. Washington is now urging Brazil to alter its new process of fingerprinting and photographing U.S. visitors.
"We have told the Brazilians that we think that these are measures that provide tremendous inconvenience to travelers and that they need to be changed," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.
Uh . . . wanna repeat that once more?
UPDATE: US tries to piss off the British.
posted by chris at 4:38 PM
IMF warns US
With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund.
Prepared by a team of I.M.F. economists, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration's tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits pose "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.
The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years — "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.
The danger, according to the report, is that the United States' voracious appetite for borrowing could push up global interest rates and thus slow global investment and economic growth.
More.
posted by chris at 4:27 PM
Hospital discounts for those that don't need it
From Democracy Now!:
Hospitals negotiate discounts with big institutions such as insurance companies or the government that require payment of only a fraction of the listed charges. These institutions have strong bargaining power and can guarantee hospitals a certain number of patients.
Uninsured patients, on the other hand, have no bargaining power and aren't even told that big institutions get these reduced rates. As a result they end up with huge medical bills and no way of paying them.
Hospitals then hound those patients for payment using collection agencies and lawyers who use such methods as filing lawsuits, slapping liens on homes, seizing bank accounts, and garnishing wages to extract payment.
Part of the reason the uninsured cannot pay their medical bills is because hospitals aren't informing them about available resources and charity care.
For example, a few states operate a funding pool for hospitals to offset the money they spend on charity care as well as their bad debt. The total amount of money in the pool in New York State is approximately $847 million a year.
The transcript.
posted by chris at 3:26 PM
What's on TV?
AIDS killed three million people around the world last year, more than two million of them in Africa. The three major U.S. television networks' evening news programmes devoted a combined total of 39 minutes to the issue.
The American Geophysical Union and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences both concluded last year that greenhouse gas emissions almost certainly contribute to global warming, which is altering the Earth's weather and climate in potentially catastrophic ways. The three evening network news shows devoted 15 minutes to global warming in 2003.
Over the same year, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, an operation in which some 8,000 people might have been killed, the same toll as AIDS takes in a single day. The three major networks' evening news shows devoted 4,047 minutes to coverage of Iraq.
War! Uh! Good God, y'all! What is it good for? TV ratings.
posted by chris at 3:19 PM
Why did we attack Iraq again?
Iraq had ended its weapons of mass destruction programs by the mid-1990s and did not pose an immediate threat to the United States before the war, according to a report released Thursday.
Bush administration officials likely pushed U.S. intelligence assessors to conform with its view the country posed an impending danger, said one of the authors of the study.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- a nonpartisan, respected group that opposed the war in Iraq -- conducted the study.
It follows a nine-month search in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- the key reason the administration cited in its decision to invade Iraq.
"We looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we've come to the conclusion that it is broken," author Joseph Cirincione said Thursday on CNN's "American Morning."
"It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to pre-existing policies."
The report says that the "dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."
"We found nothing," Cirincione said. "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."
Story.
posted by chris at 1:16 PM
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
The Labor Department presents . . . How to screw your employees!
The Labor Department is giving employers tips on how to avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible under new rules expected to be finalized early this year.
The department's advice comes even as it touts the $895 million in increased wages that it says those workers would be guaranteed from the reforms, which Labor Secretary Elaine Chao called long overdue.
Among the options for employers: cut workers' hourly wages and add the overtime to equal the original salary, or raise salaries to the new $22,100 annual threshold, making them ineligible.
The department says it is merely listing well-known choices available to employers, even under current law.
"We're not saying anybody should do any of this," said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.
Oh no, of course not.
posted by chris at 5:19 PM
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Monday, January 05, 2004
Moby saw my video!!
The 15 finalists of MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest are now available online. Check them out - it's a wealth of creativity nicely honed towards a single target. They'll announce the winner next Monday and then that ad will be aired on national television.
posted by chris at 8:22 PM
The Smokescreen
Bush is drawing up a positive, soft-focus and upbeat campaigning platform portraying him as the candidate of national unity.
Senior figures close to Bush have spent months examining previous presidential campaigns in an effort to shape a winning strategy against a potentially tricky electoral backdrop. They have settled on an approach echoing Ronald Reagan's dreamlike 'morning in America' re-election campaign of 1984, which successfully portrayed another divisive Republican President as a moderate 'father of the nation' in a series of television adverts which were light on actual politics but heavy on soft-focus camera work.
More surprisingly, Bush's team has also drawn lessons from Bill Clinton's successful 1996 campaign, which depicted the then incumbent as someone who was focused on doing his job, passing laws and making decisions, rather than taking part in a political campaign - what is called a 'Rose Garden strategy'.
'Americans don't really like politics, so the longer a president can put that off, the longer he can look like he's governing instead of politicking, and the better off he will be,' said Bruce Reed, a domestic policy adviser to Clinton for the 1996 campaign.
In an effort to portray the President as a man above the political fray, White House aides, led by Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove, have lined up a series of politically neutral but eye-catching policy initiatives to be unveiled during this month's State of the Union address to Congress.
Among the ideas being trailed in the US media is a suggestion that Bush will announce plans to return an American to the moon. 'We want to have the President talk about an important national goal that is big and a unifying theme,' one aide said.
The calculation is that Bush's so-called apolitical approach will find favor with floating voters in crucial states such as Florida and Michigan, especially when compared to the more straightforwardly political stances taken by Dean.
Things to watch out for.
posted by chris at 1:57 PM
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