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January 07, 2005
Bush Inauguration Protest 2005: Thousands Will Rally on Jan. 20 to Protest Against the Presidential Inauguration.
While the presidential inauguration committee vigorously makes preparations for the 55th presidential inauguration, anti-Bush organizations are making their own plans to have a Bush inauguration protest. "For the past four years, the Bush administration has tried to silence the voice of the people. We are coming to Washington on Jan. 20 because we want our audience with the president," states Jet Heiko, who is responsible for launching www.TurnYourBackOnBush.org and who will be in the frontline on inauguration day.
Just like the presidential inauguration is scheduled to have its festivities to follow throughout the inauguration ceremony, so do many anti-war and anti-Bush groups will be arranging to have an inauguration protest parade, rallies, and demonstrations against Bush's inauguration.
The D.C. Anti-War Network is organizing a rally and a march to the White House on the morning of the inauguration and is spreading the word to fellow supporters,through the website www.counter-inaugural.org, to go to presidential inauguration and "turn their back" on President Bush. Another anti-war group called A.N.S.W.E.R. will have a "CounterInaugural" protest similar to their previous demonstration on Dec. 18 where 400 people came out to the corner of Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles to send out the message: "Bring the Troops Home Now!." Other groups like the Mobilization for Global Justice and the Committee to ReDefeat the President will be united to rally against the presidential inauguration.
Although protesters will not have the opportunity to march along the parade route on the inauguration date, the National Park Service and Park Police said it is granting permits for the use of other specific locations. But as Brian Becker, national coordinator for the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, adds, "We are now planning for possible legal action if that is necessary to protect the right of the people to gather in mass assembly along the route of the inaugural parade."
Posted by Tuck at January 7, 2005 12:52 PM
Comments
We Need the Oil, Right? So What's the Problem?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 14 February 2005
Such openness is rare; it set me back on my heels. The question came last Monday as I finished a lecture in Pewaukee, Wisconsin–the first of a handful of talks I gave for "Great Decisions 2005," a program of the Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
With the "weapons of mass destruction" of recent memory having evaporated as casus belli for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I had decided to experiment with a tutorial on what I believe to be the real reasons behind the war—first and foremost, oil. Passing by a phalanx of late-model gas-guzzlers on my way in, I found myself wondering how my observations on the oil factor would be received. In the end, I was more than a little surprised that none of the 250 folks in that very conservative audience seemed to have much of a problem.
The Most Recent Death
I had thought I was in for a much more difficult time. Among other things, the news had just broken that 22 year-old Lance Cpl. Travis M. Wichlacz of the Milwaukee-based Fox Company had become the fifth from that company, and the 33rd from Wisconsin overall, to be killed in action in Iraq. His stepmother told a reporter, "Travis was kicking down doors. They were going into houses and finding weapons caches and dismantling bombs." Cpl. Wichlacz died in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad on February 5.
We began with a moment of silence in his memory, and then imagined ourselves into the scene with the newspaper reporter who had spoken with Wichlacz' father, Dennis. We tried to anticipate questions Mr. Wichlacz might ask us:
Q. "How could our country have had such bad intelligence that President Bush was misled into starting this war?"
A. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, Dennis. The Bush administration decided to attack Iraq many months before any ‘intelligence' was adduced to ‘justify' such an attack. Yes, the intelligence conjured up was bad. But its target was Congress; even Colin Powell has admitted that. And the aim was to deceive our lawmakers into forfeiting to the Executive Congress' constitutional prerogative to authorize war."
Q. "But what about my son?... and the others who died? Why?"
A. "Oil."
Oil
Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of "It's the Crude, Dude", has noted that decades from now it will all seem a no-brainer. Historians will calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq "swims on a sea of oil." It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.
But that will be then. Now is now. How best to explain the abrupt transition from early-nineties prudence to the present day recklessness of this administration? How to fathom the continued cynicism that trades throwaway soldiers for the chimera of controlling Middle East oil?
The Earlier Cheney on Our Soldiers
In August 1992, Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under a very different President Bush, was asked to explain why US tanks did not roll into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Cheney said:
"I don't think you could have done that without significant casualties... And the question in my mind is how many additional casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many... And we're not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
"Where the Prize Ultimately Lies"
Later, then-CEO Dick Cheney of Halliburton found himself focusing on different priorities. In the fall of 1999 he complained:
"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand...So where is this oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."
What had changed in the seven years between Cheney's two statements?
The US kept importing more and more oil to meet its energy needs.
Energy shortages drove home the need to ensure/increase energy supply.
Oil specialists concluded that "peak oil" production was but a decade away, while demand would continue to zoom skyward.
The men now running US policy on the Middle East appealed to President Clinton in January 1998 to overthrow Saddam Hussein or "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."
In October 1998 Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill declaring it the sense of Congress that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein."
International sanctions left a debilitated Iraq with greatly weakened armed forces headed by an "evil dictator."
Shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Vice President Cheney's energy task force dragged out the maps of Iraq's oil fields. (We now have some of the relevant documents, courtesy of a bitterly contested Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But the courts have upheld the White House decision to keep the task force proceedings, and even the names of its members, secret.)
To be fair, taking over Middle East oil fields was not a new idea. In 1975 Henry Kissinger, using a pseudonym, wrote an article for Harpers titled "Seizing Arab Oil," outlining plans to do just that, preventing Arab countries from having absolute control over the modern world's most vital commodity. But in those days there was a USSR to put the brakes on such adventurism.
Prize Lies
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has claimed that the conflict with Iraq "has nothing to do with oil," but those who do not limit their news intake to FOX are aware that his credibility is somewhat tarnished. After all, it was Rumsfeld who assured us, among other things, that he knew where Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" were located. And for a war supposedly not about oil, US military planners certainly gave extremely high priority to securing the oil fields—and even the Oil Ministry in Baghdad.
It will bring no consolation to young widow Angela Coakley, whom Cpl. Wichlacz married last May just before shipping out to Iraq, or to his parents to know that they are not the first to suffer immeasurable loss on false pretenses.
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
No Static
In Pewaukee I fully expected such observations to cause some static, at least during the formal post-lecture Q&A session before most of the audience drifted off into a light snow. I was later advised not to misread the lack of demurral as concurrence, but rather to chalk it up to Mid-West reticence.
Some twenty folks did linger in a small circle that was dominated by a persistent, well dressed man (let's call him Joe), who just would not let go:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked Joe if he would feel differently were it to have been his son that was killed, rather than Cpl. Wichlacz, but the suggestion seemed so farfetched as to be beyond Joe's ken. (And therein lies yet another important story). So I resorted to a utilitarian approach. "Joe, we're just not going to be able to control the oil in Iraq. The war is unwinnable. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, and they are very upset with us; they will not let us prevail."
But this too made little impact on Joe.
How about Because It's Wrong
I sized Joe up as one who would press for having the Ten Commandments prominently displayed in the courthouses of America. So I took a new tack, asking him, "Isn't one of those commandments about stealing... and one about killing... one about lying... and even one about coveting your neighbor's possessions? Would you think we might lop off those four and whittle the tablets down to the remaining six so as to spare ourselves potential embarrassment?"
Joe walked off to drive his gas-guzzler home.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray McGovern is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush.
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at February 14, 2005 03:42 PM
Abel,
You are the ultimate partisan hack.
Posted by: Wayne at March 12, 2005 09:13 PM
Wayne,
One would think that you'd be smart enough to know what I really think about your opinion. Nevertheless, Thanks for finally learning how to spell my name. --Abel
Your POST follows:
"Abel, You are the ultimate partisan hack."
Posted by: Wayne at March 12, 2005 09:13 PM
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 4, 2005 12:46 AM
I hereby POST the following article without further comment. The original may be found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03recruit.html?oref=login
--Abel
June 3, 2005
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE
Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.
Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.
Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.
"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."
Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.
Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.
Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.
A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.
"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."
Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.
The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.
"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.
Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "
Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.
"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."
Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, "it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight."
In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children's decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference.
But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.
"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."
Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism.
But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military's increased intrusion into the lives of their children.
"The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom," he said. "They're contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war."
The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students' names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters "the same access to secondary school students" as is provided to colleges and employers.
So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds.
"The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind," said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children's personal information.
Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer.
"It didn't say that the military has access to students' information," he said. "It just said to write a letter if you didn't want your kid listed in a public directory."
A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas's attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country.
But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said.
"Because of the situation we're in now, I would not want my son to serve," he said. "It's the policy that I'm against, not the military."
After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school's role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district's 14,000 students.
The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier's assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool.
He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters' claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students.
And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans.
Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been "politically apathetic," she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind's reporting requirements, nor did she opt out.
When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be "a rebel without a cause."
"In this world," she recalled telling him, "we need a strong military."
But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - "Like, 'Hey, let's join the military. It's fun,' " she said.
First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the "false advertising," she said, then her congressman.
On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted.
"Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue," she said. "The point is not whether I support the troops. It's about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools."
Laura Cummins, in Accord, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article.
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 4, 2005 12:58 AM
Below is an interesting Article that I'm POSTing in the hope that still more Americans will finally begin the process of questioning themselves as well as our actions. "After all," as David Kuo states, "if we don’t question ourselves, we are still chasing the apparition known as Deep Throat rather than the uncertain man named Mark Felt who still wonders about what he did." Enjoy! The original may be found at:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16789_1.html
--Abel
Shooting from the Heart
David Kuo
Deep Throat's Unmasking, and Ours
Mark Felt agonized over his role in exposing the Watergate scandal. It's the kind of self-searching that Jesus would love.
After 30 years of speculation and curiosity, we now know Deep Throat was a patriotic federal government employee, passed over for promotion, in conflict with his bosses, at odds with the White House, tormented with himself and his loyalties, caught up in a game of private intrigue, who leaked information to a news outlet. That makes him just like the rest of us who have been involved in Washington's inner circles. It is all pretty disappointing really. We were hoping for an exceptional man. We got an every man.
Maybe that is why this disclosure has become a Rorschach test for commentators, political leaders, staffers, journalists, and everyone else involved in politics. Deep Throat’s unmasking as the unremarkable Mark Felt begs us all to stop speculating about him and start looking inside ourselves, examining our own actions. Have we been faithful to our country? Have we served ourselves or others? And when we start doing that we all get a bit fidgety because there is a lot of darkness inside us all. So we stop and lash out instead.
Maybe that is why one prominent conservative commentator wrote that it was Mark Felt who brought down a president, weakened America, emboldened the Soviet Union, and brought forth the demonic Pol Pot and his killing fields. Because he exposed the crimes of a corrupt White House, he is responsible for all subsequent world events? Does that mean he was also the architect of communism’s collapse? Should he get credit for the Teletubbies, Spice Girls, and "Star Wars" too, given that they appeared in the post-Watergate era?
Ah, that feels better doesn’t it? It is all his fault. If we can just blame our government's failures to confront genocide on Deep Throat, then we bear no responsibility ourselves. This brand of passing the buck in a supercharged, hyperbolic, ideologically driven fashion is the primary characteristic of 21st-century American politics.
But the facts about Mark Felt don't support his demonization. He didn’t stand in Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter’s way in 1975, 1976, or 1977 as America complacently ignored the torture of millions in Cambodia. He didn’t embolden the Soviet Union. He was an old-school career FBI employee who covertly exposed the corruption of an imperious White House team that thought it was under attack from lots of groups including “the Jews,” truly believed it was “on the right side of history,” and didn't have the humility to admit it was ever wrong.
A prominent liberal commentator writes that the timing of Deep Throat’s identification is fortuitous because the Bush White House is just as corrupt as Nixon's was. Bush, this logic goes, secretly took the country to war for his own ends and profit. He wantonly sacrificed more than 1,600 American lives to take out Saddam Hussein. All that America needs now is another super-secret superhero like Mark Felt to expose the insidious cabal convening nightly in the West Wing or some undisclosed location. The real problem is with President Bush.
Then there are the journalists. I’ve heard from friends in the White House, Department of Justice, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and Pentagon that several wannabe-Woodwards are calling around to officials, saying “You can be a hero just like Mark Felt. Give me the information, and I’ll protect your anonymity and get the story out. Later, if you want to step forward, you can go on the speaking circuit and make lots of money.”
Virtually every person in a position of power in Washington has played the leaking game. Some give information; others receive. Sometimes it is done as part of an institution’s strategic decision-making. It is often advantageous, for instance, to leak a proposed policy as a trial balloon. The name of a potential Supreme Court nominee can be leaked to ascertain preliminary reaction. Other times the leaking is done to hurt another political party, another candidate, or a rival. Sometimes individuals leak information to the media to build goodwill with reporters. One of President Bush’s senior nominees in the first term was famous for holding background meetings with reporters, leaking information, and building goodwill. He sailed through his confirmation hearings with no bad press.
Here’s the rub though. No one likes to admit that they’ve leaked–even if they do it as part of their every day job. We prettify the language and say we’re “giving the story to…” or are “providing information to…” or “just talking on background.” Then there’s the most popular description of all, “spinning.” But leaking can be a high. There is a certain rush of power. We are in control. We are playing the reporter to our side. We are manipulating…I mean, spinning. But there's no lasting high; once the adrenaline rush wears off, it feels a bit slimy. And if it doesn’t feel slimy, then we’ve probably been doing it for too long.
The flood of biographies of Mark Felt in the wake of his revelation make it clear that he has wrestled with his role as leaker-in-chief for 30 years. He found moments of peace, but they were overwhelmed by recurring fears over what people would think of what he had done. Most telling, however, was the conscience question: Did I do the right thing?
I wonder how many people in politics are asking that question these days? Based on all of the hacking going on in the name of "public service," it seems like it may be the least popular of all questions.
That is understandable though. Who really wants that much self-knowledge? To examine conscience requires the painful task of self-reflection while overcoming our own capacity for self-deception. A famous prayer beginning the process of conscience examination starts by asking, “O Lord, grant me light to see myself as Thou dost see me…”
Jesus, who said virtually nothing about politics save “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” had everything to say about questions like these. To see ourselves as we are, he said, we must first look at our hearts. What comes out of our mouths is simply a gasp of what is inside of us.
Let’s be honest, these are annoying statements.
We don’t want to look at our own hearts and consciences. Not really look. I find it easier to look at the rest of the world and comment on it. My neighbor, for instance, needs to paint over his purple house, my president needs to pay more attention to the poor, my friends need to consume less and give more, someone needs to ban the New York Yankees.
But looking at others' blemishes isn’t the best option. Looking inside and asking if I’ve done the right things in service to America, to people, to politics, and, most important, to God is what I have to do. And it is what all of us in politics, the media, business, and everywhere else needs to do as well.
Questioning ourselves and our actions seems to be the best response to this week’s news. After all, if we don’t question ourselves, we are still chasing the apparition known as Deep Throat rather than the uncertain man named Mark Felt who still wonders about what he did.
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 4, 2005 02:33 AM
Read the article below and begin pushing for really supporting our brave veterans who have fought and are still fighting George W. Bush's illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sorry but there's really no "nice way" to tell the truth--Abel
See Original at: http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=28676&archive=true
Sunday, June 5, 2005
Advocates see veterans of war on terror joining the ranks of the homeless
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, June 2, 2005
WASHINGTON — Advocates for the homeless already are seeing veterans from the war on terror living on the street, and say the government must do more to ease their transition from military to civilian life.
Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, said about 70 homeless veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan contacted her group’s facilities in 2004, and another 125 homeless veterans from those conflicts last year petitioned the Department of Veterans Affairs for assistance.
“It’s not a big wave, but it’s an indicator that we still haven’t done our job,” she said. “I think that our nation would be very embarrassed if they knew that.”
The group, founded in 1990, is a national network of charitable organizations designed to provide resources and aid for homeless veterans.
Veterans Affairs officials estimate that about 250,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and another 250,000 experience homelessness at some point.
Boone said the reasons behind the veterans’ housing problems are varied: Some have emotional and mental issues from their combat experience, some have trouble finding work after leaving the military, some have health care bills which result in financial distress.
George Basher, director of the New York State Department of Veterans Affairs, said he believes guardsmen and reservists are particularly at risk because they often bypass resources like the Transition Assistance Program when they return home.
“Those are the ones most likely to have private health insurance, so they’re likely to show up at an HMO looking for treatment and not a VA hospital,” he said. “There’s no central place for treatment.”
Still, Pete Dougherty, coordinator for the Veterans’ Affairs Department's homeless programs, said veterans today have more options — outpatient facilities, counselors, job training programs — than the troops returning from the Vietnam War.
“Most of the folks we’re seeing now are worried about losing their homes and think they won’t be able to afford to stay in them,” he said. “Before, the vets were out there but were unseen and unnoticed. Now we can reach out and make a difference sooner.”
But Boone added that most veterans don’t seek help for mental and emotional problems for years after their return from combat, meaning the problem of homelessness among war on terror veterans will likely grow.
“We’re still going to have homeless veterans because we haven’t tackled how to deal with the separation issue,” she said.
For more information on resources for homeless veterans, call (800) VET-HELP or visit www.nchv.org.
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 5, 2005 01:27 PM
About 50% of the American people who voted in 2004 have always known that George W. Bush lied to the American people in order to wage an illegal war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As bad as Saddam was, the war we waged against him was, and still is, an illegal war. The original story is at:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=50
The following article is meant for the about 50% other Americans who believed that George W. Bush was an honest man. I'm sorry but there's still isn't any "nice way" to tell the truth about Iraq and Saddam--Abel
Media: Chair of Republican Party Put at a Loss by Downing Street Minutes
Posted by: downing on Sunday, June 05, 2005 - 11:05 PM Print article Email to a friend
Chair of Republican Party Put at a Loss by Downing Street Minutes
By David Swanson, www.afterdowningstreet.org
On June 5, 2005, Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the Republican Party, was asked about the Downing Street Minutes on "NBC News' Meet the Press." To my knowledge, this was the first serious treatment of the matter on any U.S. network news show. It still remains for a news program to report on the matter on its own behalf, as opposed to asking a Republican guest to comment on it.
The transcript is here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8062380 and below with commentary:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the now-famous Downing Street memo. This was a memo, July 23, 2002, from the head of British intelligence to Prime Minister Blair; in effect, notes taken from a briefing that was given to Prime Minister Blair after the head of British intelligence came back from a trip to Washington. It says this: "[The head of British Intelligence] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
This is July of 2002. We didn't invade until March of 2003. And the prime minister of Great Britain is being told by the head of his intelligence that he went to Washington and believes that a decision had already been made and that the administration was fixing or manipulating the intelligence to support the policy.
MR. MEHLMAN: Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 911 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all.
[Mehlman is pretending to claim that these bodies have investigated the Downing Street Minutes and discredited them, while really claiming that these bodies discredited the idea that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence to fit its desired policy. This amounts to claiming that a new piece of evidence can be dismissed on the grounds of what authorities allegedly concluded PRIOR TO discovering the new evidence. This is absurd.]
The fact is that the intelligence of this country, the intelligence of Britain, the intelligence of the United Nations, the intelligence all over the world said that there were weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq.
[With regard to the United States and Britain, the whole point is to determine whether their "intelligence" was dishonest. The United Nations certainly never agreed with it; nor did "the world." The United Nations rejected the evidence presented by the United States, and worldwide opposition to the war was more powerful than ever before in history – much of it focused on the belief that the Bush Administration was lying.]
We knew that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction before.
[Because we sold them to him.]
We still know that there was a weapons of mass destruction program.
[When? Just before the war? Or a program in some past year that had long since been dismantled? The former claim would be a lie, the latter an irrelevance.]
He was evading the sanctions, and he had plans to reconstitute the program.
[Actually, of course, he had complied with the sanctions and informed the world of that fact, and complied with investigations.]
We also knew that Saddam Hussein had uniquely invaded his neighbors, had uniquely supported terrorists and we all know today that we are safer because he's been removed from power.
[Actually, there is nothing unique about invading one's neighbors. Just ask Haiti. Hussein did not support Al Quaeda in any way. That lie has been endlessly debunked. And terrorist incidents have increased since the war started – which more of us would know if the Bush Administration had not ceased releasing annual statistics on the matter. In any event, the over 1600 US soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis who have been killed are not safer – they're not anything.]
So I believe that that individual report not only has been discredited
[by whom? when? where? on what grounds?]
but that the overall reasons for removing Saddam Hussein were broader than that, they were correct, and we're now safer and certainly the people of Iraq are safer now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power.
[For the points of view of some actual Iraqis on this, see www.uslaboragainstwar.org ]
MR. RUSSERT: I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited.
MR. MEHLMAN: I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it.
[Again, he means PRIOR TO emergence of this piece of evidence – a dubious assertion in itself.]
MR. RUSSERT: There--let me go back to another sentence from that report. "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, now head of the World Bank, said the other day, "The war never ended," and the concern many Americans have, Mr. Mehlman, is that we now have 1,669 Americans who've died bravely in Iraq, 1,532 of those after the president said major combat operations were over. We have 12,762 Americans wounded or injured, 12,000 of those after the president said major combat was over. This memo seems to suggest that the head of British Intelligence told Prime Minister Blair that there was little discussion in Washington to plan for the aftermath of military action.
MR. MEHLMAN: I would respectfully disagree with that finding. I think that there was clearly planning that occurred, planning that occurred to deal with the results of the war. If you remember after the first Gulf War, whether it was the breaching of the dams that we saw all over Iraq, that didn't happen. Whether it was the fires that we saw, that didn't happen this past time. Plans were made for after the war. There's no question that there has been an insurgency. The insurgents understand the stakes of the situation in Iraq. They understand that if we're successful, their efforts to promote terrorism around the world, their efforts to defeat democracy and freedom will be hurt. And there's no question-- therefore, we need to deal with these insurgents.
[Plans were clearly made to safeguard the oil, but that hardly addresses Russert's citation of figures of deaths. Nor does Mehlman give any explanation of what in the heck he means by suggesting that Iraqis resisting the occupation are trying to "promote terrorism around the world."]
But the president has mentioned repeatedly that he thinks every day about it and meets with the families of the men and women who have given their lives in Iraq.
[Meets with them every day? How many families has he met with? More than one? Clearly he has not met with members of Gold Star Families for Peace or Iraqi Veterans Against the War or Military Families Speak Out or Military Families Against the War or Veterans for Peace. These organizations are working to end the war and are almost certainly not comforted to hear that Bush thinks about "it."]
They've given their lives for an incredibly noble cause.
[Oil?]
We did plan for the future. There are some things you can plan for. There are some things that are harder to plan for, but I believe we're doing a very important mission in Iraq, which is defeating the terrorists, promoting democracy and you've seen throughout this spring what the effects of that democracy have been in other Arab nations.
[Again, the reference to "terrorists" appears to be an attempt to dishonestly connect Iraq to 9-11. Saudi Arabia, the home of most of the 9-11 terrorists, is a US ally and the furthest thing from a democracy.]
MR. RUSSERT: The primary rationale given for the war, however, was the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. And again I refer you to the memo of the prime minister's meeting. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than half that of Libya, North Korea and Iran."
MR. MEHLMAN: Well, the president, I think, was responsible in saying we need to simultaneously prepare for war and also try to avoid that war.
[But we now have official government minutes showing that he was not doing that. He was only telling us that he was doing that. He was lying to the American people and to Congress.]
There were simultaneous efforts at the diplomatic stages that were made and yet at the same time it would have been irresponsible for us to say we're going to wait and then plan for war later because we wouldn't have had as effective an effort as we did to remove Saddam Hussein from power, so we needed to do both at the same time.
[The point is not that the Pentagon was planning how it would fight a war if it had to do so, but that Bush had already determined to go to war and to lie about why it was necessary.]
I would also, though, disagree, as I said a moment ago, with the notion that Iraq was somehow less of a threat. Iran and North Korea hadn't invaded their neighbors. Iran and North Korea hadn't used weapons of mass destruction. Iran and North Korea hadn't, in the same way that Saddam Hussein had, been paying off suicide bombers in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. Iran and North Korea are serious challenges. So was Saddam Hussein, and removing him makes the world safer, makes America safer.
[So, the chairman of the Republican Party is better qualified than top intelligence officials to rank the members of the "axis of evil"? Why, then was the bogus justification for attacking Iraq its fictional pursuit of nuclear weapons? Meanwhile North Korea's actual possession of such weapons was not considered a danger? Please. And the comments about Iraq invading neighbors are out of place. Iraq was not threatening to invade anyone. The United States invaded Iraq while pretending that Iraq was threatening the United States. In the past, if the past is relevant, the United States has invaded far more countries than Iraq has.]
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 7, 2005 12:14 AM
To All:
Getting to the truth is, as people say, "Better late than never." The following article may be found at:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050606/the_hunting_of_the_president.php
Read and Learn. --Abel
The Hunting Of The President
A few weeks ago, I wrote that for the Downing Street Memo to have any effect, members of Congress would have to get behind an investigation into the document. Now, it seems, the game is on.
"But for those aligning with the Conyers camp, it will not be easy to raise awareness in the mainstream media, even with CNN's belated recognition. We learned from the 2004 election cycle that the mainstream media will not pursue controversial investigations without political backstopping."
I'm pleased to report that early congressional support has made a difference. Rep. John Conyers gathered 88 signatures on a letter to the White House demanding that the president explain the memo. That letter was rebuffed by the White House but it was enough to get CNN and the LATimes on the case. A few days later, the Washington Post filed its own story.
On Thursday, Senator John Kerry announced he would be raising the Downing Street Memo in Congress upon his return from recess. That, predictably, led to a reaction from the conservative media machine.
In today's National Review Online, the conservatives reveal their concern and unease. In their opening salvo, James S. Robbins attempts to argue that the memo is "old news." He argues that the three major pieces of information contained in the memo were all previously known and where necessary, previously discredited.
Robbins treats the Downing Street memo as a series of new accusations. This is wrong. The Downing Street Memo is a new source document that is evidence, not accusation. It is evidence that the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq by April 2002. It is evidence that the Bush administration acted on that decision and was using Operations Northern and Southern Watch to hit Iraqi command and control targets to prepare the battlefield in advance of a declaration of war and Congressional authorzation. It is evidence that the Bush administration had decided to "fix the facts" around the policy they could not otherwise justify to the American people.
So, when Robbins says, for example, that the "The charge of intelligence fraud (if it is such a charge) has already been investigated and found baseless," his statement relies on an investigation (the Silberman-Robb Commission) that was not only unable to look at the political use of intelligence, it relies on an investigation that did not have in hand the evidence he is attempting to refute.
What Robbins does not do, however, is provide a refutation that deceiving the American people and Congress is not an impeachable offense. If the evidence in the Downing Street Memo can be further corroborated—which will most likely require more high-level leaks—the Downing Street Memo could be the equivalent of the Watergate break-in.
And now John Kerry is stepping into the fray. Perhaps Senator Kerry can expand the protective umbrella around the media and enable a new generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins to dig into this story. It will take time and patience, but there must be a few officials left in office who—for whatever reason—are willing to reveal the truth.
In the meantime, we've learned from Rep. Conyers' office that he has opened up his letter to the American people and has received 100,000 signatures already. As Bill Moyers suggested last friday, it's time to wade in. Sign up with Rep. Conyers and ask your editorial board to cover the story.
--Patrick Doherty | Monday 2:41 PM
Posted by: Abel P. Ochoa at June 14, 2005 03:45 AM
