safire: I've known Cheney since our Nixon days. He's thoughtful, calmly conservative, nonpompous, decisive and was accessible to me over the phone on the hectic morning after 9/11.

In Washington, the US Homeland Security Department said today non-US airlines will be told "on a flight by flight basis" whether to put sky marshals on board, as a precondition for entering US airspace.
Yesterday's announcement by the British government followed a British press report -- denied by Saudi authorities -- that Islamic extremists were planning to attack a British airliner in Riyadh by crashing small planes into it.

Do you think GlobalNet (which until December 22 was called iDial Networks, and is a trendy VoIP company based in Woodlands, Texas) negotiated this contract in a week? With Libya completely isolated by American sanctions? Or did GlobalNet have a tip off that Libya was going to be opened to American investment, and started the negotiations months before? If there was a tip off, Gaddafi could not have been acting on the basis of Saddam's capture, and somebody in the American government must have known about Gaddafi's 'surprise' announcement in advance.

Butler who resolutely said that any unilateral war engaged by the US against Iraq would be wrong, illegal and unjustifiable, and that the only way military action should occur, if it does and if its absolutely necessary, is through UN Security Council approval.


fisk: Far from being another despotic little killer, Gadhafi is now, according to Jack Straw, "statesmanlike and courageous."


For Rove, gay marriage is the new Willie Horton, a wedge issue perfectly suited to fire up the corporate-funded right-wing church network while diverting public attention from an ailing economy and a failing war effort.
As governor of Vermont, Howard Dean approved gay civil unions, somewhat different from gay marriage. But the Bush/Rove GOP is unlikely to make such fine distinctions, any more than Bush One belabored the legal intricacies of the Willie Horton parole.

Just after Japan's surrender, the secretary of war sent a team of analysts called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to Japan to evaluate the effects of America's bombing campaign. Among other things, the group was charged with ascertaining how the aerial assault (both conventional and nuclear) affected the morale of Japanese citizens and the decision-making of Japan's wartime leaders.
The team's conclusions fly in the face of what we now consider the conventional wisdom. "It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender," the Survey says.

The 2003 award is shared by adventurer Steve Irwin and columnist Michael Duffy. The crocodile hunter declared, in the presence of John Howard, that the Prime Minister is the greatest leader in the entire world. Soon after, Irwin scored an invitation to lunch with George Bush at the Lodge - demonstrating that flattery works.

In awarding the logistics contract, the Army acknowledged last year, it failed to consider that haliburton was under criminal investigation for a previous Pentagon contract, even though that inquiry was disclosed in Halliburton's annual report.

Ms. Hall, the Halliburton spokeswoman, said subcontractors were kept confidential "in order to ensure subcontractor safety" in Iraq. By contrast, Bechtel, the other large government contractor involved in the reconstruction effort, lists its subcontractors on its Web site.

The three-day conference included officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the corps and other government agencies as well as executives from KBR. The companies that attended, according to David C. Farlow, a spokesman for the United States Central Command, included only "commercial contractors currently working in Iraq."

For Australia, the obvious example of such a threat that comes to mind is North Korea, an impoverished Orwellian society where paranoia, poverty and nuclear potency intersect, financed by drug smuggling and missile sales.

Back in Moscow, most commentators were sure of the motive: Chelsea was, like Chukotka before it, a safety net. Should the Kremlin ever demand Abramovich's extradition, Britain would think twice with thousands of Chelsea fans picketing the high court. (A day after the Chelsea deal, Khodorkovsky's right-hand man Platon Lebedev was arrested in Moscow; two weeks later, Yukos's Moscow offices were raided by armed police.)

Writing in The Independent, Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, said: "It is undignified for the Prime Minister, and worrying for his nation, to go on believing in a threat which everyone else can see was a fantasy. Nor will Tony Blair ever recover his credibility until he stops insisting he is right when the public can see he was wrong."

Libya was not close to building a nuclear weapon, said Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) yesterday. The deal was brokered by Britain and America in secret talks that sidelined the IAEA, the United Nations' atomic energy agency.

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.
The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

U.S. President George W. Bush called Putin twice this month to raise concerns about where Russia is headed, according to a senior State Department official. On Dec. 1, Bush called to express concerns about whether the rule of law was being used selectively.
And, in what appears to be an attempt to push Khodorkovsky into making a deal, Tax Ministry reports have been leaked claiming the company owes $5 billion in back taxes.
On Tuesday, the same day as a Moscow court extended Khodorkovsky's stay in jail another three months, a visibly tense Putin indicated for the first time that the Yukos affair might not be an isolated case and threatened action against other oligarchs that gained their wealth in fraudulent privatizations if they did not toe the line.

Bush's next declared mission, that of toppling Yasser Arafat, only reinforces the image of the president as a king who knows not the boundaries of his kingdom, nor the limits of his power. Or, as a captive of pro-Israeli hawks hell-bent on remaking the Middle East to Likud designs.
He invoked democracy but ignored its expression abroad and suspended its principles at home.

To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice, however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases, a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.

"The West should be very afraid of what is going on in Russia now," said Boris Berezovsky, the former owner of Sibneft and Putin antagonist exiled in London. "What's happening now could lead to a new military build-up. And a nationalist Russia armed with nuclear weapons is far more dangerous for the West than Hitler's Third Reich ever was."
Putin has also seemed anxious to talk up Russia's military capabilities. On the eve of the EU-Russia summit in Italy shortly after Khodorkovsky was arrested, he made clear in an interview with Italian journalists that he considered Russia a force to be reckoned with. He stressed again that Russia retains the right to launch preemptive strikes and pointed out that Russia has weapons that "can penetrate any missile defense system."

While tacitly acknowledging that the alert was a fake, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge decided to maintain the ‘Orange Code’ alert: "Despite the fabricated report, there are no plans to change the threat level. Officials said other intelligence has been validated and that the high level of precautions is fully warranted."
What is disturbing in the December 21 statement is the fact that an "actual" or "attempted" Al Qaeda terrorist attack seems already to be in the official pipeline.
In the words of David Rockefeller: "We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."

According to the official statement, which must be taken seriously, an "actual terrorist attack" in the near future on American soil would lead to a Red Code Alert. The latter in turn, would create conditions for the (temporary) suspension of the normal functions of civilian government, as foreseen by General Tommy Franks. This scenario was envisaged by Secretary Tom Ridge in a CBS News Interview on December 22, 2003: "If we simply go to red ... it basically shuts down the country," meaning that civilian government bodies would be closed down and taken over by and Emergency Administration. The scenario is presented in detail at the Homeland department's Ready.Gov

Whenever any of the administration’s "misspeaks" were exposed, Fatherland Security czar Tom Rigid would take to the air and publicly change the Colorform on the Alibi for Authoritarianism Rainbow to a bolder shade.

Rumsfeld deepened the pit by summarizing the anarchy thusly, "It’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." With this remark he unintentionally disclosed that some of the freest people in the world are now occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In an April 2003 interview with the New York Times, Garner said, "If President Bush had been president [during Vietnam], we would have won." Why Garner thought a drunken, drug-abusing, MOOA (Missing Out of Action) National Guardsman would have made a good president back then remains unclear.
Garner did next to nothing to stabilize the country during his brief rule. Seeing an opportunity, Henry Kissinger managed to place one of his lackeys, L. Paul Bremer III, the former managing director of Kissinger & Associates (and the man in charge of counterterrorism in the Reagan White House), in the void widened by Garner.

would it be asking too much to do the same for the American people through the adoption of the following two amendments to the U.S. Constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power to declare war, and this time we
really do mean it." "No person shall be denied life, liberty, or
property without due process of law, and this time we really do mean it."

By all world standards, America's trade deficits are
stunningly unsustainable. We have to go back to Italy
in 1924 to find a major nation that, in percentage
terms, has run a larger peacetime trade deficit.
The full significance of this is that Italy in 1924
was a true economic basket case -- so much so that in
January 1925, Mussolini seized dictatorial powers