Attorney Gen. John D. Ashcroft's 1998 leadership PAC, Spirit of America, and his Senate reelection campaign committee, Ashcroft 2000, raised more than $100,000 last year in order to pay a fine and legal costs for violating campaign finance laws, according to Federal Election Commission records and Garrett Lott, treasurer of both committees.

One journalist, NBC reporter and "Meet the Press" host Andrea Mitchell, appears to have several connections of interest.
On July 6, she interviewed Wilson about his trip to Niger, and two days later she reported officials tried to cast Wilson as a Democratic "partisan."
And on July 16, her husband, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, was honored at a White House reception held to celebrate former President Gerald Ford's 90th birthday. The grand jury subpoenaed the guest list, which has not been released.

This week, the Bush administration added another violent "regime change" notch to its gunbelt, toppling the democratically elected president of Haiti and replacing him with an unelected gang of convicted killers, death squad leaders, militarists, narcoterrorists, CIA operatives, hereditary elitists and corporate predators -- a bit like Team Bush itself, in other words.

No, Aristide did something far worse than stuffing ballots or killing people -- he tried to raise the minimum wage to the princely sum of two dollars a day. This move outraged the American corporations -- and their local lackeys -- who have for generations used Haiti as a pool of dirt-cheap labor and sky-high profits.

"The niceties of democracy were thrown out the window, and the matters of principle so vigorously defended by President Chirac and Foreign Minister de Villepin over Iraq were quickly shunted aside," said the Jamaica Observer in a March 1 editorial. "And new Canadians went with the flow." The Caribbean Community must understand, "if they thought otherwise," that "democratically-elected leaders are easily expendable if they, at a particular time, do not fit the profile in favor with those who are strong and powerful."

"He was kidnapped and all of the circumstances seem to support his assertion. Had he resigned, we wouldn't need blacked out windows and blocked communications and military taking him away at gunpoint. Had he resigned, he would have been happy to leave the country. He was not."

Robinson reported that he had worked the phones to find out the State Department's story and been told that South Africa had refused Aristide asylum. Robinson spoke with South Africa's foreign minister, who said that Aristide had not asked for asylum. (Of course he hadn't - he had not planned to be leaving the country!)

It is a mind-boggling measure of the Bush Pirates' ferocious lawlessness that Powell would personally initiate the overt, criminally culpable act in the kidnapping of a head of state. This aspect of the crime alone should send him to The Hague.

A CNN anchor speculated that Aristide was "fabricating revisionist history on the fly," with the transparent inference that Rep. Waters was a dupe or liar, herself. "Do you think we would make that up?" the Congresswoman asked, shocked and offended.

In the case of Aristide's kidnapping - and that is the objective name of the crime, since he left in the coercive custody of the U.S. under threat of death from none other than the Secretary of State - the media collaborated with the perpetrators to justify the "disappearing" of a head of state. What shall we call such media? "Lackey" and "stooge" don't work. The terms connote subservient status, and a kind of haplessness. But there is nothing hapless or subservient about Big Media, who are, through their interlocking ownerships and financial and directorship ties "full members of the presiding corporate pantheon."

It's already begun. The toad-like Deputy Secretary of State, Roger Noriega, this week appeared on Ted Kopple's ABC Nightline to slander Aristide as an "erratic and unreliable" personality who made up the kidnapping story. "He's demonstrated within the last few hours that he's not a responsible person," said Jesse Helms' former chief of staff. Having somehow failed to kill Aristide, they will assassinate his sanity.

Noreiga and Condoleezza Rice have been saying the same things for years about Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, another president whose constituency is based among the poor. Anti-government demonstrators have begun carrying signs reading, "Bye bye Aristide, Chavez you're next."