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Washington, DC – “It was reported today that our government’s former top intelligence officer for Middle East issues has described the troubling misuse of intelligence on Iraq by the Bush Administration to take the country to war. On the same day, we learn that Scooter Libby was directed by the Vice President and others to leak sensitive national security secrets to publicly sell the Administration’s case. Evidence that the Bush White House manipulated and selectively declassified intelligence to wage a public relations campaign before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq grows every day.


“Now more than ever, it is critical that Congress completes a full and thorough investigation into whether this Administration did mislead the American people into a long and costly war in Iraq. This Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s investigation into prewar intelligence. That investigation is still not complete. Our troops and the American people expect and deserve that this investigation be thorough and be completed so that the lessons can finally be learned and these mistakes can never happen again.”


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http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html?mode=print

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Official apologizes for Nazi allusion

Associated Press

February 11, 2006

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Lt. Gov. Michael Steele apologized yesterday for comparing embryonic stem cell research to Nazi medical experiments, saying, “in no way did I intend to equate the two.”

Steele had made the remark to the Baltimore Jewish Council on Thursday after speaking about a recent trip to Israel. One of the audience members had asked for his thoughts on stem cell research.

“You, of all folks, know what happens when people decide to experiment on human beings, when they want to take your life and use it as a tool,” Steele said in remarks reported by The (Baltimore) Sun.

The council's executive director, Art Abramson, said the audience was quiet after Steele's remark. The lieutenant governor, who is seeking a Senate seat, left soon afterward.

Steele's Democratic opponents denounced the remarks, even after Steele issued an apology. “It was really quite horrifying,” said Myrna Cardin, a member of the council.

“The Holocaust was a unique event in the history of mankind, and the kinds of experiments that were conducted on human beings by Nazis and their henchmen . . . are beyond comparison, and I think the lieutenant governor would agree with that,” Abramson said.

Scholars say images of Muhammad not always controversial

Muhammad cartoons a boon for some papers

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Latest quotes from Bush......

"We don't fear the future because we're going to shape the future." ~ GW Bush 2/11/06


" I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room." ~ GW Bush 2/11/06
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The Nation -- Twenty-two members of the House have now signed on as co-sponors of the call to establish a select committee of the Congress to investigate whether the Bush administration's actions before and after the invasion of Iraq violated Constitutional requirements, statutes and standards in a manner that would merit impeachment of the president or vice president.

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U.S. must 'pay' over cartoons, Iran says
Europe also blamed as protests continue

By Nasser Karimi
ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 12, 2006

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's hard-line president accused the United States and Europe yesterday of being “hostages of Zionism” and said they should pay a heavy price for the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have triggered worldwide protests.

Denmark – where the drawings were first published four months ago – warned Danes yesterday to leave Indonesia, saying they faced a “significant and imminent danger” from an extremist group and announced it had withdrawn embassy staff from Jakarta, Iran and Syria.

Yemen announced that three chief editors of privately owned Yemeni papers will stand trial for printing the Danish cartoons and that their publishing licenses will be suspended. Information Ministry officials said the editors are charged with offending the prophet of Islam and violating religions.

This month, two Jordanian editors were put on trial for reprinting the Danish caricatures of Muhammad.

Saudi Arabia's top cleric said in a Friday sermon that those responsible for the drawings should be put on trial and punished.

Muslims in several European and Asian countries, meanwhile, kept up their protests, with thousands taking to the streets yesterday in London's biggest demonstration over the issue so far.

Last week, demonstrators in tightly controlled Iran attacked the Danish, French and Austrian embassies with stones and firebombs and hit the British mission with rocks.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks came in a speech yesterday marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

Ahmadinejad, who is at odds with much of the international community over Iran's nuclear program, launched an anti-Israeli campaign last fall when he said the Holocaust was a “myth” and that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” In his address, he linked his public rage with Israel and the cartoons satirizing Islam's most revered figure.

“Now in the West insulting the prophet is allowed, but questioning the Holocaust is considered a crime,” he said. “We ask, why do you insult the prophet? The response is that it is a matter of freedom, while in fact they (who insult the founder of Islam) are hostages of the Zionists. And the people of the U.S. and Europe should pay a heavy price for becoming hostages to Zionists.”

The drawings – including one that depicts the prophet with a turban shaped like a bomb with a burning fuse – were first published in September and recently reprinted in other European publications that said it was an issue of freedom of speech.

Islam widely holds that representations of the prophet are banned for fear they could lead to idolatry.

Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim country, has seized on the caricatures as a means of rallying its people behind a government that is increasingly under fire from the West over its nuclear ambitions.

Shiite Muslims do not ban representations of the prophet, and some in Iran's provincial towns and villages even carry drawings said to be of Muhammad. But Tehran said the newspaper caricatures were insulting to all Muslims.

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said on behalf of the European Union that Ahmadinejad's remarks should not be silently accepted.

“These remarks stand in complete contradiction to the efforts of numerous political and religious leaders who after the events of the past few days are campaigning for a dialogue between cultures that is marked by mutual respect,” Plassnik said.

She was referring to appeals for calm made in recent days by Arab governments, Muslim clerics and newspaper columnists who fear the sometimes deadly violence has only increased anti-Islamic sentiment in the West.

Norway's ambassador to Saudi Arabia apologized yesterday for the “offense” caused when a Norwegian newspaper published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Denmark, which has been stunned by the wave of protests over the caricatures that first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September, urged its citizens to leave Indonesia as soon as possible, saying they were facing “a significant and imminent danger” from an unnamed extremist group.

The warning yesterday came hours after the ministry said it had withdrawn Danish staff from Indonesia, Iran and Syria.

The Danish ambassador to Lebanon left last week after the embassy building in Beirut was burned by protesters.

Jyllands-Posten has apologized for offending Muslims but stood by its decision to print the drawings, citing freedom of speech.

The newspaper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, who was in charge of the drawings, went on indefinite leave Thursday, but many Muslims said that would do little to quell the uproar.

The paper has denied that Rose was ordered to go.

“He was not forced out,” the paper's spokesman Tage Clausen told The Associated Press in Copenhagen. “He's on vacation, that's all.”

Saudi Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, called on Muslims to reject apologies for the “slanderous” caricatures.

“Is there only freedom of expression when it involves insults to Muslims?” he said in his sermon, which was published yesterday in the Al Riyad daily.

Noisy but peaceful rallies also were held in Turkey, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, although the Middle East was largely calm.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said the caricatures were damaging attempts to blend the Muslim faith with democracy.

“It sends a conflicting message to the Muslim community: that in a democracy it is permissible to offend Islam,” the U.S.-educated leader wrote in a commentary that appeared yesterday in the International Herald Tribune.

In Philadelphia, 200 protesters with signs reading “Irresponsible Journalism” gathered outside the offices of The Philadelphia Inquirer to condemn the newspaper's decision to reprint a caricature last week that had angered Muslims worldwide.

“It was done knowing that it was against the wishes of the Muslim people,” said Mahmood Siddique, 50. “It was done in bad taste in the name of freedom of speech.”

Iranian leader threatens nuclear policy shift amid dispute

By Nasser Karimi
ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 12, 2006

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's hard-line president yesterday threatened to revise his policy of working within international nuclear frameworks, as diplomats in Europe said the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency had stripped most of its surveillance equipment from Iranian nuclear sites.

The diplomats, who demanded anonymity in exchange for revealing the confidential development, said the move was the result of retaliatory measures announced by Iran. It leaves the International Atomic Energy Agency with only the most basic means to monitor Iran's nuclear activities.

In Iran, thousands rallied across the nation yesterday to celebrate the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and show support for Iran's nuclear rights.

State-run television called the nationwide demonstrations “a nuclear referendum.”

In a speech before tens of thousands massed in Tehran's Azadi Square to mark the 27th anniversary of the revolution that brought a Muslim theocracy to power, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad focused on the building crisis surrounding Iran's disputed nuclear program.

“The nuclear policy of the Islamic Republic so far has been peaceful,” he said. “Until now, we have worked inside the agency (IAEA) and the NPT (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) regulations.

“If we see you want to violate the right of the Iranian people by using those regulations (against us), you should know that the Iranian people will revise its policies.”

The Iranian leader appeared in part to be responding to Thursday's call by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for Iran to restore a freeze on its nuclear activities and pursue talks to shift its uranium enrichment program to Russia.

Tensions between Iran and the international community escalated last month after Iran removed U.N. seals and began nuclear research, including small-scale uranium enrichment.

Yesterday, the IAEA's board voted to send Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, saying it lacked confidence in Tehran's nuclear intentions and accusing Iran of violating the nuclear arms-control treaty.

Iran responded by ending voluntary cooperation with the IAEA and announcing it would start uranium enrichment and bar surprise inspections of its facilities.

With most surveillance equipment and seals from Iran's nascent uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz now removed – and Iran recently ending the agency's rights to inspections on short notice – the IAEA has few means to monitor the progress of Tehran's enrichment efforts. It also is crippled in its attempts to look for secret sites and experiments that could be linked to nuclear arms.

The agency still has some seals and equipment at Natanz and Isfahan, where Iran is converting raw uranium into the feedstock gas for enrichment under basic agreements linked to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That monitoring is considered inadequate in the agency's ongoing efforts to establish whether the country has tried to develop a nuclear weapons program at undeclared facilities.

In 1975 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet future energy requirements.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric.

On August 2, 2005, the latest NIE concludes Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest. That important information has been generally ignored.

 In the Washington of today there is no need to bother with unwelcome intelligence that does not support the case you wish to make. Polls show that hyped-up public statements on the threat from Iran are having some effect, and indiscriminately hawkish pronouncements by usual suspects like senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain are icing on the cake. Ahmed Chalabi-type Iranian "dissidents" have surfaced to tell us of secret tunnels for nuclear weapons research, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps reminding the world that Iran is the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." Administration spokespeople keep warning of Iranian interference on the Iraqi side of their long mutual border - themes readily replayed in FOX channel news and the Washington Times. This morning's Chicago Tribune editorial put it this way:

There will likely be an economic confrontation with Iran, or a military confrontation, or both. Though diplomatic efforts have succeeded in convincing most of the world that this matter is grave, diplomatic efforts are highly unlikely to sway Iran.

    On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that Congress has the political will to use military force against Iran, if necessary, repeating the mantra " We cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear nation."

Richard Perle has come out of the woodwork to add a convoluted new wrinkle regarding the lessons of the attack on Iraq. Since one cannot depend on good intelligence, says Perle, it is a matter of "take action now or lose the option of taking action." One of the most influential intellectual authors of the war on Iraq, Perle and his "neo-conservative" colleagues see themselves as men of biblical stature. Just before the attack on Iraq, Perle prophesized:

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020606A.shtml

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020606C.shtml

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U.S. must 'pay' over cartoons, Iran says
Europe also blamed as protests continue

By Nasser Karimi
ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 12, 2006

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The newspaper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, who was in charge of the drawings, went on indefinite leave Thursday, but many Muslims said that would do little to quell the uproar.

The paper has denied that Rose was ordered to go.

“He was not forced out,” the paper's spokesman Tage Clausen told The Associated Press in Copenhagen. “He's on vacation, that's all.”

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The explanation for Flemming Rose's leave:

No Holocaust Cartoons in Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Islam's rage - The West should not appease those who would intimidate

By John O'Sullivan; senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, editor at large of National Review magazine and a member of Benador Associates.

February 12, 2006

As the riots spread through the Islamic world, the British Foreign Secretary, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations Secretary General, various responsible Muslim organizations, many commentators in Europe and the United States, including some distinguished conservative commentators, are calling for restraint on both sides.

What both sides would those be then? Well, one side has published a handful of cartoons, arguably blasphemous and certainly insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, and the other side has burned embassies, taken hostages, murdered three people suspected of being Christians and/or Danes, shot at Danish soldiers helping children in Iraq, marched through London with banners threatening further bomb attacks on the city, and attacked and beaten people whom they suspected of some vague connection with, well, with Europe or Christianity.

Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation.

For, contrary to much “responsible” commentary, Jyllands-Posten, the small regional Danish newspaper that first published the caricatures of Muhammad, did not do so from trivial motives. This was a serious and justified protest against the fact that Danish artists had been frightened out of illustrating a children's book on Islam and Muhammad.

They feared for their lives – and their fear was reasonable. In Holland only last year the film-maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist for his semi-pornographic film criticizing Islam as hostile to women. His collaborator, the Somali-Dutch feminist MP, Hirsan Ali, is now under permanent police protection since radical Islamist terrorists have threatened to kill her too. And murderous intimidation of this kind is now not uncommon in Western Europe.

Nor were the Danish cartoons all as crude and pointless as some critics have alleged in their earnest search for reasons to hold “both sides” guilty. One cartoon shows the Prophet with his turban evolving into a bomb. Insulting? Maybe. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Or maybe a perfectly fair comment on the arguments of radical Islamists that their religion justifies the murder of innocent bystanders, on the subsidies that Muslim governments give to suicide bombers, and on the thousands of Muslims baying for blood (and occasionally obtaining it) in response to a caricature.

Three cartoons were, indeed, more harsh and insulting than the rest. But these had not been published originally in Jyllands-Posten. They were added by the radical Islamists who distributed the cartoons around the Muslim world. These men committed the very blasphemies that they now use as an excuse for attacks on Danes and Christians.

Vile though it is, this trickery by radical Islamists at least demonstrates the uselessness of appeasing their demands for censorship. If they are granted, our concessions will merely be the springboard for a further attack on Western liberty. And if we disobligingly refuse to furnish them with a pretext, the Islamists will manufacture one as Hitler used to manufacture border incidents in order to justify his planned aggressions. So we might as well fight in the first ditch rather than the last.

Naturally, not all Muslims are guilty of either terror or sympathy with terror. Some moderate Muslims have spoken out against it at risk to their own lives. Their courage should be recognized and applauded and their safety protected. But others have either timidly gone along with murderous extremism or qualified their condemnation of it with criticism of Western governments, U.S. foreign policy, racism, etc. And it is this large middle ground of “moderate Muslims,” especially Muslim immigrants living in Western Europe and the United States, who are either welcomed or feared as potential recruits in an Islamist jihad.

Hence some of those adhering to the “both sides” analysis want to prohibit words and images that these millions might regard either as blasphemous or as insulting to minorities in a multicultural society. They see this as necessary to maintain social peace. (A British minister admitted that a proposed new law against religious insults would have banned the Danish cartoons.)

But there are powerful practical arguments against such a law. It would have to prohibit whatever any sizable religious group considered blasphemous. Given the number of religions in the modern West, that would prohibit a great deal. If it were applied in a sufficiently strict way to satisfy even moderate Muslims, it would intrude very considerably on free speech and artistic expression. So it would be applied in a haphazard and discriminatory fashion – appeasing the more unreasonable believers and ignoring peaceable ones – and it would bring the law into disrepute.

For a foretaste of this, look at the justified criticism of the British police for strictly enforcing vague laws on insulting behavior against harmless individual cranks while failing to prosecute Islamist mobs for what is plainly illegal incitement to murder. Such partial law enforcement would eventually cause more division in society than the widest definition of free speech. Curbing blasphemy is best left to social pressure and good manners. But these need to be shown by “both sides” and they need to leave room for honest, vigorous and controversial debate.

The secondary argument that we must all censor ourselves to avoid offending others in a multicultural society is a highly ironic commentary on the liberals' promise that multiculturalism meant a more lively, colorful, and argumentative society. We are now told that it means holding our tongues on sensitive issues and telling young women not to dress in ways that might provoke a pious Muslim to rape them.

If multiculturalism is incompatible with a free and lively society, as some implicitly now concede, then the sensible response is not to gradually chip away at Western freedom but to ensure that immigration from non-Western cultures proceeds at a rate that is assimilable culturally as well as economically. In other words, Muslims coming to Europe or America would automatically adjust to the freedoms of a free society because they would lack the numbers to insist on everyone else changing to suit them – which is currently the Islamist demand.

That demand is, finally, the reason for applauding those French, German, Spanish and other European newspapers that have reproduced the cartoons as a gesture of sympathy with Jyllands-Posten and those politicians, such as France's Nicholas Sarkozy, who have supported them. Even if the arguments for laws against blasphemy were valid – and they are not trivial – that would count as a secondary consideration alongside the need to resist and indeed defeat blackmail, intimidation and murder.

Those who take refuge in the false equivalence of the “both sides” argument are, in the end, guilty of cowardice. They are seeking excuses to avoid defending their own freedom and civilization against attack. They should seek courage – not “Dutch courage” but Danish courage – by ordering a glass of aquavit with a Carlsberg chaser.

We're at war but only one side seems to get that

By Claudia Rosett; journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her commentary first appeared on NationalReviewOnline.

February 12, 2006

'Rage over cartoons” has been the gist of many a headline over the past week describing the violence with which masked gunmen and arsonist mobs in the Islamic world have been protesting the publication in Denmark five months ago of political cartoons caricaturing Muhammad.

Rage, yes. But let's please get over the idea that this latest violence has anything much to do with the cartoons.

This is more of the same rage that for years – decades, actually – has brought us parades of masked gunmen, along with bombings, beheadings, the murder of aid workers, tourists and journalists, the assaults on resorts in Kenya and Bali, on the trains and subways of Madrid and London, on the weddings, funerals and religious ceremonies of Israel and post-Baathist Iraq. This is more of the same rage – inspired one may presume by factors other than Danish political satire – that produced that act of war known as Sept. 11.

With each step, we have looked for ways to defuse the anger by understanding the grievances. Bookshops have filled with volumes on the history of Islam, the wounded pride, the regional distinctions, the contending forces within Islam itself. Our political leaders, who have relatively little to say – and just as well – about Buddhism, Hinduism or for that matter Animism, have taken to celebrating the end of Ramadan, invited Islamic moderates to their state dinner tables and told us over and over that Islam is a religion of peace. We have debated whether to describe those who deviate from this serene vision as Islamic radicals, Islamo-fascists, militant Islamists, or plain old evil-doers, terrorists, fascists and thugs who happen to be Muslims.

And as the Danish drawings have made world headlines in recent days, our statesman have given every sign of being more disturbed by the contents of the cartoons than by the grotesque and bullying violence of the response. From many quarters, we have been warned that we must above all exercise that Christian virtue of turning the other cheek – if not positively feeling the rioters' pain. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, self-described chief diplomat of the world, has stepped into the cartoon fray, taking the time – while accepting a $500,000 environmental prize in the United Arab Emirates – to say he shares the anguish of Muslims over the cartoons, but urges them to “forgive the wrong they have suffered.”

Bill Clinton has condemned the cartoons as “totally outrageous.” The Bush White House has agreed with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen that all sides should move ahead “through dialogue and tolerance, not violence” – as if all sides had committed acts of equal gravity. The State Department has trotted out a spokesman to pronounce the cartoons “offensive” and a spokeswoman to scold that “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable” – a reprimand presumably meant not for the gunmen and arsonists but for the press that dared publish the cartoons.

The press, which these days includes the Internet, has been struggling over whether to run the cartoons or not – a debate salted with allusions to Hamlet's “To be or not to be,” to print or not to print. Two editors in Jordan who bravely reprinted the cartoons – reportedly on the theory that people should at least know what they are rioting about – have been arrested. Newspapers in Germany, Norway, France, Spain, Mexico, Iceland and Hungary have run the cartoons. Many in the United States have given them a pass. The Times of London ran an editorial on the matter with links to the cartoons, explaining this was meant to underscore that the viewing of them is a matter of choice. And some Western newspapers and blogs have been prompted to review the vast archive of grossly Anti-American anti-western, and above all anti-Semitic cartoons published daily in the state-controlled press in the most dictatorial countries of the Muslim world. They will soon have plenty more to review. An Iranian state newspaper is holding a Holocaust cartoon contest.

But all this might be chalked up as merely a sort of jarring cultural or religious misunderstanding, needing mainly a big dose of the patience, tolerance and dialogue so many world statesmen have been urging – were it not for the violence, and the credible threats of violence. Palestinian gunmen have stormed the European Union offices in Gaza and threatened to kidnap Scandinavians and Germans. Mobs have attacked and torched the Danish embassies in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran, with assaults for good measure on the embassies of Norway. The Danish cartoonist, his newspaper, and others who have published the cartoons have been getting bomb threats and death threats. Iran's Holocaust contest is no joke, not simply because it is sick – which it is – but because it is accompanied by Iran's building of nuclear bombs, teaching and funding of terror, and officially announced plans to annihilate Israel.

These things cross a line that separates “dialogue” from acts of terrorism and war. Whatever the offense, or lack of it, the real question for the free world is where we draw the line over threats and violent acts meant to control or kill us. Are there any grounds on which it is all right for Palestinians, swimming for decades in Western aid, to storm the EU offices in Gaza? Are there any grounds on which it is acceptable for embassies to go up in smoke because the authorities of Syria, or Lebanon, or Iran, do not protect them? Are there any grounds on which it is appropriate for a secretary general of the U.N. to treat such attacks as mere breaches of etiquette, pronouncing himself “alarmed” apparently in equal measure by cartoonists and gunmen?

What's noteworthy about the latest violence is not that it is unusual – but how very ordinary in so many ways it has become. Yes, of course, the grimly whimsical surprise is that this time the lightning rod has turned out to be not the famous London underground, or the grand train stations of Madrid, or the twin towers of New York, but a set of cartoons out of Copenhagen. The Danish drawings did not trigger some previously nonexistent fury. They have simply become the latest litmus test of how very much the worst thugs of the Islamic world believe they are entitled to get away with, whatever the pretext.

As for the cartoons, what ought to jump out here is that it is not, in fact, common for the Western press to caricature Muhammad, or even to run pointed cartoons about Islam. One has to wonder if the organizers of the gunmen, arsonists and death-threat-deliverers (and it takes a fair amount of organization to get hold of Danish flags in Gaza, or burn an embassy in the police-state of Syria) had to scour the ample outpourings of the Western press looking for something, anything, over which to take offense, and – faced with reams of material trying to understand their pain – had to fall back as a last resort on the cartoons of Denmark. To what extent is the Western press already afraid to risk offending those who even before the recent protests had racked up a record of death threats and murder?

If statehood, citizenship and civilization itself are to mean anything, we are all in the end accountable for our own actions. When people riot and brutalize and burn, there are individuals in the crowds who are responsible. And in the places where this is happening, if the governments will not call these individuals to account, we need to hold those governments themselves responsible. Cartoons alone, to quote another line from Hamlet, are in a class with nothing more than “words, words, words,” and those are grounds on which newspapers, nations and religions may have their disagreements and their dialogues. But when violence enters the picture, that is a matter for governments to settle, and in the free world the job of government and politicians is not to opine upon cartoons, but to lay down the law that no one may with impunity threaten our liberty and lives.

Why I still support the president

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

February 12, 2006

No sooner had I written recently that I was frustrated with President Bush's hardheadedness, muddled messages and refusal to learn from mistakes than I got a letter from a reader who asked whether – with the benefit of hindsight – I would change my support for Bush.

No, absolutely not. Not until Democrats stop sending forth as their presidential nominees mediocre professional politicians who are so craven for power and so unencumbered by core beliefs that they'll say and do anything to win.

And not as long as Bush keeps saying the right things on many of the issues, including immigration reform, the war on terror, the necessity of fighting the war in Iraq, school accountability, Social Security reform, appreciating cultural diversity and – to pick up on an issue that the president has mentioned frequently in recent days – a clear opposition to economic protectionism.

Coming from a business background, the nation's first MBA president is not bullish on the idea of Americans imposing protectionist measures such as trade barriers in a well-meaning but foolhardy attempt to level the playing field with regard to foreign competition.

On the economic battlefield, as on the military one, Bush obviously doesn't believe in retreat. It's a theme he hit on in the State of the Union address when he said: “Keeping America competitive requires us to open more markets for all that Americans make and grow. ... With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker.”

And it's something he mentioned again just a few days ago in a speech to a business and industry association in New Hampshire. He talked about how Americans were experiencing new competition from countries such as India and China, and then he said: “The temptation with uncertainty and competition is to say we can't compete; let us kind of wall ourselves off. ... I strongly reject the notion of becoming a protectionist nation. I don't think this country ought to fear the future. I don't think we ought to fear competition. I know we ought to shape the future with good policies out of Washington, D.C., and make sure that we're the pre-eminent economy in the world.”

You tell them, Mr. President. You're right. No one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker, assuming the worker doesn't sell himself short and give up before the competition is over.

Besides, there's no other alternative. International competition is intense and relentless, and it'll only get stronger in the years to come. The question isn't whether we're going to compete in the global marketplace. We are competing. And now we have to come out on top. If we can't build the cheapest products (because our labor costs here in the United States are significantly higher than those in developing countries such as China and India), then we have to strive always to build the best products – the ones that consumers can't live without, even if they have to pay more.

That means giving our people better training in math and science. Bush has proposed doubling, over the next 10 years, the amount of federal aid that goes to research in engineering and the physical sciences at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Energy Department's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. The tab: $50 billion.

That figure could be higher. And it probably should be, given the stakes involved. But it's a good start, and Bush deserves credit for even beginning this conversation. He's doing exactly what presidents should do: challenging their people to be better than they are.

We need that boost. Americans are so used to leading the way, to being the country that others seek out and emigrate to. It is sometimes difficult for Americans to even conceive of losing our international prominence and falling into second place – or third or fourth. Too many of us don't take seriously that there are other countries out there ruthlessly trying to cut our products and producers out of the market.

What Bush wants the country to understand is that we can't let that happen. We won't be scared off. We won't throw in the towel. We won't demand that government protect us from competitors. We will do what Americans always do. We will fight. And we will win.

If you support this idea, then you have to support this president.

Nuking the Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for “free market economists” who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefitting Americans. Where is the benefit when employment in US export industries and import-competitive industries is shrinking? After decades of struggle to regain credibility, free market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.

Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth.

US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is “the envy of the world.” Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.

The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized “new economy” never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.

In five years the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them over-qualified.

Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. The low measured rate of unemployment does not include discouraged workers. Labor arbitrage has made the unemployment rate less and less a meaningful indicator. In the past unemployment resulted mainly from turnover in the labor force and recession. Recoveries pulled people back into jobs.

Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off. Today the unemployment is permanent as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones.

Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

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Account frozen...

Here is some legit info from people who don't have an axe to grind. Like I said in an earlier post, I want the truth no matter what side is telling it.

Employment Situation Summary
Technical information:
Household data: (202) 691-6378 USDL 06-160
http://www.bls.gov/cps/

Establishment data: 691-6555 Transmission of material in this release
http://www.bls.gov/ces/ is embargoed until 8:30 A.M. (EST),
Media contact: 691-5902 Friday, February 3, 2006.


THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: JANUARY 2006

Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 193,000 in January, and the
unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of
the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Job gains occurred in several
industries, including construction, mining, food services and drinking places,
health care, and financial activities.

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

The number of unemployed persons fell to 7.0 million in January, and the
unemployment rate decreased to 4.7 percent, seasonally adjusted. The unemploy-
ment rate had ranged from 4.9 to 5.1 percent during most of 2005. The jobless
rate for adult men declined to 4.0 percent in January. For other major worker
groups--adult women (4.3 percent), teenagers (15.3 percent), whites (4.1 per-
cent), blacks (8.9 percent), and Hispanics (5.8 percent)--unemployment rates
were essentially unchanged. The rate for black teens, which had an unusually
large decline in December, rose to 31.4 percent in January. The unemployment
rate for Asians was 3.2 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1,
A-2, and A-3.)

In January, 16.3 percent of the unemployed had been without a job for 27
weeks or longer, down from 18.2 percent in the prior month. In January 2005,
the proportion was 21.0 percent. (See table A-9.)

Total Employment and the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

Total employment continued to trend upward in January. The labor force
participation rate and the employment-population ratio showed little or no
change over the month, at 66.0 and 62.9 percent, respectively. (See
table A-1.)


There is a lot more to read at this website If you are interested, I just didn't want to bore everybody by posting the whole thing.

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American imports pump up basketball's popularity in Iran

By Karl Vick
THE WASHINGTON POST

February 13, 2006

TEHRAN, Iran – Making himself as inconspicuous as a 7-foot-2 black man can be in Iran, Garth Joseph sidled up to the store counter. His air was at once playful and furtive. “Give me that good stuff,” he whispered.

The clerk, a bespectacled woman dressed in a black head scarf, reached under the counter and brought forth a slab of pork: It was black-market bacon, absolutely illegal in the Islamic Republic of Iran and priced like the contraband it was.

“Fifteen dollars for bacon!” Joseph squawked, reaching into his sweats for his wad of green Iranian currency. “It's so much money, but I love bacon. I eat about two pounds of bacon a day in America.”

But in America, Joseph warmed the bench during his only season in the National Basketball Association, hobbled by injuries and struggling for a place in a league moving away from the big man. And in Iran, he is huge in every way, the object of stares and delight not only for his gargantuan size, but also as the most conspicuous and highest-paid of the basketball players who left the United States to play the pivot along the “axis of evil,” a grouping in which President Bush included the country where they have found their fortunes.

About 20 Americans play hoops for a living in Iran. They nurture pro careers that might not exist in the States, navigate a culture that offers precious few diversions in public – though a lot more behind closed doors – and, as much as possible, avoid politics. Iran is at the center of international concern for its nuclear ambitions and has remained notorious to the United States since 1979, when student radicals took over the U.S. Embassy in a siege that lasted 444 days. But for offshore ballplayers working for a paycheck, Iran is just another stop on an international circuit that quietly counterbalances the NBA's burgeoning import of players from Croatia, Congo and China, to name just the C's.

“One of my friends – he's really like a cave man – he says, “Are they walking around with AKs?'” said Andre Pitts, a Texas native who plays point guard on the same team with Joseph, Saba Battery. “I said, “If you came here, you wouldn't ever want to go back, the way they treat you.'”

Black-market bacon is the least of it. American players are paid from $60,000 to $200,000 a year to elevate a sport that in Iran ranks in public popularity behind soccer, volleyball and wrestling, in that order. They are paid in dollars, which they must wire home through third countries because U.S. banks are prohibited by sanctions from doing business with Iran.

The Americans “cover up the weaknesses of the team and help basketball in the whole country,” said Mustafa Hashemi, coach of Petrochimi, sponsored by the Petroleum Ministry in the southern city of Mahram, a city so devoid of acceptable restaurants that the Americans eat in a company cafeteria.

“It's like being at a camp,” said Eddie Elisma, a New York native drafted in 1997 by the Seattle SuperSonics and now a Petrochimi team leader. “It's not as bad as you think.”

“The Middle East – based on what they read in The Post or see on CNN – will scare most travelers off,” said Jerald Wrightsil, who built a business representing U.S. players offshore after his own overseas career in the 1990s, when Eastern Europe was the new frontier. “But players chasing a paycheck, they're willing to take that chance.”

There have been perils. Stones sometimes rain down from the stands, said Pitts, adding that a fragment injured an eye of one teammate.

But players say the primary risk in Iran is being bored to death. The conservative Muslim clerics who prohibit the public sale of pork, proscribed by the Koran, do the same for alcohol. Women are required to cover their hair, and public mixing of the sexes is officially discouraged.

For the professional athlete, such strictness has its upside.

“It prolongs my career,” said Pitts, recalling the night spots of secular Syria, where women sometimes danced on the bar. “I'm getting good rest.”