- 25 Iraqi Soldiers Die in Blast At Army Base
- Rumsfeld: Iraq No Safer Now Than It Was In 2003
- To Prevent Civil War in Iraq, Amnesty Considered For Fighters
- Exxon Mobil Hires Ex-White House Official
- Thousands Call For Early Elections In Bolivia
- Pakistani Bars Rape Victim From Leaving Country
- GOP Considers Raising Retirement Age to 69
- Rep. Sanders Attempts to Overturn Part of Patriot Act
- State Democrats in Wisconsin Call For Impeachment of Bush
We speak with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) who is convening a public hearing tomorrow in Washington on the so-called Downing Street Memo and other newly released documents that he says show the Bush administration's "efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence." We also speak with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. [includes rush transcript - partial]
Half a century after Emmett Till's mutilated body was found in a Mississippi river, investigators have unearthed his casket and reopened the case. We play excerpts of a new documentary, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" that uncovers new evidence in the case and we speak with the filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp.
Yes, that is what informed critics mean when they say Bush fixed the intel. Sadly, though, the people who run our Dem/liberal firmament are rarely this well-informed. Over and over, leading liberals go on TV and offer the silly "but Bush said there were WMD" argument. This is an automatic loser, as Howard Dean showed on Meet the Press last month in this laughable, hopeless exchange:
DEAN (5/22/05): Some of the things that the president said on our way into Iraq, they just weren't true, and I don't think that's right. So--Hopeless! Dean himself had said there were WMD ("probably"), and he looked silly when Russert called him on it. Indeed, many major Dems, including Bill Clinton and Al Gore, had said there were WMD; most leading figures did seem to believe this. But neither Dean, nor anyone else, made those fake, phony claims about Saddam's nukes--the claims which drive the debate from August 02 through the fall (much more on these claims next week). Sadly, though, today's Dems and liberals are simply too stupid to organize even the simplest points. They've been slaughtered this way on TV for years--and that's why the Post can offer this cheap escape now. You might want to recall this ineptitude when you get more brilliant messaging from your inspired liberal leaders.RUSSERT: Such as?
DEAN: Such as the weapons of mass destruction, which we have all known about, but the--
RUSSERT: Well, you said there were weapons of mass destruction!
DEAN: I said I wasn't sure, but I said I thought there probably were.
Close to two years later, there are new attempts to cover Kazemi’s lens, to prevent her photographs from reaching public eyes – only now the censorship is happening inside her adopted country of Canada. Last week Montreal’s Cote St. Luc Library removed five of Kazemi’s photographs from display after Jewish patrons complained of alleged “pro-Palestinian bias”; they left up the rest of the exhibition, which had already been displayed in Paris and London. Kazemi’s son, Stephan Hachemi, called the removal of the Palestinian photographs “a violation of my mother’s spirit” and rightly demanded that the library show the entire exhibit or nothing at all. So the library took down the entire show.
This made-in-Canada censorship comes as the Iranian government continues to stonewall any attempts to bring Kazemi’s murderers to justice. After refusing to return her body to her son, Iran has acquitted three intelligence officials accused in her death, and most recently, mocked Canada’s calls for an international inquiry. For its part, the Canadian government has been accused by Kazemi’s family of “begging, not insisting” that the Iranian government be held to account for her death.
TIMES DOWN ON DOWNING
The New York Times yesterday devoted coverage to the issue first reported on May 1 in Britain. Todd S. Purdum wrote a piece downplaying their significance with lines like, "But the documents are not quite so shocking," etc., etc. One sentence in this put-down of those concerned with the issue struck me as so typical and bizarre.
He refers to anyone who suspected that WMD's would not be found in Iraq -- "the near unanimous conventional wisdom in Washington" -- as "lonely voices," as in, "though some lonely voices did predict it."
Yo, Todd, what about the 30 million anti-war activists who rejected the "near unanimous conventional wisdom" --the "wisdom" that Senate investigators branded as "group think"? Were they all "lonely voices" a la Eleanor Rigby? This story was headlined as a "Peephole to the War Room"and played at the bottom of page A-10.
And this from the newspaper of record, the paper that has already admitted its pre-war coverage was flawed. What about today?
The hearings had been planned for the Democratic National Committee offices because the Republicans controlling the House Judiciary Committee had refused to permit the ranking Democratic Member to use a large room on the Hill.
However, the Democrats did have access to a small room in the Capitol, and Congressman Conyers has decided to move the hearings there. This does not indicate any change in position from the Republicans."
Bush has only himself to blame. His assault on Social Security, his opposition to stem cell research, his padding of the wallets of his corporate cronies all have shown him to be out of step with the American people.
But it's the Iraq War that is taking a daily toll on his popularity. Vice President Cheney can prattle on about how the insurgency is in its "last throes," but the American people can see with their own eyes that this is not the case.
Every day, there's a brutal suicide bombing or two.
Every day, a U.S. soldier or two or three is being killed over there.
And the Iraqi government shows no signs of being able to put the country back together.
Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have no answer, either.
Today, the five unions now comprising the Change To Win Coalition (CTWC)--along with SEIU, the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, Laborers, and UNITE HERE--meet to form what amounts to a rival federation, whether they all formally leave the AFL-CIO or not. These unions' collective 5 million membership represents 40 percent of the AFL-CIO's 13 million total. If the mammoth 2.7 million member National Education Association aligns with the effort, CTWC will hold exactly half of all union members in the United States.
The avowed basis of the break is a fundamental disagreement on strategy, often depicted as a choice by the insurgents of organizing over politics. This is misleading. Many of the unions remaining in the federation are every bit as committed as the CTWC group to organizing new union members. And some CWTC unions, particularly SEIU, are keenly aware of the importance of politics in increasing union membership. The fight is really about consolidation and political focus. SEIU has argued that the current practice of having several unions competing in single industrial sectors--"15 separate organizations in transportation, 15 in construction, 13 in public employment, 9 in manufacturing, and so on"--defeats the scaled effort needed to take on business in today's climate. It wants to compel fewer, bigger, more clearly sectorally-based unions, as in northern Europe. And it has argued that labor must find ways to mobilize support outside itself, chiefly through more engagement in state and local politics.
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