Global

CPT team members Peggy Gish, Maureen Jack and Anne Montgomery travelled an   hour north of Baghdad on the road to Tikrit to visit the uncle of a friend of the team who had recently been imprisoned.  

At 6.00 am one morning he, his wife and five young children were awakened from sleep by a megaphone. Their house was surrounded by a number of army   vehicles and two helicopters.  The soldiers said that they were looking   for a senior member of Saddam's regime, who they had been told was hiding   there.  The children saw them as they pointed their weapons; they were   frightened and crying.  The soldiers found and removed a significant sum   of money.  They handcuffed the owner of the house and two memb! ers of his   extended family.  They said that they would hold them for an hour and then   release them; about a kilometer along the road they freed the other two,   but they took the owner of the house to prison and held him there for   twelve days.

I just wanted you to know Mr Wasserman, that I ENJOYED your article immensly. It was tough and powerful. Thanks for telling the truth about this EVIL Bush empire. Please write more articles of this nature!!

The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton's path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party's presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to "middle class" Americans -- while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

 AUSTIN, Texas -- You've got to hand it to those clever little problem-solvers at the White House. What a bunch of brainiacs. They have resolved the entire problem of global warming: They cut it out of the report!

            This is genius. Everybody else is maundering on about the oceans rising and the polar icecaps melting and monster storms and hideous droughts, and these guys just ... edit it out.

            "The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, and could threaten health and ecosystems," reports The New York Times. Presto -- poof!

            They're saving the world from hunger again. This time, the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, Calif., to proclaim the glories of chemical-industrial agriculture, biotech, genetically modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age. The forum has been a federally sponsored Ministerial Conference and Expo of Agricultural Science and Technology. Under the approving eyes of bigwigs from firms like Monsanto, U.S. officials like Agriculture Secretary Helen Veneman pounded the drum for high-tech agriculture.

            Said Veneman last Monday, "This conference is for those most in need. It (hunger) has to become a global agenda ... new approaches are needed."

On June 19th, we had our first big victory in the fight to overturn the FCC's decision to weaken media ownership rules when the Senate Commerce Committee approved a bi-partisan proposal that we support, S. 1046, that would reinstate the previous limit on how many TV stations a media giant can own. The committee also approved, with minor changes, an amendment reinstating the ban on cross-ownership between the dominant newspaper and television station in most markets.

This happened in part because of the public outcry over the FCC's decision and the large number of people contacting the FCC and their U.S. Senators.

I will keep you informed of where this legislation stands in the Senate, but for now the focus shifts to the U.S. House.

The powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-LA), still supports the FCC decision. After the Senate committee vote, Bloomberg News reported that Rep. Tauzin had vowed to "kill" the Senate bill if it were sent over to the House. Despite over 146 sponsors for the House version of the Senate bill, HR 2052, Rep. Tauzin has blocked its consideration in his committee.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was so eager to see the United States launch a preemptive strike against Iraq in early 2002, that he ordered the CIA to investigate the past work of Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, who in February 2002, was asked to lead a team of U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, in an attempt to undermine the scientist.  

The unusual move by Wolfowitz underscores the steps the Bush administration was willing to take a year before the U.S. invaded Iraq to manipulate and or exaggerate intelligence information to support it's claims that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States and that the only solution to quell the problem was the use of military force.  

            Here I am, enjoying post-solstice sunrise at 5.48 a.m., and, on California's North Coast, sunset at 8.35 p.m. (probably classified info if you ask Tom Ridge). I'm in the early summer of 2003, and already people are acting as though the first Democratic primary was only a month or two away. Already we're wading deeper into the issues that will pulse with increasing intensity across the next 17 months.

            Is the task of booting George Bush out of the White House paramount? Out with the imperial Crusader, the death-penalty-loving, Bill-of-Rights-trashing, drug-war-advocating corporate serf! By all means. But whoa! Who's this we see, galloping out of the mists of rosy-fingered dawn, a knight errant sent by the gods to give the kiss of life to all our fainting hopes? It's . why, it's. yes, it's another imperial Crusader, a death-penalty-loving, Bill-of-Rights-trashing, drug-war-advocating corporate serf. Only he's a Democrat, not a Republican. That changes everything. Or does it?