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Intelligence briefing

An Odd Accusation From Ralph Nader

After several decades as one of America’s great public-interest advocates, Ralph Nader has developed an extraordinary response when people say they don’t think he should run for president in 2004.

     During a Feb. 4 interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, Nader had this to say when asked about an editorial in The Nation urging him not to run this year: “It’s a marvelous demonstration by liberals, if you will, of censorship. Now mind you, running for political office is every American’s right. Running for political office means free speech exercise, it means exercising the right of petition, the right of assembly. And so when they say ‘Do not run,’ they’re not just challenging and rebutting; they’re crossing that line into censorship, which is completely unacceptable.”

     News anchor Melissa Block followed up: “Wouldn’t censorship, though, be if anyone were physically preventing you from running? They’re not saying that you can’t run; they’re asking you not to. They’re asking you to make that decision for what they consider to be the greater good of the country.”

Move on video dissemination

 The Serving Earth group is arranging for the MoveOn.org video entitled "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" to be shown at as many local libraries as possible. They need volunteers from central Ohio communities to contact their local library, post flyers provided by MoveOn in high traffic areas, and assist with a group discussion following each screening. If you'd like to help out with this project, please contact Becky at 488-7122 or at servingearth@aol.com.

Raising hell

AUSTIN, Texas -- Friends of liberty, raise hell! To the barricades, or at least to the post office and the emails. A British citizen named Katharine Gun faces two years in prison for revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency tried -- and succeeded -- in getting the Brits to help us with illegal spying operations at the United Nations. The targets were the delegations of the six countries on the U.N. Security Council that were undecided on how to vote on the critical Iraqi war resolution.

            Now, there are two schools of reaction to this tawdry, slimy little spy episode: It was illegal, immoral and wrong, and Katharine Gun should get a medal for exposing it. Or, some are shocked, shocked to hear of spying at the U.N., where it is apparently only slightly less common than dirt.

            Well, if it wasn't much of a secret to begin with, why is this woman going to prison for telling the truth? Give her a medal anyway.

Senator facing-both-ways

We await Michael Moore's concession speech after his hero, General Wesley Clark, tasted the ashes of defeat in Tennessee and Virginia and sensibly threw in the towel.

            If Howard Dean was the hero of the dot-coms, Clark was a creation of the Arkansas-Hollywood axis embodied in Clinton-era stage managers such as Harry and Linda Thomason, Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson. It was supposed to be "The Man from Hope: The Sequel," this time with a genuine military officer rather than Bill the Draft Dodger. The rollout movie for the Clark campaign was Linda Thomason's "Native Son," alluding to Clark's early years in Little Rock.

Call Congress: Censor Bush

Today is the public launch of our "Censure" campaign. We're taking out a full-page ad in the Washington Post. We're also holding a press conference in Washington, including two former top intelligence officers from the CIA and the State Department, as well as:

  a.. A mother from Oregon whose daughter, a member of a National Guard unit deployed to Iraq a year ago, was injured by a mortar round; and

  b.. A father from San Diego who lost his son, a US Marine, in combat in Iraq.

Thanks to you, we've already reached well beyond our goal of 300,000 people calling on Congress to censure President Bush for misleading us in his rush to war. In fact, more than 400,000 of us have now signed on.

Can you help us make today's launch even more impactful, by calling your Representative and Senators? You can reach them at:

   Senator Mike DeWine
   DC Phone: 202-224-2315
   Local Phone: 937-376-3080

   Senator George V. Voinovich
   DC Phone: 202-224-3353
   Local Phone: 614-469-6697

   Representative Patrick J. Tiberi
   DC Phone: 202-225-5355

Editorial: Janet Jackson and morality

People and industries that are still ranting and raving about Janet Jackson's breast need to shut up.

We live every single day with our young men and women in danger and dying in a war that is proving itself each and every day to be a thousand times more obscene than a breast being shown on national TV.

If anyone was watching the commercials for the Super Bowl they would have noticed that there is a very real aggression and negative view to women in general and hints of violence and aggression permeated these thirty-second spots.

I, of course blame George Bush and the whole conservative mind set that is going on in this country right now.  Any time we are at war citizens immediately become more, "moral" and conscious.  This is a mechanism used to keep us from looking at the corruption and lies that are going on right under our noses with our government and especially the news programs that give us the information. The bandwagon that has been transported into a witch-hunt over a one-second view of Janet Jackson's breast is more disturbing than anything I can remember.

Who's the real madman?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Just for the record, since the record is in considerable peril. These are Orwellian days, my friends, as the Bush administration attempts to either shove the history of the second Gulf War down the memory hole or to rewrite it entirely. Keeping a firm grip on actual historical fact, all of it easily within our imperfect memories, is not that easy amid the swirling storms of misinformation, misremembering and misstatement. But since the war itself stands as a monument to what happens when we let ourselves get stampeded by a chorus of disinformation, let's draw the line right now.

            According to the 500-man American team that spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, there aren't any and have not been any since 1991.

            Both President Bush and Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now claim Saddam Hussein provoked this war by refusing to allow United Nations weapons inspectors into his country. That is not true. Bush said Sunday: "I had no choice when I looked at the intelligence. ... The evidence we have discovered this far says we had no choice."

Sexing Up

LONDON -- In a way, it was heartbreaking to watch the Mother of Parliaments deal with half of a particularly nasty problem in an impressive way. It was sad and depressing for an American because the United States seems so unable even to begin to address the first half of the same problem -- how and why were we so badly misled about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. Did our leaders lie to us, knowingly distort or exaggerate? Or was their own intelligence that bad, and if so, why? And why isn't something being done about it.

            In Britain, the debate was over the accuracy of a British Broadcasting Co. -- the state-owned radio and television network -- report that the government had "sexed up" a prewar dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The BBC's claim was traced to a respected weapons inspector and expert Dr. David Kelly, who was outed by the government itself and who later committed suicide. With that, the uproar became so great -- and you haven't seen uproar until you've seen the British tabloid press in full cry -- that an independent commission was named to investigate the whole mess, and Blair's political life was on the line.

McNamara: The Sequel

Apparently to Robert McNamara's mortification, Errol Morris, whose film "The Fog of War" I discussed recently, passes over his subject's 13-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara brandishes his Bank years as his moral redemption, and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual ghastly record. In fact, the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's excellent history of the Bank, "Mortgaging the Earth," published in 1994.

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