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| Bush Admin Backing Down from WMD Claims |
| 01.26.04 (12:17 am) [edit] |
Here they come, little by little the Bush administration is beginning the epic back down of its contentious premise for preemptive war in Iraq.
"I don't think they exist," David Kay said Sunday. The outgoing top U.S. inspector, who now believes Saddam Hussein had no such arms has officially resigned his post, now questions the accuracy of American intelligence before the Bush-Iraq War.
But if Kay was Paul O'Neil, the president's former Treasury Secretary, he would already know the answer.
According to O'Neil, The President told members of his National Security Council "Go find me a way to do this," as early as January 2001.
Kay might also be privy to the secret Bush memo, 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq' which discussed the occupation of Iraq eight months before 9-11. The memo, obtained by Ron Suskind, for his new book [i]The Price of Loyalty[/i], envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
Unfortunately, David Kay was not present in those meetings. Neither was half the American public who unwittingly supported the unprecedented preemptive strategy on Iraq and the bloodshed that soon followed.
What is the American public to think now that high-level administration officials are opening the door for the possibility that Hussein no longer possessed those infamous WMDs?
Let us examine their words closely as they come to grips with the insanity of their misleadership.
In May 2003, Def. Secretary Don Rumsfeld conceded just seven weeks of fruitless search by David Kay et al, that, contrary to its pre-invasion scare mongering, there might not have been any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
Last Wednesday during an n NPR interview Vice President Dick Cheney says he believes "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had the chemical and biological weapons.
Sec. of State Colin Powell concedes, "What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?"
Let us never forget what we were told. The Proletariat has taken the liberty to detail the WMD claims that paved the path to the invasion of Iraq:
[u]30 January, 2002.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade ... This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." --State of the Union address
[u]8 November, 2002.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein." --On the UN Security Council backing resolution 1441
[u]5 February, 2003.[/u] [b]Colin Powell:[/b] "One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file ... is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents ... The trucks and train-cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection ... in a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War." --UN Security Council
[u]5 February, 2003.[/u] [b]Colin Powell:[/b] "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan."
[u]5 February, 2003.[/u] [b]Colin Powell:[/b] "Let me remind you ... of the 122mm chemical warheads the UN inspectors found. This discovery could well be ... the tip of a submerged iceberg. The question before us all is when will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg?"
[u]14 February, 2003.[/u] [b]Hans Blix:[/b] "Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections of more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming." --UN Security Council
[u]27 February, 2003.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world, and we will not allow it ... Acting against the danger will also contribute greatly to the long-term safety and stability of our world." --American Enterprise Institute
[u]18 March, 2003.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." --Televised address, giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war
[u]18 March, 2003.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other."
[u]20 March, 2003.[/u] [b]George Bush:[/b] "At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger."
--Televised address, announcing the start of the war
[u]22 April, 2003.[/u][b] Hans Blix:[/b] "The US was very eager to sway the votes in the Security Council, and they felt stories about these things would be useful to have, and they let it out. And thereby they tried to hurt us a bit and say we had suppressed this. It was not the case, and it was a bit unfair, and hurt us."
--Hans Blix, telling the BBC the US had seized on his alleged failure to include details of a drone and cluster bomb found in Iraq, in his presentation to the Security Council before the war
[u]24 April, 2003.[/u] [b]Jack Straw:[/b] "Given the fact that it will be American and British military who will be first on to any site, it will always be possible for those who opposed this military action to say, 'Oh well, they were planted'. Now, they won't be planted. We're going to immense care to ensure the veracity of the finds."
--BBC News Interactive's 'Talking Point'
[u]28 April, 2003.[/u] [b]Tony Blair:[/b] "There was a six-month campaign of concealment of those weapons ... Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a little bit." --Monthly news conference at 10 Downing Street
[u]14 May, 2003.[/u] [b]Jack Straw:[/b] "I hope there will be further evidence of literal finds ... It [Iraq's illegal arsenal] certainly did exist. There is no question about that ... It's not crucially important." --BBC 'Today'
[u]23 May, 2003.[/u] [b]Hans Blix: [/b]"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were not ... It may turn out that in this respect the war was not justified."
--Berlin newspaper, 'Der Tagesspiegel'
David Kay and the American intelligence community may have their questions, but the Proletariat believes the most challenging question at this moment is not whether the Bush administration distorted evidence to justify its decision to invade Iraq, but whether Congress and/ or the American public will hold the Bush administration accountable for it.
As Nazi leader Hermann Goering said during the Nuremberg trials in 1946, "Naturally the common people don't want war; ... But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along ... . All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
---Proletariat
E.D.Petty © 2003-2004
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| Home-Grown Workers Eager |
| 01.13.04 (9:12 am) [edit] |
[u]Reproduced from Atlanta Journal-Constitution[/u]
Did President Bush ever hear of Booker T. Washington's "Cast Your Bucket" speech?
If so, he has chosen to ignore that great man's advice, as shown by his request to Congress to offer a three-year renewable guest visa for illegal immigrants who have job offers.
In 1895, Washington, the renowned African-American leader, spoke to the Atlanta Exposition, a national gathering of the nation's leading business and political leaders. His subject was the racist practice of refusing to hire African-Americans in favor of importing foreign white workers to fill available jobs.
"To those of you who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth, cast down your bucket where you are," Washington pleaded to a packed audience, many of whom resented that he had been invited to speak to them.
Washington spoke of the lost ship captain who cried out to the master of a nearby ship, "water, water, we die of thirst," only to be told by the master that the vessel was in fresh water and that he should therefore "cast your bucket where you are."
But Washington's plea was ignored, and business leaders callously continued to refuse to hire Americans, particularly African-Americans, in favor of cheap imported labor.
Indeed, Washington's plea has often been ignored. In 1987, when teenage unemployment among African-Americans approached 80 percent, greedy garment employers petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service to import cheap foreign workers on grounds that there was an "unskilled labor shortage." This cruel policy continues to be followed on the specious claim that "Americans won't do the dirty jobs that foreign workers are willing to do."
In fact, any one of the millions of unemployed Americans will tell you that it is not the dirty jobs that they disdain, but the slave wages paid to do those jobs. Nothing is more dirty or dangerous than coal mining or garbage collection, but there is no shortage of people applying for such jobs when a decent wage is paid.
Cut off the flow of illegal immigration, and the wages paid for the dirty jobs would skyrocket.
During the 1970s, for example, office buildings in Los Angeles hired union workers as janitors, paying high wages and substantial benefits. Then greedy businessmen learned that by hiring independent contractors who would hire illegal immigrants, they could cut wages in half and withdraw all benefits. Thousands of Americans were thrown on the heap of the unemployed.
As documentation by author Gary Imhoff revealed, illegal immigration "widens the differences between classes in the U.S.; it keeps down the price of hiring a maid or a gardener for the rich while it makes things worse for the poor."
Some products would cost more if wages rise. But most people would be willing to pay a few extra cents for their toothbrush if it meant a decent living wage for unemployed Americans and refusing to exploit the misery of our desperate neighbors. Higher wages would enable more Americans to buy products from abroad and increase the employment opportunities of workers in those countries.
Message to Bush: Go back and read Booker T. Washington's eloquent plea for justice.
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Robert Hardaway is a law professor at the University of Denver.
Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opini on/0104/12equal.html" title="http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opini on/0104/12equal.html" target="_blank"http://www.ajc.com/opinion/co...
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Views expressed in this article are not neccessarily those of the Proletariat. They are published on this Blog purely to add to the national debate over undocumented workers and amnesty.
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