Cosmos Left

The Night Before Christmas

Don Bush doesn't have to worry about the war crimes he has committed in Afghanistan and Iraq, because as the chief Don of the interational capitalist syndicate, he has already announced his gang is immune from any war crimes prosecution and any international tribunal that indicts the US will simply not be recognized.

As Don you get to do that. Don Bush also gets to view and edit videotapes and transcripts of the testimony given this week at the Milosevic trial by General Wesley Clark, who, as former NATO commander, know a few things about war crimes and bombing civilians himself.

In a just, sane world, and time is running out to achieve it, the lead defendants in any international war crimes tribunal would be George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon and Tony Blair. Their governments planned and carried out illegal acts of state terrorism that have murdered tens of thousands of Afghanis, Iraqis, and Palestinians. Israel is the outlaw regime possessing weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East that illegally occupies land stolen from the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants and slaughters innocent Palestinians every day.

Bush's forces killed tens of thousands of innocent Afghanis without providing a shred of evidence that Kabul had anything to do with Sept. 11, let alone the tens of thousands of its citizens. Bush's forces executed hundreds if not thousands of Afghan prisoners of war, leaving them to die in sealed containers.

The US and Israel planned the overthrow of Saddam Hussein long before September 11. As far back as 1996, the emerging neoconservative cabal around Bush consisting of pro-Likud Zionists like Cheney, Libby, Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle, openly called for the US to invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein as part of an overall campaign to bolster US and Israeli domination of the Middle East.

Only hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Rumsfeld was ordering the Pentagon to take advantage of the tragedy and make plans to invade Iraq.

Bush and his deluded supporters should not get too puffed up over the capture of Hussein in a Tikrit "spider hole." Six hundred soldiers to capture one man--truly impressive, and indicative of the cowardly, one sided slaughter inflicted on a disarmed and defenseless people by the most powerful military machine in history.

And before allowing themselves to get sucked into the repulsive voyeuristic jingoism being whipped up around the humiliation of Hussein, Americans should remember that Bush told them they were going to war because Hussein had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and was about to use them in a terrorist attack against the US on a scale that would dwarf September 11. Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rice all stated as fact that Saddam had 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, a million pounds of sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve gas.

And they lied. All of them. Not a liter was ever found because none exist. Whatever Reagan and Bush Sr. supplied to Iraq to kill Iranians were destroyed in the first gulf war or by UN inspectors.

And they knew they lied. Powell and Rice both admitted long before Bush invaded that Hussein had been disarmed and was no longer a threat to the region.

As Bush's stooges in the capitalist media try to extract the maximum political capital from Hussein's capture with a relentless campaign of jingoistic propaganda, the US president will no doubt enjoy a short-term boost, just as he did from the plastic turkey during the Thanksgiving publicity stunt.

The capture of Saddam solves nothing for Bush.

Hussein was found in a hole with a pistol and $750 thousand dollars. He had no phone or any other means of communication. It does not appear he was directing the sophisticated guerrilla resistance that's been striking American soldiers 30-odd times a day. US military officials are already saying the insurgency will continue, and already a Baghdad suicide bombing has killed 17 Iraqi policemen, among others.

Bush is trying to capitalize on the deep-seated hatred many Iraqis feel toward the dictator the US saddled them with, a reality we saw reflected in the streets of Baghdad and other cities, where some citizens celebrated the capture of Saddam.While Iraqis are Quisling collaborators, and others have genuine illusions in Washington, most Iraqis don't want Hussein OR the US in their country. They want their sovereignty and national dignity back. They want to be free of foreign armies bombing their women and children and defiling their culture and setting up roadblocks and telling them where they can be and can't be.

Consider the following testimony from Iraqis as reported in the Dec. 14 NY Times:

"It was very hard in Saddam's time," said 30-year-old Jabaar Husan while waiting in line for cooking gas. "But life becomes harder to me and my children now, so I can't consider it better. The Americans did nothing for us. They just brought killing, theft, robberies, all those things."

"Saddam sucked our blood," said Ban Tariq, a mother of four just before the electricity failed in her Ghazalia house. "We expected after he was toppled that we would have our fortunes again, but we really got nothing. Each day we have a new crisis."

A guard at a Samarra [see "The Battle of Samarra," below] soccer field that had been fired upon by US helicopters told a Newsday reporter: "No matter how much food they hand out or how many schools they say they're going to build, we're never going to accept the Americans here....They are occupiers and we will drive them out."

Another Samarra resident said: "Yesterday we were just sitting around, but today we will be in the ranks of the fighters for liberation, because we won't stand for the crimes of the American bull."

"We are not fighting for Saddam," an Iraqi named Kashid Ahmad Saleh told the NY Times last week. "We are fighting for freedom and because the Americans are Jews. The Governing Council is a bunch of looters and criminals and mercenaries. We cannot expect that stability in this country will ever come from them. The principle is based on religion and tribal loyalties. The religious principle is that we cannot accept to live with infidels. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him, said, 'Hit the infidels wherever you find them.' We are also a tribal people. We cannot allow strangers to rule over us."

Bush will never win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. His policies of war, repression and economic plunder will only deepen the resistance to the US occupation. Iraqis will correctly perceive Bush's humiliation of Hussein as an attempt to humiliate all Iraqis as well as Arabs and Muslims the world over.

Already, just one day after the announcement of Hussein's capture, US soldiers had to use batons to break up a demonstration in Tikrit protesting Saddam's capture.

"We sacrifice our blood and souls for you Saddam," scores of Iraqis chanted.

"God is Greatest, America is the enemy of all peoples," the crowd chanted, fists raised, echoing a slogan of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas during the '80s ("the US government is the enemy of all humanity").

It is being reported that US soldiers then charged the demonstration, beating and arresting some of the protesters. Perhaps these troops were inspired by the video of the Cincinnati cops beating Nathaniel Jones to death.

Iraqis are well aware of what is taking place in their country.

"It's great that he's caught, but it wasn't him who screwed up the petrol and the electricity and everything else so badly, so now a canister of gas that was 250 dinars costs 4,000, if you can get one," said Ghazi, a 52-year-old dentist, while on line for gas in his car. (Reuters, Dec. 15, 2003) "This is an oil country and it should be rich. It should not be Afghanistan."

Mohammad Saleh, a 39-year-old building contractor, added, "The Americans promised freedom and prosperity; what's this? Go up to their headquarters, at one of those checkpoints where they point their guns at you, and tell them that you hate them as much as Saddam, and see what they do to you."

About the same thing an American cop will do to you these days if you look at them cross-eyed, brother Mohammad.

"The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans kill you in public."

Even with a videotape filming them killing you. Ask Nathaniel Jones's family.

Bush is in for a rude surprise. The Iraqi working class will never surrender to US colonialism. Iraqi workers and peasants will say no to Hussein's Baathists, Islamic fundamentalism, and US imperialism, and they will forge a revolutionary working class leadership that will kick the US and British occupiers out of their country once and for all.

December 2003--Recent declassified government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive reveal that Ronald Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in March 1984 to deliver a message concerning weapons of mass destruction to Hussein's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz: Don't let our public criticism of Iraq using chemical weapons get in the way of Washington's aim "to improve bilateral relations."

A year ago Rumsfeld told CNN that he had "cautioned" Hussein over his using chemical weapons against Iran. However, that doesn't square with the declassified State Department documents that show no evidence of a caution. Rumsfeld did manage to tell Hussein that the US would view "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."

Graves of 9 Afghan kids murdered by US forces

"The Americans are all the time making these mistakes," said the father of two murdered young boys. "What kind of Al Qaeda are they? Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?"

No, they weren't terrorists. But they were fair game for Bush and the capitalist killers he represents. Fair game in an imperialist war of plunder and colonial conquest. "Sorry for our little mistake, kids," the Pentagon whines perfunctorily, but you got in the way of our securing Afghanistan. We have a job to do.

The youngsters were playing ball in a dusty field in Hutala village when a US A-10 Thunderbolt jet, affectionately known as a warthog, hit them with sidewinder missiles and twin 30--mm gatling guns.

The Associated Press reported that villagers were extremely angry. One cried, "First they fire the rockets. Then they say it was a mistake. How can we forgive them?"

How indeed.

The US military were after a Taliban figure named Mullah Wazir. Hutala villagers say he had left days before the raid.

Another villager told the AP: "There are no terrorists, no Taliban or Al Qaeda here, just poor people."

Afghanistan, that OTHER war that never ended, is another human rights catastrophe made in the USA. Armed resistance to the US occupation of Afghanistan has been on the rise, as have American casualties, which was one reason why Washington has escalated its offensive against Afghan resistance fighters in recent weeks.

As in Iraq, the US invaded and occupies Afghanistan to install a puppet regime to faciliate Washington's control and plunder of the country's natural resources. But the US is no more winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq. Washington has killed tens of thousands of Afghanis since invading in October 2001, many of them victims of "mistakes" by US forces, which have a particular penchant for bombing wedding parties.

Warlords control most of Afghanistan, an impoverished nation further devastated by widespread US bombing, where the opium smuggling business is once again flourishing, which is no accident since a Bush is in power.

December 10, 2003 update--For the second time in a week, US troops killed six children in military operations against theTaliban in the Pashtun-dominated southeast of Afghanistan. The six children and two adults died when a fall collapsed on them last Friday night during an attack by US warplanes and Special Forces in the eastern province of Paktia.

Stephen Graham of the Associated Press reports that
Afghan anger against the US military is growing after the deaths of 15 children this week.

"The people are growing very hostile now, because America should know how to avoid these things," said Tareq, a 30-year-old government employee in Kabul. "They are bombing ch ildren every day. It is not Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden who is killing them."

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, Bush continues to show Iraqis how committed he is to their liberation from tyranny by wrapping entire villages in barbed wire, erecting barriers and checkpoints, illegally detaining citizens in their own country, and razing homes.

"I see no difference between us and the Palestinians," one Iraqi man fumed.

A keen observation. Israeli soldiers have been using these tactics to terrorize Palestinians on their own land. Thus it's no surprise that US officials have closely studied Israeli tactics in urban fighting and brutally policing an occupied population.

Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, revealed more than he intended when he said: "You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force--force, pride and saving force."

Brown shows he has absorbed the racist mindset of the exploiting class he kills and dies for.

After a Nov. 17 guerrilla attack in the town of Abu Hishma, Americans began encircling the town in razor wire, while a US jet dropped a 500 pound bomb on the house used to attack the US forces. Now, men have identification cards they need to get through checkpoints.

The Orwellian, Alice-in-Wonderland, nightmarish reality Bush is inflicting on Iraq could be seen on a sign posted in front of the barbed wire fence that read: "This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot."

Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman chimed in: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."

War criminals like Sassaman are deluded fools who will only ensure that more US soldiers die in Iraq.

We are learning more about the teacher/pupil dynamic going on between Israeli and US forces and how that's translating into Iraqi corpses. Bill Vann of the WSWS reported on December 10 that Washington is about to unleash a campaign of mass killings and assassinations in Iraq. And who better to teach the finer points of a brutal counterinsurgency operation than urban warfare specialists from the Israeli Defense Forces, whom the Pentagon brought to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, headquarters for US Special Forces.

This dovetails with a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh that foretold a "major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq" and the integral role Israeli forces will play in it.

"According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers--again, in secret--when full-field operations begin."

Vann's article provided further confirmation of Israel's role in assisting Washington's counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. Brig. Gen. Michael Vane, a senior Pentagon officer, confirmed that US officers had gone to Israel to learn about urban combat and intelligence methods from the Israeli Defense Forces. He wrote: "We recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas."

It shows, as the ever-widening razor wire surrounding Iraqi villages looks more and more like the Nazis in Warsaw and the Israelis in the West Bank.

The brutality of US imperialism that is erupting the world over is also oozing from the pores of the imperialist metropolis itself. On Sunday, Nov. 30, Cincinnati police savagely beat an unarmed Black man to death with metal batons. The murder of 41-year-old Nathaniel Jones was captured by a videotape, like so many other instances of police barbarism have been since the Rodney King beating rocked the world.

Jones was a 350-pound man with a history of heart problems and the sleep disorder, narcolepsy. What is known is that a White Castle employee initially called 911 to report a man passing out in the parking lot. Paramedics called police for assistance after assessing he was a nuisance after waking up.

The videotape, taken from a camera mounted atop the police car, shows Jones trying to defend himself from the cops' attack. But a minute and a half of the tape is missing--the part showing how the police provoked Jones to take a swing at them.

Immediately the cops and their rightist defenders like Bill O'Reilly tried to turn the victim into the criminal and blame Jones for his own death. He was a violent drug abuser, they wailed in police state unison. He had traces of cocaine and PCP in his blood. He swung at the police. He had it coming.

The killer cops' apologists sound like Lieut. Col Brian Hilferty in Afghanistan, who blamed the children and other civilians for their own deaths: "We try very hard not to kill anyone. We would prefer to capture the terrorists rather than kill them. But ... if non-combatants surround themselves with thousands of weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and howitzers and mortars in a compound known to be used by a terrorist, we are not completely responsible for the consequences."

NOTHING Jones did remotely justified the orgy of violence inflicted on him by those depraved cops. Nothing he did justified six cops beating him 40 to 50 times with metal batons, many to the head. Nothing Jones did justified being left to die in the parking lot.

Jones was the eighteenth Black man murdered by Cincinnati cops since 1995. In 2001, after Timothy Thomas was slain by killer cops, a rebellion erupted in several Black neighborhoods, prompting a state of siege, all night curfew, tear gas, and rubber bullets from the cops.

We have watched in rage as cops commit these gruesome acts over and over again with impunity. The six cops who murdered Nathaniel Jones are on a paid administrative leave. They should be tried and convicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Rampant cop brutality is deeper than "a few bad apples." The police are the most local arm of an increasingly brutal capitalist state apparatus. The videotaped sadistic fury that bludgeoned Nathaniel Jones to death in Cincinnati is the domestic equivalent of US marines shooting a wounded Iraqi on the ground to death and laughing about how good it felt, an atrocity that was filmed and is currently circulating the Internet (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5365.htm).

While the police and the armed forces both serve the US capitalist class and its profit system--the former repress and terrorize US workers, the latter slaughter the international working class--these repressive class institutions differ in class composition and social base, so communists view them differently. The armed forces are primarily young workers in uniform, and winning them over to the working class movement is a prerequisite for any successful revolution. Cops are a hardened caste that is antilabor to the core. Despite their "police benevolent association" union trappings, cops are not a part of the labor movement. They are enemies of the working class. Whenever unionists exercise their rights in the class struggle they're met with the armed brute force of the bosses' state apparatus--cops. This is when class conscious workers learn the truth about capitalist democracy and which class the cops are a part of.

There will come a time when workers will organize defense guards against cops, state police, private goons, and everything else the capitalists throw at labor to crush us. Before that happens, groups will form in those communities most victimized by police terror--oppressed national minorities--to defend themselves from the thugs in uniform who now have a license to kill.

Individual cops will defect as revolution approaches, but as a whole they are an alien, hostile class institution. After viewing that tape of those animals beating Nathaniel Jones to death, and remembering how New York's "finest" shoved a plunger up the rectum of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, every worker, every decent human being, should be repulsed by cops and see them as the class enemies they are.

Just as those workers who stand up to the bosses learn the truth about bourgeois democracy and whose side the cops and state are on in the class struggle, all workers just received a harsh lesson in just how undemocratic this "democratic" system is with the signing of the Medicare prescription drug bill, one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people, and there have been many, and the list is growing.

Most American seniors as well as the general public wanted a prescription drug plan that is under the existing Medicare program, where the federal government could negotiate with the pharmas in order to get lower drug prices. But what did we get from this representative democracy?

The Medicare "reform" bill is the first step toward privatizing and abolishing Medicare. It was written behind closed doors and behind the backs of the American people by lobbyists for the drug companies and the capitalist politicians in both parties whom they buy, sell, and rent. The bill is a bonanza for private insurance companies, health plans and drug companies. The bill expressly forbids the government from negotiating drug prices, making the US the only advanced industrialized nation unable to negotiate on behalf of its citizens, which is why drug prices are so much lower in other countries.

The new Medicare law gives private insurance firms and health care plans complete control over prescription drugs, which is why so much money will be gouged from the savings of working class seniors. The plan doesn't start until 2006, when those eligible will enroll in private insurance that will cov er 75 percent of drug costs up to $2,250, while paying a $250 yearly deductible and a $35 monthly premium. Then comes the notorious "donut" feature of the bill: recipients receive ZERO benefit until they pay another $2850, and out of pocket costs hit $3600. Only after all that gouging does Medicare cover 95 percent of costs.

Studies show that Bush's big victory will cover less than one fourth of the total drug costs for the elderly. Many will save nothing from the plan because they won't be able to afford the deductibles and premiums.

If that weren't enough, seniors received a few more surprises from Bush and his Democratic accomplices when the bill was passed: 1) seniors are expressly forbidden from purchasing Medigap insurance policies that help millions of seniors pay out of pocket costs; and 2) retirees face onerous financial penalties for failing to immediately enroll in the "voluntary" drug plan.

Most Americans had no idea what was in the new law--let alone have any meaningful input into its passage. The bill's signing was fraught with bribery and influence peddling. American workers were excluded from any debate. Indeed, there was no serious public debate of this crucial issue affecting the lives of 200 million people. The Medicare law was written by and for the insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries, behind the back of the US working people. This Medicare debacle is the latest confirmation that Cuban working people have far more influence and meaningful input into the national legislative process than US workers do.

The dominance of the pharmaceutical, insurance and health care corporations proves that the profit motive has no place in a basic societal function such as health care. Universal health care should be a fundamental social right guaranteed to every human being. Insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and health care conglomerates should be nationalized, transformed into public utilities and placed under the democratic control of the working class.

Which brings us to the latest unconscionable scandal brought to society by the primacy of private profit: the critical shortage of flu vaccines in the most advanced technological nation in the world.

Right back at ya, Bush!

December 3-5, 2003--It may not go down in history as another Tet offensive, but the November 30 battle in Samarra, Iraq, between US troops and Iraqi guerrillas will haunt the US warmakers for a long time. Just when the Pentagon was crowing over the "great two weeks" for the coalition that supposedly saw fewer attacks on US forces, Iraqi insurgents struck US soldiers from rooftops and alleyways in highly coordinated attacks on two separate US convoys.

US military spokespeople initially reported that American troops delivered a massive counterattack that killed 46 Iraqis. Later that number was revised upward to 54. The compliant US media reported this overwhelming victory as a fact.

However, as with Jessica Lynch and so many other stories from this war, the Pentagon's version is turning out to be a lie--another crude attempt at propaganda to camouflage the catastrophe US imperialism is inflicting on Iraq.

The bodies of 54 slain Iraqi insurgents were never found. It seems the only evidence for that number came from interviews with US soldiers. THEY claimed they'd killed 54 Iraqis. That's like saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because Iraqi defectors say there are.

As in the Jessica Lynch case, the Pentagon tried to turn Samarra into a propaganda victory, and its kept press dutifully went along, reporting as fact a big military victory for US forces in killing 54 Iraqi guerrillas. Except, like everything else that comes out of their foul mouths, they lied.

According to an eyewitness report reported on informationclearinghouse.info, Iraqi insurgents surprise attack inflicted casualties on US soldiers with rocket propelled grenades, small arms fire, and mortar shells. The Americans fired back indiscriminately with automatic weapons, tank cannon and rockets from helicopter gunships. When the guerrillas withdrew, US troops kept shelling residential neighborhoods in the city for hours.

When the smoke cleared, the Associate Press reported that Samarra citizens were saying 8 or 9 civilians were dead. Al-Jazeera also reported 8 civilians had been killed by US fire. The anaesthetist with Samarra hospital's accident and emergency department stated "we received the bodies of eight civilians, including a woman and a child." Hospital director Abd Tawfiq told Al-Jazeera, "more than 60 people wounded by gunfire and shrapnel from US rounds are being treated at the hospital."

One Samarra eyewitness testified that "hysteria" gripped the US troops after guerrillas attacked the two American convoys at opposite sides of the city.

"I watched part of the first attack from our neighbors' house, but then I left after half an hour after the helicopters buzzed over our heads rocketing houses hysterically. They killed a number of children, women, and elderly peole as well as civilian men, after they were unable to wipe out the Iraq Resistance unit which managed to withdraw after an intense battle that left a few of them wounded."

Another Iraqi confirmed that the Iraqi fighters slipped away after the fighting got intense, but the American forces continued shelling houses with people in them, even houses with white flags on them.

"Why do they arrest people when they're in their homes," asked a college student. "They come at night to arrest people. So what do they expect those people to do?"

Other eyewitnesses said that US tanks shelled hospitals and people dropping off the injured at those hospitals. Agence France Presse reported that a bus was totally burned just outside a hospital entrance. Among the dead were two Iranians who were on their way to visit a Shiite shrine.

A kindergarten was evacuated before it was shelled, according to Ibrahim Jasem, a guard at the school.

"Why did they attack randomly? Why did they shoot a kindergarten with tank shells?"

The AP reported that many of the guerrilla fighters who had attacked the US troops were Hussein Fedayeen loyalists, and when the Americans fired at civilian homes and mosques indiscriminately, "many civilians got their guns and joined the fight." After suffering humiliating raids by US soldiers for weeks, these Iraqis were seething and eager to give it back to the Americans. An eyewitness told Newsday that "these were normal people who were not involved in the resistance. But they saw how the Americans were firing their machine guns and tanks in every direction, and they wanted to fight back."

And this is the problem facing Bush. The more he unleashes the murderous might of the US military against Iraqis, the more angry and alienated Iraqis will become, and the more Bush will drive them to join the ranks of the resistance.

"All the people in town today are asking for revenge," said an emergency-room worker at the Samarra General Hospital, according to a San Francisco Chronicle account. "They want to kill Americans like they killed our civilians. Give me a gun, and I will also fight."

The New York Times quoted a 47-year-old shopkeeper who witness two Iraqi civilians die from US gunfire: "If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself . . . The Americans were shooting in every direction."

Eyewitnesses report that mosques, schools, hospitals and pharmaceutical factories were also hit by US shells. One 12-year-old boy was killed when a shell struck his school.

The AFP reported that walls in the area where guerrillas attacked the US forces were now plastered with slogans supporting Saddam H ussein.

IslamMemo interviewed several Samarra citizens who vowed they will no longer sit on the sidelines in the war against the occupiers. One man said: "Yesterday we were just sitting around, but from today we will be in the ranks of the fighters for liberation, because we won't stand for the crimes of the American bull."

November 30-December 2, 2003--George W. Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to US occupying forces at Baghdad Airport was a crudely staged publicity stunt cut from the same cloth as his May 1 "Mission Accomplished" show on the USS Lincoln. And since it was cooked up by Karl Rove and Andrew Card--the same political and marketing "geniuses" responsible for that debacle, the top secret Turkey Has Landed stunt is destined to suffer the same ignomonious fate. Even the turkey Bush served up to the troops in the propaganda photo op was a fake plastic model. The soldiers were fed from cafeteria steam trays.

The publicity stunt that used US soldiers as background props for Bush's photo-op was the result of weakness, not strength, and only served to illuminate the depth of the crisis facing US imperialism in Iraq. The decision to send Bush was made in the hopes of reversing the sagging morale of US troops and the steady erosion of US support for the occupation of Iraq, both fueled by the mounting US casualties that were not supposed to happen. It was also specifically designed to reverse the growing perception that Bush was indifferent to the plight of the soldiers serving in Iraq, a perception bolstered by Bush's refusal to attend funerals of slain troops, his ban on press coverage of returning coffins, and his cutting of veterans benefits.

The act of imperialist leaders visiting their occupying armies is nothing new. Caesar, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton, all carried out this vainglorious tradition. Bush's venture stands out, however, in terms of its cloak and dagger and clandestine nature. When Hitler visited occupied Paris in June 1940, however, he was able to enjoy a tour of the capital and see the sights, despite the brutality of his army.

Bush, however, was forced to sneak in Baghdad Airport like a thief in the night. While Johnson, Nixon and Clinton's visit to the troops were widely reported, Bush flew in with all lights off on Air Force One under total secrecy, stayed for two and a half hours, didn't go beyond the heavily fortified Baghdad Airport, and prohibited any reporting of Bush's appearance until he was back on Air Force One for the return trip to Washington.

Fox News proved once again that their marketing ploy of "fair and balanced" is an insulting Orwellian lie. The White House told Murdoch's right-wing, pro-war network in advance of the trip, and Fox was the only news organization allowed to record the event, confirming that far from being fair and balanced, it is nothing more than propaganda arm of the state.

For all the capitalist media's gushing over Bush's courage in making the flight to Iraq, it has been reported that the Vietnam-era deserter wanted to back out at the very end, exhibiting the same kind of courage he showed on September 11 when the nation was under attack and his main concern, by his own admission, was to get out of the way.

This stunt was largely for domestic consumption. Bush could care less about the Iraqis. He intends to bludgeon them into submission. And Iraqis, who have already suffered so many deaths and devastation, have no illusions about Bush's staged visit. Some samples of Iraqi opinion reported by Reuters:

"As far as I'm concerned he's welcome to come and more than welcome to leave."

"We welcome Bush as we welcome any gu est who comes peacefully. But we want to draw attention to the fact that there is no security, no jobs and no services well into the American occupation of Iraq."

"To hell with Bush. He is another Mongol in a line of invaders who have destroyed Iraq."

"Bush has zero popularity here."

"Look at what we have to go through. Our living conditions have become deplorable. The U.S. situation in Iraq will only become worse if things do not improve."

And they are not likely to improve if US soldiers continue to murder Iraqis in cold blood like the two young sisters who were collecting wood in Baquba, about 35 miles north of Baghdad. Don't you feel safer already, you Bush bozos?

Bush had come and gone, but the war crimes under his orders continue. And, the fact that Bush was forced to steal into Baghdad like a thief in the night may have actually emboldend the guerrilla resistance. Hours after Bush left, a US soldier was killed in a mortar attack in Mosul. A day later, the latest brazen insurgent attack resulted in the deaths of 7 Spanish intelligence agents, 2 Japanese diplomats, 2 South Korean workers, and now, 2 more US soldiers killed in a rocket-propelled grenade ambush in western Iraq. Despite Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's claim that it's been a "great two weeks" for the occupying forces, the death toll for coalition forces in November--105, including 75 Americans--make it the bloodiest month of the war for imperialist troops since it began in March.

This is not to say that all Iraqis want Hussein's Baathists back in power, or to deny that some Iraqis do not want US forces to leave before the chaos caused by the invasion is resolved, or that others who are Quislings more than eager to collaborate with and profit from the new colonial setup. Even among Iraqis with illusions in Bush, the reviews of his visit were less than glowing.

"Even if he had made a broadcast directly to us from the airport, Iraqis would have felt it was a historic moment and been proud to listen. But to simply speak to the US troops made it seem rather bewildering and irrelevant. It doesn't make sense to us."

A member of the American-selected Iraqi Governing Council was left bewildered. "We cannot consider Bush's arrival at Baghdad International Airport as a visit to Iraq. He did not meet with Iraqis."

An artist said, "America is a great country and Bush is a great leader, but why does he sneak in and out of Iraq? Everyone watched him on television when he left. Why couldn't we watch this man while he was here?"

A linguist stated, "He should have spoken to the plain people and listened, as well. There is much heartfelt gratitude to the Americans for toppling the monster with whose name I will not pollute my tongue. But we would also express our anger that our liberator has become our occupier. By not speaking directly to Iraqis when he stepped upon our soil, Bush showed contempt and showed also that America is just a colonizer."

A similar sentiment was articulated by a car trader: "It was an insult. Why did Bush travel all these thousands of miles just to meet with Americans? Are there no Americans for him to greet in America? He snubbed the Iraq people by staying out at the airport and not paying respects to the Iraqi people. He should have come to Baghdad and shaken our hands."

Most Iraqis want neither Hussein OR Bush. They want the US and British forces out, their national sovereignty restored, self determination, and a truly free and independent Iraq. The Iraqi workers and peasants are the only social force capable of achieving these objectives in the current context of imperialist occupation. If they were organized in a revolutionary party, they could defeat the occupation army WITHOUT a restoration of the Baathists.

Although you'd never know it from the capitalist press, Iraqi workers have begun to fight back. There were several demonstrations and strikes in October by workers, including mass rallies by the unemployed in Baghdad and Basra. And several strikes have broken out at oil refineries in those same cities.

The working class resistance has been strong enough for Coalition Provision Authority chief Paul Bremer to declare strikes to be illegal and strikers the enemies of US soldiers. This is what Bush has in mind when he told the troops they were "helping Iraq to be free."

Bremer's Coalition Authority has no problem with one of Saddam Hussein's acts--the 1987 law forbidding public sector workers from organizing unions or engaging in collective bargaining.That one fits in nicely with Bush's desire for an obedient workforce in the newly privatized Iraq, and shows how congruent Bush and Hussein's thinking is in terms of how to exploit Iraq's working people.

But Bremer has taken away what Hussein gave his employees--state subsidies for housing and food. In a country suffering from 70% unemployment, this does not exactly win hearts and minds. As Bush accelerates privatization and deepens the attack on Iraq's working class, we will see more resistance from that nation's toilers. Increasingly, workers will put their stamp on the fight to defend Iraq's sovereignty by kicking the US occupiers out of their country.

Another example of Washington's commitment to freedom and democracy is the puppet Iraqi National Council's decision to shut down the widely viewed Arab television station, Al Arabiya, which broadcast an audiotape of what was alleged to be Hussein's voice urging Iraqis to resist the occupation armies and their Iraqi collaborators. Rumsfeld had the gall to accuse Al Arabiya of "embedding" its reporters with Iraqi "terrorists", that is, Iraqi patriots fighting Washington's illegal occupying army.

Bremer has already issued media regulations telling Iraqi journalists what they can and cannot write; US troops have shut down a radio station and impounded newspapers and destroyed newspaper offices; US forces shelled the Palestine Hotel when it was filled with journalists and the offices of Al-Jazeera in both Kabul and Baghdad; and US troops have killed numerous journalists, all of them, suspiciously enough, were "non-embedded."

So much for Bush liberating Iraq with a free press and a free workforce. We saw another example of democracy building courtesy of the US in a Nov. 30 NY Times article entitled, "Building democracy: Iraqis learn bureaucracy at town meetings." The article focuses on the neighborhood councils, district councils, and city council established "at the encouragement of the American occupation authorities" to help choose the "transitional assembly" that is to select the next interim government.

After learning that Iraqis are insulted that the councils have no authority, no budget, no real power, and are ignored by the national Iraqi Governing Council, Times reporter Joel Brinkley reveals more than he intended when he describes what happened when the Baghdad City Council "plunged headlong into a discussion of national health-care financing."

"In capsule form," Brinkley writes, "they articulated problems that, in the United States, have consumed millions of hours of study and debate over the last decade. The Iraqis disposed of them quickly."

Those rash, impulsive Iraqis. Let's see what drove them to such irrational behavior. A Baghdad councilman explained:"We have been trying to finance the system from our own revenues. But it isn't working. The prices are too high for the citizens, but they aren't enough for the hospitals. The minister of health has ordered prices reduced by 50 percent. But we should cancel this whole system of self-financing. WE NEED A SYSTEM THAT MAKES SURE EVERYONE GETS COMPLETE MEDICAL CARE." [emphasis added]

Uh-oh. That won't meet with Caesar Bush's approval.
But we'll let Brink tell us what happened.

"Without dispute, the council agreed to send a letter to the Health Ministry calling for the abolition of free-market health-care financing. And that, some Americans say [what "some Americans?" This guy sounds just like Bush!], is the chief weakness of the infant councils."

An "American advisor" elaborates: "They jump to big conclusions without enough critical thinking or study. It's almost an emotional thing."

One can imagine a similar scenario in the US if town councils started passing resolutions calling for the abolition of free-market, health-care financing and the institution of a single-payor, government-funded national health system. They would be scolded for jumping to the same "big conclusion" that Iraqi working people have drawn--medical care is a human right that should be guaranteed to every person and not subordinated to the dictates of the free market. They would be told to curb their emotionalism and do more critical thinking and study until they realize in a calm and dispassionate way that the profits of the pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and insurance companies come first.

Brinkley's article reconfirms that the interests of the ruling financial oligarchy supersede working people's right to health care from New York to Baghdad. Bush and his capitalist class are looting workers in the US and Iraq with their privatization and austerity schemes. One day the working people in the US and Iraq will stand together and fight US imperialism and the comprador Iraqi bourgeoisie.

Many Iraqis know that the reason US troops are occupying their country is for control of Iraq's oil and to reshape the entire Middle East for US and Israel domination. They're aware that every reason Bush gave to invade their nation--weapons of mass destruction, ties to bin Laden and 911 terrorism, and liberating Iraq--have been exposed as lies and deception.

And as Bush intensifies the murderous military campaigns to beat Iraqis into submission, the anger, resentment and determination of Iraq's workers and peasants to fight back will also grow, as will their demand that the occupying armies stop the slaughter of Iraq's people and immediately withdraw from the country.

This process will only intensify after the Battle of Samarra. On November 30, 2003, as many as 60 to 100 Iraqi guerrillas launched two separate and highly coordinated attacks on two American convoys that had just delivered currency to two banks in Samarra. The guerrillas opened fire from alleys and rooftops using mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire and homemade bombs.

We know that a fierce, pitched battle ensued that raged for three hours. But, as has been the case since the beginning of this war, the Pentagon's initial account of the Battle of Samarra is being contradicted and revealed to be fraught with apparent lies.

It was initially reported that US forces repelled the attack, killing 46 Iraqi fighters. Then the Iraqi death toll was revised upward to 56 dead, while American casualties were limited to 5 wounded.

But according to an eyewitness report by Muhammad Abu Nasr published on informationclearinghouse.info, the resistance fighters inflicted casualties on the Americans before withdrawing. US troops then opened fire indiscriminately on residential neighborhoods of Samarra, as if in a blind, retaliatory rage.

Local residents report that US forces indiscriminately bombed and shelled mosques and schools, killing 8 or 9 Iraqis--all civilians. Samarra Hospital confirmed they had received the bodies of 8 Iraqi civilians, including a woman and a child, and 60 more civilians suffered injuries from US gunfire and shrapnel.

As for the 46 or 54 Iraqi guerrillas whose deaths were reported by US journalists as a fact--their bodies were never found, which is no surprise--there was no body count! Those brilliant American correspondents forgot Rule No. 1 of journalism--check your sources! They reported the high Iraqi death toll based on interviews with US soldiers!

That's like saying your proof for the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is that it was based on inverviews with Iraqi defectors!

The aftermath of Samarra is confirming that as the US steps up its murderous repression to teach the Iraqis a lesson, it is only enraging Iraqis and driving them in to the arms of the resisters.

"If I had a gun, I would have attacked the Americans myself," said Satar Nasiaf, a shopkeeper who saw two Iraqi civilians killed by US troops, as reported in the Dec. 2 NY Times.

"Civilians shot back at the Americans," said "Ali Hasan, who was wounded by shrapnel. They claim we are terrorists. So OK, we are terrorists. What do they expect when they drive among us?"

Bush didn't win too many hearts and minds in Samarra. The Associated Press reports that many Samarra residents say that the Iraqi Resistance fighters who attacked the Americans were loyal to Saddam Hussein, but that when US troops started firing indiscriminately, many civilians grabbed their guns and began to fight.

All dictators must fall

November 19, 2003--Antiwar demonstrators from England and all over Europe are assembling in London for tomorrow's huge protest against George Bush's state visit to Buckingham Palace. More than 100,000 are expected to fill London's streets to tell Bush he's a war criminal for invading and occupying Iraq, defying the police state and armed camp the Blair government has mobilized to intimidate them.

The international working class should rejoice in the humiliation being inflicted on George Bush. Instead of the triumphant victory parade that had been envisioned by its planners 18 months ago, Bush and Blair will be running from the masses' anger, slinking about in their well-fortified bubble, only showing their cowardly faces at stage managed photo-ops. One public event after another had to be cancelled, including the traditional open carriage ride down the Mall and an address to Parliament.

Bush the Puny punked out of addressing the Parliament when Blair could not guarantee that Labor Party MPs would not heckle Bush or walk out on him.

The White House wanted Blair to shut down the London subways, grant diplomatic immunity to US snipers and security agents in case they were to kill any protesters, allow an artillery weapon known as the "mini gun" to be flown in, equip Buckingham Palace with special protective barriers, close off vast parts of the city, and allow US fighter jets and Blackhawk choppers to patrol London's skies.

Even Bush's poodle, Tony Blair, could not agree to these outrageous demands. Nevertheless, Blair did turn London into an armed fortress, spending 20 million pounds and deploying 14,000 gun-carrying police officers. This is in addition to Bush's 700 armed agents, two 747s, a Blackhawk helicopter and a motorcade of 20 armored vehicles.

While Washington failed to convince Blair to shut down London's subways, British authorities did agree to the creation of a "sanitary"exclusion zone around Bush by closing a number of the city's roads.  This should make Bush feel at home, since last week during a visit to Little Rock, Arkansas, police restricted demonstrators to an Orwellian "free speech zone."

US and British intelligence agencies--and their stooges in the media like Fox News--have issued sinister warnings that Al Qaeda may be planning a terrorist attack under cover of the massive demonstration. In addition to generating a climate of intimidation and hysteria, these threats are central to the rulers' propaganda offensive equating opposition to the war with terrorism.

But there may be something else going on here. Since it's becoming clearer that Al Qaeda is a tool of US, British, and Israeli intelligence, there is a distinct danger that the rulers may be preparing a state-sponsored terrorist provocation in London this week, a point cogently argued by Julie Hyland in her November 18th World Socialist Web Site article entitled, "Bush's visit to London: Is a state provocation being prepared?"

November 20, 2003--Right on cue, Istanbul, still reeling from the Nov. 15 bombings of two synagogues that killed 23 people, suffered two more explosions today that killed another 27 at a London-based bank and the British consulate. Equally on cue, it is being reported that an Al Qaeda representative phoned a Turkish news agency claiming responsibility for the blasts.

The Istanbul attacks came just in time for use in speeches by Bush and Blair during the former's visit to Buckingham Palace. "You see," they chimed in chorus to the world, "this is what we're up against.  These are the bloodthirsty terrorists we are fighting in Iraq!"

How convenient, this synchronicity between Bush's big visit and Al Qaeda's latest terrorist attacks in Istanbul. The CIA said there'd be a terrorist attack during the visit, and there were--in Turkey, the country that refused Bush permission to invade Iraq from the north. A nation full of Muslims, too.

Al Qaeda equals the CIA! Open the files! Shut down Camp Gitmo in Guantanamo Naval Base! Free all political prisoners! US out of Guantanamo!

November 20, 2000--Nearly 200,000 demonstrators marched to London's Trafalgar Square today and cheered the toppling of George Bush's effigy, a first-strike missile cradled in its arms. What a fitting outpouring of contempt for one of the most despised individuals in modern history who, along with his poodle Tony Blair, has a date with an international war crimes tribunal for the criminal and barbaric invasion of Iraq.

The massive antiwar demonstration gave notice to Bush and the exploiting class he represents that the eyes of the world are trained on them and the atrocities they are committing in Iraq every day. Bush's answer to the Iraqis' support for the guerrilla insurgency has been to drop 500-, 1000-, and 2000-pound bombs from F-16s and AC-130 gunships on crowded residential areas from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk. The bombings are part of the latest wave of psychopathic-sounding military operations hatched by the warmaniacs in the Pentagon--Iron Hammer and Ivy Cyclone.

The Iraqi resistance has the imperialists in a state of panic. Faced with mounting US casualties and an ever-growing guerrilla resistance, Bush is frantically trying to intimidate the Iraqi people and break them through sheer terror from the skies. The bombings are also motivated by a desire to bolster the declining morale of US troops and convince the American public that something is being done to stop the battlefield losses.

Winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis

November 2003--This photo showing a US soldier binding women and children in their own home was just released by Al Jazeera.net. It should repulse every human being with a decent bone in their body. It should shame every confused and brainwashed American and every flag-waving bigot who still blindly support this barbaric aggression. This picture is why Bush and Rumsfeld will never win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and why popular support for the guerrilla resistance to the US occupation is growing every day.

John Rees of the British Stop the War Coalition had this to say: "This kind of behaviour produced a response which forced the British out of India and will undoubtedly force the British and Americans out of Iraq.

"The American and British forces in Iraq are showing all the worst traits of colonial occupying forces throughout history."

This photograph is just the latest piece of evidence that will be used to convict George W. Bush and the rest of his criminal gang at an international war crimes tribunal.

The British Stop the War Coalition is organizing a demonstration to greet Bush when he visits London on November 19th that promises to be so massive it will humiliate the White House war criminal in front of the entire world. The march is scheduled to end at  Trafalgar Square, where a giant statue of Bush will be toppled in the same manner Hussein's statue was pulled down by US troops on the day Baghdad was "liberated."

The whole world will be watching--and cheering.

US Chinook shot down near Fallujah, Nov. 2, 2003

November 2003--Taking up George W. Bush's challenge to "Bring 'em on," the Iraqi guerrilla resistance obliged by shooting down a U.S. Chinook helicopter with a shoulder to air missile near Fallujah, Iraq, on November 2, 2003. At least 15 soldiers were killed and more than 20 others wounded in the single most devastating defeat for US forces since the war began, and six months after Bush declared major combat operations were over.

AP reports that villagers proudly showed off charred pieces of the chopper's wreckage to reporters arriving on the scene. Many Iraqis celebrated the Chinook's demise as well as other attacks on US forces in Fallujah. A crowd of exuberant Iraqis gathered around a burning US vehicle. One jubilant youth was hearing US helmet.

"This was a new lesson from the resistance, a lesson to the greedy aggressors," said a Fallujah resident. The Americans, he added, will "never be safe until they get out of our country."

He's right. Another US soldier was killed last night when a homemade bomb exploded as his vehicle drove by. In Abu Ghraib, a Baghdad suburb, US troops fought Iraqis for the second time in three days. Witnesses said the trouble began when Americans ordered citizens to leave THEIR marketplace. Some say the soldiers lobbed a stun grenade into the crowd that seriously injured several Iraqis. A grenade was reportedly thrown at the Americans, who opened fire.

The Americans then heard shouts of "By blood and soul we sacrifice for you, Saddam Hussein," according to a witness, Hamad Ali.

In the fierce gunfight that has continued for days, at least three or four Americans were reported dead, and Al-Jazeera is reporting up to 14 Iraqi civilians were killed and five wounded, including a 6-year-old child who was crushed to death by a US tank.

And, contrary to the lie continually peddled by Washington and their well-coiffed media whores, the resistance is not limited to the so-called "Sunni Triangle" near Baghdad. In Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad, a vehicle carrying US soldiers was fired upon by automatic weapons as it drove down a street. When the vehicle stalled, the wounded troops fled on foot. Townspeople set the vehicle ablaze.

"They (Americans) are occupying the world," stated Shaza Ahmed, a Mosul resident. "What do you want the people to do? Kiss them?"

The continuous escalation of the armed resistance and the obvious popular support it enjoys exposes still another lie of the Bushites--that Iraqis would greet the US forces as liberators. The recent success of the guerrilla resistance has thrown the rulers into such disarray that they can't agree on where the attacks are coming from.

One day the Pentagon claims Saddam Hussein is directing the attacks. The next day Powell says no, Hussein's not behind them. Next it was Hussein's former deputy hatching the attacks. No, take that back. One day the Coalitions claims foreign terrorists slipping in from Syria are organizing the attacks. The next day brings a denial that there's evidence of foreign infiltration. It's Al Qaeda, it's Iran, it's everyone but the Iraqi people pissed off that once again foreign armies have returned to occupy their valuable soil (US and UK this time; UK last time).

While it's clear that hundreds of Islamic volunteers from other countries are in to Iraq to help their Muslim brothers and sisters defend their nation against imperialist occupation, it's equally obvious that this is an Iraqi national liberation movement that is unfolding.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with a brain. When families are wiped out by bombs and soldiers sent from a nation thousands of miles away, don't be shocked if the people support the guerrilla resistance against the foreign invaders.

Let's make one thing clear--attacks against US and UK soldiers ARE NOT TERRORIST. And Iraqi fighters carrying out those attacks are not terrorists. They are defending the sovereignty of their country against foreign aggressors who illegally invaded and occupy Iraq. They are waging a legitimate war of national liberation against an imperialist army terrorizing and murdering their people. You are neither a criminal nor terrorist when you take up arms against a foreign power that has occupied your country. This is recognized by international law, something Bush has shown clearly he has nothing but contempt for.

Further, we must draw a distinction between the attacks on US soldiers and the bombings of the United Nations headquarters and International Red Cross in Baghdad. These criminal acts appeared to be cut from a different cloth than the legitimate national liberation attacks on US forces. All signs point to the CIA or the Mossad, both of which are organizations of professional killers and terrorists openly operating in occupied Iraq.

But the lion's share of the increasingly organized and sophisticated guerrilla resistance is the work of Iraqis--both former Baathists and Republican Guardsmen and ordinary Iraqis who didn't support Hussein but resent the US occupation.

Remember that the only reason the US conquered Baghdad with relative ease is that Rumsfeld bribed the commanders of the Republican Guard to quit without a fight--which left at least tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers free to regroup and fight a guerrilla war, one that was predicted by COSMOS LEFT in April.

Bush--like his father 12 years before--chose not to test the Vietnam Syndrome. If victory could be won without provoking public opposition to large scale American casualties, both Bushes decided to try that route. So Junior decided to enjoy the short-term fruits of a relatively easy conquest of Baghdad by bribing the Republican Guard leadership around the capital city.

Hussein had outsmarted a Bush again. Let Junior have his short-term victory. We shall see whether the Americans can stomach a protracted guerrilla war.

Thus it turns out that Rumsfeld was not the Napoleonic genius that the gushing bourgeois media--and, shamefully, Socialist Workers Party leader Jack Barnes--deemed him to be.

There's an element of the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation that the capitalist press is consciously underreporting, but they won't be able to for very long--Iraqi workers are joining the struggle and beginning to put a proletarian stamp on the resistance.

A key part of this weekend's "Day of Resistance" was a three-day general strike that shut down most of Baghdad, according to the Times of India. Numerous demonstrations and strikes by workers and the unemployed have occurred in Baghdad and Basra over the last several weeks, reports Roberto Sarti of marxist.com.

A one-day oil strike occurred in Iraq's biggest refinery in Basra in early October. Three more strikes have taken place at Baghdad's Daura Oil Refinery, whose director, Dathar Khashab, is a former Baathist official. Khashab told a journalist that "Privatization [of Iraq's oil industry] is good because it keeps workers in fear. It keeps workers in fear of their jobs. Every worker here know I control his life. If I sack him I ruin his life, his family's life."

This guy would fit in nicely at Wal Mart.

Workers of the world, UNITE!

Things that are bothering me . . .

1) On Saturday, July 12, 2003, the Associated Press reported that the month before the FBI told law enforcement agencies that a detained Al Qaeda suspect said he had masterminded a plot to start devastating forest fires throughout the western United States. The contents of the FBI memo were first reported by The Arizona Republic. Rose Davis of the National Interagency Fire Center declined to share the memo with the Republic, and the FBI office in Denver did not return a phone call. The Republic reported that the detainee said the plan involved several individuals setting fires using timed devices in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. The paper also said many of the forest law enforcement officials contacted about the report were not aware of the FBI warning.

In a disturbing follow-up to this story, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on October 31, 2003, that in April Gov. Gray Davis asked Bush for $430 million to remove unhealthy trees on 415,000 acres of forest, but his request was ignored until last week -- when it was denied. Davis released an April 16 letter from his office that warned Bush that a bark beetle infestation of those trees was threatening major wildfires in three counties: Riverside, San Diego and San Bernadino.

Davis wrote: "This situation is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state" [emphasis added]. One month earlier, Davis had declared a state of emergency in the three counties because of the beetle infestation and the potential for Santa Ana winds to fuel major fires.

But Bush ignored this warning, just like he ignored NASA engineers' warnings about the inevitable Columbia shuttle disaster, and just as he ignored specific warnings about September 11. Gray Davis and the Democrats share responsibility for this tragedy, as they joined the Republicans in slashing funds for firefighting resources.

George W. Bush endangers the physical safety and well being of the American people and the entire world. His government--and the capitalist class he represents--have got to go.

2) Four of the soldiers who either served with Private Jessica Lynch or rescued her have died under suspicious circumstances.

Petty Officer First Class David M. Tapper died from wounds received in Afghanistan.

Lance Cpl. Sok Khah Ung was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Spc Josh Daniel Speer died in an automobile accident.

Spc Kyle Edward Williams committed suicide after shooting a man to death Williams had caught breaking into his Jeep.

Sure, they could be nothing more than coincidences.  But the more we're learning about the viciousness of the US ruling class and the military/intelligence structure that serves it, the more suspicous I'm becoming about the stench surrounding the Jessica Lynch rescue.

Also troubling is the fact that Lynch just refused to see the Iraqi who saved her life. That's right, Mohammed al-Rehaief, the man who was shot at by US soldiers while he attempted to tell them about Lynch lying wounded in a Nasiriyah hospital, who was granted asylum in the US because he feared revenge attacks in Iraq, was snubbed by Lynch when he visited Palestine, West Virginia.

Mr. al-Rehaief had been named an honorary West Virginian and given a hero's welcome in Palestine, but Ms. Lynch did not attend the ceremonies. Perhaps seeing the man who saved her life would jar the "selective amnesia" the Pentagon claims is afflicting Private Lynch.

The Pentagon has lied about the Lynch episode from the beginning, cynically exploiting the female soldier as a lynchpin in the government's war propaganda offensive. COSMOS LEFT analyzed this sordid affair in two essays on Oh Really O'Reilly entitled, "O'Reilly Pleads to Pentagon: 'Tell the truth about Jessica!..." and "Saving Private Lynch, Bill Bennett, and Clarence Thomas."

Lynch's rescue was consciously packaged as a cure for the country's malaise that existed at the beginning of the war. The fact that her "rescue" was staged fits in with the pattern of lies that have marked this entire criminal endeavor.

JESSICA LYNCH UPDATE

This story gets more bizarre and offensive by the day. The November 6 Daily News published an article entitled "Fiends raped Jessica," discussing the soon-to-be-released book by Lynch, "I Am a Soldier, Too." Her story, as told to and written by author Rick Bragg, contains the lurid bombshell that Lynch was raped by her Iraqi captors.

There's just one problem. Private Lynch doesn't remember it. The Pentagon says she has "selective amnesia." And her alleged rape is one of those things she is not able to recall. On what basis, then, is this revelation made? The News writes that "[t]he scars on Lynch's battered body and the medical records indicate she was anally raped," and, quoting Bragg from the book: "fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23, 2003."

We await independent confirmation of those medical records. But we remain skeptical for two reasons: a) the Pentagon's track record of lying about this episode from the beginning, and b) the credibility of Bragg, who, as the News concedes, was a NY Times reporter until he had to quit after admitting he had a "legman do some of his reporting." This type of honesty makes Bragg the perfect "journalist" to shill for the Pentagon. Judith Miller's usefulness in this regard may be wearing thin, as her lies regarding Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction have been thoroughly exposed.

The accusation of rape by Iraqi "fiends" smacks of being planted by the Pentagon. It's the type of sensationalistic propaganda that you'd expect from Washington right when Bush is poised to escalate the slaughter of Iraqis in his attempt to crush the Iraqi guerrilla resistance. Soon the air will be filled with shrieks from right wingers calling for the blood of those subhuman rapist ragheads. Last night, as if on cue, Bill O'Reilly kicked off his show by reporting as fact that Lynch had been raped by her Iraqi captors.

It'll be just like 1990, when the air was filled with cries of revenge against those Iraqi monsters who murdered Kuwaiti babies by throwing them out of their incubators. The Bushites said it must be true--a Kuwaiti woman testified in front of Congress that she saw these gruesome deeds happen before her eyes. There was just one problem--the woman was the niece of a Kuwaiti prince, and the accusation was a lie cooked up by the Hill and Knowlton advertising firm with close ties to the Bushites.

Those seeking to use this alleged rape as a justification for Bush's war should proceed with caution, given the track record of US soldiers raping young women from Korea to Okinawa to the Philippines.

The Pentagon cannot be happy about the interviews Lynch is giving  now that her books is about to be published, because what Lynch does remember about her nightmare does little to bolster the Pentagon's version of what happened. In an upcoming interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, Lynch actually contradicts the claim made by Iraqi lawyer Mohammed Odeh Al Rehaief that he witnessed a Fedayeen soldier slapping Lynch as she lay in her hospital bed. Perhaps there was more to Lynch's snubbing of Rehaief when he visited her hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, than meets the eye.

"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing. [No one raped me either!-CL]

"I'm so thankful for those people, because that's why I'm alive today."

Lynch confirms that Iraqi doctors tried to transport her to safety in an ambulance but were fired upon by US soldiers. And she criticized the Pentagon's falsification of her rescue for war propaganda purposes. Asked by Sawyer if the military's version of the "rescue" bothered her, Lynch replied, "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong."

Referring to the Pentagon's initial account that Lynch had emptied her weapon at Iraqi soldiers and heroically resisted them, Lynch tells Sawyer, "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't."

It looks like our skepticism regarding the rape charge is justified. The Associated Press reported from Iraq (Nov. 7, 2003) that Iraqi doctors who treated Lynch are dismissing her biographer's claim that she was raped by Iraqi soldiers. Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, the orthopedic surgeon who operated on Lynch's fractured femur, said he found no signs that she had been raped or sodomized.

The Lynch episode may be only a strange coincidence. But when we're facing a government that brought us Pearl Harbor, Operation Northwoods, and September 11, we not only have a right--we have a duty--to be skeptical.

Our skepticism is further justified when we consider the coincidences that dog the Bushes and the fate of those investigative journalists who may have strayed to close to the truth about this blood-stained royal family. James Hatfield, author of a book called "Fortunate Son," which documented Bush's cocaine addiction, supposedly committed suicide while sitting on a toilet.

Coincidentally, investigative journalists Steve Kangas and Paul Wilcher were found dead by the toilet. Kangas was a liberal Web site warrior who earned the wrath of billionaire Bush supporter Richard Scaife. Wilcher's mistake was investigating the "October Surprise" of 1980, when Bush Senior is accused of making a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after Reagan's election.

Like Halliburton (VP Richard Cheney), Bechtel (former Sec. of State George Schultz), and the irrepressible Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where Bush's favorite weapons inspector, David Kay, was vice president until October 2002. SAIC is now in the electronic vote counting business, along with other major Bush campaign donors Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S (see "Microsoft at Center of Axis of Evil," below).

The study of more than 70 US companies revealed they gave more than $500,000 in donations to Bush's 2000 campaign, "more than they gave collectively to any other politician in the past dozen years."

Cops raiding S. Carolina school for drugs, Nov. 5, 2003

November 2003--No, it's not US troops raiding a Tikrit school looking for insurgents or weapons of mass destruction. No, it's not Israeli soldiers terrorizing Palestinians in a West Bank school. It's police storming a high school in Goose Creek, South Carolina, looking for drugs and weapons, ordering students to the ground, terrorizing them with guns drawn.

It's a sickening sight, a graphic indication of the depth of the crisis gripping capitalism today, and a sobering illustration of the repression and brutality the US ruling class is using to terrorize working people from Iraq to Gaza to South Carolina.

There were no drugs or weapons found in Stratford High School. Just like there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Perhaps Principal George McCrackin can find his David Kay to issue a report declaring that there has been drug activity in the high school in the past, and there may be some in the future, but as for now--not a trace.

COSMOS LEFT discussed this dichotomy in an earlier essay entitled, "The True Face of US Imperialism--Home and Abroad" (A Tribune of the People: Home Page 2), where we were struck by the similarity in facial wounds suffered by a Baghdad boy and an Oakland antiwar protester. Today, the images of American cops, American soldiers, and Israeli soldiers storming homes, schools and hospitals, shackling and blindfolding civilians, shooting men, women and children in cold blood are assuming a chilling synchronicity.

We are all Palestinians now. We are all feeling the jackboot of US and Israeli imperialism. The international working class had better organize a mass revolutionary socialist movement soon, or we will be staring Armageddon in the face. The capitalists are dragging humanity into another world war. We must reject their dog eat dog values, and the profiteering and wars that accompany them. In fighting for the US capitalists for Social Security, Medicare, health insurance and pensions, American workers will fight Washington's war machine, and in the process discover our own values of internationalism and proletarian solidarity, our own humanity and self worth.

There are two Iraq-related stories in the news that illuminate the problems confronting the US rulers as they prepare to escalate the Iraq war and expand US military aggression around the world. One involves the US Army bringing cowardice charges against an Army interrogator who sought psychological counseling after he saw the corpse of an Iraqi man sliced in half by US gunfire.

The Army has since dropped the cowardice charge against Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, choosing to charge him with dereliction of duty instead. Pogany's crime is that he has retained too much humanity for the bloodthirsty warmaniacs in the Pentagon, White House and Wall Street. After seeing the mangled body, Pogany started shaking, vomiting, and suffering panic attacks. This is a no-no. A message had to be sent to any other faint-hearted nervous Nellies in uniform by those brave politicians, generals and business tycoons who order young men and women to their deaths and profit obscenely from their sacrifice.

The Pentagon brass wants only hardened killers in the US military like Lt. Col. Steven Russell, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regimen. Russell, whose unit fired at Tikrit homes in a retaliatory strike after the recent downing of a Black Hawk helicopter, had this to say about the strike: "This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them."

That's a fitting quote to accompany the war crime you just committed, Lt. Col. Russell. Collective punishment of the kind you just meted out to Iraqi civilians is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention's Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

The other scandal that underscores how the US rulers really feel about their soldiers involves Simone Holcomb, a 30-year-old medic from Colorado facing desertion charges because she refused to abandon her children and return to duty in Iraq. Both Holcomb and her husband's tour of duty in Iraq was interrupted when a child custody battle forced them to take an emergency leave and return to Ft. Carson, Colorado.

Their seven children had been in the care of Mr. Holcomb's mother, but his ex-wife, the mother of two of the children, won temporary joint custody with the grandmother and filed for full custody. The judge at the hearing ordered that one of the Holcombs had to remain in Colorado in order for them to win full custody. Vaughn returned to his 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, while Simone stayed in Colorado without the Army's permission, though she did ask for a reassignment to Ft. Carson or release from active duty.

The army, looking to make another example, has started to dismiss Holcomb from the military and is threatening jail time.

We see how important family values are to the US rulers when they conflict with imperialist wars.

REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won, Seoul, Oct. 29, 2003

October 29, 2003--Adding their voices to the hundreds of thousands worldwide who denounced Bush's criminal war in Iraq on October 25, more than 1,000 Korean workers from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions fought with police in the streets of Seoul today. The workers were protesting "unfair" working conditions and the Korean government's decision to send more troops to Iraq on behalf of George Bush.

Workers of the world, unite against imperialist wars!

Mass rally in La Paz, Oct. 17, 2003

October 2003--You'd never know from the press coverage in the US, but an insurrection is taking place in the South American nation of Bolivia, the second poorest country in the Americas behind Haiti. While most Americans can recite the latest gory details of the Kobe Bryant case, which is now playing the same role in the corporate media that Gary Condit's did in 2001, few know that the workers and peasants in Bolivia are in the midst of a popular uprising that is already in a prerevolutionary stage.

There's a reason why the capitalist press isn't going out of its way to cover the workers struggles in Bolivia. The media bosses don't want to shine a light on how horrible life is under capitalism for the working class in countries like Bolivia. The capitalist media chieftains don't want US workers to see how hard Bolivian workers are fighting back with strikes, marches, and land seizures. This might give ideas to working people in the US as they see southern California grocery store workers and Los Angeles bus and subway mechanics striking for their jobs, wages, health care, and pensions.

The bosses also don't want US workers to discover how Washington is orchestrating the Bolivian government's murderous repression of the Bolivian masses. According to an account in the weekly magazine Pulso, a US military command is instructing the Bolivian army on how to crush the insurrection. Some US officers are monitoring deployment and tactics, while others are making sure sufficient supplies of arms and food reach the Bolivian army.

This upsurge in working class combativity among Spanish-speaking workers from Los Angeles to La Paz is not a pleasant development for the US ruling class.

The rulers don't want these workers to begin linking up their struggles for jobs, wages, health benefits and justice. The bosses don't want workers to start generalizing their struggles and realizing that there are no Bolivian or American solutions to the crisis of capitalism, but international answers from an international working class.

On the home front, the US capitalists do their best to prevent the subway and bus mechanics from linking up with the striking grocery workers--despite being in the same region of the state and striking over the same issues--health care and wages! The bosses accomplish this with the willing help of the union bureaucracies atop the Amalgamated Transit Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union--the labor lieutenants of capital, as Lenin called them.

The capitalists and their labor lieutenants in the trade union movement also don't want Latino-led US workers witnessing the level of organization, mobilization and combativity being shown by their brothers and sisters in Bolivia, whose massive mobilizations from all over the country forced the resignation of the hated president Sanchez de Lozada.

The rulers don't want us to know about the defense committees and roadblocks organized by the workers and peasants throughout Bolivia; about the peasants seizing the land that they till; about the general strike called by the Confederation of Bolivian Workers, or COB, the major trade union organization in the country.

The US political establishment does not want North American workers to know about the rich history of anti-capitalist struggles of Bolivia's tin miners and coca farmers Bolivia's workers are exploited doubly--by the national bourgeoisie of Bolivia and by foreign imperialist capital.

In recent years, privatization and increased foreign capital has dramatically increased the impoverishment of the Bolivian working class. Industry and industry, resource after resource have been sold off to foreign investors, while social misery and unemployment skyrocketed. When the La Paz government announced the plan to export natural gas to Mexico and the US, the masses--including peasants fed up with the US-supported eradication of coca crops--drew the line and began the strikes and protests that forced President Sanchez de Lozada from power.

When the Army massacred scores of protesting workers and peasants, toilers from all over Bolivia literally dropped everything and organized roadblocks and a mass march on the capital to demand de Lozada's resignation.

Bolivia has a long history of working class combativity. Their workers almost made a revolution in 1952, during the '60s, and as recently as February of 2003. All that is missing from the current upsurge is a mass revolutionary workers party.

This has enabled the reformist leadership of the workers and peasants such as Evo Morales, former head of the coca growers and leader of the Movement towards Socialism, to help the Bolivian capitalists stabilize matters with their new president, Carlos Mesa. The COB suspended the general strike, and Morales supports giving Mesa a "breathing space."

But despite this misleadership, the Bolivian masses took matters into their own hands and moved the class struggle forward. Their level of organization, determination and combativity has delivered a partial victory and put Bolivian workers in a stronger position. They have also inspired working people the world over.

And we will hear from the Bolivian masses again.

US working people can support the fight by Bolivia's workers and peasants by demanding that Washington immediately end all military and political aid to the Bolivian regime and stop helping the army massacre Bolivian workers, peasants and students.

See "Victory for Bolivian Workers! US Puppet de Lozada Resigns!" on "Fighting US Imperialism."

September 30, 2003--It's nice to see the mass media covering what this Web site and others reported on over two months ago: someone in the White House "outed" the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson as a CIA agent. In the July 17-23 essay, "Bush and Blair: Partners in War Crimes" [below], this is what we said:

"Things are getting scary on both sides of the Atlantic for those who dared cross Bush and Blair on this war. Bush just retaliated against Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly revealed he told the White House a year ago that the Niger uranium story was bogus, by having slimy right wing pundit Robert Novak "out" Wilson's wife as a CIA agent! No doubt there is a federal statute prohibiting this kind of leak. That can be added to the growing list of impeachment charges . . ."

Actually, there are two federal statutes that make it a felony to publicly reveal the identity of intelligence agents: the National Agents Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act. At the conclusion of the August 11th essay directly proceeding "Bush and Blair: Partners in War Crimes," we stated: "Look for the CIA to come out swinging against the White House in the coming months."

You know the ruling class has problems when different factions begin turning on each other--and we could see this manifestation of internecine warfare between the CIA and White House coming a mile away. Once it was clear that Bush was trying to blame the CIA for Iraq, when it was the White House and the Pentagon that politicized and "sexed up" the intelligence data to fit their political agenda, it was only a matter of time before the CIA retaliated.

It's a good bet it was CIA director George Tenet who was the "high administration official" behind the September 27 Washington Post story that two Bush administration officials had also called six other Washington journalists, including Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, and urged them to reveal Plame's

The Post article quotes this senior official as saying that the exposure of Plame was "meant purely and simply for revenge."

All signs point to Bush's chief political advisor and hatchet man Karl Rove as the source of the leak. Joseph Wilson himself has named Rove as the main suspect, saying publicly on August 21 that he wished "to see whether or nor we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words."

It's unlikely this is mere bravado. Karl Rove runs the Bush White House. There's no way "senior administration officials" get quoted unless it has Rove's approval.

The Guardian's Julian Borger reports that when Time and NBC News reporters were told about Ms. Plame, Democratic sources say Rove was the source each time, referring to "Wilson's wife" as being a CIA employee.

Novak is claiming that Plame was only an analyst, not an undercover agent, thus no lives were endangered.
But Novak wrote in his article that "Wilson himself never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Even more telling is the testimony of Ray McGovern, who was for 27 years a senior analysis for the CIA. McGovern told journalist William Rivers Pitt that : "I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know, that his wife was in fact a deep operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration's first priority issue: weapons of mass destruction."

The key word is "supposedly." This CIA outing scandal reconfirms that there were no WMD; that they were merely an excuse for Washington's criminal military invasion of Iraq.

Wilson has backtracked from directly accusing Rove as being the source of the leak, though he still maintains Rove knew of it and did nothing to stop it. The other prime suspect is Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, one of the leading architects of the Iraq war.

Wilson also says that several Washington reporters told him Rove said that his wife was "fair game." Wilson is convinced that the outing of his wife Valerie was an act of revenge to punish him for accusing Bush of manipulating intelligence to hype the threat from Iraq.

The key issue for working people is not whether the senior Bush officials violated the federal laws protecting the identities of CIA agents. They are professional killers in the service of the exploiting rich and we shouldn't give a rat's ass about any of them, "Johnny" Spann included. The lesson of this latest Bush scandal is that it proves he's lied all along about Iraq, that he's a vengeful gangster who won't hesitate to ruin the lives of anyone who crosses him and tells the truth.

There are already signs of a coverup underway to shield Bush from this scandal. The Justice Department told the White House of the investigation on September 29. But White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales did not inform the White House staff until the following morning, which gave White House aides 12 hours to clean things up before the FBI arrived.

And the fact that Karl Rove worked for Attorney General Ashcroft on several of his Missouri campaigns suggests that a Justice Department investigation of this White House would be less than impartial.

When the US ruling class decided that Richard Nixon had become more of a liability than an asset, along came Deep Throat and the flood of leaks that resulted in Nixon resigning in disgrace.

No one bourgeois politician--including George W. Bush--is indispensable to the ruling class. If he becomes too much of a liability to the overall interests of the US ruling class, he's gone, too. Violating the National Agents Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act are only two of many impeachable offenses committed by the war criminal in the White House.

What's positive about this affair to the working class is that it shows the growing tensions and conflicts within the rulers over the debacle they've created in Iraq.

September/October 2003--There's an Axis of Evil screaming to be examined in these two news stories--one that illuminates the Orwellian nightmare unfolding before our eyes courtesy of the Bush gang. And for all the Bill Gates haters out there, Microsoft is at the center of both sordid tales. It is, in effect, the tie that binds them.

Yesterday, a Reuters article by Reed Stevenson reported about a joint report issued by computer security experts that said the "ubiquitous reach of Microsoft Corp.'s software on desktops worldwide has made computer networks a national security risk susceptible to 'massive, cascading failures.'" ["cascading"--as in the August 14th blackout!]

The report to the Computer Communications Industry Association's meeting of industry leaders said that Microsoft is the number one target for writers of viruses like Blaster and Slammer. Dan Geer, one of the experts who authored the report, stated, "The nature of the platform that dominates every desktop everywhere is such that its dominance, coupled with its insecurity, cannot be ignored and IS A MATTER OF CORPORATE AND NATIONAL POLICY." [emphasis added]

Now consider this. On July 15, 2003, the Homeland Security Department chose Microsoft as its preferred supplier of desktop computer and server software. As the Financial Times said of the Bush administration's economic policies, "the lunatics are running the asylum."

Wonderful. The governmental agency supposedly created to protect Americans chooses the computer company most vulnerable to cyber-terrorism as its exclusive supplier.

Which only proves that Bush's Homeland Security and war on terror have nothing to do with protecting Americans. They have everything to do with taking away our democratic rights.

Microsoft for Homeland Security--from the same people who brought us September 11.

The plot thickens as we explore the second news story involving the growing scandal surrounding Diebold and the other electronic vote counting corporations.

The rulers' response to Florida's paper ballot, hanging-chad fiasco in 2000 has been to push touch-screen, computerized voting machines made by four companies--Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

The problem is that these machines have already proven to be highly vulnerable to manipulation and rigging; the companies own all proprietary rights, meaning once a vote is tabulated all trace of it is gone; and all four corporations enjoy close connections to the Bush administration, who just gave them billions of dollars to build a new computerized vote counting system by the 2004 elections. Diebold's boss Wally O'Dell is a huge Bush contributor who has promised to deliver his state to Bush in 2004. That's right--the CEO of the leading vote counting company is on record as promising to deliver Ohio to Bush next year.

Don't bet against him--Diebold's election department is led by Bob Urosevich, whose brother Todd founded and still runs ES&S. Diebold and ES&S count about 80% of America's votes.

According to Chris Floyd of the Moscow Times, the Urosevich brothers got into the vote counting business courtesy of Howard Ahmanson, a leader of the ultraright Christian Reconstructionist movement. Ahmanson is also a major player in ES&S.

This is not a matter of speculation or potential abuse. In Georgia's 2002 elections, the Democratic governor and senator were defeated in what were termed "amazing" upsets, after the last polls before the election showed them well ahead.

A similar phenomenon occurred in Minnesota, when Mondale lost in another stunning last second vote swing. More glitches happened in--surprise--Florida, where Jeb Bush received many votes intended for his Democratic opponent. And when a defeated Florida Democrat asked a judge to look at the computers tallying the votes, the court said the companies owned them.

Nebraska's Republican senator Chuck Hagel used to run ES&S. When Hagel ran in his last election, his own company actually counted the votes. Pre-election polls showed Hagel losing, but Hagel won in still another "amazing upset."

The shenanigans continued during the San Luis Obispo County's March 2003 primary election, when absentee vote tallies were sent to an Internet site run by Diebold hours before the polls closed.

Everything keeps pointing back to Republican-connected Diebold. We know what we know about the unfolding sordid tale of corruption and fraud involving Diebold not because of the corporate media--big surprise--but due to the heroic efforts of a Seattle-based voting activist named Bev Harris, who is rapidly becoming to Diebold what Erin Brokovich was to Pacific Gas & Electric Corp.

Harris, who runs a voting activist investigative site called BlackBoxVoting.org and is the author of an upcoming book, "Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st century," accidentally discovered the startling information about Diebold's vulnerability to fraud and manipulation while surfing the Internet for her research.

Harris learned that people around the world had downleaded from an open Diebold FTP site. The site contained several gigabytes of files that included sourced codes, manuals, installation versions of its voting system, and its vote counting program, GEMS.

Conspiracy Planet reports that Harris says that a Diebold employee then turned over to her internal company memos that corroborate what Harris wrote on BlackBoxVoting.org concerning Diebold's security problems. An October 2001 memo by Diebold's chief engineer, Ken Clark, admits that it is easy to do an "end run" around the Diebold voting software used in touch screen and optical scanning machines, AND THAT THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN USED IN ELECTIONS. [emphasis added]

Harris's BlackBoxVoting.org also reports that according to an Aug. 4 Wired.com article, Diebold spokesman Mike Jacobsen "confirmed that the source code Rubin's team examined was last used in November 2002 general elections in Georgia, Maryland, and in counties in California and Kansas."

However, earlier Diebold told the press that the software containing "stunning security flaws" that made hacking simple, was an older version that had never been used in any election.

Harris explained the security flaws this way:

"The GEMS election file contains more than one 'set of books.' They are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see them if you go into MICROSOFT ACCESS. [emphasis added]

"You might look at it like this :Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

"You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

"You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.

"Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you vote them from room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in the files we examined was to count the votes from 'room 2.'"

Think of those amazing last minute upsets discussed above in the recent elections in Georgia, Minnesota, California, Kansas, Nebraska, and of course, Florida, the mother of all election thefts.

Harris reports that Diebold's internal memos show that Metamor, the Independent Testing Authority entrusted with testing voting machine software, pointed out the security flaw to Diebold, who persuaded them not to include it in their report [just like Bush persuaded the EPA to delete the global warming data].

Diebold said they're now relying a password system to restrict access, but Harris demonstrated in a July report that the GEMS password can be overridden by a teenager.

Conspiracy Planet reports that "This leaves only the Windows NT security which is altogether outside the Diebold viting system. Unfortunately, other memos indicate that Windows XP is now being installed, which has less security.

Harris's investigative expose showed that Diebold lied to Georgia when it sold the system to the state, promising in the technical proposals that "entries on the audit log cannot be terminated or interfered with by program control or by human intervention."

Well, all of these embarrassing revelations were not going well over at Diebold, whose executives showed how they fit right in with their vicious and vindictive corporate gangster brethren at the White House and Fox News. Diebold sicced their lawyers after BlackVotingBox.org, charging copyright infringement concerning materials on other Web sites that BlackBoxVoting.org only linked to, links that have been ruled legal by the courts.

Harris defends her right to publish Diebold's memos supersedes the company's copyright protection rights because engineer Clark's memo shows intent to break the law. The security flaw violates Federal Election Commission standards and state laws prohibiting the sale of voting systems that are not tamper resistant.

Harris also contends that publishing the m emos serves an overriding public interest to safeguard the integrity of the elections (which is an illusion; these elections have no integrity because they're undemocratic on their most error-free day, but we'll return to that).

Bev Harris argues that other memos reveal more evidence of Diebold's noncompliance with the law, more security flaws, and other problems. Two sets of memos discuss u sing cell phones to intercept and transmit data. Further, Diebold has used changed versions of software, versions that were never tested.

As a result Harris's brilliant work, over 500 voting activists in the US, Canada, Europe and the South Pacific have the Diebold memos in their hands, memos that prove: 1) Diebold software is simple to manipulate; 2) Diebold has been using untested, uncertified software; 3) Diebold has used insecure and unauthorized remote communications, including cell phones to intercept vote data during elections; and 4) Diebold has used deceptive language in selling its system to states.

As these problems associated with Diebold have been exposed, largely through the efforts of Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting, someone in Maryland's state government decided it would be a good idea to study the state's new $56 million electronic voting system, since it was made by--Diebold.

So who does Maryland hire to study the machines? Why, none other than the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the shadowy defense contractor led by Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle executive Frank Carlucci, and former CIA director Robert Gates.

According to Chris Floyd, SAIC's track record of fraud charges and security problems has not stopped it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors.

It is in this capacity that SAIC is knee deep in the US occupation of Iraq. Wolfowitz turned the SAIC into a job hiring hall for the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmad Chalabi who are willing stooges for US imperialism. These are the liars whom Bush, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, and Rumsfeld relied on for the WMD fiction.

Last week the conclusions of SAIC'S report on Maryland's computerized vote counting machines were less than reassuring. The analysis discovered 66 flaws that could cause errors and fraud, but because much of the report was censored, many of the problems, and how they will be remedied, will be kept a state secret.

SAIC characterized Diebold's system as "at high risk of compromise" and laid out the series of security problems that included a lack of a plan, unencrypted vote transmissions, and a computer server at the State Board of elections that can be easily sabotaged by hackers.

BlackBoxVoting.org, in a Sept. 25 article, reported that out of 200 pages, 69 were heavily redacted.
This should come as no surprise. Any review by such a politically connected firm like SAIC cannot be considered impartial. Indeed, BlackBox reveals "that the SAIC's vice chairman, Bill Owens, also happens to be Chairman of VoteHere, the company that stands to benefit most if the SAIC report manages to identify certain security flaws while helping Diebold remain afloat."

That's because VoteHere produces a cryptography system that "verifies" votes, which it says will solve Diebold's problems. Owens, by the way, is also a close backer of VP Richard Cheney and a member of the Defense Policy Board.

Diebold does not plan to fix the security problems in the 33,000 touch-screen machines outside of Maryland, including those in California, where 14 counties used Diebold machines in the October 7 recall election.

While Beverly Harris and others interpret the report's fin ding that "328 security weakness, 26 of them critical" has a serious problem, Diebold characterizes it th is way: "We are please to be moving forward. The thorough system assessment conducted by SAIC verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security."

Yeah, and War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and No Sense makes Sense.

THIS JUST IN. Tom Flocco reports that Beverly Harris's site, BlackBoxVoting.org, has been shut down by internet service provider Advance Internet Technologies until after the California recall ballots are counted.

Harris explains that "At the website, there is analysis of internal memos and actual files from Diebold's Corporation's Global Election Management Systems (GEMS), maker of both touch-screen and optical scan voting m achines to be used in 14 California counties on Tuesday--including the two largest minority and ethnic--Los Angeles and Oakland-Alemeda." Harris added that "the memos indicate plausible deniability regarding election vote-rigging in Tuesday's recall election."

For more on Diebold and the growing scandal enveloping US bourgeois democracy, readers should check out Dissident Voice.

September 2003--With the entrance of former NATO commander Wesley Clark into the Democratic presidential campaign, the US rulers are covering all their bets. Just in case the Howard Dean safety valve doesn't work out, now the US capitalists have a Democratic Eisenhower waiting in the wings to serve their interests and continue deceiving the American people.

The media are already leading this web of deception, presenting Clark as a resolute opponent of the war against Iraq. The truth is that like all the Democratic "alternatives" to Bush, Clark supported the war and US imperialism's basic objectives in conquering Iraq. Clark's only criticisms of Bush were tactical. He was concerned that the US didn't have enough troops, employed a flawed military strategy and did not garner sufficient international support.

On the question of weapons of mass destruction, Clark had no doubt that they existed and would be found. He told CNN's Paula Zahn on April 2: "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this."

Yeah right. While Clark was critical of Rumsfeld's initial tactics in the early phase of the US invasion, he was quite happy with the outcome: "If the alternative to attacking in March with the equivalent of four divisions was to wait until late April to attack with five, they certainly made the right call."

And if that's not enough evidence for you, Clark just revealed in a Sept. 18 interview that he "probably" would have voted for the Congressional resolution that authorized Bush to invade Iraq. So much for Clark's antiwar credentials. They belong right next to Howard Dean's, who says we must "stick it out" in Iraq, "now that we're there."

Flash: The very next day Clark was singing a different tune after news reports of his initial statement suggested he had undercut his "antiwar" status.
"I never would have voted for war. What I would have voted for is leverage. Leverage for the United States to avoid a war."

Already the mumbo jumbo and the double talk. This guy fits right into bourgeois politics. Here's a translation of all Clark's hemming and hawing:

"I supported the war. Check my statements back in April. I support the goals of US imperialism, the right to invade a country and violate its people's sovereignty. However, I'm to be presented as the "antiwar" Democratic alternative, the military man with a smile and a conscience. So in order to maintain the antiwar veneer, I can't contradict what the media says about me."

Sections of the ruling class are pushing Clark. He's bright, articulate, reassuring, and as a general his patriotism cannot be impugned. Influential Democratic circles--disappointed in John Kerry's dismal performance--are salivating over the prospect of contrasting Clark with the flight suit phony in the White House. There is a palpable belief that Clark would be a breath of fresh air in a field crowded with stale, conventional, scripted party hacks like Gephardt, Lieberman, Edwards, Graham, and Kerry himself, who increasingly seems as old as Herman Munster.

Wesley Clark's resume shows he has been a faithful servant of the US ruling class for many years. It also documents his record as a war criminal who ordered the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999--heinous acts of aggression that included the use of depleted uranium weapons, toxic nerve gasses, napalm and sterilization chemicals, according to Counterpunch's Mitchel Cohen's reporting of an interview with a Spanish NATO pilot.

Clark defended all of these bombings, including one that killed many civilians aboard a Yugoslav train as "an uncanny accident."

Clark led the unprovoked NATO bombing of Belgrade, a war crime that slaughtered thousands of civilians. He is such an antiwar candidate that he single-handedly almost started a world war when he ordered British Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton to forcibly stop Russian planes carrying peacekeeping troops from landing at Kosovo's Pristina Airport. To which Shelton replied, "Sir, I'm not going to start World War III for you."

Just what we need to get us out of Iraq--a trigger-happy commander in chief with on-the-job experience in deploying depleted uranium shells, leveling cities, and rationalizing the bombing of innocent civilians.

Much blood has been spilled on the orders of Wesley Clark, including the 84 Americans burned alive in the 1993 holocaust in Waco, Texas. Clark was the commander of the Cavalry Division of the US Army's III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas. The tanks used in the murderous assault on the Branch Davidian's Mt. Carmel compound were from Clark's Ft. Hood unit. Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair report that there is evidence senior aides to Clark were involved in the April 19 attack on the compound.

Clark's service to his Wall Street masters also includes his command of Haitian refugee camps in the 1980s, where, according to government documents expunged by a refugee lawsuit, inmates were sprayed with toxic chemicals, and many males jailed at Miami's Krome camp and Puerto Rico's Ft. Allen refugee jail grew full female breasts, a condition known as gyneacomastia.

Wesley Clark may be a dream come true for the US rulers, but he's no answer for the working class.

*****************************

September 20, 2003--The Bush administration continues its plunge into disarray as the catastrophe it has unleashed in Iraq and unfolds and the stench surrounding September 11increasingly pollutes the nation. First Vice President Cheney told Meet the Press he's not surprised that 70% of Americans think Hussein was behind 911, and "if we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11. We don't know. We've learned a couple of things. We've learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda that stretched throught most of the decade of the '90s."

In other words, 70% of Americans believe the link between Hussein and Sept. 11 because the government and its media have been pounding that lie into a terrified and disoriented population for two years.

Then came the retreat reflecting the growing confusion and uncertainty in the Bush gang. Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice immediately chimed in chorus: Oh no, we never said that. We never claimed Hussein was DIRECTLY involved in September 11.

Bush on September 17: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in September 11."

But then Bush said: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." And on January 30, 2003, Bush declared: "...because of his [Hussein's] Al Qaeda connections, because of his history, he is a danger to Americans."

When asked about polls showing 70% of Americans believe there's a link between 911 and Hussein, Rumsfeld replied: "I've not seen any in dication that would lead me to believe that I could say that."

But on July 9, 2003, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the US invaded Iraq not so much because of weapons of mass destruction, but "because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11th."

The reason so many Americans believe that Hussein was behind Sept. 11 is because Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Powell, and their media whores have been drumming this falsehood into our heads for two years. It is an indictment of the capitalist educational system and testimony to the advanced disease state of this body politic.

It's no accident that the capitalist press is giving scant coverage to Bush's admission that Hussein had nothing to do with 911. To do otherwise would illuminate the media's role as an accomplice to the government's lying and deception.

While the blame rests squarely with the politicians and media, too many Americans still have their heads in the sands, too many ignore the lessons of American and world history, too many forget Washington's past lies to justify military aggression, too many are clueless as to what Washington does in the world, too many are a little too quick to genuflect in front of the flag and leave everything to assholes like Bush.

To those mindless Americans who still back Bush and think Iraq is a just war--you are holding the rest of us back. Wake the fuck up. You have a responsibility as a citizen of this planet to inform yourself instead of continuing to believe proven liars.

As more Americans learn that Bush has lied about Sept. 11 as much as he has about Iraq, they will start making the necessary connections. Already this is happening, a process led by the courageous relatives of Sept. 11 victims like Mandy Kleinberg and Kristin Breitweiser.

All of us have an obligation to agitate and counter the lies wherever we encounter them in our lives. We can no longer afford to avoid talking politics at the dinner table or at gatherings with family or friends. If you hear anyone regurgitating the lies or apologizing for Bush, stand up and be heard. We no longer have the luxury of relegating politics to the status of an academic exercise. This is about our survival.

We have said before that 911 will be Bush's undoing. You can't allow a crime of that magnitude to occur and cover up the truth forever. Not any more.

This disarray in the Bush administration is reflected in the fingerpointing going on not only between the White House and the CIA but within the White House itself. Bush's disagreement with Cheney over the nonexistent link between Sept. 11 and Iraq suggests that this president is getting ready to blame Cheney for the debacle and dump him from the ticket in 2004.

Bush is feeling the heat from the rising death toll of US soldiers caused by an increasingly sophisticated Iraqi guerrilla campaign that the US military concedes is supported by ordinary Iraqis. As the disastrous consequences of Bush's criminal aggression become clear, discontent and opposition are growing. Among the people this has thus far been manifested in Bush's declining poll numbers. On September 28, however, we will see this opposition in the streets when massive protests against Washington's and Israel's occupations of Iraq and Palestine sweep the US and the world.

The Iraq occupation is so disastrous that Bush is hearing it from ruling class circles, including Republicans like Senator Chuck Hagel, and conservative Democrats like John Murtha, who has called for heads to roll at the Defense Department. Even more ominously for Bush is the fact that growing numbers of soldiers in Iraq--and their families back home--are raising their voices in dissent. Many are writing emails, forming support groups, joining antiwar groups that are raising the same demand that will bring millions into the streets October 25th: "Bring the Troops Home Now!"

More and more soldiers are realizing they've been lied to by Bush and used as cannon fodder for oil companies, Halliburton and Bechtel. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to September 11, and no processions of grateful Iraqis throwing flowers. And soldiers are realizing that those firing at them are not just Baathist remnants, Saddam loyalists, or foreign Islamic warriors infiltrating from Syria and Iran. It's ordinary Iraqis, patriotic Iraqis, working class Iraqis who are the guerrillas shooting at them.

The fierce firefight in Fallujah was a sobering sign for the US rulers. As many as eight US soldiers were killed in that overnight battle.

It was all lies. Australian journalist John Pilger reports that Colin Powell said the following in Cairo on February 24, 2001: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Two months later, Condaleeza Rice said this: "Saddam does not control the northern part of the co untry. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

And now US soldiers are sitting ducks and dying every day and they want to go home.

But Bush and Rumsfeld have stuck them there. So American GIs are panicky, pissed off, and trigger happy. In recent days they have killed journalists, 8 Iraqi policeman, an Italian diplomat searching for looted antiquities, and a 14-year-old boy at a wedding party, where US forces mistook celebratory gunfire for an attack, as if US forces didn't mistakenly slaughter enough civilians at wedding parties in Afghanistan because they thought they were being fired upon.

Bush's forces are losing the hearts and minds of Iraqis every day.

"The killing of the policemen was the turning point for me," said one Iraqi. "I thought they came as liberators and had hoped that they would bring this country freedom. Initially, we were against the police, calling them agents of the Americans. but by killing the police, the Americans showed their true faces.... I think the attacks against them will increase, and revenge for the dead policemen will be taken."

You're not going to be viewed as liberators when you blow the heads off of people driving in their own country. You're not going to be welcome with open arms when you blow the heads off of children and they land in their mother's lap.

Freelance journalist Felicity Arbuthnot told the World Socialist Web site in a September 17th article that American soldiers are breaking into homes, shooting doors open, shooting citizens in their living rooms. They drag men from their beds in their underwear and throw them to the ground in front of neighbors. They are blindfolding them and shoving their faces into the dust.

GIs are humiliating Iraqi women and children in their own homes, running their hands over them. Soldiers are trampling Muslim customs. There are reports US troops are are looting the homes they are trashing. Bush's forces are forcing Iraqis into the hot sun in cages like those in Guantanamo, parsing out rations of water to them.

Is this what we're supposed to be supporting when flag-waving patriots repeat the mantra, "We must support our troops" in that hypnotic, zombie-like tone? No, we don't support our troops committing atrocities and acting like stormtroopers. Bring them home now!

Bush is in trouble because more and more American soldiers agree with that demand.

Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st  Airborne serving near Mosul, wrote the following letter to his hometown newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star: "I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that. I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.

"We have all faced death in Iraq without reason or justification. How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the men and wo men whose job it is to protect them rather than their leader's interest?"

Readers can check out the entire text of Predmore's letter at www.pjstar.com/news/opedcolumns/b0gtbbgr059.html

Top Gun AFTER hearing of 2nd WTC crash

July 30, 2003--Note the speed with which Bush, whom Bill O'Reilly describes as a "warrior against terror," leaps to the nation's defense after hearing from advisor Andrew Card that Flight 175 had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Remember that, despite hearing specific warnings about plots to skyjack jets and crash them into the Pentagon and WTC, the commander in chief ordered no enhanced airport security and even worse--THERE WAS NO AIR DEFENSE between DC and New York on September 11. Normal military procedures to dispatch jet fighters to intercept wayward planes were not followed. When they were sent, they left too late from air bases too far way at speeds too slow.

Yet Bush continued to read goat stories to schoolchildren for a full twenty minutes after the second WTC attack.

Today, this "commander in thief" who deserted from the Vietnam war sends working class youth to kill and die in Iraq for corporate profits, exposing them and Iraqis to radiation from depleted uranium shells, then cuts funding for veterans' health insurance, military family housing, extra pay for hazardous duty, family-separation allowance, and opposes tax credits to 200,000 low income soldiers while enacting whopping tax cuts for the capitalists the soldiers are dying for.

*********************************

July 29-30, 2003--If you didn't already believe Washington is run by a gang of psychotic criminals, the report that the Pentagon was about to set up a futures market to predict terrorist attacks should close the argument.

This latest gem from US "intelligence" comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is now headed by John Poindexter, one of the many Iran/Contra criminals rehabilitated by George W. Bush to help him spy on the American people.

DARPA actually envisioned a futures trading market where financial parasites, usually referred to in more respectable terms as speculators or investors, would bet with one another over the Internet on the odds of terrorist attacks, coups, assassinations occurring around the world. The wagering would have been open to anyone--typical speculators, intelligence agents, terrorists working intelligence agencies, you name them.

The Pentagon actually thought this was a way to gain intelligence about terrorist plots: use Washington as a bookmaker. In one stroke, Bush has revealed the bankruptcy of capitalism and the fraudulence of his "war on terror."

Yes, Poindexter's travesty was shot down quicker than Seabiscuit out of the starting gate, but this shows the character and mentality of not only Poindexter but the man who chose him to run the Pentagon's espionage program--Bush. Think about the 3,000 September 11 victims, and then think hard about what Bush's stooge proposed: a ruse where rich speculators and investors would profit from anonymous bets on future terrorist attacks.

The futures terror market was the second gem to come from the deranged mind of Poindexter--the first was the Orwellian "Total Information Awareness" which would have snooped on millions of Americans and stored intimate details of their lives into an electronic database. Congress promised to monitor this spying and safeguard the rights of Americans. Does anyone with a brain, eyes and ears believe them? Do you trust them? Those millionaire scoundrels with guaranteed lifetime pensions and health insurance who are aiming to dismantle Social Security and Medicare?

The most bizarre aspect of the futures terrorist market scheme is that it illuminates what the capitalist media has swept under the rug--the suspicious insider trading involving speculation of the stock prices of United Airlines, American Airlines, and every insurance company impacted by September 11. In the days before the terrorist attacks, an astronomical amount of bets were placed that the value of these companies' stocks would go down as opposed to going up.

August 6, 2003--COSMOS LEFT is convinced that the Sept. 11 insider trading scandal is one of the powderkegs waiting to explode all over Washington. Poindexter's scheme spotlights governmental complicity in September 11, like the fact that Buzzy Krongard, currently the No. 3 man at the CIA, used to run AB Brown, the bank where most of the put options involving United and American were placed.

Poindexter's futures terror market idea is not so much an indication of the US ruling class's desperation and stupidity--it is further confirmation that there capitalist government is an illegitimate fraud and a mortal threat to the people of this country. As the Declaration of Independence proclaims, when it gets to that point, it is the "duty of the people to destroy or abolish that government."

Therefore the solution is a little deeper than electing Howard Dean or any other so-called "anti-Bush" candidate. More on the Dean candidacy and the Democratic presidential campaign soon.

August 8, 2003--It is clear by now that Bush's execution of Uday and Qusay Hussein on July 22 did not stop the desire of nationalist Iraq is to defend their country against foreign invaders. If anything, the cold blooded murder of those four individuals trapped in that Mosul house has only stiffened the resolve of Iraqi patriots to rid their nation of those who are brutally occupying it.

Whomever was cornered and slaughtered in that Mosul home put up a valiant fight for their lives and their country in a mismatch involving overwhelming odds against them. In that sense they died heroes--who will not only inspire oppressed Arabs and Muslims but the oppressed and exploited everywhere.

Four Iraqis--three men and a 14-year-old, armed only with AK-47s, fought off for SIX hours a far superior force of 200 US soldiers in dozens of aircraft and vehicles using rockets, automatic weapons, rocket propelled grenades and TOW missiles. There exists skepticism over who was killed that day, because initial accounts reported bodies burned beyond recognition and the "touching up" of the bodies purported to be Hussein's sons performed by the Pentagon for the photographs.

This was no wartime battle--it was a gangland slaying ordered by the world's capitalist don--Bush--against a couple of two-bit soldiers who were the sons of a two-bit capo. There was a conscious cold-blooded decision by Bush and Rumsfeld to murder the sons rather than take them alive. Alive they would be a threat to Bush, for they could provide all the sordid details of how Washington supplied Iraq with chemical and biological weapons and instructed them to kill as many Iranians as possible with them.

"DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES."

Ask David Kelly.

The decision to "take out" Oday and Qusay is also further confirmation that Bush's WMD pretext is a complete fraud. If Washington cared about WMD it would surely want the sons alive, since they were in charge of Iraq's WMD program.

The US rulers also thought that killing Hussein's sons would boost the badly shattered morale of US soldiers, whose grumbling was growing louder and more embarrassing. The US high command may also have deluded themselves into thinking that killing the sons would reduce the number of guerrilla attacks on American forces.

Let's get one thing straight--the Iraqi resistance we are seeing is more than "Saddam loyalists," "Baath Party remnants," and terrorists. The guerrilla warfare being waged by Iraqis is not terrorism. It is legitimate armed resistance by an indigenous people against a hostile, murderous foreign occupying army that invaded their country illegally. The Iraqis have a right to fight to take their country back. Iraq belongs to them.

The US has brought disaster to the people of Iraq. Their economy is in a shambles; their infrastructure is severely damaged; their resources are being plundered in preparation for privatization and control by US capitalists; their museums looted; their soil contaminated with depleted uranium; their culture and religious customs are being desecrated; their women and children are being dragged from their homes in terror.

Washington, LEAVE THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ ALONE!

The only way to "support the troops" is to demand that Washington withdraw them unconditionally and immediately.

Under Bush's orders US soldiers are acting like thugs and looking exactly like Sharon's Israel Defense Forces. Today US snipers murdered two Iraqis in Baghdad for allegedly selling weapons. That makes them armed combatants in the Pentagon's gangster minds. US soldiers are killing innocent civilians all over Iraq, especially Tikrit, Baghdad and Falluja.

Washington keeps changing its tune on the disaster it has created in Iraq. First it was Uday and Qusay. If they could only get the Hussein boys, the guerrilla attacks would stop, for they were ordering them. But the killings of US soldiers continued. Then the key is getting Saddam Hussein. Once he's gone, the attacks on the American "liberators" will cease, according to the war maniacs in Washington. So the Pentagon intensified the storm trooper raids on Iraqi homes, looking for "Saddam loyalists" who will provide tips as to Hussein's whereabouts.

The American capitalist media did its part to brainwash the American people into thinking that getting Hussein was the key to ending the war that supposedly ended on May 1, according to Napoleon Bonehead on the USS Lincoln. The Pentagon's cable TV networks led the way with "Target Saddam" constantly plastered across the screen.

Only now the US brass is changing its tune again. They're not after Hussein with these raids, they're after the second tier chain of command ordering the guerrilla attacks on American soldiers. The result has been an increase in those storm trooper raids on Iraqi homes by US soldiers, just as Israeli soldiers are terrorizing Palestinians with raids on their homes, and just as New York City cops are breaking into Harlem apartments and scare a woman to death.

This kind of tactic is not a very smart way to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. It does ensure a growing hatred, resentment, and desire for revenge against American soldiers.

It's almost humorous listening to these Pentagon idiots whine about alleged bounties on American forces by Saddam loyalists, and how they state with a straight face that the bounties prove how desperate the pro-Saddam forces are. Meanwhile don Bush is floating $25 million bounties from Afghanistan to Iraq trying to nab Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, a measure of how desperate and demented the US rulers are, led by their intellectually challenged, Top Gun, Napoleon Bonehead commander in thief.

The Americans will likely corner and murder Saddam Hussein, as they apparently did to his two sons. But if they really think killing Hussein will liquidate the Iraqi resistance, they're as demented and deluded as they seem. Bush and Rumsfeld have transformed the hated despot into a nationalist hero, a symbol of the Iraqi people's resistance and desire for national liberation and sovereignty.

On a television news segment tonight, a young man from Tikrit explained the situation succinctly: "Saddam is here. Saddam is everywhere."

As in "I'm Spartacus." "I'm Spartacus."

As in a national liberation struggle. Bush and Rumsfeld have succeeded in transforming Hussein into a symbol of Iraqi nationalism. They can cut off the head of Hussein but the body of Iraqi nationalism will survive and make the imperialists play a heavy price. US imperialism has lost the war politically; COSMOS LEFT said this in April and nothing has happened to change that.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld continue to earn the well deserved hatred of the Iraqi people by killing their children, desecrating their land, culture and religion. The Iraqis will continue to fight back. And it is not terrorism. Terrorism is what the US is doing when it assassinates people in the street. People in the country the US illegally attacked and occupies.

Bush and his apologists slander the entire Iraqi people by calling attacks on US soldiers the work of terrorists. This attempt to link Iraqi patriots with the September 11 terrorists is despicable propaganda crudely aimed at hoodwinking Americans that they should support Bush's war on Iraq.

Washington is also slandering any Arab or Muslim who comes to Iraq to help the Iraqis defend their national dignity and honor. They are not terrorists. They are part of an internationalist brigade to fight a brutal colonial army that illegally invaded a sovereign, defenseless nation. They are heroes, not terrorists. They are in the t radition of the internationalist brigades who joined the Spanish Republicans' fight against Franco's Fascists.

Similar internationalist brigades should be organized and sent to Palestine to defend Palestinians against the terror of the racist, apartheid, Zionist regime in Tel Aviv.

Speaking of Israel, COSMOS LEFT is convinced Tel Aviv is the "foreign government" Senator Bob Graham
is talking about which was involved in the September 11 attacks. This whole 28 page redaction of Bush's phony September 11 commission whitewash is a diversion from Israel's links to 911. In addition to demanding an immediate end to all US aid to Israel, and Israel's immediate withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, we should demand that all US government files on Israeli intelligence's knowledge and possible complicity in September 11 should be declassified at once.

August 11, 2003--There have been enough disturbing reports about the Israeli art student spy rings, deportation of Israeli spies, Israel-owned Odigo employees getting WTC warnings hours before the attacks, the history of Israelis posing as Arabs and committing terrorist acts, the fake Al Qaeda cells in the West Bank, the sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967, the Lavon incident, the King David Hotel bombing, Fox News reporter Carl Cameron's report that all US intelligence files concerning Israeli knowledge of 911 is classified.

Release all CIA, FBI, NSA, and DOD files!

Bush apologists are so desperate they're reduced to whimpering that Bush was only following the same intelligence and same regime change policy that Clinton pursued when he bombed Iraq throughout the 90s and enforced harsh economic sanctions against the Iraqi people.

Exactly. Which only confirms what the World Socialist Web Site, the Militant, COSMOS LEFT, and many others have been saying all along: US imperialism is a bipartisan policy. There are no fundamental foreign policy differences between the two major capitalist parties in Washington. Clinton lied about WMD, Bush lied even more about WMD, and the next capitalist president will lie too.

NO MORE LIES!

That's why working people need to break from this two party shell game and form a mass socialist party that fights for a vastly different foreign policy than Bush, Kerry, Dean, or Lieberman's, which all support US imperialism's wars and strong support for the most murderous rogue state in the Middle East--Israel.

A socialist workers government in the US would abolish the war budget, unilaterally disarm all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, immediately end all military, economic and political support to Israel and demand they withdraw from the Occupied Territories, cease all military actions and threats against Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, abolish all settlements, release all political prisoners, grant full right of return to all Palestinian refugees, tear down all walls and fences, end all checkpoints, and return East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

In the face of the WMD embarrassment and scandals, Bush supporters have also been reduced to squirming like rats while squeaking a different tune: "Uh, it wasn't the actual weapons, it was the weapons programs that we ALL know Saddam possessed, and he gassed his own people..."

No, Bush and Powell and Cheney and the rest of the war criminals swore that Hussein had weapons deliverable NOW, or 6 months, or 45 minutes according to Blair. We all know about the PROGRAMS that that the US, Britain and France helped build in the 80s; we all know how the Reagan/Bush crowd helped Hussein get chemical and biological weapons so he could kill as many Iranians as possible.

There are no WMD left in Iraq. They had been destroyed by the first Gulf war and by the UN inspectors for 8 years. But that's not even the issue. COSMOS LEFT opposed the UN inspections and economic sanctions that violated Iraq's sovereignty and killed over a million of its people, many of them children.

The US has no moral right to order any sovereign government to unilaterally disarm any weapons it may possess. As long as Washington has chemical, biological, nuclear, or any other weapon systems, and given the fact it is the only government to incinerate hundreds of thousands with atomic bombs, has used biological and chemical weapons from Vietnam to the Balkans to Afghanistan to Iraq, has gassed its own people in Waco, Texas and exposed its own soldiers to nuclear and chemical contamination, then any nation on this planet has the right to defend itself by any means necessary and has the right to tell the US to go to hell.

Months ago COSMOS LEFT predicted Bush would try planting WMD in Iraq. Recently there was a disturbing report on What Really Happened that Special Ops did try to plant WMD, but the plan was foiled when they came under friendly fire. The CIA is one again being blamed for "faulty intelligence."

Look for the CIA to come out swinging against the White House in the coming months.

July 17-23, 2003--The growing divisions in ruling class circles over Bush and the Iraq war--fueled by the WMD scandal and Bush's State of the Union speech lie--are a good sign for the working class. Many capitalist rulers are having doubts that Bush's unilateralist and reckless foreign policy will end up harming US imperialism's long-term interests. They're worried that Bush's lies on Iraq will hurt their ability to wage war on workers in other nations around the world, like Iran, North Korea, even Cuba. They fear that Bush will provoke social and political explosions that may threaten to get out of their control, turmoil that Howard Dean, Al Sharpton, and Dennis Kucinich will not be able to contain.

Any time you hear CIA and State Department veterans like Greg Thielmann, Joseph Wilson, and Ray McGovern publicly accuse a president of lying to the American people to go to war, that president--and the exploiting rich he represents--have major political problems. Even the gutless Democrats are starting to make some noise. When they talk about  Bush damaging long term US interests, they're concerned that Bush's lies will jeopardize public support for future interventions by US imperialism, and they are coming.

Bush's decline and unraveling seem to be accelerating with each day's embarrassing revelations that he lied through his teeth over Iraq. Bush lies every time he opens his mouth. And with each lie, his nose grows longer and the hole he's digging gets bigger.

This week, with Kofi Annan at his side, Bush told the world that "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." That's a lie. Hussein let the inspectors comb the entire country with full access everywhere and they found nothing. It was Bush and Blair who cut the inspections short in order to invade Iraq.

At the press conference with Blair, Bush repeated the lie that Hussein was at the center of the international terrorist network, and that removing him was an integral part of Bush's "war on terror." That's another lie. Bush has yet to produce a shred of evidence connecting Hussein to Al Qaeda, bin Laden, or terrorism. It was the CIA that sponsored bin Laden and others who would form "Al Qaeda," which is nothing but a CIA-created network of false flags and double agents.

Bush lied when he recently said weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, when he meant the two hydrogen trucks that the British sold Iraq in 1987. Bush lied about the pilotless drones capable of launching biological weapons in the US; he lied about the International Atomic Energy Association report that didn't exist; he lied about the aluminum tubes; he lied about the Niger yellowcake uranium.

But working people can't be content to just sit back and revel in this scumbag's nosedive. We've got to organize ourselves politically, which means quitting this lazy game of waiting for some Democrat to save the day. If things get bad enough, Bush will allow or stage another terrorist attack in the US in order to justify an even broader assault on our rights, including the imposition of martial law and the suspension of 2004 elections.

The elections won't matter anyway, even if they are held. The rulers' "response" to Bush's stealing the fraudulent 2000 election was to turn over vote counting to Republican controlled computer companies like Diebold, which have proprietary rights over the machines that will wipe out all trace of the vote and which can be tampered with easily. Ask Republicans Chuck Hagel, Sonny Perdue, Saxby Chambliss, Norm Coleman, Jim Ryan, and John E. Sununu how they all won miracle last minute come from behind victories in this past election.

As Joseph Stalin once said, "It's not who does the voting, it's who counts the votes that matters." Such is the decayed state of US bourgeois democracy in 2003.

Meanwhile, the bad news keeps on coming for the capitalist rulers and their frat boy sadistic coward masquerading as commander in chief. In addition to the daily deaths of US soldiers and the WMD scandal; India refused to send troops to Iraq to help Washington pacify the country; the Justice Department refused to obey District Court Judge Brinkema's order allowing alleged 20th hijjacker Zacharias Moussaoui to question detained terrorist suspect Ramzi Binalshibh, which may prove Moussaoui's innocence as well as demonstrate embarrassing links between the CIA and Al Qaeda.

Most alarming to the rulers are the growing reports of near insurrectionary language coming from American soldiers in occupied Iraq: "If Donald Rumsfeld were here, I'd ask him for his resignation"; "The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush"; "Well it pretty much makes me lose faith in the Army. I mean, I don't believe anything they tell me. If they told me we were leaving next week, I wouldn't believe them"; and from a sergeant whose job is to maintain morale: "They [the Army] turn around and slap you in the face...kicked in the guts."

These kind of comments have not gone unnoticed among Pentagon brass--who aim to put a muzzle on the whines in the ranks. Already these soldiers are learning all about the "freedoms" they're supposedly fighting for. General John Abizaid, the new commander of the US occupation forces in Iraq, warned on July 16 that any soldier who criticized Rumsfeld would face "possible verbal reprimand or something more stringent."

There you have it. This great democratic army that liberates from tyranny the world forbids its foot soldiers who do the fighting from exercising freedom of speech. Well, we say no. Rank and file soldiers are citizen soldiers and should have the same constitutional rights and civil liberties that all Americans have. They should have the right to speak out against their "leaders" who misled them into hell with a deluge of lies, fabrications, forgeries and deception.

This seething discontent and outspoken criticism of Bush and Rumsfeld is an embryonic glimpse of a glorious future when broad layers of the armed forces are won to a revolutionary working class political perspective. One day--and it can happen rapidly in an explosive framework--soldiers will stop obeying orders from their corrupt and reactionary officers and will instead be reading communist literature.

General Abizaid also made news when he directly contradicted his boss Donald Rumsfeld's June 30th assessment, which claimed Iraq was not "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance."

Abizaid stated on July 16th that Iraqis "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla type campaign. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it. The level of resistance...is getting more organized and it is learning."

So much for the genius Rumsfeld. It'll be most satisfying watching whose downfall is faster and harder--his or Bush's. Both names are dirt among the troops in Iraq.

Tony Blair's downfall will even be quicker, especially after the suspicious death of weapons inspector David Kelly, thought to be the BBC source for the report that London fabricated the lie that Iraq's WMD could reach England in 45 minutes.

Things are getting scary on both sides of the Atlantic for those who dared cross Bush and Blair on this war. Bush just retaliated against Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly revealed he told the White House a year ago that the Niger uranium story was bogus, by having slimy right wing pundit Robert Novak "out" Wilson's wife as a CIA agent! No doubt there is a federal statute prohibiting this kind of leak. That can be added to the growing list of impeachment charges, a subject on the lips of growing numbers of Americans, and not just Democrats. [Visit votetoimpeach.org]

Listen to the shameless media whores still try to cover up for Bush by baiting his Democratic "opponents" to say that Bush "intentionally misled" Americans, in other words, lied. The implication is that Bush is not capable of lying, and that it borders on treason to suggest that he did. Of course, the capitalist media has a self interest in covering up for Bush's deception--since they aided and abetted in the multitude of lies he peddled to justify invading Iraq.

Meanwhile, as they feign shock over the mere suggestion that Bush lied, the lies grow bigger and more deadly every day, an arms inspector is found dead in Britain under suspicious circumstances, and the governments of checks and balances, separation of powers, and parliamentary and representative democracy are shedding their legalistic trappings and revealing they're all about special ops, black bags, false flags, double agents, and murder. As the deceased Kelly said days before his untimely death: "dark actors playing games."

Bush and Blair are looting working people in Britain and America, they're putting British and American soldiers in harm's way and ordering them to be brutal occupiers in order to enrich US capitalists, they lied through their teeth and now they're getting caught red-handed and fingerpointing, scapegoating, and setting up the fall guys.

The "16 words" are just one small example of the broader pattern of lies employed by Bush and Blair to justify their criminal war and occupation. Every argument, every excuse, has been a lie. And the bourgeois media helped Bush and Blair lie. Hundreds of journalists and web sites--COSMOS LEFT included--dissected the major speeches of Bush, Blair and Powell leading up to the war line by line. The capitalist media chose not to employ such critical analysis and opted to do their job--praise the speeches as brilliant, and parrot the line that Hussein was a madman who threatened the Middle East and the US.

This is what COSMOS LEFT said 6 months ago concerning Bush's 16 words ["The British government has learned that Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"]:

"This is a recycled story that dates way back to 1981-82, right when the US was starting to back Baghdad for doing Washington's dirty work in fighting the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah. Iraq failed in its attempt to import yellowcake (unrefined uranium from Niger). The US and Britain have never provided any more information or evidence about this. It means nothing now anyway."[ "A REPLY TO BUSH'S STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH," February 2-9, 2003]

Well, the evidence still amounts to nothing, but Bush's slimy attempt to lay the bogus evidence at the feet of British intelligence may yet bring him down.

So someone forged documents based on Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger and other African nations in the early 80's, when Washington was beginning to support Iraq's attempts to build biological, chemical and nuclear programs in order to help the US crush the Iranian revolution. The prime suspects for the forgeries included British intelligence, Israeli intelligence, or Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, specifically, the embezzler Chalabi, Rumsfeld and Cheney's puppet who heads the Iraqi National Congress.

Cheney is behind much of this of course. It is no surprise that his secret energy papers released last week by the Judicial Watch/Sierra Club lawsuit included detailed maps of Iraqi oil fields. Many are aware of the juicy development contracts handed to Halliburton after the recent war, but few know that Halliburton reaped huge profits from doing business with Hussein throughout the '90s, when sanctions were strangling the Iraqi people and killing hundreds of thousands of them.

Of course the 16 words describing the nonexistent uranium sales were not the only lie told by Bush to terrorize Americans into backing the war. Bush's supporters are trying to trivialize and minimize this lie in order to deflect attention from the entire package of lies peddled to win support for this war.

Every charge Bush made about chemical weapons was a lie. Every claim Cheney made about nuclear weapons was a lie. Every claim Powell made about biological weapons was a lie. Every connection Wolfowitz and Woolsey made to bin Laden and Al Qaeda was a lie. Every slander from the mouth of the butcher Sharon against Palestinians is a lie, too.

The same script of lies are being peddled to justify invading Iran and North Korea. Iran harbors terrorists; Iran is terrorist; Iran threatens the world with weapons of mass destruction; Iran is enriching uranium to make nuclear bombs.

This is all bullshit, as it was with Iraq. Washington has hated the Iranian people since they overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979. That's why the US backed Hussein in his war with Iran, why it sold him biological and chemical weapons and helped him kill as many Iranians as possible.

The US wants to invade Iran in order to impose a puppet protectorate regime, just as it's trying to do in Iraq. A compliant regime that will let US corporations and banks plunder the resources and labor of Iran, which is rich in both. Establishing protectorates in Iraq and Iran will make it easier for US imperialism to best its rivals and dominate the world.

Iran's intelligence agency did not organize a coup in the US and overthrow a legally elected government, as the CIA did to Iran in 1953. Iran did not impose a brutal dictator on the people of the United States, as the US did to Iranians for 26 years. Iran did not attempt to take over the natural resources of the United States, as Washington has done to Iran with the oil in its ground.

It's like this: the 1979 Iranian revolution got in the way of US imperialism's control of oil-rich and strategically vital Iran. The US wants it back. The corrupt capitalist government in Iran is not reliable enough for Washington's taste, and the masses are still a factor, especially as they fight for their rights and economic justice.

They must be crushed in Washington's eyes. That's why Bush is itching to invade Iran after militarily conquering Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a reckless and adventurist policy, particularly since neither country is stabilized with resistance crushed, but that's how US imperialism is driven to act when capitalism is in the kind of crisis it's in today.

Washington is even more pissed at the North Korean masses, who went further than the Iranian working class and overturned capitalism to establish a workers state in the northern part of Korea. Did North Korea invade the United States and divide us into North and South? Did North Korea send hundreds of thousands of troops to the US and kill millions of Americans? Did North Korea place nuclear weapons of US soil? Did North Korea keep tens of thousands of troops in the US and forcibly prevented the reunification of America?

In the process of demonizing North Korean leader Kim into the next lunatic dictator who must be deposed, the US media has been lying about Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program and the nature of the 1994 agreement between Washington and Pyongyang involving nuclear reactors and oil shipments. The US reneged on its agreement to supply oil shipments to North Korea, and refused to sign a nonaggression pact promising not to attack North Korea militarily. Washington refuses, and, given its track record of invading North Korea, killing millions of its citizens, and occupying the Korean peninsula for another 50 years, North Korea has every right to defend itself by any means necessary against US aggression.

Besides, the record shows that these days Washington attacks weak, defenseless countries lacking nuclear and other deadly weapons capabilities. If a nation like N. Korea or Cuba can defend itself and inflict substantial casualties on US forces, Washington thinks twice about attacking, because, contrary to the Bushes, Rumsfeld, and SWP leader Jack Barnes, US imperialism IS still plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome--because it has yet to be definitively tested.

And I'm getting a little tired of the bourgeois media's propaganda campaign of demonizing North Korean leader Kim Jong II into some kind of deranged lunatic who threatens regional and world peace. It's not Kim who claims God has spoken to him directly and ordered him to wage war against Afganistan and Iraq. It's not Kim whose deployment of weapons of mass destruction, uranium shells and cluster bombs have killed tens of thousands of civilians in two illegal wars against two defenseless nations.

It's George Bush who is the lunatic, the demented Caesar, the world's worst leader with weapons of mass destruction who, along with Britain's Tony Blair, is guilty of war crimes.

The scandal surrounding US and British imperialism's war crimes in Iraq is getting more sordid every day. These crimes were too big for the perpetrators to get away with unscathed. Get the war crimes tribunals ready.

Get Them Out of There! (AP-Wally Santana)

July 7-9, 2003--The bloody occupation and guerrilla resistance predicted on these pages and elsewhere have come to pass in Iraq with a vengeance. Bush's "liberation" of Iraq has turned into a disaster. His "victory" may yet turn into this Napoleon Bonehead's Waterloo. Attacks on US soldiers are escalating, as are the dead and wounded. No weapons of mass destruction have been found. Nor will they be--because they didn't exist after the early 90s. If any weapons are found, they will have been planted by the Pentagon--and all clear thinking people on this planet will know it.

Bush, Blair and their accomplices lied through their teeth about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. They used fabricated, plagiarized, 12-year-old dossiers; they pressured their intelligence agencies to soup up and doctor the evidence to justify the decision they'd already made; they suppressed information that undermined their contention that Hussein had WMDs and was linked to Al Qaeda and September 11. The latest embarrassing revelation comes from Joseph C. Wilson, a former ambassador who now says he told Bush last year that Iraq never tried to buy uranium from Niger, which didn't stop Bush from stating that Iraq did try in his State of the Union speech. Today the White House was forced to admit that Bush was wrong to include that information in the speech. In other words, they admitted that Bush lied.

They all lied--and thousands have died--with no end in sight. They can try to point fingers, shift the blame, engage in revisionism by now claiming the reason for war wasn't really the WMDs, it was liberating Iraqis from the evil dictator Hussein. But they're not going to get away with that. Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld all guaranteed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and would use them as soon as they could. The government and its media waged a relentless campaign of psychological warfare against the American people, bombarding them with propaganda and lies that Hussein represented an imminent threat to Americans' security. Rumsfeld guaranteed that Hussein was hiding weapons in Tikrit. "We know where they are," he lied arrogantly.

This scandal is blowing up in Blair's face as the evidence is proving this beyond any doubt. Due to a completely different relationship of class forces in the US, including the absence of a labor party, plus the fact that 911 occurred in the US and not Britain, Bush is not feeling the political heat engulfing Blair.

But as the American death toll rises, there are signs that the Teflon around Bush may be eroding. It's not just the polls showing declines in Bush's overall approval ratings and reflecting doubts that he told the truth about Iraq. It's not only the growing criticism in ruling class circles of Bush's "bring them on" comment that invited attacks on US forces. It's deeper than the strong showing by the most openly anti-Bush candidate among the Democratic contenders for the president, Howard Dean.

It's the underlying malaise; the palpable sense of dread, foreboding, insecurity, and powerlessness that permeates the American population. It's the feeling that we've been taken. Had. Snookered. LIED TO. It's the 6.9% unemployment rate, the highest in nine years. It's the attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other social services; it's the budget cuts crippling working people's needs from coast to coast. It's the feeling that wars will never end; that we're more vulnerable to terrorist attacks; that our rights are disappearing; that the power of the corporate State is wringing our necks; that we're under the jackboot of repression, the iron heel of a police state; that we're living in a Matrix world of brainwashing and manipulation; that Orwell's 1984 is here.

This feeling of demoralization is spreading among US soldiers occupying Iraq. They, like the American people, were told that the war was over. That they would be treated as liberators by Iraqis. Instead they're stuck in the hellish fire of the Iraqi summer desert, shot at during broad daylight, fired upon from the shadows of night, facing the seething resentment of the Iraqi people who justifiably hate the presence of foreign invaders defiling their women and traditions.

Reports continue to surface that morale is plummeting among US soldiers in Iraq. They're pissed off and they want to go home. Many are realizing that Bush lied to them; that he sent them into a one-sided slaughter, not a war. They're not happy about the atrocities they committed; about the children's body parts splattered in front of them; about shooting old men and women at checkpoints; about civilians blown to bits by cluster bombs; about the people contaminated by depleted uranium shells.

US forces are also not happy about their looting of palaces and the airport, and how they allowed historic museums to be looted by organized gangs. They're starting to have doubts about the whole thing, including their "commander in chief." Those who don't already know will not be thrilled to learn that this shithead who is so quick to send others into hell went AWOL from his Texas Air Guard unit in 1972 and got away with it because of Daddy's connections.

Many soldiers and their families, along with other Americans, didn't appreciate Bush inviting attacks on US forces in Iraq while he struts his phony macho swagger from a position of well guarded luxury. More and more GIs aren't happy with the house-to-house searches; they don't like busting down doors and seeing the terror they're causing in the faces of Iraqi children; they're not comfortable with abusing and humiliating the people whose country they are invading; they don't like the blindfolding, the hooding, the shackling of Iraqis; they don't like dragging Iraqis from their homes and throwing them in prison camps; they don't like treating human beings like animals. In short, they don't want to be like the Israeli Defense Forces. Many American soldiers already are not happy they've been transformed into hated occupiers by Bush and Rumsfeld.

Soldiers are discovering that they were not ordered to kill and die in hell to protect the US from weapons of mass destruction; that they were not sent to Iraq to liberate its people, because they know the devastation that has been inflicted on the Iraqi people, and they're discovering first hand how much the Iraqis don't want to be occupied by foreign armies.

Slowly, American soldiers are learning that their government lied to them about everything--including Iraq's alleged link to September 11.

Many soldiers already understand that they WERE sent to Iraq so that Bush and the capitalist class he represents could plunder Iraq's resources and be in a stronger position to dominate the world. Along the way, Bush and his capitalist cronies at Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group are fattening themselves off the blood of dead Iraqis AND Americans. Many working people--in uniform and out--are grasping that fact as well.

This discontent in the military will grow as the situation worsens in Iraq, and this discontent will spread into US society, reigniting the antiwar passions unleashed by last year's movement and going even further down the road of independent working class political action.

It's a myth, a lie, that Bush and his policies are popular. The truth is he is loathed and despised by broad layers of working people in the US. It's deeper than the polls, or the recent anti-Bush demonstrations in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia that typically were ignored by the media. Those millions of Americans who marched against a war on Iraq were not some fleeting appirition, and they have not disappeared overnight. The sinking economy, the US casualties in Iraq, the sabotaging of a September 11 inquiry, the weapons of mass destruction scandal, the "bring them on" comment, are causing Americans to have increasing doubts about their president.

There has been an ebbing of mass demonstrations, but we will see their revival eventually. There will also be more working class resistance, as we're seeing with the Tyson meatpackers in Jefferson, Wisconsin. Unfortunately, there will be an energized electoral movement to elect Democrats next year, which WILL derail mass demonstrations and other manifestations of proleterian methods of struggle.

This is the problem with the impeach Bush campaign. US imperialism is not on the march because a reckless cowboy stole the election, or because he is influenced by or has been hijacked by neoconservatives. Bush and the capitalist class he represents go to war because the crisis of world capitalism DRIVES them to try to violently reorganize the world, just as German imperialism tried to do before the first two world interimperialist wars of the 20th century.

US imperialism planned a military conquest of Iraq long before 911; they used the terrorist attacks to frighten the American public to get backing for a colonial war the US capitalists had long anticipated finishing. They need to install a puppet protectorate regime that will let Washington dominate that strategic oil rich region by besting its chief imperialist rivals in Europe and Asia.

The contradictions and crises plaguing world capitalism--long-term decline in profit rates, increased competition for world markets and control of natural resources like oil and diamonds, overproduction, onerous debt, trade deficits, currency clashes and crises, declining fossil fuel resources--these are what fuel the escalating conflicts among the imperialist powers; these are what fuel the next world imperialist war. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the escalating political and economic divisions among the imperialist nations now define world politics. That's what the first gulf war was about; it's what explains Washington's intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Philippines and everywhere else the tentacles of US imperialism reach, as well as the war drive threatening Iran, Liberia, Cuba and beyond.

With no Soviet Union to restrain them, a wing of the US ruling class made a conscious, cold-blooded decision to compensate for their relative economic weakness by unleashing Washington's military supremacy to violently subjugate the world for US capitalists. So they crush the easy victims first--defenseless, impoverished countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, taking care to avoid nations like Cuba and North Korea that can defend themselves.

But first the US rulers needed an "external threat," as Zbigniew Brezsinski put it in his book "The Grand Chessboard"; a "Pearl Harbor type event," as Dick Cheney's Project for a New American Century think tank wrote in 1997, in order to get the American people on board, because dammit, they're just too democratic in spirit to support imperialist aggression abroad without such a catalytic event.

September 11 served the US ruling class well in that regard--as did the capitalist media, which served as a willing conduit for Washington's lies and misinformation surrounding what really happened that day. But the hysteria and fear generated by those terrorist attacks, and the political cover that they gave Bush, cannot last forever. Because Bush and his accomplices in the Democratic Party must keep lying to justify their aggression. They can't come out and say they wage war for big business profits and to exploit workers around the world. They must lie about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. They must say they slaughter civilians for humanitarian reasons. But the imperialists are getting caught in the lies, and they will continue to be exposed as liars and war criminals. And that poses political problems for them.

The same lies Bush told concerning Iraq he is shamelessly repeating about Iran. Iran is building nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction; Iran is a terrorist state; Iran has ties to Al Qaeda; Iran is a threat to Israel and the Middle East.

This is all the same level of bullshit and propaganda that Bush peddled about Iraq. The truth is Washington has wanted to drown the Iranian Revolution in blood since 1979, when the Iranian people toppled the despised US-installed dictator, the Shah, dealing a strategic blow to US capitalism and its desire to dominate that part of the world. In 1953 Washington organized a bloody coup to overthrow the legally elected president, Mossadegh, because he had the audacity to proclaim that Iranian oil belonged to Iran, not foreign oil companies.

Iran is an even bigger prize for US imperialism than Iraq. If Washington can install puppet protectorate regimes in both countries, in addition to the bases it has established in Afghanistan and Central Asia, then US imperialism will be that much stronger than its closests imperialist rivals.

And if you think Bush may send troops to Liberia for humanitarian reasons, you probably believe that weapons of mass destruction HAVE been found in Iraq. Bush will send soldiers to Liberia to catch up to its European rivals. France dispatched troops to Cote d'Ivoire to throw its weight around. Britain's forces are in Sierra Leone in assertion of British imperialism's interests. Washington can't let that go unanswered. It will send its forces to Liberia to deepen Washington's domination of West Africa, long a French stronghold, with an eye toward the lucrative oil fields in the region and throughout the continent. US capitalism has a long history of dominating Liberia. From 1926 to 1951 it was known as the "Firestone colony," a reflection of the country's near total dependence on the US-based rubber processing corporation.

No single imperialist rival--and no coalition of imperialist competitors--can defeat Washington militarily. The only force on the planet that can defeat US imperialism and disarm the capitalist war maniacs is the US working class. And we're not going to do that by getting suckered into impeachment drives or elect Democrats campaigns.

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party; the only disagreements with Bush are tactical in nature. Right now there's a one-sided class war being waged against working people. Workers are disenfranchised in this two party capitalist monopoly. We have no political party and no political program that speaks for us. We need to break from the Democrats and build a socialist party that will fight for a workers and farmers government which will conduct a completely different foreign policy than Bush, Kerry, Lieberman or Dean's.

The crisis facing the international working class is a crisis of leadership. We have to get together and figure out how to defend ourselves against the rapacious capitalist profit drive and the brutal imperialist wars that accompany it. If we don't, capitalism will drag all of us into another world war. We need to figure out what is to be done.

June 7-10, 2003--As the lies of the Bush administration unravel, and the corporate media's role in these lies is laid bare, one conclusion is inescapable: this is a diseased body politic. We need a socialist revolution for our own survival.

Many decent and honorable people--like Ramsey Clark--are calling for Bush's impeachment, and that campaign might still take off as the gravity of Bush's crimes become clearer. But impeachment won't help a diseased body politic. The whole capitalist system and government need to be "impeached." Impeaching an individual isn't enough. Impeach Bush, and you'll get another individual just as willing to serve US imperialism. The two leading Democratic Party presidential candidates--John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman--were as hawkish as Bush on invading Iraq.

By all means, visit the votetoimpeach.org site. There's no question that Ramsey Clark articulates compelling arguments for Bush's impeachment--that by the very rules established in the Constitution, Bush's actions constitute high crimes and misdemeanors meriting impeachment. But that's if you accept the legitimacy of this capitalist government. Impeaching Bush implies that someone else is legitimate instead, which means that the entire system is legitimate--something Marxists will not concede--and shouldn't.

And that's what would happen if the impeachment drive ever takes off. Democratic Party forces, which would inevitably ascend to the leadership of an impeachment campaign, would opportunistically turn the effort into an elect Democrats campaign, with all the resulting disorientation and confusion that would generate.

Revolutionary socialists will have tactical disagreements over whether to participate in an impeachment drive, to give it critical support or abstain, etc., but all sides would certainly intervene vigorously with socialist explanations of the inadequacy of impeachment and the need for a different government.

Now, about those lies. Bush and Blair face a rising crescendo of criticism as the truth comes out that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction. An October 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency report says they had no evidence of WMD; the CIA says they were pressured by the White House to manufacture the evidence; the CIA says they were bullied by Cheney and Libby; reports that British intelligence souped up intelligence documents; ongoing reports of fabrications, forgeries, and plagiarized papers; even testimony by retired US intelligence official Greg Thielmann that Bush distorted intelligence and substituted conjecture for evidence.

The biggest lies have come from the top, and there's no end in sight. Last week Bush flat out said they had found the weapons of mass destruction. This was how it was reported, and at least some Americans believed him. Except it was a lie. No weapons were found. He was talking about those two tractor trailers which the CIA initially claimed produced germs for biowarfare. Now those assertions have been disputed. The trucks were used to make hydrogen for weather balloons. But there were never weapons found. Bush lied.

Oh, admissions from the war criminals were flying this past week. Sharon admitted Israel is occupying Palestinian land. Rumsfeld admitted Iraq's WMD may not be found after all. And then there's Paul Wolfowitz.

First, the US Deputy Defense Secretary either told Vanity Fair that "for bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," or, he told them, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."

Initial reports had the "for bureaucratic reasons" version; after the initial uproar, the Bush camp screamed that the quote was taken out of context, so the new version surfaced, which supposedly absolved Wolfowitz and his accomplices.

But in the face of growing evidence that Washington and London lied through their teeth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one version of Wolfowitz's quote is as damning as the other and says the same thing: everyone agreed that WMD was the reason that would be easiest to sell to the public.

And with the corporate media's help, Bush did brainwash and browbeat enough Americans to believe that Hussein was about to kill them with chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.

The second version is useful to the rulers because they claim it shows WMD was only a "core" reason alongside support for terrorism and Hussein's brutal treatment of the people. But the evidence linking Hussein to Al-Qaeda is as nonexistent as the weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday we learned that the CIA suppressed reports that Al-Qaeda suspects told interrogators that bin Laden had specifically rejected ties to Hussein. And "liberating Iraq's people" was an excuse tacked on after the invasion began.

Now the lies are unraveling. But Bush and Wolfowitz show no signs that they care, as Bush's lie about the two trailers and a second brazen quote from Wolfowitz show. The latest remarks were made by Wolfowitz in a talk to delegates at an Asian security meeting in Singapore. In discussing the different approaches toward Iraq and North Korea regarding military action or diplomacy, Wolfowitz said, "...Look, the primarily difference--to put it a little too simply--between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq."

On June 4, the British newspaper The Guardian originally reported this story, which was based on German sources and running in the German press, with a headline that read "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil." The article quoted Wolfowitz as saying, "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

After a deluge of criticism, mostly from the US, the Guardian pulled the article and posted a retraction, claiming it misconstrued Wolfowitz's comments to imply he said that oil was the major reason for going to war.

The Guardian stated: "He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defense website, 'The...difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.'

"The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed."

In so doing, the Guardian took its place alongside HBO, LA Times, and NY Times and the growing ranks of liberal bourgeois publications cowardly capitulating to the right wing pressure emanating from Washington.

Oh yes, another amended version of what Wolfowitz really said. It's a good bet he uttered what was originally reported. But even allowing that the Defense Department's "official" version is accurate, to the extent Wolfowitz's mumbo jumbo makes any sense, it is still damning.

The Guardian's attempt to make sense out of Wolfowitz's comment is as ludicrous as it is gutless. "The sense is..." That Iraq has all this leverage over the United States? Iraq has been impoverished, pulverized and crippled for over 12 years by harsh US-led economic sanctions. Its sovereignty had been repeatedly violated; its oil industry was in shambles; its people hungry and its children dying; its water poisoned.

As opposed to North Korea, also impoverished and teetering on collapse. One difference Wolfowitz left out--North Korea is well armed and capable of inflicting heavy casualties.

With no oil. Either way you cut it--Iraq was swimming with oil and incapable of defending itself; North Korea has no oil and capable of kicking Bush's ass.

Bullies and punks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are, it was a no-brainer. Which is not to say that North Korea, as well as Iran and Cuba, are not on Bush's hit list.

Wolfowitz's candor is a reflection of the arrogance permeating the Bush administration. We'll say whatever the fuck we want to say, and we'll do whatever the fuck we want to to, because we've got the power, BECAUSE WE CAN.

And until the American working class gets hip to how they're getting hosed, the Bush cabal will continue their plunder and conquest.

But they're getting resistance. Starting with the site of their glorious victory--Iraq.

********************************

Just listen again to the calvacade of lies from the US government:

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." — Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002.

"We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about." — Ari Fleischer, press briefing, April 10, 2003.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Dick Cheney August 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush September 12, 2002

"If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world." Ari Fleischer December 2, 2002

"The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it."
Ari Fleischer December 6, 2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

George W. Bush January 28, 2003

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
Colin Powell February 5, 2003

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
George W. Bush February 8, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
George W. Bush March 17, 2003

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
Ari Fleisher March 21, 2003

"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
Gen. Tommy Franks March 22, 2003

"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."
Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman March 23, 2003

"One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites."
Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark March 22, 2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld March 30, 2003

"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty."
Neocon scholar Robert Kagan April 9, 2003

"We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them."
George W. Bush April 24, 2003

"We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so." George W. Bush May 3, 2003

"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now."
Colin Powell May 4, 2003

But now the rats are singing a different tune:

"We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country."
Donald Rumsfeld May 4, 2003

"I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program."
George W. Bush May 6, 2003

"U.S. officials never expected that 'we were going to open garages and find' weapons of mass destruction."
Condoleeza Rice May 12, 2003

"I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden."
Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne May 13, 2003

"Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found."
Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps May 21, 2003

"Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction."
Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff May 26, 2003

"They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer. "
Donald Rumsfeld May 27, 2003

[Thanks to Active Opposition.com]

May 21, 2003--The ugliness, thuggishness, vindictiveness and sadism of George W. Bush are leaving a legacy of horror and suffering from New York City to Baghdad. Of course, Bush is nothing more than a reflection of the class of exploiters he dutifully represents.

On May 16, 57-year -old Alberta Spruill died of a heart attack after a gang of cops in riot gear burst into her Harlem apartment and set off a concussion grenade. Bloomberg's band of killer Keystone cops, acting on a bum tip from a loser informant, thought they were were busting a drug dealer. Instead, Alberta Spruill is dead. The latest victim of not so friendly fire by US armed forces. Oops, sorry.
Scratch that. As we write, US soldiers have "mistakenly" shot and killed at least three Afghan soldiers in Kabul while they were unloading weapons off a truck.

Innocent lives come and go, but the informant game must go on. Their role in law enforcement is invaluable, you see. So invaluable to the FBI that four Black Birmingham girls had to die in a 1963 church bombing. So invaluable to the FBI that that the agency allowed the first WTC bombing to occur in 1993. So invaluable to the FBI that they allowed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to kill hundreds of people. So important to the FBI that it allowed an innocent man to rot in jail in Boston while the guilty mobster continued to murder.

There's more to George Bush's America than cops terrifying a 57-year-old woman to death. There are children imprisoned at Guantanamo Naval Base; hundreds of Arab Muslims illegally detained; US citizens thrown in the brig with no evidence against them and no lawyers to defend them; families and elderly trampled by mounted police; antiwar demonstrators shot with rubber bullets; a nude John Walker Lindh bound, gagged, and shackled to a cot, blindfolded with duct tape; high school girls humiliating and degrading each other while US soldiers force Iraqi men to strip naked and run through the streets; US troops shooting Iraqi civilians who want them out of their country; Iraqi kids being blown to pieces by cluster bombs; cholera spreading in Iraq; US soldiers encouraging the looting of museums; an American truck driver running over an antiwar protester on a bridge; teachers, actors, and others losing their jobs for opposing Bush and his wars; millions losing their jobs and benefits; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under attack while hands the superrich massive tax breaks that amount to the brazen plundering of the US Treasury.

George Bush's America is violent, boorish, and intolerant of dissent. On May 20, New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was booed off the stage by students at Rockford College, Illinois for daring to present a liberal critique of the US war on Iraq.

It's a good bet that these right wing students, so quick to wave flags and blindly support their "commander in chief," will never have to serve in the armed forces themselves.

According to the NY Daily News, the Times is looking into whether Hedges violated the paper's "ethics policy" with his "blunt" remarks. The Times should choke on the very word "ethics." As Bill Vann explains in his World Socialist Web Site May 13 article, "Journalistic ethics, hypocrisy and war at the New York Times," these ethics guidelines prohibit the paper's reporters from participating in groups that "seek to shape public policy," so that the Times' "reputation for strict neutrality in reporting on politics and government" remains intact.

However, we don't hear the Times "looking into" whether another of its reporters, Judith Miller, is guilty of violating those same ethics guidelines. Miller is an "expert" on "militant Islam" and "biological warfare" from the Middle East Forum, a right-wing Zionist group led by imperialist ideologue Daniel Pipes. For several years Miller has functioned as a shill for US intelligence agencies, dutifully passing along as fact whatever lies the CIA feeds her.

On April 21, Miller authored a piece called "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." On the surface, a way out for the Bush administration as it tries to explain to the world why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Miller attempted to contribute to the propaganda by reporting as fact the notion that Iraq deep-sixed the WMD just before Coalition forces arrived. The only problem with Miller's article is that she offered no substantiation for this claim. Miller did not interview the scientist, she was not allowed to write about him for three days, and what she did write was approved by the military.

On May 10, Miller wrote another pack of lies. This time she claimed that "experts" from the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha had determined that a truck found in northern Iraq was a mobile biological weapons lab, the same lie Sec. of State Powell peddled to the UN back in February. Once again, Miller named no sources and offered no proof.  On the same day, the Washington Post, in a story that did name sources, refuted Miller's baseless assertions. In fact, the Post wrote that the MET Alpha team had given up its search for WMD.

While the Times drives Jayson Blair out of the human race, Miller continues to engage in dishonest reporting. Today's May 21 edition of the Times featured another attempt by Miller to push the same lie: "U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs To Germ Arms." Another sensationalist headline, but the first paragraph reveals Miller's story contains zero proof: "...but they have found neither biological agents nor evidence that the equipment was used to make such arms."

It is Judith Miller who should lose her job for writing politically motivated pieces based on unproven allegations that have served as a pretext for Bush's colonial war of aggression against Iraq.

George Bush's America. After allowing the September 11 attacks to occur on his watch, after he ignored specific multiple warnings that Al Qaeda was about to hijack jets and crash them into the WTC and Pentagon, George Bush vowed a "war on terror" to protect the US from further terrorist attacks. Two wars and tens of thousands of dead civilians later, the US is more vulnerable to terrorism than ever.

August 15-17, 2003--Whatever specifically caused the massive power failure that blacked out much of the US and Canada from Cleveland to Toronto it was NOT a "natural occurrence," as New York's Mayor Bloomberg stupidly proclaimed yesterday. No, this was an accident waiting to happen courtesy of privatization, restructuring, mergers, deregulation and all the other glories of the "free" market. This disaster is incestuously related to the 2001 energy crisis inflicted on California by Enron, Duke, Reliant and other energy corporations, which reap huge profits through buying power plants and cost-cutting, or speculation, Enron's speciality.

Bush exhibited his typically pathetic nonleadership to the crisis. He explained that the blackout showed the nation's power grids needed upgrading because the system was "antiquated," sounding eerily like Jack Nicholson's lawyer George character in Easy Rider.

Bush leaves out the fact that his father signed the deregulation electricity bill that paved the way for the energy catastrophes that have followed. He omits that his crony Ken Lay's Enron played the major role in the deregulation explosion that caused the 2001 California energy shortage and the August 14 blackout. Enron plundered California's treasury, manipulating prices and shortages, literally holding up the state while Bush did nothing. This was done while Lay held extraordinary influence in the Bush White House, dictating Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appointments while holding secret meetings with Cheney the contents of which the vice president refused to reveal, no doubt because they in volved Enron's ripoff of California, its Daebol, India, power plant problems, and the natural gas pipeline in Afghanistan.

Bush was thus an accomplice to his crony Ken Lay's fleecing of California.

Greg Palast accurately reports that Enron's energy deregulation virus somehow spread to Bush ally George Pataki's state, where the governor and his industry-picked utility commissioners deregulated utility prices and let Niagara Mohawk cut costs and underfund its grid system. Then in 2000 they allowed the National Grid of England to buy Niagara Mohawk, fire 800 maintenance workers and pocket a cool $90 million in the getaway.

Niagara Mohawk is one of the leading suspects behind the Blackout of 2003. We're learning that Bush was warned in 2001 by energy industry officials that the nation's power grid was in serious trouble and needed immediate upgrading. Like the specific 911 warnings he received, they went in one ear and out the other. Besides, Bush had other priorities, like spending $100 billion to invade Iraq.

Listening to the initial fingerpointing from power companies and politicians from both nations sounded like the blame game over the Iraq disaster going on among the Defense and State Departments, CIA, the White House and 10 Downing Street. US officials said it began in Canada; Canadian officials claimed lightning struck lines in upstate New York; Mayor Bloomberg blamed a natural occurrence at Niagara Falls; some theorized a fire at a Con Edison power plant; upstate New York blamed downstate New York.

The latest reports claim that mishaps involving several power lines in Ohio set off a chain reaction of automatic shutdowns that cascaded around the Lake Erie Loop up to Canada and back down to New York and New Jersey. Authorities are pinpointing this occurrence on lines operated by First Energy Corporation.

First Energy also owns the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Toledo that almost suffered a China Syndrome-like meltdown 2002 when acid in cooling water almost ate through the six-inch-thick lid of the nuclear reactor. The company faced recent legal and financial problems involving its failure to modernize the plant's equipment, which may explain why one of its alarms didn't function, further exacerbating the crisis.

All of this may be true, but COSMOS LEFT cautions against believing whatever official explanations are offered by the government. Something is disturbingly suspicious about this blackout. Alarms not working; dozens of grids falling like dominoes; mysterious reversals of power flows. And the government, beginning with Bush, was a little too quick to categorically dismiss the possibility that cyber terrorism was the culprit. How did they know so quick?

According to Michael Hirsh and Daniel Klaidman's August 25 Newsweek article, the CIA told senior officials during an emergency conference call at 5:30 p.m. the day of the blackout that they had "put on the radar" the chance that there may have been "some terrorist tampering."

There may have been, but it all depends on what you mean by "terrorist." The National Security Agency, the same outfit that intercepted bin Laden and Al Qaeda's electronic communications before 911, and which destroyed all its files on 911, hired 35 hackers in 1999 to simulate a hacker's attack on the nation's power grid. The results exposed how vulnerable the grids were to hacker sabotage.

The timing of that Microsoft worm virus right before the August 14 blackout is coincidental if not suspicious.

Richard Clarke, the former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure, and Counterterrorism, agrees.

"Anybody who says that the know that happened last night is lying. If it were a cyber-attack, you wouldn't know right away. And you might never know."

Clark's statements directly contradict the assertion by Michehl Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, that "We don't have any indication of blown-up equipment. So we're almost certain that it is not terrorism of any kind."

Since COSMOS LEFT believes that Al Qaeda is a creation and asset of the CIA and the Mossad, it is entirely possible that the August 14 blackout was an "inside" job, brought to you by the same murderous gangsters who brought us September 11.

Bush had the gall to claim that the blackout's emergency response procedures proved that work since the September 11 attacks had paid off. To the contrary, the blackout shows that Bush's Homeland Security is a joke, a fact even Bill O'Reilly was humiliated into admitting. Homeland Security is about spying on Americans and taking away our rights to defend ourselves against government repression. It has nothing to do with making us secure. August 14 proved that.

Bush--and the capitalist class he represents--is a mortal threat to the people of this country and the entire world. The Democrats are no better. They too a party of big business; they supported deregulation, they are beholden to the energy monopolies, and they were on Enron's payroll too. As with health care, communications, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and transportation, energy is too vital to the nation's well being to leave in the hands of pirates. The energy corporations should be forced to open their books for full public review; they should be nationalized and transformed into public utilities democratically controlled by the working people.

This crisis illuminated the chaos and anarchy that characterizes monopoly capitalism. Everywhere we turned we learned that there are no mandatory reliability standards, federally enforced obligations for private utility owners to upgrade and maintain an increasingly fragile power grid.

From the New Deal until 1992 there existed a modicum of federal regulation of the electric industry. A utility company owned the power plant, transmission lines and distribution lines. After Bush Sr. signed that deregulation bill the nation's power grid has been transformed into a Monopoly board for speculators and capitalists. One company owns the power plant, another owns transmission lines, and still another owns the distribution networks. This anarchy enabled criminal speculators like Enron to manipulate energy shortages and loot the entire state of California.

Bush claimed that the blackout was a "wake-up call." Indeed it was still another wake-up call to working people that BOTH political parties are in the hip pockets of greedy capitalists, and that we need to form a working class party that puts safety and social needs before profits.

It was a wake-up call that electricity--like health care--is too vital to society to be run for private profit. Too important to leave in the hands of speculators and profiteers. A national power grid requires SOCIAL PLANNING. It cannot be subject to the not so tender mercies of the free market, which guarantees only plunder and chaos. The entire energy industry should be nationalized and the books of every energy corporation should be opened for public review. The production, transmission and distribution of electricity should be coordinated as part of a national plan.

If it costs $60 billion to modernize the nation's power grids, then we should demand that the government immediately take that money from the war budget and start the upgrading. While we're at it, we should abolish the entire war budget, tax corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, oil companies, banks, insurance companies, war contractors, and pharmaceutical companies to fund a national public works program, provide jobs for all, expand Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and establish a free universal national health insurance program.

Assuming California's October 7 recall election occurs, citizens in that state will have a chance to support such a working class program by voting for either the Socialist Workers Party (www.themilitant.com) or the Socialist Equality Party (www.wsws.org).

August 27-31, 2003--Don't look now, but US politics is moving a few tics to the left. It's not just the polls showing declining support for Bush and the Iraq war, and the soaring campaign of Howard Dean. Nor is it just the California recall election, which if nothing else is proving that Bush's reactionary policies DO NOT have broad political support.

This leftward shift has also been evident in the recent court decisions that reaffirmed affirmative action, abolished sodomy laws, and removed the Ten Commandments from Alabama's courthouse. It was evident in political activist Roger Celero's victory over the government's attempt to deport him. It's at work in the growing revolt among hundreds of municipalities AGAINST the Patriot Act, in rulings by District Court Judge Brinkema that have weakened the Justice Department's prosecution of Zacharias Moussaoui, and in the humiliating defeat of Fox's lawsuit against Al Franken.

And when you hear Norman Podhoretz wailing against the rising tide of leftism, and Bill O'Reilly railing against the oil companies for gouging working people at the gas pumps, something significant is taking place.

All these examples of a leftward shift are occurring in bourgeois politics--capitalist courts, capitalist political campaigns, bourgeois opinion polls, etc. There is no upsurge in working class struggles taking place--though there are important labor fights unfolding, like theTyson meatpackers in Wisconsin and many others around the country involving Latino and Asian workers.

No, the shifts to the left are occurring in ruling class circles, particularly the courts, because historically judges look beyond what's happening now, carefully gauging the trends and projecting what's ahead. Right now some judges are worried that perhaps Bush is going too far, and failing so miserably that he risks generating negative reactions strong enough to spark social explosions that may go beyond what can be constrained with acceptable capitalist boundaries.

SWP leader Jack Barnes is still getting a few things right these days, and he was absolutely correct in explaining how bourgeois judges are more far sighted than capitalist politicians, who are snake-oil salesman always looking at the past.

These more enlightened bourgeois forces sense the growing malaise and discontent among broader layers of the population caused by the lies about Iraq's WMD, the rising US death toll, the increasing chaos and destruction and the sense that Bush has unleashed a catastrophe.

More people are learning how Bush lied about September 11--before, during, and after--even to the point of ordering the EPA to cover up the serious health hazards in downtown Manhattan caused by the World Trade Center destruction.

Thus the lie peddled incessantly by the corporate media that Bush enjoys a broad base of support for his colonialist wars and reactionary domestic policies is coming apart.

By far the chief beneficiary of this anti-Bush sentiment has been former Vermont governor Howard Dean. More than any other Democratic candidate, Dean has successfully capitalized on the intense opposition to Bush that exists not only among Democrats but in the nation overall. He has shrewdly postured himself as the candidate most ardently opposed to George Bush by employing the most militant anti-Bush rhetoric, particularly concerning the Iraq war.

The result so far is that Dean is blowing away his Democratic rivals, especially the ossified and decrepit party hacks like Kerry, Gephardt and Lieberman, all of whom supported Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Dean is serving as a lightning rod for all those opposed to Bush and his reactionary policies. Many of the hundreds of thousands who marched against the Iraq war before it began are rallying to Dean.

And that's exactly how the rulers want. The rulers always need to present a "left" candidate to safely defuse mounting anger and keep it within acceptable bounds. That's Dean's job--to keep opposition to Bush's reactionary antilabor agenda straitjacked to the capitalist two party shell game.

And what is the "antiwar" Dean saying about the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq? That since "we're stuck there...we have to live with it. We have no choice. It's a matter of national security. If we leave and we do n't get democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States."

This is essentially the position of Kerry and Lieberman, who supported Bush from the beginning. Which means that Dean is in fundamental agreement with US imperialism's foreign policy. He supported the first gulf war and Bush's ongoing war against Afghanistan--which means he supports the war crimes Bush is committing there.

A visit to Dean's Web site reveals the candidate sees nothing wrong with US foreign policy prior to his alleged differences with Bush's Iraq war. He claims Bush's Iraq war is a departure from the good old days when Washington's foreign policy was a beacon of light. His only criticism of Bush is that he's not doing a good job of advancing the interests of the US capitalists worldwide. He's not getting the job done.
So the big antiwar candidate actually opposes withdrawing all US troops from Iraq, reasoning that since they're already there, they've got to stay and finish stabilizing and democratizing Iraq.

We are already witnessing the horrifying results of that colonialist effort. And what does the "antiwar" Dean say? Since we're there, we've got to stick it out?
Stick what out? The goal of US imperialism to plunder Iraq and dominate the Middle East and beyond. Dean's and the rest of the Democrats' only disagreements with Bush are over HOW BEST TO ACHIEVE THAT OBJECTIVE. So they quibble over whether to bring in the UN, internationalize the occupation, involve more Iraqis to mask the blatant foreign colonialism occurring, send more troops to subjugate the Iraqi people, etc.

One does not oppose the war by saying we've got to stick it out because we're there, Mr. Dean. Y ou oppose the war by calling for the immediate unconditional withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and the Middle East. NOW!

But Dean is headed in the opposite direction. The antiwar Democrat recently selected Steven Grossman to his campaign fundraising staff. Grossman is the former head of the pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC. Like all capitalist politicians who slavishly support the racist and expanionist Zionist state of Israel, Dean already has Palestinian and Israeli blood on his hands. His policy toward Israel would be indistinguishable from Bush's or Lieberman's.

Domestically Dean is pro-death penalty, supports abolishing welfare as we know it, and as a sound fiscal conservative backs slashing social services to balance budgets on the backs of working people. He underfunded public defense while governor of Vermont and opposed medicial marijuana.

But because Dean has postured himself as THE anti-Bush candidate, he is now the man to beat for the Democratic nomination in 2004, because that's how much hatred for Bush is out there.

If Dean's record and views are not enough to dash his supporters' euphoria and bring them down to earth, they should consider this: the theft of the 2000 election by the Bush cabal was not an aberration; it was a reflection of the degeneration and bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy. In other words, the fix is in. The rulers' reaction to the 2000 debacle was to ban exit polling, abolish the Voter News Service consortium, and turn matters over to electronic vote counting machines that can be easily rigged and wipe out all the evidence without a trace. The capitalist owners of such electronic tabulation companies, Diebold being a prime example, enjoy close ties to the Republican Party.

That's if the Bush cabal even allows elections in 2004. If things are going bad enough, look for another terrorist attack that will give Bush the pretext to declare martial law and postpone the presidential elections.

But assuming elections take place, the rulers have their "left" alternative to Bush in place to hoodwink the public into thinking they actually have a choice. But we've already heard enough from Howard Dean to deduce that his presidency would not be that different from George Bush's. Dean serves the same capitalist class that Bush does. His foreign policy would echo Bush's: war, colonial plunder, a rock -solid alliance with Zionist Israel.

COSMOS LEFT believes that most terrorist incidents taking place in the world today--including the UN headquarters bombing and the Najaf mosque bombing--are the work of the CIA, MI-5 (British intelligence), and the Mossad. That is the true Axis of Evil threatening world peace today. Sooner or later the international working class will have to organize politically to defeat this US/Israeli/British Axis. FOR OUR OWN SURVIVAL.

It'll take a lot more than voting for Howard Dean. We have to organize independently of the capitalist war parties and build a mass socialist movement whose goal is the abolition of capitalism and the profit drive that condemns our world to wars, depression and fascism.

Instead of supporting these capitalist politicians, we'd be better off building mass demonstrations against Bush's wars and repression like the upcoming October 25 national actions. We should raise these demands on Bush, Dean, and every capitalist politician: "End the Occupation of Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!"

Meanwhile, voters in California should vote for either the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist Equality Party--the only two working class alternatives on the ballot October 7.

September 2003--He's no Pinocchio, this George Bush. As Bush tells bigger and bigger lies, nothing about him grows bigger. Instead, with each lie, Bush shrinks in stature. As I watched him squirming and squinting during his Sept. 7 speech to the nation on Iraq, I was struck by the incredible smallness of the smirking coward in the White House.

Bush looked a lot more shaken than May 1 when he pompously strutted on the USS Lincoln to proclaim combat operations in Iraq were over. This time he told Americans to fork over $87 billion to bolster the conquest of Iraq and get ready for more deaths and sacrifice. Meanwhile he just issued rules telling hospitals not to treat poor people in the emergency room. This is the stuff of revolutions.

Bush's father once said if the people knew what he was really doing, they would string him up by his heels. That applies double to his wretched son. Right now Bush is the most despised individual in the world today. When the American working class realizes the magnitude of the crimes Bush has committed against them and all of humanity, his day of reckoning will come.

The myth of Bush's popularity and widespread support for Bush's policies is shattering. The reason he wasn't at Ground Zero on September 11 is that his advisers feared the large protests that would have greeted him. They will instead see huge demonstrations against US imperialism's wars and support for Israel on September 28 and October 25.

A humiliated and chastened Bush is reduced to publicly shaking down nations he once scorned for trying to stop him from further pulverizing Iraq and setting the Middle East ablaze. Lacking shame, the arrogant and clueless Bush has the gall to expect the rest of the world to clean up the mess he's inflicting on the Iraqi people.

Bush desperately tries to deflect attention away from the catastrophe he's creating in Iraq by repeating the lie that Iraq is connected to Sept. 11, that the invasion is part of the broader "war on terrorism"; that by conquering Iraq we are getting back at those behind 911.

The bad news is that with the complicity of the corporate media, Bush has convinced 70% of Americans that Hussein was behind the 911 attacks. The good news is that Bush's approval ratings are plummeting, and there's more talk cropping up in the media about the stench surrounding Sept. 11, the overwhelming evidence that points to some level of governmental complicity in the attacks, Bush's bizarre behavior that morning, the lack of air defenses, Bush's connections to the bin Laden family, Saudi Arabia and oil, the fact that Bush blocked any honest investigation into September 11, sabotages the phony investigation he was forced to allow, continues to classify what he was told about the coming attacks at that August 6, 2001CIA briefing.

There's a growing sense that Bush doesn't represent working people; that he's a stooge for big business. Malaise grows over the tanking economy and millions of lost jobs; over the fact that something's very wrong about Sept. 11; over the wars without end; over the fact that after two wars and erosion of our civil liberties the US is more vulnerable than ever to another massive terrorist attack; over the rising US death toll in Iraq; over the Road Map that's become a highway to hell in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Bush and Sharon, doing their best to imitate Saruman and Sauron, inflicting death and destruction from their Twin Towers of Evil, competing over who has more blood on their hands as they try to shore up their doomed empires.

Yesterday (Sept. 11, 2003) US soldiers mistakenly killed 8 Iraqi policeman, at least 2 others were killed and 7 wounded in a fierce gun battle with Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah; more were wounded after separate attacks on US convoys west of Baghdad and in Northern Iraq.

The friendly fire killing of 8 Iraqi cops capsulizes Bush's Iraq catastrophe. This is not exactly the way to recruit Iraqis to the campaign to give an Iraqi face to Washington's occupation.

Meanwhile, Israel threatens to expel or murder PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have responded with militant demonstrations in Gaza and outside Arafat's besieged compound in the occupied West Bank.

Sharon targets Arafat out of desperation, because despite all of the horror and death Israel has caused the Palestinians in its futile attempt to crush their national liberation resistance, the Palestinians have refused to buckle and continue to fight back. Arafat's survival is a reflection of the Palestinian nation's refusal to die. In killing Arafat, Tel Aviv wants to kill the nation of Palestine. But it will not die, even when Arafat does.

The people of the US should demand that Washington end all ties to Israel, stop all financial, military and political support, and open all intelligence files concerning Israeli spy rings in the US and Mossad's connection to September 11.

Speaking of state-sponsored terrorism, Washington is openly warning of another horrifying terrorist attack on US soil. The reappearance of another cobbled together video of bin Laden, combined with Washington's moves on preparation for a smallpox attack, do not bode well. Believe these bastards--there WILL be another terrorist attack in the US. The capitalist gang in power will either sponsor it, allow it to happen, or are so criminally incompetent that it will happen anyway. Either way, this government has to go, for our own survival. We need to fight for a workers and farmers government that will disarm the Pentagon, abolish the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, Homeland Security and every other imperialist outfit that threatens humanity.

And while we're on the subject of Mossad-sponsored terrorism, COSMOS LEFT has a sneaking suspicion that there's more to the recent bizarre case of the pizza delivery man who blew himself up in Erie, Pennsylvania, than meets the eye. Something is telling me that this was a test case, a trial run, for the suicide bombings that are coming to the US that will be made to appear are the work of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

************************

One lesson emerged from the recent Democratic presidential debate that was co-sponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus--THE DEMOCRATS ARE NO ALTERNATIVE TO BUSH. Whatever the tactical differences over pace and timing, they support the goals of US imperialism in Iraq and are rock solid in their commitment to Zionist Israel.

Every one of them support US imperialism's goals in conquering Iraq. They criticize Bush only for not achieving those goals of dominating Iraq and plunder its resources. They attack him for failing to secure international support and UN participation, and for damaging US credibility with his unilateralist approach.

Every Democratic contender except Dennis Kucinich said they'd approve Bush's request for $87 billion for the Iraq occupation. They hemmed, they hawed, they prefaced each cowardly capitulation with the obligatory, "I'll do whatever it takes to support our troops already in Iraq." Translation: we support US capitalism's goals of conquering Iraq for political domination and economic profit, but we're too gutless to say that, so we'll hide behind the troops already put in harm's way by Washington, claiming we're doing it for them.

The one candidate who forthrightly opposed Bush's request for $87 billion--Kucinich--calls for the UN to internationalize the occupation of Iraq, thus relieving Washington of shouldering the burden alone. Not one Democratic candidate supports the national sovereignty of the Iraqi people.

While we should vote for those socialist parties offering genuine working class programs, we need to recognize that politics is more than participating in an undemocratic electoral process. Since America's bourgeois democratic elections have been exposed as fraudulent, we're better off building mass demonstrations like the upcoming September 28 and October 25 actions against Washington's wars and support for Israel.

Bush the Puny may be a demented Caesar, but he's still extremely dangerous. The best way to fight him is by marching in the streets AND building a mass socialist party that represents the working class and not corporate profits.

Bush the Puny is discovering that the world is not bowing before his feet. In addition to his decline in the polls; the rejection of his right wing federal judicial nominee Estrada; the defeat of his proposal to end overtime for millionsof workers; the looming return of the international mass movement opposed to his policies; the unfolding disaster he has wrought in Iraq and the resistance to his occupation that won't go away; the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and even Bush's stooge David Kay has come up empty-handed; the highway to hell that his Road Map for Peace has delivered in the Middle East; the latest defeat handed the Justice Department by Judge Brinkema in the Moussaoui case; and now Bush the Puny really has problems when one of its few governmental allies in the world--Poland--does not enjoy public support for sending Polish troops to Iraq, according to a Sept. 10 NY Times report by Ian Fisher.

"People don't understand whywe should mess in other people's countries," says Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, director a Polish research organization. "The term international solidarity is hard to explain, especially when you express it in terms of army and occupation."

Amen, brother.

Zdzislaw Nagder, former activist in the Solidarity union movement, put it this way: "We should not hide behind a general euphemism about our stabilizing role. At this point we are conceived as paid subcontractors of occupiers."

And that is an accurate conception.

Card tells Bush of 2nd WTC crash; Top Gun did nothing

May 3-7, 2003--No one has benefited more politically from September 11 than George Bush. It has given him the cover to launch two wars of aggression and colonial conquest and lay the scaffolding for a police state in the US. Indeed, Bush plans to cynically and shameless exploit September 11 through the next election, when he will time his campaign kick-off to coincide with the September 11 memorials.

Yet on one level the spectre of 911 haunts George Bush. The attacks are in the news in a way that poses problems for Bush. The government's prosecution of Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker arrested in Minnesota weeks before 911 for his suspicious behavior at a flight school, is not going the way Washington hoped.

Moussaoui, now on trial for conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism on September 11, was detained on August 16, 2001, after a Minnesota flight school alerted the FBI of his suspicious behavior while training there, like only wanting to learn how to steer the jet, not how to take off or land. After a half dozen phone calls, the FBI sent agents who were so clueless that the flight school instructor had to practically scream at them that "a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb."

While Moussaoui was jailed by the INS for violating his visa, Minnesota FBI agents sought authorization for a FISA warrant to search his computer. Despite warnings from French intelligence that Moussaoui was connected to Al Qaeda and bin Laden, and that Moussaoui had trained at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, the same facility where Abdul Hakim Murad had trained to prepare for a suicide hijack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the FBI refused to allow a search of Moussaoui's computer hard drive.

Immediately after September 11, FBI boss Robert Mueller categorically denied the FBI had any indication that terrorists might hijack jets and use them as flying bombs. This, we've learned, was a lie. The FBI had been aware that Al Qaeda had been training at flight schools since 1996. FBI agents questioned officials from two flight schools about several Arab pilots who trained there--the same schools attended by Murad, who had told Philippine and US intelligence about plants to crash a jet into the Langley CIA building at Ramzi Yousef's trial for the first WTC bombing.

In 1998, the FBI interrogated officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate who allegedly was a bin Laden pilot.

This FBI awareness of flight school training for suicide hijackings continued all the way until September 11. The Phoenix memo by an FBI agent warned about what was coming. A Minneapolis FBI supervisor actually told Washington that suspicious student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui wanted to fly a jet into the WTC. Two weeks before 911, FBI agent Robert Wright warned headquarters that "someday, someone will die," after the Bureau prevented him from going after someone who would be one of the hijackers.

All of which means Mueller, Bush's FBI choice, lied through his teeth when he claimed the FBI knew nothing about flight schools and skyjackings, just as Condoleeza Rice lied when she stated the hijacking warnings they had received concerned traditional hijackings and not suicide hijackings. Mueller played a key role in covering up Bush Sr.'s ties to the BCCI scandal in 1991. Fine public servant, that Robert Mueller. It's an honor for George W. to work with him.

In his pretrial motions, Moussaoui acknowledged he is an Al Qaeda loyalist but denies the government's charge that he was a September 11 co-conspirator. In an attempt to prove his innocence, Moussaoui wants to question two leading Al Qaeda figures in US custody--Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected coordinator of the September 11 attacks, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, allegedly the mastermind of 911.

Moussaoui argues that bin al-Shibh and Mohammed will corroborate his defense that he was not a September 11 co-conspirator. The government has refused these legitimate requests, claiming they would compromise national security. Sorry, that information is classified.

The pretrial proceedings in this case have been marked by governmental secrecy, secret court hearings, and sealed motions. The Justice Department has even refused to give Moussaoui details of a new prosecution theory that he intended to crash a hijacked jet into the White House in a plot separate from September 11. Judge Brinkema has criticized prosecutors for their secrecy and on April 24 ordered the Justice Department to give Moussaoui a top-secret court filing related to the dispute over his access to Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

If this trend continues and the Moussaoui proceedings get to messy, look for Bush to throw Moussaoui's case to a military tribunal, where it will be even easier to sweep the truth under the rug and frame Moussaoui.

Government prosecutors have told Judge Brinkema that talking to Mohammed would compromise sensitive intelligence information. I bet it would--like the connections between the CIA and Al Qaeda, bin Laden being a CIA asset, the CIA informants inside Al Qaeda, the NSA electronic intercepts of bin Laden communications BEFORE 911, and so much more that it merits a separate page on this site. All of this is deeper than failing to connect the dots. The FBI consciously sabotaged the investigations of Moussaoui and Al Qaeda pilots training in US flight schools. The NSA consciously destroyed all files relating to September 11. The CIA allowed Ziad Samir Jarrah, Mohammed Atta, Kahlil Almihdhar, and Nawaf Alhamzi to waltz in and out of the US throughout 2000 and 2001. Newsweek reported that "five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in the attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s."

OPEN THE FILES!

Mohammed Atta was wired $100,000 by General Mahmud  Ahmed, the head of the Pakistani intelligency agency ISI, who coincidentally was in DC on the morning of September 11 having breakfast with senators Graham and Goss, chairmen of the congressional intelligence committees.

OPEN THE FILES!

Too much remains classified, like disturbing reports about an Israeli spy ring in the US who had monitored the 911 hijackers while posing as art students. They were deported after the September 11 attacks. Fox News reporter Carl Cameron quoted a US official as saying, "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that's been gathered. It's classified information."

UNCLASSIFY THE FILES!

Employees for an Israeli telecommunications firm called Indigo, which provides the core message passing system for all instant messages and is located two blocks from the World Trade Center's former location, received warnings two hours before the WTC attacks that they were on the way. Indigo, along with several other Israeli telecommunications companies like Amdocs, Telrad and Comverse, have received juicy contracts from Washington for telephone intercept and automatic wiretapping equipment.

Florida Senator Robert Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, upon hearing classified information in secret congressional testimony, stated: "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing--although that was part of it--by a sovereign foreign government...It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."

Why? Release all files related to September 11 now! What are they hiding?

Israel has a well documented history of staging terrorist attacks and blaming Arabs for them. In 1954 Israeli agents planted bombs in several buildings in Egypt, then tried to frame Arabs for the terrorism. One of the bombs exploded prematurely, enabling the Egyptians to arrest one of the bombers, which eventually led to the discovery that an Israeli spy ring was at work. History knows this incident as the Lavon Affair after the Israeli defense minister at the time.

And according to Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, Israeli intelligence tricked Reagan into bombing Libya in 1986 by planting a "Trojan horse" radio transmitter in Tripoli which broadcast messages implicating Qadaffi in the Berlin disco bombing that killed US personnel.

It is no shock that the slogan of Mossad is "by way of deception, thou shalt wage war."

The White House is keeping information from the American people that we deserve to have. On August 6, 2001, while vacationing at his Texas ranch, Bush received word from the CIA that Al Qaeda was planning to skyjack jets and crash them into American landmarks. The specific contents of that CIA briefing to Bush remain classified. Bush refuses to release them. Nor will he reveal what the CIA told him about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 911 mastermind allegedly caught by the US months ago in Pakistan whom Zacarias Moussaoui wants to use as a witness for the defense.

Why are these files classified? Why is Bush keeping this from the people? What does he have to hide? After September 11, there is no place for classified information, and no reason to keep ANYTHING from the American public. We should get our fucking head out of the fucking sand and demand answers to these questions. We should demand Bush be held accountable for allowing 911 to happen under his watch.

Contrary to Bush and Rice's lies, the White House received specific and multiple warnings about a pending attack in the months leading up to 911. In response to threats to kill Bush and other leaders while they met on an island off Genoa in June 2001, Italy set up anti-aircraft artillery to meet the threatened missiles or planes that would act as bombs. In July the CIA predicted that bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike "in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will be with little or no warning."

In light of the above warnings, a competent commander in chief would have done two things immediately, even if he were on vacation: 1) bolster airport security and 2) strengthen air defenses around New York and Washington, DC.

Bush did neither, making him at the very least guilty of criminal incompetence and negligence. Even after hearing Flight 11 had struck the WTC's North Tower at 8:46am, Bush failed to order the Air Force to scramble fighter jets into action, which would have prevented Flight 175's crash into the South Tower. Instead, he continued to read goat stories to the Sarasota schoolchildren for another half hour.

Why, Mr. Bush?

These and many other questions need answering. Instead, Bush has done everything possible to sabotage any investigation into September 11. It was only after he was shamed by a group of courageous relatives of September 11 victims did Bush "allow" the phony whitewash currently under way. Bush covered himself by stacking the "independent" commission with five Republicans who have veto power over who gets subpoenaed.

Already the commission has delayed the release of documents containing the closed door congressional testimony that raised more questions than it answered. This prompted 911 widow Kristen Breitweiser, who more than anyone else shamed Bush into letting a commission proceed, to write a letter to the NY Times which criticized the commission's delay in releasing the documents:

"This delay is nothing more than a stalling tactic by the White House to prepare its spin on whatever information is eventually released by the transcripts. The 9/11 families and the country have waited long enough for answers. Each day of delay is another day that this country remains vulnerable and perilously at risk to another terrorist attack."

This is the same commission that Bush appointed Henry Kissinger to chair, in one of the worst appointments in the annals of US history. Kissinger's multiple conflicts of interest forced his resignation within days. Bush's next selection, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, while less controversial, has an intriguing conflict of interest of his own, not that it deterred the shameless Bush. Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, the oil company which participated in a joint drilling operation in Azerbaijan with Delta Oil, one of whose investors is Osama bin Laden's brother in law, Khalid bin Mahfouz, who has been a major business partner with the Carlyle Group and the Bush family since the 1980s.

The American people should be demanding that all intelligence files be opened and that George W. Bush be held accountable for September 11, instead of fawning over this small, sadistic man dressed up as Top Gun who went AWOL from the Texas Air Guard in 1972 and is gutting veterans benefits today.

The spectacle on board the Abraham Lincoln must rank as one of the most depraved obscenities in the history of the United States. It was a revolting, cheap publicity stunt that was an insult to every American killed or wounded in combat and to all veterans who have served in the armed forces.

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A major reason for the Teflon around Bush is that the capitalist media continues to cover up and lie for him regarding the 2000 election, September 11, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  A recent NY Times headline announced that US forces had found chemical agents, but upon reading the article, we discover that it was not weaponized chemical agents, not "weapons of mass destruction," but industrial ingredients. But the headline explicitly suggested that what was found were the only chemical agents anyone cares about.

This kind of reporting from our "free press" is exactly why a majority of Americans wrongly think Hussein was behind 911.

Similarly, many search engines and news services erroneously reported that the sign held by Iraqis saying "US killers get out or we will kick you out" actually said "US killers get out or we will kill you."

This is exactly the kind of dishonest reporting that COSMOS LEFT called the NY Times to task on in 1986. In a Saturday edition, a Times headline said that Oliver Tambo, then head of the African National Congress, called on South African Blacks to kill whites. The article, however, reported no such thing. When I wrote a letter to the editor pointing this out, the Times did not print its response but instead responded directly to me, claiming that the headline was an error and had been pulled in a later edition.

The US capitalist media continues to function as a willing accomplice in the government's campaign to deceive the American people. They have perfected the Nazis' Big Lie technique in a manner that would make Goebbels blush with shame. The press, in uncritically accepting everything Bush says as fact and spoonfeeding it to the public, enabled Washington to blatantly and openly lie to the US and the entire world to justify this illegal and immoral war.

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May 8, 2003--While the bourgeois media glorifies Bush and Rumsfeld's glorious "victory" in Iraq, the reality beneath this veneer is quite grim. The World Health Organization has warned that Iraq faces an epidemic of cholera. Exploding cluster bombs are maiming and killing children. On Wednesday in Baghdad, hundreds of doctors, nurses, and medical workers demonstrated against the US occupation and the public health crisis it has generated. Carrying signs reading "We want a new healthy health system," "Civil rights act now," "We want our civil rights," "No more corruption," and "New clean era, new clean figures," the demonstrators protested Washington's decision to appoint a senior Baath Party member to be minister of health.

And on Thursday, two American soldiers were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad--a shooting at close range in broad daylight and a sniper attack. US forces have also been the target of land mines, rocket propelled grenades, small arms, machine gun and rifle fire.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, just days after Rumsfeld announced that the end of major combat operations heralded a phase of stabilization and reconstruction, hundreds of Afghans chanting "Death to Bush" and "Long live Islam" demonstrated in Kabul against the US occupation of their country.