Hillary's LIST

Hillary’s List Republican strategies to guarantee that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination by Michael Carmichael

Global Research, February 9, 2008

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“Clinton will be the Democrat, and I don’t know who the Republican will be, but the election will be about the war on terror and the Republican will win.” Karl Rove, Fox News, December 2007 Many astute Republicans believe that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the salvation of their party. On Super Tuesday, it is time that the American people take a serious look at why the opposition party favors the nomination of the former First Lady. For months, the leading Republican strategists and tacticians have been salivating at the thought of running their presidential campaign against Senator Clinton. The senior Republican political consultants: Karl Rove and Dick Morris have predicted that Senator Clinton will be the Democratic candidate who will be defeated by the Republican nominee this November. Their theory of the self-destructive candidacy of Senator Clinton has been the idée fixe of Republican strategy since she formally became a candidate for the presidency. Overt Republican operations to ensure Senator Clinton’s victory have ranged from destructive email campaigns against her opponents to massive direct financial support to her campaign from corporate lobbyists loyal to the neoconservative and corporate ideals of the Republican Party. Serious question marks have been raised over the role of heavyweight Republican contributors, Alan Quasha and Hassan Nemazee, who have been described as “Hillary’s mystery money men.” These two valuable political assets have records of financial backing for both George W. Bush and former Senator Jesse Helms. In a suspicious transaction, Quasha acquired Harken Oil from George W. Bush providing the future president with a financial windfall that launched him into his career as an owner of a team in minor league baseball. Bush bought the Texas Rangers and financed his campaign for governor with the capital provided by Quasha, who is now backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. With his longstanding relationship with George W. Bush, there is little wonder why Quasha is referred to as “Hillary’s mystery man.” But, Quasha’s ties to Hillary are not as simple as that, because his family is linked to both: the former dictator of the Phillipines, Ferdinand Marcos, and the international intelligence community – a linkage that brought him into the charmed circle of George Bush, Sr. over two decades ago. Hillary’s other “mystery man,” Hassan Nemazee is the employer of the long-serving Clinton apparatchik: Terry McAuliffe, a former head of the Democratic National Committee. According to Bill Maher and a growing number of people, covert Republican operations included the rigging of the New Hampshire primary via secret manipulation of the Diebold voting machines to produce the startling “upset” only a few weeks ago – in order to enhance Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. Maher had the courage to voice the suspicion that is on millions of lips - that the Republicans want to manipulate the outcome of the Democratic nomination to rig it for Clinton, whom they deem to be an easy mark. Underscoring Maher’s opinion that is becoming more popular as the campaign develops, Peter Wehner provided a column for the Washington Post titled: “Why Republicans Like Obama.” Wehner writes, “A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.” The important point in Wehner’s thesis echoes the opinions of Karl Rove and Dick Morris: Clinton would be easy prey, while Obama would be extremely difficult to defeat because of his message of change – and his formidable political and rhetorical gifts. For some Democratic Party members, it is troubling that Mark Penn is Senator Clinton’s top political advisor. Some Democratic strategists find it bizarre that Penn was brought into the Clinton’s political operations by Dick Morris, the strident Republican political consultant who is known to loathe the Clintons. This was not always the case. Morris has a long and complicated history with the Clintons. Morris began serving them in the 1980s, but fell out of favor one icy evening in 1990 when an argument between Morris and both Clintons degenerated into fisticuffs – with the towering ex-footballer, Bill Clinton, soundly beating the nerdish Morris to a pulp. After suffering his humiliating beating by Bill Clinton, in the wee hours Morris rang the senior consultant in the Clinton campaign sobbing, “He beat me up!” This priceless gem of Clintoniana is recorded for posterity in Ray Strother’s autobiography, Falling Up. After 1990, the Clintons replaced their consultants with a new team led by James Carville who had been a factotum for Strother in the early 1980s. While the Carville team led the Clintons to victory, success was short-lived. The Republicans struck back with the extremist Contract with America of Newt Gingrich to obtain a majority in Congress in 1994, and the Clintons had another house-cleaning. In the mid-1990s, Clinton sacked Carville and company and re-hired Dick Morris who would mastermind the devastating 1996 campaign before his involvement in a prostitution scandal that led to his ignominious downfall. Prior to Morris’ dalliances with the prostitute, he engineered the insertion of the pollster Mark Penn into the Clintons’ circle of political experts. Both Morris and Penn have curious histories of advising foreign politicians most of whom lean to the right. According to astute observers, Penn is closely aligned with heavyweight Republican operatives linked to Karl Rove. Penn’s client list contains prominent right-wingers including Joseph Lieberman, and he is only one of the major polling figures behind the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. Now the head of the controversial corporate public relations giant, Burston Marsteller, Mark Penn is fabulously wealthy with a lengthy client list of major right-wing corporations including Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Bill Gates’ Microsoft. For many Democrats, Penn’s right-wing and archconservative client list seems odd for the chief political advisor to a major contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. While Hillary enjoys the support of Republican contributors and right-leaning Democratic operatives, the Republicans have their own Hillary agenda. At the same time that they have been maneuvering on behalf of Senator Clinton to help ensure her supremacy in the primaries, Republican strategists have been laying the foundation to swiftboat her political momentum shortly after she accepts the Democratic nomination in Denver this August. A bewildering network of websites have been erected to dissect, dismember and detonate Hillary Clinton’s candidacy before it really takes off – with peak operations scheduled to launch before, during and after the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August. One of these online sources provides verbatim quotes attributed to the Senator that are disturbingly anti-semitic. Senator Clinton really has two intractable and virtually insurmountable political problems: her image and that of her husband, the former president: William Jefferson Clinton. The Clinton Era remains a controversial and puzzling epoch in American history, one that is, at times, described in glowing terms as a progressive presidency and at others as the final breakdown of America’s commitment to the New Deal and the social democratic ideology that preserved capitalism while other nations were abandoning it. Pride of place in the Clinton museum of progressive ambiguities is occupied jointly by: • the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) a trade pact that was hailed as a landmark in free trade but is now regarded as little more than a gift to major corporations that out-sourced millions of American jobs to cheaper foreign labor most of whom work for slave wages and • the dissolution of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of American social security since the 1930s. Let us not forget Bill Clinton’s greatest achievement in foreign policy: frequent military interventions and the flagrant abuse of the military as an instrument of policy while laying the foundation for neoconservativism and the troubling vision of the so-called Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Most voters can still remember another Clinton contribution to his own historical legacy – the abuse of the military for public relations in the putrescent ‘wag the dog’ bombing of Baghdad that came in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky revelations in 1998 and led to the production of the Hollywood movie with Dustin Hofmann and Robert De Niro. Other Republican attempts to destroy Senator Clinton’s political viability have taken a darker and decidedly more sinister complexion: the compilation of Clinton death lists. While the validity of these lists has been discounted by Snopes, a lingering miasma of doubt swirls around many of the less publicized aspects of the Clinton era. Some of these death lists are so detailed that they could only emanate from informed sources in Arkansas law enforcement – a relatively inexhaustible reservoir for damaging tittle-tattle about the Clinton couple. Due to his lengthy service to the Clintons when they were in Little Rock, some of these highly informed security personnel are personally known by Dick Morris and other political operatives inimical to the Clintons. While the time bombs planted within Hillary Clinton’s candidacy outlined above are troubling, the definitive analysis of her vulnerability is found in a memo that is now enjoying broad circulation to Republican and right-leaning Americans via the internet. Attributed to her arch-nemesis, Dick Morris, the memo is titled simply: “Democrats are coming.” In Morris’s inimitable style, the author reveals his glee at the very thought that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic nominee. The ‘Morris’ memo surfaced on the internet shortly after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected resurgence in the mysterious New Hampshire primary that a growing number of people believe to have been rigged in her favor via covert political operatives who attacked the Diebold optical scanners – because they wanted to blunt the surging upward trend of Senator Barack Obama - whom they see as the most dangerous threat to neoconservativism. Presented as a deconstruction of Bill Clinton’s now well-worn five minute commercial that is little more than a hagiography of his wife, ‘Morris’ reveals what the major Republican strategists refer to as the “soft white underbelly” of Hillary Clinton’s claims on the presidency. In his forensic dissection of Bill Clinton’s message in favor of Hillary, ‘Morris’ argues that Hillary Clinton: Helped Black Panthers who had been indicted for the torture and murder of a federal agent when she was in law school; Flunked the DC Bar Exam and only found employment in Arkansas through Bill’s political connections; Served on the board of Walmart; Took political appointments that enhance her resumé; Took credit for major accomplishments that she does not deserve; Is totally devoid of any meaningful experience whatsoever in international affairs and diplomacy; Has no important legislation to her credit after eight years in the Senate, In this explosive memo, ‘Morris’ makes other points designed to discredit Clinton with those Democrats who support the concept of a “war on terror.” (See Appendix below) Senator Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities present an extremely attractive target for Republican strategists. Enticed by the very thought of her presidential candidacy, Republican operatives will stop at nothing to ensure her nomination and the devastation of her primary opponents. On Super Tuesday, 2008 - only one opponent to Hillary Clinton remains: Senator Barack Obama. The cover story on a recent edition of Newsmax, a Republican Party magazine that frequently features the writings of Dick Morris, is adorned with a large and flattering photograph of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton while the headline proclaims: “She can save our party.” She probably can.

Lovely (choke) HiLIARy on Walmart (ugh)

Robert Parry: Obama, Clinton and the GOP Attack Machine

File under the I Couldn't Agree More Department

Veeger

Obama, Clinton & GOP Attack Machine

By Robert Parry
February 2, 2008

Barack Obama argues that the Democrats will have a better chance for victory in November if they have a presidential nominee who opposed the Iraq War from the start and who can contrast that judgment against John McCain’s enthusiasm for a centuries-long U.S. occupation of Iraq.

What Sen. Obama didn’t say out loud, but what Democratic voters surely recalled was the endless baiting of John Kerry for having been “for the war before he was against it,” earning a place – as George W. Bush put it – “in the flip-flop hall of fame.”

Hillary Clinton would be open to similar attacks since she voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq and remained a staunch war supporter almost until the eve of Campaign 2008, when she realigned herself with the anti-war sentiments of rank-and-file Democrats.

She was for it, for it and for it – before she was finally against it.

But another factor that plays to Obama’s advantage as the prospective nominee – when compared to Hillary Clinton – is that the Right’s powerful media apparatus and the Republican attack strategies appear less successful against Democrats with strong oratorical skills and the ability to inspire enthusiasm and passion.

Over the past two decades when the Democrats have put up candidates who are competent but who lack pizzazz – think Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry – the Republicans have been most effective in leveraging their media advantages to damage the Democrats and deny them the White House.

In contrast, Bill Clinton bested the Republican machine by exploiting his impressive speaking skills and by generating excitement and hope. Even though the Right never gave up trying to destroy President Clinton, his ability to communicate with the American people was always his saving grace.

Today, that eloquence edge clearly goes to Barack Obama, who has demonstrated the capacity to excite and uplift voters, even drawing comparisons with the brilliant oratory of John F. Kennedy.

That ability to inspire a young generation has earned Obama the public embrace of iconic members of the Kennedy clan, including the late President’s daughter Caroline and his surviving brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Hillary Clinton herself has likened Obama’s oratory to “poetry” and her detailed policy prescriptions to “prose.” But the painful truth is that the solid prose of Dukakis, Gore and Kerry wasn’t a match for the grinding nastiness of the Republican attack machine.

When both parties have fielded less-than-riveting candidates, the Right’s media power has enabled the Republicans to drag even the most inarticulate candidates, such as the two George Bushes, across the finish line. But the Democrats don't have that advantage.

New Attacks

If anything, that media imbalance is even worse today.

Over the past few years, the Right has continued to pour tens of billions of dollars into its media infrastructure – ranging from books, magazines and newspapers to talk radio, cable news and the Internet – while the Left still resists any comparable media investment, leaving its few outlets – like Air America Radio – to struggle along under-funded.

So, one of the few certainties of Campaign 2008 is that whoever is the Democratic nominee can expect a full-scale barrage of Republican attacks, anti-Democratic “oppo” injected into the public debate.

This has been a pattern for the past two decades, from 1988 when the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times spread false rumors about Michael Dukakis’s mental health to 2004 when Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News raised doubts about John Kerry’s Vietnam War heroism.

If the pattern holds, the anti-Democratic themes also will resonate through the mainstream media, which is conditioned to picking up attack lines from the Right, partly as a defense against accusations of “liberal bias” from conservative anti-press organizations.

Given this right-tilted asymmetry, the Democrats have little choice but to make the question of vulnerability to Republican smears a factor in their nominee selection process. The euphemism for this assessment is called “electability.”

Some observers argue that the certainty of Republican assaults should favor Clinton over Obama (because the Clintons already have been “vetted” and Obama is a fresh target). But that analysis may not be entirely accurate.

While it’s true that the Clintons were subjected to extraordinary scrutiny during their eight years in the White House, their past seven years offer a whole new set of targets. There are also legitimate questions about the secretive fundraising for the Clinton presidential library, Bill Clinton’s overseas speaking fees, and his business ventures.

One senior Democrat told me that he’s heard complaints from Washington lobbyists about getting “shaken down by Clinton Inc.” with pressure to not only pony up for Hillary Clinton’s campaign but also to chip in large sums to Bill Clinton’s library and philanthropic foundation.

Business Questions

Stories already are appearing in major newspapers about Bill Clinton’s mixing of business and politics, and about the tens of millions of dollars he has earned by making speeches around the world.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the former President stands to make $20 million as he unwinds a complicated business relationship with Yucaipa Cos., the investment firm of his longtime supporter, billionaire Ron Burkle, which has connections to the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. [WSJ, Jan. 22, 2008]

The New York Times described the help Clinton gave Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra in securing a lucrative uranium deal with the repressive government of Kazakhstan in 2005, shortly before Giustra made an unreported $31.3 million donation to Clinton’s foundation. [NYT, Jan. 31, 2008]

Clinton insiders are nervous, too, about possible Republican access to Secret Service records detailing the couple’s movements over the past seven years.

Though some Democrats don’t want to believe that George W. Bush would let political operatives exploit such confidential records, his father – President George H.W. Bush – green-lighted an illegal search of Bill Clinton’s passport file in fall 1992. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.”]

So, whether Democrats like it or not, they will have to evaluate the relative risks of Republican attacks on their presidential nominee. Either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can expect “the treatment,” whether fairly or not.

That is part of the price American liberals and progressives have to pay because of their failure over the years to invest in information outlets that could create some balance between the media power of the Right and Left. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Left’s Media Miscalculation.”]

Part of that risk evaluation must be who can better survive the assaults: Hillary Clinton with the experience – as well as the scars – from the partisan battles of the 1990s, or Barack Obama, who may not be as battle-tested but who has demonstrated a rare ability to lift Americans out of the foul and muddy trenches of past political wars.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.

Mattt Janovic on the irony of John McCain (or NOT)

McCain states to South Carolina supporters: 'Federal spending is out of control,' misses the irony , by Matt Janovic

I'd be embarrassed too if I were a Republican,
but who's that stupid these days?

"We're all Keynesians now."

--President Richard M. Nixon, 1971.

Florence, South Carolina

--That we are. Senator John McCain is a man who has truly lost what was left of his PTSD-addled mind. The Hanoi Hilton won. Having just authorized his most recent 'OK' vote for more-and-more spending for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan just wasn't enough for shell-shocked John McCain, that other Vietnam War hero who isn't named 'Randall Cunningham.' And he went as far as to allude to Randy in his comments to prospective South Carolina voters. Wasn't that nice? According to John McCain, Cunningham's kind of corruption won't happen 'when [he's] president.' Sure. Fine words, but does he mean it and is he even capable of achieving such lofty goals without disbanding the GOP as a national party? Face it America: it's in the DNA of the Republican Party to collude with corrupt Big Business and dirty banking, and they have no intentions of changing (and neither do many of you).

But what about his comments on federal spending? We all know that Senator McCain has been an avid supporter of the war--especially when it's going well--and has continued to vote for appropriations to continue it, alongside all his fellow incumbents currently occupying Congress (Democrats and Republicans). Back in July, there was the publicized 'Graham-McCain amendment'

to the July appropriations (H.R. 1585) for the war. Since then, it seems the president keeps asking mom for more allowance, and mom is real enabler--even when she's out of money.

The proposed amendment for longer military leaves went nowhere, which is what it was designed to do. Yet, it did give McCain that hint of possibly being on-the-side of the American public (he's not) who are still majorally against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who have even greater numbers when it comes to a possible war with Iran. We don't want one (McCain does, as well as a decades-long occupation of Iraq). The public has spoken about its disenchantment with the war, and Congress has done its best throughout 2007 and recent days in 2008 to avoid hearing it. The problem is, eventually they have to listen. The laws of physics aren't going to be suspended anytime soon.

Graham-McCain and other legislative and speech-making gambits have had another purpose, a subtext-of-sorts: to give John McCain the appearance of being against the war while he has been voting for every appropriations bill to keep it going. That makes his own politics and attempts at a mixed-message congruent with the president's wishes and agenda. This is also true of the voting records of Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and the majority of the incumbents in Congress at this writing. Somehow, the senator came down with a case of amnesia today, forgetting he helped authorize most of the aforementioned 'overspending' he's acting so upset over:

McCain blamed overspending in part for the nation's economic troubles. "As a Republican, I stand before you embarrassed. Embarrassed that we let that spending get out of control, and it led to corruption. Now we have former members of Congress residing in prison," McCain told a town-hall style meeting at the Carolina Hospital East Campus in Florence. "If I'm president, it's going to stop." "I'm not too astonished," by the bleak news, McCain added. "We let spending get totally out of control, and it continues today, and I'm sorry to tell you this." (AP, 01.18.2007)

The honorable thing would be to resign and not run for president. The average citizen should also understand that Senator McCain has either voted for more appropriations, or been absent from voting on Iraq and several other issues. He has a 56% truancy, he doesn't show up for over half of the votes he's supposed to. A significant number of them are hot-button issues, but the most important have been plans for withdrawal from Iraq--he just doesn't want to be pinned-down on it in the public mind when the war is unpopular. I'd be embarrassed too if I were a Republican, but who's that stupid these days?

Millions, naturally, it's just they're very embarrassed to admit it in public or at parties. Of course, they should feel this way irregardless of the state of the economy at any given point in our history. In any political era, simply being a Republican is adequate criteria for self-embarrassment. But some people insist on it and revel in parading it around. McCain is just a symptom of this sense of denial among so-called conservatives, it being a clutching-at-straws of a dying ideology.

Few strident supporters of the GOP are going to get that light-bulb moment of epiphany where they finally understand that what they believe in has little objective basis in reality and that the frontier mentality might work for some, but not for the many. This is what makes the Bush administration's stimulus plan so amusing. He's arguing for what some Democrats in Congress have prodded him to do all along. Belatedly, he's only halfway getting the picture, somehow thinking that tax cuts are the panacea for everything. The world doesn't resemble the world in the minds of GOP, it requires state intervention, and not the kind that benefits the major shareholders of Lockheed or Halliburton and the rest of America's elites.

What's truly interesting in all of this is George W. Bush's momentary turning away from military Keynesianism ('barracks Keynesianism,' otherwise known as our bloated defense budget, which is similar to what the Soviets had) to a standard Keynesianism that's typified by social spending to stimulate the economy. Also interesting were Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's veiled-barbs on the 17th of January against the 2000 tax cuts for America's wealthiest, noted by the Wall Street Journal in an online op-ed:

Appearing before Congress, Mr. Bernanke told Democrats what he thought they wanted to hear. The former academic economist blessed a "fiscal stimulus package," as long as it is "explicitly temporary." How new federal spending can be "temporary," he didn't say, as if a dollar collected in taxes or borrowed and then spent can be recalled. The "temporary" line was thus a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Mr. Bush's desire to make his tax cuts permanent. The Fed chief did aver that, "Again, I'm not taking a view one way or the other on the desirability of those long-term tax cuts being made permanent." But of course refusing to endorse something is itself a point of view -- a point Democrats were already joyfully repeating yesterday. (Wall Street Journal, online edition, 01.18.2007)

The current administration confirms this--cut taxes, and give-out a $145 billion (by 6:00 PM EST it was upped to '$150 billion') rebate to American taxpayers, while retaining the 2000 tax cuts into progressive taxation that provided economic stability for the nation for more than 50 years. During those 50 years, the GOP was in the dog house, confined to being a collared opposition party that had little more than red-baiting for a political tool (and no vision, funny how things don't change--even when they change). For the Republicans, it's just more of the same 'let the working-class pay for everything' MO, and less paid by the ultra-rich. Great, what happens after everyone's spent their checks? Bernanke seems to be saying, 'I don't stand behind your 2000 tax cuts, either in principle or in reality.' Neither does most of America if you ask the right questions, but pollsters have mortgages to pay (sorry, I didn't want to mention that uncomfortable fact).

It all begs-the-question that most die-hard conservatives ask whenever one suggests social spending of almost any sort: 'Yeah, but where's it going to come from?' Coupled with the 2000 tax cuts for the rich, it's hard to imagine where any of the money for all of this is coming from. McCain was smart enough to state the obvious fact that it will only be a 'temporary fix,' but he wants to be president (he still will after January 21st, 2009). Isn't the temporary fix what the GOP is all about? It's funny how it doesn't matter with war and defense spending, it's never an issue for either party overall. Yes, where is it all going to come from?

One thing's certain: the president must be in very big trouble indeed to start throwing money he doesn't have at the public again. He's officially back to what he was before September 11th, 2001, an embattled and ineffectual joke without a plan, Dick Cheney's monkey. George W. Bush and his administration have been an unfortunate and extremist phenomena that clawed its way into office, ensuring the demise of an ideology whose time had come to die. Be careful what you wish for (too late). You have to say one thing about the president: no vision, but he can change without changing. That's quite a trick, and you'll never hear of the president calling the vice president by any nicknames.

Dueling banjos--Bernanke VS. George W. Cheney (Wall Street Journal, January 18th, 2007): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120062129547799439.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

US Politics on 'Graham-McCain,' July 2007: http://uspolitics.about.com/od/wariniraq/a/sen_2078_amend.htm

The AP on Senator McCain's Bloviating all over himself (and South Carolina), January, 18th, 2008: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_on_el_pr/republicans_economy

When Johnny came marching home, he called for more defense spending (Hurrah! Huraah! McCain's defense spending record in the Senate): http://votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53270&type=category&category=22&go.x=7&go.y=6

[Remember this, dear Reader, the GOP picks the guy who's turn it is; that man is ... John McCain. and THAT is in their DNA, too. Would be a wonderful world with McCain and Nancy Pelosi in control of the US government, wouldn't it?? Veeger]

Hillary Clinton: For bombs or FOOD??

Hillary Clinton Voted to Continue Cluster Bombing Civilians

dailykos.com — The main point: Hillary Clinton voted to let our military continue to use cluster bombs in areas with concentrated civilian populations, despite the thousands of innocent children who have died or been handicapped due to picking up unexploded cluster bomblets.

Submitted:

2 days ago, made popular 1 day 14 hr ago

Depleted Uranium
Kucinich for President 2008 Toll free: 1-877-413-3664
Paid for by Kucinich for President 2008
dennis4president.com

The United States must order an end to illegal use of depleted uranium munitions and lead an international effort to recover depleted uranium. We must promote environmental remediation. Also, we must develop a program to provide care and restitution for people suffering as a result of the United States' use of depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons production, nuclear testing, and uranium mining.

Through four wars (Gulf War I, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II), the U.S. military has deployed tons of nuclear tank missiles of depleted uranium (DU), which are solid 10-pound uranium bullets made from radioactive waste from the U.S. Department of Energy's uranium enrichment process. At least 350 tons of solid radioactive uranium remains in Iraq after Gulf War I, and 2,000 more tons of radioactive rubble has been added from our present Gulf War II. Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

According to Pentagon experts, approximately 13,000 Gulf War I veterans are now dead as result of injuries and illnesses incurred while participating in military operations between August 1990 and October 1991. As of May 2002, at least 221,000 veterans were on disability as result of injuries and illnesses incurred during military operations in the Persian Gulf combat theater of operations. All of our troops presently in Iraq are continually being exposed to this radioactive depleted uranium contamination, other war related contaminants, water- and food-borne illnesses, and endemic diseases every second they remain there. A recent study shows that U.S. Gulf War veterans' children have a much higher likelihood of having three specific types of birth defects: two types of heart valve abnormality occurring to children of male veterans, and genital-urinary defects to children born of female veterans. A study of British veterans of the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reveals that they have 10 to 14 times the usual level of chromosomal abnormalities.

A Canadian medical research facility recently found that the urine of Afghani people living near the area where the United States carried out military operations contained radioactive isotopes 100 to 400 times as high as Gulf War veterans from the United Kingdom who were tested in 1999. The Canadian team recorded an average of 315.5 nanograms of these isotopes in people in Jalalabad, Tora Bora, and Mazar-e-Sharif. A 12-year-old boy near Kabul tested at 2,031 nanograms. The maximum exposure considered safe by the United States is 9 nanograms/year. With growing evidence of an increase in birth defects and stillborns, the situation should be addressed as an issue of the highest priority.

According to humanitarian law specialist, Karen Parker J.D., a weapon is made illegal in two ways: (1) by adoption of a specific treaty banning it; and (2) because it may not be used without violating the existing law and customs of war. A weapon made illegal only because there is a specific treaty banning it is only illegal for countries that ratify such atreaty. A weapon that is illegal by operation of existing law is illegal for all countries. This is true even if there is also a treaty on this weapon and a country has not ratified that treaty. As there is no specific treaty banning depleted uranium weapons, its illegality must be established in the second fashion.

The laws and customs of war (humanitarian law) include all treaties governing military operations, weapons, and protection of victims of war, as well as all customary international law on these subjects. In other words, in evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted.

There are four rules derived from the whole of humanitarian law regarding weapons: Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle, defined as legal military targets of the enemy in the war. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off of the legal field of battle. (The "territorial" test). Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that is used or continues to act after the war is over violates this criterion. (The "temporal" test). Weapons may not be unduly inhumane. (The "humaneness" test). The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 use the terms "unnecessary suffering" and "superfluous injury" for this concept. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. (The "environmental" test).

DU weaponry fails all four tests:

It cannot be "contained" to legal fields of battle and thus fails the territorial test. Instead, the DU is air-borne far afield of legal targets to illegal (civilian) targets: hospitals, schools, civilian dwellings, and even neighboring countries with which the user is not at war.

It cannot be "turned off" when the war is over. Instead, DU weaponry continues to act after hostilities are over and thus fails the temporal test. Even with rigorous cleanup of war zones, the air-borne particles have a half-life of billions of years and have potential to keep killing and injuring former combatants and non-combatants long after the war is over. The toxicity is confirmed by U.S. Army documents. The Director of the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute stated in a congressionally mandated report that "No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium." (Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the U.S. Army: Technical Report, AEPI, June 1995)

It is inhumane and thus fails the humaneness test. DU weaponry is inhumane because of how it can kill -- by cancer, kidney disease, etc. -- and long after the hostilities are over, when the killing must stop. DU is inhumane because it can cause birth (genetic) defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and nonviable infants and the like, thus affecting children who may never be a military target and who are born after the war is over. The teratogenic nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry amounts to genocide.

It cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment and thus fails the environment test. Damage to the natural environment includes contamination of water and agricultural land necessary for the subsistence of the civilian population far beyond the lifetime of that population. The U.S. Army also confirms that depleted uranium contamination will affect food and water. The primary U.S. Army training manual:

Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks states, "NOTE: (Depleted uranium) contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption." Cleanup is an inexact science and, in any case, extremely expensive -- far beyond the ability of a poor country to pay for.

In the course of armed conflicts (wars), weapons may only be used against legal military targets and for the duration of the war. Weapons may not cause undue suffering or superfluous injury. Weapons may not use or employ "poison." Weapons may not severely damage the environment. DU weaponry cannot be used in military operations without violating these rules, and therefore must be considered illegal. Use of illegal weapons constitutes a violation of humanitarian law and subjects the violators to legal liability for their effects on victims and the environment, as well as criminal liability. In my view, use of DU weaponry necessarily violates the grave breach provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and hence its use constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity.

All illegal use of depleted uranium munitions should be halted, as the U.S. becomes a leader in the international movement to recover depleted uranium.

The Bush Administration Conquers Washington

The Bush Administration Conquers Washington

I OFTEN think about John Brown.

I often wonder if he "really" gets it. I started following his POWERFUL blogsite, subscribing and actually going to my Google reader to read it REGULARLY. Afterall, what happened to the State Department is of high interest, from Colin Powell to Condi Rice to Karen Hughes to the latest WaPo attacks on Condaleeza Rice which seem to indicate some type of change is about to take place in the State Department AGAIN.

I often wonder IF John Brown had any inkling of what was to befall America when he turned in his powerful resignation letter OR was he grandstanding?

I often wonder if he has sleepless nights watching all this killing.

I often wonder if he reads the endless comments of Americans who are aghast at all the killing, the distortions, the vast assault on America's "moral fiber" during these past five years. OR .. is it all just some ideological "game".

One of my all time favorite internet articles is in the links below, the one where John Brown walks us through the labyrinth of agencies as he tried to verify IF indeed there were 5000 new businesses opened in Iran! I was very heartened that he wrote it.

Below is the latest Tomgram and John Brown is at his BEST here.

Interestingly, the more I look at his output, the more I think he took in American history exactly as I did when I spent many hours reading on America in my twenties. (at one time, during the conservatism of the University of Minnesota's history department and switched to an American Studies major .. and incidentally spent a long time trying to understand Russian by enrolling in the courses.) We actually read Fredrick Jackson Turner, we learned about the Millenial forces who came to settle America without the creepy misleading American history propaganda at work in our minds.

It took me four hours of time to read every single link below and then back track THEM and it was well worth the effort; I read all the comments, too and many questions I had were definitely answered. A new adminstration really should consider having John Brown be Secretary of State. He's really got a grasp of how one MIGHT get America's foreign policy back on track without the dubioius PR and without the micromanagement.

Reading history is not where it is at per se, it's what we do with information TODAY that matters. And the US empire is dependent on an arrogant WASP who thinks he is a CEO! while parading around the world as triumphant CESEAR. Montebello, Quebec, Sydney Australia and other sites were proof of THAT.

Consider signing up for his RSS feed. You may like all of what you see, but you will have an idea of some of the forces at work, going on behind the scenes and get a vision of what America's foreign service COULD be.

I honestly wish him and his countdown keychain a great life!

Veeger

Tomgram: John Brown, Invading Washington

Over the last seven years, it's often been said that George W. Bush exists in a bubble. When it comes to the cast of characters in his administration -- and the Washington Consensus generally -- it turns out he isn't alone. The other night I watched Harvard academic Joseph Nye and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage discuss the crisis in Pakistan with talk-show host Charlie Rose. The two of them had just finished co-chairing a Center for Strategic and International Studies commission that produced a report, clearly meant for the next administration, on wielding American "smart power" in the world.

Nye is an exceedingly conventional American internationalist; Armitage is a former "Vulcan" who, in the first years of the Bush administration, though Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department, was close to the neocons of the Pentagon, but may now be repositioning himself for a Democratic administration. They could be said to represent the heartland of the present Washington Consensus.

Yet when they talked of Pakistani autocrat Pervez Musharraf ("I mean, Musharraf has been our boy, but we`ve not been able to do much with it..."), of the Pakistani situation more generally ("I mean, after Musharraf, there are other secular generals…"), and of the American role there ("Well, we have to be working with both Benazir Bhutto and also with our contacts in the army to make sure this doesn't turn into chaos…" "If you do anything to help Benazir, it has to be done very quietly and behind the scenes…"), they might as well have been discussing deploying federal "smart power" to Maryland, or more appropriately, to the U.S. Territory of Guam. Conceptually, they remain deep inside Washington's Pakistan, Washington's dream of a controllable world.

The Bush administration, too, had its dreams of a controllable Pax Americana to go along with a Washington-based Pax Republicana; but, as former diplomat John Brown makes clear below, these were the most provincial of global dreams, hatched at think-tanks inside the Washington Bubblesphere. The world was reimagined as a kind of imperial dreamscape for a go-it-alone group of armed imperial isolationists who, unlike most imperialists, couldn't even imagine a way those elsewhere could join in their imperial project. As Brown indicates, Bush and his top officials were the most bubblicious of non-diplomats. In the language of another era, they were not just Ugly Americans, but the ugliest of all -- and proud of it.

But perhaps they were only extremes of the Washington norm. Perhaps Americans, even in their post-World War II high-imperial phase, were never anything but powerful provincials with little grasp of the wider world: a self-contained universe of Joseph Nyes and Richard Armitages. Perhaps if you are singularly wealthy and powerful, as the United States was from 1945 into the 1970s, the provincial blunders you make don't blow back on you for 20, 30, 40 years. Now, on the downside of hyperpowerdom, they seem to blowback in about the time it takes to play your basic 30-second ad.

We also tend to ignore how much Americans actually take their bubble with them into the world. Consider, for instance, this description from the British Guardian's David Smith on his arrival at Camp Victory, one of the monstrous "mega-bases" the Bush administration has built in Iraq. American reporters often set foot in places like this, but almost never offer such descriptions, perhaps because finding a Little America in the midst of chaos and mayhem strikes them as nothing out of the ordinary.

"I arrived at Camp Liberty, one of the main US bases, and found breakfast in the 'morale area' where food facilities include a Burger King, Cinnabon, Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits and Seattle's Best Coffee Iraq. It's a sort of pre-fab American simulacrum, Disney World meets Platoon in the desert. There's also Alterations & Embroidery, Barber, Beauty, Electronics, Gift Shop, Jewelery, Magic Island Technologies, Rug Shop, Photo Processing and even New Car Sales. I wandered around the Bazaar, which takes credit cards but is closed on Fridays, and found kitsch mementos, hookah pipes, brass ornaments, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' rugs bearing the US and Iraqi flags and a collection of Saddam portraits and clocks. A difficult purchase to explain at customs, perhaps. "

So consider with Brown just how provincial the Bush imperial moment really was. Tom

Too Parochial for Empire

The Bush Administration Conquers Washington

By John Brown

As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my "Bush's Last Day Countdown Keychain" tells me there are 433 days, 11 hrs, 50 minutes and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about the fate of the Republic, I wonder what the Bush legacy will be.

Many commentators have written about how the domestic politics of this administration have left the United States more divided than ever; or perhaps the unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush will be most remembered for -- with an unfinished barrier across the U.S.-Mexican border as the main monument to his eight years in office.

To some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era will be remembered most for the acceleration of America's putative march to empire. Advocates of such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the U.S. has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan, its massive sea power, and its all-volunteer professional army; the inordinately expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being evidence that the U.S. is engaged in a ruthless effort to control the world's oil resources); the threats of possible military action against Iran (interpreted as a desire to control the Middle East in collaboration with Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in former Soviet areas in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (seen as a reflection of America's determination to remain the global hegemon); the increasing frictions with China (proof that the U.S. will not tolerate a competitor in Asia); the constant disagreements with the Europeans (a reminder on our part that we -- not they -- are the boss).

Indeed, there is little doubt that the military, economic, and cultural impact of the United States continues to be enormous. Calling this global footprint "imperial" is certainly tempting. But for a nation to be an empire, its leaders must have a plan or vision for how to deal with the rest of the world -- as, arguably, Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage did with their "large policy" for American overseas dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as the beginning of an American-style empire that led to "the American century," a period that now seems so long ago and so far away. (Are we not now, in fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)

Bush and Visions of Empire

The immense (but declining) global power of the United States notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage required to engage in truly imperial ambitions has simply not been a part of the Bush administration's mindset. This remains so despite its assembly-line-style production of countless "national security" reports on a vast range of global security matters -- committee-written, unreadable documents marked by a total lack of intellectual coherence or clear direction. These can, if anything, be seen as a collective "cover-up" for the administration's obvious lack of thought beyond the here-and-now.

To be sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or implemented (as Theodore Roosevelt himself realized), but the Bush administration's version of such now appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or reason -- on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven by a self-aggrandizing Pentagon budgetary process and "priorities" strikingly determined by shifting domestic politics (what Congressional district or crony corporation had put in the best, or most influential, bid for a base, military-style activity, or war-production plant). True, our generals remain engaged in the fearsome-sounding "Global War on Terror" by order of the White House -- but this has proven a helter-skelter example of global confusion, regularly renamed by an administration clueless about what its "war" really is.

Put another way, the Bush administration was never able to define, shape, or direct in an "imperial" fashion the powerful forces, negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American democracy.) As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their "offices") -- the only "empire" that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense had the urge to dominate with their "unitary executive," "wartime," commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the U.S., however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.

The President and His Diplomats

To make some sense of all this, let's start at the top. With his utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of Mexico), George W. Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff, "Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing." The President's major foreign-policy decision -- to invade Iraq -- was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander in chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to "kick ass" overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.

Kicking ass -- playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards -- has remarkably little to do, however, with anything that might once have been defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement such plans. For example, a year after his "axis of evil" State of the Union Address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and Shiites in their country, "emperor" Bush allegedly responded that he thought "the Iraqis were Muslims." (No way, after all, that you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarizes George W. Bush's preparation for putative empire building than the following nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:

"When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word 'Taliban' -- the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and repressive version of Islamic law -- during a verbal Rorschach test, Mr. Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the writer gave him a hint ('repression of women in Afghanistan') that Mr. Bush replied, 'Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.'"

Given the tabula rasa in Bush's mind regarding the world outside "the homeland" (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor and, as Secretary of State, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in 2000 that, as a "Europeanist," "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope"; and Powell's qualifications were based on his military savvy -- and loyalty -- not his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times reported in 2001, was "a problem solver, not a visionary."

As became clear after the horror of 9/11 -- a foreign policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that no "empire" in its right mind would have allowed -- Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point briefers on day-to-day events they had not foreseen and did not control. Compare them to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their positions at some point in his White House career. A cynical maneuverer who may not have been to everyone's liking, he nonetheless worked in the realm of global strategy. In the way he attempted to play off the Soviet Union against China in relation to the Vietnam War, he was an imperial planner of the first order (if not always with the greatest success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich and on nuclear weapons to the sole tome that Rice authored by herself -- a bland monograph on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the scholarly American Historical Review in 1985. What her sad little historical "study" demonstrated, if anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch, anything but a geopolitician of Soviet -- or any other -- affairs.

Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision -- or even of grasping essential global cause and effect -- they doubtless would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process: "Why exactly are we doing this?" "Is it really in our interests to invade a third-world country thousands of miles from our shores?" Or, put another way: "How does this invasion preserve or expand the American empire"?

All the President's Men: Cheney and Rumsfeld

According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they -- and their neocon poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neocons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the U.S. -- were the true framers of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas -- or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas -- about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney's former position as CEO of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand U.S. influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld's utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there ("events" which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq -- or success in that country -- was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, "war" would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything -- which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts -- both personal and political -- to settle. "Foreign policy," in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the Vice President and Secretary of Defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays -- the State Department and the CIA -- perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to "kick ass" among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney's treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration's claim about Saddam Hussein's search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy "experts" and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual U.S. national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the Secretary of Defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq -- any more than it did when George W. Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his "mission accomplished" moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was -- for a while -- the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The U.S., he wrote, made "foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein."

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W. Bush's national security "homeland." That may be the President's ultimate legacy.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.

Copyright 2007 John Brown