Oil for Friends
Hugo Chávez repays his Congressional amigo.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Money can't buy love, unless you're Anna Nicole Smith. But these days a little heating oil can buy friends in Washington, especially when they come as cheap as Democrat William Delahunt. Massachusetts wants bargain oil prices to help it through the winter. Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chávez wants influence in Washington. Leave it to the Congressman from the Commonwealth and a Kennedy to close the deal.
Last week Venezuela announced that its U.S.-based Citgo Petroleum would sell 12 million gallons of home heating oil at a 40% discount to help the poor in Massachusetts. The deal was announced by Mr. Delahunt on the lawn of a beneficiary before Thanksgiving, with Congressman Ed Markey at his side. "This today is about people, it's not about politics," Mr. Delahunt said with a straight face. Massachusetts-based Citizens Energy, run by the Kennedy clan, will be one of the distributors.
"To Citgo, to the people of Venezuela, our debt," the Congressman pledged. Mr. Delahunt should rightly feel a debt to the people of Venezuela, whose per-capita income is perhaps one-tenth that of Massachusetts and whose sole source of hard currency is the oil that their leader is now giving away to the second-richest state in the union. But Mr. Delahunt has no unpaid debt to Mr. Chávez. For some years now the Congressman has been lobbying hard for the Venezuelan despot, whom he paints as a misunderstood humanitarian. How French.
Mr. Chávez came to power in 1999. In seven years he has a domestic record of human rights abuses, election fraud, property confiscations a la Zimbabwe's Mugabe, erosion of the independent judiciary, limits on press freedom and militarization. His best friends include Fidel Castro, the Iranian mullahs and Colombia's FARC terrorists.
The Bush Administration is worried about all this, but Mr. Delahunt has no qualms. After Mr. Chávez was briefly deposed in 2002 because of his use of violence against dissent, Mr. Delahunt visited Venezuela and proclaimed, "I think he's learned from this. I think he understands that healing and reconciliation are the true qualities of leadership, not division." Mr. Chávez's attacks on his critics have since worsened.
Mr. Delahunt returned to Caracas to dine with Mr. Chávez in August and was asked whether he might be acting in opposition to U.S. policy. "I don't work for Condoleezza Rice. I don't report to the State Department. I report to the people who elected me in the state of Massachusetts. I belong to an independent branch of government."
Which would be more accurate if it were possible for Massachusetts to have a separate foreign policy. Mr. Delahunt's lobbying for the dictator undermines any official U.S. pressure on Mr. Chávez to behave more humanely, which is precisely why Mr. Chávez is returning the favor by plying Mr. Delahunt with cheap oil.
For less pliable Americans, el jefe del Caracas has a different policy. On Monday, a U.S. Congressional delegation led by House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde and ranking Democrat Tom Lantos was barred from entering the country and held aboard their aircraft for two hours. The delegation's itinerary had been known to Venezuelan officials for weeks. For a little more discount oil, perhaps Mr. Delahunt will explain to his colleagues how this was all just one big misunderstanding.
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
If you write it - They won't come...
Only the photogs show up for Cindys book signing at President Bush's Ranch in Crawford. It seems her approval rating has plummeted to single digits. Classic shot. He he he. Embarrasing, they could have at least hired some extras to create the illusion of a crowd. Common people! haven't you learned anything from Fidel and Saddam?
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Waiting for Havana
November 27, 2005
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
ON the two-hour ride from Havana to Varadero, on an expressway where light traffic rolls along with only an occasional billboard to disturb the view, you see nothing but palm-covered hills, the lapping aqua sea crashing on craggy shores, deep valleys shrouded in mist, and Matanzas, a historic onetime sugar-rich town, along a sun-sparkling bay. Along the rest of the road, there is only a nearly uninhabited countryside, and breathtaking views of the ocean on the north and vales and mountains on the south.
It doesn't take much effort to imagine cliffside resorts here, with sweeping golf courses, sprawling ranches, and roadside restaurants sprinkled up and down the coast.
Cuba is a large island, three-quarters the size of Florida, and aside from crowded hot spots like Havana and Varadero and a handful of colonial cities and resorts, it is largely underdeveloped - making it a sleeping giant of Caribbean tourism.
"The travel industry is sitting on the last virgin territory in the entire world," says Kirby Jones, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. "Americans want to go there for the same reason that dozens of companies around the world have. There's money to be made."
Ian Schrager, the New York entrepreneur who helped create the trend for stylish boutique hotels with the Royalton in Manhattan, the Delano in Miami Beach and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, went to Cuba in 1994-95. "I was completely enchanted with the country," he says. "I was completely taken with it. To me what was interesting was Old Havana, like Venice, a special place frozen in time."
There's no question he would like to put a hotel in Old Havana. "My customers are waiting for Cuba to happen," he says.
In Miami, Frank Del Rio, the chief executive of Oceania Cruises, who left Cuba as a child, is clear on the subject.
"It's got mountain ranges, colonial cities, beaches; it's got everything," he says. "No travel organization in the United States will be caught flat-footed when the travel restrictions are lifted. We are all prepared."
Cuba, with its magnificent, unspoiled beauty, seduces in many ways. To American business executives, it is an untapped market of 12 million people eager for American goods. To American hoteliers and cruise ship executives, it represents a tantalizing glimpse of the future - of future ports for their passengers, of future resorts for their customers.
To American tourists, it represents the taste of a forbidden fruit - of a land that has been off limits since 1961.
And they are all waiting for the one thing they believe will all but certainly make their dreams come true: the end of Fidel Castro.
WHILE Americans are waiting for Havana, Havana is preparing itself for Americans. To Cuban tourism officials, their island - onetime cabaret of the Caribbean, beacon of romance and the good life - is the magnet that will once again attract American vacationers and, with them, American dollars. In a recently published study given to me in Havana, several Cuban economists and tourism officials say that Americans are the most demanding and biggest spenders in the world, a conclusion that has become something of a mantra for Cuban officials.
"We're doing everything we can to upgrade our hotels, to bring up standards to the level Americans expect," Antonio Martínez Rodríguez, the director general of the Nacional, Cuba's premier hotel, tells me one afternoon.
He's talking not only about his hotel, an updated 1930's Art Deco national monument that once played host to Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner and the mobster Meyer Lansky. His gaze, steady behind thick glasses, his voice raspy, he ticks off numbers and percentages, unrolling existing plans for the further development of international tourism in his country - 80 percent of the work force at major hotels is college educated, he says, and most are multilingual; contemporary amenities like business centers, e-mail access, satellite television and, of course, air-conditioning are now routine in top hotels.
Cuba's tourist industry, he says, will revolve not only around sun and sand but will also include ecology-centered and health-oriented ventures. Leaning forward to make his point, Mr. Martínez says: "We'll be ahead of just about everyone in the world in the health tourism area. And we have culture and history and all our music and our friendly people."
By now, I have heard variations on the theme, which boils down to an image of Cuba as a prime world destination, not just a Caribbean resort. Estefanía R. Escobar Díaz, an official at the Ministry of Tourism, tells me fervently: "We see Americans as friends. We want Americans to come see."
We are meeting in a plainly furnished reception room in the modest ministry quarters, across the Malecón, not far from a wall that bears anti-American slogans. Ms. Díaz, a bubbly middle-aged woman, is leaning back on a 50's-style sofa, a stack of brochures on her lap. An assistant brings a tray with two cups of black coffee, and Ms. Díaz continues, saying: "This estrangement between you and us is forced. It is not natural."
That was a preamble to the sales pitch. In a dark skirt and pale blouse that seem to be standard office wear in Havana, Ms. Díaz hands me new tourism brochures and color-coded graphs tracing the growth of Cuban tourism in the last 10 to 15 years. Even without American tourists, who make up the majority of vacationers in the Caribbean, Cuba ranks No. 3 (after the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) among destinations in the Caribbean, with more than two million visitors in 2004, a leap from 340,000 in 1990, according to the ministry.
Now Canadians, Italians, the British, Spaniards and Germans and a trickle of Latin Americans fly to Cuba on direct and nonstop flights. This summer, Virgin Atlantic introduced twice weekly London-Havana flights. Ten airports have been built in Cuba in the past few years to accommodate the flow of travelers who may want to skip Havana and go directly to, say, Cayo Coco or Varadero.
On the narrow strip of Varadero, a spit of land connected to the mainland by a causeway, as many as 50 hotels crowd fluffy sand dunes along a beach that stretches about 12 miles. There are older, grand hotels like Meliá las Américas, with its new golf course, multiple cuisines and bars and all-inclusive rates; the sprawling couples-only Sandals Princesa del Mar, which sells itself as an idyllic honeymoon spot; and other resorts by Sol Meliá, the Spanish hotel chain, which manages some of the major accommodations in Cuba in joint ventures with the government.
Some of the development is so new that palm trees haven't had time to grow tall enough to give shade from a brutally hot sun.
BY midafternoon, the cobblestones of Old Havana sizzle, reflecting sun rays so powerful you can't look at the sky without squinting. It is the siesta hour. But people are spilling over the narrow sidewalks and strolling down the streets and into the bars, restaurants and hotels, museums and churches - all the buildings that make Old Havana one of the most photographed cities in the Americas.
Sightseers wind into the Ambos Mundos, one of a dozen or more small hotels that have been preserved or carved out of crumbling buildings, waiting to go up the elevator to visit Hemingway's room, a sun-drenched studio where some of his manuscripts and a typewriter he used when he stayed there are kept in glass cases. Pictures of Hemingway abound, and a sculpture of his face is mounted in the lobby.
Funny, in these long years when Americans have not been free to travel to Cuba, how much Hemingway figures in the island's tourism - the Finca de Vigía outside Havana, his bars, his fishing boat, the Hemingway marina. One of the most frequent photos you see in public places shows Hemingway whispering in Fidel Castro's ear. Cubans know an effective image when they see it - the American Nobel Prize winner with the revolutionary hero.
Blocks away, at the Raquel, the cool tiled lobby offers a refuge from crowds and heat, and at the Florida, where an imposing staircase leads to rooms of high ceilings and antique furnishings, guests lounge in the atrium under a stained-glass dome painted by a Cuban artist.
Just about everywhere in Havana, Cuban art takes a prominent place. Paintings and sketches hang in corridors, in rooms, in hotel lobbies. But there's only graffiti in La Bodeguita.
A block west of the Plaza de la Catedral, one of five plazas around which much of Old Havana lives and works, on a dirty alley wide enough for one car, men idle on the sidewalk and in the entryways of dark foyers. The doorway of one tiny place is blocked by a crowd.
This is the Bodeguita del Medio, at Calle Empedrado 207, probably the best-known bar in Havana, jammed floor to ceiling with Hemingway memorabilia and the photos and signatures of just about every soul that has stepped into the place. Foreigners, mostly young men in baseball caps, half sauced at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, jam around the bar and scream out their orders - mojitos! mojitos! mojitos! - to the bartender, a middle-aged fellow who mass-produces the rum and mint cocktail and, like an assembly line, slides the glasses down the counter.
AT the end of a long day in Old Havana, I meet the man most responsible for the restoration of the city, Eusebio Leal Spengler, the Historian of the City of Havana, a title that does not begin to convey his importance. He's agile, graying, wearing eyeglasses and short sleeves. There's nothing imperious about his manner.
Sitting in a stifling room in a restored building where he has his office, his rooms filled with paintings, plaques, photos and books, he quickly recounts the history of the restoration of Old Havana, which began with his master plan in the 80's. Starting with government funds and a vision, he can now count 16 hotels where there were nearly none, 65 restaurants and the restoration of 36 percent of the area.
"I won't see the full restoration of the city," he says a bit wistfully, "so much is left to be done, but this is a start."
Talking rapidly, like one who has said this many times before, he paints an overview of the restoration movement and his role in it. "Old Havana is like a small city-state," he says, but he is not a solo act. He reports to Fidel Castro; he is a member of the government.
"I am the State," he says, and there's a touch of gloating in this, even if it comes with a smile. "What we're doing here is trying to preserve the patrimony, the memory of the Cuban nation."
That patrimony presumably includes the decrepit mansion in a slummy area of the city where three young boys, barely visible in the dark stairs, approach me, tugging at my shirt, saying "money, money," their open palms stuck out. I walk by them up to the second floor and open the door to one of Havana's favorite restaurants, La Guarida, a small place that gained a spot of fame when it was featured in the 1994 Miramax film "Strawberry and Chocolate."
Posters from the movie are pasted on the walls along with a mishmash of images of santos and Jesus, something out of the hippie 60's. With its funky atmosphere, La Guarida is a hit with foreigners, from diplomats and journalists to drifters. Everybody goes to La Guarida, I am told - best food in town.
No, it isn't. Five days in Cuba and I've not had a good meal except at the Café del Oriente in Old Havana. But foreigners get the best food money can buy. Foreigners get the best of everything. Most Cubans shop for food at neighborhood markets where dogs sniff around, vegetables are rotting and flies buzz over raw meat laid on bloody counters.
With incomes ranging from $8 to $20 a month, the working-class Cuban cannot afford the Palco supermarket in the Cubanacán area, with its shelves of Kellogg's cereals and six-packs of Coca-Cola (both made in Mexico) and the slabs of fresh beef in the butcher area. That, and the preserved mansions in Miramar and Siboney (where Fidel Castro has a compound), are within reach only of retired generals like the one I met one morning there, and other members of the Havana elite - diplomats, foreign entrepreneurs, government functionaries and their families.
AMERICANS want to believe that only Fidel Castro stands in the way of their vacation plans. "Ten minutes after his death," says Mr. Del Rio, of Oceania Cruises, "there will be normalization of ties. I believe the regime will end the moment of Fidel's death."
He and other tourism executives already see their ships packed with Americans sailing for Cuban ports; ferries zipping back and forth on daytrips to Havana and Varadero; as many as 50 flights a day taking off from Florida for the island; and the flags of Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and other signature hotels flying there.
But today's Cuba is not the pre-Castro Cuba many Americans remember - or fantasize about.
"Americans are wrong if they think that once Castro is gone, everything will be as it was before," says Lissa Ree Weinmann, the director of the Cuba Project at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York. "Cubans have changed" - many Cubans today only know life under Castro - "and many of them will not accept any kind of American domination."
There does not seem to be a chance of any immediate loosening of the restrictions, says Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who is a leader in the battle to lift the embargo. But he says that if a vote in Congress were taken secretly, the ban on travel and trade would most likely fall. Cuban experts cite a range of American organizations, from the American Society of Travel Agents to food exporters across the South, which support free travel and trade.
Lifting the embargo will take as much as a decade, estimates Antonio R. Zamora, a Miami lawyer with the New York firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed who has published at least three studies on United States-Cuba relations. "The embargo is trade, buying and selling, and it is banking, credit cards, investment," he says.
There are also knotty property issues, he says, referring to the American-owned companies and industries expropriated by Cuba when Fidel Castro took over. Those issues will take years to resolve, but he is convinced that the travel ban will come down first.
When that happens, Mr. Zamora, a Cuban exile who fought at the Bay of Pigs, foresees a huge surge in travel to the island. "Cuba is like having a place as beautiful as Hawaii," he says, "only 90 miles from the United States."
"It has a very strong singular culture," Mr. Schrager says, "unlike other islands, like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, that seem like atolls next to it. Cuba is a real country with a distinct personality. It's exotic and timeless. Whether it's music or some other reason, it captures our fancy.
"And politics aside, Castro, he's the last great world leader on the world stage. He is the last one left, and to me that adds to the legend."
•
Getting There
With a few exceptions, the United States government does not allow Americans to travel to Cuba, just 90 miles from Key West. Among those permitted to travel under a General License (no application necessary) are accredited journalists, full-time professionals traveling for research, and government officials.
A permit known as a Specific License, issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury, must be obtained by anyone else, including those traveling for educational activities, to visit immediate relatives, on behalf of private foundations, for research or educational institutes or for religious activities. Though some Americans travel to Cuba from a third country like Mexico or Canada, they risk substantial fines.
For more information and travel arrangements, you can contact Marazul Charters, 4100 Park Avenue, Weehawken, N.J. 07086, (201) 319-1054, www.marazul.com, a government-approved agency. Marazul has two flights a week from Miami to Havana (on leased American Eagle or Falcon Air planes); it will also book flights from Montego Bay, Jamaica; Toronto and Montreal; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Mexico City and Cancún; and Nassau, the Bahamas. The company also makes hotel reservations and books air travel in Cuba.
All licensed travelers must have a visa from the Cuban government. Visas can be obtained through the Cuban Interests Section, 2630 16th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20009; (202) 797-8518. The visa fee is $50; consular services, $20. Foreign currency must be changed to Cuban convertible pesos; for the best exchange rate, take euros or Canadian dollars.
Where to Stay
Hotel Nacional, Calle O at 21, Vedado, (53-7) 873-3564, www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com, the best hotel in Havana, designed by McKim, Mead & White, was built in 1930. The hotel has 457 rooms, a cabaret, several bars and restaurants. Room rates range from $120 to $660.
Hotel Ambos Mundos, Calle Obispo 153, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-9529, is a 54-room restored hotel where Hemingway lived in the 30's. Rooms start at $80.
Hotel Florida, Calle Obispo 252, Old Havana, (53-7) 862-4127, is a 25-room hotel with a high atrium, a stained-glass skylight, and a restaurant and bar. The ample high-ceilinged rooms have colonial appointments, marble floors, wrought-iron beds, satellite TV and minibars. Rates from $90.
Hotel Raquel, Calle Amargura at San Ignacio, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-8280, has 25 rooms decorated with art by Cuban painters and an elegant Art Nouveau lobby; the hotel's biblical name evokes Cuban-Jewish culture. Rooms from $80.
Meliá las Américas, Varadero, (53-45) 66-7600), all-inclusive; from $220.
Sandals Princesa del Mar and Sandals Royal Hicacos, Varadero, www.sandalscuba.ca, for couples only, all-inclusive; rooms from $170.
Where to Eat
Café del Oriente, Oficios 112, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-6686, an elegant but casual restaurant (with live music), has some of the best food in Havana, with a good selection of wines. A meal with a glass of wine comes to about $20.
El Aljibe, Séptima Avenida, Miramar, (53-7) 204-1583, is a favorite restaurant with foreigners and the Havana elite. A large, open terrace with a bamboo roof, it's a place for large groups and after-hours drinking and eating. Its specialty is pollo asado el aljibe (roast chicken), which comes in a steaming pot. The meal is a bargain at $15 and should be washed down with Cristal beer ($2 a bottle).
La Guarida, Calle Concordia 418, Central Havana, (53-7) 862-4940, is Cuba's most famous paladar (as Cuba's home restaurants are called). The food, which runs to chicken and pork and some seafood, is mildly interesting though not excellent. Main dishes run around $12.
What to See and Do
There's really only one main attraction: Old Havana, with museums, cathedrals, plazas, hotels, restaurants and bars. But the rest of Havana - mainly Vedado, Miramar and Siboney - are worth a car tour to get a better view of how the elite lives.
Outside Havana: Scenic Pinar del Río Province (southwest of Havana) is a three-hour drive on bus tours that leave daily from major Havana hotels. Havanatur, a government tourism agency with offices in major hotels, can arrange your tours; (53-82) 75-0100.
LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA, an editor at Sunday Styles, is the author of a memoir, "The Noise of Infinite Longing" (Harper- Collins).
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
ON the two-hour ride from Havana to Varadero, on an expressway where light traffic rolls along with only an occasional billboard to disturb the view, you see nothing but palm-covered hills, the lapping aqua sea crashing on craggy shores, deep valleys shrouded in mist, and Matanzas, a historic onetime sugar-rich town, along a sun-sparkling bay. Along the rest of the road, there is only a nearly uninhabited countryside, and breathtaking views of the ocean on the north and vales and mountains on the south.
It doesn't take much effort to imagine cliffside resorts here, with sweeping golf courses, sprawling ranches, and roadside restaurants sprinkled up and down the coast.
Cuba is a large island, three-quarters the size of Florida, and aside from crowded hot spots like Havana and Varadero and a handful of colonial cities and resorts, it is largely underdeveloped - making it a sleeping giant of Caribbean tourism.
"The travel industry is sitting on the last virgin territory in the entire world," says Kirby Jones, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. "Americans want to go there for the same reason that dozens of companies around the world have. There's money to be made."
Ian Schrager, the New York entrepreneur who helped create the trend for stylish boutique hotels with the Royalton in Manhattan, the Delano in Miami Beach and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, went to Cuba in 1994-95. "I was completely enchanted with the country," he says. "I was completely taken with it. To me what was interesting was Old Havana, like Venice, a special place frozen in time."
There's no question he would like to put a hotel in Old Havana. "My customers are waiting for Cuba to happen," he says.
In Miami, Frank Del Rio, the chief executive of Oceania Cruises, who left Cuba as a child, is clear on the subject.
"It's got mountain ranges, colonial cities, beaches; it's got everything," he says. "No travel organization in the United States will be caught flat-footed when the travel restrictions are lifted. We are all prepared."
Cuba, with its magnificent, unspoiled beauty, seduces in many ways. To American business executives, it is an untapped market of 12 million people eager for American goods. To American hoteliers and cruise ship executives, it represents a tantalizing glimpse of the future - of future ports for their passengers, of future resorts for their customers.
To American tourists, it represents the taste of a forbidden fruit - of a land that has been off limits since 1961.
And they are all waiting for the one thing they believe will all but certainly make their dreams come true: the end of Fidel Castro.
WHILE Americans are waiting for Havana, Havana is preparing itself for Americans. To Cuban tourism officials, their island - onetime cabaret of the Caribbean, beacon of romance and the good life - is the magnet that will once again attract American vacationers and, with them, American dollars. In a recently published study given to me in Havana, several Cuban economists and tourism officials say that Americans are the most demanding and biggest spenders in the world, a conclusion that has become something of a mantra for Cuban officials.
"We're doing everything we can to upgrade our hotels, to bring up standards to the level Americans expect," Antonio Martínez Rodríguez, the director general of the Nacional, Cuba's premier hotel, tells me one afternoon.
He's talking not only about his hotel, an updated 1930's Art Deco national monument that once played host to Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner and the mobster Meyer Lansky. His gaze, steady behind thick glasses, his voice raspy, he ticks off numbers and percentages, unrolling existing plans for the further development of international tourism in his country - 80 percent of the work force at major hotels is college educated, he says, and most are multilingual; contemporary amenities like business centers, e-mail access, satellite television and, of course, air-conditioning are now routine in top hotels.
Cuba's tourist industry, he says, will revolve not only around sun and sand but will also include ecology-centered and health-oriented ventures. Leaning forward to make his point, Mr. Martínez says: "We'll be ahead of just about everyone in the world in the health tourism area. And we have culture and history and all our music and our friendly people."
By now, I have heard variations on the theme, which boils down to an image of Cuba as a prime world destination, not just a Caribbean resort. Estefanía R. Escobar Díaz, an official at the Ministry of Tourism, tells me fervently: "We see Americans as friends. We want Americans to come see."
We are meeting in a plainly furnished reception room in the modest ministry quarters, across the Malecón, not far from a wall that bears anti-American slogans. Ms. Díaz, a bubbly middle-aged woman, is leaning back on a 50's-style sofa, a stack of brochures on her lap. An assistant brings a tray with two cups of black coffee, and Ms. Díaz continues, saying: "This estrangement between you and us is forced. It is not natural."
That was a preamble to the sales pitch. In a dark skirt and pale blouse that seem to be standard office wear in Havana, Ms. Díaz hands me new tourism brochures and color-coded graphs tracing the growth of Cuban tourism in the last 10 to 15 years. Even without American tourists, who make up the majority of vacationers in the Caribbean, Cuba ranks No. 3 (after the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) among destinations in the Caribbean, with more than two million visitors in 2004, a leap from 340,000 in 1990, according to the ministry.
Now Canadians, Italians, the British, Spaniards and Germans and a trickle of Latin Americans fly to Cuba on direct and nonstop flights. This summer, Virgin Atlantic introduced twice weekly London-Havana flights. Ten airports have been built in Cuba in the past few years to accommodate the flow of travelers who may want to skip Havana and go directly to, say, Cayo Coco or Varadero.
On the narrow strip of Varadero, a spit of land connected to the mainland by a causeway, as many as 50 hotels crowd fluffy sand dunes along a beach that stretches about 12 miles. There are older, grand hotels like Meliá las Américas, with its new golf course, multiple cuisines and bars and all-inclusive rates; the sprawling couples-only Sandals Princesa del Mar, which sells itself as an idyllic honeymoon spot; and other resorts by Sol Meliá, the Spanish hotel chain, which manages some of the major accommodations in Cuba in joint ventures with the government.
Some of the development is so new that palm trees haven't had time to grow tall enough to give shade from a brutally hot sun.
BY midafternoon, the cobblestones of Old Havana sizzle, reflecting sun rays so powerful you can't look at the sky without squinting. It is the siesta hour. But people are spilling over the narrow sidewalks and strolling down the streets and into the bars, restaurants and hotels, museums and churches - all the buildings that make Old Havana one of the most photographed cities in the Americas.
Sightseers wind into the Ambos Mundos, one of a dozen or more small hotels that have been preserved or carved out of crumbling buildings, waiting to go up the elevator to visit Hemingway's room, a sun-drenched studio where some of his manuscripts and a typewriter he used when he stayed there are kept in glass cases. Pictures of Hemingway abound, and a sculpture of his face is mounted in the lobby.
Funny, in these long years when Americans have not been free to travel to Cuba, how much Hemingway figures in the island's tourism - the Finca de Vigía outside Havana, his bars, his fishing boat, the Hemingway marina. One of the most frequent photos you see in public places shows Hemingway whispering in Fidel Castro's ear. Cubans know an effective image when they see it - the American Nobel Prize winner with the revolutionary hero.
Blocks away, at the Raquel, the cool tiled lobby offers a refuge from crowds and heat, and at the Florida, where an imposing staircase leads to rooms of high ceilings and antique furnishings, guests lounge in the atrium under a stained-glass dome painted by a Cuban artist.
Just about everywhere in Havana, Cuban art takes a prominent place. Paintings and sketches hang in corridors, in rooms, in hotel lobbies. But there's only graffiti in La Bodeguita.
A block west of the Plaza de la Catedral, one of five plazas around which much of Old Havana lives and works, on a dirty alley wide enough for one car, men idle on the sidewalk and in the entryways of dark foyers. The doorway of one tiny place is blocked by a crowd.
This is the Bodeguita del Medio, at Calle Empedrado 207, probably the best-known bar in Havana, jammed floor to ceiling with Hemingway memorabilia and the photos and signatures of just about every soul that has stepped into the place. Foreigners, mostly young men in baseball caps, half sauced at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, jam around the bar and scream out their orders - mojitos! mojitos! mojitos! - to the bartender, a middle-aged fellow who mass-produces the rum and mint cocktail and, like an assembly line, slides the glasses down the counter.
AT the end of a long day in Old Havana, I meet the man most responsible for the restoration of the city, Eusebio Leal Spengler, the Historian of the City of Havana, a title that does not begin to convey his importance. He's agile, graying, wearing eyeglasses and short sleeves. There's nothing imperious about his manner.
Sitting in a stifling room in a restored building where he has his office, his rooms filled with paintings, plaques, photos and books, he quickly recounts the history of the restoration of Old Havana, which began with his master plan in the 80's. Starting with government funds and a vision, he can now count 16 hotels where there were nearly none, 65 restaurants and the restoration of 36 percent of the area.
"I won't see the full restoration of the city," he says a bit wistfully, "so much is left to be done, but this is a start."
Talking rapidly, like one who has said this many times before, he paints an overview of the restoration movement and his role in it. "Old Havana is like a small city-state," he says, but he is not a solo act. He reports to Fidel Castro; he is a member of the government.
"I am the State," he says, and there's a touch of gloating in this, even if it comes with a smile. "What we're doing here is trying to preserve the patrimony, the memory of the Cuban nation."
That patrimony presumably includes the decrepit mansion in a slummy area of the city where three young boys, barely visible in the dark stairs, approach me, tugging at my shirt, saying "money, money," their open palms stuck out. I walk by them up to the second floor and open the door to one of Havana's favorite restaurants, La Guarida, a small place that gained a spot of fame when it was featured in the 1994 Miramax film "Strawberry and Chocolate."
Posters from the movie are pasted on the walls along with a mishmash of images of santos and Jesus, something out of the hippie 60's. With its funky atmosphere, La Guarida is a hit with foreigners, from diplomats and journalists to drifters. Everybody goes to La Guarida, I am told - best food in town.
No, it isn't. Five days in Cuba and I've not had a good meal except at the Café del Oriente in Old Havana. But foreigners get the best food money can buy. Foreigners get the best of everything. Most Cubans shop for food at neighborhood markets where dogs sniff around, vegetables are rotting and flies buzz over raw meat laid on bloody counters.
With incomes ranging from $8 to $20 a month, the working-class Cuban cannot afford the Palco supermarket in the Cubanacán area, with its shelves of Kellogg's cereals and six-packs of Coca-Cola (both made in Mexico) and the slabs of fresh beef in the butcher area. That, and the preserved mansions in Miramar and Siboney (where Fidel Castro has a compound), are within reach only of retired generals like the one I met one morning there, and other members of the Havana elite - diplomats, foreign entrepreneurs, government functionaries and their families.
AMERICANS want to believe that only Fidel Castro stands in the way of their vacation plans. "Ten minutes after his death," says Mr. Del Rio, of Oceania Cruises, "there will be normalization of ties. I believe the regime will end the moment of Fidel's death."
He and other tourism executives already see their ships packed with Americans sailing for Cuban ports; ferries zipping back and forth on daytrips to Havana and Varadero; as many as 50 flights a day taking off from Florida for the island; and the flags of Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and other signature hotels flying there.
But today's Cuba is not the pre-Castro Cuba many Americans remember - or fantasize about.
"Americans are wrong if they think that once Castro is gone, everything will be as it was before," says Lissa Ree Weinmann, the director of the Cuba Project at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York. "Cubans have changed" - many Cubans today only know life under Castro - "and many of them will not accept any kind of American domination."
There does not seem to be a chance of any immediate loosening of the restrictions, says Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who is a leader in the battle to lift the embargo. But he says that if a vote in Congress were taken secretly, the ban on travel and trade would most likely fall. Cuban experts cite a range of American organizations, from the American Society of Travel Agents to food exporters across the South, which support free travel and trade.
Lifting the embargo will take as much as a decade, estimates Antonio R. Zamora, a Miami lawyer with the New York firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed who has published at least three studies on United States-Cuba relations. "The embargo is trade, buying and selling, and it is banking, credit cards, investment," he says.
There are also knotty property issues, he says, referring to the American-owned companies and industries expropriated by Cuba when Fidel Castro took over. Those issues will take years to resolve, but he is convinced that the travel ban will come down first.
When that happens, Mr. Zamora, a Cuban exile who fought at the Bay of Pigs, foresees a huge surge in travel to the island. "Cuba is like having a place as beautiful as Hawaii," he says, "only 90 miles from the United States."
"It has a very strong singular culture," Mr. Schrager says, "unlike other islands, like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, that seem like atolls next to it. Cuba is a real country with a distinct personality. It's exotic and timeless. Whether it's music or some other reason, it captures our fancy.
"And politics aside, Castro, he's the last great world leader on the world stage. He is the last one left, and to me that adds to the legend."
•
Getting There
With a few exceptions, the United States government does not allow Americans to travel to Cuba, just 90 miles from Key West. Among those permitted to travel under a General License (no application necessary) are accredited journalists, full-time professionals traveling for research, and government officials.
A permit known as a Specific License, issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury, must be obtained by anyone else, including those traveling for educational activities, to visit immediate relatives, on behalf of private foundations, for research or educational institutes or for religious activities. Though some Americans travel to Cuba from a third country like Mexico or Canada, they risk substantial fines.
For more information and travel arrangements, you can contact Marazul Charters, 4100 Park Avenue, Weehawken, N.J. 07086, (201) 319-1054, www.marazul.com, a government-approved agency. Marazul has two flights a week from Miami to Havana (on leased American Eagle or Falcon Air planes); it will also book flights from Montego Bay, Jamaica; Toronto and Montreal; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Mexico City and Cancún; and Nassau, the Bahamas. The company also makes hotel reservations and books air travel in Cuba.
All licensed travelers must have a visa from the Cuban government. Visas can be obtained through the Cuban Interests Section, 2630 16th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20009; (202) 797-8518. The visa fee is $50; consular services, $20. Foreign currency must be changed to Cuban convertible pesos; for the best exchange rate, take euros or Canadian dollars.
Where to Stay
Hotel Nacional, Calle O at 21, Vedado, (53-7) 873-3564, www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com, the best hotel in Havana, designed by McKim, Mead & White, was built in 1930. The hotel has 457 rooms, a cabaret, several bars and restaurants. Room rates range from $120 to $660.
Hotel Ambos Mundos, Calle Obispo 153, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-9529, is a 54-room restored hotel where Hemingway lived in the 30's. Rooms start at $80.
Hotel Florida, Calle Obispo 252, Old Havana, (53-7) 862-4127, is a 25-room hotel with a high atrium, a stained-glass skylight, and a restaurant and bar. The ample high-ceilinged rooms have colonial appointments, marble floors, wrought-iron beds, satellite TV and minibars. Rates from $90.
Hotel Raquel, Calle Amargura at San Ignacio, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-8280, has 25 rooms decorated with art by Cuban painters and an elegant Art Nouveau lobby; the hotel's biblical name evokes Cuban-Jewish culture. Rooms from $80.
Meliá las Américas, Varadero, (53-45) 66-7600), all-inclusive; from $220.
Sandals Princesa del Mar and Sandals Royal Hicacos, Varadero, www.sandalscuba.ca, for couples only, all-inclusive; rooms from $170.
Where to Eat
Café del Oriente, Oficios 112, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-6686, an elegant but casual restaurant (with live music), has some of the best food in Havana, with a good selection of wines. A meal with a glass of wine comes to about $20.
El Aljibe, Séptima Avenida, Miramar, (53-7) 204-1583, is a favorite restaurant with foreigners and the Havana elite. A large, open terrace with a bamboo roof, it's a place for large groups and after-hours drinking and eating. Its specialty is pollo asado el aljibe (roast chicken), which comes in a steaming pot. The meal is a bargain at $15 and should be washed down with Cristal beer ($2 a bottle).
La Guarida, Calle Concordia 418, Central Havana, (53-7) 862-4940, is Cuba's most famous paladar (as Cuba's home restaurants are called). The food, which runs to chicken and pork and some seafood, is mildly interesting though not excellent. Main dishes run around $12.
What to See and Do
There's really only one main attraction: Old Havana, with museums, cathedrals, plazas, hotels, restaurants and bars. But the rest of Havana - mainly Vedado, Miramar and Siboney - are worth a car tour to get a better view of how the elite lives.
Outside Havana: Scenic Pinar del Río Province (southwest of Havana) is a three-hour drive on bus tours that leave daily from major Havana hotels. Havanatur, a government tourism agency with offices in major hotels, can arrange your tours; (53-82) 75-0100.
LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA, an editor at Sunday Styles, is the author of a memoir, "The Noise of Infinite Longing" (Harper- Collins).
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Uphill battle to curb flow of U.S. cash to Cuba
Paolo Spadoni Special to the Sentinel
Posted November 28, 2005
It has been almost a year and a half since the Bush administration intensified its sanctions program with respect to Cuba by allowing Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island only once every three years, instead of annually, and limiting remittances just to immediate relatives.
Mainly intended to deprive the Castro government of U.S. dollars, Washington's new regulations consistently target a specific group of U.S. citizens who channel into Cuba more hard currency than any other group. In the past decade, remittances sent or personally delivered by Cuban-Americans to family members on the island, and mostly used for purchases in state-owned hard-currency stores, have provided an economic lifeline to the same government U.S. policy was supposed to undermine.
There is little doubt that President Bush's recent measures have significantly reduced the number of U.S. visitors to Cuba, thus depriving the latter of the hard currency that deterred travelers would have brought for their personal expenses and for relatives. Curbing the overall flow of remittances to Cuba, however, is a much more difficult task.
Here is why U.S. authorities face an uphill battle in trying to curtail money transfers to Cuba from the United States:
Instead of making use of formal wire-transfer services, Cuban-Americans tend to rely on relatively inexpensive and more user-friendly informal remittance channels. It is well known that a huge flow of remittances arrive on the island in the luggage of entrusted agents, or "mules," who travel to Cuba through third countries and carry money for cheaper fees than the ones charged by official agencies such as Western Union.
Cuban-American mules, who are generally U.S. citizens who hold a Cuban passport, can easily circumvent restrictions by using the U.S. passport to enter and leave the United States and the third-party country, while using the Cuban passport for the rest of the journey. And even placing U.S. inspectors in several third-country airports won't help much. Cuban-American cash can be sent or personally transferred to citizens of other countries (some mules are Mexicans and Colombians), who will then travel to Cuba and deliver the money to recipient families.
In the past year, mules' operations have become increasingly sophisticated, especially since late 2004 when Fidel Castro put an end to the commercial circulation of the U.S. dollar in Cuba in favor of the convertible peso or CUC, a local currency that has no value outside the island. Cubans who receive dollars from abroad must now exchange them for CUCs in order to make purchases in hard-currency stores. Their purchasing power has been greatly reduced after the 10 percent fee on dollar-CUC exchanges introduced in November 2004 and the re-evaluation of the CUC by 8 percent against all international currencies last May.
Currently, most Cubans are receiving remittances in CUCs rather than in dollars or other currencies. Given that mules carry substantial amounts of cash in single trips, and now probably even more money than before as travel to the island has become riskier due to Bush's new restrictions, the key issue is where they acquire CUCs before delivery. Cuba's strict financial controls make it unlikely that mules exchange tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, or eventually Euros or other major currencies, at local banks or exchange houses. One possibility is the existence of an unofficial organization in Cuba that dedicates itself to these exchanges, or perhaps ghost companies outside the island engaged in these transactions. Mules might also rely on local intermediaries to split the money and exchange smaller sums at different locations. After all, there is evidence that some remittances are delivered by Cuban nationals rather than foreign residents.
Remittances to Cuba are also facilitated by the emergence of third-country-based money-transfer services that allow funds to be transmitted to the island from the United States through the Internet. As transactions are routed via foreign banks, it is extremely difficult for U.S. authorities to exercise effective control. For instance, funds transferred to Cuba via Canada-based Transcard (used by an ever-increasing number of Havana residents) are credited to secure bank accounts in Canada. The recent proliferation of similar businesses located in Europe, such as Spain and Italy-based SerCuba and Switzerland-based AWS Technologies, further complicates the U.S. attempt to curtail remittances to Cuba.
After almost 18 months since the enactment of a new U.S. policy toward Cuba, most Cuban-Americans and their relatives on the island might be physically apart but still economically tied.
Paolo Spadoni is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. He wrote this commentary for the Orlando Sentinel.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Posted November 28, 2005
It has been almost a year and a half since the Bush administration intensified its sanctions program with respect to Cuba by allowing Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island only once every three years, instead of annually, and limiting remittances just to immediate relatives.
Mainly intended to deprive the Castro government of U.S. dollars, Washington's new regulations consistently target a specific group of U.S. citizens who channel into Cuba more hard currency than any other group. In the past decade, remittances sent or personally delivered by Cuban-Americans to family members on the island, and mostly used for purchases in state-owned hard-currency stores, have provided an economic lifeline to the same government U.S. policy was supposed to undermine.
There is little doubt that President Bush's recent measures have significantly reduced the number of U.S. visitors to Cuba, thus depriving the latter of the hard currency that deterred travelers would have brought for their personal expenses and for relatives. Curbing the overall flow of remittances to Cuba, however, is a much more difficult task.
Here is why U.S. authorities face an uphill battle in trying to curtail money transfers to Cuba from the United States:
Instead of making use of formal wire-transfer services, Cuban-Americans tend to rely on relatively inexpensive and more user-friendly informal remittance channels. It is well known that a huge flow of remittances arrive on the island in the luggage of entrusted agents, or "mules," who travel to Cuba through third countries and carry money for cheaper fees than the ones charged by official agencies such as Western Union.
Cuban-American mules, who are generally U.S. citizens who hold a Cuban passport, can easily circumvent restrictions by using the U.S. passport to enter and leave the United States and the third-party country, while using the Cuban passport for the rest of the journey. And even placing U.S. inspectors in several third-country airports won't help much. Cuban-American cash can be sent or personally transferred to citizens of other countries (some mules are Mexicans and Colombians), who will then travel to Cuba and deliver the money to recipient families.
In the past year, mules' operations have become increasingly sophisticated, especially since late 2004 when Fidel Castro put an end to the commercial circulation of the U.S. dollar in Cuba in favor of the convertible peso or CUC, a local currency that has no value outside the island. Cubans who receive dollars from abroad must now exchange them for CUCs in order to make purchases in hard-currency stores. Their purchasing power has been greatly reduced after the 10 percent fee on dollar-CUC exchanges introduced in November 2004 and the re-evaluation of the CUC by 8 percent against all international currencies last May.
Currently, most Cubans are receiving remittances in CUCs rather than in dollars or other currencies. Given that mules carry substantial amounts of cash in single trips, and now probably even more money than before as travel to the island has become riskier due to Bush's new restrictions, the key issue is where they acquire CUCs before delivery. Cuba's strict financial controls make it unlikely that mules exchange tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, or eventually Euros or other major currencies, at local banks or exchange houses. One possibility is the existence of an unofficial organization in Cuba that dedicates itself to these exchanges, or perhaps ghost companies outside the island engaged in these transactions. Mules might also rely on local intermediaries to split the money and exchange smaller sums at different locations. After all, there is evidence that some remittances are delivered by Cuban nationals rather than foreign residents.
Remittances to Cuba are also facilitated by the emergence of third-country-based money-transfer services that allow funds to be transmitted to the island from the United States through the Internet. As transactions are routed via foreign banks, it is extremely difficult for U.S. authorities to exercise effective control. For instance, funds transferred to Cuba via Canada-based Transcard (used by an ever-increasing number of Havana residents) are credited to secure bank accounts in Canada. The recent proliferation of similar businesses located in Europe, such as Spain and Italy-based SerCuba and Switzerland-based AWS Technologies, further complicates the U.S. attempt to curtail remittances to Cuba.
After almost 18 months since the enactment of a new U.S. policy toward Cuba, most Cuban-Americans and their relatives on the island might be physically apart but still economically tied.
Paolo Spadoni is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. He wrote this commentary for the Orlando Sentinel.
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Who's Crying Now?
Here's a man-bites-dog story: It seems the U.N. actually did something worthwhile last week. Here's the Jerusalem Post's report:
Following intense US pressure, the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday issued an unprecedented condemnation of Monday's Hizbullah attacks on northern Israel.
This condemnation--slamming Hizbullah by name for "acts of hatred"--marked the first time the Security Council has ever reprimanded Hizbullah for cross-border attacks on Israel. The condemnation followed by two days a failed attempt to get a condemnation issued on Monday, the day of the attack, when Algeria came out against any mention of Hizbullah in the statement.
When asked what changed from Monday to Wednesday, one diplomatic official replied: "John Bolton," a reference to the US ambassador to the UN. Bolton lobbied vigorously for the passage of the statement.
Would someone remind us again why senators filibustered Bolton's appointment? Was it because he was supposed to be an ineffective diplomat, or an effective one? Or was it just because he hurt George Voinovich's little feelings?
Following intense US pressure, the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday issued an unprecedented condemnation of Monday's Hizbullah attacks on northern Israel.
This condemnation--slamming Hizbullah by name for "acts of hatred"--marked the first time the Security Council has ever reprimanded Hizbullah for cross-border attacks on Israel. The condemnation followed by two days a failed attempt to get a condemnation issued on Monday, the day of the attack, when Algeria came out against any mention of Hizbullah in the statement.
When asked what changed from Monday to Wednesday, one diplomatic official replied: "John Bolton," a reference to the US ambassador to the UN. Bolton lobbied vigorously for the passage of the statement.
Would someone remind us again why senators filibustered Bolton's appointment? Was it because he was supposed to be an ineffective diplomat, or an effective one? Or was it just because he hurt George Voinovich's little feelings?
Kerry Throws His Flip-Flops Into the Ring
From the Associated Press comes evidence that John Kerry* is running for president again, reprising the strategy that worked so well in 2004:
Kerry initially voted in favor of a Republican-sponsored resolution calling on President Bush to explain his strategy for success in Iraq. Minutes later, the Democrat changed his vote.
The Courier-Mail of Queensland, Australia, carries a story in tomorrow's paper titled "Downer Delivers Message of Hopelessness." We haven't had a chance to read the actual article yet, but from the headline it certainly sounds as though Kerry is definitely running.
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who single-handedly won the Vietnam War.
Kerry initially voted in favor of a Republican-sponsored resolution calling on President Bush to explain his strategy for success in Iraq. Minutes later, the Democrat changed his vote.
The Courier-Mail of Queensland, Australia, carries a story in tomorrow's paper titled "Downer Delivers Message of Hopelessness." We haven't had a chance to read the actual article yet, but from the headline it certainly sounds as though Kerry is definitely running.
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who single-handedly won the Vietnam War.
Dems. Misreading the American People?
Best of the Web Today - November 28, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Glug, Glug, Glug . . .
In recent weeks most Democrats seem to have have concluded that the war effort is a sinking ship, the American people have already jumped overboard, and if Democratic politicians follow them off the side, the people will reward them by putting them in charge of the life rafts. The Washington Post notes some poll results that suggest the Dems are all wet:
Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale--with 44 percent saying morale is hurt "a lot," according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. . . .
Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."
The Washington Times' Jennifer Harper and the Los Angeles Times' Max Boot both note the result of another poll, this one by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which shows that the general public is considerably more optimistic about Iraq than just about any group of "opinion leaders." Respondents were asked if they thought efforts to establish a successful democracy there will succeed or fail:
Succeed Fail
News media 33% 63%
Foreign affairs 28% 71%
Security 28% 70%
State/local government 51% 45%
Academic/think tank 27% 71%
Religious leaders 41% 56%
Scientists/engineers 13% 84%
Military 64% 32%
General public 56% 37%
Watching "Meet the Press" on Sunday, we were especially struck by the dour drumbeat from the journalists' panel, which consisted of David Broder, David Gregory, Eugene Robinson and Judy Woodruff. All agreed that democracy in Iraq is simply hopeless. But their pessimism was totally divorced from the facts: Not one even mentioned the elections scheduled for two weeks from Thursday. Maybe it will turn out that we can do without experts after all.
By JAMES TARANTO
Glug, Glug, Glug . . .
In recent weeks most Democrats seem to have have concluded that the war effort is a sinking ship, the American people have already jumped overboard, and if Democratic politicians follow them off the side, the people will reward them by putting them in charge of the life rafts. The Washington Post notes some poll results that suggest the Dems are all wet:
Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale--with 44 percent saying morale is hurt "a lot," according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. . . .
Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."
The Washington Times' Jennifer Harper and the Los Angeles Times' Max Boot both note the result of another poll, this one by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which shows that the general public is considerably more optimistic about Iraq than just about any group of "opinion leaders." Respondents were asked if they thought efforts to establish a successful democracy there will succeed or fail:
Succeed Fail
News media 33% 63%
Foreign affairs 28% 71%
Security 28% 70%
State/local government 51% 45%
Academic/think tank 27% 71%
Religious leaders 41% 56%
Scientists/engineers 13% 84%
Military 64% 32%
General public 56% 37%
Watching "Meet the Press" on Sunday, we were especially struck by the dour drumbeat from the journalists' panel, which consisted of David Broder, David Gregory, Eugene Robinson and Judy Woodruff. All agreed that democracy in Iraq is simply hopeless. But their pessimism was totally divorced from the facts: Not one even mentioned the elections scheduled for two weeks from Thursday. Maybe it will turn out that we can do without experts after all.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Bono Says His Music Will Last 100 Years
Bono Says His Music Will Last 100 Years
8:32 AM PST - Monday, November 21, 2005 AP Staff NEW YORK
Bono says he'd rather be remembered for his music than his activism.
A dedicated lobbyist for the world's poor and AIDS-stricken, the U2 frontman told CBS' "60 Minutes" that "I think my work _ the activism _ will be forgotten.
"And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away," he said in an interview that aired Sunday. Since 1999, Bono has helped persuade Republicans and Democrats, presidents and lawmakers, to provide millions to help end the scourge of AIDS, eliminate poverty in Africa and forgive Third World debt.
The Irish rocker also predicted that his music will still be around in 100 years, explaining that his songs occupy "an emotional terrain that didn't exist before our group did." And Bono said he has no intention of slowing down. He noted that people in rock 'n roll burn out at age 40, and said he wanted to see if his band could continue making "extraordinary" music.
"You know I'm still hungry," said the 45-year-old winner of 14 Grammy awards. "I still want a lot out of music."
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Saturday, November 19, 2005
Cuba, Iran lash out at Internet freedom
By Declan McCullaghhttp://news.com.com/Cuba,+Iran+lash+out+at+Internet+freedom/2100-1028_3-5960298.html
Story last modified Fri Nov 18 05:57:00 PST 2005
TUNIS, Tunisia--Cuba, Iran and African governments lashed out at the U.S. government this week, charging that the Internet permits too much free speech and that the way it is managed must be reformed immediately.
The U.S. and other Western nations "insist on being world policemen on the management of the Internet," Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who has been the country's leader since 1987, said at a United Nations information society summit here.
"Those who have supported nihilistic and disorderly freedom of expression are beginning to see the fruits" of their efforts, Mugabe said, adding that Zimbabwe will be "challenging the bully-boy mentality that has driven the unipolar world."
These criticisms demonstrate that a detente reached at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on domain name management has hardly resolved long-running disputes about Internet management, the primacy of the English language online, and the so-called digital divide between nations with functioning economies and those with dysfunctional ones. The deal resulted in the creation of a U.N. Internet Governance Forum expected to meet in Greece in 2006.
"Fidel Castro, the unflinching promoter of the use of new technologies," believes "it is necessary to create a multinational democratic (institution) which administers this network of networks," said the WSIS delegate from Cuba.
In Cuba, only people with government permission can access the Internet, owning computer equipment is prohibited, and online writers have been imprisoned, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based free speech watchdog group.
Too often, the Internet is used for the "propagation of falsehoods," said Mohammad Soleymani, Iran's minister of communication and information technology.
Soleymani called for the elimination of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)--which approves new top-level domain names--in favor of United Nations control.
"Changing the current Internet governance to a participatory, legitimate and accountable system under an international authority is imperative," he said.
But changes proposed by Third World countries that would give them more influence are "being rejected because they are not facilities managed by the Breton Woods institution by the West's neo-colonial desires," charged Zimbabwe's Mugabe, referring to a post-World War II agreement that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Mozambique Prime Minister Luisa Diogo predicted the struggles to replace ICANN were not over, saying that "it is a matter of justice and legitimacy that all people must have a say in the way the Internet is governed." ICANN does have an international board of directors, including members from Senegal, Morocco, and Nairobi, but critics say that's not enough.
A recurring criticism of the WSIS summit was that wealthier nations had not done enough to help poorer ones take advantage of the Internet.
"The proceeds have not been equally shared by developing and developed countries," said Sudan President Omar Ahmad al-Bashir. "The digital divide is growing between the rich and the poor countries."
Economists generally agree, however, that investors prefer nations with a respect for property rights, the rule of law and a functioning court system--which means that few African nations make the list.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, offers an Index of Economic Freedom. The index finds a close correlation between wealth and a stable, functioning government. Wealthy regions like Hong Kong, the U.S., and Switzerland respect economic rights, the index shows, while poor nations like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran and Cuba show the least respect for them.
Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Story last modified Fri Nov 18 05:57:00 PST 2005
TUNIS, Tunisia--Cuba, Iran and African governments lashed out at the U.S. government this week, charging that the Internet permits too much free speech and that the way it is managed must be reformed immediately.
The U.S. and other Western nations "insist on being world policemen on the management of the Internet," Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who has been the country's leader since 1987, said at a United Nations information society summit here.
"Those who have supported nihilistic and disorderly freedom of expression are beginning to see the fruits" of their efforts, Mugabe said, adding that Zimbabwe will be "challenging the bully-boy mentality that has driven the unipolar world."
These criticisms demonstrate that a detente reached at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on domain name management has hardly resolved long-running disputes about Internet management, the primacy of the English language online, and the so-called digital divide between nations with functioning economies and those with dysfunctional ones. The deal resulted in the creation of a U.N. Internet Governance Forum expected to meet in Greece in 2006.
"Fidel Castro, the unflinching promoter of the use of new technologies," believes "it is necessary to create a multinational democratic (institution) which administers this network of networks," said the WSIS delegate from Cuba.
In Cuba, only people with government permission can access the Internet, owning computer equipment is prohibited, and online writers have been imprisoned, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based free speech watchdog group.
Too often, the Internet is used for the "propagation of falsehoods," said Mohammad Soleymani, Iran's minister of communication and information technology.
Soleymani called for the elimination of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)--which approves new top-level domain names--in favor of United Nations control.
"Changing the current Internet governance to a participatory, legitimate and accountable system under an international authority is imperative," he said.
But changes proposed by Third World countries that would give them more influence are "being rejected because they are not facilities managed by the Breton Woods institution by the West's neo-colonial desires," charged Zimbabwe's Mugabe, referring to a post-World War II agreement that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Mozambique Prime Minister Luisa Diogo predicted the struggles to replace ICANN were not over, saying that "it is a matter of justice and legitimacy that all people must have a say in the way the Internet is governed." ICANN does have an international board of directors, including members from Senegal, Morocco, and Nairobi, but critics say that's not enough.
A recurring criticism of the WSIS summit was that wealthier nations had not done enough to help poorer ones take advantage of the Internet.
"The proceeds have not been equally shared by developing and developed countries," said Sudan President Omar Ahmad al-Bashir. "The digital divide is growing between the rich and the poor countries."
Economists generally agree, however, that investors prefer nations with a respect for property rights, the rule of law and a functioning court system--which means that few African nations make the list.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, offers an Index of Economic Freedom. The index finds a close correlation between wealth and a stable, functioning government. Wealthy regions like Hong Kong, the U.S., and Switzerland respect economic rights, the index shows, while poor nations like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran and Cuba show the least respect for them.
Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Monday, November 14, 2005
Who Is Lying About Iraq?
A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.
BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.
What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.
The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.
This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."
Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":
This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.
No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:
This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.
Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:
The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:
The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.
Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's December issue.
BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.
What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.
The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.
This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."
Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":
This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.
No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:
This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.
Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:
The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:
The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.
Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's December issue.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Who are the real racists?
Party trumps race' for Steele foes
By S.A. Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 2, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.
Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an "Uncle Tom" and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.
Operatives for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) also obtained a copy of his credit report -- the only Republican candidate so targeted.
But black Democrats say there is nothing wrong with "pointing out the obvious."
"There is a difference between pointing out the obvious and calling someone names," said a campaign spokesman for Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
State Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a black Baltimore Democrat, said she does not expect her party to pull any punches, including racial jabs at Mr. Steele, in the race to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.
"Party trumps race, especially on the national level," she said. "If you are bold enough to run, you have to take whatever the voters are going to give you. It's democracy, perhaps at its worse, but it is democracy."
Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black. "Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community," she said. "His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people."
During the 2002 campaign, Democratic supporters pelted Mr. Steele with Oreo cookies during a gubernatorial debate at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
In 2001, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. called Mr. Steele an "Uncle Tom," when Mr. Steele headed the state Republican Party. Mr. Miller, Prince George's County Democrat, later apologized for the remark.
"That's not racial. If they call him the "N' word, that's racial," Mrs. Marriott said. "Just because he's black, everything bad you say about him isn't racial."
This week, the News Blog -- a liberal Web log run by Steve Gilliard, a black New Yorker -- removed a doctored photo of Mr. Steele that depicted him as a black-faced minstrel.
However, the blog has kept its headline "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house." A caption beneath a photo of the lieutenant governor reads: "I's Simple Sambo and I's running for the Big House." A spokesman for the Maryland Democratic Party denounced the depiction as being "extremely offensive" and having "no place in politics or in any other aspect of public discourse," The Washington Post reported. Democrats have denied any connection to the News Blog.
Still, Mfume spokesman Joseph P. Trippi said Mr. Steele opens himself to such criticism by defending Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. for holding a Republican fundraiser in July at the all-white Elkridge Club in Baltimore.
"The facts are the facts. Ehrlich went to that country club, and Steele said it didn't bother him," Mr. Trippi said. "I think that says something ... and should be part of this debate."
Several club members told the Baltimore Sun that, though blacks are welcome as guests and there is no policy banning blacks from membership, the club never has had a black member in its 127-year history. Democrats also have used the club for various events, including Peter O'Malley, brother of and adviser to Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democratic candidate for governor. Peter O'Malley held his wedding reception there in 2003.
State Sen. Verna Jones, Baltimore Democrat and vice chairman of the General Assembly's legislative black caucus, said black Republicans deserve criticism because the Republican Party has not promoted the interests of the black community.
"The public policies supported by Democratic principles are the ones that most impact the African-American community," she said. "I'm not saying [Mr. Steele] is a sell-out. That's not for me to say."
In July, however, Mr. Mfume noted how Republicans were rallying for Mr. Steele but his party had ignored his historic candidacy. "More voters in Maryland are carrying the impression that the Democratic Party talks the talk, but doesn't always walk the walk. People may find a way to cross over in the fall," he said.
Steele campaign spokesman Leonardo Alcivar said state Democrats are afraid of losing the black vote to Mr. Steele. "That has caused a great tremble throughout the Maryland Democratic Party," he said. "Of course [they are] going to condone racism. It's nothing new, and it's not surprising."
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
By S.A. Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 2, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.
Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an "Uncle Tom" and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.
Operatives for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) also obtained a copy of his credit report -- the only Republican candidate so targeted.
But black Democrats say there is nothing wrong with "pointing out the obvious."
"There is a difference between pointing out the obvious and calling someone names," said a campaign spokesman for Kweisi Mfume, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
State Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a black Baltimore Democrat, said she does not expect her party to pull any punches, including racial jabs at Mr. Steele, in the race to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.
"Party trumps race, especially on the national level," she said. "If you are bold enough to run, you have to take whatever the voters are going to give you. It's democracy, perhaps at its worse, but it is democracy."
Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black. "Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community," she said. "His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people."
During the 2002 campaign, Democratic supporters pelted Mr. Steele with Oreo cookies during a gubernatorial debate at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
In 2001, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. called Mr. Steele an "Uncle Tom," when Mr. Steele headed the state Republican Party. Mr. Miller, Prince George's County Democrat, later apologized for the remark.
"That's not racial. If they call him the "N' word, that's racial," Mrs. Marriott said. "Just because he's black, everything bad you say about him isn't racial."
This week, the News Blog -- a liberal Web log run by Steve Gilliard, a black New Yorker -- removed a doctored photo of Mr. Steele that depicted him as a black-faced minstrel.
However, the blog has kept its headline "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house." A caption beneath a photo of the lieutenant governor reads: "I's Simple Sambo and I's running for the Big House." A spokesman for the Maryland Democratic Party denounced the depiction as being "extremely offensive" and having "no place in politics or in any other aspect of public discourse," The Washington Post reported. Democrats have denied any connection to the News Blog.
Still, Mfume spokesman Joseph P. Trippi said Mr. Steele opens himself to such criticism by defending Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. for holding a Republican fundraiser in July at the all-white Elkridge Club in Baltimore.
"The facts are the facts. Ehrlich went to that country club, and Steele said it didn't bother him," Mr. Trippi said. "I think that says something ... and should be part of this debate."
Several club members told the Baltimore Sun that, though blacks are welcome as guests and there is no policy banning blacks from membership, the club never has had a black member in its 127-year history. Democrats also have used the club for various events, including Peter O'Malley, brother of and adviser to Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democratic candidate for governor. Peter O'Malley held his wedding reception there in 2003.
State Sen. Verna Jones, Baltimore Democrat and vice chairman of the General Assembly's legislative black caucus, said black Republicans deserve criticism because the Republican Party has not promoted the interests of the black community.
"The public policies supported by Democratic principles are the ones that most impact the African-American community," she said. "I'm not saying [Mr. Steele] is a sell-out. That's not for me to say."
In July, however, Mr. Mfume noted how Republicans were rallying for Mr. Steele but his party had ignored his historic candidacy. "More voters in Maryland are carrying the impression that the Democratic Party talks the talk, but doesn't always walk the walk. People may find a way to cross over in the fall," he said.
Steele campaign spokesman Leonardo Alcivar said state Democrats are afraid of losing the black vote to Mr. Steele. "That has caused a great tremble throughout the Maryland Democratic Party," he said. "Of course [they are] going to condone racism. It's nothing new, and it's not surprising."
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
More from crazy Hugo
VENEZUELA-US
Chavez: I'll respond if Bush slights Venezuelan gov't at summit
Caracas, Nov 2 (EFE).- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an increasingly vocal antagonist of the United States, says he once let slide a disparaging comment by George W. Bush about the South American nation's government but that if the U.S. leader tries it again at a summit this week, the slight will not go unanswered.
Chavez, a leftist admirer of Cuba's Fidel Castro, said that Bush "will get an immediate response" from him if the U.S. president implies he is not a democrat at the 4th Summit of the Americas to be held on Friday and Saturday in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
After recalling Bush's remark at a past summit that his government would push for "democracy in Haiti, Bolivia and Venezuela," Chavez said that he looked at the U.S. leader "out of the corner of my eye" but decided not to say anything.
"If President Bush says it again, he's going to get an immedite response from me, because (the Venezuelan) people are honorable and I'm not going to accept it if he runs over us," Chavez said, according to a Communications Ministry transcription of an interview he gave Tuesday night to the new international regional television channel Telesur.
He also said that he would give "a blunt response and an invitation to debate" if Bush insists on reviving the U.S. proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, known as the FTAA, which the Venezuelan leader said was "imperialist," as well as "dead." "Bush will push for free trade and I will encourage him to debate. I don't care what they say," he remarked.
Regarding reports that U.S. authorities had asked Argentina to see to it that "nobody is disrespectful of Bush, and that (Chavez) does not interrupt him," the Venezuelan leader said that Washington had made the same request of former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso shortly before the 2nd Summit of the Americas held in Canada four years ago.
"You're not going to believe me, but Bush is afraid of you," Chavez said Cardoso told him at the time.
"Those who feel powerful don't like others to debate them. I don't care if they debate me. I like to incite debate," said Chavez, who the Bush administration has criticized as having autocratic tendencies.
"Sometimes I interrupt, but respectfully, because I believe that debates should be like that and that someone should not come, read a speech, finish and then we applaud them ... What a nuisance! It's better to interrupt!" he exclaimed.
Regarding his participation in a march to a Mar del Plata stadium to demonstrate opposition to Bush, a protest being organized by leftist Argentine groups, Chavez said that he had been invited but that his security team was still evaluating whether or not he would participate.
"I don't want to cause problems. It's true I'm going (to Argentina) with much humility to talk about my ideas. I'm very grateful for the invitation to that great gathering (i.e. the march). I know it's going to be really big and peaceful. If I can't go, fine, I won't go. But the important thing is that the people go to that funeral march for the FTAA," Chavez said.
"I want to go. I've said so," he continued, adding that "they've walled off part of the city and the stadium is a little outside the wall. So they told me that my being there, and (trying to) come back inside the wall - which seems like it's higher than the Great Wall of China - could create problems." EFE ar/bp
Chavez: I'll respond if Bush slights Venezuelan gov't at summit
Caracas, Nov 2 (EFE).- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an increasingly vocal antagonist of the United States, says he once let slide a disparaging comment by George W. Bush about the South American nation's government but that if the U.S. leader tries it again at a summit this week, the slight will not go unanswered.
Chavez, a leftist admirer of Cuba's Fidel Castro, said that Bush "will get an immediate response" from him if the U.S. president implies he is not a democrat at the 4th Summit of the Americas to be held on Friday and Saturday in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
After recalling Bush's remark at a past summit that his government would push for "democracy in Haiti, Bolivia and Venezuela," Chavez said that he looked at the U.S. leader "out of the corner of my eye" but decided not to say anything.
"If President Bush says it again, he's going to get an immedite response from me, because (the Venezuelan) people are honorable and I'm not going to accept it if he runs over us," Chavez said, according to a Communications Ministry transcription of an interview he gave Tuesday night to the new international regional television channel Telesur.
He also said that he would give "a blunt response and an invitation to debate" if Bush insists on reviving the U.S. proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, known as the FTAA, which the Venezuelan leader said was "imperialist," as well as "dead." "Bush will push for free trade and I will encourage him to debate. I don't care what they say," he remarked.
Regarding reports that U.S. authorities had asked Argentina to see to it that "nobody is disrespectful of Bush, and that (Chavez) does not interrupt him," the Venezuelan leader said that Washington had made the same request of former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso shortly before the 2nd Summit of the Americas held in Canada four years ago.
"You're not going to believe me, but Bush is afraid of you," Chavez said Cardoso told him at the time.
"Those who feel powerful don't like others to debate them. I don't care if they debate me. I like to incite debate," said Chavez, who the Bush administration has criticized as having autocratic tendencies.
"Sometimes I interrupt, but respectfully, because I believe that debates should be like that and that someone should not come, read a speech, finish and then we applaud them ... What a nuisance! It's better to interrupt!" he exclaimed.
Regarding his participation in a march to a Mar del Plata stadium to demonstrate opposition to Bush, a protest being organized by leftist Argentine groups, Chavez said that he had been invited but that his security team was still evaluating whether or not he would participate.
"I don't want to cause problems. It's true I'm going (to Argentina) with much humility to talk about my ideas. I'm very grateful for the invitation to that great gathering (i.e. the march). I know it's going to be really big and peaceful. If I can't go, fine, I won't go. But the important thing is that the people go to that funeral march for the FTAA," Chavez said.
"I want to go. I've said so," he continued, adding that "they've walled off part of the city and the stadium is a little outside the wall. So they told me that my being there, and (trying to) come back inside the wall - which seems like it's higher than the Great Wall of China - could create problems." EFE ar/bp
Hugo's latest stunt - F-16s to Cuba/China
F-16 aircraft could be sent to Cuba or China
Venezuela could send to Cuba or China some F-16 planes previously bought from the United States, "as they are reluctant to sell us the spare parts," President Hugo Chávez said.
"Failure to perform the agreement allows for either party to waive it," Chávez cautioned during a ceremony to execute an agreement with Chinese company Wall to develop the Simón Bolívar telecommunications satellite.
"Therefore, we can do with those planes whatever we please. All of a sudden, we can send 10 planes to Cuba, or China to investigate the technology," he added.
As explained by Chávez, Venezuela has looked for spare parts elsewhere. "And they the United States) began to exert pressure on those countries to prevent them from providing support for the F-16 maintenance."
Recently, the US government forced Israel to freeze an agreement to streamline Venezuelan F-16, AFP reported.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Venezuela could send to Cuba or China some F-16 planes previously bought from the United States, "as they are reluctant to sell us the spare parts," President Hugo Chávez said.
"Failure to perform the agreement allows for either party to waive it," Chávez cautioned during a ceremony to execute an agreement with Chinese company Wall to develop the Simón Bolívar telecommunications satellite.
"Therefore, we can do with those planes whatever we please. All of a sudden, we can send 10 planes to Cuba, or China to investigate the technology," he added.
As explained by Chávez, Venezuela has looked for spare parts elsewhere. "And they the United States) began to exert pressure on those countries to prevent them from providing support for the F-16 maintenance."
Recently, the US government forced Israel to freeze an agreement to streamline Venezuelan F-16, AFP reported.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Letter from a Doctor at war...
Below is a letter written by a Doc receiving our wounded. Gives further insight to the sacrifice our men and women are doing overseas.
Hey guys!
Well, I?ll fill you in on a little of what goes on here?The Andrews? Aeromedical Staging Facility (ASF) is a place that's been around since the Vietnam war at least...and it probably has not seen as many casualties in its hallways and rooms as there are here now, since the time of that Southeast Asia conflict. We have missions either coming and/or going out each day (except sometimes Thurs), and our typical over-night ward census is around 25 to 35, but sometimes it gets even above 40 patients. The predominate mood of the personnel on the medical staff who work here tends to evolve over time, after arriving here?usually, at first shock and amazement...often to disgust and disillusionment...then on to acceptance and detachment... It's a job that's got to be done, and the only way to effectively keep from developing a DSM-IV psychiatric diagnosis (like the numerous PTSD and adjustment disorder patients we?ve had return from Iraq so far)...is learn to compartmentalize to some degree or another?
Every other day of the week, a C-141 or C-17 lands on the runway of Andrews AFB, arriving from Ramstein Air Base carrying up to 45 patients fresh from the Iraq theater, after usually only a 24 to 72 hour staging and stabilizing period that they've spent at the Landstuhl Army hospital in Germany. The sickest and most severe patients come off the plane first. Only the strongest team members among our ASF staff (which includes approx 20 nurses and med techs that are here with me on a four month TDY; most are deployed out of Wright-Pat AFB), can lift the first few stretchers that come off the aircraft and into the waiting ambulances. The very severe CCAT patients either go right on to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (for Army patients) or on to Bethesda Naval Medical Center (for USMC patients). It takes up to six men and women to lift one of these patient litters, since also on board each stretcher is usually the following equipment (suspended about the patient's chest and abdomen, on a frame attached to the sides of the litter): a ventilator, cardiac monitor, numerous drains (e.g, JP drains from massive wound sites), chest tubes and drains, NG tube and suction/drain, Codman intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring systems, Venodyne pumps (to prevent deep vein thrombosis), foley catheter, and sometimes a feeding tube, as well as bags of IV fluids, antibiotics, blood transfusion products, morphine, etc. Sometimes it's hard to actually even see the patients beneath the plethora of modern medical devices they are buried under. The fact that some of these warriors are missing limbs, to top it all off, doesn't make the load seem any lighter... These are the living memorials of the worst of war's nightmarish effects, barely alive and clinging on a thread?
After the ambulances and ambuses from Bethesda and WRAMC pull away with their patients, and with the CCAT teams, comprised of nurses, doctors, and respiratory therapists, that have also deplaned with the most critical patients...we load the remainder of the patients, some on litters and some ambulatory, into our waiting ambuses to take back to our staging facility/ward, for overnight staging and patient management (and sometimes sleep for them). Our casualties span the gamut and range from multiple shrapnel wounds from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which is just a sterile name for roadside bombs... to bullet wounds (many times the bullets are still embedded in the wounds)...to fractures and sprains from rolled-over humvees and other vehicles?to numerous Psychiatric cases, such as post traumatic stress d/o and major depression?You can usually easily detect who these types of patients are right as they step off the plane, by the sign of the "hundred-yard-stare" which is evident in their eyes. We see lots of very interesting things, and hear many curious stories about what things are like on the ground, and out along the roads, in Iraq. Overall, the morale seems high, and I frequently hear wounded soldiers tell me that they regret not being able to be back in Iraq or Afghanistan with their units, fighting with and defending their buddies who are still over there. Often when injured soldiers who are Special Forces come to us, they?re accompanied by an attendant and watched like a hawk at all times. It's kind of spooky to think that an E-4 knows such important intel that he can't be trusted alone for a minute without any non-special ops people around if he's injured and under medication.
On a typical night we will go through up to ten to twenty vials of IV morphine sulfate. Periodically, cries and moans come from rooms as I walk down the hallway making rounds, while medical technicians pull gauze from gaping wounds (every bullet and shrapnel wound gets a dressing change each night on our ward). In seconds, nurses rush to the scenes, often with needle caps between their teeth and alcohol swabs and syringes in hands, ready to provide relief with their injections for anxious wounded soldiers.
I'm usually able to get out of the ASF by 0130 or 0200 on the nights of our incoming (three to four days per week), and I drive home to my room to forget the worst of the sights and sounds, one more time. I'm up by 0630 or 0700 the next morning, back to the ward for my rounds, and then out to the flight line to load our overnight guests onto waiting C-130's, which will take them to various Army and Marine posts around the country. Most go back to hospitals that are closest to the bases that each mobilized (or, "mob'd") out of. A few, like some of our SOF patients, go who-knows-where...Some of these covert ops types, are even whisked away on private commercial jets...maybe in attempts to thwart anyone who may be out there attempting to track their movements and gain access to their knowledge.
Well, lots more intriguing stuff to write, but I gotta get back to the room and catch up on some badly needed sleep... and after a nap, then get up some energy to go and find a decent meal somewhere. All of us here realize that things could always be worse, and we could be over in theater getting bombed and shot at! Everyone on staff here seems to be holding up okay, though, and things seem to have settled into somewhat of a routine. Sometime soon, we?ll be having some debriefing sessions, in order to help anyone that may be getting affected emotionally/spiritually by the work here. There?s of course lots of carnage to witness and tough medical and trauma cases to continuously manage, as well as the ever present awareness of the acuity of this war that we?re engaged in over in the Middle East? What is inspiring, however, is witnessing the courage and strong spirits of many of the wounded young men and women we receive back from over there? There?s always hope left for our country, as long as we continue to raise self-less and brave kids like these?.
Glad we can still stay in touch. God bless everyone, and stay safe during the holidays!
- Eric
Sent by: PMA
Hey guys!
Well, I?ll fill you in on a little of what goes on here?The Andrews? Aeromedical Staging Facility (ASF) is a place that's been around since the Vietnam war at least...and it probably has not seen as many casualties in its hallways and rooms as there are here now, since the time of that Southeast Asia conflict. We have missions either coming and/or going out each day (except sometimes Thurs), and our typical over-night ward census is around 25 to 35, but sometimes it gets even above 40 patients. The predominate mood of the personnel on the medical staff who work here tends to evolve over time, after arriving here?usually, at first shock and amazement...often to disgust and disillusionment...then on to acceptance and detachment... It's a job that's got to be done, and the only way to effectively keep from developing a DSM-IV psychiatric diagnosis (like the numerous PTSD and adjustment disorder patients we?ve had return from Iraq so far)...is learn to compartmentalize to some degree or another?
Every other day of the week, a C-141 or C-17 lands on the runway of Andrews AFB, arriving from Ramstein Air Base carrying up to 45 patients fresh from the Iraq theater, after usually only a 24 to 72 hour staging and stabilizing period that they've spent at the Landstuhl Army hospital in Germany. The sickest and most severe patients come off the plane first. Only the strongest team members among our ASF staff (which includes approx 20 nurses and med techs that are here with me on a four month TDY; most are deployed out of Wright-Pat AFB), can lift the first few stretchers that come off the aircraft and into the waiting ambulances. The very severe CCAT patients either go right on to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (for Army patients) or on to Bethesda Naval Medical Center (for USMC patients). It takes up to six men and women to lift one of these patient litters, since also on board each stretcher is usually the following equipment (suspended about the patient's chest and abdomen, on a frame attached to the sides of the litter): a ventilator, cardiac monitor, numerous drains (e.g, JP drains from massive wound sites), chest tubes and drains, NG tube and suction/drain, Codman intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring systems, Venodyne pumps (to prevent deep vein thrombosis), foley catheter, and sometimes a feeding tube, as well as bags of IV fluids, antibiotics, blood transfusion products, morphine, etc. Sometimes it's hard to actually even see the patients beneath the plethora of modern medical devices they are buried under. The fact that some of these warriors are missing limbs, to top it all off, doesn't make the load seem any lighter... These are the living memorials of the worst of war's nightmarish effects, barely alive and clinging on a thread?
After the ambulances and ambuses from Bethesda and WRAMC pull away with their patients, and with the CCAT teams, comprised of nurses, doctors, and respiratory therapists, that have also deplaned with the most critical patients...we load the remainder of the patients, some on litters and some ambulatory, into our waiting ambuses to take back to our staging facility/ward, for overnight staging and patient management (and sometimes sleep for them). Our casualties span the gamut and range from multiple shrapnel wounds from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which is just a sterile name for roadside bombs... to bullet wounds (many times the bullets are still embedded in the wounds)...to fractures and sprains from rolled-over humvees and other vehicles?to numerous Psychiatric cases, such as post traumatic stress d/o and major depression?You can usually easily detect who these types of patients are right as they step off the plane, by the sign of the "hundred-yard-stare" which is evident in their eyes. We see lots of very interesting things, and hear many curious stories about what things are like on the ground, and out along the roads, in Iraq. Overall, the morale seems high, and I frequently hear wounded soldiers tell me that they regret not being able to be back in Iraq or Afghanistan with their units, fighting with and defending their buddies who are still over there. Often when injured soldiers who are Special Forces come to us, they?re accompanied by an attendant and watched like a hawk at all times. It's kind of spooky to think that an E-4 knows such important intel that he can't be trusted alone for a minute without any non-special ops people around if he's injured and under medication.
On a typical night we will go through up to ten to twenty vials of IV morphine sulfate. Periodically, cries and moans come from rooms as I walk down the hallway making rounds, while medical technicians pull gauze from gaping wounds (every bullet and shrapnel wound gets a dressing change each night on our ward). In seconds, nurses rush to the scenes, often with needle caps between their teeth and alcohol swabs and syringes in hands, ready to provide relief with their injections for anxious wounded soldiers.
I'm usually able to get out of the ASF by 0130 or 0200 on the nights of our incoming (three to four days per week), and I drive home to my room to forget the worst of the sights and sounds, one more time. I'm up by 0630 or 0700 the next morning, back to the ward for my rounds, and then out to the flight line to load our overnight guests onto waiting C-130's, which will take them to various Army and Marine posts around the country. Most go back to hospitals that are closest to the bases that each mobilized (or, "mob'd") out of. A few, like some of our SOF patients, go who-knows-where...Some of these covert ops types, are even whisked away on private commercial jets...maybe in attempts to thwart anyone who may be out there attempting to track their movements and gain access to their knowledge.
Well, lots more intriguing stuff to write, but I gotta get back to the room and catch up on some badly needed sleep... and after a nap, then get up some energy to go and find a decent meal somewhere. All of us here realize that things could always be worse, and we could be over in theater getting bombed and shot at! Everyone on staff here seems to be holding up okay, though, and things seem to have settled into somewhat of a routine. Sometime soon, we?ll be having some debriefing sessions, in order to help anyone that may be getting affected emotionally/spiritually by the work here. There?s of course lots of carnage to witness and tough medical and trauma cases to continuously manage, as well as the ever present awareness of the acuity of this war that we?re engaged in over in the Middle East? What is inspiring, however, is witnessing the courage and strong spirits of many of the wounded young men and women we receive back from over there? There?s always hope left for our country, as long as we continue to raise self-less and brave kids like these?.
Glad we can still stay in touch. God bless everyone, and stay safe during the holidays!
- Eric
Sent by: PMA
Havel praises Czech stance on Cuba
(PDM staff with CTK) 8 November - Former president Vaclav Havel praised Czech diplomacy for "taking again a principled attitude towards the dictatorial regime in Cuba," in an interview with CTK.
He was reacting to another in a series of diplomatic spats between Prague and Havana, which banned the celebrations of the Czech national holiday in a luxury Havana hotel on October 28 to which Cuban dissidents were also invited.
The Czechoslovak Independence Day celebration that the Cuban authorities labelled "a counter-revolutionary action," eventually took place in Czech charge d'affaires Petr Stiegler's residence.
The Czech Foreign Ministry handed a protest note to Aymee Hernandez, Cuban charge d'affaires in Prague, who categorically dismissed it.
Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda discussed the incident with his EU counterparts at their meeting yesterday.
"When the European Union was going to adopt a recommendation to the member states not to invite dissidents to the celebrations of their national holidays, it probably wanted to prevent similar things from happening. But such a policy is extremely short-sighted. It is a compromise with evil, it is accommodating the totalitarian power. I am glad that they [Czechs] contributed to the rejection of the draft resolution," Havel told CTK.
Hernandez told the Spanish news agency EFE that "the whole Cuban dissident movement is trumped up, hired by the United States" and that "if someone regrets the behaviour of the Czech government, it is the Cuban people."
The Czech Republic is critical of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his totalitarian regime. It had pushed through U.N. resolutions criticising Cuba.
Havel, a former dissident, said that it is only a matter of a short time before Castro's regime collapses.
The international community can fight against it through embargoes, diplomatic boycotts, financial support to the regime's opponents as well as the biggest supply of information to them, Havel said.
Havel has focused on human rights observance, including in Cuba, since his second and last possible term as Czech president expired in early 2003.
Havel, 69, was Czechoslovak president from 1989-1992 and Czech president from 1993 to 2003.
CTK news edited by the staff of the Prague Daily Monitor, a Monitor CE service.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
He was reacting to another in a series of diplomatic spats between Prague and Havana, which banned the celebrations of the Czech national holiday in a luxury Havana hotel on October 28 to which Cuban dissidents were also invited.
The Czechoslovak Independence Day celebration that the Cuban authorities labelled "a counter-revolutionary action," eventually took place in Czech charge d'affaires Petr Stiegler's residence.
The Czech Foreign Ministry handed a protest note to Aymee Hernandez, Cuban charge d'affaires in Prague, who categorically dismissed it.
Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda discussed the incident with his EU counterparts at their meeting yesterday.
"When the European Union was going to adopt a recommendation to the member states not to invite dissidents to the celebrations of their national holidays, it probably wanted to prevent similar things from happening. But such a policy is extremely short-sighted. It is a compromise with evil, it is accommodating the totalitarian power. I am glad that they [Czechs] contributed to the rejection of the draft resolution," Havel told CTK.
Hernandez told the Spanish news agency EFE that "the whole Cuban dissident movement is trumped up, hired by the United States" and that "if someone regrets the behaviour of the Czech government, it is the Cuban people."
The Czech Republic is critical of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his totalitarian regime. It had pushed through U.N. resolutions criticising Cuba.
Havel, a former dissident, said that it is only a matter of a short time before Castro's regime collapses.
The international community can fight against it through embargoes, diplomatic boycotts, financial support to the regime's opponents as well as the biggest supply of information to them, Havel said.
Havel has focused on human rights observance, including in Cuba, since his second and last possible term as Czech president expired in early 2003.
Havel, 69, was Czechoslovak president from 1989-1992 and Czech president from 1993 to 2003.
CTK news edited by the staff of the Prague Daily Monitor, a Monitor CE service.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Anti-Americanism has become ideology
LATIN AMERICA
BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.firmaspress.com
President Bush learned two lessons at the failed Summit of Mar del Plata: the visceral hatred that the ideas inspired by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez have for the United States, and the profound division that afflicts Latin America.
The devastating protest was not surprising, however. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Left everywhere stopped offering options for governance or serious theories about development and equity and sought refuge in protest.
The enemies of globalization explain their ideas by stoning McDonald's to smithereens. Anticapitalists hurl pies at the president of the International Monetary Fund.
Anti-Americanism has turned into ideology. The communists have exchanged Das Kapital for T-shirts with the image of Ché Guevara and choruses of brief (and badly rhymed) slogans. The Left today is nothing but circus and street violence.
But that strategy, along with the corruption and follies of many governments, has burrowed deeply, especially in Latin America, where a growing number of citizens despise democracy as a method to organize coexistence and reject the market economy as a way to create and assign wealth.
Throughout almost the entire region, populism has revitalized itself in either of its two variants: the for-now tranquil and vegetarian form favored by Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez and Argentina's Néstor Kirchner; and the ferocious and authoritarian form defended by Venezuela's Chávez and Cuba's Castro, all of them sworn enemies of international free trade, as was seen in Mar del Plata.
Eleven years ago, when the first Summit of the Americas was held in Miami in 1994, the atmosphere was totally different. I remember having a long conversation at the time with Argentine President Carlos Menem and his foreign minister, Guido di Tella, from which it could be deduced that Latin America had come of age and was taking the same sensible road that the First World had taken.
No one doubted that the way to development and an end to poverty was through free trade, market economics and international cooperation, in the manner of Spain, Singapore and the other Asian Dragons, and other successful nations. Within that context, the Free Trade Area of the Americas announced by President Clinton opened the door to hope.
There was also a chart to reach safe port: the so-called Washington Consensus. Through the control of inflation and the monetary mass -- through fiscal balance, a reduction in public expenditure, an opening to international trade and the privatization of the entrepreneurial activities of the official sector -- sustained growth and reduced poverty could be achieved.
And that prescription was not only for the Third World, because Europe itself insisted on its application within the European Union, as reflected in the Maastricht accords that later gave life to the euro. Simply put, that was sensible governance on the eve of the 21st century.
In Latin America, however, things generally proceeded otherwise. The populist culture was so deeply entrenched that public expenditure could not be controlled, and in some countries it was impossible to privatize the ruinous public enterprises. In other countries, the privatization processes were scandalous forms of corruption and embezzlement, which often converted state monopolies into private monopolies without allowing the market to behave freely.
The result of the failed reforms? A return to statism, a distrust in international trade and a disbelief in democracy and the market. They all led to the victories at the polls of Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador, Chávez, Lula, Vázquez and Kirchner. It was a return to the past, a stubborn rejection of the fact that the entire 20th century was misspent trying out the diverse variants of collectivist populism.
Mar del Plata, then, was a confrontation between the cheery original vision of the first Summit of the Americas, more than a decade ago, and the darker vision held by half the continent after a period of frustrations and failures.
It's true that Chile remains as an example that political and economic freedom, when exercised together, achieve the miracle of development and greater equity -- in Chile, Latin America's leading nation, poverty has been reduced from 42 percent to 18 percent in 15 years. But a more reasonable forecast points to pessimism.
As Brazilians say sarcastically about their own country: Latin America is the continent of the future -- and always will be.
©2005 Firmas Press
BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
www.firmaspress.com
President Bush learned two lessons at the failed Summit of Mar del Plata: the visceral hatred that the ideas inspired by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez have for the United States, and the profound division that afflicts Latin America.
The devastating protest was not surprising, however. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Left everywhere stopped offering options for governance or serious theories about development and equity and sought refuge in protest.
The enemies of globalization explain their ideas by stoning McDonald's to smithereens. Anticapitalists hurl pies at the president of the International Monetary Fund.
Anti-Americanism has turned into ideology. The communists have exchanged Das Kapital for T-shirts with the image of Ché Guevara and choruses of brief (and badly rhymed) slogans. The Left today is nothing but circus and street violence.
But that strategy, along with the corruption and follies of many governments, has burrowed deeply, especially in Latin America, where a growing number of citizens despise democracy as a method to organize coexistence and reject the market economy as a way to create and assign wealth.
Throughout almost the entire region, populism has revitalized itself in either of its two variants: the for-now tranquil and vegetarian form favored by Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Uruguay's Tabaré Vázquez and Argentina's Néstor Kirchner; and the ferocious and authoritarian form defended by Venezuela's Chávez and Cuba's Castro, all of them sworn enemies of international free trade, as was seen in Mar del Plata.
Eleven years ago, when the first Summit of the Americas was held in Miami in 1994, the atmosphere was totally different. I remember having a long conversation at the time with Argentine President Carlos Menem and his foreign minister, Guido di Tella, from which it could be deduced that Latin America had come of age and was taking the same sensible road that the First World had taken.
No one doubted that the way to development and an end to poverty was through free trade, market economics and international cooperation, in the manner of Spain, Singapore and the other Asian Dragons, and other successful nations. Within that context, the Free Trade Area of the Americas announced by President Clinton opened the door to hope.
There was also a chart to reach safe port: the so-called Washington Consensus. Through the control of inflation and the monetary mass -- through fiscal balance, a reduction in public expenditure, an opening to international trade and the privatization of the entrepreneurial activities of the official sector -- sustained growth and reduced poverty could be achieved.
And that prescription was not only for the Third World, because Europe itself insisted on its application within the European Union, as reflected in the Maastricht accords that later gave life to the euro. Simply put, that was sensible governance on the eve of the 21st century.
In Latin America, however, things generally proceeded otherwise. The populist culture was so deeply entrenched that public expenditure could not be controlled, and in some countries it was impossible to privatize the ruinous public enterprises. In other countries, the privatization processes were scandalous forms of corruption and embezzlement, which often converted state monopolies into private monopolies without allowing the market to behave freely.
The result of the failed reforms? A return to statism, a distrust in international trade and a disbelief in democracy and the market. They all led to the victories at the polls of Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador, Chávez, Lula, Vázquez and Kirchner. It was a return to the past, a stubborn rejection of the fact that the entire 20th century was misspent trying out the diverse variants of collectivist populism.
Mar del Plata, then, was a confrontation between the cheery original vision of the first Summit of the Americas, more than a decade ago, and the darker vision held by half the continent after a period of frustrations and failures.
It's true that Chile remains as an example that political and economic freedom, when exercised together, achieve the miracle of development and greater equity -- in Chile, Latin America's leading nation, poverty has been reduced from 42 percent to 18 percent in 15 years. But a more reasonable forecast points to pessimism.
As Brazilians say sarcastically about their own country: Latin America is the continent of the future -- and always will be.
©2005 Firmas Press
House With Bride for Sale on Ebay
7:56 AM PST - Thursday, November 03, 2005AP Staff
DENVER
For $600,000, a 40- to 60-year-old man can buy a house in a trendy Denver neighborhood that comes complete with a bride. Deborah Hale, 48, has placed an ad on eBay offering to sell her home in the Washington Park area to a compatible man who wants to spend his life with her. She also has her own Web site outlining the deal. advertisement
"I'm looking for my soul mate," Hale told the Rocky Mountain News Tuesday. She did not immediately return a telephone message left at her home Wednesday.
Hale lives part-time in the 1910 bungalow-style house. She also has a jewelry business in Albuquerque, N.M.
She has received about 60 responses.
"I have to say that the e-mails that I have got have been very kind and very nice," Hale said.
The deadline for bidding is Valentine's Day 2006.
Hale's Web site is http://www.housewithbride.com . Her eBay ad is listed under "House With Bride."
Doing business with Cuba seminar scheduled
Note: sadly, it's all about the money . . . spotted this today on the wires...
Nov 9, 2005 8:59 AM
"During a panel discussion, those of us who have done business with Cuba will offer our experiences in exporting and allow for questions from the audience,” said Rodney Mosier, executive vice president of the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
Did you know that trade with Cuba is legal? You can legally export products to Cuba and get paid in advance through a program supported by the U.S. Government.
A seminar has been developed to help people learn more about doing business with Cuba. The seminar will be held, Tuesday, Nov. 29, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Amarillo Civic Center Grand Plaza in conjunction with the Amarillo Farm and Ranch Show. It will provide comprehensive information about trading with Cuba, including the process, realistic expectations, important contacts and the necessary licenses.
“The seminar will focus on the potential of the Cuban market and how to conduct business with Cuba. During a panel discussion, those of us who have done business with Cuba will offer our experiences in exporting and allow for questions from the audience,” said Rodney Mosier, executive vice president of the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
There is no charge to attend the seminar thanks to the following sponsors: WTAMU Small Business Development Center, Texas-Cuba Trade Alliance, Texas Sorghum Producers, Texas Corn Growers and the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
“We encourage anyone who is involved in the manufacturing or marketing of the products that may legally be sold to Cuba to attend and find out more,” said Mosier. Legal exports to Cuba include: agricultural products, food, live animals, wood products and medical supplies.
The presenters for the seminar are: Jaime Malaga, Dept. of Agricultural & Applied Economics, Texas Tech University, Cynthia Thomas, president of TriDimension Strategies, L.L.C. and Wayne Cleveland, executive director, Texas Sorghum Producers.
For more information, call 806-372-5151 or visit www.SmallBusinessDevelopmentCenter.com
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Nov 9, 2005 8:59 AM
"During a panel discussion, those of us who have done business with Cuba will offer our experiences in exporting and allow for questions from the audience,” said Rodney Mosier, executive vice president of the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
Did you know that trade with Cuba is legal? You can legally export products to Cuba and get paid in advance through a program supported by the U.S. Government.
A seminar has been developed to help people learn more about doing business with Cuba. The seminar will be held, Tuesday, Nov. 29, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Amarillo Civic Center Grand Plaza in conjunction with the Amarillo Farm and Ranch Show. It will provide comprehensive information about trading with Cuba, including the process, realistic expectations, important contacts and the necessary licenses.
“The seminar will focus on the potential of the Cuban market and how to conduct business with Cuba. During a panel discussion, those of us who have done business with Cuba will offer our experiences in exporting and allow for questions from the audience,” said Rodney Mosier, executive vice president of the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
There is no charge to attend the seminar thanks to the following sponsors: WTAMU Small Business Development Center, Texas-Cuba Trade Alliance, Texas Sorghum Producers, Texas Corn Growers and the Texas Wheat Producers Board.
“We encourage anyone who is involved in the manufacturing or marketing of the products that may legally be sold to Cuba to attend and find out more,” said Mosier. Legal exports to Cuba include: agricultural products, food, live animals, wood products and medical supplies.
The presenters for the seminar are: Jaime Malaga, Dept. of Agricultural & Applied Economics, Texas Tech University, Cynthia Thomas, president of TriDimension Strategies, L.L.C. and Wayne Cleveland, executive director, Texas Sorghum Producers.
For more information, call 806-372-5151 or visit www.SmallBusinessDevelopmentCenter.com
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
Greenpeace fined for reef damage
Greenpeace divers were inspecting Tubbataha's reefs for damage
Environmental group Greenpeace has been fined almost $7,000 (£4,000) for damaging a coral reef at a World Heritage site in the Philippines.
Their flagship Rainbow Warrior II ran aground at Tubbataha Reef Marine Park, in the Sulu Sea, 650km (400 miles) south-east of Manila.
Park officials said almost 100 sq m (1,076 sq ft) of reef had been damaged.
Greenpeace agreed to pay the fine, but blamed the accident on outdated maps provided by the Philippines government.
"The chart indicated we were a mile and a half" from the coral reef when the ship ran aground, regional Greenpeace official Red Constantino told AFP news agency.
"This accident could have been avoided if the chart was accurate," he said, adding, however, that Greenpeace felt "responsible" for the damage.
'Immediate action'
The accident happened while the Rainbow Warrior was on a four-month tour of the Asia-Pacific region to promote environmentally-friendly energy sources.
Greenpeace divers were at the Tubbataha park, off the coast of Palawan island, to inspect the effect of global warming on the coral reef.
The Rainbow Warrior escaped serious damage
Mr Constantino said the reef appeared to be healthy, with no evidence of bleaching which is believed to be caused by warmer sea temperatures.
The Rainbow Warrior II escaped serious damage and was towed into deeper water by its own rubber boats.
Tubbataha park manager, Angelique Songco, praised the work Greenpeace was doing to protect the environment.
"We also appreciate the immediate action they took to get the full assessment of the damage," she said.
Sent by Sr.Cohiba
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