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K-Revolution WithinUS * GreenDean? * BlixUndermined
30 April 2003
"The U.S. military is the strongest in the world by far, and will remain so.
But Democrats cannot lead the nation without being strong enough
to confront the bloat and waste in the Pentagon budget."
Dennis J. Kucinich1) Kucinich on Military Spending- - Kucinich: The Peoples Choice and Opportunity
2) The Man from Vermont is Not Green
3) The mirage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction- - Hans Blix vs the US: 'I was undermined'
4) When the Depleted Uranium dust settles
5) Northwoods: A Pentagon Plan for Terror to Justify War against Cuba- - Statement of a widow of a 9/11 victim to 9/11 Commission
6) ACLU Action Alerts - Rights of Privacy and Reproductive Freedom
Editor's Notes:Where Are The Activists?
Dennis Kucinich's candidacy for US President provides an opportunity for each of us to help transform the US government. Look at the issues, the actions, the qualifications to take leadership in international affairs. What's more, Kucinich is independent (without corporate-takers). Kucinich has already taken on the role of world leader with his introduction of legislation to ban space-based weapons. He was against Yucca Mountain's transport bonanza. He works in opposition to NAFTA, and other trade issues that sacrifice workers' well-being, and harm the environment. His actions speak louder than words. Yet where are the activists in supporting him? We need to multiply and engage our organizations to realize the time is now! We can transform the US Government in 2004, but not if we wait too long in 2003!
Item 2 is a "Meet Howard Dean" (February 22, 2003) CounterPunch article by fellow Vermonter, Michael Colby. Colby states that ‘the man from Vermont is not Green and not Liberal.' Item 3 is on the ‘mirage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction' by Imad Khadduri, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist now living in Canada. This item also includes an article by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, accusing the Bush administration of undermining his efforts ‘to hunt down Iraq's banned weapons.'
Item 4 is on the Depleted Uranium issue and how this could be incredibly more harmful to humankind than previously realized! Item 5 goes back to the 1960's and a Pentagon plan to engage terror to justify an invasion and occupation of Cuba. This report comes from The Emperor-Clothes.com that believes that the US ‘instigated 9-11, just as the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed instigating fake attacks on Americans in 1962 - to create a climate where military action seems justified.' This again shows the relevance of the film produced by Frank Dorrel, "What I've Learned About US Foreign Policy: The War on the Third World." And the relevance of going all the way behind a Dennis Kucinich nomination for President in the Democratic Party. This is a practical approach with a qualified individual to make a transformation happen. The only area that Kucinich received criticism from the progressive network was for his voting record for pro-life legislation. He never opposed a woman's right to choose, but now admits to expanding his vision to become an avid supporter of the US Constitutional right for choice, while not denying actions of mutual interest to reduce unwanted pregnancies. There is a place where pro-life and pro-choice meet, where conservatives and progressives stand together. Item 6 is from the ACLU, making it easy to send a fax to support for rights of privacy issues and reproductive freedom.
Kucinich in 2004 - The Revolution Within US!
1) Kucinich on Military SpendingFROM THE KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGN
A debate recently erupted between two rival Democratic campaigns, with one candidate quoted as saying "We won't always have the strongest military," and a rival campaign attacking the candidate for implying he'd compromise "America's military supremacy."
In response, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform subcommittee that monitors the Pentagon, issued the following statement:
"They're both wrong. The U.S. military is the strongest in the world by far, and will remain so. But Democrats cannot lead the nation without being strong enough to confront the bloat and waste in the Pentagon budget."
"Our military budget is almost as big as that of all other countries combined. While we have unchallenged superiority in military strength, we also have more people without healthcare than any other advanced industrial country -- and Democrats must be bold enough to say the two issues are linked."
"I don't agree with other Democrats that we can continue to increase military spending, and still deliver on our domestic agenda for middle class and working Americans. We can't. That's voodoo budgeting.
"In this campaign, I plan to make a major issue of hometown security -- healthcare, jobs and education for all -- and misspent Pentagon dollars, even as other Democratic candidates join President Bush in pressing for still more exorbitant military budgets."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dennis Kucinich is the progressive choice for 2004. On war and peace, military spending, national health insurance, workers rights, gay rights, civil liberties and many other issues, Kucinich articulates a vision different from and more progressive than the other candidates.
Please spread the word about the campaign --
http://www.kucinich.us= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - Kucinich: The Peoples' Choice and OpportunityDear Friends and Colleagues Everywhere,
I have been writing these paragraphs for a few days now in my head. Recently I have noticed a shift in me, I know a lot about what is wrong with our country, other countries, and our world. I have become satiated with the negative, the injustice, the lack of love and compassion. I see that the 'sin' in this world is the belief in separation, from each other, from our planet and from the cosmos. Every separation belief that results in an inhumane action points again and again to this 'sin'. Hugh Lynn Cayce, eldest son of Edgar Cayce, would often quote a Biblical phrase that went something like this: "I have set before thee life and death, light and darkness, good and evil; CHOOSE THOU." In pondering this statement I do not feel it is speaking about fundamentalism, but instead we have the choice in how to use our minds and hearts to choose light and LIFE in the midst of seeming darkness and despair, or evil. We can let our minds dwell on the pain, injustice or greed, and become overcome, angry and helpless OR we can acknowledge the former and direct our minds and hearts to that which is true, that which we know is possible, that which we can create with love and action together. The Cayce Readings suggest and invoke us to be the leaven that leavens the whole lump!
In this spirit I am sending you information on Representative Dennis Kucinich from Cleveland Ohio who is running for President of the US, as a Democrat. I have heard Dennis speak in person 3 times now, twice this past Friday. In my opinion he is ultimately grounded in Spirit and at the same time ultimately practical. As he speaks to issues, he says what so many of us feel, he brings spiritual principles into every issue, without sounding spacey or ungrounded. This is a man of integrity, who speaks his truth without fear. I truly believe he has been 'called out' to represent and embody the new paradigm. HE is US, We are Him. This is our campaign, his words as well, he is riding an energy that has been seeded and now has grown to the point of manifestation. If we choose to focus our energies in agreement inwardly and in our actions we can and will create the country and the world we want. It is a matter of belief in the power of love and a commitment to taking any and all actions to manifest our desires.
I believe that Dennis Kucinich is the rallying point for this change for America and for the World. This campaign is not just about a US president, this change effects every country. I received an email today written by a person representing a peace group in Japan. She want to support this campaign as this quote states:"I would do my best to support Dennis Kucinich. He can be a real leader of the world. Looking forward to hearing from you! Our survival depends on who become the next US president in 2004."
Some are saying that Dennis does not have a chance, not well enough known, ideas are too far out, not enough money etc. and etc. Well we know about self fulfilling prophesy, why not focus our energies, prayers and creativity on fulfilling and manifesting our heart's desire. The following is a quote from Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Tikkun Community: "The truth is quite different. Dennis Kucinich speaks to the aspirations of many Americans who are not particularly attracted to "the Left" or to "liberals." He speaks about the deepest spiritual truths that unite people--often in ways that we in the Tikkun Community have been advocating. Personally, when I heard him the first time I thought "this is the closest I've ever heard to a politics of meaning speaker in mainstream politics." ...... . But the truth is that the only thing that makes him unelectable is our willingness to believe that and the willingness of many others to believe it. Because based on what he says and how he says it, he'd be very electable--if anyone ever heard him, and if we could help others overcome the "there is no alternative" ideology that keeps them and the media from taking people like Kucinich seriously. I believe that we could change that."
I am one of a dedicated group of volunteers working for Dennis and OUR campaign, we invite you to become involved though volunteering in whatever way you can and by financially supporting him. He is only accepting money from individuals, each can give up to $2000.00 US dollars. The actor Peter Coyote suggested that if we really wish to see him run that each of us could give $25.00 and get commitments of three others to send $25, who would get 3 more etc. in a month around a billion dollars would be accumulated. He continues by saying; "A small donation now will advance his campaign immeasurably, force the media to pay attention to him, and spread his positions: National Health for all, anti-Nafta and Gatt, ending the war, de-militarizing space. There is virtually no difference between his positions and the Green Party platform, but as a Democratic Congressman, he is not a symbolic candidate. He is a tried and tested politician who has stayed true to his principles."
Let us join our hearts, minds and visions of the possible, for we are 'the ones we have been waiting for!'
Suzanne Keehn
Dennis's website is
kucinich.usThe address to send donations is:
Kucinich for President Committee
P. O. Box 110180
Cleveland, Ohio 44111
2) The Man from Vermont is Not GreenThe Man from Vermont is Not Green
CounterPunch
February 22, 2003
Meet Howard Dean
The Man from Vermont is Not Green
(He's Not Even a Liberal)
by MICHAEL COLBY
For Vermonters who have seen Howard Dean up close and personal for the last eleven years as our governor, there's something darkly comical about watching the national media refer to him as the "liberal" in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. With few exceptions in the 11-plus years he held the state's top job, Dean was a conservative Democrat at best. And many in Vermont, particularly environmentalists, see Dean as just another Republican in Democrat's clothing.
As the son of a wealthy Long Island family (his father was a prominent Wall Street insider), Dean's used to having his golden path well greased. After dutifully attending Yale and then medical school, Dean looked for a state to launch both a private medical practice and a political career. He chose Vermont as much for its beauty as its lenient mood toward carpet bagging politicians, thus joining Brooklynite Bernie Sanders as a born again Vermonter.
Dean became Vermont's accidental governor in 1991 after Governor Richard Snelling died of a heart attack while swimming in his pool. Dean, the lieutenant governor at the time, took the state's political reins and immediately followed through with his promise not to offend the Snelling Republicans who occupied the executive branch. And Dean carried on with his right-leaning centrism for the next eleven, long years. With his sights now set on the White House, the Dean team has been doing its best over the last year to polish up a mediocre gubernatorial record. They're also trying to position Dean as "the liberal" in the Democratic field so as to grab the much-coveted early primary voters. And nowhere are the tall tales of Dean's liberalism more off the mark than when the Dean team begins to gush about his environmental record. "EP under Governor Dean meant Expedite Permits, not Environmental Protection," proclaims Annette Smith, the director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment.
Smith is no stranger to Dean's environmental record, having tangled with the Dean administration on everything from the OMYA Corporation's mining to pesticide usage on Vermont's mega-farms. When Smith learned that Dean was holding a press conference at the Burlington Community Boathouse last week to celebrate his eco-legacy, she fired off emails to Vermont environmentalist calling for a protest of the event and wondering if they were "going to let Governor Dean ride out on his white horse of environmental leadership?"
It was Smith who stumbled onto Dean's official gubernatorial web site a couple of years ago and found a bucolic photo of her home town of Danby being featured with this caption: "Time stands still here, you might even forget when it's time to go home." Ironically, the location depicted in the photo was the same spot Dean was pushing to host a massive gas pipeline, a plan that would have required timber clear-cuts and other dramatic topographical changes. The Dean team removed the photo within a couple of weeks, but not before Smith made hay with his apparent hypocrisy.
"Dean's attempts to run for president as an environmentalist is nothing but a fraud," Smith told Wild Matters. "He's destroyed the Agency of Natural Resources, he's refused to meet with environmentalists while constantly meeting with the development community, and he's made the permitting process one, big dysfunctional joke."
Those are not the words you'd expect to hear from an environmentalist if all you relied on for your news was the mainstream press. The Burlington Free Press, for example, has spent considerable space putting one coat of varnish after another on Dean's tenure, including a rather smarmy salute to his eco-record. The word from those quarters is that Dean is the environment's friend and he's done nothing but anger the business community by slowing development and stymieing growth.
Dean's record, however, shows just the opposite. Remember, when Dean took office there were no Wal-Marts in Vermont; there was no Home Depots; Burlington's downtown was dominated by local stores not the national chains that now rule the roost; there were 36% more small farmers in existence; there were no 100,000-hen mega-farms; and sprawl wasn't a word on the tip of everyone's tongue.
Interestingly, Dean told the Free Press last week that he wished the rest of "the country were more like Vermont." But it certainly seems Dean has been doing his best to make Vermont more like the rest of the country. Stephanie Kaplan, a leading environmental lawyer and the former executive officer of Vermont's Environmental Board, has seen the regulatory process under Dean become so slanted against environmentalists and concerned citizens that she hardly thinks its worth putting up a fight anymore.
"Under Dean the Act 250 process (Vermont's primary development review law) and the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) have lost their way," contends Kaplan. "Dean created the myth that environmental laws hurt the economy and set the tone to allow Act 250 and the ANR to simply be permit mills for developers."
Kaplan points to the "Environmental Board purge" in the mid-90s that allowed Dean to set the pro-development tone. In 1993, the Board issued an Act 250 permit to C&S Grocers in Brattleboro with conditions that restricted the diesel emissions from its heavy truck traffic. After C&S execs cried foul and threatened to move to New Hampshire, Dean broke gubernatorial precedent by publicly criticizing the Environmental Board for issuing what he called a "non-permit."
A year after receiving their public rebuke from Dean, four of the Environmental Board members including the chair were up for reappointment. With the not-so-subtle clues from Dean that he didn't approve of the Board's political direction, the Republican majority in the state senate shot down each and every one of their appointments, thus dramatically changing both the structure and climate of the Board.
"After the post-C&S purge," says Kaplan, "the burden of proof for Act 250 permits switched from being on the applicants -- where it's supposed to be -- to being on the environmentalists. That's why 98% of the permit requests are approved and only 20% ever have hearings."
There is, however, one issue that Dean deserves credit for: his peripatetic efforts in land conservation. During his tenure, Dean has overseen the public preservation of over one million acres of Vermont land, most notably the former Champion Corporation lands in the Northeast Kingdom.
"But these special parcels seem to be the only land Dean cares about," says Kaplan. "The rest has been fair game for over development." As Dean goes national he may be able to fool an Iowan or two with his eco-record, but Vermonters have seen enough to know that being green isn't easy for Dean. And he's far from being a liberal.
Michael Colby is the editor of the national monthly, Wild Matters He
can be reached at mcolby@wildmatters.org .
This CounterPunch article was originally posted at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/colby02222003.html
3) The mirage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction- - Hans Blix vs the US: 'I was undermined'
''The mirage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction''
By Imad Khadduri
Former Iraqi nuclear scientist
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (Canada)
April 30, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) -- In late August 2002, I listened with trepidation to President Bush's burgeoning false allegations about Iraq's nuclear military capability. Even then, one could discern that the sustained use of misinformation to support the invasion of Iraq showed that the President's claims were not based on any facts. I, having worked with Iraq's nuclear program for thirty years, reacted with a series of articles expounding on the fact that Iraq had ceased its nuclear weapons program at the start of the 1991 war. I refuted the claims and evidence most famously, or infamously, branded by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Security Council in February 2003 in which Powell argued that Iraq had rejuvenated its nuclear weapons program after the Gulf War.
With heightened apprehension, I listened to Vice President Dick Cheney's claim on MSNBC that the U.S. does not accept the results of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) extensive inspections nor its failure to find any evidence of a rejuvenated Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The IAEA explicitly exposed the fact that a uranium procurement document provided by British and American intelligence as a piece of evidence proving Iraq's nuclear weapon capability was, in fact, a planted forgery. Cheney provocatively claimed, on the day before Bush's 48 hours ultimatum to invade Iraq, that U.S. intelligence had proof otherwise. My last retort to that incredible plain lie was that some bogus evidence might be planted once U.S. forces were on the ground in Iraq.
Bombing to waste, yet again, the main Nuclear Research Center at Tuwaitha, and foolishly allowing American soldiers to break IAEA protective seals and opening Tuwaitha's radioactive burial mound for looters who then contaminated themselves and their families, the Americans have yet to produce their "evidence" of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. Why is Cheney now silent about Iraq's nuclear weapons program? With U.S. troops in control of Iraq, this information cannot be a "national security" issue anymore.
In addition to the non-existent nuclear weapons program, two developments in the past two months have convinced me that, since 1991-1992, Iraq did not rejuvenate its chemical or biological weapons programs, either..
..It was the second event, which took place two weeks ago, which convinced me of the futility of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Amer Al Saadi, the chemical engineer and a senior scientific consultant to the Iraqi government, was the first prominent personality to surrender to the American forces after his German wife interceded with a German TV station to arrange for his surrender. For the past decade, he had been a polished, dignified and assured spokesman. He participated in the biological weapons program since its start in the early eighties. I knew him personally and had great admiration for his scientific integrity. In a ten-minute interview with German TV, Al Saadi asserted that: "I was always telling the truth. Iraq does not have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. I have nothing to hide. Time will bear me out."
Indeed, time is bearing him out to the chagrin of Bush and Blair. The American and British hopes of finding any WMDs in Iraq, not planted by them, are vanishing mirages.
Bush, Blair and their senior officials lied to their people, knowingly, and waged a criminal invasion in lieu of this reason. Is this the democracy model for a "liberated" Iraq?
[Imad Khadduri has a MSc in Physics from the University of Michigan (United States) and a PhD in Nuclear Reactor Technology from the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). Khadduri worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. He was able to leave Iraq in late 1998 with his family. He now teaches and works as a network administrator in Toronto, Canada. He has been interviewed by the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, FOX, the Toronto Star, Reuters, and various other news agencies in regards to his knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear program. This article was originally printed in
www.YellowTimes.org.]
Imad Khadduri encourages your comments:
imad.khadduri@rogers.comOther articles by Imad Khadduri on YellowTimes.org:
''Iraq's nuclear non-capability''
''La incapacidad nuclear de Irak''
''La non-capacité nucléaire de l'Irak''
"'Saddam's bombmaker' is full of lies"
'The nuclear bomb hoax''
"The demise of the nuclear bomb hoax"
"The fig leaf of moral impotence"
"Cheney's bogus nuclear weapon"
For the complete article and links, see:
http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1310&mode=thread&order=0= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Related article:
Hans Blix vs the US: 'I was undermined'By David Usborne in New York
Independent (UK)
23 April 2003
For the first time since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, confronted the Americans openly yesterday, accusing the Bush administration of lacking credibility in its efforts to hunt down Iraq's banned weapons.
Mr Blix, 74, derided by Washington for his failure to find the "smoking gun" that would have convinced the UN to give legal backing to the war, also accused Washington and Britain of deliberately undermining his efforts before the war.
For the complete article, see:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=399573
For items 4-6 - See:
DU Settles * Pentagon Plan for Terror * Citizens Rights
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