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GrayZone * WMDplant * KnotOut * MexUFOs


18 May 2004



"You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."

– George W. Bush
,
(joking?) at a Gridiron Club dinner,
Washington, D.C., March 2001.




1) The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh
- - Secret operation approved by Rumsfeld leads to abuse
- - Legal Foundation Clearing Way for Abuse Scandal
- - U.S. Denies Rumsfeld Approved Iraq Interrogations Methods
- - US guards 'filmed beatings' at Guantanamo
- - Precondition for Peace in the Middle East
2) New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq
- - 'Sarin bomb attack' on US troops :
- - Powell: Intelligence by CIA Wrong
- - Suicide Car Bomb Kills Iraq Governing Council Head
- - From the White House, a nightmare scenario
3) Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps On Fighting
- - State Rep. Joe Smith on Voting for Kucinich in Oregon Primary
- - Paper Trail: The Ohio Vote matters in 2004
4) UFOs In Mexico


Editor's Notes:

In Seymour Hersh's breakthrough article, published by The New Yorker magazine, Hersh wrote that - - "The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush." And so begins the investigation that the Pentagon could not make go away.. They could, perhaps, if there were no photos, but images of torture by US-Occupying forces in Iraq are too vividly felt to ever be dismissed. So what's next? The last article in item 1 has the best idea, which unfortunately has not dawned on the modern-day John Kerry. After serving with honor to help end the Vietnam War, Kerry is hiding behind the politics of shame and dishonor. Perhaps we can each send him this article by Ruth Rosen, "End the Occupation."

But the war-oil mongers will likely not stop at anything. Even after hundreds and thousands of US service personnel are dead and maimed, while billions are being poured into a lost cause for a greedy misguided few. So, what is next? Perhaps we will discover, as item 2 reports, there will be the planting of WMDs to pursue the ungodly cause of deception and lies. Yet what is most disturbing is the White House counting on terrorist attacks in the US before the November election.

Item 3 features a NY Times articles, "Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps On Fighting." Keep an eye on the Oregon State Primary results, which is on 18 May. A vote for Kucinich is still sending a message for peace and honor. Also in this item is a link to a petition you can sign to protect the vote in Ohio, where electronic voting machines are set to be in place in 31 counties without a paper trail verification. The 2004 election is going to be very close - and could come down to just a handful of votes in this key state. Item 4 is a special UFO report released by the Mexican air force. These are very interesting times, but the reports of widespread abuse of prisoners by US forces is most troubling, and the cover-ups of truth by the distorted face of evil looking at oneself in the mirror of terrorism, and the downgrading of the human spirit and the US military.

Please note that Flyby News will again show the films of John Pilger and Dennis Kucinich in a program called: The Indecent War On Freedom. Please request, if interested, for an attached PDF file for the flyer of this program, which will be presented Wednesday 16 June 2004 at the Greenfield, MA, public library, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. The featured film by London-based, Australian journalist John Pilger, "Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror," has recently won the gold award in the political category at the prestigious 2004 WorldMedia Festival.




War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose;
then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.


-- Karl Kraus

(1874 ­ 1936)




1) The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh

- - Secret operation approved by Rumsfeld leads to abuse
- - Legal Foundation Clearing Way for Abuse Scandal
- - U.S. Denies Rumsfeld Approved Iraq Interrogations Methods
- - US guards 'filmed beatings' at Guantanamo

THE GRAY ZONE
by Seymour Hersh

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker,
Issue of 2004-05-24, Posted 2004-05-15

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A...

For this article, see:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

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- - Secret operation approved by Rumsfeld leads to abuse

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a secret operation last year that expanded interrogation methods used in Afghanistan to the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-05/16/content_1472182.htm

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- - Legal Foundation Clearing Way for Abuse Scandal

Did Administration Construct Legal Foundation Clearing Way for Abuse Scandal?
By Pete Yost
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted on Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment.

Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Newsweek magazine reported. Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA3OO8JBUD.html

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- - U.S. Denies Rumsfeld Approved Iraq Interrogations Methods

The denial was made in response to an article on the New Yorker magazine, which said Rumsfeld had approved expanding an interrogation program, which had been used in Afghanistan to hunt for al-Qaeda.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aQW2Wz0HMv3Q&refer=us

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- - US guards 'filmed beatings' at Guantanamo

Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1217973,00.html

'They tied me up like a beast and began kicking me' :

As America struggles to come to terms with military abuse in Iraq, similar stories are emerging from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Tarek Dergoul, a Briton released from the camp in March, talks here for the first time about his two-year ordeal.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6196.htm

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- - Precondition for Peace in the Middle East

End the Occupation
by Ruth Rosen
Published on Monday, May 17, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle

[Excerpt]

..For democracy to have a chance, the United States must withdraw its troops, leave no military base in Iraq and not try to control that nation's oil policy. The United States must also pressure Israel to commit to a clear timetable to create a coherent Palestinian state. This is a precondition for peace in the Middle East.

It's an act of patriotism to call for an end to the occupation. President Bush has damaged our national reputation and undermined our democratic ideals and traditions. To paraphrase a poignant question posed by a young John Kerry: How do you ask a soldier to be the last person to die in Iraq?

For the complete article, see:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0517-02.htm



2) New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq

- - 'Sarin bomb attack' on US troops :
- - Powell: Intelligence by CIA Wrong
- - Suicide Car Bomb Kills Iraq Governing Council Head
- - From the White House, a nightmare scenario

- - New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq
Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2004
by the Mehr News Agency (Tehran, Iran)

BASRA - Fifty days after the first reports that the U.S. forces were unloading weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in southern Iraq, new reports about the movement of these weapons have been disclosed.

Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country.

An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor's Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.

For the complete article, see:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0413-02.htm

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- - 'Sarin bomb attack' on US troops

A roadside bomb containing a small amount of the nerve agent sarin has exploded near a US military convoy in Iraq, the US military announced today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1218878,00.html

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- - Powell: Intelligence by CIA Wrong

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq before the war was wrong.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-05/17/content_1474804.htm

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- - Suicide Car Bomb Kills Iraq Governing Council Head

A suicide car bomb killed the head of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and at least eight other people Monday at a checkpoint outside the main Baghdad headquarters of the U.S.-led administration.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5161942

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- - From the White House, a nightmare scenario

White House officials say they've got a "working premise" about terrorism and the presidential election: It's going to happen. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." And, he added, "it will happen here." There are two worst-case scenarios, the official says. The first posits an attack on Washington, possibly the Capitol, which was believed to be the target of the 9/11 jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. Theory 2: smaller but more frequent attacks in Washington and other major cities leading up to the election. To prepare, the administration has been holding secret antiterrorism drills to make sure top officials know what to do. "There was a sense," says one official involved in the drills, "of mass confusion on 9/11. Now we have a sense of order." Unclear is the political impact, though most Bushies think the nation would rally around the president. "I can tell you one thing," adds the official sternly, "we won't be like Spain," which tossed its government days after the Madrid train bombings.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040524/whispers/24whisplead.htm



3) Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps On Fighting

- - State Rep. Joe Smith on Voting for Kucinich in Oregon Primary
- - Paper Trail: The Ohio Vote matters in 2004

Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps On Fighting
By RICK LYMAN
Published: May 17, 2004
NYTimes.com > Washington > Campaign 2004

PORTLAND, Ore., May 16 - Before Americans get too engrossed in a general election contest between President Bush and Senator John Kerry, Dennis J. Kucinich would like to remind them of something: He's still out here, working hard every day, slogging from town to town, the second-to-last person still standing in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"Math is not my major, but I can count," the Ohio congressman said as his car wound along the dripping, piney woods of the central Oregon coast, a glowering sky flecking the windshield with pin-sized raindrops. "I understand that Kerry has enough delegates to be nominated. I can count, but I can also figure."

Dennis J. Kucinich is still campaigning, hoping to influence his party to take an unambiguous stance against the war. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

And this is how Dennis Kucinich - the former boy mayor of Cleveland whose half-forgotten, dead-but-still-twitching presidential campaign is now focusing on Tuesday's Oregon primary - figures it:

"The reason I have not dropped out of the race is that we may have a nominee, but the future direction of the Democratic Party has not yet been determined."

And what he wants Mr. Kerry, and the Democratic Party, to do is to take an unambiguous stand not only against the war in Iraq but against "the very idea that war is inevitable." The nation's whole political mindset must be changed, Mr. Kucinich said.

"We are at the unusual juncture where what is morally right and politically efficacious are in confluence," he said. "My presence in the race provides a persistent reminder of the necessity of taking a new direction, the first step of which is to bring our troops home now."

O.K. But isn't that pretty big talk for a guy who has won exactly zero primaries - in fact, who performed poorly in most of them?

Mr. Kucinich recognizes this, and knows that much of the country has pretty much forgotten that he is still running. "At this point, I am not suffering from the overwhelming burden of high expectations," he said.

However, he said, the war in Iraq is turning out to be just the disaster he had predicted, and if he can just keep accumulating delegates here and there, he might be able to go into the Democratic convention in Boston this summer with enough juice to nudge the party toward his way of thinking.

That's all he wants now.

"I guess you can say I am saving the Democratic Party from itself," Mr. Kucinich said. "And I can possibly prevent some people from jumping into the arms of a third-party candidate. I mean, why is Ralph Nader even an issue this year? What is to stop us from stealing his playbook?"

At the moment, Mr. Kucinich is focusing on Oregon. He has spent 30 days here in the last two months, and he is using some of his precious reserve of campaign funds on last-minute television advertisements.

He takes heart that Mr. Kerry, whose campaign has paid little attention to the primary calendar in recent weeks, feels compelled to come to Portland on Monday, with no less than former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont in tow.

"What's happening," Mr. Kucinich insisted, "is that events are starting to prove that I was right. When all else fails, truth has a way of protecting its own."

At the public library in Florence, on a leafy street between Highway 101 and the sea, more than 100 Kucinich supporters spilled from a small meeting room at 7:30 Saturday morning. He was due any minute for the first of six stops that day.

"I figure we have to have someone for those of us who are against the war," said Don Norton, 71, a retired corrections official wearing a "No War" button. "If it wasn't for Kucinich, there wouldn't be anyone speaking for us."

Howard Shapiro, 70, a retired schoolteacher sporting two buttons ("Dissent Is Patriotic" and "Re-Defeat Bush"), said that like many in the room, he expected to vote for Mr. Kerry in November. But on Tuesday he goes Kucinich, if only to send Mr. Kerry a message.

A microphone was passed through the crowd so people could explain what brought them there.

"I'm just getting tired of being embarrassed to be an American," one woman said.

"I really like to be in a place where my ideas are not superfluous," said another.

The crowd rose and cheered when Mr. Kucinich arrived in a blue blazer over a red shirt and blue jeans.

"How many of us have had that feeling, that we can't believe what this country has become?" Mr. Kucinich asked. "I know that many of us feel a sense of disconnection from our country, and that this produces in us a kind of grief. We grieve for the America that was, the America that cared for civil liberties."

American politics, apparently, have gone completely topsy-turvy: conservatives crank up deficits and get bogged down in foreign wars while progressives pine wistfully for a golden-hued past.

Normally, Mr. Kucinich speaks in a calm, reassuring way, though every now and then his voice rises in a passionate crescendo. The effect is less that of a lonely political crusade than a religious revival, and his language has echoes of the pulpit.

"What is the way out of this?" he asked. "It is reminding us where we came from."

At a rally later in Lincoln City, nearly 200 people packed the Bijou Cinema, where Mr. Kucinich was presented with a quilt bearing the logo "Dept. of Peace." This referred to his proposal to create such a cabinet-level agency to promote harmony and conflict resolution, a notion much ridiculed on conservative talk radio shows as emblematic of the sort of fuzzy-headed thinking common among this particular strain of liberal.

"We can change the whole debate in this country, and we've got to do it," Mr. Kucinich said. "It's about the party standing for something, something other than the next check from the corporate interests."

In an almost hushed voice, he continued: "This is a spiritual matter, not just a practical political matter."

The entire time he spoke, an angelic young woman stood at the side of the auditorium with her arms raised above her head, sometimes shaking them gently, as though sending waves through the air.

The young woman, Eden Sky, 27, said she was "focusing," which she described as a kind of praying, a blessing. And she seemed almost puzzled when asked why she chose to focus on Mr. Kucinich. "Because he is the only one worth focusing on," she said.

If he continues to win a few here and a few there, Mr. Kucinich said, he expects to go to Boston with about 50 delegates, and to bring along an additional 2,000 supporters. "We will help shape the external environment of the convention as well," he said.

What he really must do, he said, is to have a serious conversation with Mr. Kerry, with whom he has a friendly relationship, to try to persuade him that a troops-out-now platform is the way to beat President Bush and unlock the door to the nation's progressive yearnings.

"Up until now, I have been his opponent in the primaries and it wouldn't be appropriate," Mr. Kucinich said. "But the time to have that discussion is probably very close."

He reached into one of his traveling bags and pulled out a thick stack of newspaper pages, each one with articles meticulously underlined, nuggets of information that he found interesting or appalling, more grist for his mill.

"We've been out here campaigning for 15 months," he said. "It's a long time."

But it will be worth it, he said, if he can just inch his party toward justice.

"In a way, I feel like Johnny Appleseed," Mr. Kucinich said. "I'm planting seeds all over this country: seeds of peace, seeds of hope. At some point, maybe years from now, there will be orchards. So in a sense, it's about more than this election. It's about more than politics. It really is about envisioning a new America."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/politics/campaign/17kucinich.html

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- - State Rep. Joe Smith on Voting for Kucinich in Oregon Primary

Former Chairman of the Oregon Democratic Party State Rep R.P. Joe Smith on Voting for Kucinich in Oregon Primary

In a letter to the Oregonian today, [Oregon] State Representative R.P. Joe Smith of Northeast Portland explains why he's voting for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in Tuesday's primary election. Said Smith: "This summer and fall I will enthusiastically be doing everything I can to help elect John Kerry… But today I mailed in my ballot, having voted for Dennis Kucinich.

"My reason: the issues Rep. Kucinich, D-Ohio, has raised, and the goals he has urged us to look at, demand attention in the coming national debate, and we can assure that by sending a few Kucinich delegates to the Democratic National Convention who will see to it those issues and goals are clearly on the table.

"I hope enough of my fellow Oregonians will join in voting for Kucinich to make that happen. And then I urge my fellow Oregonians to wholeheartedly join together and elect Kerry."

R.P. Joe Smith is a State Representative from Northeast Portland and former Chairman of the Oregon Democratic Party.

---------------------------------

For information about the Kucinich National campaign, visit:

http://www.kucinich.us

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- - Paper Trail: The Ohio Vote matters in 2004

In November 2nd, this historic election could come down to just a few votes here in Ohio. But will those precious few votes count?

Last week, Governor Bob Taft signed a bill authorizing up to 31 Ohio counties to install election voting machines in time for the November election. The bill, passed by the Ohio legislature, delayed mandated paper verification of all votes until 2006. The Ohio Controlling Board is expected to approve the appropriations bill in a matter of days.

The Ohio Vote matters in 2004

Today I've taken action to protect the vote in Ohio, where electronic voting machines are set to be in place in 31 counties without a paper trail verification of each votes. The 2004 election is going to be very close - and could come down to just a handful of votes in this key state.

Please join me in signing the Paper Trail Petition today and pass it on to everyone you know.

http://actforvictory.org/act.php/home/petitions/diebold_ohio



4) UFOs In Mexico

Mexican DoD Acknowledges UFOs In Mexico
By Santiago Yturria
syturria@intercable.net
Images courtesy of Mr. Jaime Maussan
5-11-4

`It is one of the most important film documents we have been able to access, especially because it comes from an official source,'' said Jaime Mausan, a journalist who has been tracking the UFO phenomenon for more than 25 years.

For photos and the article, see:
http://www.rense.com/general52/deff.htm



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