Flyby News
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Sub NY * Bush Junta * ABM Suit * Stolen Elections
30 October 2002
1) Global Warming Submerging NY
2) Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11
3) Oral Argument in Kucinich v. Bush on Plaintiffs' Motion
4) PBS Stations To Air Evidence Bush Stole 2000 Election
Editor's Notes:
Item 1 is more than about NY submerging. Item 2 encapsulates again the 9/11 issue with the viewpoint of Gore Vidal and foreign press. But the truth is sinking in.. Item 3 is on the oral arguments in a lawsuit regarding the illegality of the President's ABM withdrawal. This happens tomorrow in D.C. Item 4 is on the stealing of our elections, and getting air-play on PBS.
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1) Global Warming Submerging NY
Stop global warming or NY submerges
- Greenpeace
INDIA: October 28, 2002
NEW DELHI - By the year 2080, Manhattan and Shanghai could be underwater, droughts and floods could become more extreme and hundreds of millions of people will be at risk from disease, starvation and water shortages.
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18347/story.htmThat is the picture that a Greenpeace senior official painted of the future if the world failed to take urgent steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming.
"We're talking of about the submergence of islands, submergence of Shanghai, the submergence of Bombay, the submergence of New York City," Greenpeace climate policy director Steve Sawyer told Reuters late last week.
"Manhattan would be under water."
Sawyer, who is in New Delhi for a 10-day annual U.N. climate change conference, said global warming would lead to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which in turn would cause a five to seven metre (16 to 23 ft) sea-level rise and the inundation of coastal regions.
"Most coastal cities would be uninhabitable in their present forms...and that's a catastrophic change of the shape of continents."
Some environmentalists have said that recent climate disasters around the world - from droughts in India, Australia and the United States to floods in Europe - have been graphic harbingers of some of the expected consequences of global warming.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that by 2100 global average surface temperature will be 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius higher than it was in 1990.
Sawyer said an increase in temperatures would lead to more extreme droughts and a rise in frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones.
"What these temperature changes are going to do to the hydrological cycle, particularly in the tropics, is not a very pretty picture," he said.
Between 2050 and 2080, tens of millions of people would be more at risk of malaria, coastal flooding and starvation and hundreds of millions of people would be at risk from water shortages, he said.
Delegates from 185 countries are attending the climate conference, which is likely to be the last major climate meeting before the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is expected to come into force early next year.
The Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the developed world by 2012 to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels.
But the United States, the world's biggest air polluter, has refused to ratify the treaty, which it sees as flawed because it does not bind developing countries. It also says it would hurt the U.S. economy. The Earth Summit in Johannesburg earlier this year was widely criticised by environmentalists and vulnerable Pacific nations for barely touching on the problem of global warming. The United States was singled out for criticism.
Story by Sugita Katyal
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
2) Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11
Sunder Katwala
Sunday October 27, 2002
America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'
Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches. He quotes extensively from a 1997 analysis of the region by Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national security adviser to President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal argues, US administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware that the American public would resist any war in Afghanistan without a truly massive and widely perceived external threat.
'Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.' Vidal also attacks the American media's failure to discuss 11 September and its consequences: 'Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.'
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.'
At the heart of the essay are questions about the events of 9/11 itself and the two hours after the planes were hijacked. Vidal writes that 'astonished military experts cannot fathom why the government's "automatic standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking" was not followed'.
These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes should automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has deviated from its flight plan. Presidential authority is not required until a plane is to be shot down. But, on 11 September, no decision to start launching planes was taken until 9.40am, eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck the North Tower.
'By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot down.'
Vidal asks why Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, stayed in a Florida classroom as news of the attacks broke: 'The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.' He also attacks the 'nonchalance' of General Richard B Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, in failing to respond until the planes had crashed into the twin towers.
Asking whether these failures to act expeditiously were down to conspiracy, coincidence or error, Vidal notes that incompetence would usually lead to reprimands for those responsible, writing that 'It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than .... Well, yes, there are worse things.'
Vidal draws comparisons with another 'day of infamy' in American history, writing that 'The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it.' He quotes CNN reports that Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congressional investigation of the day itself, ostensibly on grounds of not diverting resources from the anti-terror campaign.
Vidal calls bin Laden an 'Islamic zealot' and 'evil doer' but argues that 'war' cannot be waged on the abstraction of 'terrorism'. He says that 'Every nation knows how - if it has the means and will - to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11 ... You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no-one has suggested bombing Palermo.'
Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani intelligence in creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat: 'Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it' but with American support. "From 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.'
Vidal also quotes the highly respected defence journal Jane's Defence Weekly on how this support for Islamic fundamentalism continued after the emergence of bin Laden: 'In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.'
Vidal, 77, and internationally renowned for his award-winning novels and plays, has long been a ferocious, and often isolated, critic of the Bush administration at home and abroad. He now lives in Italy. In Vidal's most recent book, The Last Empire, he argued that 'Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.'
For this originally posted article and links to:
Talk: Gore Vidal on Bush
Observer Worldview
Terrorism crisis: Observer special
Visit this following URL:
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,819931,00.html
3) Oral Argument in Kucinich v. Bush on Plaintiffs' Motion
The following came through the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space list serve, from John Burroughs, who is the executive director of Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy about the Oral Arguments planned for October 31st regarding the ABM withdrawal law suit. If you are in D.C., please go... and send news about it to flyby.
The following is from John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy, which came to Flyby via the Global Network's list serve:
+ + +
The oral argument in Kucinich v. Bush on plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment and defendants motion to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment will take place on Thursday, October 31, beginning at 1000 am, in Courtroom 21, U.S. Courthouse, 3rd and Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC, before federal district judge John Bates, U.S. district court for the District of Columbia. This is not the ceremonial courtroom. It is next door to it. The public can observe the proceedings (space allowing, about 120 spectators).
There is no time limit set for conclusion of the argument. If the judge grants plaintiffs' motion or defendants' motion, that will decide the case at this level. It may be some time before the judge issues his decision.
The case was brought by Congressman Dennis Kucinich and 31 other members of the House of Representatives to challenge President Bush's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without congressional approval. The main papers filed in the case are available in pdf at
http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/ABMlawsuit/indexoflinks.htm-John Burroughs
John Burroughs, Executive Director
Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy
211 E. 43d St., Suite 1204
New York, New York 10017 USA
tel: +1 212 818 1861 fax: 818 1857
e-mail: johnburroughs@lcnp.org
website:
http://www.lcnp.org For more background on this, see following Archive links:
June 12, 2002 -- Lawsuit to stop withdrawal from ABM Treaty - Item 1
http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1023931432,38812,m"Ohio lawmaker to file lawsuit to stop withdrawal from ABM treaty"
and
June 21, 2002 - "ABM Treaty Still Lives" -- Item 2
http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1025805829,84082,m"ABM Treaty still lives, say congressmen who sue to undo its 'unconstitutional' knifing by Bush without OK of Congress"
4) PBS Stations To Air Evidence Bush Stole 2000 Election
PBS Stations To Air Evidence Bush Stole 2000 Election
Two Must See Movies
From: Greg Palast
Email:
Greg PalastThursday, October 17, 2002
PALAST INVESTIGATION OF FLORIDA VOTE THEFT TO AIR ON PBS, FEATURED AT HAMPTONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Two films, "Counting on Democracy" and "Unprecedented," premier this month.
>COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY
In the face of the controversial decision by the PBS network to refuse to transmit the investigative report, the nation's top PBS stations will independently broadcast COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY.
Directed by Emmy-award winner Danny Schechter, the 57-minute documentary follows BBC television reporter Greg Palast as he discovers how Katherine Harris removed up to 57,000 legal voters from registries -- most black -- five months before the 2000 election.
While the public broadcast network chiefs refused to schedule this important report, WNET (New York), KCET (Los Angeles), KQED (San Francisco) and dozens more are insisting on showing the expose before the mid-term elections.
See full schedule at
http://www.GregPalast.com/events2.cfm#news253= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
A second film on the scandal of the vote theft in Florida, UNPRECEDENTED, opens this month in national screenings sponsored by People for the American Way, the NAACP and The Nation.
The Robert Greenwald Production includes exclusive footage from Palast's confrontations with Katherine Harris' vote fixers. Palast will join directors Joan Sekler and Richard Perez at the New York opening.
For more information and some photo stills, go to
http://www.Unprecedented.org
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