Barf Bags for Kerry:
Why I’m NOT voting for Nader
By Mark Robinowitz, www.oilempire.us - September 2004

In 2000, the Nader campaign had an unanticipated, yet vital role: the narrowness of the outcome exposed the Bush cabal’s dirty tricks in Florida (election machine tampering, keeping voters away). If Nader hadn’t run, Bush would have stolen Florida in secret.
Gore won the election, but supported the coup. He suppressed the Congressional Black Caucus demands to discuss the fraudulent Florida electors on January 6, 2001 (as depicted in Fahrenheit 9/11).
I don’t regret voting for Ralph in ‘96 and 2000, but I’m not supporting him now. Like most Democrats, Nader is silent about the fact that 9/11 was not a “surprise” attack, deliberately allowed to happen to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions to grab Mideast oil as the world reaches the peak of petroleum production.
While the 2004 election at best will be “regime rotation,” a “good cop / bad cop” contest between friendly fascism and full strength fascism, it is important that the faction that deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen be removed from power before they can do more damage.
The “Project for a New American Century” neo-conservatives (who boasted in 2000 they needed another “Pearl Harbor” to achieve their goals of global conquest) succeeded in getting the world war underway. But the bluntness of the Bush regime has kept most US allies from participating, and they have been unable to get the oil flowing at hoped-for amounts, alienating some of their previous supporters.
The most important book of this political season is “Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil” by Michael Ruppert, available through www.fromthewilderness.com. “Rubicon” accuses Cheney of running the multiple “war game” exercises on 9/11 (including a “plane-into-building” scenario near Dulles Airport, Virginia!) that confused the military response to the hijacked planes, preventing them from being intercepted according to standard operating procedure. al-Qaeda did not have the ability to suppress the NORAD protection of the East Coast or hamper FBI investigations of the flight schools. The book is based on mass media articles and direct testimony, and has over 1,000 footnotes as references. In a democracy, it would get the Pulitzer Prize for its courageous investigation. Media institutions everywhere have a duty to examine the specifics of these charges before November 2.
9/11 is the pretext for what President Cheney calls the “war that will not end in our lifetime,” a “musical chairs” scramble to control the remaining oil reserves. Fortunately, a growing list of politicians, military veterans, authors and celebrities are speaking out about the need for a real investigation of 9/11. The Progressive Democrats of America recently urged their members to support 911truth.org. Green Party candidate David Cobb (who has even less visibility than Nader’s effort) is also speaking to this core issue. A Zogby poll released during the Republican convention found that 49% of New York City residents surveyed believed that Bush had foreknowledge of the attacks. Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian Minister of Defense, states he doesn’t believe the official story.
November 9, or 11/9 (9/11 in reverse), is a week after Election Day. Whether Kerry is allowed to win or there’s an “October Surprise” that throws the outcome, let’s use 11/9 to start the dismantling of the fear paradigms that are wrecking the world. Surviving Peak Oil will require using the remaining oil to relocalize food production and build a renewable energy economy. To do this will require reallocating the military budget for peaceful purposes, and that reallocation can only happen by exposing 9/11.

Carol Quigley, one of Bill Clinton’s professors at Georgetown University, wrote that “the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
The Kerry / Bush “choice” reminds me of the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race between Edwin Edwards, the corrupt incumbent, and Klansman / Republican David Duke. Many voters were horrified, and only those in cahoots with Edwards could vote for him without regret. The best slogan from that campaign was “vote for the crook - it’s important.” (Edwards won, but Duke got a majority of white votes.)
Kerry and Bush are blood brothers in Skull and Bones, the infamous Yale University secret society. John Heinz, Senior, father of Teresa’s first husband, George Herbert Walker Bush (“poppy”) and Senator Prescott Bush (W’s grandfather, who helped fund Hitler) are also part of this ultra-exclusive club, possibly the most powerful hidden institution in American politics.
Kerry, Bush and Cheney are distant cousins, part of the American aristocracy. Kerry has more royal blood than Bush, and if installed next year, would be the wealthiest President ever.
Kerry was selected (long before the primaries) as the Democratic challenger since he has a long history of loyal service to the Oil Empire. He helped neutralize (politically) the CIA cocaine scandal during the Iran-Contra investigations. He supports the Iraq war (but under new management), Plan Columbia, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, NAFTA, WTO, a new gas pipeline from Alaska, more freeways, nuclear power, genetic frankenfood, and modest increases in energy efficiency that are woefully inadequate to the challenges of declining fossil fuel supplies. He will hide the deeper truths of 9/11 and Peak Oil while using them as excuses for the Orwellian surveillance society. I hope that everyone who votes for Kerry will promote peace and freedom if the Democrats move back into the White House, and pressure Kerry to oppose war and fascism.

The 2004 "election" features a plutocrat from the occult Skull and Bones secret society who supports police state legislation, a new gas pipeline from north Alaska, more troops to Iraq, the war in Columbia, nuclear power, delaying fuel efficiency improvements in cars until 2015 and opposes the Kyoto Treaty. And then we have the incumbent, who is a war criminal, complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 people in New York and countless Iraqis, Afghans and others.

The 2004 Presidential "election" makes the 2000 contest look honest in comparison -- at best, it will merely be "regime rotation" (replace Bush but keep the most important policies). The biggest way the election has been rigged is not phony computerized ballot machines (although they are a severe violation of democracy), but the manipulation of the process to ensure that Bush's cousin was picked as the opposition candidate. Bush, Kerry and Cheney are cousins, part of the American aristocracy.

Many more people who voted for Bush in 2000 have become disillusioned with him than the numbers of citizens who voted for Gore and now want to support Bush. The main question for the 2004 selection is whether Kerry is allowed to win or whether Team Bush will steal the election again.

Senator John Kerry
the most likely candidate for the D's in 2004 (as predicted by this website throughout the rise and fall of Howard Dean, the doctor for the death penalty)

a member of the Skull and Bones secret society / death cult, just like George W. Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush (president 1981-1993), Senator Prescott Bush (W's grandfather, who helped fund Hitler), and John Heinz, Senior (father of Teresa Heinz Kerry's deceased first husband)

favors more nuclear power reactors

voted for Bush's aggressive war to seize Iraq's oil

supports "Plan Columbia" (military aid to a brutal narco-dictatorship)

has an extremely wealthy wife (good for financing TV ads)

has good hair (telegenic)

his campaign's foreign policy chair - Rand Beers - was, until last year, "President" Bush's anti-terror expert on the National Security Council (the passing of the torch from Bush to Kerry?)

Kerry said in May 2004 that he might appoint anti-abortion judges

the D's are having their Convention in Boston (Kerry is from Massachusetts)

Kerry is reportedly a member of the ultra-exclusive transnational "Bilderberg" group http://www.bilderberg.org/2001.htm Clinton attended the annual Bilderberg meeting of Earth's elites the year before he became President - which suggests that Kerry is extremely likely to be allowed to replace Bush (but keep most of the policies: the War on Terror, Homeland Security, Peak Oil wars)

and Kerry is a cousin of George Walker Bush and Richard "Dick" Cheney

In early 2003, this website predicted "If Senator Kerry is picked as the Democratic candidate at the 2004 Convention in Boston, then the Presidential selection will be a contest between the liberal and conservative wings of the Skull and Bones Society!"

Skull and Bones versus Skull and Bones.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
(although with better speeches)

Kerry’s vote in support for what most legal scholars see as an illegitimate war has raised serious questions regarding his commitment to international law and the U.S. Constitution. Given his apparent dishonesty in justifying the war, it also raises questions should he actually become president as to what additional lies John Kerry would be willing to tell the American people in order to justify possible future U.S. invasions of other countries.
Democrats have to wonder whether it makes sense to throw out the dishonest warmonger currently in the White House only to replace him with what many now see as a dishonest warmonger from their own ranks. As a result, it is likely that by the time the primaries come around, the voters will opt not for the former front-runner Kerry, but a candidate who will not abuse the trust of the American people in order to pursue his militarist agenda.
- Kerry’s Deceptions on Iraq Threaten His Presidential Hopes by Stephen Zunes, Tuesday, August 26, 2003 by CommonDreams.org www.commondreams.org/views03/0826-03.htm

(note: it seems painfully clear that Kerry has been the insider front-runner all along - the voters are unlikely to determine who the candidates are, elite managed propaganda campaigns are more important in this decision)

Howard Dean went to Yale, but he wasn't "tapped" for the Skull and Bones secret society.
Dean's coverup of crimes in Vermont are much less interesting for the empire than Kerry's muzzling of the CIA / cocaine scandals, his support for war on Columbia, Iraq and other targets, and his "old money" connections. Kerry has been the insiders' choice for "challenging" fellow Bonesman George Walker Bush, and while Dean is also an elite, consensus Democrat, he didn't ask the power brokers nicely to run for President, and he hasn't committed great crimes on behalf of empire (merely on behalf of Vermont companies) and therefore will not be allowed into the Oval Office. It's a sad lesson in how power works for the "Dean Cult" - his followers who were fooled into thinking he's the peace candidate.

John Kerry makes Dick Cheney seem middle class in comparison.
Kerry is experienced in covering up great scandals of empire.
If Kerry was fooled by the not-too-bright Bush (as he claims in defending his vote for Iraq war), then why would anyone want to vote for someone dumber than Bush?

www.almartinraw.com/public/column107.html

Kerry’s Losing Campaign: Incompetence or Conspiracy? (Part 2); Pat Buchanan, Write-In Candidate

This is the question. Is John Kerry throwing the election to his fellow Bonesman George Bush, who is also member of a secret society called the Order of Skull and Bones? The evidence suggests that he certainly is. The fact that he hasn’t hired any competent consultants like Jim Carville certainly suggests that he is not putting his all into this campaign fight. To the informed observer, it certainly appears that this so-called incompetence may be more calculated than inadvertent.
The fact that his campaign staff is largely comprised of thirty-something wide-eyed liberals who don’t know the realities of Washington and who weren’t there in the 1980s, as it were, and don’t know what’s happening, do not know the realities, would suggest that this is not an unintentional level of incompetence, but an intentional level of incompetence designed as a losing proposition at the polls.

www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/27/1558247&mode=thread&tid=25
Tuesday, January 27th, 2004
Democracy Now! Questions Democrats About Previous Iraq WMD Claims

AMY GOODDMAN: Senator Kerry -- quick question. You said that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons when other nations wouldn't try. What intelligence was that based on?
JOHN KERRY: I don't know what report -- I don't know what you are talking about.
AMY GOODDMAN: You said Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.
JOHN KERRY: When did I say that? I don't recall. I don't know.
AMY GOODDMAN: You said he was developing chemical and biological weapons.
JOHN KERRY: I never said he was developing nuclear. I believe I said --
AMY GOODDMAN: You said, why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons.
JOHN KERRY: Attempting to, because he did. He did attempt to.
AMY GOODDMAN: According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.
JOHN KERRY: Say it again?
AMY GOODDMAN: You said according to intelligence, Iraq has biological and chemical weapons.
JOHN KERRY: That's what we were told. Right.
AMY GOODDMAN: Is that intelligence wrong? Do you think Bush -- you made a wrong statement, then? Because Kucinich at the time was saying no credible sources were there, but you are saying --
JOHN KERRY: I'm sorry, we're going to have to do --
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy was then told by Kerry's people to stop asking questions and the press could ask them later. But when she asked if there would be an avail after the event, press lingo for press availability, Kerry's staffers conceded that there would be none. We persisted in our questioning of Kerry on this issue.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Senator Kerry, why did you say that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction?
STAFFER: We have to get the Apollo crew in here.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Answer the question, senator Kerry. Why did you accuse Saddam of having weapons of mass destruction?

Teresa Heinz Kerry is a Billionaire

In 2000, a group called "Billionaires for Bush or Gore" lampooned the narrow range of candidates offered by the two-party system (since both Bush and Gore supported corporatism, empire, NAFTA / WTO, etc.). This year, having an actual billionaire as a major candidate who is the almost certain victor in November is a new development in American politics. It is beyond satire.

www.startribune.com/stories/587/4848689.html
Teresa Heinz Kerry, through a network of investments in blue-chip corporations, venture capital funds and municipal bonds, controls a family fortune worth an estimated $1 billion, an analysis of public records shows.
The $1 billion figure is double the estimates of her wealth that are widely cited in news stories about her husband, Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
The couple would rank as the wealthiest to occupy the White House, far surpassing such storied presidential fortunes as the Kennedys'. Their assets are so vast and far-reaching that they mirror the U.S. economy and will probably raise questions about conflicts of interest.
"She represents a new ballgame in terms of her wealth and in terms of the wealth she controls," said Kevin Phillips, a political commentator and author of the history "Wealth and Democracy."
Heinz Kerry's investments, worth an estimated $500 million in 1995, have grown over the past nine years to $1 billion or more, even accounting for large living expenses and charitable contributions, according to an analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Senate financial disclosure reports, probate documents and other public records.
Because key details of Heinz Kerry's investments are not in the public record, a precise valuation is not possible. The Los Angeles Times' analysis produced estimates as low as $900 million and as high as $3.2 billion. Three senior executives at investment companies that handle accounts for wealthy clients reviewed the Times' study and said the $1 billion valuation was a fair and conservative estimate.
Heinz Kerry has declined requests by the Times in recent months for interviews. Campaign representatives for Sen. Kerry and his wife said the couple regard their assets as private. The representatives also declined to provide answers to written questions over the past two weeks.
Heinz Kerry's money is actively managed every day of the year, providing capital to Gannett, Anheuser-Busch, and Pfizer among many others. It helps finance municipal sewer systems, technology start-ups, schools and more.
The trust accounts are held at Mellon Financial Corp., the Pittsburgh institution that has long handled the affairs of the Heinz family. She inherited the family's fortune in the food business 13 years ago.

a websearch on "mellon bank covert cocaine" will bring up some very interesting articles. if even only a few of them are true, it suggests a deeper reason why the less popular Kerry was selected as the Democratic nominee (and probably has already been picked by the powers-that-be as the next President of the Empire)

reading about Bill Clinton's ties to drug money (a search at www.fromthewilderness.com will bring up several articles) and Kerry's smoothing over of the CIA / cocaine scandal after Iran-Contra suggest that Presidential candidates need to be somewhat complicit in the crimes of empire to be allowed to win

the most popular Democratic candidate during the primaries, Gov. Howard Dean, had many scandals in Vermont (see www.oilempire.us/dean.html) but they didn't involve, as far as is known publicly, money laundering of drug cash and other covert operations. this is probably why Dean's campaign was blocked by the Democratic Party in favor of the favored candidate, John Forbes Kerry

Kerry, Bush and Cheney are cousins

Bush and Kerry aren't just "blood brothers" in Skull and Bones -- they are allegedly distant cousins, too. (How many people can trace THEIR ancestry back to the 1600s? Unless your ancestors were nobility, it is unlikely that you can identify your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.)

John Forbes Kerry and George Walker Bush are ninth cousins, twice removed. See this website http://www.familyforest.com/Kerry_Bush_Cousins.html for family ties between Kerry, the Bushes and previous US presidents. It suggests that we have an American nobility similar to European aristocracy, something that we are taught does not exist in this country.

Bush is also the 9th cousin of John Hinckley, Jr., who was accused of shooting Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1981. (The Hinckley and Bush families were business partners in Texas - see www.nathanielblumberg.com/neil.html for the connections between the Hinckley and Bush families) Kerry is Hickley's 10th cousin, once removed - and there are no known business ties between the Kerry and Hinckley clans.

http://members.aol.com/wreitwiesn/candidates2004/

http://members.aol.com/wreitwiesn/candidates2004/kerry.html

9/GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
3730
Thomas Richards, b. ... , d. Weymouth, Mass., 28 Jan. 1651  
m.
3731
Welthean (Loring?), b. ... , d. Barnstable, Mass., between 3 July and 4 Nov. 1679
 
3730 & 3731 have other descendants, such as:  
 
Thomas Richards m. Wealthian (Loring?)
.Mary Richards m. Thomas Hinckley
.Samuel Hinckley m. Sarah Pope
.Mary Hinckley m. Samuel Bangs
.Joseph Bangs m. Thankful Hamblen
.Lemuel Banks m. Rebecca Keeler
.Elijah Keeler Bangs m. Esther Stackhouse
.Mary Ann Bangs m. Joseph Ambrose Beaky
.Martha Adela Beaky m. David Davis Walker
.George Herbert Walker m. Lucretia Wear
.Dorothy Walker m. Prescott Sheldon Bush
.GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH (b. 1924), US President, m. Barbara Pierce
.GEORGE WALKER BUSH (b. 1946), US President

http://members.aol.com/wreitwiesn/candidates2004/cheney.html
8/GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
1088
William Fletcher, b. in England in 1622, emigrated with his father,
d. Chelmsford, Mass., 6 Nov. 1677 [Fletcher 3 (pp. 11-12)]
m. Concord, Mass., 7 Oct. 1645
1089
Lydia (?Fairbanks), widow of Edward Bates, d. Chelmsford, Mass., 12 Oct. 1704
 
1088 & 1089 have other descendants, such as:  
 
William Fletcher m. Lydia (?Fairbanks)
.William Fletcher m. Sarah Richardson
.Esther Fletcher m. Stephen Pierce
.Benjamin Pierce m. Elizabeth Merrill (see 1122 & 1123, below)
|.Benjamin Pierce m. Anna Kendrick
| .FRANKLIN PIERCE (1804-1869), US President
.Esther Pierce m. Nathan Richardson
.Esther Richardson m. Joshua Pierce
.James Pierce m. Polly/Mary Stacy
.Gen. James Pierce m. Chloe Holbrook
.Jonas James Pierce m. Kate Pritzel
.Scott Pierce m. Mabel Marvin
.Marvin Pierce m. Pauline Robinson
.Barbara Pierce m. George Herbert Walker Bush (see 2234, below)
.GEORGE WALKER BUSH (b. 1946), US President

Bush vs. Kerry? They’re distant cousins
Genealogy buffs claim political rivals are linked
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4286105/

A family tree analysis indicates that President Bush, at left, and his front-running Democratic challenger, John Kerry, are 16th cousins, three times removed. Such links aren't all that unusual, genealogy buffs say.
By Matt Sedensky
The Associated Press
Updated: 1:29 p.m. ET Feb. 17, 2004

HONOLULU - Democratic presidential candidates are constantly being compared to the current commander in chief. Now, two genealogy buffs say they have proof President Bush and the current Democratic front-runner share similarities thicker than water.
Bruce and Kristine Harrison, Hawaii-based publishers of historical databases, traced back the family histories of Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
The result? They're cousins.
Well, 16th cousins, three times removed, to be exact. But cousins, nonetheless.
Truth be told, one might find such distant family ties between Bush and any of the four other major Democratic candidates.
The link between the president and the Rev. Al Sharpton might date back a bit further, Bruce Harrison said, but tracing ancestries helps illuminate a greater message on human interconnectedness.
"I believe everybody on the planet is related if you go back far enough," said Harrison, 51, whose Millisecond Publishing in Kamuela puts out a line of ancestral history CDs. He and his wife have spent the last eight years compiling information from hundreds of genealogical books and periodicals. "We're setting the stage for others to explore their curiosity," he said.
Other big-name ancestors
Harrison says the search through family trees also turned up other big-name ancestors of Kerry and Bush. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is the president's ninth cousin, twice removed, while Kerry can count Johnny Appleseed as his sixth cousin, six times removed. Both the president and the Massachusetts senator can claim ties to figures ranging from Charlemagne to Walt Disney to Marilyn Monroe, Harrison said.
For an average user of the Family Forest software, it could be more difficult to find such well-known links, but Harrison says he believes everyone can find some ancestral information in the database.
As for the political adversaries' kinship, the only reunion in store seems to be a debate, should Kerry win his party's nomination. A Bush campaign spokeswoman said she had no comment on the issue. A message left with Kerry's spokesman was not returned.
'Just bragging rights'
The Honolulu County Genealogical Society's Mary Ann Bolton said she wasn't too impressed with those who troll family trees looking for star-studded connections.
"I don't really put too much into that," she said. "That's just bragging rights."
Harrison said his motivation in finding the link wasn't political, nor was it purely curiosity. Since publicizing the Bush-Kerry relation, the number of daily visits to his Web site has more than tripled.
© 2004 The Associated Press.

Rand Beers and John Kerry

Rand Beers was on Bush's National Security Council until he quit in 2003 and became the foreign policy spokesperson for the Kerry Presidential Campaign. Journalist Michael Ruppert calls this the handing of the torch from the Bush administration to his intended replacement, who is Bush's blood brother in the Skull and Bones secret society.

 

Rand Beers and Move On support the "War on Terror"

from the film "Uncovered: the whole truth about the Iraq War"

"It is fair to say that the Iraq war was a diversion from the war on terrorism. It certainly meant that people weren’t paying as much attention to Afghanistan as they should have and the resources that might have gone to Afghanistan ended up being focused more on Iraq."

 

www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/032503_perfect_storm_2.html
from THE PERFECT STORM - Part II by Michael Ruppert

As resignations of outraged civil servants are stacking up on both sides of the Atlantic like freshly cut firewood, the Bush administration was also seriously hurt by the resignation of the top Bush National Security Council official in charge of terrorism, Rand Beers. A March 19 UPI story, while repeating the Bush administration position that Beers' resignation was not because of administration deceit and vanishing credibility, left no doubt that Beers, widely respected in Washington, was just plain fed up and possibly sensing a sinking ship.

 

www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102003_beyond_bush_2.html
from Beyond Bush II, by Michael Ruppert

A key sign that Kerry might be the anointed one came for me when George W. Bush's chief counter-terrorism adviser Rand Beers resigned in a dramatic moment last June, in protest over Bush's handling of the war on terror and his headlong rush into Iraq. Beers immediately became Kerry's senior foreign policy advisor, as Kerry continued to state that he would improve on and expand the war on terror. Beers' protestations concealed what I considered to be a much more sinister objective, the placement of a key, hands-on operative to manage a smooth transition of power and a continuation of secret policy. Beers, who had served in national security roles for three Republican administrations, was the man who had replaced Lt. Col. Oliver North after North was fired in 1987 during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Although Beers is not listed as a [Council on Foreign Relations] member he was a key contributor, and acknowledged in a 1996 CFR report "Making Intelligence Smarter" produced by a CFR panel headed by AIG Chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. Narconews publisher Al Giordano refers to Beers as a "CFR type". One thing is certain, Rand Beers committed perjury right after 9/11 by testifying before Congress that Colombian and Ecuadorian rebels had links to Al Qaeda. He got caught and had to go back and amend his testimony and retract the statement. Sound familiar? Giordano caught that and actually published Beers' retraction under oath at www.narconews.com/beersperjury1.html

 

www.narconews.com/beersperjury1.html
September 10, 2002
Narco News '02
Beers "Corrects" Falsehood Under Oath in Dyncorp Case

I made the following statement: "It is believed that FARC terrorists have received training at Al Qaida terrorist camps in Afghanistan." I wish to strike this sentence.

Narco News Commentary: Under oath and "the penalties and pains of perjury" last November, Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers made a blatantly false statement, toying with the emotions of American citizens after the aerial attacks of September 11th to try to justify, of all things, aerial herbicide attacks on Ecuadoran peasant farmers near the Colombia border.
Now he swears under oath that his outrageous and shocking statement was false.
Thus, a high official of the U.S. government had to admit in court that he had committed perjury; lied under oath to the same court.
Narco News has obtained a copy of the State Department fixer's "correction" filed in the court case by Ecuadoran farmers against Dyncorp, the company contracted to attack them.
Here, we publish it, as we did Beers' deposition, in full. ...

 

www.narconews.com/dyncorpterrorism1.html
Who Are the Terrorists?
DynCorp's Paul V. Lombardi in Federal Court
Narco News '02
DynCorp Charged with Terrorism
Lawsuit Unites U.S. Workers & Ecuador Farmers vs. Fumigation
Part I of a Series
By Al Giordano
A class-action lawsuit filed in Washington, DC, on behalf of 10,000 farmers in Ecuador and the AFL-CIO allied International Labor Rights Fund has DynCorp CEO Paul V. Lombardi running scared and lashing back with intimidation tactics.
Lombardi's DynCorp, one of the top 20 federal contractors, has already sprayed toxic herbicides over 14 percent of the entire land mass of the nation of Colombia, purportedly to eliminate coca crops.
Although DynCorp's taxpayer-sponsored biological warfare has not made a dent in the cocaine trade, it has caused more than 1,100 documented cases of illness among citizens, destroyed untold acres of food crops, displaced tens of thousands of peasant farmers, and harmed the fragile Amazon ecosystem, all in the name of the "war on drugs."
DynCorp has also been exposed for contracting mercenary soldiers-of-fortune for the covert activities of the US-imposed "Plan Colombia."

http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9966

Not Quite A Dream Team  

Laura Flanders is the host of "Your Call" heard on KALW-FM in San Francisco, and on the Internet, and author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, forthcoming from Verso Books in March 2004.

John Kerry's primary victories are mounting and "anyone-but-Bush" voters are hankering for a show-down with the Resident. The Massachusetts Senator's "bring it on" victory speeches get big-d Democrats fired up, but when it comes to foreign policy, Kerry is hardly the anti-Bush many are longing for.
As the jockeying begins among those who fancy a government job should Kerry beat Bush in November, it's never too early to give the hopefuls currently advising the candidate a serious look.
Consider Kerry's foreign policy advisers. Ask the candidate's supporters, and the advisor they mention first is Joe Wilson, the Clinton-era National Security Council member who investigated claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy weapons-grade uranium from Niger. Wilson won battle stars from progressives for going public with his findings, which contradicted the Bush administration's claims. Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was outed by a White House source or sources as a consequence.
Wilson may be a white hat, but it's hard to say the same about Richard Morningstar, Rand Beers and William Perry, three other members of Kerry's foreign policy team.
Morningstar, a former advisor to President Clinton on Caspian energy, was instrumental in pushing for the controversial Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The plan has strong support on both sides of the political aisle.
A consortium of oil companies are deeply invested, including Britain's BP, and the U.S. firms Unocal and Amerada Hess. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration did all it could to clear the way for BTC, including extending U.S. Export-Import Bank financing, and recruiting Dick Cheney, James Baker and others to lobby local governments. James Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, represents BP. Dick Cheney's Halliburton, an oil-industry supplier, won the contract to build refineries for several Caspian states. As a member of its Board of Directors, Condoleezza Rice helped negotiate Chevron's deal to drill the Caspian's purportedly richest field, the Tengiz.
In 2003, Morningstar explained to the Harvard University Caspian Studies program that the pipeline, which would run through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, is expected to be used by Caspian Sea states to bring their oil west to market. As Morningstar explained to the Harvard project's members, it advances various regional policy goals, among them, promoting energy security and ensuring that neither Russia nor Iran can develop a monopoly over pipelines from the Caspian. (Harvard's Caspian Studies program is sponsored by, among others, Chevron, Unocal and Amerada Hess.)
With Turkey's agreement, work on the BTC pipeline began in September '02. The World Bank agreed last November to provide $250 million in financing, but human rights groups and environmentalists are still hoping it can be stopped. Last year, Amnesty International released a report noting that the project would violate the human rights of thousands of people and cause severe environmental damage. Amnesty International alleges that the pipeline's backers' agreement with the Turkish government strips local people and workers of their civil rights.
A Kerry administration with Morningstar as national security advisor could be expected to keep the BTC on track. Nothing much would change in the worlds of agribusiness and trade either. In 1999, as U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Morningstar issued a scathing attack on EU policy barring genetically modified foods. "Politics and demagoguery have completely taken over the regulatory process," he said. Bush's Agriculture Secretary, Ann Veneman, uses virtually the same exact words.
Another of Kerry's foreign policy advisors is Rand Beers. Sean Donahue of the Massachusetts Anti-Corporate Clearinghouse wrote a revealing account of Beers' career for the Counterpunch Web site last month.
Suffice to say that Beers was the public face of Clinton's deadly crop-fumigation program in Colombia. He once said under oath that Columbian terrorists had received training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. (A claim he later had to withdraw.) "If John Kerry lets Rand Beers continue to guide his foreign policy, a Kerry administration will be no better for rural Colombians than a Bush administration," wrote Donahue. Voters who want Sen. Kerry to offer a humane alternative to Bush should demand that the senator pledge now not to make Beers secretary of state.
Rounding out Kerry's team is William Perry. As Clinton-era secretary of defense, Perry spearheaded a post-cold war plan to restructure the defense industry, but the Perry plan wasn't quite the "peace dividend" Americans had in mind. Perry pushed a government program that paid military contractors to consolidate, arguing that only vast conglomerates would have what it takes to compete in the 21st Century. The Pentagon provided partial underwriting for defense industry mergers. In what critic Bernie Sanders, I-VT, dubbed "payoffs for layoffs," Perry's Pentagon picked up the costs of moving equipment, dismantling factories and providing golden parachutes for top executives. Foreign Policy in Focus reports that Perry had to get a conflict of interest waiver before he could greenlight the merger-subsidy program. He worked as a paid consultant for Martin Marietta immediately before joining the Clinton administration.
Today, Lockheed Martin, which was created in a merger announced just months after the start of Perry's policy, is the nation's top weapons maker. Its component parts include Martin Marietta, Loral Defense and General Dynamics. The mergers shrank company payrolls, but hugely expanded their political influence. When he retired in '98 Perry joined the board of one of the biggest—the Seattle-based Boeing Corporation. For those who are interested, Perry also joined the Carlyle group, the Saudi-based firm whose partners include no end of world leaders, including former British Prime Minster John Major, former secretary of state James Baker and the first President Bush.
Anyone but Bush maybe, but many voters might also want to see in government anyone but Morningstar, Perry and Beers.

Published: Feb 17 2004

 

January 26, 2004
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers
Kerry's Drug War Zealot
By SEAN DONAHUE
www.counterpunch.org/donahue01262004.html

Michael Ruppert on Kerry's "investigation" of drug scandals

I have a long history with Kerry. Back in 1986, 1987, and 1988, I was in contact with his office and his chief of staff Jonathan Winer on a number of occasions about CIA drug trafficking. They eagerly asked for any material I could send them and gave me a direct line. It was one of my most bitter lessons about how hot issues are controlled. Kerry, in charge of the potentially explosive Iran-Contra drug hearings succeeded in producing a 1,200-page record that was a treasure trove of information for researchers, but absolutely useless in unraveling a corruption that controls the US government to this day. What lies buried in those pages was enough to have turned the American political system inside out. In the end, its greatest usefulness was as a benchmark against which to compare the CIA's investigation of itself after the 1996 Dark Alliance stories and hard revelations of CIA connections to cocaine smuggling that Kerry knew all about anyway. Those of us close to the issue took the lemons Kerry had left us and made lemonade, as we forced the CIA Inspector General to reconcile his 1998 report with what we already knew was in Kerry's.
And still - as intended - nothing changed. John Kerry had successfully contained what was, up to that time, the biggest scandal in American history.
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102003_beyond_bush_2.html

www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/schanberg.php

Senator Covered Up Evidence of P.O.W.'s Left Behind
When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A.
by Sydney H. Schanberg
February 24th, 2004 1:00 PM

Senator John Kerry, a decorated battle veteran, was courageous as a navy lieutenant in the Vietnam War. But he was not so courageous more than two decades later, when he covered up voluminous evidence that a significant number of live American prisoners--perhaps hundreds--were never acknowledged or returned after the war-ending treaty was signed in January 1973.
The Massachusetts senator, now seeking the presidency, carried out this subterfuge a little over a decade ago-- shredding documents, suppressing testimony, and sanitizing the committee's final report--when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs

Henry Kissinger: "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
from the book "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the US Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam"
by Monika Jensen-Stevenson, William Stevenson
(Monika was a producer on "60 Minutes" who left because they would not allow her to broadcast this story.)
Here's a review from amazon.com

(This 1990 book is) a bizarre story of men left behind for the sake of political expedience and due to a number of highly classified clandestine operations, which were purposely kept from the American people.

The story line begins with the sad saga of a young ex-marine who escaped from Vietnam on the late 1970s and claimed to have seen a large number of fellow American servicemen still being held by the Vietnamese. However, he was quickly charged with desertion and collaboration with the enemy, in what seemed to be a desperate effort on the part of governmental officials to bury his story of American prisoners as deeply as possible from public view. From here the plot takes a number of twists and turns.
As the authors began to investigate the young marine's story, layers of deception, half-truths, and active censorship began to emerge. What they finally uncovered was an amazing tale of official deception from the highest levels in government, and also a very well organized and relentless abuse of official governmental power.
This book reveals convincing evidence of American soldiers and sailors deliberately abandoned for political expedience, and of families torn apart by these acts. It also raises quite provocative questions concerning the very nature of democracy, and the corruptibility of ordinary men given such power. Similarly, they show how the use of claims of national security were used to derail efforts to learn the truth, and of an active conspiracy to keep the public from discovering the truth.
There are many of us who have long believed that Nixon and Kissinger made a pact with the devil himself in order to to extricate the United States fro the ongoing horror of Vietnam. What is truly mind-boggling is to discover just how right we were to suspect that they, and many others in the government since that time, would take such drastic action as they have to conceal these facts and to evade the truth.
---------------------
In a separate story, an American woman married to a Vietnamese man says her husband saw Americans:
"as late as 1978 with his own eyes on more then one occasion. He was riding his scooter far out in the country side and saw a group of tall, long haired and bearded Caucasion men working the rice paddy fields under Vietnamese armed guard. When he looked a little too long and too hard the guards aimed thier rifles at him so he looked away and kept driving.
"He said the caucasian mens faces were very sad. My husband wouldn't lie to me.He still insists it true and we have told many people about it. Since then I made it a point to question every Vietnemese refugee I met. Several had told me they saw them with their own eyes as late as 1982."I was also told that it was common knowledge in Vietnam that American POW's were still there.They were surprised that most Americans didn't know about it. They just figured maybe we didn't want them back or didn't care."
>http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml

Senator Kerry's support for Plan Columbia
military aid to a brutal narco-dictatorship

www.ciponline.org/colombia/062206.htm

Speech by Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), June 22, 2000
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I have followed the issue of narcotrafficking and other international crimes for years, particularly during my tenure as chairman of the Subcommittee on International Operations, Narcotics and Terrorism. Although I have many concerns about this piece of legislation, I believe we have a chance here to provide support to a Colombian administration trying to address its largest problem--drug trafficking.
The line between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency is not at all clear in Colombia, but we cannot let this stop our extension of aid. Withholding aid is not an option. In doing so, we would send the message to Colombia, our important ally in the war on drugs, that when the going gets tough, they must go it alone. We must be very clear: the terrible human rights conditions in Colombia are inextricably tied to the narcoterrorists. That won't change overnight with our support of this assistance package, but it won't change at all without our help. And just as important as our support for this package will be our continuing oversight of its implementation. If human rights abuses continue, or if we begin to get embroiled in the counterinsurgency efforts, the Senate must remain vigilant, ending the program if necessary. But we cannot simply turn our backs and walk away.
Civil conflict in Colombia has worn on for half a century as the government has fought narcoterrorists for control of the country. Opposition groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] and the National Liberation Army has made a business of guerrilla warfare and continue to terrorize the civilian population. Paramilitary groups, formed in the 1980's as anti-guerrilla forces, have resorted to many of the same terror tactics. Opposition and paramilitary groups control much of the country and the vast majority of the drug producing areas. It is clear that drug money fuels the fighting. In the last decade, this conflict has claimed over 35,000 lives and has created a population of over a million and a half internally displaced persons.
Colombian President Andres Pastrana, in sharp contrast to his recent predecessor, is trying to improve human rights conditions and promote democracy, under extremely difficult conditions. Under Pastrana, the Colombian Government has begun the first peace talks ever with the FARC. Though the talks have been slow moving and have encountered setbacks, Pastrana has clearly made the peace process a top priority.
Plan Colombia was developed by President Pastrana as a comprehensive approach to strengthening the Colombian economy and promoting democracy, with heavy emphasis on fighting drug trafficking. In my view, any successful approach to Colombia's myriad of problems will require a strong counterdrug effort. The United States contribution to Plan Colombia, as proposed by the administration, does this.
Let us be clear, however, that the drug trade in Colombia is not simply a Colombian problem. The United States is the largest and most reliable market for the Colombian cocaine and heroin that is at the center of this conflict. We have approximately 5.8 million cocaine users and 1.4.
million heroin users. Based on the most recent National Household Survey on Drug Abuse estimates, fourteen million Americans are current drug users. Clearly we are making a large contribution to the problem and should therefore contribute to finding a solution.
The United States must seize the opportunity presented by President Pastrana's current efforts to fight drug trafficking and bring stability to Colombia. This legislation offers us a chance to play a constructive role in Colombia while simultaneously promoting American interests.
The Plan addresses the major components of the problem. `Push into Southern Colombia' is designated to affect the major growing and production areas in the South. It provides for the training of special dedicated narcotics battalions, and the purchase of helicopters for troop transport and interdiction. To complement this effort, interdiction tools will also be upgraded, including aircraft, airfields, early warning radar and intelligence gathering. The Plan also provides increased funding for eradication of coca and poppy, and the promotion of alternative crop development and employment. Perhaps most importantly, the Plan calls for and provides resources for increasing protection of human rights, expanding the rule of law, and promoting the peace process.
As I outlined earlier, Colombia's situation is bleak, and this may be its last chance to begin to dig its way out. If we fail to support aid to Colombia, we can only sit back and watch it deteriorate even further. This Plan presents a unique opportunity to support the Colombian Government's effort to address its problems while at the same time promoting U.S. interests. The Colombian Government, despite immense obstacles, has begun to address significant human rights concerns and is working to instill the rule of law and democratic institutions. Though the United States is not in the business of fighting insurgents, we are in the business of fighting drugs, and this is clearly an opportunity to work with a willing partner in doing so.
While I support a United States contribution to helping Colombia, I believe that if we are going to commit, we must do so in the context of an ongoing process under constant review to respond to changing needs.
My first concern is the fine line that exists between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations, particularly since they are so intertwined in Colombia. It is impossible to attack drug trafficking in Colombia without seriously undercutting the insurgents' operations. We must acknowledge that the more involved in Colombia's counternarcotics efforts we become the more we will become involved in its counterinsurgency, regardless of our intentions to steer clear of it. But, because the drug trade is the most destabilizing factor in Colombia, our cooperation with the government will over the long run, advance the development and expansion of democracy, and will limit the insurgents' ability to terrorize the civilian population. But our military involvement in Colombia should go no further than this. Efforts to limit number of personnel are designed to address this.
I appreciate the concerns expressed by my colleagues that the United States contribution to Plan Colombia
is skewed in favor of the military, but we must keep in mind that our contribution is only a percentage of the total Plan. The total Plan Colombia price tag is approximately $7.5 billion. The Colombian Government has already committed $4 billion to the Plan, and has secured donations and loans from the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the Andean Development Corporation, and the Latin American Reserve Fund. As part of our contribution, and to balance military aid, the United States must continue to support Colombian requests for additional funding from international financial institutions and other EU donors. We must also continue to implement stringent human rights vetting and end-use monitoring agreements, and make sure that our Colombia policy does not end with the extension of aid.
Second, I am concerned that even if the Plan is successful at destroying coca production and reducing the northward flow of drugs, large numbers of coca farmers will be displaced, worsening the current crisis of internally displaced people in Colombia. Colombia has the largest population of internally displaced persons in the world, estimated at over one and half million in November 1999. Seventy percent of those displaced are children, and the vast majority of them no longer attend school. There is every indication that as Plan Colombia is implemented, this population may grow. This problem underscores the importance of supporting the Colombians in their efforts to secure economic aid for alternative development. Unless we strongly support loans and additional donations, the danger remains that desperate farmers will simply move across the borders into Peru and Bolivia, and undo all the eradication progress that has been made in those areas.
My third major concern with respect to this aid package is that it does not adequately address Colombia's human rights problem. The Colombian Government has made a real effort to address human rights and to promote the rule of law. Pastrana has worked to root out members of the military who have committed gross violations of human rights, and has suspended a number of high-level officers. He has also attacked corruption in the legislature, and has come under heavy fire for doing so. Despite this progress, there is no question that recent events in Colombia have raised some cause for concern. The Colombian Government's unfortunate decision to send back to the legislature a bill to criminalize genocide and forced disappearance was a significant setback for the promotion of human rights and the rule of law. I would like to commend my colleagues on the Foreign Operations Subcommittee for bolstering the human rights component of this legislation. In addition to requiring additional reporting from the Secretary of State on the human rights practices of the Colombian security forces, Senator Leahy's provisions for human rights programs in the Colombian police and judiciary, a witness protection program and additional human rights monitors in our embassy and Bogota, and Senator Harkin's provision to provide $5 million to Colombian NGOs to protect child soldiers, demonstrate our commitment to improving the human rights situation.
Despite my reservations, the potential benefits of this plan are too large to ignore. In light of the changes made by the committee, I believe the plan can help advance United States interests by reducing drug trafficking and thereby promoting stability and democracy in Colombia. We must now work
to ensure that our concerns do not become realities. Recognizing that we are not the sole contributors to this Plan, we must support Colombia's requests for additional aid from our allies, and work closely with them to ensure that additional aid complements our efforts in the areas of human rights and strengthening the rule of law. The committee report recognizes the importance of reducing the drug trade first to build confidence among the Colombian people that progress can be made in other important areas such as economic development and democracy.
Plan Colombia's counterdrug focus will also benefit the United States by reducing the flow of drugs to the United States. The United States is faced with a serious drug problem which must be attacked at both ends--supply and demand. Our consideration of counterdrug aid to Colombia should force us to look inward, reexamine our domestic counterdrug plan, and find ways strengthen it.
The United States has long been the cocaine traffickers' largest and most reliable market, fueling continued and expanded cultivation and production. Without addressing the problem here at home, we present no reason to expect that the growers and traffickers will not continue to shift their operations to maintain access to their best market.
Increasing funding and expanding drug treatment and prevention programs are absolutely imperative if we are to coordinate an effective counterdrug campaign, particularly if we are to expect any real improvement in the situation in Colombia. Levels of drug abuse in the United States have remained unacceptably high, despite stepped-up interdiction efforts and increased penalties for drug offenders.
Our criminal justice system is flooded with drug offenders. Three-quarters of all prisoners can be characterized as alcohol or drug involved offenders. An estimated 16 percent of convicted jail inmates committed their offense to get money for drugs, and approximately 70 percent of prisoners were actively involved with drugs prior to their incarceration.
America's drug problem is not limited to our hardened criminals. The 1997 National Household Survey revealed that 77 million, or 36 percent of Americans aged 12 and older reported some use of an illicit drug at least once in their lifetime. The statistics in U.S. high schools are even more disturbing. According to a 1998 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 54 percent of high school seniors reported that they had used an illicit drug at least once and 41.4 percent reported use of an illicit drug within the past year.
As we support Colombia's efforts to attack the sources of illegal drugs, we need to make sure we are addressing our own problems. According to recent estimates, approximately five million drug users needed immediate treatment in 1998 while only 2.1 million received it. It was also found that some populations--adolescents, women with small children, and racial and ethnic minorities--are badly underserved by treatment programs. Only 37 percent of substance-abusing mothers of minors received treatment in 1997. Drug offenders, when released from jail, are often not ready or equipped to deal with a return to social pressures and many return to their old habits if they are not provided with effective treatment while incarcerated and the social safety net they so desperately need upon release.
It is clear that drug treatment works, and there is no excuse for the high numbers of addicts who have been unable to receive treatment. As we increase funding for supply reduction programs in Colombia, we must increase funding for treatment to balance and complement it. Drug research has made significant strides in recent years, and there are a variety of treatment options now available to help even the most hardcore addicts. These treatments have been successful in the lab studies. Now we must allow these methods to be successful in helping the population for whom they were developed. Access to drug abuse treatment in the United States is abysmal when compared to the resources we have to provide it.
The administration's Office of National Drug Control Policy argues that a balanced approach that addresses both demand reduction and cutting off supply at the source is necessary to significantly reduce drug abuse in America. While Plan Colombia works to cut off the drug supply, we must balance that with increased funding for drug abuse prevention and better treatment programs that reach more of the population that so desperately needs it.
Plan Colombia is an opportunity to help an important ally attack the sources of illegal drug production reduce the flow of cocaine and heroin to the United States. The United States must stay engaged with the Pastrana government and support its critical efforts to combat drug trafficking. Instead of being limited by our reservations, we must use them to carefully craft a policy that addresses economic development, political stability, human rights and the rule of law. Drug trafficking is the major obstacle to the advancement of these goals, and it must be curbed if any progress is to be made in our drug war at home.
As of June 25, 2000, this document was also available online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r106:S22JN0-125:

www.narconews.com/kerry2000.html

The Narco News Bulletin
"The Name of Our Country is América"
Q. Why Didn't Al Gore Pick John Kerry For Vice President?
A. Kerry knows too much?
(A Journalist's Guide to Inconvenient Facts)

Selections from the Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policychaired by Senator John F. Kerry
Mother Jones timeline of Contra cocaine scandal
Senator KERRY: What did you do with those drugs?
Mr. MORALES: Sell them.
Senator KERRY: What did you do with the money?
Mr. MORALES: Give it to the Contras.
Senator KERRY: All right.

"What was the response when the Kerry Committee report was released? According to a Lexis-Nexis search, only four major papers reported the committee's findings -- none on the front page." -- Mother Jones

Columbia Journalism Review analysis:
"Even when a special Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, chaired by Senator John Kerry, released its long-awaited report, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, big-media coverage constituted little more than a collective yawn. The 1,166-page report -- it covered not only the covert operations against Nicaragua, but also relations with Panama, Haiti, the Bahamas, and other countries involved in the drug trade -- was the first to document U.S. knowledge of, and tolerance for, drug smuggling under the guise of national security. "In the name of supporting the contras," the Kerry Committee concluded in a sad but stunning indictment, officials "abandoned the responsibility our government has for protecting our citizens from all threats to their security and well-being."
"Yet when the report was released on April 13, 1989, coverage was buried in the back pages of the major newspapers and all but ignored by the three major networks. The Washington Post ran a short article on page A20 that focused as much on the infighting within the committee as on its findings; The New York Times ran a short piece on A8; the Los Angeles Times ran a 589-word story on A11. (All of this was in sharp contrast to those newspapers' lengthy rebuttals to the Mercury News series seven years later - - collectively totalling over 30,000 words.) ABC's Nightline chose not to cover the release of the report...." -- Columbia Journalism Review Declassified documents from The National Security Archives
DEA agent Cele Castillo Interview by Webster Tarpley, Radio Free Michigan archives:
"…at that time, Jan. 14, 1986, to be exact, George Bush was in Guatemala City. At the same time that George Bush was there, I also saw Calero, head of the Contras, and Oliver North. And I met George Bush at the cocktail party at the ambassador's residence, and basically, what he was doing, was walking around, shaking hands with everybody. And he came up to me, and asked me what my job description was as DEA agent. And I told him that I conducted international narcotics investigations on traffickers down in Central America. I also advised him that I was the agent in charge of reporting for El Salvador, and I forewarned him that there were some funny things going on at Ilopango Airport, with the Contras. He shook my hand, he smiled, and he just walked away from me, without saying another word. From that moment, I knew he knew something about the Contras."
Consortium News analysis:
"When this important report was issued in April 1989, the Post buried the information in a scant 700-word article on page A20. And most of that story, by Michael Isikoff, was devoted to Republican criticisms of Kerry, rather than to the serious evidence of contra wrongdoing. Other establishment publications took the cue that it was safe to mock Kerry. Newsweek dubbed him a "randy conspiracy buff." -- Consortium News
How the Contras Invaded the United States by Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight: a WBAI radio NY report
Third World Traveler: How Establishment Newspapers Do Damage Control for the CIA
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that "the agency's relationship with the New York Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper's late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy - set by Sulzberger - to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible." -- Third World Traveler
Narco News: From Mexico to Colombia, the Times still does the CIA's dirty work on behalf of the corrupt war on drugs
From the Boston Globe: August 6th, 2000
"But Kerry and Gore remained at odds on some issues. In 1991, in one of the most important votes of Gore's career, the Tennessean voted to support President Bush's request to use force in the Gulf War.
Kerry voted against the resolution. He said he wanted to give economic sanctions more time to work ''before rushing headlong into war.''
By some accounts, Gore's vote helped him secure the vice presidential spot. Bill Clinton had waffled on whether he would have voted for the use of force, and the governor of Arkansas was searching for a running mate with foreign policy experience who had backed the Gulf War.
Kerry's name came up in the initial search for a running mate, but he was not seriously considered, partly because of his voting record and his opposition to the Gulf War resolution. Indeed, Kerry's Gulf War vote has been a sore point with some Gore aides in the current process." John Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War testimony: April 23, 1971, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Open Letter to John Kerry and Teresa Heinz, Boston Phoenix, September 11, 1997, by the publisher of Narco News, from somewhere in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast...
Q. So why did John Kerry vote for Plan Colombia?
A. Because he was running for Vice President?
Text of Kerry Speech in Support of Plan Colombia.
Second Open Letter, Much Shorter:
Dear John,
Sometimes it takes a tap on the shoulder to wake up and smell the herbicide.
Sincerely,
Al Giordano
publisher
The Narco News Bulletin

John Kerry supports making cars more efficient - but not now.

Kerry wants to increase fuel efficiency standards for cars by a SMALL amount, with a deadline that would be after his second term as President. This is a joke, because ALL of the major car companies have prototypes that get about 100 mpg (they're not hybrids), developed in the 1980s.

Sen. John Kerry: "I support updating CAFE standards to 36 miles per gallon by 2015. This proposal will reduce America's dependence on oil by saving 2 million barrels of oil per day _ almost as much as we currently import from the Persian Gulf. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, smog and ozone pollution. Fuel efficiency can be significantly improved through better use of technology, without limiting vehicle choice, without harming safety and without injury to the industry."

Dennis Kucinich has a deeper understanding of the possible:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, 2004: "The technology already exists to make light trucks that achieve 40 mpg and cars 45 mpg, and I will establish those standards as one early step in a major shift away from the use of fossil fuels. I will spur research and investment in ethanol, hydrogen, solar, wind, and ocean energy sources. We will have hybrid and fuel-cell cars dominating the market and 20 percent of our overall energy use from renewables by 2010."

www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=352185
Published on Wednesday, February 18, 1970
John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress
By SAMUEL Z. GOLDHABER
Crimson Staff Writer

At Yale, Kerry was chairman of the Political Union and later, as Commencement speaker, urged the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and to scale down foreign military operations. And this was way back in 1966.
When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. The Navy assigned him to the USS Gridley which between December 1966 and July 1968 saw four months of action off the Vietnam coast. In August through November, 1968, Kerry was trained to be the skipper of a patrol boat for Vietnamese rivers. For the next five months, until April of 1969, Kerry was the commanding Lieutenant of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. He was wounded slightly on three different occasions and received a Silver Star for bravery. His patrol boat took part in Operation Sealords, mostly scouting out Viet Cong villages and transporting South Vietnamese marines to various destinations up and down narrow rivers covered with heavy foliage on either side. One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to be friend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities.

Pulling Out
Immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, Kerry said, would take about seven months due to complex logistics problems. During that interval he would allow only "self-defense return of fire." "Logistic suport is now what Nixon is talking about leaving there and I don't want to see that. I don't think we should leave support troops there and I don't think we should give Vietnam any more than the foreign aid given any other one country." He does not feel there would be a massive slaughter of American, sympathizers once the United States pulled out. ....

He supports a volunteer Army, "if and only if we can create the controls for it. You're going to have to prepare for the possibility of a national emergency, however." Kerry said that the United Nations should have control over most of our foreign military operations. "I'm an internationalist. I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."
On other issues, Kerry wants "to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care." He also favors a negative income tax and keeping unemployment at a very low level, "even if it means selective economic controls."

Kerry on "Meet the Press" (1971)

(Audiotape, April 18, 1971):
MR. CROSBY NOYES (Washington Evening Star): Mr. Kerry, you said at one time or another that you think our policies in Vietnam are tantamount to genocide and that the responsibility lies at all chains of command over there. Do you consider that you personally as a Naval officer committed atrocities in Vietnam or crimes punishable by law in this country?

KERRY: There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

www.counterpunch.com/baker05222004.html

May 22 / 23, 2004
Feminists Stand By Their Man
Abortion, Judges and Kerry
By BRANDY BAKER

The thought of anti-abortion zealots winning appointments to the Supreme Court under a Bush presidency was the one factor that terrified many into staying the course with the Democratic Party in 2000. Voters, many with pinched noses and sick stomachs, pulled the lever for Al Gore and the idea of Roe V. Wade being overturned has motivated many to promise support for John Kerry this November.
On Wednesday, John Kerry told the Associated Press that he was open to the idea of appointing anti-abortion judges "as long as it doesn't lead to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade."1
All hell would be breaking loose right now if Ralph Nader said something like this. The leaders of the feminist movement were ready to tar, feather, and run Nader out of DC when he blundered and proposed that if Roe V. Wade were overturned, abortion would be protected because the decision would go back to the states. Elizabeth Cavendish, Interim President of NARAL Pro-Choice America has only this to say about Kerry's statements: "There's a huge difference between Bush and Kerry on choice and this is not going to undermine the pages-long documentation that Kerry is pro-choice."2 Yes, Nader was wrong to say what he said in 2000, and no, he is not perfect, but what many do not know (and what the mainstream feminist movement will not tell you) is that Ralph Nader recently signed to NOW's platform of political, social, and economic rights for women.3 Kerry has not. And not long before Kerry told all of us that he was no redistribution democrat, Nader spoke up for cleaning people4: a segment of the workforce that is overrepresented by women and people of color. Cleaning people only are noticed if someone is unhappy with their work.
The problem is that we have a single issue women's movement that is not equipped to address the collective oppression of women who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder because the movement restrains itself with blind support for the Democratic Party. Ralph Nader knows that abortion is not the only concern of the majority of this country's women, which is why he will stick up for those who clean the houses of the limozine liberals who are campaigning the hardest for Kerry.
Despite the fcta that we won Roe V. Wade under the anti-choice Nixon administration and we did not have abortion providers in over 85% of all counties under Clinton, many see a Democratic Party presidency vital to securing abortion rights. Kerry's statements kill the myth we are guaranteed pro-abortion judges if he becomes president, it also kills the other argument that ABBers have been promoting: you know, the one that claims that we can build a movement after we get a Democrat in office and that Democrat will do all of the right stuff. John Kerry said that he would be open to appointing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court only 24 days after what many have said was the largest demonstration in American history. Movements work, but the two party system does not.

Kerry's wife funding efforts to dumb down the environmental movement

NonprofitWatch.org
Extended Discussion of John Kerry's Enron Hypocrisy: 
www.nonprofitwatch.org/heinz/extended.html

For eight years Teresa maintained a close relationship with Ken Lay. Since 1995 Mr. Lay served as a trustee of the Heinz Center for Economics, Environment and Science which Teresa founded to memorialize her late husband. Teresa, as well Fred Krupp the executive director of Teresa's main environmental philanthropy Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), also served as trustees. ....

Regarding Teresa, Mr. Kerry and his campaign have celebrated Teresa Heinz for her philanthropy, of which environment is a major part. However, NonprofitWatch.org suggests that a significant part of her environmental advocacy was shaped to benefit Enron's interests. Teresa long served as vice-chairperson of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), though she has stepped down from that role and is currently just a trustee. Teresa's Heinz Foundation has long been a major financial supporter of EDF. In light of Teresa's relationship to Enron's Ken Lay and her role with EDF, the below policy stances by EDF that benefited Enron raise questions regarding the ethics and integrity of Teresa's work.
-- In 1998 EDF opposed a ballot initiative Proposition 9 that would have repealed utility deregulation in California. When the bill to deregulate California's energy market passed the legislature in 1996, EDF failed to voice opposition. Energy deregulation proved to be a gross catastrophe for California in terms of economics and the environment but was of great benefit to energy companies such as Enron. Teresa's close ties to Enron's Ken Lay raise the question of whether she was beguiled by Mr. Lay and his likely donations to the Heinz Center.
-- EDF was a major proponent of greenhouse gas emissions trading, a business-friendly approach to address global warming. While environmentalists criticize Bush regarding his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, it should be noted that the Kyoto's trading clauses which EDF influenced have been criticized by some environmentalists as loopholes of the treaty. Enron was a strong supporter of Kyoto as the company looked forward to profiting from trading in greenhouse credits. In light of Enron's business shenanigans and the company's utter collapse, NonprofitWatch.org suggests that the emissions trading scheme may itself be a house of cards. Moreover, the capacity to trade depends upon low targets for emissions reductions. Here again, close ties to Ken Lay raise questions about the judgement of EDF.

WHICH KERRY DO YOU LIKE?
http://nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200401260838.asp
RICH LOWRY, NATIONAL REVIEW - Today's Kerry excoriates Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating American civil liberties with his evil tool, the Patriot Act. "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night," Kerry huffs. "So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time." Maybe Kerry should have thought about that before voting for the Patriot Act in 2001 - since laws and liberties are pretty important and all. Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean, Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. "It reflects," he said on the Senate floor, "an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work." While supportive of "sunset" provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself "pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation." These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate an era of brown-shirt law enforcement.

John Kerry, A.D. (After Dean), attacks President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act as "one-size-fits-all testing mania." Worse, according to Kerry, "By signing the No Child Left Behind Act and then breaking his promise by not giving schools the resources to help meet new standards, George Bush has undermined public education and left millions of children behind." The funding charge is a canard - overall spending on education under Bush is up 65 percent - but it gives Kerry a way to join the Dean-led assault on the act, which he voted for - enthusiastically.

"This is groundbreaking legislation," John Kerry, B.D. (Before Dean), gushed on the Senate floor, "that enhances the federal government's commitment to our nation's public education system ... and embraces many of the principles and programs that I believe are critical to improving the public education system." He didn't just support the bill, he took credit for it: "Last year I worked with 10 of my Democratic colleagues to introduce legislation that would help break the stalemate and move beyond the tired, partisan debates of the past. Our education proposal became the foundation of the bill before us today."

As for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the target of Dean and other liberal critics, Kerry promises to "fix it." The agreement supposedly doesn't do enough to keep Mexico from employing low-wage workers, thus encouraging jobs to leave the United States and depressing wages here. True to form, he used to love the trade deal. "NAFTA is not the problem," he explained in 1993. "Job loss is taking place without NAFTA."

This article about Bill Clinton also applies to John Kerry. Clinton didn't go to Vietnam and Kerry did, but both politicians adopted similar the "establishment anti-war activist" facades. When each ran for President, they abandoned their previous "anti-war" stances adopted at the height of peace protest - and are now loyal servants of empire.

www.namebase.org/news01.html
Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?
by Daniel BrandtFrom NameBase NewsLine, No. 1, April-June 1993

Bill Clinton is promoted as the first baby boomer and anti-war activist in the White House. Yet I was also these things, and I cannot identify with Clinton at all. In order for this piece to make any sense, it's important that I show how two different anti-war protesters might have stood together in a demonstration for different reasons, after arriving from different directions.
To begin with, one has to divide the student movement into two periods, before and after 1968. This year was pivotal: the McCarthy campaign, the RFK and MLK assassinations, the police riot in Chicago. Anti-war protesters on conservative campuses such as my University of Southern California and Clinton's Georgetown, were almost always bona fide prior to 1968. There was no percentage in it otherwise, as the polls were overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At USC I organized a peaceful draft card turn-in ceremony in 1968. We were physically ejected from the campus by fraternity boys, and had to continue in a church across the street, where the frat rats feared to tread. A poll by our student newspaper showed that most students agreed with the fraternity. At USC, and the same was probably true of Georgetown, a student politician couldn't get more than a handful of votes by taking an anti-war position.
In 1969 everything suddenly changed. Major anti-war organizing efforts appeared on campus, coordinated through national networks. I guessed that these new activists, who seemed to come out of nowhere to organize the Vietnam Moratorium, were former McCarthy-Kennedy campaign workers. Although I had been co-chairman of our SDS chapter the previous year, these were all new faces to me. I was astounded and a little suspicious. Everything had turned around completely: now no student politician could hope to win without the long hair, the beads and sandals, and speaking at freshmen orientation by abandoning the lectern and sitting on the edge of the stage, "rapping" to them movement-style.
When it came time to confront the draft, these same student politicians used their mysterious connections to get out the easy way. Sometimes they pulled strings to secure a place in the overbooked National Guard, but most got out clean. Almost half of all undergraduate men were released when the first lottery was held at the end of the year, which of course brought our anti-draft movement to a halt. I now refer to my 1969 experience as the "Sam Hurst syndrome," after the articulate and good-looking student body president who sat on the edge of the stage and rode into power on the post-1968 wave. It's my euphemism for slick, well-disguised self-interest and a great head of hair.
I noticed that new students could not tell the difference between Sam Hurst's activism and mine. Students with safe lottery numbers sadistically inquired about my number -- they would find it amusing if my number was also safe, now that I had been convicted for refusing induction. It was every man for himself. Then it got worse. By September 1970 the big movement on campus centered on Timothy Leary's old colleague Richard Alpert, who now called himself Baba Ram Dass and told overflow crowds that the best way to do revolution was to sit in the lotus position and do nothing. Soon Rennie Davis of Chicago Eight fame was spending his time puppy-dogging a teenaged guru from India. Within another year there was no discernible movement at all, just embarrassing burnouts like the Weather Underground and eventually the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped and brainwashed Patty Hearst.
Bill Clinton is even slicker than Sam Hurst. His anti-war activism, as well as everything else he did, developed from a focused interest in his own future. After 1968 it would have been unthinkable for Clinton to ignore the anti-war movement and face political obsolescence -- not because of his revulsion over carpet bombing, but because it was time to hedge his bets. Clinton is not an intellectual, he's merely very clever. A clever person can manipulate his environment, while an intellectual can project beyond it and, for example, identify with the suffering of the Vietnamese people. But this involves some risk, whereas power politics is the art of pursuing the possible and minimizing this risk. Almost everything that happened to the student movement is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn't amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening -- the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

• Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
• Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
• The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
• Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton's, didn't hurt his career either.)
• Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
• The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.
The major point here is that by 1969, protest was not necessarily anti-Establishment. When thousands of students are in the streets every day, and the troops you sent to Vietnam are deserting, sooner or later it's going to cut into your profits. If you can't beat them, then you have to co-opt them. Clinton's mentors and sponsors realized this, Clinton himself sensed the shift, and until more evidence is available it's fair to assume that his anti-war activity was at a minimum self-serving, and perhaps even duplicitous.

 

http://brianwillson.com/awolkerry.html

An Open Letter to Senator John Kerry on Iraq by S. Brian Willson
October 10, 2002

... In the life of being a Senator, John, I'm afraid that your career again proves that power corrupts (and blinds), and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Of course you have many friends in the same camp.
With your vote for essentially agreeing with the selected resident of the White House's request for incredible authority in advance to wage wars against whomever he wants, you have contributed to finalizing the last of the world's empires, and the likely consequent doom of international law, peaceful existence, and hope for the future possibilities of Homo sapiens. Of course, it also means that searching for the motivations of other people's rage and desperate acts of revenge will be overlooked, dooming us to far more threats and instability then if we had seriously pursued a single-standard in the application of international law equally with all nations in the first place. We are too much of a bully to do that, and have stated over and over again that the American Way Of Life is not negotiable. Can you understand that this means species suicide?
I'm sorry and terribly fearful for this state we are in. Your vote is terribly misguided, John. Now that veterans have reorganized throughout the nation as once again an important part of the growing movement, know that we shall work hard for your defeat, whether as a Presidential candidate or for another Senate term.

 

 

www.commondreams.org/views04/0209-03.htm

Published on Monday, February 9, 2004 by Newsday / Long Island, NY
Kerry, Too, Needs to Clear the Air
by Scott Ritter

 On April 23, 1971, a 27-year-old Navy veteran named John Kerry sat before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and chided members on their leadership failures regarding the war in Vietnam.
"Where is the leadership?" Kerry, a decorated hero who had proved his courage under fire, demanded of the senators. "Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned?" Kerry lambasted those who had pushed so strongly for war in Vietnam. "These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude."
Today, on the issue of the war in Iraq, it is John Kerry who is all pious rectitude.
"I think the administration owes the entire country a full explanation on this war - not just their exaggerations but on the failure of American intelligence," Kerry said following the stunning announcement by David Kay, the Bush administration's former lead investigator in Iraq, that "we were all wrong" about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in that country. The problem for Sen. Kerry, of course, is that he, too, is culpable in the massive breach of public trust that has come to light regarding Iraq, WMD and the rush to war.
Almost 30 years after his appearance before the Senate, Sen. Kerry was given the opportunity to make good on his promises that he had learned the lessons of Vietnam. During a visit to Washington in April 2000, when I lobbied senators and representatives for a full review of American policy regarding Iraq, I spoke with John Kerry about what I held to be the hyped-up intelligence regarding the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. "Put it in writing," Kerry told me, "and send it to me so I can review what you're saying in detail."
I did just that, penning a comprehensive article for Arms Control Today, the journal of the Arms Control Association, on the "Case for the Qualitative Disarmament of Iraq." This article, published in June 2000, provided a detailed breakdown of Iraq's WMD capability and made a comprehensive case that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat. I asked the Arms Control Association to send several copies to Sen. Kerry's office but, just to make sure, I sent him one myself. I never heard back from the senator.
Two years later, in the buildup toward war that took place in the summer of 2002, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Kerry sits, convened a hearing on Iraq. At that hearing a parade of witnesses appeared, testifying to the existence of WMD in Iraq. Featured prominently was Khidir Hamza, the self-proclaimed "bombmaker to Saddam," who gave stirring first-hand testimony to the existence of not only nuclear weapons capability, but also chemical and biological weapons as well. Every word of Hamza's testimony has since been proved false. Despite receiving thousands of phone calls, letters and e-mails demanding that dissenting expert opinion, including my own, be aired at the hearing, Sen. Kerry apparently did nothing, allowing a sham hearing to conclude with the finding that there was "no doubt" Saddam Hussein had WMD.
Sen. Kerry followed up this performance in October 2002 by voting for the war in Iraq. Today he justifies that vote by noting that he only approved the "threat of war," and that the blame for Iraq rests with President George W. Bush, who failed to assemble adequate international support for the war. But this explanation rings hollow in the face of David Kay's findings that there are no WMD in Iraq. With the stated casus belli shown to be false, John Kerry needs to better explain his role not only in propelling our nation into a war that is rapidly devolving into a quagmire, but more importantly, his perpetuation of the falsehoods that got us there to begin with.
President Bush should rightly be held accountable for what increasingly appears to be deliberately misleading statements made by him and members of his administration regarding the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. If such deception took place, then Bush no longer deserves the trust and confidence of the American people.
But John Kerry seems to share in this culpability, and if he wants to be the next president of the United States, he must first convince the American people that his actions somehow differ from those of the man he seeks to replace.
"Where is the leadership?" John Kerry asked more than 30 years ago, questioning a war that consumed life, money and national honor. Today this question still hangs in the air, haunting a former Navy combat veteran who needs to convince a skeptical nation that he not only has a plan to get America out of Iraq, but also possesses the leadership skills needed to avoid future ill-advised adventures.
Scott Ritter, former UN chief inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, is the author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America."
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