Cindy Sheehan writes that we need to learn a new language of peace and love that we can speak - even shout - to our leaders, who only understand the language of greed and murder.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122305I.shtml



Cindy Sheehan
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Sheehan

Common Dreams
by Gary Alan Scott

12/22/05

How bitterly ironic is it that the Bush Administration bottled up the release (until the 2004 election had concluded) of documents showing that the pretext for the Vietnam War was faked and hyped just like the Iraq war. Indeed, there was no aggression by the North Vietnamese against U.S. vessels in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. And now we learn that King George has defied the law and dusted off Nixonian tactics for spying on U.S. citizens. If the country had known either of these things prior to the 2004 election, Dubya might have been able to take an even longer vacation at the ranch, after all that hard work of being President!

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1222-30.htm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Guardian [UK]
by Philip James

12/22/05

Is America becoming what it most fears: a big brother state ruled by diktat, where no one is protected from eavesdropping by the secret police, and everything is permitted in defence of the homeland, including torture? Perhaps I'm naive, but I grew up believing that America was somehow different, that alongside the corporate greed, brash materialism and barely functioning social safety net, a unique society prospered. This America was a land of limitless opportunity, a magnet to those escaping oppression, offering prince and pauper alike the possibility to dream big.This America still exists, but it is being eroded by an administration that believes it can rule outside the rule of law. They are fast replacing the American dream with an American nightmare, an Orwellian world where memos defending torture are penned in the department of justice and judges are made redundant in the public interest...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1671984,00.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Unknown News
by Helen & Harry Highwater

12/23/05

So the Bush administration is spying on Americans, without going through the process required by law. It's an impeachable offense, but Bush and Cheney have both said they intend to continue the spying. In the coverage of this, I haven't seen any mention of who it is that Bush Cheney et al are spying on, but the answer is obvious. The White House is spying on reporters and activists. This ain't rocket science, it's just a short process of elimination. Maybe you figured it out before I did...

http://www.unknownnews.org/051223a-hh.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo

Boston Globe
by Thomas Oliphant

12/22/05

In attempting to understand the shameful puniness of the response by President Bush and Congress to the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, I ran across an interesting number the other day. That number is $29 billion. This is presumably the sum just voted for the task of shifting from cleanup to actual reconstruction -- of both properties and lives. I say presumably because the number turns out to be a fraud. In fact, it represents the allocation of large sums of money that Congress has already appropriated. ... Perhaps you recall the atmosphere in September in the immediate aftermath of the horror that Katrina wreaked. Within three weeks, Congress had passed, and Bush had signed into law, roughly $62 billion in appropriations to pay for the massive cleanup. Nearly four months later, depending on which agency's figures you prefer, no more than a third of that money has been spent. ... Always inventive, what the government really did was repackage all this 'assistance' for the purpose of creating the illusion in the current budget mess that something meaningful is happening when nothing could be further from the truth...

http://tinyurl.com/d7erx


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

National Ledger
by William Fisher

12/22/05

President Bush's do-it-yourself eavesdropping notwithstanding, the Pentagon could soon have legal authority to 'covertly' gather intelligence on American citizens in the United States -- a power taken from them because of excesses during the Vietnam War. The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting in closed session, last month quietly approved a request from the Department of Defense (DOD) to allow it to conduct surveillance operations within American Muslim communities. The DOD said the cooperation of these communities could help fight insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

... But civil liberties groups and leaders of the Muslim community say the Pentagon is using the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to resume the domestic spying powers that Congress banned after those powers were used to spy on Americans during the Vietnam era...

http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27262269.shtml


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Philadelphia Inquirer
by staff

Some Americans seem willing to accept any incursion into their civil liberties if the President tells them it's needed to catch terrorists. But over time, more and more citizens will come to realize that the President's refusal to obey the mild, flexible requirements of U.S. law regarding wiretaps for such purposes did not stem from urgency to fight terrorism. It stemmed from an arrogant habit of his White House: the quest to expand executive power secretively and without accountability... [Editor's note: But how much more 'time' do we have? - MLS](12/22/05)

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/13461236.htm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Atlanta Journal Constitution
by Bob Barr

12/21/05

When President Bush explained, over the course of three days, his administration's secret interception of communications involving American citizens without court approval, he repeatedly cited three authorities for such action. One of these was Article II of our Constitution, which provides authority for the president to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Not relying on my memory -- which has proved faulty from time to time (rarely, of course) -- I reread Article II to determine if in fact there was language in it that I had missed previously, that when the president serves as commander in chief, he can order federal agencies to violate the law. Of course, I found no such authority, because none exists...

http://www.bobbarr.org/default.asp?pt=newsdescr&RI=698


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

AlterNet
by G. Pascal Zachary

12/23/05

Given the likelihood that Bush's allies will find no legal basis for his actions, Bush's confession ought to be viewed as a triumph of lawlessness over law. After all, the president had options. Many commentators and critics have noted that he could have asked Congress to approve his spying program. He did not. Instead he chose lawlessness. And now he is boasting about it. His confessions -- for he keeps repeating himself, as boasters will -- are calculated, a means of positioning himself as a troubadour of conscience, the nation's chief advocate of lawlessness. His posture is not just the act of a desperate president whose own Republican Party stalwarts are abandoning him. Bush's advocacy of lawlessness lies at the heart of the right-wing agenda to remake America...

http://www.alternet.org/story/29995/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

12/21/05

The Bush administration's decision to sometimes bypass the secretive U.S. court that governs terrorism wiretaps could threaten cases against terror suspects that rely on evidence uncovered during the disputed eavesdropping, some legal experts cautioned. These experts pointed to this week's unprecedented resignation from the government's spy court by U.S. District Judge James Robertson as an indicator of the judiciary's unease over domestic wiretaps ordered without warrants under a highly classified domestic spying program authorized by President Bush...

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1151AP_Domestic_Spying.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp