Slate
by Bruce Reed

11/15/05

Since Halloween, Sam Alito has been dressing up as a mild-mannered civil servant who followed his father into the family business. Unlike the nakedly careerist John Roberts, who bounded from one Reaganite political post to the next, Alito was supposed to have spent his youth as a career bureaucrat in short sleeves and a pocket protector. Newly released papers from the Reagan library show that Alito was as much of a right-wing suck-up as Roberts. In a 1985 job application to become a Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Ed Meese, Alito boasted of his longstanding conservative credentials: 'The greatest influences on my views were the writings of William F. Buckley Jr., the National Review, and Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign' -- when Alito was all of 14...

http://www.slate.com/id/2130356/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

WorldNetDaily
by Pat Buchanan

11/14/05

Echoed by anti-Bush media that can smell blood in the water, the Democratic Party is charging that Bush misled, deceived or lied us into war. With polls showing 57 percent of the nation no longer believes Bush to be honest and truthful, the unanswered charges have had a devastating impact. But Bush has a last card to play, and on Veterans Day, he played it, the ace of trumps in any president's hand: the patriot card. Speaking in Pennsylvania to the troops, Bush said that pro-war Democrats like John Kerry saw the same intelligence he did and voted to take Saddam down, and that Democrats now accusing him of faking intelligence are undercutting our fighting troops in Iraq. Translation: Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. We are one step away from the T-word. With his poll ratings at rock bottom and little to lose, Bush has just escalated the war politics...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47406


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

AntiWar.Com
by Justin Raimondo

11/14/05

Cornered by their critics, overwhelmed by massive antiwar sentiment, and pursued by the relentless Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the War Party is in full retreat, hiding behind the ramparts of an elaborate edifice of lies. The administration's defenders are shooting blindly, averring -- per Norman Podhoretz -- that, since 'everybody' believed what the administration was claiming about Iraq's alleged WMD prior to the invasion, we're all living in the same alternate universe. In the Bizarro World of the neocons, if we all believe a lie, that makes it true. Or, rather, that makes the whole idea of truth irrelevant, and we should all 'move on,' as the Clintonites used to say...

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8023


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

CounterPunch
by Paul Craig Roberts

11/14/05

Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you without a trial. The Bush administration wants the power to detain indefinitely anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant or a terrorist without presenting the detainee in court with charges. In England the power to arrest people and to hold them indefinitely without charges was taken away from kings centuries ago. Bush apparently thinks he is the reincarnation of an absolute monarch. ... On Thursday November 10, the Republican controlled US Senate voted 49 to 42 to overturn the US Supreme Court's 2004 ruling that permits Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detentions. How dare the US Supreme Court defend the US Constitution and the civil liberties of Americans when we have terrorists to fight, argued the Republican senators. What are civil liberties, the Republicans asked rhetorically, but legal tricks that allow criminals and terrorists to escape...

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11142005.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Albany Times Union
by Tom Teepen

11/14/05

President Bush's position on torture, and his administration's, has degenerated into political gibberish. In Panama last week, Bush perfunctorily reiterated the claim that the United States doesn't use torture, then launched into one his patented and passionate soliloquies about the evil of terrorism and how it must be opposed by every possible means, in effect an argument for the torture he had just supposedly disavowed. ... In the name of protecting us, this administration is abandoning our historic values, cramping our personal freedoms, violating our privacy, making a mockery of justice and asserting a right for the president, as commander in chief, to ignore U.S. law if he wishes to. Who is to protect us from our protectors?

http://tinyurl.com/983ne


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Washington Post

11/13/05

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees. Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws...

http://tinyurl.com/7ltdj


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Washington Times

11/14/05

Concerned that the nation's borders are not properly protected against terrorists, illegal aliens and drug smugglers, a Senate committee warned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that if he fails to correct the situation promptly, they will. Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME], chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joe Lieberman [D-CT] want to know whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should be merged to 'enable them to operate more effectively.' In a report made public last week, the Homeland Security Department's Office of Inspector General recommended that the two agencies -- with overlapping jurisdiction for border security and immigration enforcement -- be merged, questioning whether they had the ability as separate organizations to carry out their homeland security missions. The report, requested by Collins and Lieberman, said a lack of effective coordination between the agencies had affected apprehension, detention and removal efforts...

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051114-014004-5760r.htm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

On the Spanish island of Majorca, the police quietly opened a criminal investigation in March after a local newspaper reported a series of visits to the island's international airport by planes known to regularly operate for the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, it has emerged that an investigative judge in Palma has ordered the police inquiry to be sent to Spain's national court, to consider whether the CIA was routing planes carrying terrorism suspects through Majorca as part of its so-called rendition program.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111405E.shtml

Kelpie Wilson: Buried in the bowels of the budget bill is a stunning poison pill - one of the biggest land grabs in history. Engineered by the Chair of the House Resources Committee, Mr. Richard Pombo, this pill is disguised as a modification to mining law. It would transfer up to 350 million acres of public land into private ownership in order to fund a $70 billion tax cut for the rich. The only appropriate response is to regurgitate this poison pill all over their slick designer shoes.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111405A.shtml

Republikanische Abgeordnete fordern den Bau einer großen amerikanischen Mauer zu Mexiko, um die Einwanderung zu verhindern.

„Vom großen Aufbruch in die Offenheit, in eine grenzenlose Welt von Freiheit und Demokratie mit einem globalen Fluss von Menschen, Informationen und Gütern, wie sich das manche nach dem Ende des Kalten Kriegs und der Mauer zwischen Ost und West vorstellten, ist heute nicht mehr viel übrig geblieben. Schon eher lässt sich beobachten, dass überall neue Mauern errichtet werden, um die Grenzen vor unerwünschten Eindringlingen zu sichern…“ Artikel von Florian Rötzer in telepolis vom 06.11.2005

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/21/21283/1.html


Aus: LabourNet, 15. November 2005