Carter fights his reputation as a lightweight, but even he admits that he is surprised by the book he has just written. During his editorship of Vanity Fair, the 55-year-old has made a point of neither voting nor buying shares, a position of lofty disinterest from which he descends with a 340-page polemic attacking Bush and comparing Donald Rumsfeld to Hermann Goering.

What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Freedoms, Ravaged the Environment and Damaged America and the World is a book that has been assembled rather more than written. With great recourse to lists and bullet-point breakdowns, it audits Bush's shortcomings across every department of government, opening each chapter with one of the president's goofy quotes ("It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it") then slamming home wave after wave of damning facts and anecdotes: that Bush tried to reclassify "manufacturing" jobs to include people who worked in fast-food joints; that teachers in Missouri were ordered to remove every third light bulb from schools to save money; that parents of soldiers in Iraq were in some cases forced to buy their children's own body-armour vests ("$1,500 retail"), plus hundreds of statistics attesting to Bush's failure to help America's poor, sick and discriminated against. The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results. Carter says he intended to write a short handbook, but that the more he and his researchers looked into it, the longer the book got.

"We had meetings on the research every couple of days; we went through 30,000 reports - it was daunting, what the Bush administration had done," he says. "I went into this thinking I knew maybe a 10th of it; I didn't know the 1,000th of it. I'm really crummy at deadlines - which is strange, 'cos I'm a very punctual person usually for lunches - and a really slow writer, but I had to do this in four months and worked till 2am every morning. I was saying to my kids, the one thing this book did was use my brain cells, 'cos I've been an editor so long. An editor rarely uses his brain; he uses his gut more than his brain. My brain was worn out, the tips of my fingers were worn out."

With this book and the Vanity Fair editorials in which he rehearsed its outraged tone, Carter joins what might be regarded as the cultural opposition to Bush, a loose alliance that numbers among its members Michael Moore, the comic Al Franken, and the shock-jock Howard Stern - and which some suggest has done more to help dislodge Bush from the White House than full- time politicians like the anaemic John Kerry. Carter downplays his own influence. "I'm sort of flattered to be included with those guys," he says. "They are more vocal than I am, but I try to stay independent. The fact is that their greatest influence is in the Democratic states; when the cultural elite endorses a candidate anywhere else, people tend to run for the hills." Is the fact that people like Moore and Carter put so much energy into trashing Bush an indication of John Kerry's failure to do so? "No. I'm not in the least disappointed with Kerry. I think he's a perfect candidate; honest, forthright and he plays fairly. He is a very brave man. The thing people forget is that the only reason Bush looks presidential, is because he is president. You could stick Michael Moore on Air Force One and he'd look presidential, too."

Carter's Vanity Fair editorials, formerly chatty introductions to the articles in that issue, now bolts of hellfire, can sit a little strangely with the Annie Leibowitz celebrity love-ins, although this, he says, is the magazine's magic: soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Carter has been angry before, of course; he characterises himself as a "very angry young man" in the years when he set up and edited Spy, the satirical magazine, with Kurt Anderson, which mocked the very world Vanity Fair now celebrates. But, says Carter, you can't carry on being furious like that and as he got older, got married and had four children (he is divorced now and engaged to Anna Scott, a British PR), he found he was quite content, not a good stance for a satirist. "But this got me up again," he says, "in the way I haven't felt since my early 30s. It was a sense of outrage as you went along." The thing that most shocked him was the discovery that "the Bush administration is doing everything in its power to cut back the benefits for veterans, both of past wars and of the troops in Iraq now".

Does he at least think Bush believes he is doing the right thing? "I don't know. I don't know how you think you are doing the right thing by having a tax system that barely affects the middle class, and makes life so much easier for so many wealthy people. America has almost too many wealthy people and the tax cuts were designed for them."

Some of Carter's friends warned him off doing the book - "You gotta be crazy," he recalls them saying, "they'll come after you" - but in fact, if anyone is going to come after Carter, it is more likely to be his cohorts in the media. Already, bitchy remarks are circulating about the number of researchers Carter used (nine), which he responds to with a sigh and says: "The fact is I have a full-time job and four kids and I'm not much of a researcher myself. The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book. So."

Earlier this year Carter found himself attacked simultaneously in the New York Times and LA Times, with stories about a payment he received, some $100,000, for recommending the novel A Beautiful Mind as a film project to the producer, Brian Grazer, and the director, Ron Howard. It is not unusual for film ideas to come from magazines - another Russell Crowe flick, Proof of Life, came from a long Vanity Fair article about the kidnap and ransom industry - but there were whispers about the propriety of the magazine's editor having a stake in a film which, through his magazine, he was in such a good position to promote. The surrounding furore took oxygen from a certain dislike of Carter's style, in the same way that his predecessor at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, was so eagerly mocked for her failure at Talk magazine. But there was also a genuine unease at the relationship of journalists such as Carter to the people they report on; Howard and Grazer appeared in the Vanity Fair top powerbrokers list and the film, which won an Oscar, was obviously well covered in the magazine.

"Confused, not bruised," he says of the episode. "I had no idea where it was coming from. It was just a ... I was being criticised for being successful. I do documentary films on the side, one of which is called 9/11 and is about these two documentary film-makers and the twin towers, and one called the Kid Stays in the Picture, about the life of Bob Evans. I loved doing them, they're really fun and they did well. And I think that in some circles it's going to cause some envy and I think this came from envy more than anything else, and envy is a characteristic I literally can't understand."

This is the kind of defence to get Carter detractors howling, proof of how far he has come since his days at Spy, an egomaniac who, by his own admission, oversees every caption and headline in the magazine, having tried delegation and found it "didn't work". Against the weight of his new book, Carter enemies might posit a daffy exchange he once had with Nicole Kidman, who interviewed him for another magazine.

NK: What keeps you curious? Isn't that a lovely word? What's your favourite word?

GC: My favourite word? It's canoe. I love the word canoe and all that it implies and the history of the canoe and all the rest of it. The canoe is a big part of Canadian culture.

NK: That's very strange. Canooooo, canooooo . . . It is a nice word.

GC: What's your favourite word?

NK: Bliss.

Carter rolls his eyes at this and in his best sardonic drawl says: "Canoe is still one of my favourite words." He insists he isn't grand - "Grand in what way?" he says, looking bemused - that he always eats "in the same crummy restaurant" in his neighbourhood in New York, that he doesn't go to black-tie events, that at the Vanity Fair Oscars party he doesn't work the room. Jesus, he's not even American, he's Canadian, from a modest upbringing outside Ottawa.

Nevertheless, I suggest that there is a problem with the power exerted by the Hollywood PR machine over magazines such as Vanity Fair: don't they have to suck-up to succeed?

"I think that's absolutely non-existent. I think it's the most oversold story in the world. Because I've never found any kind of obstruction, pressure, anything, ever."

This isn't what I've heard; Lynn Barber, for example, had to leave Vanity Fair after offending one of Hollywood's most powerful PRs and being told, in not so many words, that she would never work in this town again.

"Well, the trouble is for Lynn to work, you've got to get the other person to sit down. Well, you can't put a gun to someone's head and say you have to sit down in this chair opposite Lynn. If Lynn could do her job without co-operation, she'd still be on staff. But it only works if you get a willing subject, and we ran out of willing subjects in the US."

But surely that's an example of the power of the PR handlers? "No, I don't know if it was that or not. I think she did a story on Michael Caine that he wasn't thrilled with. But it's not about that. That is the single most oversold, erroneous story in journalism."

Whenever he can, says Carter, he tries to get a non-film star on the cover - "even a musician is better" - while trying to keep "the utterly loathsome" off the front page. It is getting harder; "the level of celebrity in America now is so low," he says, "so unbelievably low."

Meanwhile, the staff at the magazine are proud he has added its voice to the political debate; if the book sells just one copy, he says, he'll "have felt I have done my part". There is a point in What We've Lost wherein the two sides of Carter meet, a classic, Vanity Fair moment in which he quotes from a phone-in that took place last year on the political TV channel, C-Span. Half way through the conversation, it becomes clear that the caller complaining about Bush is an entertainer of some sort; after pressing for her identity, to no avail, the presenter eventually says in amazement: "Is this Cher ?" It is.

The lesson is clear: when even the celebrities are getting mad with Bush, we had jolly well better sit up and listen. This year, Graydon Carter will be voting.


Extract from Graydon Carter's book
We've lost lives and allies, liberties and freedoms. In the age of George Bush, we have lost our way

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

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 1:35 PM 0 comments

By Richard Reeves

NEW YORK -- President Bush (news - web sites) is coming to town. You better watch out, you better not shout -- unless you're a certified delegate inside Madison Square Garden. With protesters somewhere out of sight, the Republican National Convention will be a celebration of the ideology, values and interests served by this second Bush presidency.

Whether you agree or disagree with the words pouring from the podium over Americans who see reflections of themselves in George W. Bush, the real issue of this election will not be mentioned. The core issue is this: Our president is incompetent. He is not a good president.

Let me count the ways:

(1) He has divided the country; we are all part of a vicious little hissing match. We were united and humbled on Sept. 12, 2001. We are divided and humiliated now, telling lies about each other.

(2) He has divided the world. "We are all Americans now," headlined Le Monde on that Sept. 12. Now there are days when it seems as if they are all anti-Americans.

(3) He is leaving no child or grandchild without debt. He has taken the government from surplus into deficit in the name of national security and increased private investment. We can pay the debt in two ways: with more government revenues (taxation) or by borrowing -- against the sweat and income of new generations. The president has chosen to borrow.

(4) He campaigns as a champion of smaller government, but is greatly increasing the size and role of government. Ideological conservatism, it turns out, costs just as much or more than ideological liberalism. Conservative and liberal politicians are both for increasing the reach and power of government. The difference between them is which parts and functions of the state are to be empowered and financed. The choice is between military measures and order, or more redistribution of income. Money is power.

(5) He is diminishing the military of which he is so proud now as commander in chief. The invasion and occupation of Iraq (news - web sites) have obviously not worked out the way he imagined -- naked torture was not the goal. But the far greater problem for the future is that our proud commander has revealed the hollowness behind the unilateral superpower. From the top down, we have not been able to win Iraq, much less the world. And going into Iraq has compromised or crippled the war on terror he declared himself.

(6) He is diminishing scientific progress, the great engine of the 20th century. Only the truly ignorant can believe that the proper role of government is to hinder medical research and environmental study in the name of God.

(7) He is diminishing the Constitution of the United States. Cheesy tricks like amending the great text of freedom to attack homosexuality can be dismissed as wedge politics. But it is worse to preach against an activist judiciary while appointing more activist judges who happen to hold different beliefs, particularly the idea that civil liberties are the enemies of patriotism, security and freedom itself.

(8) He has surrounded himself with other incompetents. The secretary of state is presiding over the rape of diplomacy and its alliances. The secretary of defense has sent our young men and women into situations they were never meant or trained to handle, and now they are being ordered into battle by an appointed minister in a faraway land. The national security adviser does not seem to know that her job description includes coordinating defense and diplomacy. And then there was our $340,000-a-month local hire, Ahmed Chalabi, sitting in the gallery of our House.

(9) He has been unable or unwilling to deal with declining employment and the rising medical costs of becoming an older nation.

(10) He is, as if by design, destroying the credibility of the United States as a force for peace in the world -- an honest broker -- particularly in the Middle East.

The list is longer, miscalculation after miscalculation. President Bush has not been able to function effectively at this pay grade. He may mean well, but this has been a difficult time, and he is in over his head. We and our kids will pay the price for his blundering, blunderbuss adventure in Washington. He has been tested in a difficult time -- and, unhappily for all of us and the world, he has not been up to the job.

Ted Rall by Ted Rall

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 5:55 PM 0 comments

Washington accused of ignoring nuclear terror threat

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

22 August 2004

The Bush administration insists that its top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. But in a withering new book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the White House has been so heedless of the threat that nuclear armageddon in one or more US cities is now "more likely than not" over the next decade.

Graham Allison, a former defence official under both Republican and Democratic administrations and now a leading researcher at Harvard, describes the Bush administration as "reckless" for its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear powers. In his book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Mr Allison lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk that al-Qa'ida or another group could either build or buy a nuclear weapon and then smuggle it into the United States.

He demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.

"No one observing the behaviour of the US government after 9/11 would note any significant changes in activity aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring the world's most destructive technologies," he writes. At the same time, al-Qa'ida is known to have taken steps to obtain nuclear weaponry since 1992, and has publicly stated its ambition to kill four million Americans.

"On the current course," Mr Allison concludes, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable." The most likely scenario, according to security experts, is that al-Qa'ida or another group would buy or steal fissile material and then construct its own bomb, using science that has been in the public domain for 30 years. Hence the urgent need to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, a programme for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, has been so poorly funded that it will take another 13 years to finish at the current pace. "The incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium were secured than in the two years before 9/11," Mr Allison told The Independent on Sunday.

A further 43 countries have varying amounts of fissile material as by-products of their civilian nuclear power industries, but as things stand the US is only willing to take this off their hands if they pay for the privilege.

Mr Allison described the Bush administration's approach to North Korea and Iran as "paralysis" - offering neither carrots nor sticks to prevent those countries becoming full nuclear weapons states. If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line - carrying with it the distinct possibility of selling parts or technology to the highest bidder - it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in all our history".

A nuclear North Korea would almost certainly induce Japan and South Korea to develop their own programmes. And the Bush administration is talking about new nuclear tests and the development of so-called "mini-nukes" and atomic bunker-buster bombs.

Mr Allison ascribed many of the White House's failures to the war in Iraq, which, he says, has diverted attention and eaten up resources in a country that had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons programme.

But he also accused the White House of a failure of imagination, an odd combination of denial and fatalism."They don't get that this is a preventable catastrophe," he said. An effective "war on nuclear terrorism", Mr Allison argued, would cost around $5bn (£2.75bn) per year. "In a current budget that devotes more than $500bn to defence and the war in Iraq," he suggested, "a penny of every dollar for what Bush calls 'our highest priority' would not be excessive."

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 8:49 PM 0 comments

The new Caesars
The Bush administration's empire building is trampling on who we are and were always meant to be -- a republic.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gary Hart

Aug. 18, 2004  |  The cause of imperialism, weakened for a time by the fall of the European and Soviet empires, has found new advocates. The fact that the 21st century imperial power happens to be the United States of America, whose independence from colonialism was declared 228 years ago, seems not to matter. The neoconservatives' project to position the United States as the world's dominant power -- and to use that power to govern in venues chosen seemingly by them alone, and collectively where reasonably easy but unilaterally where necessary -- has been advanced and saluted.

A careful review of the statements of President Bush and his administration up to the declaration of victory in Iraq yields little evidence of the true purpose of America's invasion. The world is now familiar with the arguments: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction; Iraq has or will soon have a "nuclear capability"; Iraq harbors and supports terrorists planning attacks on the United States; Iraq itself is a threat to U.S. national security. All have proved untrue and are no longer offered as justification for America's "preventive" war on Iraq, an action with precedent in U.S. history possibly only in the Philippines more than a century ago.

Today the president and his team offer the rationalization that deposing Saddam Hussein was necessary to achieve peace in the Middle East. This argument was never used in the run-up to war for the simple reason that it condoned an act of empire. Leave aside the fact that the argument is severely flawed, as subsequent history has shown. The United States is now bogged down in urban warfare against indigenous militias, a style of warfare for which it is largely unprepared and that causes unsustainable levels of civilian casualties. The war has substantially contributed to anti-American sentiments throughout the region and possibly throughout the Islamic world. Peace in the Middle East is now farther in the distance, not closer.

The costs to U.S. taxpayers will ultimately exceed the $200 billion honestly predicted before the war by Bush economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey, who was fired for his candor. Somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 civilian Iraqi casualties are also among the costs. Much more important to most Americans are the almost 10,000 U.S. combat and noncombat (including psychological) casualties. We don't know the exact number because the Pentagon will not release noncombat casualty figures and the "free" press does not seem capable of finding out.

Before the war I predicted that if the Iraqi Republican Guard chose to fight in the cities, American casualties could mount to between 5,000 and 10,000. Gen. Barry McCaffrey predicted as many as 50,000 American casualties under these circumstances. We were both ridiculed by conservative editorial boards and commentators. Instead of the Republican Guard, we are now faced with religious militia carrying out the same strategy.

Had the international legal standards for preemptive warfare been met, it could plausibly be argued that America's invasion of Iraq was not imperial in nature. That traditional standard permits preemptive action where a threat is "immediate and unavoidable," a standard clearly not met where Iraq is concerned. So, much else is at work here: the fanciful, but not idealistic, notion that the United States can invade and occupy a nation situated in the center of the complex and troubled Middle East, install a favorable democratic government, and use its position as friendly military occupier to condition the behavior of neighboring nations, introduce "democracy" at the point of a bayonet if necessary, and bring Middle Eastern combatants to the bargaining table.

This project has at least two fatal flaws. It is an act of empire. And it was never disclosed to the American people so that they, acting in their capacity as popular sovereigns, could ratify it. Those who applaud this strategy include eminent British historian Niall Ferguson, who basically argues that America is an empire and ought just to get on with it, and writers such as Robert Kaplan, who, as an American, understands the difficulties of selling imperialism to a republican polity and therefore urges empire by "stealth."

Why should we care one way or the other? The answer is simple. The United States cannot be simultaneously republic and empire. For evidence, see Rome (circa 65 B.C.). We salute the flag of the United States of America "and the Republic for which it stands." Since the time of the Greek city-states, republics have shared certain immutable qualities: civic virtue or citizen participation, popular sovereignty, resistance to corruption (by special interests) and a sense of the common good. Empires consolidate power in the hands of the few; seek expanded influence, by force if necessary; export centralized administrations to foreign lands; dictate terms to lesser powers, and manage foreign occupied peoples for their own political and commercial advantage.

The Bush administration neocons claim none of these characteristics for their imperial actions in Iraq. They claim to want only what is best for the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people seem to be resisting, sometimes in murderous ways, these benign boons. Even more to the point, even if one were to concede the best motives to the neocons (and that represents a real struggle), the imperial project is not who we are or who we should wish to become. Woodrow Wilson cannot be claimed as prophet here, even cynically, for his internationalism was benign, not militaristic, and internationalist, not unilateralist. These are huge differences.

The imperial project is in direct contradiction to America's constitutional principles. We are a republic, not an empire, and we are a republic much in need of restoration, as the erosion of the quality of resistance to corruption and the erosion of the exercise of civic virtue testify. America's 21st century project should be restoring our republic, not projecting imperial power into venues we are, by our very nature, unequipped to dominate.

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

Ted Rall by Ted Rall

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 1:43 PM 0 comments

Republican Congressman Says Iraq War Was Mistake

Reuters
Wednesday, August 18, 2004; 10:03 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking ranks with the White House and his Republican leaders in Congress, Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska has said in a letter to constituents the U.S. military action in Iraq was a mistake.

The Iraq war was a "costly mess" with no quick way out, wrote Bereuter, vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a senior member of the House International Relations Committee.

"I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action especially without a broad and engaged international coalition," he said in the letter dated Aug. 6.

Republican leaders in Congress have supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq on grounds that it had weapons of mass destruction that posed a danger to the United States. No stockpiles of such weapons have been found.

But Bereuter, who has resigned his seat in the House of Representatives to become president of the Asia Foundation, expressed dismay over the decision to go to war.

"The cost in casualties is already large and growing, and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible," he wrote, reflecting on his 2002 vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

"Our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened," he added.

"Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world."

The White House had no comment on the letter.

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 4:00 PM 0 comments

Our nation's greatest security challenge is shutting down global terrorist networks, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and reducing the likelihood that they are someday used by other countries or terrorists.

Even as President George W. Bush rightly calls upon others to foreswear nuclear weapons, he is asking Congress to approve a costly and counterproductive campaign to research new, more "usable" nuclear weapons designed to destroy underground, nonnuclear targets. Such weapons have no practical role in dealing with terrorist networks and their devastating power makes them inappropriate against nonnuclear targets.

What's more, the development of new types of nuclear bombs could also lead to renewed testing at the Nevada Test Site.

Bush administration officials say there are currently no plans to resume nuclear testing. They also claim that no decision has been made to move from the current research phase to development of new types of nuclear weapons. Though the administration may not have made a formal decision to build and test a new weapon, there is ample evidence that suggests it is preparing the way to do so.

The administration wants Congress to appropriate an additional $30 million a year to reduce the time needed to resume testing to 18 months. The Bush administration continues to oppose the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Earlier this year, the Energy Department outlined a five-year, $500 billion spending plan for research and development of a new high-yield nuclear weapon called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and it has begun research on a new nuclear weapon capable of destroying chemical and biological agents in storage.

The administration also claims that these new weapons projects will only "slightly complicate" U.S. nuclear nonproliferation efforts. That's an understatement. The reality is that new U.S. nuclear weapons development or testing will only give former adversaries and proliferators -- such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and India -- an excuse to follow suit.

Thankfully, congressional Republicans and Democrats -- including Utah's delegation -- have begun to raise serious questions.

The House Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding for proposed new nuclear weapons projects. In its June report, the committee said it is unconvinced by the Department of Energy's "superficial assurances" that it only wants to study the nuclear penetrator.

Next month, the Senate appropriations committee, including Utah's Sen. Robert Bennett, will have its chance to weigh in. Bennett announced that he is introducing legislation that would reinforce Congress' role in reviewing any presidential proposal to renew underground nuclear weapons testing and to establish additional monitoring stations for possible radiological effluents. U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson has introduced similar legislation in the House.

But the legislation is largely symbolic. Concerned members of Congress must take more decisive action to stop the administration well before the president proposes a resumption of testing.

Proponents of the new weapons say that by enhancing earth penetrating capabilities and reducing yields of nuclear weapons, adversaries may believe than an American president might actually be willing to use nuclear weapons to take out leadership and weapons targets. But the notion that nuclear weapons can be developed to destroy targets with little collateral damage is highly misleading and dangerous.

To contain the fallout of a relatively small 5 kiloton nuclear bomb, it would have to be detonated about 350 feet underground -- nearly 10 times the depth that current warheads can be made to penetrate the earth.

The proposed nuclear penetrator is far larger, with a yield likely to be more than 100 kilotons. Though it would be detonated a few meters underground, this bomb would produce wide-scale fallout that would contaminate and kill civilians, as well as U.S. military personnel in the area.

The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a blast equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. Even if smaller weapons were used against suspected chemical or biological weapons sites, small errors in intelligence and targeting could disperse rather than destroy deadly material.

Nuclear weapons should not be seen as simply another weapon in the United States' vast arsenal. So long as nuclear weapons exist, their role should be limited to deterring the use of nuclear weapons by others.

U.S. leaders must act decisively to prevent renewed nuclear blasts -- whether they are underground test explosions in Nevada or in future war in a foreign land. They can start by eliminating expensive and unnecessary new nuclear weapons projects and reconsidering ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 11:47 AM 0 comments

In the story published Thursday in the newspaper, Post media critic Howard Kurtz writes that editors resisted stories that questioned whether Bush had evidence that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," assistant managing editor Bob Woodward says in the story. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than many believed.

Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks told Kurtz, "There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said, "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale."

In his more-than-3,000-word story, Kurtz writes, "The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times."

A number of critics have faulted the American news media for not being more skeptical about the Bush administration's claims before the beginning of the war in March 2003. In the year and a half since Saddam was toppled, U.S. troops have yet to discover any weapons of mass destruction.

In a study published in March by the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, researchers wrote: "If the White House acted like a WMD story was important, ... so too did the media. If the White House ignored a story (or an angle on a story), the media were likely to as well."

In May, The New York Times criticized its own reporting on Iraq, saying it found "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been" and acknowledging it sometimes "fell for misinformation" from exile Iraqi sources.

# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 2:39 PM 0 comments