By: Michael Isikoff  

Why is the Bush administration blocking the release of an 800-page congressional report about 9-11? The bipartisan report deals with law-enforcement and intelligence failures that preceded the attacks. For months, congressional leaders and administration officials have battled over declassifying the document, preventing a public release once slated for this week. Newsweek has learned new details about the dispute.

Among the portions of the report the administration refuses to declassify, sources say, are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda. Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they're refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain - including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA website.

From:  

Welcome to The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 111! If you know anything about the sport of cricket - and I have a feeling that the vast majority of people reading this know nothing about cricket whatsoever - then you will know that a batsman's score of 111 is considered to be extremely unlucky. This score is known as a Nelson and superstition states that the batsman will be "out" on his next shot. For some reason it seems particularly appropriate this week as cracks may be appearing in the Bush administration's seemingly-invincible facade. All hell is breaking loose in Iraq, much to the consternation of the administration (1), and George W. Bush (2) appears to be seriously screwing up the global war on terrorism. Meanwhile several administration members resigned last week, including EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman and spokesman Ari Fleischer (10). Enjoy.

"A cynic might say that the only thing Republicans have to fear is the end of fear itself."

- E.J. Dionne, in the Washington Post, May 25, 2003

By: Dennis Rahkonen  

When was the last time a policy-driven windfall for Big Business and the individually well-heeled translated into a boon for America's wage-earning majority? Certainly not during the Reagan years, when huge breaks were granted to America's corporate and financial hierarchy. It was a time of extended unemployment for millions, with the jobs that were finally found providing lower pay, fewer benefits, and worse conditions than those originally lost.

Bush's ballyhooed "solution" to 6% joblessness is just so much additional injustice dumped on top of existing injustices, both economic and social. And it's that accumulated inequity - the favoritism constantly shown the elite while ordinary people's worsening needs go unmet - that lies at the heart of our country's troubles.

President Bush promises that fuel-cell cars will be free of pollution. But if he has his way, the cars of tomorrow will run on hydrogen made from fossil fuels.

By: Barry C. Lynn  

By launching an ambitious program to develop what he calls the "Freedom Car", Bush seemed determined to realize the kind of future that hydrogen-car supporters have envisioned for years. Using existing technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water. Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms. The hydrogen is then recombined with oxygen in fuel cells, where it releases electrons that drive an electric motor in a car. What Bush didn't reveal in his nationwide address, however, is that his administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent - and potentially as dirty - as the one that fuels today's SUV's. According to the administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90% of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels - in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10% will be cracked from water using nuclear energy.

Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the benefits offered by hydrogen. Although the fuel-cell cars themselves may emit nothing but water vapor, the process of producing the fuel cells from hydrocarbons will continue America's dependence on fossil fuels and leave behind carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming.

By: David Olive  

The cover of Time magazine's latest Canadian edition notes that our "nation's influence in the world is shrinking".

Inside this edition of the branch-plant magazine are 10 pages of features and columns on Canada's pint-sized military, dwindling diplomatic corps, and shrinking foreign aid budget. Plus a reminder it's not too late for Canada to win a coveted prime ministerial invitation to George W. Bush's ranch in Texas by following the ennobling Aussie example of outsourcing your foreign policy to Washington.

The cover image is a map of North America in which there's a big empty space where Canada used to be. And the main headline: "Would anyone notice if Canada disappeared?"

Something like 3% of the world population agreed with this war. For the rest - watching the Philippine dissidents now being suppressed by the Pentagon, the U.S.-backed Christian Sudanese at war with the regime in Khartoum, the Chileans suddenly frozen out of free-trade talks by a vengeful White House - the question that should trouble Time's editors in New York is: "How many people in the world wish that America was a little less visible right now?"

"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."

- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at a hearing of the Senate's appropriations subcommittee on defense, May 14, 2003

"We believe he [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

- Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, March 16, 2003

By: Andrew Gumbel  

Few companies represent the corporate face of the Bush administration quite like Bechtel of San Francisco. And few - Vice-President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, is the only possible competitor - were quite so identified with the drive to overthrow Saddam Hussein, starting months before the U.S.-led invasion began.

The point man from the earliest stages was George Schultz, a Bechtel board member and former Secretary of State from the Reagan era. As chairman of the so-called Committee to Liberate Iraq, Mr Schultz was one of the biggest cheerleaders for war who argued both for the removal of Saddam Hussein and also the benefits of rebuilding Iraq after Saddam was gone. He never explicitly said his own company should be in charge of the reconstruction, but nobody much doubted that was what he meant.

Indeed, last month, Bechtel was awarded the primary contract - worth as much as $680m (£415m) in the first instance, but potentially much more lucrative given total reconstruction estimates as high as $100bn - to rebuild Iraq's water and electricity supplies, roads, schools, sewers, and hospitals.

Editorial from:  

Several voices around the world say the Pentagon falsified reports about West Virginia's hero, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, to boost patriotic support for President Bush's war on Iraq.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer said it's a shame that Lynch, a teen-age soldier injured in an ambush, was used as "a propaganda pawn" by the administration.

Similar reports of Pentagon falsification about Lynch have appeared in the London Times and the Toronto Star, as well as on the BBC in England.

Jessica Lynch is a genuine West Virginia hero. It's too bad that she evidently was exploited by military brass for propaganda purposes.

"...in the short and medium term, an increase in a country's level of income inequality has a significant positive relationship with subsequent economic growth."

- Kristin J. Forbes, in an article in the American Economic Review

By: Andrew Greeley  

Patently, President Bush is not going to assume responsibility for the World Trade Center catastrophe. His political allies blame former President Bill Clinton (as they are blaming him three years later for the current recession). Moreover, Bush continues to stonewall attempts to set up an independent investigation of what went wrong, and continues to sit on the 900-page report prepared by a bipartisan congressional committee.

Instead, the President continues to respond to terror with his cowboy rhetoric: We will get Osama bin Laden. We will get the Mullah Omar. We will get the terrorists who blew the hole in the USS Cole. We will get the anthrax killer. We will get Saddam Hussein and his sons. Most recently, we will get the killers who attacked the compounds in Saudi Arabia.

The latter will be quite a trick since the killers were suicide bombers...

"What they really meant when they said they'd change the tone was something like this: If you elect Al Gore, we're going to keep up the assault, maybe even intensify it, because as you see from the campaign, we're branding him a liar over the most inconsequential little things (which - oh, by the way - don't even happen to be lies). But if you elect us, then all this stuff will stop. So presto! The tone will change!"

- Al Franken

By: Robert Byrd  

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11^th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

"...there wasn't a single top official of the Clinton administration convicted of any crime involving public conduct in office. And, you know, the only official ever convicted of anything was the chief of staff to the Sec. of Agriculture, who was convicted of lying under oath in a failed prosecution that cost $21 million by an independent counsel. By contrast, 27 officials of the Nixon administration were convicted in Watergate, and 32 members of the Reagan administration convicted of crimes committed in Iran Contra and other scandals. So that's quite a contrast. And everything that Clinton was accused of in terms of crimes turned out to be bogus."

- Sidney Blumenthal

By: Peter Beinart  

To conservatives, the Bush administration is everything its predecessor was not: decent, ethical, honest. It doesn't abuse government power or the public trust. As Wall Street Journal columnist and presidential hagiographer Peggy Noonan has put it: "Bush brings character to the table."

That's the claim. Here's the record...

By: William Safire  

The FCC proposal remains officially secret to avoid public comment but was forced into the open by the two commission Democrats. It would end the ban in most cities of cross-ownership of television stations and newspapers, allowing such companies as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune to gobble up ever more electronic outlets. It would permit Viacom, Disney, and AOL Time Warner to control TV stations with nearly half the national audience. In the largest cities, it would allow owners of "only" two TV stations to buy a third.

We've already seen what happened when the FCC allowed the monopolization of local radio: today three companies own half the stations in America, delivering a homogenized product that neglects local news coverage and dictates music sales.

And the FCC has abdicated enforcement of the "public interest" requirement in issuing licenses. Time was, broadcasters had to regularly reapply and show public-interest programming to earn continuance; now they mail the FCC a postcard every eight years that nobody reads.

"[This tax cut is] a major stoking of the boilers... [that] will provide immediate relief to millions of American families and businesses and indeed states. And it will, it will, create jobs."

- Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), Senate Majority Leader

"[This tax cut is] irresponsible, unfair, and duplicitous."

- Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), Senate Minority Leader

By: Bob Herbert  

The Dixie Chicks were excoriated for simply exercising their constitutional right to speak out. With an ugly backlash and plans for a boycott growing, the group issued a humiliating public apology for "disrespectful" anti-Bush remarks made by its lead singer, Natalie Maines.

Halliburton, on the other hand, can do no wrong. Yes, it has a history of ripping off the government. And, yes, it's made zillions doing business in countries that sponsor terrorism, including members of the "axis of evil" that is so despised by the President.

But the wrath of the White House has not come thundering down on Halliburton for consorting with the enemy. And there's been very little public criticism. This is not some hapless singing group we're talking about. Halliburton is a court favorite. So instead of being punished for its misdeeds, it's been handed a huge share of the riches to be reaped from the reconstruction of Iraq and U.S. control of Iraqi oil.

"Bill Bennett is through... He is objectively discredited. He will not be proffered any public post by any President into the foreseeable future. He will not publish another book on another virtue, if there is any he has neglected to write about. It is possible that the books written by him on the subject, sitting in bookstores, will work their way to the remainder houses. These are the consequences of the damage he has done to himself."

- William F. Buckley Jr.

Editorial from:  

Against some of the best economic advice in the land, President Bush and his Republican Congressional leaders have concocted a benighted final tax-cut plan that will do far more to deepen the nation's deficits and debt than to stimulate the wallowing economy. In a rush for approval by Memorial Day, the leaders have cannibalized parts of competing packages into a tentative $318 billion grab bag that again offers the most significant relief to the upper-bracket Americans so dear to the administration. Dividend taxes will be cut, not eliminated as the President hoped, but so will capital gains taxes. The latter was a conservative chestnut rejected two years ago when the first Bush cuts were enacted in the long-ago euphoria of an actual budget surplus.

By: Arianna Huffington  

I've been racking my brain, trying to reconcile the ever-widening chasm between what the White House claims to be true and what is actually true. After all, we know the President and his men are not stupid. And despite the tidal wave of misinformation pouring out of their mouths, I don't believe they are consciously lying.

The best explanation I can come up with for the growing gap between their rhetoric and reality is that we are being governed by a gang of out-and-out fanatics. The defining trait of the fanatic - be it a Marxist, a fascist, or, gulp, a Wolfowitz - is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief.

Bush and his fellow fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis who can go without air for hours. Such is their mental control, these political masters can go without truth for, well, years. Because, in their minds, they're always right. Oopso facto.

"No one has had the guts to say it: Our Braveheart war hero President caved in to the terrorists. Pulling our troops out of Saudi Arabia was Al-Qaeda demand Number One. So, while our dear President is doing his Top Gun landing on the aircraft carrier, he's ordering the most cowardly, craven, gutless act by a Commander-in-Chief in memory, effectively getting on bended knee to Osama bin Laden and saying: 'Your wish is my command.'"

- Greg Palast

By: E.J. Dionne Jr.  

A New York Times/CBS News poll last week captured the Democrats' problem: While 53% of Americans said that Republicans had a clear vision of where to lead the country, only 40% said that of Democrats. The standard response at this point is a call for Democrats to move sharply leftward and offer voters "a choice, not an echo". That was Republican Barry Goldwater's battle cry in 1964. You may recall that Goldwater moved his party to the right, captured all of six states, and lost in a landslide. The Democrats' problem is not about ideological positioning - an insider game anyway - but about conviction. It's about picking the right fights and drawing the right lines.

That's what made Sen. John Kerry's speech yesterday about service and citizenship so interesting. Of course, no one can be against national service or patriotism. President Bush speaks often about these subjects and has appointed some good people to lead his service effort. He could have killed the AmeriCorps program, President Clinton's creation. Instead, he morphed it into his USA Freedom Corps.

"No Republican President has balanced the budget in this country for 34 years. If you care about the money you send to Washington, you better elect a Democrat, because Republicans can't manage money."

- Howard Dean

By: Robert E. Reynolds  

This seems to be the pattern with the Republican Party and with many conservatives, the abandoning of our troops. As anyone who has followed the MIA/POW issue, and the Senate Kerry/Smith hearings, it was Republican Presidents who abandoned our troops.

The Eisenhower administration knew that the North Koreans had not returned all the known POW's, but they did nothing about it.

The Nixon/Kissinger administration knew that the North Vietnamese had not returned all our known POW's from Laos and Cambodia, men who fought in their "secret wars". They abandoned them.

The Bush I, Cheney, Powell administration found it a useful to have Captain Speicher declared dead. The Bush II, Cheney, Powell administration found it useful to have him resurrected.

By: Warren Buffett  

The annual Forbes 400 lists prove that - with occasional blips - the rich do indeed get richer. Nonetheless, the Senate voted last week to supply major aid to the rich in their pursuit of even greater wealth.

The Senate decided that the dividends an individual receives should be 50% free of tax in 2003, 100% tax-free in 2004 through 2006 and then again fully taxable in 2007. The mental flexibility the Senate demonstrated in crafting these zigzags is breathtaking. What it has put in motion, though, is clear: If enacted, these changes would further tilt the tax scales toward the rich.

The Senate's plan invites corporations - indeed, virtually commands them - to contort their behavior in a major way. Were the plan to be enacted, shareholders would logically respond by asking the corporations they own to pay no more dividends in 2003, when they would be partially taxed, but instead to pay the skipped amounts in 2004, when they'd be tax-free. Similarly, in 2006, the last year of the plan, companies should pay double their normal dividend and then avoid dividends altogether in 2007.

Overall, it's hard to conceive of anything sillier than the schedule the Senate has laid out...

"Two and half million jobs in two and half years. If we re-elect this President, we'll be in a depression. That's eight million jobs in eight years... This President has forgotten ordinary people."

- Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, May 18, 2003

By: Hope Yen  

The Dow closed down 185.58, or 2.1%, at 8,493.39, having gained 0.9% last week to post its third winning week. It was the biggest point decline since March 24, when the blue chips lost 307 points; still, the Dow was trading at levels seen a little more than a week ago.

The broader market also finished lower. The Nasdaq composite index fell 45.76, or 3%, to 1,492.77, also the biggest drop since March 24, when the index declined 52 points. That came after last week's advance of 1.2%, the index's fifth straight week of gains.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 23.53, or 2.5%, to 920.77, after rising 1.2% to also notch its fifth winning week. It was also the biggest one-day loss since March 24, when the index fell 31 points.

The dollar slid to multiyear lows against the euro and the Japanese yen...

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