we start with several stories about Iraq:
Claims that Iraq had active 'weapons of mass destruction' programs have not been confirmed; nothing has been found. Here's a summary of the lack of evidence regarding WMD from the BBC, 13 July 2003.
Bush: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Robert Scheer reports about this in the Los Angeles Times via TruthOut.org
Geoffrey K. Pullum comments on George W. Bush's mis-use of rhetoric:
When this claim was later queried by the press, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was put out front to say, "It's technically accurate." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice explained, "The British have said that."
What any linguist familiar with English lexical semantics would notice here is that Rice switched verbs. Bush didn't make a statement about what the British had said; he made a statement about what they had learned.
The difference is crucial, because learn is what is known as a factive verb. I can say that two plus two is five time I like, but I can't learn that two plus two is five unless it really is.
Pullum's conclusion:
Whatever the rest of the justification for war against Iraq, the President really did personally vouch for the truth of the Niger yellowcake story in his State of the Union speech to Congress and the people.
That's what happens when you say "X has learned that P": you commit yourself to the claim that P is true. Don't toss factive verbs around lightly.
Here is a summary of the Wilson/Plame story posted at Politics Unusual
Bush welcomed the CIA probe on the leak (via CNN): so what's happened since?
Why is only Congressman Waxman interested (via Global Policy)?
Here's a quote from the relevant New York Times article [I refuse to link to the NYT archive.]
The United States government is paying the Halliburton Company an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show.
Halliburton, which has the exclusive United States contract to import fuel into Iraq, subcontracts the work to a Kuwaiti firm, government officials said. But Halliburton gets 26 cents a gallon for its overhead and fee, according to documents from the Army Corps of Engineers.
The cost of the imported fuel first came to public attention in October when two senior Democrats in Congress criticized Halliburton, the huge Houston-based oil-field services company, for "inflating gasoline prices at a great cost to American taxpayers." At the time, it was estimated that Halliburton was charging the United States government and Iraq's oil-for-food program an average of about $1.60 a gallon for fuel available for 71 cents wholesale.
But a breakdown of fuel costs, contained in Army Corps documents recently provided to Democratic Congressional investigators and shared with The New York Times, shows that Halliburton is charging $2.64 for a gallon of fuel it imports from Kuwait and $1.24 per gallon for fuel from Turkey...
Here's the BBC story by John Kampfner -- 'Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'' Here's some commentary from the blogosphere (blah3.com)
And here are links to Steno Sue's work:
The original (false) report in the Washington Post Note: this report includes the statement that they found "a 'prototype' Iraqi torture chamber in the hospital's basement, with batteries and metal prods" [why haven't we heard more about this? Perhaps it was another lie?] The WP ombudsman attempts to cover Steno Sue's ass The stenographers re-visit the story
A story on the 'war on terror':
Here is the text of the 9 11 report (from Findlaw and CNN)
Commentary from Alternet.org
Even the Saudi-American community thinks little is gained by keeping these secrets.
Several stories on politics:
Again, I refuse to link to the NYT archive, but here's the gist of the article from May 2, 2003:
Smithsonian Is No Safe Haven for Exhibit on Arctic Wildlife Refuge
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times, May 2, 2003
SEATTLE, May 1 Things had been going along pretty well in the improbable life of Subhankar Banerjee, a native of Calcutta, India, who has become perhaps the leading photographer of one of the coldest and most uninhabited places on earth, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
A physicist by training who learned photography from fellow shutterbugs in the off hours at Boeing, Mr. Banerjee found a publisher for a book of his wildlife photos and was granted an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Then, in a March 18 floor debate about oil drilling in the refuge, a senator urged every member to read Mr. Banerjee's book before calling the refuge a frozen wasteland. Suddenly Mr. Banerjee's work was being promoted on C-Span, one of the highest honors of his life, he said.
But it has been nothing but trouble ever since. The Smithsonian exhibit will still open on Friday, though in a much different version than what had been scheduled. Mr. Banerjee and the book's publisher say members of the Smithsonian told them that the museum had been pressured to cancel or sharply revise the exhibit of birds, caribou, musk oxen and other images he had photographed.
Smithsonian officials say that no pressure was applied and that the changes to the show -- it was moved from the main floor rotunda to a lower-level room, and captions were deleted and truncated -- are part of the routine, last-minute preparations for a major exhibition. [This is BS, sez Ghost Town Orange]
Now Mr. Banerjee, who had hoped to discuss the journey of the buff-breasted sandpiper or what it is like to be stuck in a tent with a wind-chill temperature of minus 80 degrees, finds himself in a political storm.
"I am naive about politics," Mr. Banerjee, who is 34 and lives in Seattle, said. "I still consider this a great honor. I don't understand how all this happened."
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, plans to question Smithsonian members at a hearing next week and will display some of Mr. Banerjee's pictures and the deleted captions.
"I want the world to see the caption of the little bird that the Smithsonian says is too controversial for the public," Mr. Durbin said. "There was political pressure brought on this exhibition. And it's a sad day when the Smithsonian, the keeper of our national treasures, is so fearful."
Smithsonian officials are angered and embarrassed at being in the middle of a congressional fight over whether to open the refuge to oil and gas drilling. "We do not engage in advocacy," said Randall Kremer, a museum spokesman. "And some of the captions bordered on advocacy."
Documents from the Smithsonian give an idea of the changes. For a picture of the Romanzof Mountains, the original caption quoted Mr. Banerjee as saying, "The refuge has the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen and is so remote and untamed that many peaks, valleys and lakes are still without names." [gasp, a caption bordering on advocacy--Ghost Town Orange]
The new version says, "Unnamed Peak, Romanzof Mountains." [Just routine last-minute preparations, apparently.]
This year the Smithsonian is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the national wildlife system; the first refuge was created by President Theodore Roosevelt, on Pelican Island in Florida.
But perhaps no other refuge has received as much attention as the Arctic domain, which was first protected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and enlarged by President Jimmy Carter.
As the centerpiece of his national energy policy, President Bush wants to open about 1.5 million acres of the refuge's coastal plain to drilling. It is, supporters of the move say, a potential motherlode of oil.
Led by Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who heads the Appropriations Committee, drilling supporters have derided the refuge as largely barren, frozen and lifeless for nearly 10 months a year. Most pictures of the refuge show the vast caribou herd that migrates to the coastal plain, or the birds that fly in to feast on the fecund grounds in the refuge's brief but intense summer.
Mr. Banerjee's breakthrough was to record four seasons of life on the refuge, particularly around the area where drilling would take place. Mr. Banerjee used his life savings and cashed out his retirement account to pay for the 14 months he spent in the refuge with a digital camera.
"I was looking for a place where I could live with the bears," he said. "Northern Alaska seemed perfect. But on the first day I was there, it was the coldest day of the year so far, and I panicked. My guide said, `It will get worse. But you will survive.' "
Sitting behind snow blinds with an Inupiat guide, he photographed birds, bears and other creatures going about life in the depth of winter. The biggest surprise was to find American dippers, tiny songbirds, feeding on bugs near hot springs when most of the refuge was engulfed by darkness and chill. When Mr. Banerjee returned from the refuge, he was still unpublished. He called the Smithsonian and Mountaineers Books, a nonprofit publisher in Seattle. Both were convinced by the images he brought back.
"Our intention was to produce a poetic testimony to this land," said Helen Cherullo, publisher of Mountaineers Books. The book, "Seasons of Life and Land, A Photographic Journey by Subhankar Banerjee," advocates preservation of the refuge. It features quotations from President Carter, the writer Peter Matthiessen, and the nature poet and essayist Terry Tempest Williams. Some of these quotations were to be in the exhibit; they have all been deleted. Mr. Banerjee's supporters say the changes were clearly a reaction to the debate in March, when Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, held up some of the images and said people who dismissed the refuge as white nothingness were wrong. The vote to open the refuge to drilling failed 52 to 48, prompting Senator Stevens to personalize the defeat. "People who vote against this today are voting against me," Senator Stevens said. "I will not forget it."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Stevens, said his office had applied no pressure on the Smithsonian. The senator, she added, did not even know about the show until last week. Shortly after the vote, the Smithsonian ( which earlier had written to Mr. Banerjee about its excitement about the project and promoted it on its Web site) sent a letter to the publisher, saying that the Smithsonian no longer had any connection to Mr. Banerjee's work, which the publisher thought meant the show might be canceled. Mr. Banerjee complained to some contributors to the book, including Mr. Matthiessen, who raised a fuss, prompting Senator Durbin's inquiry.
Mr. Kremer, the museum spokesman, said the letter disassociating the museum from Mr. Banerjee's work was in error. "There was no pressure whatsoever, either from the White House or anyone else," he said. "This museum is a sacred trust of the American people, and we take that responsibility very seriously."
It didn't make the headlines for long, but aides for Republican Senator Hatch were caught breaking into Democratic Senators' computers, stealing files, and leaking them to the press.
If we want honest elections, we won't let Diebold run them. See Blackboxvoting.org for more information on 'electronic voting'
The most fiscally irresponsible administration in American history. A Flood of Red Ink, from the Economist. And recovery from these deficits will not be easy:
This time the turnaround will be much tougher. There will be no peace dividend from the end of the cold war (indeed, the pressure on military spending may continue to increase). America is unlikely to see another stockmarket bubble, with its surge in tax revenues. As baby-boomers retire, the pressure from entitlement spending will be more acute. Set against this background, the path back to a sustainable fiscal policy will be extremely painful, even without any dramatic fiscal crisis. Long after Dubya is back on his ranch, Americans will be trying to recover from the mess he created.
And a pair of disasters to bookend the year:
Here's the Voice of America report--RealAudio links on page The conclusion of the investigation into the accident: some blame lies with NASA engineers over-reliance on PowerPoint:
From the New York Times: (no expiring links)
Published: December 14, 2003In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.
NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.
The Guardian's report for December 30: the death toll could reach 50,000
Still looking for more top news stories for 2003?
Here is Project Censored's top 25 censored media stories of 2002-2003.
And here is The Guardian Observer's news quiz for 2003.
Praise the LORD. Praise the LORD, O my soul.
I will praise the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing. --Psalm 146:1-4 NIV
I will praise the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing. --Psalm 146:1-4 NIV
