The JvL Bi

The JvL Bi-Weekly

James van Luik

Publisher & Editor & Compiler

Please forward the Bi-Weekly to any who might be interested

Monday, March 15, 2004

Volume 3, No. 5

[Editor's Note: Annually the US State Department issues a report on the state of abuses of human rights world wide. However, it does not include the United States in this report. To fill this gap the People's Republic of China has issued such a report devoted to the US record on human rights. They have been doing this for the last five years and the web site following contains their most recent one:

China Issues A Human Rights Report About the US

People's Daily (China), March 2, 2004

To see the full Report go to

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/20040301_136190.shtml]

7. Articles

1. A Message from Ramsey Clark

2. Meddling American Empire Lurches On

3. Poll: War Support by Demographic

4. Alan Greenspan is the Ultimate Oligarch

5. 2004: Choose Your Favorite Pro-War Candidate

6. Rights and Protections Denied Same-Sex Partners

7. Targeting Iraqi Civilians

1. A MESSAGE FROM RAMSEY CLARK

The Bush administration has worked towards the removal of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office for three years. It has enforced a unilateral embargo and cut off humanitarian aid to the poorest country in the hemisphere. It has sought to undermine support for President Aristide while supporting his opposition. It has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to force him out of office. It has supported calls for elections in violation of the constitution and laws of Haiti.

Most recently the US has forced regime change by armed aggression supporting former Haitian military officers, FRAPH leaders and criminal elements who entered Haiti with heavy firepower. Though only hundreds in number they easily captured Cape Haitien, Gonaives, Hinche and Les Cayes, killing a police armed only with pistols, who were untrained in warfare, or in defending against commando units.

This small force could never have entered Haiti if President Aristide, a man of peace, had not abolished the Haitian army, a praiseworthy act. Unfortunately, this left the country defenseless against armed aggression.

The international organizations, CARICOM, OAS and the UN should have acted to protect the democratically elected government of Haiti. After Costa Rica abolished its army, President Somoza (who US President Franklin Roosevelt called "our SOB ") of Nicaragua, twice threatened invasions of Costa Rica, only to be stopped, once by the OAS and once by Venezuela.

The US consistently acted to force President Aristide to leave Haiti, abandon his constitutional duties, repudiate democratic processes and desert his people to the tender mercies of the Old Regime. The army, the paramilitary FRAPH, criminal gangs and the old oligarchy that supported Duvalier terrorism against the Haitian people with US support for 30 years. When in 1986 Baby Doc Duvalier was forced to leave, his repressive forces no longer able to contain the anger of the people, it was in a US Air Force plane to the French Riviera with millions of dollars wrung from the sweat of the poor people of Haiti.

President Aristide consistently refused to leave his people, to resign, to subvert Haitian democracy and constitutional government under enormous pressure from the Bush Administration. He was under that enormous pressure for months as violence was again threatening his presidency as it did in 1991, nine months into his first term as the first democratically elected president of Haiti, the first and only country in which a successful slave rebellion took place. That revolution was begun by Toussaint Louverteur in 1791 and ended under Jean-Jacques Dessalines and others who defeated Napoleon's legions, 20,000 strong, and won independence for Haiti in 1804.

In his autobiography published in exile in 1992, first in France, Aristide wrote, "In Haiti, we are watching the ascent of a rebellious people who are revolting against slavery. I am only the reflection, an echo of that movement. They are the principal actors. I simply try to exist in their dimension, to show love and non-violence, through and beyond all the difficulties of life, as the only thing that will enable us to go forward."

President Aristide listed in the final chapter of his autobiography, "The Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti," first spoken by him before the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 1991. The commandments of President Aristide, the political faith of a priest, scholar and person of, by and for the poor, included: liberty; democracy; fidelity to human rights; the right to eat and to work; defense of the Haitian diaspora; no to violence; fidelity to the human being – and the highest form of wealth – fidelity to Haitian culture; everyone around the same table.

This is the man President Bush has deposed.

If the Bush administration policy of unilateral wars of aggression, violations of international law and the US Constitution and regime change is to be stopped before the US loses its last friend and creates a wave of terrorism that will engulf the planet for years, the US Congress must investigate:

1. The role of the US in forcing President Aristide from Haiti

2. The support the Bush administration gave in training, financing and arming the aggression against Haiti

3. The acts the Bush administration took to destabilize social order in Haiti, to support the old army, the FRAPH and the wealthy oligarchies

4. The role the US played in President Aristide's sudden departure from Haiti, contrary to all his public statements, and his transport to a distant country

5. Any explanation the Bush administration has for its failure to demand the former military, FRAPH and other violent groups to lay down their arms, arms the US provided, until the eve of the president's coerced departure

6. Why Washington placed every pressure at its disposal to force the democratically elected President of Haiti to surrender his constitutional powers

7. Why President Aristide was kidnapped in fact, even as Toussaint Louverteur was kidnapped to imprisonment in France in 1803 and Philippine President Emilio Aquinaldo was kidnapped by US soldiers to end the Philippine-American War in 1901?

The Western Hemisphere cannot be a safe or happy place until US military and economic intervention and regime change end, justice for all is assured, reparations for past offenses to Haiti are paid and until President Aristide returns to Haiti to serve his people.

2. MEDDLING AMERICAN EMPIRE LURCHES ON

JACK LAKAVICH

Mike Whitney's good article, "Regime Change in Haiti: The Bush Dominoes Keep Falling (March 2nd, 2004) really puts into clear focus the nature of the bumbling American Empire.

What I find so astounding, indeed outrageous, is that the American Empire had a clear and direct hand in the ouster of President Aristide of Haiti. American Marines, 2000 on standby for several years, force Aristide into exile and fly him out. This is just the last straw. Here is the US supposedly championing "freedom and democracy", while at the same time deliberately undermining it. Aristide was democratically elected. He championed the poor in the poorest country in the world, but the American empire is not interested in the poor, and much less those who champion their cause. When the whole story is told the American Empire will be seen with bloody hands yet again, in yet another country, and this one on its very doorstep. Step by step the US caused the downfall of Aristide.

And this is not to say that Aristide did everything right, that is not the point of this sordid affair.

The CIA was there to begin the destabilizing, Aristide's character was maligned and abused. Jesse Helms, that arch conservative, was able to influence the Congress – not that it needed much of a push since it is part and parcel of the American Empire – to chop off $500 million in Aid to Haiti, and so the slide into chaos began, exactly what the US Empire wanted. Of course chaos will result from this heartless stopping of Aid to a very poor country. Aristide was too "left"! My god, today even a liberal in the US is maligned as dangerous! Aristide, in the words of Jesse Helms, "was a little Castro". Well hello! The paranoia of Cuba was fully operative! And how can the Empire abide a nation on its doorstep which dares to speak out and stand for its people! How dare a country defy the US Empire! Cuba is to be commended for its steadfastness against US sanctions, and that is not to say that it is perfect.

There are so many examples of US meddling in the affairs of many countries, leaving behind chaos and instability. The US has the cheek to criticize China on its human rights record, and there are human rights abuses in China, but the US is the last country on earth that should preach to others about their records. Every country has some human rights abuses and problems, including my country, Canada! I heartily applaud China in issuing a very appropriate response…. The Information office of China's State Council issued on March 1^st the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2003, supplementing the US report. With a multitude of factual evidence, the article shows problems the US has with human rights and its violations of human rights in other countries. Congratulations China!

The American Empire keeps preaching to North Korea, to Iran, among others, about their nuclear programme. How come Israel is not included in this list? Another example of this sordid Empire is its foisting on Canada the Missile Defence System. No one should be fooled by the promises of the Americans. First, the so-called Missile Defence System is a dud, it just will not work, it is meant for big lucrative contracts for US companies. But the most scary part is that the Americans want to weaponize space, with nuclear weapons. They should not be trusted with words to the contrary. It is to fuel their Military Industrial Complex, the mainstay of its economy!

The illegal brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq is yet another example why the US should NEVER be trusted with its words. It used lies and fear for this horrendous misadventure. They are not in Iraq for the Iraqi people, the Empire has its own interests, no matter what the human cost in Iraqi lives, and even American lives. It is clear the US Empire is very experienced in tearing down, destroying, bombing destabilizing, and has no follow through plan to really help the people it has imposed itself upon. Look at Afghanistan, the US is still bombing away and hunting for Osama Bin Laden, who for a time was "Osama Bin Forgotten". Other countries, including Canada are trying to clean up the destruction as they work away at nation building. US promises to the Afghani people, is really the people be damned!

I am using the word Empire very deliberately, not cynically, because all events happening these days, and for so long now, flow out of the Empire mindset. However, even powerful Empires come to an inglorious end, and the US Empire is full of cracks already, and is really falling apart, but before that happens there will be more destruction and destabilization, and undermining of peace and justice.

3. POLL: WAR SUPPORT BY DEMOGRAPHIC

STAFF OF THE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE, MARCH 01, 2004

(Twenty eight percent of 1,013 adult residents of the United States said they are "very certain" when told: "As you know, the US sent troops into Iraq to force it to disarm its WMD. Are you absolutely certain, pretty certain or not certain that this was the correct thing to do?")

4. ALAN GREENSPAN IS THE ULTIMATE OLIGARCH

RALPH NADER

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan strayed away from his charter once again to warn about the people's entitlement programs – Social Security and Medicare – becoming unaffordable. He suggested cuts in benefits to reduce deficits.

In the same breath, Mr. Greenspan urged that Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy – a huge cause of the growing federal deficits – be made permanent. His priorities should come as no surprise, for Mr. Greenspan is the ultimate oligarch.

The hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare giveaways annually, from local to state to federal governments, are not his concern. He is comfortable with this kind of direct and indirect corporate socialism where profits are less taxed and costs are socialized on the backs of individual taxpayers.

Instead, what bothers Mr. Greenspan are the social insurance programs for tens of millions of Americans-most of them the coming elderly. He raises the specter of social security insolvency because fewer workers will be supporting retirees. He testified that "it is important that we tell people who are about to retire what it is they will have." If so, why didn't the Chairman recall the projections by the Social Security trustees who tell us that the retirement fund is solid until 2042 without any changes or benefit cuts, based on an average GDP growth rate of 1.7 percent annually? The latter figure is very conservative. For the past 50 years the average GDP growth rate has been well over three percent.

At 1.7 percent, after 2042 without any changes, the decline in benefits would be gradual. At over three percent growth rates, benefits would continue beyond that date. Curious, isn't it, that the Chairman would ignore the corporate lobbying causes of the federal deficits, such as corporate tax shelters, loopholes, subsidies, handouts, giveaways and so forth. Why, if corporations and the wealthy were taxed at the rates prevailing in the prosperous 1960s, the deficits would be no more, quite soon.

Medicare is another matter. Its precarious future state is hostage to staggering annual price increases by the health care and drug industries which could be addressed by an efficient single payer health insurance system.

Mr. Greenspan chose not to mention the budget busting corporate bonanzas embedded in the $540 billion ten-year prescription drug deal. The massive drug industry lobbying battalions raised their champagne glasses when they got a ban on Uncle Sam negotiating drug price discounts for medicines paid for by the government. There was no mention of that lurking Niagara of red ink, corporate profiteering by the Chairman. Mr. Greenspan needs to be more introspective about why he focuses on benefits for the people that stimulate economic demand and ignores budgets and handouts for the corporations. It is not enough for him to pronounce the tautology that the latter stimulate economic growth. For whom? The increasing number of unemployed uninsured and undefended workers, whose white collar and blue collar jobs are being exported to very low wage authoritarian countries?

The Chairman has serious trouble criticizing the corporate states, including doing anything about the consumer credit abuses that the Federal Reserve directly is supposed to stop, like predatory lending. Reaction by the Democrats – John Kerry and John Edwards – was one of proper outrage to Mr. Greenspan's remarks. In their mind they may have been regretting why President Bill Clinton re-nominated the Republican Greenspan to another four-year term in 2000.

5. 2004: CHOOSE YOUR FAVORITE PRO-WAR CANDIDATE

JOHN PILGER

A myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a worldview different from that of George W. Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush" movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.

While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied the American media, the message of their equivalents in the Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000, the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative pressure group, published an ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." Every one of its recommendations for aggression and conquest was adopted by the administration.

One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, published a 19 page manifesto for the "New Democrats," who include all the principal Democratic Party candidates, and especially John Kerry. This called for "the bold exercise of American power: at the heart of "a new Democratic strategy, grounded in the party's tradition of muscular internationalism." Such a strategy would "keep Americans safer than the Republicans' go-it-alone policy, which has alienated our natural allies and overstretched our resources. We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of US global leadership…"

What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from euphemisms, there is none. All the leading Democratic presidential candidates supported the invasion of Iraq, bar one: Howard Dean. Kerry not only voted for the invasion, but expressed his disappointment that it had not gone according to plan. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "Did I expect George Bush to f*** it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." Neither Kerry nor any of the other candidates has called for an end to the bloody and illegal occupation; on the contrary, all of them have demanded more troops for Iraq. Kerry has called for another "40,000 active service troops." He has supported Bush's continuing bloody assault on Afghanistan, and the administration's plans to "return Latin America to American leadership" by subverting democracy in Venezuela.

Above all, he has not in any way challenged the notion of American military supremacy throughout the world that has pushed the number of US bases to more than 750. Nor has he alluded to the Pentagon's coup d'état in Washington and its stated goal of "full spectrum dominance." As for Bush's "preemptive" policy of attacking other countries, that's fine, too. Even the most liberal of the Democratic bunch, Howard Dean, said he was prepared to use "our brave and remarkable armed forces" against any "imminent threat." That's how Bush himself put it.

What the New Democrats object to is the Bush gang's outspokenness – its crude honesty, if you like – in stating its plans openly, and not from behind the usual veil or in the usual specious code of imperial liberalism and its "moral authority." New Democrats of Kerry's sort are all for the American empire; understandably, they would prefer that those words remained unsaid. "Progressive internationalism" is far more acceptable.

Just as the plans of the Bush gang were written by the neoconservatives, so John Kerry in his campaign book, A Call to Service lifts almost word for word the New Democrats' warmongering manifesto. "The time has come," he writes, "to revive a bold vision of progressive internationalism" along with a "tradition" that honors "the tough-minded strategy of international engagement and leadership forged by Wilson and Roosevelt . . . and championed by Truman and Kennedy in the cold war." Almost identical thoughts appear on page three of the New Democrats' manifesto:

As Democrats, we are proud of our party's tradition of tough-minded internationalism and strong record in defending America. Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman led the United States to victory in two world wars . . . [Truman's policies] eventually triumphed in the cold war. President Kennedy epitomized America's commitment to "the survival and success of liberty."

Mark the historical lies in that statement: the "victory" of the US with its brief intervention in the First World War; the airbrushing of the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War; the American elite's nonexistent "triumph" over internally triggered events that brought down the Soviet Union; and John F. Kennedy's famous devotion to "liberty" that oversaw the deaths of some three million people in Indo-China.

"Perhaps the most repulsive section of [his] book," writes Mark Hand, editor of Press Action, the American media monitoring group, "is where Kerry discusses the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement." Self-promoted as a war hero, Kerry briefly joined the protest movement on his return from Vietnam. In this twin capacity, he writes: "I say to both conservative and liberal misinterpretations of that war that it's time to get over it and recognize it as an exception, not as a ruling example of the US military engagements of the 20^th century."

"In this one passage," writes Hand, "Kerry seeks to justify the millions of people slaughtered by the US military and its surrogates during the 20^th century [and] suggests that concern about US war crimes in Vietnam is no longer necessary . . . Kerry and his colleagues in the 'progressive internationalist' movement are as gung-ho as their counterparts in the White House . . . Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi?"

The "anyone but Bush" movement objects to the Coke-Pepsi analogy, and Ralph Nader is the current source of their ire. In Britain, seven years ago, similar derision was heaped upon those who pointed out the similarities between Tony Blair and his heroine Margaret Thatcher – similarities which have since been proven. "It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the Guardian commentator Hywel Williams. "But the imperialism of the liberal may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature – its conviction that it represents a superior form of life."

Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New Democrats come from a tradition of liberalism that has built and defended empires as "moral" enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle.

As the New Democrats' manifesto rightly points out, the Democrats' "tough minded internationalism" began with Woodrow Wilson, a Christian megalomaniac who believed that America had been chosen by God "to show the way to the nations of this world, how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." In his wonderful new book, The Sorrows of Empire (Verso) Chalmers Johnson writes:

With Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual foundations of American imperialism were set in place. Theodore Roosevelt . . . had represented a European-driven, militaristic vision of imperialism backed by nothing more substantial than the notion that the manifest destiny of the United States was to govern racially inferior Latin Americans and east Asians. Wilson laid over that his own hyper-idealistic, sentimental and ahistorical idea [of American world dominance]. It was a political project no less ambitious and no less passionately held than the vision of world communism launched at almost the same time by the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution.

It was the Wilsonian Democratic administration of Harry Truman, following the Second World War, that created the militaristic "national security state" and the architecture of the cold war: the CIA, the Pentagon and the National Security Council. As the only head of state to use atomic weapons, Truman authorized troops to intervene anywhere "to defend free enterprise," In 1945, his administration set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as agents of US economic imperialism. Later, using the "moral" language of Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy invaded Vietnam and unleashed the US special forces as death squads; they now operate on every continent.

Bush has been beneficiary of this. His neoconservatives derive not from traditional Republican Party roots, but from the hawk's wings of the Democratic Party – such as the trade union establishment, the AFL-CIO (known as the "AFL-CIA"), which received millions of dollars to subvert unions and political parties throughout the world, and grew the weapons industry, built and nurtured by the Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's leading fanatic, began his Washington political life working for Jackson. In 1972 an aberration, George McGovern, faced Richard Nixon as the Democrats' antiwar candidate. Virtually abandoned by the party and its powerful backers, McGovern was crushed.

Bill Clinton, hero of the Blairites, learned the lesson of this. The myths spun around Clinton's "golden era of liberalism" are, in retrospect, laughable. Savor this obsequious front-page piece by the Guardian's chief political correspondent, reporting Clinton's speech to the Labour Party conference in 2002:

Bill Clinton yesterday used a mesmerizing oration . . . in a subtle and delicately balanced address [that] captured the imagination of delegates in Blackpool's Winter Gardens . . . Observers also described the speech as one of the most impressive and moving in the history of party conferences. The trade and industry secretary, Patricia Hewitt, described it as "absolutely brilliant."

An accompanying editorial gushed: "In an intimate, almost conversational tone, speaking only from notes, Bill Clinton delivered the speech of a true political master . . . If one were reviewing it, five stars would not be enough . . . What a speech. What a pro. And what a loss to the leadership of American and the world."

No idolatry was enough. At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, the leader of "the third way" and of "progressive internationalism" received a long line of media and Blair people who hailed him as a lost leader, "a champion of the center left."

The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a crypto-fascist. During the Clinton years, the principal welfare safety nets were taken away and poverty in America increased sharply; a multibillion-dollar missile "defense" system known as Star Wars II was instigated; the biggest war and arms budget in history was approved; biological weapons verification was rejected, along with a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, the establishment of an international criminal court, and a worldwide ban on landmines. Contrary to a myth that places the blame on Bush, the Clinton administration in effect destroyed the movement to combat global warming.

In addition, Haiti and Afghanistan were invaded, the illegal blockade of Cuba was reinforced and Iraq was subject to a medieval siege that claimed up to a million lives while the country was being attacked, on average, every third day: the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign in history. In the 1999 Clinton-led attack on Serbia, a "moral crusade," public transport, nonmilitary factories, food processing plants, hospitals, schools, museums, churches, heritage-listed monasteries and farms were bombed. "They ran out of military targets in the first couple of weeks," said James Bissett, the Canadian former ambassador to Yugoslavia. "It was common knowledge that NATO went to stage three: civilian targets." In their cruise missile attack on Sudan, Clinton's generals targeted and destroyed a factory producing most of the sub-Saharan Africa's pharmaceutical supplies. The German ambassador to Sudan reported: "it is difficult to assess how many people in this poor country died as a consequence . . . but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess."

Covered in euphemisms, such as "democracy-building" and "peacekeeping," "humanitarian intervention" and "liberal intervention," the Clintonites can boast a far more successful imperial record than Bush' s Neocons, largely because Washington granted the Europeans a ceremonial role, and because NATO was "onside." In a league table of death and destruction, Clinton beats Bush hands down.

A question that New Democrats like to ask is: "What would Al Gore have done if he had not been cheated of the presidency by Bush?" Gore's top adviser was the arch-hawk Leon Fuerth, who said the US should "destroy the Iraqi regime, root and branch." Joseph Lieberman, Gore's running mate in 2000, helped to get Bush's war resolution on Iraq though Congress. In 2002, Gore himself declared that an invasion of Iraq "was not essential in the short term" but "nevertheless, all American should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat." Like Blair, what Gore wanted was an "international coalition" to cover long-laid plans for the takeover of the Middle East. His complaint against Bush was that, by going it alone, Washington could "weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century."

Collusion between the Bush and Gore camps was common. During the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke, who probably would have becomes Gore's Secretary of State, conspired with Paul Wolfowitz to ensure their respective candidates said nothing about US policy towards Indonesia's blood-soaked role in southeast Asia. "Paul and I have been in frequent touch," said Holbrooke, "to make sure we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests."
The same can be said of Israel's ruthless, illegal expansion, of which not a word was and is said: it is a crime with the full support of both Republicans and Democrats.

John Kerry supported the removal of millions of poor Americans from welfare rolls and backed extending the death penalty. The "hero" of a war that is documented as an atrocity launched his presidential campaign in front of a moored aircraft carrier. He has attacked Bush for not providing sufficient funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, which, wrote the historian William Blum, "was set up by the CIA, literally, and for 20 years has been destabilizing governments, progressive movements, labour unions and anyone else on Washington's hit list." Like Bush – and all those who prepared the way for Bush, from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton - Kerry promotes the mystical "values of American power" and what the writer Ariel Dorfman has called "the plague of victimhood . . . Nothing more dangerous: a giant who is afraid."

People who are aware of such danger, yet support its proponents in a form they find agreeable, think they can have it both ways. They can't. Michael Moore, the filmmaker, should know this better than anyone; yet he backed the NATO bomber Wesley Clark as Democratic candidate. The effect of this is to reinforce the danger to all of us, because it says it is OK to bomb and kill, then to speak of peace. Like the Bush regime, the New Democrats fear truly opposing voices and popular movements: that is, genuine democracy, at home and abroad. The colonial theft of Iraq is a case in point. "If you move too fast, " says Noah Feldman, a former legal adviser to the US regime in Baghdad, "the wrong people could get elected." Tony Blair has said as much in is inimitable way. "We can't end up having an inquiry into whether the war [in Iraq] was right or wrong. That is something that we have got to decide. We are the politicians."

6. RIGHTS AND PROTECTIONS DENIED SAME SEX PARTNERS

AUTHORSHIP UNKNOWN

Because same-sex couples are denied the right to marry, same-sex couples and their families are denied access to the more than 1,000 US federal rights, protections and responsibilities automatically granted to married heterosexual couples. Among these are:

1. The right to make decisions on a partner's behalf in a medical emergency. Specifically, the states generally provide that spouses automatically assume this right in an emergency. If an individual is unmarried, the legal "next of kin" automatically assumes this right. This means, for example, that a gay man with a life partner of many years may be forced to accept the financial and medical decisions of a sibling or parent with whom he may have a distant or even hostile relationship.

2. The right to take up to 12 weeks of leave from work to care for a seriously ill partner or parent of a partner. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 permits individuals to take such leave to care for ill spouses, children and parents but not a partner or a partner's parents.

3. The right to petition for same-sex partners to immigrate.

4. The right to assume parenting rights and responsibilities when children are brought into a family through birth, adoption, surrogacy or other means. For example, in most states, there is no law providing a noncustodial, nonbiological or nonadoptive parent's right to visit a child – or responsibility to provide financial support for that child – in the event of a breakup.

5. The right to share equitably all jointly held property and debt in the event of a breakup., since there are no laws that cover the dissolution of domestic partnerships.

6. Family related Social Security benefits, income and estate tax benefits, disability benefits, family-related military and veterans' benefits and other important benefits.

7. The right to inherit property from a partner in the absence of a will.

8. The right to purchase continued health coverage for a domestic partner after the loss of a job.

Such inequities impose added costs on these families, such as increased health insurance premiums, higher tax burdens and the absence of pension benefits or Social Security benefits in the event of a partner's death.

Some same-sex and transgender families consult attorneys to draw up legal documents such as powers of attorney, co-parenting agreements and wills, that will at least permit them to declare who they wish to make health care and financial decisions for them if they becomes incapacitated; how they wish to share parenting responsibilities or, in the event of a breakup, custody of a child; and what they want to happen to their property when the die. However, these are not a substitute for legal protection under law and cannot provide the broad range of benefits and protections provided by law.

7. TARGETING IRAQI CIVILIANS

THOMAS J. NAGY

(The author has been single-minded in his attempts to prove that the US government deliberately targeted Iraqi civilians. His remarks below are extracted from a lengthy study from June 3^rd, 2003 with details of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) websites from where the information was obtained.)

Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the DIA proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the US government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.

The primary document, 'Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.,' is dated 22 January 1991. It spells out how sanctions will prevent Iraq from supplying clean water to its citizens.

In cold language, the DIA document spells out what is in store: 'Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable unless the population were careful to boil water.' The document gives a timetable for the destruction of Iraq's water supplies. 'Iraq's overall water treatment capability will suffer a slow decline, rather than precipitous halt,' it says. 'Although Iraq is already experiencing a loss of water treatment capability, it probably will take at least six months to (June 1991) before the system is fully degraded.' This document, which was partially declassified but unpublicized in 1995, can be found on the Pentagon's website at www.gulflink.osd.mil. (Nagy disclosed the document last fall. But the news media showed little interest in it. … The first one in this batch is called 'Disease Information,' and is also dated 22 January 1991. At the top, it says, 'Subject: Effects of Bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad.' The analysis is blunt: 'Increased incidence of diseases will be attributable to degradation of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification/distribution, electricity, and decreased ability to control disease outbreaks. Any urban area in Iraq that has received infrastructure damage will have similar problems.'