The speaker’s credentials were impressive. In 1999, during the Clinton Administration, he had been the chair of a national commission on terrorism. He knew his subject matter well. By coincidence he was speaking on the evening of the same day on which, according to Colin Powell, the administration got solid information tying the attack on the Cole to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and one day more than a month after Richard Clarke had handed in his memo outlining policy recommendations to deal with terrorism...click here for entire article

One thing it reflects, as John McCain has said, that his friend earned the right to speak out against the war with his distinguished service in Vietnam. The second thing it reflects is that George W. Bush never had anything to throw over a fence or keep on his office wall – no ribbons and no medals. He did not earn one flying the friendly Texas skies or plying the bars in Birmingham and he did not earn any sitting in the co-pilots seat on a 35 mile hop to the deck of the Abraham Lincoln a year ago....click here for entire article

April 27, 2004 - Am I a Liberal? Are you a Conservative? We don those labels like armor or hurl them like spears as we join in political battles but their meanings are puzzling. Just what is it that I am being liberal with? Just what is it that you are trying to conserve? It is, as the King said to Anna, “a puzzlement.”

For a decade the national purse strings have been in the uninterrupted control of the self proclaimed Conservatives of the Republican Majority in the House of Representatives. Today those same Conservatives have exclusive control of all three branches of the Federal Government. We would have expected that the result would have been that government had shrunk; that government would be operating at a modest budget surplus; and that the National Debt would be in the process of being retired. Those are, after all, values that have been at the core of Republican fiscal dogma for generations....click here for entire article

April 26, 2004 - Who is paying the price for our continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Who is making the sacrifice? I’m not talking about the dead and wounded. Who is paying the financial cost of these wars? Who is making the financial sacrifices that it takes to fight two wars on the far side of the world.

Twenty-Five percent of the soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq are weekend warriors; members of the Reserves and National Guard. They aren’t career soldiers. Before they were mobilized they had jobs or businesses. They made their livings in civilian occupations. Their Guard or Reserve service was something that they gave back to their nation. They left wives and kids at home when they reported for active duty. Many of them, those with small businesses, left employees at home as well. All of them took a big cut in income when they put on their uniforms and reported for duty....click here for entire article

April 23, 2004 - He wore number 40. He was a devastating defender for the Arizona Cardinals. He was worth 1.2 Million Dollars a year to the NFL ball club. He was no dummy and scored a 3.8 grade point as a marketing major while playing college ball. You knew that he was that rare commodity, a real student athlete. You knew he could count and you knew you could count on him. There he was, a multi-million dollar celebrity in his mid twenties, when something else happened to send his life in a different direction. September 11, 2001 hit him like he had been standing in New York when the planes hit. Pat Tillman was a patriot. He walked away from a three year contract and volunteered. He became an Army Ranger.

He is coming home. He was killed on a mission southeast of Kandahar. We don’t know how he died; all they are telling us is that he was killed in action in a fire-fight with the remnants of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. There won’t be any pictures of his homecoming. The Pentagon won’t allow us to see that. All CNN could do was run films of his devastating tackles in his last season as a football hero. His Saturday and Sunday exploits are not really important except those images remind us of what he was willing to sacrifice to serve his country in our forgotten and unfinished war....click here for entire article

The case argued yesterday does not consider what the remedy might be but whether the Federal judiciary can fulfill its Constitutional duty to insure that when the Executive acts it complies with the Constitution and Laws of the United States. At its most basic formulation the issue before the court is whether the President may, by announcing that the nation is at war, abrogate the Constitution and exercise arbitrary and dictatorial power over the individual. May he define away the individual’s unalienable rights merely by applying a label? Does the Constitution evaporate when the nation is at war?....click here for entire article

In Iraq the tissue thin Coalition’s commander announced that the mission to be accomplished in the near term is the capture or death of al Sadr and the destruction of his Mahdi militia. When viewed, as it will be viewed in the Islamic world, in the light of the Israeli strike in Gaza, that policy statement and the subsequent military execution of it will engrave the impression that the Bush-Blair has abandoned the “Roadmap” that they trumpeted just a year ago and adopted the Sharon plan of piecemeal conquest of the Islamic world from the pillars of Hercules to the gates of Zamboanga. Bush and Blair have backed into the Crusade that the President declared on the heels of 9/11They have intensified and expanded the threat of a new and spectacular attack upon their own countries. Not only Al Qaeda but now the entire constellation of Palestinian guerilla organizations has the reason to expand the theatre of their operations to include the continental United States and the British Isles....click here for entire article

April 17, 2004 - Anthony Zinni spent 39 years in a Marine uniform. He is hardly a dovish peace activist. His military career stretched from Vietnam to strikes against Iraq and Al Qaeda. After he retired the Bush Administration made him special envoy to the Mid-East to grapple with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His resume has included commanding the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force - the elite marine unit now engaged in Fallujah and a tour at the head of Central Command.

For years, General Zinni says, he warned the policy makers in Washington that an Iraq without Saddam would fracture into sectarian violence and become more dangerous to United States interests in the region and the world than Saddam ever was. When it became clear to him that the Administration intended to launch its war in Iraq, Zinni resigned to voice his opposition to the war policy...click here for entire article

Now I ask you to imagine that city under fire. Imagine troops moving house to house and building to building. Supported by tanks, attack helicopters and close air support they pacify neighborhood after neighborhood leaving a wake of broken homes and shops behind. The city is cordoned off with road blocks and check points. No one except women, children and old men is allowed to leave. Little in the way of food or medical supply is allowed in. In the city center the hospitals are filled with injured, maimed and dying people. Imagine streams of people like you, fleeing from the destruction, are reaching your hometown with only the few belongings that they could carry in their cars. Will you feel kindly toward the troops besieging that neighboring city no matter what the reason for the action? Would you greet them with flowers and sweets or with fearful, sullen stares? Would you smile at the occupying troops or would you do all that you could to defend your home and family?...click here for entire article

April 15, 2004 - Bin Laden, or rather someone who claims to be Bin Laden, made an audio tape that is being broadcast on Arab television stations this morning. In it he offers what he calls a ‘truce’ to European nations who withdraw their troops from Islamic countries within 3 months and renews threats to exact revenge from the United States. None of that is news. Al Qaeda and its allies have been trying to drive a wedge between the United States and its political and economic allies for some time using the diplomacy of terror to do so. The 3/11 attack in Madrid is a prime example of the technique.

Neither is it new that the tape blames America for Israel’s killing of Sheik Yassin, the Hamas leader. The chanted mantra that the United States is responsible for Israel’s actions has been repeatedly sold to the Arab street for years. With the Presidents shift in policy to endorse the Sharon illusion of withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for American recognition of the legitimacy of West Bank settlements will certainly give credence to the militant’s claim that America is Israel’s willing accomplice in what they label as crimes against the Palestinian people. It is significant that the Israeli Prime Minister took great pains to issue a thinly veiled endorsement of George Bush in their joint appearance yesterday, praising him as the American leader whose opposition to terrorism was the greatest in the Israeli’s experience. Bush returned the praise. The implication was that the President was trading policy for political support....click here for entire article

April 14, 2004 - They call them Parrotheads. They go to every Jimmy Buffet concert that they can find. They don’t go to hear a new song. They want the old songs – the ones that they have memorized the words to. I’m sure that you know a Parrothead, there are so many out there. They don’t go to hear Jimmy sing. They go to sing along. They go to spend a rum-soaked hour or two swinging on a tire swing, having a cheeseburger just short of paradise, and being a pirate looking back at 40. They are the unpaid backup singers on the Live from Margaritaville albums. Jimmy makes a million off of them and never has to learn a new song.

Watching the Presidents campaign appearance press conference reminded me of nothing so much as a Jimmy Buffet concert. There was no new song. The words were familiar. We all know the lyrics by heart. There was Stay the Course and Finish the Job, and the ever popular Finding Mustard Gas at the Turkey Farm. Freedom, says the President, is the Almighty’s gift to all mankind and it is our obligation to help Him give it. It was all the same old songs sung in the same old way without a note out of place. The President’s performance was flawless until some smarty-pants reporter asked him to reflect upon the biggest mistake he had made after the September 11th attacks. He was speechless for a moment but them recovered telling the world that he wished the question had been submitted in writing so that he could have prepared an answer, All in all the Fourth Estate played its role well – that of unpaid backup singers on the Live from Crawford album....click here for entire article

It is not a new system, this privatization of an Army’s logistical tail, though the GIs that ran the Red Ball Express from the channel ports to Patton’s spearhead for a private’s pay would not understand it. States Dyckman built fine estate in the Bronx with the profit he made hiring wagons and teams to both Washington’s rebels and the King’s redcoats. As the rebellion wore on he found the King's gold much more reliable than Continental shinplasters and buttered his bread from that side. It helped that he found employment as the clerk for the British Quartermaster and shared his good fortune with his patron. Even then he spent the post revolution years shuttling between New York and London courtrooms defending his fortune against claims of corruption. Even his patron sued him claiming that he had held out money from the agreed share. Overcharging is not a new phenomenon of the 21st Century....click here for entire article

For at least 50 American families it was a very rough week. A year ago when I wrote Faces on the eve of the fall of Baghdad there were just 119 families peering into their memories searching for the faces that they would never see again. Today there are more than 664 chairs that will forever remain empty at Easter. All over the world Christians gathered yesterday to celebrate the triumph of life over death in the resurrection of the Christ. For 664 American families that celebration was tempered with the reality that faith could not restore their sons and daughters to them. http://www.lindamclark.net/mingreport/poems/faces.htm

A year ago the Administration told us that its resort to war and the sacrifice of American lives was justified by the specter of an immanent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, his arsenal of fearsome weapons, and his support of international terrorism. Today the Administration is consumed with justifying, not its war policy toward Iraq, but rather its failure to act on the clear warnings that the immanent threat to America came from the Al Qaeda shadows and not Iraq....click here for entire article

We can’t even say that the heads of the intelligence services failed. The directors of the CIA and FBI were “running around with their hair on fire” in June and July knowing that a strike was immanent and trying to get anybody in the Administration to see the danger. They did not know what it was. They did not know just who it was. They did not know when it was coming but they did know it was on its way.

Since February 1993 when just a month into the Clinton Administration a sleeper cell detonated a truck bomb in the World Trade Center parking garage America knew that this country was as vulnerable to terrorist attack as were London or Tel Aviv. That crime was solved by solid police work and in the process plots to hit the infrastructure and monuments of New York City were uncovered and foiled. Perhaps, for the future, the case and the embryonic plots were unraveled too quickly...click here for entire article

April 10, 2004

* Item: An alert FBI agent in Arizona notices a large number of middle-eastern males taking flight lessons at various commercial aviation schools. He is suspicious and reports his concerns to Washington. The report stops at a middle-manager’s desk. No action is taken, no inquiry commenced.

* Item: An alert FBI agent in Minnesota checking the background of a Moroccan born French national under arrest for an immigration violation notices that he has requested flight simulator training to control a jumbo-jet in flight and requests a warrant to examine the suspect’s computer. The request dies on a middle-manager’s desk. No action is taken, mo warrant is sought, no inquiry commenced.

* Item: When the G8 meets in Genoa extraordinary security measures are put in place to protect against a rumored terrorist attack. The expected attack is said to involve a suicide mission to crash an explosive laden small plane into the building in which the conference is to be held. Specific and well publicized steps are taken to intercept such an attack. No attack occurs.

* Item: In May 2001 intelligence indicates that Al Qaeda is actively infiltrating the United States via Canada intending to strike on US soil. That information does not reach the President until August 6th.

* Item: In early 2001 the FBI carries on more than 70 separate investigations of suspected terrorist sleeper cells in the United States. That information does not reach the President of the United States until August 6th.

* Item: In early August 2001 there was a report that Al Qaeda discussed using an aircraft to either bomb or crash into the American embassy in Nairobi as early as October 2000. That report apparently died on someone’s desk in the White House and was not seen by either the National Security Advisor or President until after the Twin Towers had fallen.

* Item: At the beginning of his month long holiday in Crawford, Texas, August 6th the President is given the PDB outlining the threat that Al Qaeda will strike within the United States. The National Security Advisor schedules the first principals meeting concerning terrorist for September 4th.

* Item: On September 4th 2001 the President issues the first National Security Directive of his Presidency. It concerns the nation’s defense against terrorism. One week later Al Qaeda struck....click here for entire article

April 9, 2004 - A year ago we saw a young marine scale the statue of Saddam Hussein, drape Old Glory across the statue’s face, and attach the cable that would bring the statue to the ground. It was a masterfully managed message. Even those who harbored great doubt as to the wisdom of the policy that had brought that young marine to that place felt a moment of patriotic pride in the accomplishments of our armies. They had, in three short weeks vanquished the boogey man and brought him, symbolically at least, to his knees.

A year has passed and the images are different. The cheering crowd has faded away. Our soldiers are again at the statue, this time methodically tearing down the taunting posters that appeared in the mystery of the night. Another marine in another Iraqi place carries the load of a body-bagged friend away from the face of battle. A cluster of comrades huddle in prayer over the body of another. A roasted human haunch swings from the girders of Fallujah Bridge to haunt our memories. Even those whose breasts swell with pride and forgive any missteps to advance the New American Century must pause with a moment of revulsion at the sight of the rider of the pale horse. War is coming home to our living rooms and to our cemeteries and its message has become unmanageable....click here for entire article

Those of us whose memories are unclouded by a partisan agenda recall that in the latter days of the previous century the entire public was alert to the probability of a terrorist attack to disrupt the celebration of New Years 2000. The intercepted bomber was not the first potential threat intercepted or turned back at the Canadian border that holiday season. No specific alert to the customs service was necessary. We were all alert to that possibility...click here for entire article

It is not Vietnam’s Five-O’clock War. The world has changed in thirty years. We no longer wait for film to be processed, edited and flown around the world to a news studio. The images come to us from Baghdad with only a seven second delay. The film from Saigon was yesterday’s news – or that of the day before. In our 24 hour saturation news cycle we are seeing today’s events within hours if not minutes.

Neither is it the embedded war of a year ago, with coverage as carefully planned as the campaign to show America the relentless advance of its armies across the desert. With television’s ravenous hunger for video to fill its hours, pictures of the chaos that is occupied Iraq flow in a continuous stream to fill our screens. In the last week Iraq has become the ultimate in Reality TV coming to you almost live and as it happens....click here for entire article

April 7, 2004 - Last week I was at the financial center of the world – Wall Street and Broad – where our taxi snaked through traffic barriers and was searched from hood to trunk and sniffed by dogs to insure no terrorist drove a car bomb to the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. My appointment was at Chase-Manhattan, a sterile tower rising where my ancestor had pastured pigs in the 17th Century. Building security was tight; a system of passes, searches and barriers that insured no terrorist could reach the offices on the upper floors. When I visited Federal Hall, the nation’s first capital and the place where Washington became our first President, the metal detectors screened my person while my briefcase was x-rayed and my lap-top removed to prove it was a working computer and not a bomb.

At Federal Hall the major exhibit memorialized John Peter Zenger and his New York Weekly Journal that had published articles, ballads and false advertisements which Royal Governor William Cosby deemed seditious libel in that the criticism of him, even if true, tended to “arouse the sentiments of the people” against the government. The paper was seized, its press destroyed and Zenger was imprisoned charged with sedition and libel. Truth was no defense to the charge and the principle was that the greater was the truth, the greater was the libel against government. The 1735 trial established the principle that in America, even under British colonial rule, the press was free to criticize government. The point of the exhibit, its central theme, was that a press free to be critical of authority was at the foundation of democracy. It seemed ironic indeed that the news had just moved that Paul Bremer had just closed a Baghdad newspaper on the ground that its articles tended to provoke opposition to the American occupation....click here for entire article

April 6, 2004 - Yesterday, in a piece reflecting on the current guerilla offensive in Iraq, I wrote, “Power may grow, as Mao said, from the barrel of a gun but democracy does not.” A reader threw the sentence back at me and advised that I should tell that to our ancestors at Lexington and Concord. Alas, I cannot. My ancestors were at neither the Village Green nor the Rude Bridge on the 18th of April in ’75 for they were not Massachusetts men.

They were Marylanders and Virginians, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians. They sat in the House of Burgesses in 1619 and took their place at the Governor’s Council in Niew Amsterdam. They were with Washington at Brooklyn Heights and on the Brandywine. . They crossed the Delaware at Christmas and marched across Illinois with Rogers Clark. They, like the men from Boston, knew that they did not shoulder their arms to establish democracy but to defended their democratic liberty and freedom in their own country from the assault upon it by their own sovereign and to drive his alien invaders from the land in which the tree of liberty had taken a firm and enduring root.

No, my friends, democracy does not grow from the barrel of a gun. It grows in the hearts of free men and women, nurtured by their yearnings and watered too often by blood shed in its defense. It grows in the soil of free and open debate fertilized by a free press to distribute its ideas in the market place of open minds. What grows from the barrel of a gun is liberty’s antithesis – power that stifles debate and uses its force to still the voices of dissent, paralyze the printing press, and impose an alien regime of puppets. It is that against which my ancestors fought and bled and died....click here for entire article

April 5, 2004 - Thirty years ago the United States turned Vietnam back to the Vietnamese people. Richard Nixon’s exit strategy was realized under his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford. Ford had become our first appointed President when first Spiro Agnew and then Richard Nixon himself had resigned from the nation’s seats of power. Ford lost the Presidency to Jimmy Carter in the following election.

Last night the President, faced with the news of a determined revolt against the continuing American occupation of Iraq reiterated his promise to turn that country back to the Iraqis on June 30 – a little less than sixty days away. Those of us who were adults in 1974 remember what happened after the Vietnamese were handed back their war-torn country. We remember the Marine helicopters lifting off from the roof of the embassy in Saigon with the enemy at the gates and we remember the despair of the Vietnamese clients that we left behind. Is Baghdad to suffer the fate of Saigon?...click here for entire article