Lawrence Eagleburger, US secretary of state under President George Bush senior and an adviser on the former Yugoslavia, dies at the age of 80.

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US ex-diplomat Eagleburger dies

“Now, next week I will have legislation out on the floor that ensures that we do have a strategy to deploy the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. When President Bush 1 used it during the first Persian Gulf War, the price of oil went down 33 percent. When Bill Clinton used it in September and October of 2000, the price went down 18 percent. When George Bush 2 used it after Katrina, it went down 9 percent. It is a message to speculators.” Read full article > >

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A gusher of oil rhetoric

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, on Tuesday added his voice to the growing chorus of Republican discontent with the tax compromise.

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The Caucus: Romney Comes Out Against Tax Deal

This article titled “Barack Obama gives way to Republicans over Bush tax cuts” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Tuesday 7th December 2010 01.46 UTC

Barack Obama is bowing to Republican demands to extend a deep tax cut for wealthier Americans, to the fury of some of the president’s allies who say he has succumbed to “blackmail”.

In a bruising political battle that appears to set the tone for Obama’s dealings with the Republicans in Congress following their victories in last month’s midterm elections, the president had sought to extend a tax cut for middle-class Americans introduced by the Bush administration seven years ago which expires at the end of this month. But he wanted to see a return to pre-cut rates for households with an income above 0,000 a year, on the grounds that wealthier Americans could afford to pay more. The move would generate trillions of dollars for the financially-strapped treasury over the next decade.

The Democratic leadership believed that provided the middle class was looked after, the Republicans would find it difficult to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. The House of Representatives, still controlled by Democrats until the new Congress is sworn in next month, passed Obama’s plan by a clear majority last week. But Republicans blocked the legislation in the Senate at the weekend and said they would rather see everyone’s taxes rise than agree to scrapping the cuts for the wealthy.

Some Democrats called on Obama to stand firm and let the Republicans carry the blame for the inevitable middle-class backlash. But leading Democrats say the president is backing down and has agreed to extend tax cuts for everyone. In return, the White House appears to have extracted an agreement to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed.

Today Obama said that his priority is to “prevent the middle-class tax increase” that would have come about if there was no agreement. “There’s some serious debates that are still taking place. Republicans want to make permanent the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

“I have argued that we can’t afford it right now. But what I’ve also said, we have to find consensus here because a middle-class tax hike would be very tough not only on working families, it would also be a drag on our economy at this moment,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re coming up with a solution, even if it’s not 100% of what I want or what the Republicans want.”

Leading Democrats did not hide their frustration at the president’s backtracking. Senator John Kerry, the former presidential candidate, accused Republicans of holding the country hostage.

“They’ve said, ‘No, we are willing to hold that hostage so that we can give the wealthiest people in the country a bonus tax cut’,” he said.

The outgoing House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is reported to have expressed deep unhappiness at the deal, saying the White House gave in too easily to Republican pressure. Richard Durbin, the second highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, said the agreement to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy was “against my judgment”.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel economics prize winner, called on Obama to stand firm against the Republicans’ “tax-cut blackmail” which will cost the US treasury trillion in revenue over the next decade and prompt a “major fiscal crisis”.

“If Democrats give in to the blackmailers now, they’ll just face more demands in the future. As long as Republicans believe that Mr Obama will do anything to avoid short-term pain, they’ll have every incentive to keep taking hostages. If the president will endanger America’s fiscal future to avoid a tax increase, what will he give to avoid a government shutdown?” Krugman wrote in the New York Times.

But Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said that Obama had little choice but to make a deal.

“The Democrats generally haven’t adjusted to the fact that they lost the election badly. That’s fundamental and they haven’t accepted it. Republicans designated maintaining tax cuts as their top priority,” he said.

“The Republicans have pulled it off at the right moment. It’s immediately after the election with two years to go before the next election. So the Republicans are getting to please their constituency which believes in that from top to bottom – not just the rich but their middle-class members – without suffering any real electoral consequences. That’s why Obama caved. In the end, everybody’s taxes would have gone up. Republicans would have held to this and blamed Obama.”

Sabato said that the confrontation over taxes sets the tone for Obama’s dealings with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and an increasingly belligerent Republican leadership in the Senate next year.

“This is going to be a very inflexible Republican congress,” he said.

In a statement from the White House last night, Obama sought to explain to the American people how he had come to agree to what many in his own party decried as a humiliating climbdown. He said that he had with regrets accepted compromise in order to spare millions of struggling Americans further pain in the form of rising taxes.

Obama made no attempt to disguise his contempt for the Republican position. He said he “completely disagreed” with their insistence that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two per cent of Americans were made permanent.

“Economists from all across the political spectrum believe giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires does very little to grow our economy.”

But he said that he felt he had no option but to swallow that element in order to loosen the Republican stranglehold which would have seen two million Americans lose their unemployment benefits by the end of this month and millions more face rising taxes.

“What is abundantly clear to everybody in this town is that the Republicans will block a permanent tax cut for the middle class unless they also get a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.”

He conceded that the compromise would be unpopular equally among his supporters and opponents. But he said “I’m not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage for political warfare here in Washington.” “I think this is a symptom of the weakness that was produced November 2 which in turn was a symptom of the weakness produced by a bad economy and Obama’s decisions.”

Bush tax cuts

George Bush passed two major tax cuts that were portrayed by critics as gifting large amounts of money to the wealthiest Americans. The second round of cuts, in 2003, reduced taxes across the board from individual income tax to capital gains and estate tax. The move was controversial and the legislation only passed the Senate after Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, cast a deciding vote.

The tax cuts expire at the end of this year. Republicans campaigned in last month’s midterm elections to maintain the cuts for all tax payers. Barack Obama said he would keep the benefit for middle-lass households with a total income below 0,000 a year but that the better off should pay higher taxes at a time when the US is sinking deeper in to debt.

By some estimates, maintaining the reduced rate for households on more than 0,000 a year will cost the US government about tn in income over the next decade. But earlier this year Deutsche bank concluded that letting the Bush-era tax cuts for wealthier Americans expire would significantly slow economic growth.

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This article titled “George Bush accused of borrowing from other books in his memoirs” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Sunday 14th November 2010 19.24 UTC

George Bush’s memoirs were billed as offering “gripping, never before heard detail” of his time in the White House.

Now it appears that Decision Points is not so much the former president’s memoirs as other people’s cut and pasted memories.

Bush’s account is littered with anecdotes seemingly ripped off from other books and articles, even borrowing without attribution – some might say plagiarising – from critical accounts the White House had previously denounced as inaccurate.

The Huffington Post noted a remarkable similarity between previously published writings and Bush’s colourful anecdotes from events at which he had not been present.

Bush borrows heavily from Bob Woodward’s account Bush at War, which the White House criticised as inaccurate when it was published in 2002. He also appears to take chunks from a book written by his former press secretary Ari Fleischer.

Bush recounts a meeting between Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on the Afghan president’s inauguration day, which he used as an example of hope for the future of the country.

The former president writes: “When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on 22 December – 102 days after 9/11 – several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport.

“As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were.

“Karzai responded: ‘Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.’”

The Huffington Post notes that the account and the quote are lifted almost verbatim and without attribution from a New York Review of Books article by Ahmed Rashid.

Bush also lifts a quote from an interview John McCain gave to the Washington Post on Iraq and then presents it as though McCain had said it to him.

Even where Bush is present and is quoting himself, he appears to have had his memory jogged by the accounts of others without finding much to add.

Many of the borrowed lines are taken from Woodward’s Bush at War, with the former president’s accounts of meetings bearing a striking similarity to Woodward’s.

Bush’s publisher has suggested that only confirms the accuracy of Decision Points. Others have suggested it is a reflection of two traits the former president was often criticised for – lack of original thought and laziness.

Bush also quotes Woodward’s writings almost word for word in places. Where Woodward writes: “The second option combined cruise missiles with manned bomber attacks,” Bush says: “The second option was to combine cruise missile strikes with manned bomber attacks.”

And where Woodward’s book says: “The third and most robust option was cruise missiles, bombers and what the planners had taken to calling ‘boots on the ground’,” Bush says: “The third and most aggressive option was to employ cruise missiles, bombers and boots on the ground.”

Bush manages to remember exactly the same shouts as Woodward from the crowd at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks – “Do not let me down!” and “Whatever it takes” – even though there must have been a slew of them.

He appears to have borrowed from the memoirs of Fleischer in relating an anecdote about a hospital visit to meet injured survivors of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Striking similarities between Decision Points and other writings, uncovered by the Huffington Post website

• In Decision Points, Bush describes the inauguration of Hamid Karzai, which he did not attend: “As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai said: ‘Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.’”

•From Ahmed Rashid’s The Mess in Afghanistan in the New York Review of Books, as related personally to him by Karzai: “As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim [the Tajik warlord] looked confused. ‘Where are your men?’ he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. ‘Why General,’ he replied, ‘You are my men – all of you are Afghans and are my men …’”

• From Decision Points: “The second option was to combine cruise missile strikes with manned bomber attacks.”

•From Bob Woodward’s Bush at War: “The second option combined cruise missiles with manned bomber attacks.”

• From Decision Points: “The third and most aggressive option was to employ cruise missiles, bombers and boots on the ground.”

• From Bush At War: “The third and most robust option was cruise missiles, bombers and what the planners had taken to calling ‘boots on the ground.’”

• Decision Points: “One man yelled: ‘Do not let me down!’ Another shouted straight at my face: ‘Whatever it takes.’”

• From Bush at War: “‘Whatever it takes,’ they shouted. One pointed to [Bush] as he walked by and yelled out: ‘Don’t let me down.’”

• From Decision Points, quoting John McCain in a manner that suggests he is talking to the then president: “‘I cannot guarantee success,’ he said, ‘But I can guarantee failure if we don’t adopt this new strategy.’”

•From an interview by McCain with the Washington Post in 2007: “‘I cannot guarantee success, but I can guarantee failure if we don’t adopt this new strategy,’ he said.’”

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This article titled “Prisoner of Bush’s ‘war on terror’” was written by Michael Boyle, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 11th September 2010 10.00 UTC

During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama made a number of impassioned calls for the United States to move beyond the psychological scars inflicted by the 11 September attacks and to adopt a more mature and realistic approach to dealing with the threat posed by al-Qaida. Calling on Americans to reject the “colour-coded politics of fear”, he pledged to close Guantánamo Bay, to forbid the use of torture in interrogations, and to rely on the courts – both civilian and military – to try terrorist suspects. As a candidate, Obama made it clear that he believed it was time to move America’s response to terrorism out of the shadows and to engage in a genuine dialogue with the Muslim world.

It is hard to reconcile the sweeping ambition of candidate Obama with the cautious baby-steps taken by the man who holds that office today. Almost two years after taking office, President Obama has officially ended the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects; but on most other counts, he has come up empty-handed.

Guantánamo Bay is not closed; the US is no closer to developing a consistent policy on trying terrorist suspects in a court of law; and the dialogue with the Muslim world has sputtered out after his Cairo speech. Worse still, President Obama has preserved some of the most misguided aspects of the Bush administration’s approach to al-Qaida while defending the culture of secrecy that permitted its worse abuses – like torture and extraordinary rendition – to flourish.

Only days ago, the Obama administration defended in court the right of the CIA to conduct extraordinary renditions on terrorist suspects, which permits American officials to kidnap foreign citizens and secretly transfer them to third countries for interrogation. It has promised to insist on “diplomatic assurances” from its partners that torture will not be used, but these are, at best, unenforceable, and at worst, disingenuous. Those alleging mistreatment, the Obama administration has now argued, cannot be allowed to sue in civilian courts for fear of endangering national security.

Also against its campaign promises, the Obama administration has sought to block efforts to restore the rights of habeas corpus to detained suspects in foreign countries, thus entitling the US government to hold these suspects indefinitely in foreign jails or black sites without due process rights. This is in direct contravention to a supreme court ruling in 2008, which restored habeas corpus rights to prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. Rather than seizing the opportunity to push for new and creative legislation and policies to deal with the legal black holes created by his predecessor, President Obama has quietly continued these policies – all the while brushing off calls for accountability for Bush administration officials who initiated these misguided practices.

More worryingly, President Obama has in some respects proven more willing to use force against terrorist suspects than President Bush. He has increased the number of CIA-run drone strikes in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region. These strikes, while effective in targeting militants, have killed an unknown number of civilians. They have been waged in the shadows, without public acknowledgment and without clear lines of authority or control inside government. By expanding the number and geographic reach of these strikes – first deeper into Pakistan, then onto Yemen – the Obama administration may be inadvertently stirring hornet’s nests that will generate even more terrorist attacks on the United States.

We simply do not know what the potential blowback risks of expanding drone attacks worldwide are. Nor is it clear that the Obama administration has paused to take a measure of that risk. Such a policy may be effective in degrading the leadership structure of al-Qaida’s cells, but it may also make the United States a whole host of new enemies whose capacity for harm is scarcely understood.

It is curious that this president – so eager to condemn President Bush for similar decisions on the campaign trail – has not offered a public defence or explanation for these policies. In contrast to his predecessor, who used the bully pulpit to make the case for a generational war against al-Qaida, President Obama has left it to his subordinates to make unremarkable speeches on counterterrorism, and to his lawyers to offer strong defences for Bush-era policies behind closed courtroom doors. When confronted with failed attacks on US soil, he has appeared slow and off his game – reluctant to engage in the militant posturing that characterised the Bush approach, yet equally reluctant to engage the public in a mature discussion about the nature of the threat and the proper response to it.

His lack of public engagement with the problem of terrorism has effectively ceded the rhetorical ground on the issue of counterterrorism to the Republicans. While President Bush left no doubt that he saw terrorism as a “war” problem, we still do not know what President Obama thinks the struggle against al-Qaida is or should be. His administration quietly discontinued the use of the phrase “war on terror”, but never told the American public why it did so, or how they should now think of the threat if it is no longer a war. This has left the administration vulnerable to the obvious Republican bait that they do not know they are at war with and that they are afraid to call their enemy by its name.

But perhaps more seriously, it has also left much of President Bush’s framing of the problem virtually intact. Because of this neglect, the American public still conceives of terrorism in the terms set by George W Bush; in his two years in office, President Obama has squandered the opportunity to redefine the problem of terrorism in a way that makes a clear break from the conceptual approach of his predecessor.

It is hard to understand why this president – so eloquent and so capable of seizing teachable moments for other issues – has remained so muted on terrorism. His absence is especially notable now that, in many respects, public debate is moving backwards. The administration dithered as protests over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York became a platform for resentment against Muslims in the United States by a small but vocal group of rabid nationalists. Only after the issue had dominated television news for days, did President Obama produce a carefully hedged statement, saying that the builders had the right to build it, but he would not comment on the wisdom of doing so.

This controversy was followed up by the detestable plans by a religious extremist in Florida to burn copies of the Qur’an, which, after days of controversy, merited finally a call from Obama that he hopes the pastor “prays on it and refrains from doing it”. At two crucial moments where the president could have been a forceful voice for tolerance, he entered into the public debate reluctantly and with statements more equivocal than the situation demanded.

This gap between candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As I have argued before, he has made some important steps towards acknowledging the limits of America’s influence abroad. But he has not managed to make a decisive break from the Bush approach to managing terrorism.

He has succeeded in changing the atmospherics of America’s counterterrorism policy; gone is the rampant fear-mongering of the Bush administration and the full-throated calls for a war on the forces of “radical Islam”. But what has emerged in its place is neither a coherent policy nor a new conceptual approach for the problem of terrorism. The president has yet to deliver a vision for addressing terrorism that moves beyond the trauma of that fateful day in September nine years ago.

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This article titled “Barack Obama heads to New Orleans to mark Katrina’s fifth anniversary” was written by Chris McGreal in New Orleans, for The Guardian on Sunday 29th August 2010 22.00 UTC

Barack Obama visited New Orleans today to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating assault on the city by emphasising the dramatic shift in reconstruction policy since he took power after the failures of the Bush administration. But hanging over the trip was a widespread feeling along the Gulf coast that the president has faced his own Katrina with the disastrous BP oil spill.

Obama arrived under stormy skies that provided an appropriate backdrop to the remembrance of the hurricane that killed about 1,800 people.

He was expected to meet survivors and then talk about the huge reconstruction effort, as well as the problems posed by the BP blowout, in a speech at Xavier University, a historically black and Catholic university flooded by Katrina.

The federal government has spent 3 billion (£92bn) on rebuilding public infrastructure, such as schools and bridges, and private housing as well as reinforcing the levees that failed so spectacularly five years ago. The administration says it has freed up billions more dollars and cut through the red tape to allow many more people to receive help to rebuild their homes.

But a large part of the city’s population is still scattered across Louisiana and neighbouring Texas. New Orleans’ population has fallen by more than 20% and just a few thousand of the tens of thousands of homes that were destroyed by Katrina have been rebuilt.

Five years ago, the then Senator Obama criticised the “unconscionable ineptitude” of the Bush administration’s abandonment of hundreds of thousands of people without food, water or proper shelter in the days after the hurricane tore apart New Orleans levees and flooded the city. Later, Obama would also condemn a government that “sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes”.

But Obama arrived in the wake of what some in Louisiana regard as his own Katrina – the BP oil spill that has devastated the local fishing industry and blighted coastal tourism as well as the environment. The White House said the president talk about the oil spill clean up in his speech.

Even before the president arrived, the debate about the disastrous government failures over Katrina had been revived by Michael Brown, the former head of the much derided Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). Last week, he sought to shift responsibility for its failures in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane by blaming officials in Washington for making the “fatal mistake” of talking up facts and figures as indicators of success without acknowledging the huge obstacles the agency faced in the wake of the hurricane.

Brown said he winced when he heard President Bush deliver his now infamous endorsement: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

“I knew the minute he said that, the media and everybody else would see a disconnect between what he was saying and what I was witnessing on the ground,” Brown said. “That’s the president’s style. His attitude and demeanour is always one of being a cheerleader and trying to encourage people to keep moving. It was just the wrong time and the wrong place.”

Two weeks later Brown resigned.

The city has also been unable to shake off the legacy of the violence as looters tore into shops, some out of desperation for food but many to profit from the disaster.

Federal authorities are investigating evidence that senior New Orleans police officers gave shoot-to-kill orders against looters. A public television documentary earlier this month revealed that in one instance a police captain, James Scott, told subordinates about to go out on patrol during the crisis: “We have authority by martial law to shoot looters.”

But there was no martial law and no legal authority to use deadly force against people stealing property.

Six police officers have already been charged over the shooting of unarmed civilians attempting to cross a bridge to escape the floodwater.

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This article titled “Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Friday 27th August 2010 22.24 UTC

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.

But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

Castro told a visiting Lithuanian writer, who is known as a font of intriguing conspiracy theories about plots for world domination, that Bin Laden was working for the White House.

“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”

He said that thousands of pages of American classified documents made public by WikiLeaks pointed to who the al-Qaida leader is really working for.

“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] is indeed a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,” he said, but did not explain exactly how.

He made his comments during a meeting with Daniel Estulin, the author of three books about the secretive Bilderberg Club which includes men such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, leading European officials and business executives. Estulin says that the club is form of secret world government, manipulating economies and political systems.

Estulin offered his own views on Bin Laden: that the man seen in videos since 9/11 is not him at all but a “bad actor”.

However the two men did find something to disagree on.

Estulin has long argued that the human race will need to find another planet to live on because of overcrowding.

Castro was not keen. He observed that man had only made it to the moon, which is entirely unsuitable as a new home, and what lay beyond that was not much better. Better to fix things on earth.

“Humanity ought to take care of itself if it wants to live thousands more years,” he said.

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This article titled “Senior Republican Ken Mehlman comes out as gay” was written by Richard Adams in Washington, for The Guardian on Thursday 26th August 2010 17.56 UTC

One of the key architects of the Bush-era Republican election machine that exploited anti-gay prejudices to motivate its conservative base has disclosed that he is gay and is lobbying to legalise same-sex marriage.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Ken Mehlman, a former chairman of the Republican national committee and the manager of George Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, in an interview published on the Atlantic’s website.

Mehlman’s revelation makes him the most senior figure in the Republican party to publicly identify himself as gay. As a member of Bush’s inner circle, Mehlman would have been party to the agenda of hostility towards gay and lesbian rights that the Republicans adopted. It was designed to draw conservative and religious supporters out to vote.

Mehlman said he was aware that Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, worked to place anti-gay initiatives and referendums on election ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help the party, a claim Rove has hotly denied.

While Mehlman expressed his regret at Republican tactics during his tenure, some gay activists were angry with him. Mike Rogers, who attempted to out Mehlman and a number of other politicians, wrote on his blog that Bush’s 2004 election campaign was “the most homophobic national campaign in history. That campaign was run by one of the nation’s worst closested individuals, Ken Mehlman.”

Rogers said he wanted to hear Mehlman apologise for the damage he helped cause. “Ken Mehlman is horribly homophobic and no matter how orchestrated his coming out is, our community should hold him accountable for his past,” he said.

Other critics pointed to recent political donations by Mehlman to Republicans opposed to gay marriage or to revoking the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring homosexuals serving in the US military. In 2010, Mehlman’s donations include ,000 to the conservative Idaho senator Mike Crapo, who voted for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

“Mehlman is following the same line he touted in 2004 and 2006 as a major Republican party power leader: support anti-gay politicians who are all too comfortable demonising [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people for some votes,” said Michael Jones, of change.org.

Others welcomed Mehlman’s declaration that he was taking an active role in the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group behind challenges to California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Chad Griffin, an activist against Proposition 8, said Mehlman had made a great contribution. “When we achieve equality, he will be one of the people to thank for it,” Griffin told the Atlantic.

Liz Mair, a Republican blogger and consultant, said: “Ken Mehlman single-handedly has probably helped move the country, and the Republican party, in a more gay-friendly and equality-minded direction.”

There has been no response so far from Bush, who was informed by Mehlman several weeks ago.

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