story.news.yahoo.com 18 minutes ago Add Op/Ed - William F. Buckley to My Yahoo! By William F. Buckley Jr.

The finality of the long -- seemingly endless -- period of indecision, fractured alliances, ambivalent allies and fruitless diplomacy had an unusual touch. The president flew two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic to meet with the leaders of the diminished ranks of our allies.

The trip doesn't take much more air time than a flight to Denver, but there was operatic grace in seeking out a remote island, one of an archipelago as beautiful as any on Earth, and touching down with the prime ministers of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal, where the language spoken is foreign, and where an Atlantic U.S. Air Force base serves as a promontory of U.S. vigilance for the world Columbus left, to discover the new world.

The mother country of the Azores endured a left-wing coup in 1974. A few years later, the governor of the islands disclosed, with not much discretion, that if the military continued in power in Portugal, the Azores would declare their loyalty to Lisbon ended and make out for themselves. The Azores had been a colony for about 500 years.

We learn that the leave-taking of President Bush (news - web sites) was especially moving. He treated the natives who came to see him off in his majestic carrier, an airplane with more bodies on board than Columbus brought on his ship, to a special show of fraternity, not visibly different from his intensive exchanges with the firefighters in New York. And we know what he was thinking as, after nightfall, he boarded the plane with the honor guard, because the next day he would express himself. In New York, three days after Sept. 11, a fresh chapter opened for America; at the air base in Terceira, it moved forward to the next stage. We would be going to war.

We learned that on Air Force One there were two speechwriters there to help him craft the address he would give 24 hours later. Mr. Bush spoke the language of going to war so very different from such as was spoken during the first centuries of the Azores' sentient life on Earth. When the islands were discovered, there was no human life there. Before the colonizers settled down to being a metropolitan district of Portugal, they were fought for, and dominated intermittently, by the Spanish. When they went to war in those days, the missions were outspoken. The rulers wished for glory, foreign possessions and wealth.

Nothing of the kind preoccupied Mr. Bush in the missions he described on Monday night. Lenin preached to faithful Marxist ears that colonialism was the chief and vital enterprise of the bourgeois world, motivating policy and life. Revisionists have carefully argued, in recent years, that the overhead of colonialism often exceeded its fruits, challenging a central postulate of Marx-Lenin. It is not widely held that we are moving against Iraq (news - web sites) for material reasons, and it is plain that our motives are hardly material, unless one classifies as a material motive the determination to safeguard one's freedom and security.

In his speech the president was airborne with confidence in his mission and in the reasons for it. His exposure to the Azores might have made him more cautious when he spoke of the prospects for Iraq after liberation. Portugal, climbing out from monarchy soon after the turn of the century, moved toward an autocracy that lasted for 35 years, after which was the military coup, reaching an institutionalized democracy only in the late '70s.

President Bush spoke directly, using the personal pronoun, to the people whose country he would invade. The military campaign "will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror."

And then? "We will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." And at the close, "Unlike Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation."

Mr. Bush would have done better to speak more modestly about expectations. Sitting down on vast oil reserves does not bring prosperity or freedom, as we are quickly reminded merely by citing Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. What Mr. Bush proposes to do is to unseat Saddam Hussein and to eliminate his investments in aggressive weaponry. We can devoutly hope that internecine tribal antagonisms will be subsumed in the fresh air of a despot removed, and that the restoration of freedom will be productive.

But these concomitant developments can't be either foreseen by the United States or implemented by us. What Mr. Bush can accomplish is the removal of a regime and its infrastructure. The Iraqi people will have to take it from there.

www.alternet.org By Eric Bosse, AlterNet March 17, 2003

American investigative reporter Greg Palast writes for the London Observer and reports for BBC news. His stories have appeared in the annual Project Censored lists but rarely in mainstream American media. Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," now out in an expanded paperback edition with 40 percent new material, made the New York Times' Best Sellers list in its first week in stores.

In the opening chapter, Palast details the ways Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris rigged Florida's 2000 vote by hiring a data mining company, DataBase Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. Harris instructed Database to sift through Florida's voter rolls to eliminate felons, suspected felons, and people with names or birth dates similar to felons. In all, according to the company's documents, some 91,000 people were wrongly barred from voting.

Of those, more than ninety percent were Democrats. The majority were black.

Q: Is ChoicePoint or one of their subsidiaries still on contract in Florida?

A: No. Well, they won't be. They are getting out of the racial purge business, but they're moving into something new and better. If you read Forbes Magazine or the new edition of my book, Forbes says, "We don't know who has lost the war on terror, but we do know who has won: ChoicePoint, Inc." They're the big contractor in Total Information Awareness. They've got the big DNA database they're keeping for the new vampiric agency. ChoicePoint owns the companies that are going to do the airport profiling, the immigration intake profiling, and, most importantly, these are the guys that have the database of over 20 billion records on Americans. Now, when I say 20 billion, that was like a year ago. It's got to be way up there now. They had it at 20 billion and growing phenomenally. Until now, for 200 years, you could not go into private records without a search warrant. Under the USA Patriot Act – and I mean the one in force, we don't have to wait for the second shoe to drop – for the first time in American history the feds will be able to go through private records, the private database. They call it "data mining." They're going to be hunting through our records without a search warrant, on a massive data-crunching basis. And so, ChoicePoint is going to ring the cash register big time.

Q: Your book implies that ChoicePoint is affiliated with the political right.

A: It isn't implied. Look at their board. It looks like a Republican country club meeting. You've got Ken Langone, the investor who was also the treasurer for the Rudy Giuliani for Senate campaign. You've got Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a big Republican sugar daddy. You've got Vin Weber, the ultra-right ex-congressman who is their Washington lobbyist. You've got Howard Safir, the New York Police Chief of Repression. They've got all these Republican politicos like George Bruder out of Florida, who was deeply involved in their operations for getting rid of "the dark vote." So, look, it's a Republican firm.

Their company was chosen after they replaced a company that was only being paid about five thousand dollars a year, and Database got paid something like two million. What is it with American reporters? I mean, don't they find that interesting? I mean, if it's not in a press release, they think you might as well just throw it away.

Q: You also write about how the Bush administration stifled investigation of Saudis.

A: Yeah, well, I should stop saying that because it doesn't help the war effort. You know, a great investigator like Bob Woodward wrote that book Bush at War. I should feel ashamed about bringing up how Bush got us into war through his buddies, the Saudis.

People like Mike Moore make a lot out of the Bush connections to the Bin Laden family. That's useful to know, but I think there are more important connections.

For example, the BBC and Guardian reporting teams have information which is solid from two separate sources that there was a meeting in 1996 where Saudi billionaires agreed to fund Al Quaeda. It was kind of like, "Stop blowing up our country, get out of Saudi Arabia – what does it cost to get you to go play in Afghanistan?" The problem with that, besides giving money that not only terrorizes Afghanistan but also ends up in the pockets of people taking flying lessons with no intention to land, is that you need to follow that money.

Oh, by the way, a couple days after the attack on the World Trade Center, did you notice that we suddenly had a list of the financial institutions and charities which were funding terrorists? They didn't have that on September 8th? No one asked, "Hey, when did you guys come up with this? Boy, you must have stayed up all night, huh? You just uncovered all these guys in two days!" No, the stuff was in the files and not being acted on, in part for bureaucratic reasons but in part because of reluctance first by the Clinton administration – do understand, the Clinton administration was very reluctant to bother the Saudi Arabians because they were the people sitting on the oil spigots – but we went from reluctance to downright interference from the Bush administration.

For example, very specifically, I bring up in the book the failure to hunt down the sources and the total operation of the Pakistan bomb building program. And we're worried about Saddam Hussein? Colin Powell stands up in front the United Nations and says we can't let some crazy, fanatical dictator with nuclear bombs stay in office, and my wife says, "Oh, we're invading Pakistan, right?" But instead we've got George Bush with his arm around the dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf, who we know has weapons of mass destruction and has threatened to use them; but our President stands there and gets his picture taken with him like he's a prom date. The problem was that the CIA was not permitted to check into the funding of the Pakistan bomb program because it was funded by the Saudis, and that would embarrass the United States and in particular we have to look at some of the people involved: Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, Adnan Khashoggi.

Now, Bakhsh is a very interesting guy because he's identified as being one of the people whose money may have somehow ended up in nefarious hands. Whether he directed that or not I have no idea, but why not investigate the guy? Well, supposedly for geopolitical reasons; but maybe that was influenced by the fact that Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh is also the guy who saved Harken Oil from bankruptcy – which is our President's former oil company. Now, did Bush say, "You're not allowed to investigate my former partners"? I can't imagine such a directive. What I do know is that when you have these kinds of entangling financial and personal relationships, political relationships, it influences your viewpoint so that you are susceptible to the line that we shouldn't bother these poor Saudis. So it's not a giant conspiracy. It is a political outlook poisoned by personal finance.

Q: A systemic problem rather than a conspiracy?

A: Yeah, right, it's not some odd little flaw in the system. It is the system – in which, there is back-scratching, helping each other financially. That's how it operates.

Plus it's not exactly a career-maker for agents to go after the President's partners or his Daddy's partners. That doesn't make a good impression.

You see, we're trying to clean up campaign financing, but we also have to clean up presidential family funding if we're ever going to have any reform. That's the most poisonous part of the Bush operation. There are two people who had the courage to stand up to this publicly. One is Cynthia McKinney, who was destroyed for trying to question the Bush family financing.

Q: She was a congresswoman from...?

A: From Atlanta. And the other is Norman Schwarzkopf. You have to understand that after Gulf War One, the Bush family cashed in like crazy, and Schwarzkopf said we didn't send half a million kids into the desert so the Bush family could cash in. And you hear how much he's been out front now, right? You'd think they would wheel out their big hero. That's where they're using the duct tape. They've got him wrapped up in a basement somewhere. He's not happy. He saw the Bush family cash in.

Let me give you an example. Who won Gulf War One? And that will tell you who is going to win Gulf War Two. Gulf War One, if you look in the book, Daddy Bush writes a letter for Chevron Oil, after he leaves the White House, to the Kuwaiti Emirate. We call them the royalty of Kuwait. That means that they're dictators with robes and crowns. So, he writes to the Kuwaiti dictatorship and asks them to give Chevron an oil concession. What the hell is a President of the United States doing, lobbying for a private oil company? These guys can't say no because he saved their Rolls Royces, right? Now, he says he never got any money from Chevron, and I have no reason to doubt it. He doesn't say that Chevron then kicks in half a million dollars into the Republican campaign for sonny boy. That's really poisonous because what's happening is that the seal of the President, the seal of the Oval Office, is for sale.

And Schwarzkopf was talking about that. He was also concerned that after Gulf War One, who do we see sneaking in the desert, wearing saddle shoes and salesman's bags? Marvin and Neal Bush, trying to sell pipeline operations to the Gulf states, representing Enron Corporation. You know, these people have no shame.

Do you remember when we were promised, unless my memory fails, a democracy in Kuwait? Remember they were going to democratize? Have you heard the election results from Kuwait yet? I'm still waiting.

Q: I want to ask about two more topics: Venezuela and then...

A: Now, you're not supposed to ask about Venezuela. You've already made a mistake. With the USA Patriot Act, you're not supposed to look at anything but Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, which is the Weapon of Mass Distraction. And while you're supposed to be hypnotized by Iraq, don't watch that man behind the screen, Otto Reich in the White House, who is doing his level best to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela. So, I'm trying to write this story, but you can't get the true reports out for nothing. The New York Times runs a front-page picture of thousands of Venezuelans marching against Hugo Chavez. The same day, I'm photographing it myself, more people are marching for Chavez, but they don't show the others. It's more devastating than fabrication, because a picture makes you think, "That must be real." It's terribly sad, because the story of Venezuela is about oil. It is about crushing a dissenter to the new globalization order.

It's hard to tell the real stories because it requires investigation. It requires work. And it requires being able to say that official sources like the State Department are full of shit, that they are fabricating this stuff out whole cloth for the purpose of scrambling your brain, and that our media outlets buy it.

I can't tell you to how many reporters I've said, "Where do you get this stuff?" And they say, "Well, it was in a State Department press release," as if that's an acceptable source.

Q: What does it take for a complete blackout of like the one we're getting on, say, the U.S. spying on the United Nations delegates?

A: Official denial. American newspaper reporters and outlets will not run a story which has undercover information which is officially stone-blank denied. Now that story, for example, of spying on the U.N., that's my newspaper by the way, The Observer, and those are my friends – who are now, by the way, facing jail time for that story, under the Official Secrets Act.

Q: In England?

A: Yes. See, that's one of the reasons my new book is so much longer. If I printed everything I wanted, if I printed the American edition in Britain, I would be jailed. One of my sources has already spent six months in jail. It's just horrendous without a First Amendment. I mean, unfortunately we in the U.S. don't use our First Amendment. Like I say, if Britain needs a First Amendment they can use ours because we're not. It's a nightmare in both countries. There, the nightmare is the law. There, editors are afraid, justly afraid, of the law. Here, editors are afraid of their shadows. As I say, Bob Woodward, editor of the Washington Post, would never run the Watergate story today. It was an unnamable source versus an official denial. He would not run it now. No way. And that's why I'm "in exile."

Q: With these stories getting so little attention in the mainstream media, how do you account for the bestseller status of your book?

A: You, the Internet, the so-called alternative media, the weeklies, and radio, the independent, nonprofit radio stations. People hear about it and they want to know. And the information often goes out from the left and the right. There are what I call the honest conservatives – they're not comfortable with the country club set. I've been having discussions with my big, huge corporate publisher about something called "alternative media," which is bigger than the mainstream media. We are bigger. We should stop acting puny and stop calling ourselves alternative. They're like Lilliputians who don't want us to know that we're giants because we might do something.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

The Police Detective Branch (CICPC) investigating the murder of three soldiers that formed part of the Altamira Plaza military rebellion has confirmed reports of a third women allegedly kidnapped in the incident.

A CICPC spokesperson says the woman’s name emerged from interrogations and she has been tracked down and is a key witness in the murder enquiries.

The unnamed woman is said to be emotionally involved with one of the main suspects that now number 8 persons.

The police source has clarified that the beating received by former suspect, Edgar Machado Rojas is not directly connected to the murders but was an excuse to cover up the real motives of the murders.

Investigations now point towards vengeance killings and not crime of passion.

news.ft.com By Kevin Morrison in London and agencies Published: March 18 2003 23:06 | Last Updated: March 18 2003 23:06

Oil prices extended their slide on Tuesday, falling more than $2, and have now dropped more than 10 per cent in the past four days.

Traders said they could fall by the same margin before the weekend and have turned from fearing about prices exceeding $40 due to a war in Iraq and supply shortages to concern about oversupply as demand eases and Saudi Arabia and other Opec members boost production.

Reports that oil supplies from Venezuela were coming back stronger than expected following the almost crippling three-month strike that began late last year also eased supply concern.

Nymex light sweet crude settled $3.26 to $31.67 by the close in New York , having traded as low as $31.40, lowest since January 13, and it peaked at $33.40.

The front month Nymex contract has fallen 13 per cent in the last four trading sessions and traders expect the price could fall by the same margin during the rest of the week.

In London, IPE Brent or May delivery fell almost $3 to its lowest in three months before partly recovering to $27.25 a barrel, a drop of $2.23 by the close. The front month Brent contract has dropped 20 per cent since hitting a post Gulf War peak of $34.55 nine days ago.

"Technically, we have broken any bullish trend in the oil price, we have now entered a bear market and we are not going to find any support until the price falls to the low $20s," said one London-based trader. "Nobody wants to catch a falling knife, otherwise we would have seen a lot of people with missing fingers."

The swiftness of the market turnround has caught many investors by surprise, with several traders holding long positions.

"We have seen a massive unwinding of long positions over the last few days with some investors taking big hits," he said.

Spot gold gained about $3 to $339.50/$340.25 an ounce from $336.75/$337.50 at Monday's New York close as the precious metal gained as the US dollar slipped from its strong gains on Monday.

Base metals traded in a narrow range as concerns switched from the uncertainty about a Middle East conflict to the bearish outlook for the global economy.

Three-month copper was up about $5 to $1,686 a tonne in London Metal Exchange trading, while aluminium slipped by $4 to $1,383 a tonne and nickel added $100 to $8,210. Traders said that nickel's outperformance was due to concern about low stockpiles.

www.iht.com Neela Banerjee The New York Times Wednesday, March 19, 2003   Saudi Arabia has amassed a reserve of nearly 50 million barrels of oil that it plans to use to compensate for possible disruptions of Iraqi oil exports if war erupts, according to a senior Saudi official and industry experts who have been told about the supply buildup. "We have about 50 million barrels, most of it in the country," said the Saudi official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We can tap into it immediately once there is a shortfall." The Saudi stockpile has been built up over the last three months as oil prices have climbed near their highest levels in years. Calls have increased from various political quarters for the Bush administration to release oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which holds 600 million barrels of oil. So far, the administration has said that it will let the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries try to make up for any disruptions before tapping the reserve. OPEC is led in effect by Saudi Arabia, the only country with spare production capacity that can be called on in case of supply disruptions. "We will make sure there is enough oil in the market," the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, said in a statement. "We have plenty of spare capacity." Industry analysts said Saudi Arabia probably felt compelled to increase production to back up assertions it has long made that it can take care of problems that buffet oil markets. "It is in the Saudis' interest to produce oil and store some of it away, and the cumulative effect of that is a substantial reserve," said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. "The Saudis know that sustained high prices weaken economic activity, decrease demand and encourage non-OPEC production. They want to see a predictable, stable oil supply." Iraq has been exporting about 1.5 million barrels a day. The cushion the Saudis have built into their system could make up for about a month of disruption of those exports, although Saudi Arabia does not plan to draw down all 50 million barrels, the Saudi official said. "The United States consumes about 1 million barrels a day of Iraqi crude," said Yasser Elguindi, a managing director at Medley Global Advisers, a New York consulting firm. "So I don't think it's by accident that the Saudis have these numbers." A representative of the Saudi Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources declined to comment on the reserve. The Saudi official said that he had told members of Congress about the oil pool and that "the U.S. government is certainly aware of this." "Our oil people have been talking to the National Security Council," he added. But he said Saudi Arabia had taken this step on its own, without arm-twisting by the White House. "You look around and make plans based on different scenarios," he said. "What if there is a war? So you increase capacity. But how do you tap into reserves immediately? You want to make sure that if there are disruptions, the oil markets are covered. The administration didn't say, 'Gee, guys, can you do this for us?'" A White House spokesman declined to comment on Monday night. Saudi Arabia is producing about 9 million barrels a day, the official said, or about 1.5 million more than its OPEC quota. The Saudis have about 1.5 million barrels of additional production capacity that they can bring on in less than several weeks, if the need arises, he said. Independent experts have estimated that Saudi Arabia is producing 9.2 million to 9.5 million barrels a day, with an additional 1 million barrels that can be called upon. The Saudis have stored nearly all their reserve within their borders, the official said, rather than in installations they have in the Caribbean, Europe and the Far East. Saudi Arabia increased production when a general strike in Venezuela reduced exports from there to a trickle. Prices fall sharply on war speculation Oil prices plunged Tuesday as expectations grew that a war in Iraq would be won swiftly and without a significant cutback in Gulf oil supplies on world markets, Agence France-Presse reported from London. The price of Brent crude oil for May delivery plunged by about $3 per barrel, or more than 10 percent, to as low as $26.40 before finishing at $27.25 on the International Petroleum Exchange in London. Light sweet crude for April delivery shed $3.33 to $31.60 in late trading in New York. "The market is collapsing because people feel it's going to be a very quick war," said Robert Laughlin, a trader at GNI. Oil prices tumbled after President George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face attack. But some analysts warned that the sharp decline might not be justified given uncertainties ahead. "There are still many issues unresolved with regard to oil supply, and we still don't know if Saddam has plans to try to damage Iraq's oil fields," said Tony Machacek, a broker at Prudential Bache.