TWO FROM ALTERNET

Condi's Credibility Gap

Hey Condi, I know that you're really hesitant to testify before the 9/11 commission publicly. You've said that the Constitution bars you from testifying and that no national security advisor has ever testified before Congress. Of course, today on NPR, Nixon "enemies list" listee and legendary journalist, Daniel Schorr, made some interesting observations: you have no problem flapping your gums all over TV; the 9/11 commission isn't Congress; other national security advisors have, indeed, testified before congress. So, it seems to me that your excuses for avoiding giving testimony under oath aren't very good. Furthermore, there are some contradictory pieces of information floating around that only you have the ability to clear up:

CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02

FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]

CLAIM: In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the Administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]

FACT: According to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]

This list goes on. Condi, you owe us some answers.

Click here for more of Condi's contradictions.

The Christian Taliban

But even as President George W. Bush denounced the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul, he was quietly laying the foundations for his own fundamentalist regime at home. For the first time far right Christian fundamentalists had one of their own in the White House and the opportunity to begin rolling back decades of health and family planning programs they saw as un-Christian, if not downright sinful.

Since 2001 dozens of far-right Christian fundamentalists have been quietly installed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress. Three years later this administration has established one of the most rigid sexual health agendas in the Western world.

I've written about "abstinence based" sex education and the social dangers it presents numerous times here at Real Art: this is only part of an overall, far-reaching, fundamentalist assault against sexual freedoms that Americans have taken for granted for decades. This article gets a bit creepy at points when one realizes just how puritanical these people are, and how much political power they have already amassed.

Click here for the rest.

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