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Kucinich Dem Challenge * $700M 2004-Nukes * Kiesling



3 May 2003

"I'm a Green Democrat -- And the Democratic Party needs to learn from the Greens
and other parties who are trying to make the political dialogue relevant.
Those who stand for a political process which is authentic and not bought
ought to have a home in the Democratic Party."

– Dennis J. Kucinich


1) A Dark Horse Fights the Odds Again
- - Dennis: On Reproductive Freedom
2) Kucinich: The Military Victory is a Foreign Policy Failure
- - "Diplomatic Breakdown" by John Brady Kiesling
3) Kennedy Warns on Nuclear Tests
4) Kucinich: Back on Track
5) The Pope thinks 9-11 was an inside job

- - Forbidden Truth
- - The War on Freedom
- - The New World Order Exposed
6) Book Review: Rule by Secrecy

Editor's Notes:


During these times of unprecedented threat and loss of freedom, a person has arisen in the US to offer an opportunity to take back the leadership of the Democratic Party to the people, and to defeat the Bush administration's plans for ruling and endangering the world. Yet some people rather concede the powers to the secret societies of ruthless-murdering people. Much of our population have their minds asleep, with fear driving them into a mind-less submissive ability of being controlled, allowing the US Treasury to be robbed by those serving a plan that is diabolical in its history and present time of preemptive war and deception of freedom and democracy.

Item 1 is from the New York Times, a review of Dennis Kucinich's past and re-emergence as a political leader. And since this article questioned his stand on reproductive freedom and his change of position, we included a recent Kucinich statement on this issue, which is posted on his web site. Recently an animal rights activist friend said that her comrades were shut-off from supporting Kucinich because of their perceptions of not trusting him on the pro-choice issue. Yet if these people read his words, reviewed his actions in the last thirty years, they would realize that he would protect a woman's right to choose more effectively than any other candidate running for US President. Yet, it is in item 2, which is Kucinich's statement presented just before President Bush made his speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that should open the ears and minds of those opposing the Bush-US preemptive war plan. Kucinich states that the military victory is really a foreign policy failure. In this item, too, is a link to a recent article by John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat, who was first of three State Department veterans that resigned their posts in protest on the eve of our second Iraq war. The patriots in the US are for peace and the reduction of what causes terrorism to arise in our world. And if anyone needed more encouragement to fight on the side of Kucinich for total change in US government, item 3 should offer enough of a reason. Here Senator Kennedy warns on Bush's plans to conduct new nuclear tests with funds recently passed in Congress for $700 million for special projects related to the nuclear arsenal in 2004! Item 4 covers ground again on Kucinich, in California, where he is making quite an impact. Can this momentum be carried to such places as New Hampshire? This is the question posed to grass roots activists. Can we unite in time to help elect an independent ‘Green Democrat' into the White House?

* Program Note: The first Democratic Presidential Debate with nine candidates is scheduled for tonight, May 3, from the University of South Carolina, moderated by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.

This program will be aired:

* 11:35 p.m. Saturday on ABC News Radio.

* 11:35 p.m. Saturday on ABC News Live, an Internet broadband news service available to subscribers of RealOne, AOL Broadband and Yahoo Platinum.

* After late local news broadcasts on more than 35 ABC affiliates.

* Excerpts Sunday on ABC's This Week (check local times)

* 1 p.m., 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sunday on C-SPAN

* 12:30 a.m. Monday on C-SPAN

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Get Involved - www.kucinich.us
Join the Revolution Within US!

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1) A Dark Horse Fights the Odds Again


- - Dennis: On Reproductive Freedom


The New York Times
A Dark Horse Fights the Odds Again

April 23, 2003
By CARL HULSE


WASHINGTON, April 22 - When Dennis J. Kucinich was the enfant terrible of Cleveland politics back in the 1970's and at 31 became the youngest person ever elected mayor of a major American city, it was not far-fetched to think that he would someday be a presidential contender. Beyond his proven ability as an electoral winner, he had plenty of time remaining to reach for higher office.

"At the time he was mayor, Dennis had everything in the world going for him," said Louis Stokes, who represented Cleveland for 30 years as a congressman and backed Mr. Kucinich for mayor. "He was destined to climb high."

But it all came crashing quickly down when Mr. Kucinich presided over the city's plunge into default in 1978. The collapse attracted international ridicule and, except for a brief sojourn on the City Council in the early 80's, left the obstreperous boy wonder in political exile for 15 years before he revived his career with election first to the Ohio Senate, then to Congress.

Now, in his fourth term in the House, his face creased with age and experience, the 56-year-old Mr. Kucinich is again seeking to defy the doubters by running for president, offering himself as a liberal's liberal.

His candidacy's immediate problem is that in selling himself as an antiwar activist, he has railed against a popular president and a war that has found strong public support. Worse still, perhaps, his cash-poor campaign barely has an organization.

But if his candidacy does seem far-fetched after all, Mr. Kucinich does not appear to mind that few people give him much chance of winning the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency.

"I'm used to fighting for lost causes," he said in an interview. "I am used to doing things that other people say are impossible. I have learned throughout my whole life that you can turn it around."

Mr. Kucinich, known to some colleagues as Dennis the Menace for his energetic doggedness and somewhat impish looks, is co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus, which represents the left-most reaches of the House Democratic membership. He is a champion of universal health care, wants to return the retirement age for full Social Security benefits to 65 and would repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he says has sapped the nation of millions of jobs.

Some who know him say his chief reason for running is to cement a role as national leader of the left. But he insists that he is serious about being president, and says the driving force behind his candidacy is his outrage at the war against Iraq and the prospect of future wars he fears President Bush will wage.

"The administration's illegal attack on Iraq is not just about Iraq," he said. "It is about Iran, it is about North Korea, it is about Libya, perhaps it is about Syria."

Mr. Kucinich credits himself for helping inspire a majority of House Democrats, 126, to vote last fall against the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to use force in Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, he continued to voice opposition once the conflict began. "It is not logical to say you oppose the war and once the war started, you support it," he said.

He is also re-emphasizing his argument that the nation's military buildup, coupled with the president's push for tax cuts, is draining money that could be used for critical domestic programs. And this month he reintroduced his proposal to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace.

Mr. Kucinich began his improbable political career while still in college, after a childhood in which his struggling family moved almost constantly. He was out on his own at 17, and in 1967 lost a race for the Cleveland City Council. Having quickly learned how to tap into a populist vein of ethnic politics, he was back two years later, elected to the Council at age 23. He lost Congressional races in 1972 and 1974 but remained a force in local politics, was elected mayor in 1977 and governed the city with a tight circle of friends.

But Cleveland's finances, already troubled, spiraled out of control. The climactic moment came in December 1978, when the city was unable to meet $14.5 million in bond obligations. Despite pressure from the business community, Mayor Kucinich refused to sell the municipal electric system to cover the debt. Cleveland went bust, as did his career.

Shattered by the loss of the mayor's office the next year to George V. Voinovich, a Republican who is now Ohio's junior senator, Mr. Kucinich taught college courses, worked in radio and television, and started a broadcast production company. (He still carries his membership card from the cinematographers' union.)

His return to politics was spurred by a phone call in 1993 from a reporter for Cleveland's daily, The Plain Dealer. The reporter was pursuing a story about how local officials had now concluded that Mr. Kucinich had been right in refusing to sell the utility. Once the article appeared, "people started coming up to me and said, `Why don't you come back?' " he recalled. The slogan for his subsequent race for the State Senate was "Because he was right," with a light-bulb logo.

In 1996, two years after his state legislative victory, Mr. Kucinich ran for the House and unseated a Republican incumbent, Martin R. Hoke. He made a well-received entry to the capital, stealing the show at a Washington press dinner where, in lampooning Speaker Newt Gingrich's view of civilization, he introduced his own cornerstones: "polka, bowling and kielbasa" (though he is in fact a longtime vegetarian).

Mr. Kucinich's knack for self-promotion sometimes irritates colleagues, but few doubt his conviction. When he offered a proposal this month to cut the emergency wartime spending bill by a third in an effort to end the Iraq conflict, the House's senior military appropriator, Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, took the floor and said he knew that Mr. Kucinich was sincere. "I happen to think he is absolutely wrong," Mr. Lewis said, "but I have risen in part to support his right to express that position."

Mr. Kucinich's fervent antiwar position is drawing him some notice in Iowa, whose presidential caucuses are an important grass-roots test in which activists can have considerable influence.

"I think he is the kind of candidate who could benefit from the Iowa caucuses," said Al Sturgeon, the Democratic chairman there in Woodbury County, a place of strong antiwar sentiment. "I think he could establish himself as the candidate who tells it like it is."

But Mr. Sturgeon said he had yet to see much organization on Mr. Kucinich's behalf. The congressman, who formally entered the race in February, had raised barely $173,000 by April 15, had hired just five people for his campaign staff and had opened offices only in Cleveland, Northern California and Iowa.

David Axelrod, a newspaper reporter turned Democratic political consultant, once covered Mr. Kucinich in Cleveland. "Even accounting for the fact that he has pulled off some of the biggest upsets in Ohio political history, it is hard to envision him pulling off the biggest upset in American political history," said Mr. Axelrod, who recently joined the campaign of a Kucinich rival for the nomination, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Mr. Kucinich could also run into trouble because of the abortion issue. A longtime opponent of abortion, he began softening his stand last year and says he now supports a woman's right to choose and would not appoint judges unless they pledged to support Roe v. Wade. David Loesback, a political science professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, said that kind of shifting could be viewed by liberals as an election-year conversion.

But Professor Loesback said he could also see Mr. Kucinich making gains in Iowa, and the candidate himself says he will catch on with Americans who want the country to be taken in a "different direction." His doing so would be a remarkable step in what has already been a remarkable political resurrection.

"It took me 15 years to make any kind of significant political comeback," he said. "Luckily I had 15 years to spare."

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- - Dennis: On Reproductive Freedom


"I support Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose, and will select Supreme Court justices who affirm this Constitutional right.

I've had a journey on this issue that a year ago, before I became a candidate for President, caused me to break from a voting record that had not been pro-choice. After hearing from many women in my own life, and from women and men in my community and across the country, I began a more intensive dialogue on the issue. A lot of women opened their hearts to me. That dialogue led me to wholeheartedly support a woman's right to choose.

I have come to believe that it's not simply about the right to choose, but about a woman's role in society as being free and having agency and having the ability to make her own decisions. That a woman can't be free unless she has this right. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is one of the most serious decisions a woman might make. It is deeply personal. In our society, all women and all men have a right to make difficult moral decisions and make personal choices.
But women will not be equal to men if this constitutionally protected right is denied. I want to work to make abortions less necessary, which means sex education and birth control. I want to work to make sure that, when life is brought forward, we have prenatal care and postnatal care and childcare and universal health care and a living wage. And because I know that the right to choose is under attack -- as President, I will only support someone for the Supreme Court if he or she agrees to uphold Roe v. Wade."

http://www.kucinich.us/issues/issue_rightsreproductive.htm



2) Kucinich: The Military Victory is a Foreign Policy Failure

- - "Diplomatic Breakdown" by John Brady Kiesling

Just before President Bush made his speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich -- ranking member of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations -- issued the following statement:

"Regardless of the outcome, the war in Iraq was wrong. While the United States has won a military victory in Iraq, the Administration never justified the war, rendering it a diplomatic and foreign policy failure.

"The Administration led America into a war based on false pretenses. Even today, as the President declares an end to combat, there is no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction -- weapons that, according to the Administration, posed an immediate and imminent threat to our nation and our allies, and could not be eliminated through international weapons inspectors.

"The Administration, with its policy in Iraq, has isolated the United States from the international community and threatens to make our country less safe not more safe.

"Bringing the troops home, and bringing in the international community to assist with humanitarian reconstruction and security, must happen immediately. Rhetoric alone will not convince the world that the United States is not occupying Iraq, especially since the U.S. has prioritized the rebuilding oil infrastructures instead of providing humanitarian assistance."

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- - "Diplomatic Breakdown" by John Brady Kiesling

John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat, was the first of three State Department veterans who resigned their posts - his was at our embassy in Athens - in protest on the eve of our second Iraq war. By his account below, his was a brave act of necessity. By my thinking, it made him the first official American refusnik. He published the following long explanation of his resignation and his thoughts on American policy under the Bush administration (clearly written before the war ended) in the Boston Globe magazine this Sunday. It's well worth reading, not only because he's an articulate, even - as his letter of resignation showed - eloquent writer, but because he's a modest and moderate State Department veteran, an open man, ready to listen to other voices elsewhere, but distinctly no radical. So it tells you exactly how extreme a moment we're in when a man like Kiesling uses the Greek term Planitarehis, or "Ruler of the Planet," and not in a complimentary sense either. The Armenians, he tells us, "used a similar term in the 14th century to flatter their Mongol overlords, but for modern Greeks this is a term of fear and dislike, not respect." When a State Department veteran can say, aghast, that "the more aggressively we use our power to intimidate our foes ... the more we validate terrorism as the only effective weapon of the powerless against the powerful," you know you're in a terrifying new imperial age. The piece is, in its own way, a remarkable document of our times.

Tom Engelhardt

For the article, "Diplomatic Breakdown" by John Brady Kiesling,
The Boston Globe - April 27, 2003 - see:
http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0427/diplomat_entire.htm



3) Kennedy Warns on Nuclear Tests

Kennedy Warns on Nuclear Tests
Julian Borger
The Guardian

Wednesday 30 April 2003

WASHINGTON -- Senator Edward Kennedy yesterday warned that the Bush administration was preparing to restart the testing of nuclear weapons so it could develop a new generation of bunker-busting bombs and tactical "mini-nukes", potentially triggering a new arms race.

The veteran Democrat from Massachusetts was speaking before a congressional debate on an administration proposal to lift the legal restrictions on research into "mini-nukes" with an explosive force of less than five kilotons.

The proposal is the latest in a series of steps taken by the White House to reduce the hurdles to producing the new nuclear weapons it says may be necessary to confront threats from "rogue states" or terrorist groups.

Mr Kennedy said the Congress and the American public had not fully realised the scale of the changes under way in US nuclear policy. "They have been eclipsed for too long by the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq. We can ignore them no longer."

The administration has repeatedly said it has no current plans to resume nuclear testing, after an 11-year moratorium, but Mr Kennedy said the details of the defence budget suggested that such plans were quietly under way.

"The best way to get the indication of the seriousness of the administration is to follow the request of the money in the defence authorisation," he said. "We budgeted $700m for fiscal year 2004 [for special projects related to the nuclear arsenal], including funds that could be used to prepare for new tests and cut in half the time needed to conduct them."

In the next few days, congressional committees will debate a proposal by the departments of defence and energy to repeal a 1994 ban on the research and development on low-yield nuclear bombs.

Justifying the repeal, the Pentagon said it was necessary to "train the next generation of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers and restore a nuclear weapons enterprise able to respond rapidly and decisively to changes in the international security environment, or unforeseen technical problems in the stockpile."

Under the Pentagon's classified nuclear posture review, late last year, nuclear weapons could be used against rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya, and to pre-empt an attack with chemical and biological weapons.

The defence department is also planning a conference at the strategic command headquarters in Nebraska to rewrite nuclear policy. On the agenda are a new generation of weapons, including mini-nukes and a "robust nuclear earth penetrator" that will burrow into the earth before detonating, destroying command bunkers and arsenals.

Advocates of the "bunker-busters" argue that the fallout would be contained in the underground cavern hollowed out by the blast. But Matthew McKinzie, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council, said yesterday that calculations based on the Pentagon's own computer modeling suggested that a 0.5 kiloton nuclear warhead would have to burrow 55 metres to eliminate atmospheric fallout.

Scientists claim there is no known material hard enough to punch more than 16 metres into the earth.

Sidney Drell, a nuclear control campaigner and former Stanford University physics professor, said a nuclear warhead which only burrowed 16 metres down would throw a million cubic feet of
radioactive dust into the atmosphere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,946249,00.html



4) Kucinich: Back on Track

Pasadena [CA] Weekly Cover Story – Back on Track

[Excerpt]

For many, anti-war presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is the best person to help Democrats find their voice in time for 2004

By Joe Piasecki

Anti-war activists who are crying bloody murder in the streets over the US occupation of Iraq, parents who can't afford food or healthcare for their children, people who feel locked out of the political process, anyone who sympathizes with progressive causes — listen up!

Congressman Dennis Kucinich wants your vote in the Democratic Party primaries next March. Kucinich, once derided in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, as "Dennis the Menace" and the "Boy-Mayor" who drove that city into default some 25 years ago, has risen from relative obscurity as author of a bill that would create a US Department of Peace. He also led the failed battle to halt congressional authorization for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq.

The Department of Peace legislation, supported by 47 members of Congress, would create an executive branch department advising the president on issues of peacekeeping diplomacy and address domestic issues of family and gang-related violence, as well as hate-motivated crime.

But the peace candidate, 56, is no docile puppy when it comes to his politics. When Kucinich speaks he shakes his fist and shouts to make a point, then breaks into a cappella renditions of the national anthem. This five-foot-five vegan gets in people's faces.

" I'm passionate. Being for peace doesn't imply passivity," Kucinich told the Weekly in an interview on the campaign trail in Los Angeles. "There are people today who might be uncomfortable with the insistence on peace while our armies are in Baghdad, but I say it is urgent that we speak out for peace because the whole world is at risk now. … This war is wrong. It's illegal. It's immoral."

Kucinich, co-chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus with Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee, is running on an anti-war platform that also includes universal health care and strengthened environmental protections. He rails against President Bush's plans for the economy and has vowed to defend the working class on every issue.

He aims to be inclusive of minority voters, and has succeeded, said Congresswoman Hilda Solis, D-Monterey Park, and former California Rainbow Coalition Caucus leader Ralph McKnight. Kucinich has the full endorsement of Los Angeles Congresswoman Diane Watson and actor-activist Ed Asner, who called him a perfect candidate and introduced him to some 300 liberal LA voters at a campaign stop in LA's Koreatown earlier this month.

Kucinich also wants to reinvent the Democratic Party.

" I'm a Green Democrat," he told the Weekly. "And the Democratic Party needs to learn from the Greens and other parties who are trying to make the political dialogue relevant. … Those who stand for a political process which is authentic and not bought ought to have a home in the Democratic Party."

Mentioning Libertarians, the Natural Law Party, the Reform Party and social justice advocates of any party, Kucinich declared: "If we get everyone who is concerned about change in the Democratic Party to vote in the Democratic primary, we will become the Democratic Party."

Said former California Green Party candidate for lieutenant governor Donna Warren, "To be very honest, the Greens are talking about [possibly endorsing] Kucinich a little bit, but I don't know just how far that conversation has gone.."


.." My role in this [campaign] has been to assert the rights of my constituents to live in peace. To assert the requirements of a nation to secure its constitutional freedoms by keeping our nation at peace. To insist that only peace will help us achieve better educational opportunities, full health care for all, retirement security, stabilizing our economy. So why are some other Democrats going in another direction? I can't account for why other people do what they do. But I will tell you why I do what I do, because I passionately believe that this country's future is connected directly to worldwide cooperation, and that our country's future is damaged every time America moves toward aggressive war.

" We have to stop this, now," he said.


For the complete article, see:

http://pasadenaweekly.com/features/coverStory/coverstory.html




Items 5 & 6 - Part 2 - see:
Pope: 9/11 InsideJob * Conspiracy 'Rule by Secrecy' Evidence



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