Pentagon distorted Iraqi casualty issue, says new report

Press Release, Project on Defense Alternatives

20 February 2004

18 February 2004 -- Weapons of mass destruction is not the only Iraq war-related subject clouded by misinformation. According to a new study, the Pentagon conducted "perception management" campaigns during the Afghan and Iraq wars that also obstructed the public's awareness of civilian casualties.

These activities included Pentagon efforts to "spin" casualty stories in ways that minimized their significance or cast unreasonable doubt on their reliability. Efforts also may have included the placement of misleading news stories. Such activities are "antithetical to well-informed public debate and to sensible policy-making," according to the report's author, Carl Conetta.

The report, Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a "New Warfare", was released Wednesday by the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Besides examining several case studies, the report reviews the "news frames" promoted by defense officials to shape the public debate over casualties.

Among the suspect stories promoted by US officials were reports that the Hussein regime was stockpiling cadavers before the war in order to stage phony casualty incidents and blame them on the coalition. Another story asserted that the Iraqis were procuring uniforms like those of US troops so that they might commit atrocities that would be attributed to the United States. As in the case of Iraq's reputed possession of prohibited weapons, neither story was subsequently verified.

Hmmm...Sounds like one more unsettling parallel to Vietnam, which was another politically driven war.

Bush Chooses the F.D.A.'s Chief to Run Medicare and Medicaid

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — President Bush announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Mark B. McClellan, the food and drug commissioner, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the health insurance programs for more than 70 million Americans. The Republic is dead, long live coporate America!

Dr. McClellan faces a huge logistical and political challenge: to provide prescription drug coverage to the elderly while fending off Democratic attacks on the new Medicare law, which Mr. Bush sees as his greatest achievement in domestic policy.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. McClellan will become administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which spends more than $480 billion a year and regulates nearly every sector of the nation's health care system.

While firmly committed to the president's free-market policies, Dr. McClellan has shown a knack for working with members of both parties in a pragmatic way that blends science, economics and politics.

Dr. McClellan, a physician and economist, has received rave reviews from drug companies for his work as chief of the Food and Drug Administration, a post he assumed in November 2002. He served earlier at the White House, as health policy coordinator and a member of Mr. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. In the Clinton administration, he worked on domestic policy, as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in 1998-99.

Dr. McClellan, 40, will need all that expertise and more to carry out the new Medicare law successfully.

Under that law, Medicare beneficiaries can obtain drug discount cards this June and full-fledged drug benefits starting in January 2006. But the law also gives private health insurance plans a big new role in Medicare, and Democrats, who attack the legislation as overly generous to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, want sweeping changes, which the administration is resisting. As commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. McClellan has tried to stamp out, on safety grounds, a wave of support for allowing imports of lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada.

Dr. McClellan is the brother of the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, and a son of the Texas comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who has hinted that she may run for governor in two years.

Can you say cronyism?...I knew you could.

It's also another case of selling out the interests of the American people to the folks who have been camping out on Dubbyyuh's ass for years. The Republic is dead! Long live corporate America!

Iran Parliamentary Elections:Iranians Vote in Election That May End Reform Drive

By Parinoosh Arami and Paul Taylor
Fri February 20, 2004 06:24 AM ET

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Urged by prayer leaders to "slap America in the face," Iranians voted Friday in a disputed parliamentary election set to tighten hard-liners' grip on power and end President Mohammad Khatami's faltering reform drive.

A short, lackluster campaign was overshadowed by a ban on most reformist candidates and a crackdown on pro-reform media amid apparent public indifference. The main uncertainty concerns the turnout, with even the size of the electorate in dispute.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among the first to cast his ballot, said the Islamic Republic's enemies were trying to deter young people from voting -- an apparent reference to a boycott by blacklisted reformist lawmakers and student groups.

"You see how those who are against the Iranian nation and the Islamic revolution are trying so hard to prevent people from going to the polls," Khamenei told state television.

Conservatives seem certain to dominate the new assembly after the Guardian Council, an unelected panel of hard-line clerics, disqualified 2,500 mainly reformist aspirants and a further 1,179 contenders withdrew.

As I, and many others, predicted the rhetoric against Iran and the actions of Dubbyuh's administration in the Middle East have lead to a retrenchment of Iran's hardliners. This will set back the progressive reforms that have been under way in Iran by several years, if not decades.

So long as Dubbyuh and his merry band remain in control of this nation, we can only expect more, and more serious, blowback from their policies.