Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

I hope timber reads the above posts; he continues to claim veteran's benefits have been increased by GWBush. If that's "increased benefits," I hope it's put where the sun doesn't shine. c.i.

News flash, Howard Dean: Bush is taking care of our veterans
Date: Saturday, December 20 @ 00:00:30



Howard Dean and the boys might have just lost one of their favorite anti-Bush lines on the stump -- "He can't even find Saddam Hussein" -- but not to worry.

Dean still has another biting criticism of Bush national-security policy echoed by other Democratic candidates as well -- that President Bush has supposedly slashed veterans off of their benefits and cut combat
pay. As it happens, these charges have as much merit as the can't-find-Saddam taunt in the wake of the dictator getting pulled from a hole.

Dean has said of Bush routinely on the campaign trail: "One night, Friday night -- he hoped the media wouldn't notice -- he announced that combat pay was being cut because 'mission accomplished.' One day last January he went to a Veterans Administration hospital and said that veterans deserve the best pay, the best health care that money could buy. That was the day after he cut 164,000 veterans off their health-care benefits. This president doesn't get that the defense of the United States depends on the men and women he sent to Iraq and depends on the veterans who came home."

In today's free-spending Washington, the charge that anyone is being cut off from anything or that any spending is being reduced has, shall we say, an inherent implausibility. Indeed, no one is being cut off from their veterans benefits.

Here's the background: For 80 years, the rule was that the VA would take care of veterans with medical problems related to their military service or veterans without the means to purchase their own health care. In the mid-1990s, Congress decided to open the VA health care to all veterans, prompting a flood of new entrants into the system.

Today, the VA treats a million more patients than it did three years ago, for a total of about 5 million. This sure doesn't sound like cutting veterans off benefits, but maybe they reckon such things differently in Vermont.

Dean's charge does have a wisp of a connection to reality. Because the VA system was overwhelmed by a flood of new patients -- many of them relatively well-off -- it established a new rule saying that veterans with no medical problems relating to their service and an income above a certain threshold are not eligible for VA care. The rule affects an estimated 164,000 people. These are Dean's 164,000 veterans "cut off" from benefits. But they can't be cut off from benefits, because they never received them. The VA grandfathered in everyone already receiving care to make sure no one would be cut off.

The idea that the Bush administration is somehow stingy with the VA is simply absurd. The VA budget has increased by about a third, going from $48 billion a year to $64 billion a year. This year, the VA will provide educational assistance to more than 400,000 people, and guarantee home loans of another 300,000 people, with the total value of about $40 billion. If Dean thinks this is ungenerous, what would be his alternative -- giving veterans lifetime everything-for-free cards?

Dean's combat-pay charge is just as deceptive. The Pentagon earlier this year opposed extending recent Bush-instituted increases in "imminent-danger pay" and "family-separation allowances." It wanted to maintain the current pay of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but through different means. This was all rendered moot when Bush signed into law in November a bill preserving the imminent-danger and family-separation pay increases. So no cut in combat pay had been proposed or took place, but Dean goes his merry way, charging otherwise.

There's a lesson here about the recklessness of Dean and the other Democratic candidates who ape his anti-Bush rhetoric.

But that these charges are presented by Dean as a telling critique of Bush national-security policy also demonstrates a certain lack of seriousness about foreign policy. Dean seems to imply that we are going to wage the war on terror with really, really generous veterans health-care benefits.

Yeah, right -- and we can't find Saddam Hussein.

♦ Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A7.

By Ann W. O'Neill
Staff Writer

January 8, 2004

A secret docketing system hiding some sensitive Miami federal court
cases from public view has been exposed and is being challenged in two
higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We don't have secret justice in this country," said Lucy Dalglish,
executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The Washington-based journalists watchdog group is asking the appellate
courts to open up two Miami federal cases it says were litigated in
secret.

The group has filed briefs in the Supreme Court and in the 11th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Representing two dozen media and
legal organizations, it is mounting the stiffest challenge yet to a
practice legal experts say violates free speech rights and ignores
established court decisions favoring open records and courtrooms.

The legal challenges are emerging as the higher courts are taking a long
look at the government secrecy surrounding the detention of more than
1,000 Muslim and Middle Eastern men in the days after the Sept. 11,
2001, terror attacks.

"In recent months, it has become evident that the U.S. District Court
for the Southern District of Florida maintains a dual, separate docket
of public and non-public cases," Dalglish wrote in a brief filed late
last month in the 11th Circuit appeal of convicted Colombian drug lord
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez.

In its Supreme Court brief, the media group called the secret jailing of
an Algerian-born waiter "perhaps the most egregious recent example of an
alarming trend toward excessive secrecy in the federal courts,
particularly in cases that bear even a tangential connection to the
events of Sept. 11."

Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, 34, of Deerfield Beach, was arrested for a
violating his student visa a month after the terror attacks. Although he
sought his release in the District Court and appealed to the 11th
Circuit, no public record of his case existed until his appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The media group last week asked to join the case as
a party, a request the high court rarely grants.

In Ochoa's 11th Circuit appeal, the media group is challenging a secret
plea bargain and sentencing involving Nicolas Bergonzoli, a Colombian
drug smuggler who had business dealings with Ochoa. The case suggests
the secret docketing system predates the Sept. 11 attacks.

Both men were potential witnesses.

Bergonzoli was indicted in Connecticut for drug trafficking in 1995.
Four years later his case, still open, was transferred to Miami. No
record of it existed until Ochoa's lawyers were able to unseal parts of
the file in May. At the time, Ochoa was on trial and prosecutors were
resting their case. Bergonzoli entered a secret plea bargain and was
never called to testify at Ochoa's trial.

Neither case appeared on the court's public docket, where it would have
been assigned a number and scanned into a computer file. As a result,
the public had no way of knowing they existed. Hearings were conducted
behind closed doors, and all documents and legal motions were filed
under seal. The sensitive court papers were kept separately in a vault
at the court clerk's office in Miami, according to attorneys familiar
with the practice.

U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch, chief judge for the South Florida
district, and Clerk of Courts Clarence Maddox were out of the office and
unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

Attorney Floyd Abrams, a nationally recognized expert on free press and
court access issues, said sealed documents and closed courtrooms are
nothing new and are sometimes necessary to protect national security or
investigations. But, he said from his New York office, he was "very
surprised" to learn about cases that were fully litigated with no public
record.

"Without public docket sheets, there is no way for the public to even
know that a case has been brought or resolved," Abrams said. "It's a
significant infringement of the genuine public interest in knowing what
is going on in its judicial system."

Bellahouel's case accidentally came to light when a clerk's mistake made
his name and case number public for a few hours. A reporter for The
Daily Business Review, a South Florida legal newspaper, picked it up.

According to the newspaper, the case to detain Bellahouel was laid out
in an FBI agent's affidavit. The FBI reportedly said Bellahouel served
two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, at a
Middle Eastern restaurant in Delray Beach. He also reportedly was seen
at a nearby movie theater with a third hijacker, Ahmed Alnami.

Bellahouel was held at Krome detention center in southwest Miami-Dade
County, testified before a federal grand jury in Virginia, and was
released in March 2002 on a $10,000 immigration bond.

Bellahouel's appeal to open his files was denied by the 11th Circuit,
which issued its decision -- under seal -- on March 31. Attorneys
involved in the case are under a gag order and can't comment.

Kathleen M. Williams and Paul M. Rashkind, Bellahouel's federal public
defenders in Miami, then turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, where their
papers refer to their client by his initials, MKB. The petition, the
first official public record of the case, is heavily edited, with blank
pages and huge gaps of white space.

"The world has changed since 9/11," the lawyers argue. "But the
common-law and First Amendment rights to discuss and debate those
changing events remain alive ... The blanket sealing utilized in this
case and appeal, however, hides everything."

The Supreme Court asked the government to defend the secrecy. Late
Monday, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson filed the government's
response -- under seal. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to
take the case.

Ochoa's lawyers, G. Richard Strafer and Roy Black, had heard rumors
about Bergonzoli, ran a name search and discovered a federal case filed
in Connecticut. The file included a letter to the court clerk,
transferring the case, and a new Miami docket number. But when Strafer
plugged the number into the court's computer system, he found nothing.
The court clerk told him no such case existed, he said.

He found Bergonzoli in a federal prison, serving 37 months.

Strafer and Black have long argued that government secrecy hampered
Ochoa's defense. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union and the media
group, representing The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN
and other news organizations, are objecting, saying it hampers their
ability to inform the public.

"We're happy that the cavalry is coming to the rescue," Strafer said.
"This is a dangerous precedent. The media and the public should be
alarmed that people can be sent to prison without anyone even knowing
they had a case."

Five Impolite Questions for the president

By DON WILLIAMS
January 9, 2004

Dear Mr. President: If I knew you were reading this, I'd be grateful and surprised. You've been quoted as saying you don't read negative press. Recent reports suggest that your handlers arrange public appearances so that you seldom even see protesters against your policies.

Still, should this find its way to your eyes, I have five impolite questions, along with a few follow-ups.

* Why won't you tell us about those daily briefings you received in the nine months or so leading up to Sept. 11, 2001? Why won't you answer charges by Robert Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor you appointed to investigate 9-11, that your administration had ample warning that terrorists were capable of flying aircraft into buildings and had been discussing such actions for a decade? If you need a refresher, Mr. President, check out the story by CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston located on the CBSNews.com homepage for Dec. 17, 2003. Kean's charges are spelled out there.

* Would you please acknowledge that it was mostly elements in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - not Iraq - who worked with al-Qaida to bring down the World Trade Center? It's pretty clear that your administration grossly exaggerated claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had strong ties to al-Qaida.
I know your war in Iraq is popular now that you've caught Saddam, but the killing goes on. Nearly 500 American soldiers have died now, and about 11,000 are wounded or maimed. Some 10,000 Iraqis have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded.

Maybe you were right to protect Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where we (especially your family) have many friends and business associates. Maybe you were right to invade Iraq, but you were wrong to lie about the reasons. No Americans should die in a war based on falsehood and exaggeration.


* Why is it taking so long to get to the bottom of the Valerie Plame Wilson affair? It's been more than six months since someone high in your administration leaked the CIA operative's identity to columnist Robert Novak. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, has said her identity was disclosed to punish him for saying you exaggerated Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Surely you, like George Bush the Elder, don't approve of betraying undercover intelligence agencies.
After all, your daddy was the former head of the CIA. Couldn't you have convened a meeting to find out who did this and knock some heads together? Frankly, your handling of this smacks of a cover-up. Can you imagine the mayhem that would've ensued had President Clinton or one of his top aides betrayed an American spy to the media?


* Does some fundamental religious belief - say, that the end of the world is coming soon - influence your policies on the environment and on nuclear weapons? If not, how do you explain policies that seem designed to destroy the planet? Seriously, if you had run on a platform of destroying the Earth, I don't think your policies would be much different.
According to a list released Dec. 23 by the Sierra Club, you've tripled allowable levels of mercury pollution, shifted the burden of toxic cleanup from polluters to taxpayers, changed the rules for cleaning up America's dirtiest power plants, undermined the endangered species act and lied about the air at Ground Zero after 9-11. You've made us more dependent on Arab oil, not less.

According to Sonoma State University's Project Censored, a 27-year-old program dedicated to shining light on the shortcomings of major news media, your administration has broken or otherwise compromised about 10 international treaties. These include the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Commission, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the U.N. Convention on Climate Change. You've also made a lot of old friends angry.


* Does it worry you that the dollar appears to be in freefall just now? Our currency has fallen dramatically when measured against the Euro and others. Analysts blame this largely on our increasing deficit, now running at about half a trillion annually. Despite this, there are reports you're planning more tax cuts and a dramatic - and expensive - mission to return us to the moon. Could you hire an intern or somebody to do the math? Oh, I forgot, you avoid the negative.
Well, I know you're a busy, busy man, so I'll stop asking such impolite questions. If you ever feel you owe some answers, however - say, to those 9-11 widows who sued your administration under the RICO Act - some of us have a few other questions you might ponder. Sincerely yours.



Don Williams is the founding editor of New Millennium Writings. You may write to him at PO Box 2463, Knoxville, TN., 37901, e-mail him at [email protected] or phone him at 428-0389.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection" between Iraq and al Qaida."

"I want to bring to your attention today [to] the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network...al-Qaida affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for Saddam's network, and they have now been operating freely in [Baghdad]."

Colin's been pretty silent for a few months. I wonder what his "true" conscience is telling him?

Colin's been pretty silent for a few months. I wonder what his "true" conscience is telling him?