Rummy's a dummy in comparison.
By Michael Kinsley

The press briefings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are widely acknowledged to be the best show on television, and watching him perform in person is probably even more entertaining. By contrast, it must be hell to be trapped in the White House briefing room with Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Reading the transcripts of Fleischer's performances on the Web, though, is fascinating. In a review last week of the various war briefers, my colleague David Plotz gave short shrift to Fleischer-dismissing him as an evasive bore. This doesn't give Fleischer nearly enough credit: He is a great evasive bore.

There's a war on, for heaven's sake. The fate of civilization may be at stake, and your job is to tell the world how the war is going. Under these circumstances, how hard is it to be interesting? On the other hand, to be boring and to stay boring-to maintain your rock-solid commitment to the lack of information while fascinating information cascades from the heavens all around you like emergency food parcels-takes discipline. It takes imagination. Let us not flinch: It takes genius.

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by Matti Huuhtanen

OSLO, Norway –– Last year's Nobel Peace laureate, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, warned of new global threats in a speech Thursday opening this year's celebration, which commemorates a century of honoring people working for peace in the world's trouble spots.

Kim said the divide between the rich and poor is widening.

"We have witnessed anger caused by the gap between rich and poor in a worldwide digital divide of the information era," he said at the three-day symposium that was to include the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Lech Walesa.

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by Kevin Galvin

WASHINGTON — Debate over the federal crackdown on terrorism has centered on immigrants in federal detention, military tribunals for al-Qaida leaders and other issues seemingly removed from average Americans.

Government watchdog groups are increasingly concerned, however, that new law-enforcement tools adopted to foil terrorists are so broadly drawn that they will have direct and lasting effects on civil liberties for everyone.

At issue are the expanded search and surveillance powers granted to federal agents in the counter-terrorism bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush a little more than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Rallying Around a Wartime President is One Thing. But Why Does Dubya Remain Entirely Untouchable Even as We Question His Lieutenants -- and His Increasingly Disturbing Policies?
by Michael Wolff

To get the willies from George W. Bush, to distrust the man, to have your stomach roll a bit when you hear him speak, is to feel like the most churlish and sullen of adolescents. He's the unappealing uncle -- with his cold eye on you -- whose house you're stuck at this holiday season. While you're trying to shut out his existence, everybody else is sucking up to him.

If you knew it was just pretend, just a holiday bit -- everybody being phony and polite -- you could handle it; the problem is in thinking that all this affability, this undisaffected appreciation for the guy, is honest feeling on everyone else's part. What if 85 percent of the American people actually, deep in their hearts, approve of him -- dig him? What does that say about you and where you fit in?

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by Marie Cocco

THE COMPANY was a media darling. Its story line: It would bring a different era to a hidebound industry, delivering it from rusty shackles to the promised land of lean-and-mean competition.

The company flew high. Then it crashed calamitously low, taking its workers and retirees, but not its corporate officers, down with it. Retirees who'd been promised much were summarily told they'd get little after bankruptcy. And they would only get that because their old-fashioned, defined-benefit retirement plan was protected by a federal guarantee.

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by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- With all due respect, of course, and God Bless America too, has anyone considered the possibility that the U.S. attorney general is becoming unhinged?

Poor John Ashcroft is under a lot of strain here. Is it possible his mind has started to give under the weight of responsibility, what with having to stop terrorism between innings against doctors trying to help the dying in Oregon and California? Why not take a Valium, sir, and go track down some nice domestic nut with access to anthrax, OK?

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Both sides will lose if the west forces his hand on Israel's behalf
by Seumas Milne

The support from the Bush administration for Ariel Sharon's latest onslaught on the West Bank and Gaza must surely bring to an end any illusion that, in the wake of September 11, United States influence would be brought to bear to achieve a just peace in the Middle East.

In the first phase of the Afghan war, when US bombing was making little headway and the mood in the Arab world febrile, there was much speculation that American screws would at last be turned on their Israeli ally to draw the poison of Muslim rage. Israel's hardline leaders would be forced to bow the knee for a viable Palestinian state, it was said, in the cause of the wider war against terror.

Barely a month later, with the Taliban confined to their Kandahar fastness and the US preparing to turn its firepower elsewhere, all that has been discarded. Instead of pressure on Israel to end its 34-year-old illegal military occupation, the US is cheering on its attempt to smash the fragile institutions of the Palestinian Authority. Instead of using its unparalleled leverage to help bring about new negotiations, the US has lined up behind Sharon, the man of blood responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the past year, and still facing war crimes investigations over his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982.

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by Ellen Goodman

AT THE END of the 19th century, when African-Americans were strung like ''strange fruit'' from Southern trees, The New York Times required every story about lynching to include a quote from a segregationist justifying the hanging.

At some point, the absurdity of that journalistic ''evenhandedness'' struck home to the editors. Murder is not a story with ''another side.''

I mention that footnote to my profession's history because I've always found something odd in the notion that ''balance'' is a seesaw, outfitted with exactly two seats for opponents whose views are carefully and equally weighted. A given story may have 15 sides - or one.

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Statement by Global Exchange Women's Delegation to the Region
by Medea Benjamin

The following is a first-hand account of current conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan from human rights organization Global Exchange, which recently completed a two-week fact-finding trip is presenting their report and recommendations in Washington this week.

Introduction:

A four-person women's delegation, organized by Global Exchange and led by Medea Benjamin, traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan from November 20 to December 3. The purpose of the trip was to investigate the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and among the refugee population, to assess the consequences of US bombing, and totalk to women1s groups about what role they would like to play in atransition government.

The group traveled to Islamabad and Peshawar in Pakistan, refugee campsalong the border, and Jalalabad and Kabul in Afghanistan. Our group met with a widerange of women1s organizations involved in activities such as educatingAfghan youth, providing economic alternatives for street children andbeggars, running clinics and health care centers, assisting refugees,educating women about their rights, and promoting the legal rights of womenin a post-Taliban government. These groups include the Afghan Women1sCouncil, the Afghan Women's Network, Women's Commission for Peace, theAfghan Women's Resource Center, Afghan Women Skills and Development Center,Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan, theRevolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), and the International Human Rights Law Group.

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By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON

Preparing to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee where to get off today, Attorney General John Ashcroft lashed out at all who dare to uphold our bedrock rule of law as "voices of negativism." (A nattering nabob, moi?)

Polls show terrorized Americans willing to subvert our Constitution to hold Soviet-style secret military trials. No presumption of innocence; no independent juries; no right to choice of counsel; no appeal to civilian judges for aliens suspected of being in touch with terrorists.

President Bush had no political motive in suspending, with a stroke of his pen, habeas corpus for 20 million people; his 90 percent popularity needs no boost. The feebleness of the Democrats' response, however — with the honorable exception of Vermont's Senator Pat Leahy — is highly political. Tom Daschle is waffling wildly because he is terrified of being slammed as "soft on terrorism," which might overwhelm his strategy of running against "the Bush recession" in the 2002 elections.

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by Ali Abunimah

CHICAGO -- Once again the world has had to confront the horror of innocent men, women and children killed by suicide bombers in the heart of Jerusalem and in Haifa. No decent person can refrain from condemning such attacks in the strongest terms. Such deeds harm not only their innocent victims, which in this case probably included Palestinian citizens of Israel, but also the just cause of Palestine.

As a Palestinian I am often challenged by the press on my views about such horrific bombings. I emphatically repeat my condemnation and state that I oppose the targeting and killing of innocent civilians regardless of whether they are Israelis or Palestinians.

Yet I wonder why no one asked how I felt when five Palestinian schoolboys were killed by a bomb planted by the Israeli occupation forces in a refugee camp in Gaza less than two weeks ago � or why Israelis and pro-Israel spokesmen, who are called for comment by the same radio and television stations that call me, are rarely asked to condemn the violence that is committed in their name.

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