2000 AD

Chechnya
Check when – “Russians used a system of news management based on NATO’s. An information centre in Moscow offered NATO style briefings that had to be accepted at face value, while at the front everything possible was done to hinder journalists and exclude them from battle zones.” Guardian 30/03/2000.

May 9th former 4 term Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards was convicted of extortion schemes to manipulate the licensing of riverboat casinos – later got 10 years and $¼ million fine – Jan 8th.

November 19th – Attorney Charles Ruff, Clinton’s lawyer during Lewinsky trial, died in Washington DC aged 61.

2001, Jan 7th – President elect GW’s transition team acknowledged that labour Sec-designate Linda Chavez had provided Housing and financial aid to an illegal immigrant – she had to withdraw.

Election Campaign
Al gore decides to give it a go and you can almost sense the unease. The air is bristling with tension, an unnatural force, and a saturation of static, Pratchett’s mystical Octarine is in the air. Gore is not the choice of the elite. Gore is not wanted. In hindsight it is clear how badly the Bush clan needed to get back into power. All their crooked plans depended on being able to pull the right strings. The War on Terror is what they have in mind, a massive push to take over the middle east, the Balkans, and to oust their European rivals. Europe is doing rather too well, while the US is about to dive into recession.
How badly the Bush clan needed power is seen by the travesty of an election, which takes place in October. The most obviously fixed of all the dodgy elections ever held in the USA.
Bush like Nixon “invested greatly in projecting carefully crafted public images. In fact, Bush picked up where Nixon left off in attention to presidential imagery.”
“He projects the plain-talking CEO of American Inc, just a regular and likeable guy from Midland, Texas.” WTW – JW Dean
“No question he is mentally shallow, intectually lazy and incurious. [David Frum; The Surprise Presidency of GWB] c/o WTW – JW Dean
“Yet he has an abundance of natural intelligence, which he is willing to employ when interested in a subject.”
Vast knowledge of baseball. Seldom does nhe want to dig of focus or work hard. A loner, the Washington social scene came to a screechuing halt during his administration.”
Karl Rove – political advisor – influenced by Lee Atwater who directed Bush senior’s 1988 campaign, but died of a brain tumour aged only 40. Rove described as “Haldeman and Erlichman all in one.”

Scruples fade in dealings with Burma, Friday July 28, 2000, The Guardian

On 10th April CIA agents sacked for the ‘mistake’ of bombing Chinese embassy in Belgrade – blamed on ‘targeting error’.

Fears from Democrats that Buchanan was about to form a tactical alliance with the labour left over “Free Trade” issue. Mass protests planned during Seattle ministerial summit of the WTO in late November.

Cheney – What a F***wit
Cheney, picked this week as George W Bush's Republican running-mate and thus the next US vice-president. Cheney was  to be not so much a vice P but a co-P.
The president behind Bush
Dick Cheney has emerged as the key power-broker who looks set to be the driving force behind the new administration.
“The theoretical President-elect sits in Texas, chilling out and taking a few photo-opportunities - while, far away in Washington, the real President-elect tries to fill 7,000 jobs in 37 days, an almost biblical miracle worker. Cheney…will be a Vice-President unique in American history. He will call the shots of detail and decision. Ford's Chief of Staff at 34, one of America's master minders. George is not the smart Bush brother - that is Jeb, Governor of Florida. - nor is he particularly experienced in running things. Cheney one of Daddy Bush's oldest, most trusted friends who’s half-stab at a presidential run against Clinton in 1996 collapsed of its own accord. He did not have the ambition for the fight.”
“It was he, at Defence, who whisked Colin Powell from a mid-league military rating to become Chief of the General Staffs. Put together the emerging stalwarts of a George W. administration - Powell again, at State, Condoleezza Rice, Andy Card - and they are all names from the Cheney contact book of Republican administrations past, all veterans of Washington beltway life.
Cheney is the arch-conservative, with a House voting record - on guns, abortion and all the right-wing gut issues - to make liberals quail. As a congressman, Cheney even voted once to keep Nelson Mandela in prison because he was a 'terrorist'. He was one of the six most rabid Republicans in the House.
Has a gay press spokesman at the Pentagon openly lesbian daughter, Mary. 7 November -The heart attack was a fourth grim warning
the fury from Florida - including the storming of the canvassing board offices in Dade County by a threatening gang of Republican demonstrators - has profoundly soured the atmosphere in Washington. Who sent that mob? The shark-toothed House majority whip, Tom DeLay. How do you heal anything with a butcher leading your troops?
Peter Preston, Sunday December 17, 2000, The Observer

The Neocons Arrive
Richard Nixon’s crooked spectre manifested itself in the form of George W Bush and his neocon entourage.
To say it was a dirty campaign would be mild.
Carl Rove was famous for his “East Texas Special”. He led Bush’s campaign and started a load of false rumours about McCain, including the rumour that he was gay. He’d been had been shot down in Vietnam and held as prisoner of war, Rove’s campaign said he spent too long in the Hanoi Hilton; that he was crazy, & his wife was on drugs and distributed pictures of his dark skinned daughter around Southern Carolina .
The draught dodger George W Bush said that Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat from Georgia seeking reelection, who’d lost three limbs in Vietnam, wasn’t patriotic.
George W Bush – his father had got him into the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. “Vice president Dick cheney, who declared his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he ‘had more important things to do’.”  –.
There was also the matter of strategically used dodgy voting machines. It began in the summer of 1999. Katherine Harris, Bush’s presidential campaign co-chair-woman and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, “paid $4m to Database Technologies (DBT) to go through Florida’s voter roles and remove anyone ‘suspected’ of being a former felon. She did so with the blessing” of Jeb Bush. 31% of black men were prohibited from voting because of a felony on their record, and blacks in Florida “overwhelmingly, are Democrats”. Harris told Database “to get rid of people with ‘similar’ names to those of actual felons, people with the same birth dates as known felons, or similar security numbers; an 80% match of relevant information, the election office instructed, was sufficient for Database to add a voter to the ineligible list”. 173,000 regsitered voters in Florida were permanently wiped of fthe voter rolls. In Miami Dade, Florida’s largest county, 66% of the voters who were removed were black. 8,000 additional Floridians “were thrown off the voting rolls because Database used a false list supplied” by Texas. The list claimed to be of former convicted felons who had moved to Florida.
The election on November 7th – 90% of black Floridians voted for Al Gore. But with thousands of black citizens unable to vote, in the end Bush was given 537 votes more than Al Gore in Florida – how much difference would all those thousands of mainly Democrat supporting voters have made?
Very expensive contract between Governor Jeb’s division of elections and DBT, which accidentally wiped off the voter rolls thousands of Democratic voters. In an interview with Clayton Roberts – the Director of Elections in Florida, after Palast revealed to Roberts that he had a copy of the secret DBT contract, Roberts became uncomfortable and ended the interview. Palast continued: “It could look to others don’t you think that you paid $4m to purchase the election for the Republican Party.” Roberts called the police .
The butterfly ballot caused yet more confusion. Theresa Le Pore chose to use the “butterfly ballot” – “confusing - led thousands of democrats, to punch the wrong hole, giving their vote not to Al Gore…but to Pat Buchanan.”  There was a recount. LePore insisted on the strictest standards for determining voter intent and then, 72 hours before the final deadline, ordering her staff to take the day off for Thanksgiving. Palm Beach County failed to complete its manual re-count on time “and the whole process…was rendered void.”
“Without the butterfly ballot, Gore would have taken as many as 7,000 more votes and cruised past Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.”
She was told by the state of to replace the punchcard machines so she went for the electronic touchscreen voting sytem that had been used in Riverside County, east of LA. “She was told that Riverside’s system had performed flawlessly” but “had in fact suffered meltdown on election night, creating the first of many controversies about the reliability and accuracy of its Sequoia Pacific machines.” LePore was a “calamitously incompetent elections supervisor” but she managed to stay in the job.

It was some time before the winner was chosen – not by the ballot box, but by the suprme court.

“Our government has been overthrown” wrote Micheal Moore, by GW Bush, the “Thief-in-Chief”.

Political Donations
The Centre for Public Integrity, a non-partisan research group, points out that Halliburton has benefited from government contracts or guaranteed loans worth at least $3.8bn (£2.54bn) during his five-year stewardship.
Knut Royce, a senior fellow at the centre and co-author of the report, linked the increase in government support with the company's increased political contributions during that time. "Halliburton clearly had support in part because it had been very generous over the years in giving money to the Republicans," he said.
Halliburton gave $1.2m (£800,000) to candidates and parties while Mr Cheney was chairman, compared with $534,750 in the five years before his arrival. The $3.8bn awarded to the company since he joined in 1995 is compared with $1.3bn in the five previous years.
About $2.3bn in US government contracts was awarded to Halliburton in the past five years, almost double the level of the previous five years. But the centre made it clear that Mr Cheney had not been accused of wrongdoing. "It's simply a question of business as usual," Mr Royce said. "That's one of the [downfalls] of the system."
Jane Martinson in New York, Saturday August 5, 2000, The Guardian
Oil Tycoon
Dick Cheney has been given a "retirement" package worth $20m agreed by the Dallas-based Halliburton Corporation on July 26, the day that Mr Bush announced he had selected Mr Cheney. Had he resigned, clauses in his contract could have forced him to forfeit $10m or more in stock options and compensation.
The news of Mr Cheney's latest windfall comes as details of the extent of the former US defence secretary's personal wealth from the oil business continued to emerge.
Like Bush, Cheney has amassed great personal wealth from the oil industry. His salary at Halliburton, which he joined in 1995, was $2m a year, but he also owns or has options on more than 1m Halliburton shares, worth $51m at current market prices. In May, Cheney sold 100,000 shares, at a $5m profit.
Cheney has made clear that he has no intention of selling his other shares unless he is elected in November. "Why not? I'm not on the government roll yet, I have no control over policy," he said last Friday.
Cheney is also entitled to $2.1m in "deferred compensation", which earns 10% interest while it goes unclaimed.
"The American public should be pleased that they have a vice-presidential nominee who has been successful," Bush's spokeswoman Karen Hughes said yesterday.
Cheney gets $20m oil job pay-off, Martin Kettle in Los Angeles, Monday August 14, 2000, The Guardian

Bush called himself a great delegator!

Yugoslavia
Serbian economy suffering due to trade sanctions by US etc. Dissent spread in January. Montenegro discussed separating from Serbia in January.
Opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica won elections held on September 24th. Milosevic refused to release the complete results, demanding a run-off election.
October – popular uprising. General strike. Mobs attack parliament building. Milosevic forced to step down and Kostunica took office. US and EU begin to lift economic sanctions and offer aid.

Burma
In case you haven’t heard - Childslave workers – exploiting forced labour (international Labour Organisation) – hundreds of political prisoners – thousands of arbitrary arrests and torture – tens of thousands of ethnic Karen and other tribespeople abused, killed or driven from their land by Burmese army since 1962.
Premier Oil – a UK company have refused to pull out – even Texaco pulled out of the multi-million pound Yetagun gas pipe line. Also Pepsi Co, Eastman Kodak, Best Western have pulled out of burma.
Cheney - CEO of Halliburton Co – Dallas based – the world’s largest oilfield services company. He has business links to Burma. Rangoon military junta has an appalling human rights record. Cheney backed a lobby group called USA Engage which opposed US investment sanctions on Burma.
Cheney is also a board member of pro-business National Foreign Trade Council who recently helped persuade the supreme court to overturn a Mass. state law imposing penalties on companies who trade with Burma.
Nobel peace prize winner – Aung Suu Kyi – leader of the National League for Democracy faces daily brutal intimidation ten years after elections in which they won 82% of the vote.
- heroin production and trafficking second only to Afghanistan. Unocal and TotalFinaElf also have big Burmese operations.
July 28th 2000, The Gaurdian

Israel
Sharon was elected p.m. for the 2nd time in February.
US-Israel proposals at Camp David in 2000
Shlomo Ben-Ami – architect of the proposals which was based on “neo-colonist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.”
“At the time, West Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Clinton and Israeli prime minister Barak diod propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually seperated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian communications. The fifth canton was Gaza. It  is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is their prototype, the Bantustan “homelands” of apartheid South Africa, ever mentioned.” CHOMSKY
“The primary barrier to the “emerging vision” has been, and remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the current “Arab League’s historic offer”.”
“It repeats the basic terms of a Security Council resolution of January 1976 which called for a political settlement on the internationally recognised borders “with appropriate arrangements … to guarantee …the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and poltical independence of all states in the area.” This was backed by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states and the PLO but opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history. Similar initiatives have since been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed in public commentary.”
“Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant humiliation. Israeli plans for Palestinians have followed the guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labour leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Thirty years ago advised Dayan advised the cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that “we have no solution, you shall have to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.”
“The Palestinians have long suffered torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and take-over of basic resources, crucially water. These policies have relied on decisive US support and European acquiescence.”
“It is regularly claimed that all peace proposals have been undermined by Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel, and by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited “our trust”. How that trust may be regained is explained by Edward Walker, a Clinton Middle East adviser: Arafat must announce that “we put our future and fate in the hands of the US” – which has led the campaign to undermine Palestinian rights for 30 years.

A major intifada or uprising by Palestinians in September – caused when Sharon walked through the most holy Muslim sites producing widespread protests. The first day four Palestinians were shot dead and 150 wounded. Some tv news reports said that Israeli soldiers showed “absolutely no restraint” firing live ammunition into crowds from 20m away. Ten times as many Palestinians were killed as Israelis early on. The action of the army appeared to be linked to a political agenda to stop the peace process .

Iraq
Hans von Sponeck, who succeeded Halliday as UN coordinator of Humanitarian Relief of Iraq, resigned. “How long should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?”
Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, another UN agency, resigned over this issue.

Panama
Mireya Moscoso, first woman president of Panama. Her opponent was Martin Torrijos – son of former dictator and she is wife of the man his father deposed – Arnufo Arias in 1968. Canal to be transferred to Panama and all US troops to be pulled out – December 2001?

Brazil
The real began to stablize in Brazil. Celelbrations to mark the 50th anniversary (of what?) marred by protests by indigenous Indians, who say that racial genocide, forced labour and disease have dramatically cut their population from an estimated 5million before the Portuguese arrived in 1500 to the current 350,000.
In November Cordoso increased minimum wage by 20% in an effort to help reduce huge income inequalities. Unemployment fell to 7.1% in 2000 – the lowest since 1997.
Brazil’s workers’ Party made major gains in 2000.
Landless workers’ Movement (MST) put Cordoso under pressure too.
In September the MST threatened to invade a farm owned by Cordoso – demanded agrarian reform.

Philippines
V-P Gloria Arroyo became President.

Former Soviet Union
Chechnya – In March 2000, Putin won half of the Checehn vote even though he’d taken a tough hostile stance to Chechen demands, and his role in the launch of the second military campaign six months earlier, 1999. Independent monitors said the election was fair; but were the public voting under duress as in Nicaragua, when they voted against the Sandinistas in the full knowledge that a Sandinista government would provoke more terrorism from their powerful northern neighbour.

Former Yugoslavia
2000 Milosevic was defeated at the polls by Vojislav Kostunica. The Milosevic Era according to PBS
 2000 The new nation of Serbia and Montenegro replaces the old one of Yugoslavia. When Slobodan Milosevic does not accept his defeat in the elections, he is forced out by mass protests. In 2003, he is handed over to the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and Kosovo becomes a United Nations protectorate.
Milosevic was overthrown in October 2000.

The Chandra Levy murder – park searched twice and body found in second search, 2001 – it hadn’t been there on first search.

Al Qaida
Clinton’s administration devised a plan to strike at Al Qaida in retaliation for the assault on the Warship Cole. Clinton’s National Security advisor, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan, but Rice, still very much in her role as a director of Chevron – Texaco – later denied such a briefing according to Time Magazine 12/08/02.
According to Tenet – during November and December “we had an increase in Ramadam-related threat reporting…we were able to successfully pre-empt attacks including a planned attack against US interests.”
In October – attack against the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast killed 17 Americans – the US blamed Billal Gibraltar plot.

Star Wars
Clinton carried out promise to test the system and close it down if necessary – and since the test failed it was shut down. Just in time for Bush to start it up again.