"The Double Life of James Baker." The Bush White House appointed James Baker III to get Iraq out of its international debts -- something W calls crucial to Iraq's future. But it appears that the supremely well-connected Baker has a big-time conflict of interest: As a major equity partner in the globe-girdling merchant bank and defense contractor known as the Carlyle Group (itself a Bush-family-linked venture), the envoy is also party to a complex business deal that depends on getting Iraq to maximize its debt payments to Kuwait. Naomi Klein probes the high-stakes backscratching in The Nation (Nov. 1). http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=klein
"Abu Ghraib Interrogator Tells His Story." Roger Brokaw worked for six months as a military intelligence interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison. Now retired, he goes on the record for Lorna Benson of Minnesota Public Radio (Oct. 11) about pressures from superiors to get tougher with prisoners (most of whom seemed far from terrorist material), and about the "ghost detainees" whose status he didn't report to anyone -- largely because it was commanding officers who were hiding them. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2004/10/04_bensonl_interrogator/
"If You Had Seen What I Have Seen." "Saddam is gone, and the world is worse for it," writes Scott Ritter, a former senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq and outspoken critic of the U.S./U.K. invasion. Tracing the pre-war WMD inspection he says was programmed to fail, Ritter argues on the Web site Information Clearinghouse (Oct. 10) that things in Iraq are horrific now because Bush and Blair never cared about finding weapons; they simply wanted Saddam gone, and were willing to flout longstanding international law to make it so. http://207.44.245.159/article7038.htm
"Job growth lags Bush administration projections in 48 states." If unemployment's been dropping, lately the only reason is that the work force is shrinking. That's because job growth continues to fall well below what's needed to meet increases in the working-age population. And it's been a mere fraction of the job growth Bushies predicted their July 2003 tax cut would produce, with actual jobs below the projections in 13 of the past 15 months. According to the Economic Policy Institute's Job Watch (Oct. 8), that qualifies these times as the "weakest job recovery since the 1930s." http://jobwatch.org/
