THE CLOWN'S GALLERY OF GW BUSH

from the Financial Times of London

July 11, 2003

by Jimmy Burns in London [excerpted]

US Warned Over Bernard Kerick's
Heavy-Handed "Kicking Ass" Mentality
in Policing Baghdad and Iraq

The law enforcement operation in Iraq could disintegrate unless US forces stop "kicking ass" and take a more conciliatory attitude towards civilians, senior UK police advisers have told their government.

Some UK officials have been appalled by the language and tactics used by the U.S. security supremo, bed-wetter and high school dropout, Bernard Kerick, the former undereducated and overweaned NYC police commisioner dubbed the "Baghdad Terminator" because of his uncompromising and programmed style.

Senior UK officers with experience in Northern Ireland have expressed concern that tough tactics are fueling militancy among Iraqis who are not necessarily pro-Saddam.

from today's Jordan Times and Al-Jazeera

BAGHDAD (AFP) — The US-led coalition in Iraq announced Tuesday it was recalling staff from the interior ministry to get security and services up and running, but former intelligence officers were not invited to return. “All Iraqis who worked for the ministry of the interior should report back to work by July 22,” senior adviser to the interim interior ministry and former New York police commissioner, Bernard Kerick, told journalists in Baghdad.

“If you do not return to work by July 22, your employment will be terminated,” he added.

Kerick said that under Saddam Hussein's regime, propped up by a labyrinthine state security apparatus, the ministry included six separate offices that covered internal investigations, security and intelligence.

“These were used for investigating, intimidating and attacking members of government and Iraqis for political purposes.

“Those offices are all being eliminated and will no longer exist,” he said, urging other former workers to return to work as soon as possible, “to bring the ministry back to full force.”

He said he was not aware how many people previously worked for the ministry, explaining that much of the data on those involved in the intelligence departments had either been destroyed or lost.

Departments that the ministry is anxious to restore are those covering police, customs, border control, immigration, civil defence and the fire department, Kerick said.

The official also confirmed that Iraqis providing information leading to the arrest of those behind a spate of attacks on US troops and local police would be eligible for a minimum reward of $2,500.

The coalition's Arabic-language Al Sabah newspaper earlier invited members of the public to call a US-based cell phone or a satellite number, with coalition forces promising to treat all information in confidence.

The announcement said people could also directly approach any Iraqi police officer or coalition soldier with information.

Kerick also said the coalition was banning vehicles with tinted windows, with effect from July 20. He said that several assaults on coalition forces and Iraqi police had been carried out by attackers in vehicles with tinted windows.

With fragile security ranking as one of the top concerns for Iraqis, Kerick said Baghdad now had 34 active police stations, a figure he hoped would eventually rise to around 60, without specifying a timeframe.

At least 29 US soldiers have been killed in hostile incidents since the United States declared major combat over on May 1, while seven Iraqi policemen were killed in a bomb attack at the weekend in Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

The United States has put up separate rewards of $25 million for information leading to the capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and $15 million for each of his sons, Uday and Qusay.

from THE QUEENS TRIBUNE

September 8th, 2000

Cops And College

Lots of people inside and outside of the NYPD are wondering how Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s choice of Bernard Kerick will affect police recruitment requirements.

Police applicants are currently required to have 60 college credits to be considered for admission to the Police Academy. Those applicants who pass the written NYPD test, but who do not have the 60 credits, are placed on a waiting list for up to three years to give them time to "complete their education," sources said.

Kerick, an eight-year NYPD veteran, was appointed in 1986 without the benefit of a college degree. Kerick, a high school dropout, holds a GED (equivalency diploma). When questioned about Kerick’s lack of formal education, Rudy said it "wasn’t necessary" and that the former NYC Corrections commissioner would "do just fine without it."

That statement has prompted would-be cops and NYPD insiders to wonder if the same logic would be now applied to those seeking jobs as police officers.

QConfidential spoke to two 27-year-old Queens men who passed the NYPD test but were put on the waiting list until they gather the required credits.

"It’s a double standard," they said. "We have to wait to work on the street while the commissioner sits in his office with less education than we have now," one of the men said.

Cop out?

Noose tightening around lil' Rudy!

Jill Nelson, USA Today, is a New York writer and editor.

The Saga of Rudy and Dubya

Imagine a place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry.

Then imagine, as John Lennon would, that this country's king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.

This is the America we all live in. The Bush administration has quietly started awarding bonuses to political appointees, a practice abandoned during the Clinton administration -- back when the economy was booming, the budget had a surplus and terrorist attacks on American soil were unimaginable.

This is just the latest act of greed and insensitivity from an administration whose very legitimacy, lest we forget the 2000 election, is suspect. Add it to the growing list of outrages: undermined civil and constitutional rights, government surveillance, secret detentions without charges, fouling of the environment.

That doesn't even touch on a post-9/11 foreign policy that, according to a huge survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is rapidly making the United States one of the least favorite nations of much of the world.

Yet Americans, terrified of terrorists, seem unwilling to rein in a president who has little or no respect for the law of the land, the dream of democracy, or, as far as I can tell, the American people. As so many of us struggle to make ends meet, afraid that it may be our job eliminated in the next round of layoffs, Bush is using our tax dollars to award his political appointees, many of whom already make more than $100,000 a year.

Exactly what have they done so well? Couldn't be the economy, justice system, environment, equal protection. The administration says many of those rewarded are involved in counter-terrorism activities. Funny; I haven't been able to find one person who feels safer now than he or she did a year ago.

Frightened as Americans are of what the future holds, it's time we recognized that not only does our emperor have no clothes -- he's steadily stealing ours.

Jill Nelson is a New York writer and editor.

Tom Robbins, Village Voice: GEORGIA Politics & RUDY GIULIANI:

Cleland, running for office in Georgia, one of only 52 American servicemen who lost THREE limbs in Vietnam, an army captain, won a Silver Star at age 25 -- while Chambliss, also running in the peach state, was home nursing a sore knee from football and collecting four draft deferments, two of them medical.

Cleland, who wore two artificial legs when he first entered politics but gave them up for a wheelchair because of the pain, told reporters that Chambliss had "attacked the very fiber of my being."

Chambliss's comrade-in-arms, Giuliani, was granted deferments while in law school in the late '60s but was denied another one when he graduated and began clerking for a federal judge, appealing the decision and escaping only after the judge wrote an unusual letter to the draft board on his behalf.

When Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, a confidential study he commissioned to assess his campaign vulnerabilities warned that he could be accused of "receiving special treatment from a friendly judge to avoid military service during the Vietnam War when thousands of less fortunate people were dying."

"Rudy dug a deep deep fiscal ditch," said Harvey Robins, a budget watchdog who served as an aide to the Koch and Dinkins administrations. "There were a number of choices Rudy could have made during his tenure to improve things [NYC finances], but he preferred either to ignore long-standing problems or to deny their existence."

His decisions created enormous new pressures on the bloated City budget.

One main one was Giuliani's 2001 shutdown of the Fresh Kills landfill. The move was a going-away present to the borough of Staten Island, which put him in office in 1993 by giving him an 89,000 vote plurality over Dinkins [in addition, the Liberal Party deserved credit for the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor in 1993 also].



The decision to close was made even before firm plans were in place for an effective new means of getting rid of the city's trash. The short-term solution has been an expensive system of exporting the city's garbage to out-of-state landfills. That action alone will cost the city more than $235 million this year in added costs.

Rudy, don’t expect the bankruptcy guys to roll over for you. You thought the mobsters you tackled back when you were a U.S. attorney in the 1980s were tough. Bankruptcy guys are double tough. There are almost never enough assets to pay everyone in full, so the way you maximize your profit is by taking a piece out of someone else. That’s why bankruptcy is a blood sport. Have fun being eaten, Rudy.

"Sweeping Range of investigations
into the conduct of some of the top lieutenants
credited with the transformation of the city's

JAIL SYSTEM

is threatening ...

...to

soil, tarnish, and discredit

Mr. Giuliani's 'Mr. Clean' mythology"

By LYDIA POLGREEN, The New York Times

Rudolph W. Giuliani. Before he took office in 1994, the city's jails were violent and their management troubled: thousands of inmates were being stabbed and slashed; overtime costs were spiraling out of control, and morale had sunk among the 11,000 officers charged with keeping inmates in line.

When Mr. Giuliani's second term ended, violence in the jails had dropped by more than 90 percent. Overtime spending had been cut nearly in half. The notorious cellblocks of chaotic jails like Rikers Island and the Tombs were so quiet it was almost spooky.

Bernard B. Kerik, the man atop the Correction Department, administered Mr. Giuliani's unapologetic zero-tolerance approach faithfully, and his work in the jails ultimately led to his appointment as police commissioner in August 2000.

But now, a range of investigations into the conduct of some of the top lieutenants credited with the transformation of the city's jail system is threatening to sully one of Mr. Giuliani's accomplishments.

Mr. Kerik's successor, William J. Fraser, who had been one of Mr. Kerik's top officers, resigned last week after reports surfaced that he had used correction officers to do work at his house in Belle Harbor, Queens.

Both the Manhattan district attorney's office and its Bronx counterpart are also looking into concerns about senior officers at the jails.

At the heart of all the investigations, Ms. Gest and others acknowledge, is Anthony Serra, who until last month was a three-star bureau chief in charge of all the jails on Rikers Island, an insider who had commanded key units established to control violence in the jail system.

Mr. Serra has been the subject of a series of articles in The Daily News in the last month, in which he has been accused of using Correction Department employees to renovate his house in Putnam County, and to do political campaign work for Gov. George E. Pataki while on city time.

Under investigation is the claim that Mr. Serra pressured dozens of correction officers to work as campaign volunteers while he pocketed more than $200,000 in consulting fees.

Three other officers, including Mr. Serra's brother, Capt. Michael Serra, and a deputy warden and an assistant chief, have been put on modified duty as a result of the widening inquiry, which means they surrendered their shields, guns and cars and were assigned to lesser jobs, a correction official said.

Mr. Serra's quick rise mirrored the rapid transformation of the city's jail system. Between 1994 and this year, Mr. Serra was promoted six times, most recently to the post at Rikers Island, a high position for a man of 42.

He was also a loyal Republican Pataki soldier. He quickly went from being a low-level campaign volunteer to a highly paid consultant in a decade that catapulted Republicans to the governor's mansion and City Hall in a state and city controlled by Democrats for more than a generation.

In 1993, Mr. Serra was a volunteer in Mr. Giuliani's successful mayoral bid. This year Mr. Serra earned a six-figure fee for helping get Mr. Pataki re-elected in a landslide last month.

Mr. Fraser took over the Corrections Department in 2000 from Mr. Kerik, who is credited with transforming the department with now-classic Giuliani tools: using statistics to measure problems and judge job performance, and instituting tough penalties for inmates who broke the rules.

Mr. Bloomberg has stood by Mr. Fraser, one of very few Giuliani administration commissioners to remain in a Republican administration remarkable for its shortage of Republicans in top positions.

In a statement after Mr. Fraser's resignation was announced, Mr. Bloomberg said, "... he knows that he has done nothing wrong."

Mr. Bloomberg said he was accepting Mr. Fraser's resignation "grudgingly, knowing that he has served the city proudly, with honor and distinction."

"PPI (Public Private Initiatives Inc.):
OUR SHADOW GOVERNMENT"
PPI PPI PPI

"PPI (Public Private Initiatives Inc.):
OUR SHADOW GOVERNMENT"

"FEMA Furor As Deadline Approaches
and Only 85 of 72,000
Displaced NYC Workers Given Any Kind of Aid!"

By ANGELINA CAPPIELLO of The New York Post

June 24, 2002 -- With only 100 days left to qualify for emergency aid, about 72,000 New Yorkers displaced by the Sept. 11 terror attacks are desperately waiting for the federal government to review their applications.

So far, only 3,000 out of 72,000 displaced workers and residents [nationally] have received assistance through FEMA's Mortgage and Rental Assistance program, advocates for the displaced said yesterday.

"I think this is such a national scandal. We have only 100 days for this to be fixed so that people who lost their jobs can survive," said Margaret McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.

In May, FEMA promised to review an additional 7,000 applications - which are only available in English - but got to only 600.

Of those, only 85 of our New Yorkers have been helped.

Even those who had been receiving aid, accused FEMA of bungling their cases and cutting them off without good reason.

Cherry Kwunyeun, who lost her job as a consultant in the World Financial Center and who lives north of Canal Street, said she received three months of assistance before FEMA deemed her ineligible and the checks stopped coming.

"They told me they thought I had moved and that my income was not effected," Kwunyeun said. "But none of that is true."

After several calls and letters written to FEMA, Kwunyeun said she has lost her confidence in the government agency.

Joining the advocates for aid were Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Nydia Velasquez, who also blasted FEMA's performance.

"To date, FEMA has failed to assist almost 100,000 New Yorkers because of long, red-taped bureaucratic roadblocks," said Maloney.

FDNY Firemen Riot Against Mayor
Giuliani and Punch Out NYPD Cops While
Overturning WTC Barricades

[summarized from an article in the November 3rd, New York Times article by Dan Barry and Kevin Flynn]

* Firefighters feel that city officials seem to care more about removing the hoards of GOLD & SILVER underneath the Trade Center than they do about removing human remains.

* Since Sept. 12th, nearly every FDNY Firefighter has been restricted to his Fire House by the Giuliani Administration, backed up by Giuliani's "in-the-hip-pocket" Fire Commissioner, Mr. Thomas von Essen.

* The more than 1000 Firemens' Protest and Riot stemmed from the crescendoing belief that the Giuliani Administration had turned the Trade Center Site into what one Firemens' Union announcement called a "... full-time construction scoop and dump operation."

* Since Sept. 12th, only 64 firefighters were allowed to participate in the rescue operations "at any one time." Giuliani just this week dramatically reduced his harsh imposition [defying all logic] down to "25 firefighters at any one time."

Further summaries: Punches were being thrown in a melee between FDNY firefighters and NYPD police officers, in full riot gear, in a 2-hr. fracas. Many of the police at Ground Zero were mounted on horseback. Firefighters called for the ousters of both Mayor Giuliani and his pet Fire Commissioner, Thomas von Essen. Firefighters first yelled and then they crashed the barricades. One Fire Marshall was arrested for throwing a really good punch and inciting a riot. The police barricades were swiftly crushed.

The streets at Ground Zero resounded with the chants of "bring the Brothers home!" and "they took all the GOLD out!".

Many thousands of New York spectators joined in with the firemen and shouted at Giuliani's private contract workers, "shut 'em down! shut 'em down!".

Kevin E. Gallagher, President of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, raised up his bullhorn to his lips and bellowed to the legions of smirking policemen, "please allow us on the site in a dignified manner!"

When only more police arrived, the firemen proceeded to tear down the barricades and steel fences obstructing them from the site. Punches were thrown and profanities exchanged. Many police were either punched or pushed to the ground.

Mr. Gallagher vowed to rouse thousands more protestors in the future, including other firemen nationally, "brothers from other cities."

Cries of "Rudy must go! Rudy must go! Rudy must go!" then thundered through the angry mob scene.

Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a high school dropout handpicked by Giuliani for the job, said rather balefully, "we didn't anticipate they would pick up and flip the barricades on top of the cops."

NOTE: Many cops since Sept. 11th, with their golden egg Giuliani-drafted pension plans, have been given so much overtime by Mayor Giuliani, that they are now earning $90,000 a year. For well over 500 cops, geared up to retire this year at the age of 38, will receive a pension based on this latest year's income, based on June 2001 to June 2002. That is one fine pension! The numbers of such lucky cops could swell to the several thousands.