Thursday, December 30, 2004

Why did HE do(allow) all this?

A great tremor and a "deafening blast" follows the sound of the Trumpet. At this moment, people recognise that they are face to face with a horrible disaster. It is obvious that the world and life is about to cease to exist. That is why, everything on earth loses its value in just a few moments. Even the sound of the Day of Resurrection will suffice to break all worldly relations among people. No thoughts can occupy the minds of people other than escaping and rescuing themselves. Fear is rife and, on that day, everyone is concerned only about himself:

When the Deafening Blast comes, the Day a man will flee from his brother and his mother and his father, and his wife and his children: on that Day every man among them will have concerns enough of his own. (Surah 'Abasa: 33-37)
After an intense shake, the earth throws up all its treasures and discloses all its secrets, none of which will have any value at all from then on:

When the earth is convulsed with its quaking and the earth then shakes off its burdens and man asks, 'What does this mean?'-on that Day it will impart all its tidings because your Lord will have inspired it. (Surat az-Zalzalah: 1-5)

A terrifying noise followed by an intense tremor and sudden underground explosions ravage everything to which people formerly attached a great deal of importance. For instance, people treasured their houses, offices, cars and fields. Some people held a house to be the main target of their lives. Yet, the vanity of such goals surfaces at the very moment of the Day of Resurrection. Material wealth, to which people devoted all their lives, will disappear in a second. The goals of one who makes getting promoted in the company his main ambition become worthless. Another who devoted all his life to seizing power in his country experiences the same terrifying situation. He bitterly witnesses the disappearance of that country...Everything loses its significance...except everything done to earn God's approval. As God states in the Qur'an: "When the Great Calamity comes: that Day man will remember what he has striven for and the Blazing Fire will be displayed for all who can see." (Surat an-Nazi'at: 34-36)


A posting by someone on the Forum made me realise the most often felt disillusionment by all theists when faced with such questions as asked by this poster.

Those who suffered in this Tsunami recently and lost their lives, must have had feelings of the same type...except the children who were too young to comprehend.


Images of children dead bodies piled up in rows. Dead bodies piled up outside a mosque in Aceh and a Temple in Tamil Nadu. Christians dead while celebrating Christmas brought home the fact that none in this World can claim to be immune from collective death and destruction just on the basis of belonging to a particular caste or creed. A very profound lesson to learn there for the whole Humanity.



When a child is run over and killed by a drunk driver, the parents ask why it had to happen to them? They are not asking for an engineering analysis of masses, velocities, and forces. They are simply seeking moral answers.

I too searched for the answers.

This question leads us to examine our basic beliefs about the nature of the God that most humanity believe in, variously called Allah, God, the Trinity, and Jehovah. Most religions teach that God has a number of attributes. Among them are:

Omniscience: all-knowing, Omnipotence: all-powerful; Omnibeneficient: A loving deity, who cares for the world.

But when about 3,000 lives were snuffed out in New York, Washington, and a Pennsylvania field by attacks on 2001-SEP-11; this caused massive grief and pain to tens of thousands of spouses, partners, family members and friends. About 25,000 people a year are murdered in the U.S. About 2000 people murdered and raped in Gujrat, Around 30,000 perished in Iraq (100,000 unofficially) in the name of liberation and now another 70,000 in SE Asia Tsunami disaster. All of these events could be prevented, by an omnipotent, omniscient, caring God. It is these types of event that can cause some people to become mad at God and to lose their faith. But it drives even more people to examine their religious beliefs, and perhaps grow spiritually.

Christian Fundamentalist R. Albert Mohler, assigned full responsibility for 9-11attacks on the (then) unknown terrorists. He said: "We dare not dignify the murderers by explaining their cause. No cause, however righteous, can justify such acts. And, no righteous cause could produce such acts. He acknowledges that God is omnipotent -- infinitely powerful -- and thus could have prevented the tragedy. He however said: "This much we know—we cannot speak of God’s decree in a way that would imply Him to be the author of evil, and we cannot fall back to speak of His mere permission, as if this allows a denial of His sovereignty and active will."

Many consider these answers to be unsatisfactory. They yearn for a more complete understanding of the puzzle.

As a Muslim, I realise that death and destruction seen in recent years, all around is not the whole story. Besides all these negative things, we also see beauty, health, prosperity, life, birth, wisdom, intelligence, growth and progress. We also see goodness among people, faith, sincerity, charity, love and the spirit of sacrifice. We also see a lot of virtue and piety. It is wrong to see one side of the coin and not to see the other side. Any philosophy that concentrates on one aspect of the creation and denies or ignores the other side is partially true and partial truths are no truth at all.

It is also the fact that the element of good is more in the creation than the element of evil. We all see that there are more people who are healthy than those who are sick. There are more that eat well than those who starve.

There are more that lead decent life than those who commit crimes. Goodness is the rule and evil is the exception. Virtue is the norm and sin is the aberration. Generally trees bear fruits, the flowers bloom, the winds move smoothly.

The Best attempt to answer these questions, I found at this Link. I am at Peace now!

Why does God Allow Death and Destruction?
Not every Calamity is a punishment.

Hope you too benefit from this...InshAllah!


But nothing will ever make me feel happy about how we bungled as nation and yet again, proved ourselves to be inheritors of the Third World Legacy.

First tsunami alert lost in Indian bureaucracy

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

America's war on itself

I have a persistent mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.
Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were no links between the Ba'athists and al-Qaida: now Bush's government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army developed high-grade weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who launched the anthrax attacks in 2001 took it from one of the army's laboratories. Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences. The Pentagon's space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which doesn't yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States. It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D Roosevelt's widow. The US is now the only member of the UN security council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the world's most effective instruments for the projection of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It ensured that Saddam could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its allies in Jordan and Turkey. Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The US finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government at the climate talks in Buenos Aires last week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its own interests. US economic growth depends on the rest of the world's prosperity. The greatest long-term threat to global prosperity is climate change, which threatens to wreck many of America's key markets in the developing world. Coastal cities in the US - including New York - are threatened by rising sea levels. Florida could be hit by stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities are likely to be affected by droughts.

In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees global warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism. As a result of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to define human life... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern re-emerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies." The nuclear powers are likely to invade each other's territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.

So how does George Bush respond to this? "Bring it on." The meeting in Buenos Aires was supposed to work out what the world should do about climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. Most of the world's governments want the protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher agreement. But the Bush administration has been seeking to ensure both that the original agreement is scrapped, and that nothing is developed to replace it.

"No one can say with any certainty," Bush asserts, "what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided." As we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute "terrorism" for "warming". When anticipating possible terrorist attacks, the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best. The "precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters of national security that it now threatens American civil liberties. But it is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.

The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But instead of helping to design a treaty that would eventually bring them in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by carbon cuts.

The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, 36 hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new commitments" is forbidden. According to the head of the US delegation, the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". It's like saying that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is flying into the tower.

Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But this is now familiar practice. The US tried to sink the biosafety protocol in 1999, even though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it. It sought to trash the 2002 Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This isn't, as some people suggest, isolationism. It is a thorough and sustained engagement, whose purpose is to prevent the world's most pressing problems from being solved.

And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the Pentagon is now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of dollars in Buenos Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity. Of course we know that its delegation was representing the interests of the corporations, not the people, and that what's bad for America is good for Exxon. But this does not detract from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity of its position.

The US has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that appealing to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but surely there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's making of America.

By George (Monbiot) - The Guardian

Sunday, December 19, 2004

The circle of Life!

Science and technology worked wonders in our lives, and we are indebted to the great geniuses who, through their inventions and innovations, made our lives more pleasant and comfortable.

But, advances in science and technology have made man arrogant, and assertive about his own strengths.

So much so, a time came when he began denying the Creator himself. Call it rationalism, liberalism, or materialism or atheism. Life began drifting away from religion and its great tenets and teachings. But, the wheel has turned full circle. Today, in the land of liberalism, religion is bouncing back. Forcefully. So forcefully that it helped a president win a second term!

What was the basis of rationalism, or denial of the power of God? Are things in our hands? We never know when we will be born, and when we will pass away from this life. When we're born, we do not know how we live; and it is in no one's hands other than the Supreme Being's to guide our destinies.

I know of a person in his 60s, who had a check-up done with the best doctors in the UK some time ago. He had insured his life for a huge sum, after getting the doctors' certificate. We all know how doctors in the Western world do their check-ups. They will not do a normal diagnosis. They will make sure that all advanced systems are brought into play, and minute observations done, aided by computer and scanning machines, so that nothing is left to chance, and the insurer does not lose his money. So, this man was subjected to all tests, spread over long hours, and then came the certificate that he is perfectly alright. But, sadly, he didn't live for many more days. One morning, in one stroke, he passed away. Tests couldn't help anyone know his fate.

Man is under the mercy of the Creator. Humanity has passed through an age of reasoning. It was an age of greater faith in reason and empirical observation; espoused as it was since the Renaissance; and bolstered by scientific discoveries. Rationalistic approach was modelled on geometry and introspection to discover "self-evident truth" as foundation of knowledge. They thought seeing is believing; and failed to note that what cannot be seen can also be real.

In the materialistic world, wealth turned men away from religion and God. Liberalism was the creed. But, wealthy societies didn't deny God, per se. They ignored many of the teachings of religion. In societies like America, for instance, abortion had at times become an issue and at times a non-issue.

Atheism and Communism advocated denial of God and religion. It was also a reaction to the dominant role played by the Church in political affairs in Europe. For a period, the denial worked at some levels. Karl Marx declared religion was the opium of the masses. It found takers in eastern Europe, Soviet Union, and parts of Asia, where people were poor, and were swayed by ideology that leaned to the left and swore by the poor and the disadvantaged. But, it lasted only for a period. People turned away from Communism and its anti-religion stands.

The intellectual class in Europe and elsewhere were at one time leaning to the anti-religion lobbies. Said Sigmund Freud, "When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life". But, there were also geniuses like Albert Einstein, the father of modern science, who linked religion and science. Said he, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind". That was the age of the real and the unreal; reason and fancy; hope and hopelessness.

It was religious persecution that brought many from Europe to the shores of America after Christopher Columbus discovered the land. The British colonies in North America attracted a mass immigration of religious dissenters and poor people throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, coming as they did from the British Isles, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries. In what is today described as the Land of Opportunities, they built their lives, and lived their lives. America has always been a liberal society, that gave importance to individual freedom. As materialistic culture caught up with the people's lives there, people began straying from religious teachings. That was understandable, though not appreciable.

Religion cannot be divorced from life. Religion is what gives strength to human life and its existence. Religion is what gives solace to millions and millions of us; it takes us nearer to God; it teaches us about good living, and guides us onto the right paths. After all, it doesn't harm anyone. So, why does anyone deny it? What is good is to be cherished, preserved and promoted.

It is, thus, good to note that America, the land of the liberal, is turning back to religion. Religious revivalism is the subject of discussion in the media there for the past few weeks, after George Bush won another term of Presidency by riding the crest of a pro-religion wave set in motion by the conservatives there. It is believed that the November election results hinged not on Iraq war, or on American economy, but more clearly on socio-religious issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, and the role of religion in American life, in all of which Bush's pro-religion stands helped him.

Those who watched the elections know that Bush was defensive on Iraq and economy as he entered the campaign trail, and even in the televised pre-election debates at the fag end of the campaigning. Democrats thought victory was at hand for them. The Republicans quietly and successfully worked up the voter minds the religious way. And religious conservative votes re-elected Bush.

The fact is that the American society is returning to religion and its teachings. The Republicans exploited the general mood in the society, and identified the right subject that would see Bush through into a second term. "Deep-rooted conservatism and puritanical (religious) beliefs swayed a majority of American voters", was how commentators put it. Democrats failed to fathom the under-currents, and kept harping on Iraq and Bush's foreign policy "blunders". Bush's victory is bound to give a fillip to the religious and moral revival movement in America. Those who advocate abortion rights and same-sex marriage will find the going tough.

It could be an age of moral revival and re-generation, after a period de-generation. But, more than that, it is a return of the age of faith; the faith in the Supreme Being, the Creator, who guides all our destiny. That is what makes it important.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Iron curtain is falling across Europe

Germany's new immigration law comes into force less than three weeks from now and here's a message for Indian techies thinking of heading for the Fatherland: Ponder long, consider hard; Germany 2005 may be difficult territory to colonise with our skills. So also Holland. And France. And Italy. And who knows, Britain too, may one day soon, be pulling up the cultural drawbridge and barricading itself against the non-European barbarians at its gate.


For, though he never meant it in quite this way, Churchill's "iron curtain" is once again descending across Europe. "Behind that line," he said in 1946, "lie all these famous cities and the populations around them." Churchill, of course, meant the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe — Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. His iron curtain divided the Soviet sphere from the rest of the West. And his prescient words marked the onset of the Cold War.

But howsoever complex the situation then, it was surely less so than today. Now, the iron curtain is draped across Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Rome. It enfolds other, smaller cities and towns. Its tassels fall untidily everywhere. It screens off minds from the 'other'. For, "multi-kulti" has gone out of fashion. Hard-won European tolerance to a fault has suddenly become an outsize cheque that bounced badly, dashing hopes of a sizeable future pay-off.

How else to read the remarks of Germany's opposition leader Angela Merkel, when she announced that the very idea of a multicultural society was flawed? And what to make of Holland's chant, "normen en warden" (Dutch norms and values), even as it embarks upon one of the largest deportations of foreigners in modern European history? Why else would France ban conspicuous religious symbols such as the Jewish yarmulke, Muslim hijab and Sikh turban in state schools? And how to justify the UK's tough new measures to repatriate rejected asylum claimants? Italy, meanwhile, has promised it will never repeat the amnesties granted to illegal immigrants.

Right or wrong, but everyone seems to know why the continent is falling under the hypnotic spell of the mono-culturalism mantra. European Muslims are seen to be too many and too unreconstructed for white Christian Europeans to suffer, post-9/11. Holland has seen the ugly murder of film-maker Theo, great-great-great nephew of Vincent van Gogh, for daring to be rude about living Islam. Berlin has heard a secret recording on television of an imam telling the faithful the Germans would "burn in hell" because they were unbelievers. And Britain has discovered that Muslim-dominated parts of its cities might very well be in deepest Pakistan.

Should we care? Yes, because when multi-culturalism is discredited, it affects us all.

There may be no watchtowers, no tangible Checkpoint Charlie, no Berlin Wall to pull down. The curtain might almost be invisible in politically-correct Europe. But the heavy drapes insidiously muffle all sound, including the pleasing tapping of keyboards as Indian techies get going in Europe.

By RASHMEE Z AHMED

Saturday, December 11, 2004

US finiancial Armageddon

"America is a land of economic marvels: No one saves money, but everyone spends it. Consumers buy things with money they don't have... but never seem to run out. Home prices skyrocket... even though the majority of Americans can't afford one. Bull markets flourish on Wall Street, even though the average stock sells for 35 times earnings. Commodity prices soar, yet the inflation rate barely budges.

And most incredibly of all, the dollar's value collapses, but foreigners still buy billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds every month. Will America's delicious economic fantasy ever end?"


A Chinese Perspective
The China Price

So, the priorities lies elsewhere

The number of undernourished people in the world rose by 18 million between 1995-97 and 2000-02, a sharp reversal from the decline of 27 million in the population of the hungry in the previous five years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The reversal was largely due to China and India performing considerably worse in the second half of the decade than they did in the first half.
The FAO's report, "State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2004", estimates that the number of undernourished people in the world in 2000-02 was 852 million, of which 815 were in the developing world, 28 million in the transition economies and 9 million in the industrialised countries. India alone had 221 million hungry people at the latest count, while China had another 142 million.

Wonder what the creators of 'India Shining' campaign have to say about this?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/953870.cms

Friday, December 10, 2004

Smoking while Iraq burns!

Its idolisation of 'the face of Falluja' shows how numb the US is to everyone's pain but its own

Naomi KleinFriday November 26, 2004

Iconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph of James Blake Miller, the 20-year-old marine from Appalachia, who has been christened "the face of Falluja" by pro-war pundits, and the "the Marlboro man" by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller "after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop, deadly combat" in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips. Gazing lovingly at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather informed his viewers: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I." A few days later, the LA Times declared that its photo had "moved into the realm of the iconic". In truth, the image just feels iconic because it is so laughably derivative: it's a straight-up rip-off of the most powerful icon in American advertising (the Marlboro man), which in turn imitated the brightest star ever created by Hollywood - John Wayne - who was himself channelling America's most powerful founding myth, the cowboy on the rugged frontier. It's like a song you feel you've heard a thousand times before - because you have. But never mind that. For a country that just elected a wannabe Marlboro man as its president, Miller is an icon and, as if to prove it, he has ignited his very own controversy. "Lots of children, particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man. The clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after a battle is with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scolding letter to the Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point to the editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking water would have a more positive impact on your readers."

Please read the rest of the story for the twist in the tale.




Thursday, December 09, 2004

They hate our policies, NOT us!!

WHO wrote this — a pop sociologist, obscure blogger or anti-war playwright? "Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic — namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is — for Americans — really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims, they are talking to themselves.­
Actually, this is the conclusion of the report of the defence science board taskforce on strategic communication — the product of a Pentagon advisory panel — delivered in September. Its 102 pages were not made public in the presidential campaign, but, barely noticed by the US Press, silenty slipped on to a Pentagon website on Thanksgiving eve.­
The taskforce of military, diplomatic, academic and business experts, assigned to develop strategy for communications in the ‘global war on terrorism’, had unfettered access, denied to journalists, to the inner workings of the national security apparatus. There was no intent to contribute to public debate, much less political controversy; the report was for internal consumption only.­
They discovered more than a government sector ‘in crisis’, though it found that: "Missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation." As it journeyed into the recesses of the Bush foreign policy, the taskforce documented the failure of fundamental premises. "America’s negative image in world opinion and diminished ability to persuade are consequences of factors other than the failure to implement communications strategies," the report declares. What emerges is an indictment of an expanding and unmitigated disaster based on stubborn ignorance of the world and failed concepts that bear little relation to empirical reality, except insofar as they confirm and incite gathering hatred among Muslims.­
The Bush administration, according to the defence science board, has misconceived a war on terrorism in the image of the cold war. However, the struggle is not the west versus Islam; while we blindly call this a ‘war on terrorism’, Muslims "in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration" against Arab regimes allied with the US and "western modernity — an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a ‘war on terrorism’.­
In this conflict, wholly unlike the cold war, the Bush administration’s impulse has been to "imitate the routines and bureaucratic mindset that so characterised that era". So the US projects Iraqis and other Arabs as people to be liberated, like those ‘oppressed by Soviet rule’. And the US accepts authoritarian Arab regimes as allies against the ‘radical fighters’. All this is nothing less than a gigantic ‘strategic mistake’.­
There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-US groundswell among Muslim societies — except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the US so determinedly promotes and defends. Rhetoric about freedom is received as ‘no more than self-serving hypocrisy’, highlighted daily by the US occupation in Iraq. "Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’, but rather they hate our policies." The ‘dramatic narrative’ of the war on terrorism, Bush’s grand storyline connecting all the dots from the World Trade Centre to Baghdad, has ‘borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars’. As a result, jihadists have been able to transform themselves from marginal figures in the Muslim world into defenders against invasion, with a following of millions.­
"Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of ‘dissemination of information’, or even one of crafting and delivering the ‘right’ message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none — the United States is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims. Inevitably, therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the ‘loud and clear’ channel: the enemy."­
Almost three months ago, the board delivered its report to the White House. But, a source told me, it has received no word back. The report has been ignored by those to whom its recommendations are directed.­
For the Bush administration, expert analysis is extraneous, as it is making clear to national security professionals in its partisan scapegoating of the CIA. Experts can only be expert in telling the White House what it wants to hear. Expertise is valued not for the evidence it offers for correction, but for propaganda and validation. But no one, not in the White House, Congress or the dwindling coalition of the willing, can claim the catastrophe has not been foretold by the best and most objective minds commissioned by the Pentagon — perhaps for the last time.­

The link to the full rpeort can be found underneath.

http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-09-Strategic_Communication.pdf