Nation Topics - Indictment | The Nation

The article reports on the scandal surrounding Republican Representative Bob Ney and his involvement in Jack Abramoff's illegal lobbying. Starting in 2002, Ney accepted bribes from Abramoff for ten "official acts." Much of this money came from Native American tribes, on whose behalf Abramoff was lobbying. It is certain that Ney will face charges.

The article looks at how the ongoing trial of lobbyist Jack Abramoff is impacting the political reputation of the Republican Party in the United States. It is the author's view that the Abramoff controversy has yet to gain anywhere near the media attention accorded the CIA Plamegate leak investigation or the indictment of Tom Delay. It is suggested that the Abramoff scandal is creating headaches for Republicans and opportunities for Democrats to create political pay dirt.

The article discusses the indictment of United States Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, for allegedly lying to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents or grand jurors about his role in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) leak. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not focused on which Administration official outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. It is claimed that Cheney had a role in undermining Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had challenged the Administration's reasons for the Iraq War.

The article discusses the problems and scandals facing the administration of United States President George W. Bush. The public is losing its support for the U.S.-led Iraq War. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted. The article discusses whether the Bush Administration willfully misled the public in regards to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Bush is criticized for his lack of planning prior to the Iraq War as well as for his lack of political planning in the United States on issues such as crisis management and Social Security.

The article reports that U.S. Democrats rose up as an opposition party in the Senate after the indictment of Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Democrats called for an investigation into the President George W. Bush Administration's misuse of intelligence before the Iraq War. Republicans in the Senate have not been used to facing a minority opposition leader. The Senate has established a committee to examine charges that Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts stalled the investigation.

The article discusses the lack of political and social stability in the Balkans. Ramush Haradinaj, who resigned as Kosovo's prime minister, had been expecting his indictment for alleged war crimes for almost three months. Three factors are driving the region toward, at best, damaging civil unrest and, at worst, a revival of armed conflict: a steady, severe economic crisis; the persistence of weak states caught up in an unholy constitutional tangle; and profound incompetence on the part of the international community. The Balkans provide the clearest proof that Western military intervention, whether liberal or illiberal, is a complete waste of time, money and life if it is not accompanied by a coherent, long-term attempt to address the root causes of instability after hostilities have ceased. Kosovo is the only territory in Europe that has recorded a negative growth rate each year since 2002. Overall unemployment stands at 50 percent, while youth unemployment runs at 70 percent.

Discusses Chile under President Ricardo Lagos and the decision of Judge Juan Guzman to prosecute Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Public reaction to the indictment of Pinochet and his regime's Operation Condor, a consortium of secret police agencies which led state-sponsored terrorism in the 1970s; Efforts to redress human rights crimes; Background on the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, or Valech Commission, and its report on documented cases; The debate over public and military accountability for repression during the Pinochet era; How Commander in Chief Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre pre-empted the Valech Commission report; Criticism of the Supreme Court; Outlook for prosecution of the Condor perpetrators by Chile's tribunals and the imprisonment of former DINA director Manuel Contreras.

Editorial. The article looks at political violence and other events around the world as of October 2004, and presents the author's anxiety over politics in the United States. The attack on the children in Beslan, Russia, embodied the extreme ideological intransigence that governs so much of the world. Within the same few weeks, Mark Thatcher (former British Prime Minister Margaret's son), and Simon Mann, founder of the band of corporate mercenary soldiers called Executive Outcomes, were indicted for trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. If true, it worries me, because so many of the world's wars seem to be most heated along the path of hoped-for oil pipelines, and months ago, long before U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the war in Sudan to be genocide, there were news reports that Chad and Sudan would be the site of new pipelines designed to skirt the better-known hot spots in the Middle East. More prominent were the crazy-making contradictions flowing from the White House: A vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry means that the terrorists will strike again. Vote for President George W. Bush because the terrorists are going to strike again anyway. Our dependence on oil ought not to remain a driving force behind our social policy, our morality, our wars. Releasing ourselves from this dependence is worth the effort.

The article offers a strategy for a Democratic victory over Republican President George W. Bush in the 2004 United States election. The threat posed by George W. Bush's right-wing reaction has organized the left for presidential candidate John Kerry. For progressives, this election has revealed the growing power of their arguments and the sophistication of their activism. That energy, at the base of the Democratic Party, provides hope that victory in 2004 may mark the beginning of a movement that can transform U.S. politics. Pre-emptive war and an arrogant unilateralism produced the debacle in Iraq, which has left the U.S. more isolated, more reviled and more vulnerable. Pre-emptive top-bracket tax cuts have run up record deficits as far as the eye can see, while generating the worst jobs record of any President since the Great Depression. Though Kerry voted to give Bush the authority to make war in Iraq, and has failed to call for an end to the U.S. occupation, he challenges the pre-emptive war doctrine of the Bush Administration and promises a foreign policy that will be tempered by alliances, international cooperation and the rule of law. In the primaries, progressives provided the ideas that candidates had to embrace: the Apollo project for jobs and energy independence, the challenge to No Child Left Behind and demand for larger investment in education, opposition to the shameless giveaway to drug companies, affordable healthcare, indictment of Bush's war in Iraq, support for labor rights and environmental protections in trade accords, reaffirmation of the right to organize. These mainstream progressive positions defined the Democratic debate.

The author argues that Martha Stewart should be found innocent of securities fraud, as she is being made a scapegoat for Wall Street corruption. It was almost four years ago that the great stock market bubble burst. Despite revelations of systematic fraud across Wall Street and corporate America, the criminal consequences have been surprisingly minimal. The Wall Street banks, at the heart of the chicanery, mostly got off with a $1.4 billion settlement deal with the authorities, less than 4 percent of their profits between 1996 and 1999. The disappointingly short list of the indicted and/or jailed includes a handful of Enron execs, Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, ImClone's Sam Waksal...and not many more. The major exception was a household name before indictment: Martha Stewart, whose trial began on January 20. Why Martha? Though most people think she's charged with insider trading, she's not. She's charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, lying to federal prosecutors and securities fraud-charges for which she could do serious time if convicted. And the original trade that gave rise to all this trouble was probably not illegal in itself. What Stewart's really in the dock for are the defenses she mounted after news of her well-timed sale became public. Though she has millions of fans, Martha is not broadly loved. She was voted the seventh most annoying person of 2003 on the website amiannoying.com. There's little doubt that this dislike contributed to her indictment, and to the widespread assumptions of her guilt.