Lee Gough won’t be paying her federal income taxes this year.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the artist and part-time temp worker won’t be setting money aside for April 15th – just that the federal government won’t be getting any of it. The 37-year old Brooklynite has decided to make 2004 the year that she takes a stand, a move she’s been working towards for some time now. “I’ve asked the temp agency to increase the number of allowances on my W-4 form, and when I had unemployment I told them not to take any taxes out,” she says. “I’ve also stopped paying the federal excise tax on my phone bill, and when tax time comes along, I’ll take the $13 I’ve collected and redirect it to a more worthy cause.”

Richard Clarke was right. So was Paul O'Neill. During the six months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks the Bush administration paid little attention to the threat from al-Qaeda and instead set the stage for a war with Iraq.  

Two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, national security wasn't even a top priority for the Bush administration. Security-job security, health security and national security-was last on a list of major issues Bush planned to deal with in the fall of 2001, according to a transcript http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010831-3.html of a speech Bush gave on Aug. 31, 2001 to celebrate the launch of the White House's new website.

  National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, who is scheduled to testify Thursday before the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, says Clarke, President Bush's counterterrorism specialist, is a liar after Clarke told the commission two weeks ago that the Bush administration failed to deal with al-Qaeda seriously before 9/11.  

Seven more nations are joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and three more Central European nations have their applications pending. Although the Bush administration has set an overall course in foreign and military policy of treaty-breaking and unilateralism, it remains a strong proponent of NATO expansion.

Founded in 1949 as a security buffer against the Soviet Union, NATO has not only survived the end of the cold war. It is flourishing. Despite criticism that a post-cold war NATO would unnecessarily propagate the West-East security divide that shaped international relations for the four decades of the cold war, the U.S. government has led the drive to energize and expand NATO. In 1999, after contentious debate in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. approved the accession of Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary to NATO. Leading the NATO enlargement lobby was the neoconservative Committee to Expand NATO, which brought together several prominent neocons now serving in the Bush administration, along with conservative Democrats such as Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council.