So let’s join Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technol- ogy Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge at a recent Pentagon press briefing, where he’s addressing concerns about the Pentagon’s bold new plan to have Admiral John Poindexter personally review exactly what you bought in Safeway last week and all the dirty movies you ordered up in Motel 6 last time you were on the road.

Poindexter, you’ll recall, is the bespectacled seadog who, as one of Reagan’s National Security chieftains, instrumented another bold effort in synergy, later known as Iran/Contra, which involved shuffling money and guns along the axis of evil from Iran to the Nicaraguan contras in defiance of U.S. laws at the time. Poindexter got nailed for lying to Congress but was later pardoned.

The Columbus Free Press is launching its own Office of Total Counter-Information Awareness. In the last few months, we’ve accumulated enough information to warrant the impeachment of President George Bush.

First, let’s recall Bush’s strange relationship with that bizarre little company in Lansing, Michigan, known as Bioport. The company, despite failing various FDA inspections and being accused of bad record-keeping, holds the only federal contract for producing the anthrax vaccine. Bush has rewarded Bioport with favors such as ongoing military protection, and within weeks of 9/11 granted them a contract that tripled the price per vaccine. Now, add into the mix that the Strangelovian CIA-connected Battelle and Britain’s top secret Porton Down labs are partners with Bioport.

Although virtually unnoticed in Columbus, Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, the Trauma Medical Director at Children’s Hospital, is spearheading an international debate on the role of U.S. doctors in carrying out prison executions by lethal injection. After being rejected by American medical journals, Groner’s article “Lethal Injection: A stain on the face of medicine” was published in the November 2, 2002 issue of the British Medical Journal. Groner’s article questions the ethics of U.S. doctors who willingly participate in the execution of inmates. The article also points out parallels between the government’s use of doctors to administer lethal injection and a similar procedure that was administered by doctors in a Nazi Germany “euthanasia” program.

Within days of publication, the French newspaper Le Figaro interviewed Groner about the article. “By entering the death chamber, not only do they [U.S. doctors] destroy their relationship with their own patients, but they take the world medical community hostage. Imagine if all the doctors refused, execution would stop in this country, unless a corp of medical executioners was created,” Groner told Le Figaro.

As we go to press, the Bush administration ordered its predictable post-Christmas call-up of U.S. troops. President George W. Bush is busy resurrecting the discredited doctrine of “preventative” war to justify an attack on Iraq. “Preventative” war was last invoked by Nazi party leaders as a defense of their actions during the Nuremberg trials. The U.S. government is engaging in an unprecedented propaganda campaign to justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq. Our government’s plans to seize 119-billion barrels of known Iraqi oil reserves are conveniently ignored. Still, the reality of selling the Iraq war is proving difficult, especially since Iraq has no nuclear weapons, and its only known link to biochemical weapons were those supplied by the U.S. and its allies during the 1980s.

While the U.S. points fingers at Iraq, the press routinely reports that the Bush’s chief Islamic ally in the region, Pakistan, provided the nuclear technology to North Korea. So, Pakistan, a major nuclear power, with direct ties to Al Qaeda and the North Korean nuclear weapons program, is not a threat according to Bush.

January 22, 2003, will mark the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, the landmark privacy ruling that gives women the constitutional right to choose abortion. With the Nov. 5 elections giving Republicans the majority of the House and Senate, and with staunchly anti-abortion George W. Bush in the White House, this triumvirate of power makes the struggle to maintain abortion and reproductive rights so much more difficult and imperative.

It is estimated that prior to the passage of Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands of women died as a result of illegal abortions. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, women have lost ground to an anti-choice movement whose aggressive behavior has passed many onerous restrictions to abortion rights and threatened to crush the very rights it took generations to win — both through legislation and through Supreme Court decisions.