Posted by Atrios
The British public wouldn't support a war to save the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny because they have never experienced terrorism.
Posted by Atrios
Appears that this lovely little substance might be repsonsible for Gulf War I Syndrome.
Squalene is classed as an ad juvant - a chemical which is added to a vaccine to make it more combative. It is a naturally occurring substance in the human body but injecting it is illegal, and past scientific research in rats and mice has found that it causes auto-immune disease. Consequently, squalene in the form of a vaccine is unlicensed for human or veterinary use.
Oops, article way old. I hate when I get stuff and I don't notice the old dates on the articles...
Posted by Atrios
As of this time in the summer of 1991, only Paul Tsongas had made it clear he was running for the nomination.
Prompting sentences like this, from the August 8, 1991 Financial Times:
The shortage of declared Democratic candidates is in marked contrast to the same stage four years ago when half a dozen Democrats were formally in the race. The difference is largely explained by President George Bush's continuing high approval ratings in the polls and the widespread assumption that he will be nearly impossible to beat next year.
Posted by Atrios
It appears that David Kay, who keeps promising us "surprises" on the WMD front, which of course is one of those "tells" - I didn't realize that the discovery of WMD in Iraq, which WERE THE CAUSE OF THIS RIDICULOUS WAR was supposed to be a surprise - is the source of the fraudulent claim about the IAEA.
Former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay's appointment a few weeks ago as an adviser for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet on WMD issues is a shining example of how the game is being played. Kay is now benefiting from his successful efforts to help the Bush administration justify the Iraq war. He was the one who told the government that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna produced a report in 1991 that indicated that Iraq was at the time just six months away from having a bomb. Bush and Blair held a news conference in Crawford, Texas, last September touting Kay's claim, and the US media published it prominently. The media did not verify the allegation by talking to representatives of the IAEA, which would have been worth the investment of a few minutes' time, since such a report by the IAEA simply doesn't exist.
Demagogue's a bit hard on liberals being at fault here, I think. It is true that the deinstitutionalization movement was a liberal movement, but it wasn't supposed to stop there. The idea was that many mentally ill patients had been locked up and abandoned in horrific and, yes, expensive institutions instead of receiving any kind of proper treatment and without any attempt to provide them with anything resembling a "normal life." Deinstitutionalization was supposed to be accompanied by group homes, etc... with the patients still having very monitored existences, though with at least one foot in the "real world."
Of course, Republicans (cough Reagan cough) seized on this as a cost-saving measure, closed the public institutions, and the money for other types of care never materialized.
While misguided liberal notions are presumably behind the difficiulties people face in obtaining such things as involuntary commitment papers, as with many things that's only part of the story. From what I've seen, the core reason is often simply a lack of money, with other things being simply excuses.
Posted by Atrios
Well, I'm a day late, but anyway. Eric was running one of the best sites out there when he was still in high school, though none of us new he was such a youngster at the time. Go pay him a visit and while you're there make a donation.
Posted by Atrios
Dave Eggers writes an Op-Ed in defense of Americorps, another program Bush promised to maintain and extend but which has instead been slashed.
AmeriCorps needs an emergency infusion of $100 million just to maintain its current operations. While the Senate voted to appropriate the money, the House of Representatives refused to approve the emergency funds — and then adjourned for the summer. Meanwhile, the administration has been largely silent — and it remains unclear whether it will press Congress to provide the funds in September.
Which is confusing, considering how vocal President Bush has been about the need to maintain and even expand our national service programs. At one time, in fact, the president proposed expanding AmeriCorps to 75,000 members. "We need more talented teachers in troubled schools," the president said in his 2002 State of the Union address, the first after 9/11. "U.S.A. Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers."
It was the president's words that encouraged young people to send in AmeriCorps applications. Thousands of outrageously qualified applicants were prepared to quit high-paying jobs, to put off graduate school, to move to, say, rural Louisiana — all in the name of national service, in the name of doing something selfless for a country that needed healing. AmeriCorps approved new volunteer slots and assumed it had the support of Congress and the president. Now, on the eve of a new school year, Congress and the White House have turned their backs on these volunteers.
Must we note that the $100 million that could save AmeriCorps is less than one-tenth of what we spend in Iraq every week? Is it too obvious to mention that the president, who long scorned nation-building abroad while encouraging education here at home, is now clearly choosing the former over the latter?
It's no secret that many in the G.O.P. have long favored the dissolution of AmeriCorps. And though the process won't necessarily be speedy, Republicans in the House are well on their way to making the program a thing of the past. And what happens then? Who or what steps into the chasm created by the White House's failure to act? No one knows. But what is certain is that a generation that was beginning to engage with government, with citizenship and service, will be abandoned, and will be given good reason to shrug back into an easy and familiar, "Well, what did you expect?" sort of cynicism. In fact, the best and most idealistic members of this generation are the ones who will feel most betrayed. Preventing this is within Washington's power — and $100 million is, relatively speaking, a paltry amount to pay for keeping alive the volunteer spirit of the youth of this country.
The Bush administration's newly released budget projections reveal an anticipated budget deficit of $450 billion for the current fiscal year, up another $151 billion since February. Supporters and critics of the administration are tripping over themselves to blame the deficit on tax cuts, the war, and a slow economy. But the fact is we have mounting deficits because George W. Bush is the most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter. One could say that he has become the "Mother of All Big Spenders."
The new estimates show that, under Bush, total outlays will have risen $408 billion in just three years to $2.272 trillion: an enormous increase in federal spending of 22 percent. Administration officials privately admit that spending is too high. Yet they argue that deficits are appropriate in times of war and recession.
...
But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent.
...
But perhaps we are being unfair to former President Clinton. After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush's three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.
There was an after-dinner salute to the group's outgoing chairman, Scott G. Stewart, and someone thought it would be fun to pass around a "College Republican Hymnal" of some of Stewart's favorite decades-old songs that had been sung by the Party of the Right, a Yale group that's part of the school's debating society.
"I think they're hilarious," Stewart, now with the Leadership Institute, said yesterday, noting how dated and over-the-top they are.
So the delegates stood to sing the hoary favorite "Stomping Out the Reds," which is sung to the tune of "Bringing in the Sheaves."
The chorus goes: "Stomping out the Reds, stomping out the Reds/ We'll advance rejoicing, stomping out the Reds!"
The first verse is: "Meet the Left in action, put them all in traction/ Get great satisfaction, bashing in their heads!"
The last verse begins: "Bayonets bright gleaming, panzers forward steaming . . . "
Posted by Atrios
Says Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof.
Akerlof won, in part, for explaining why the used car market is filled with "lemons," demonstrating the problem of adverse selection in certain markets.
Posted by Atrios
South Knox Bubba shares his personal experiences with the American health insurance industry.
Poll: Who has this happen to them a lot? I swear, everytime me or the Mrs. goes to the doctor, and pay our required copayment assuming that's the end of it, we get a bill either from the doctor or the insurance company. Of course, after wasting many minutes of our lives trying to find out what the problem is, we inevitably get an "oops, we just goofed" answer.
BEGALA: Just a second. He didn't talk about gays and homosexuality, but he did talk about divorce. And I'm wondering, as a straight American, my folks have not had exactly a very good track record on marriage, OK? Don Imus, the radio host, was pointing that out this morning. Half of all straight marriages end in divorce. Tell me why Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani can get married three times, but a gay person can't get married once?
RIOS: Oh, Paul, you know what?
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
RIOS: You're talking about -- you're trying to -- you're trying to make the case for gay marriage by pointing out something else that's wrong. I mean, marriage should be a faithful union between a man and woman for a lifetime. And that's a fact. And any time...
(CROSSTALK)
BIRCH: ... the moral universe, saying you should be doing better.
RIOS: Elizabeth...
(LAUGHTER)
BIRCH: Half of your marriages fail.
(APPLAUSE)
RIOS: Elizabeth, that's -- you know what? You're right. And that's a shameful thing. And a lot of the men in here are hooked on pornography. And a lot of the women are hooked on romance novels and fantasizing about other people. The point is...
Look, there is absolutely no argument against civil union or marriage or whatever for gay people other than simple bigotry. Absolutely none.
Posted by Atrios
The wingnut representative of whatever anti-gay wingnut organization on CNN right now is claiming that gay men have an average lifespan that is 25 years shorter. The only place this statistic comes from is from the stupidest study in the world.
Posted by Atrios
Apparently Richard Perle required foreign media outlets to pay him for interviews, despite restrictions on DPB board members using their public offices for private gain.
Unemployment Drops, Jobs Decline, Labor Force Declines
Posted by Atrios
The good news it that the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.2%. The bad news is that this is entirely driven by people dropping out of the labor force. Last month Elaine Chao said that the rising unemployment number was a good thing because it was driven by people, drawn to renewed economic opportunities, re-entering the labor force. I'm sure this month she'll interpret people dropping out of the labor force as a good thing as well.
WASHINGTON -- The nation's unemployment rate declined to 6.2 percent in July as nearly half a million discouraged Americans stopped looking for a job. Payrolls were cut for the sixth month in a row, suggesting that businesses remain cautious and want to keep work forces leans despite budding signs of an economic revival.
The Labor Department's report Friday pained a picture of a job market that remains stubbornly sluggish and continues to frustrate people looking for work.
The economy lost 44,000 jobs in July. While that's an improvement from the 72,000 shed in June, economists were hoping that positions would actually be added. They were forecasting payrolls to go up by around 10,000.
Although the jobless rate dipped to a two-month low of 6.2 percent from a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, much of decline's July represented the exodus of 470,000 discouraged people who abandoned job searches because they believed no jobs were available.
Re "President Denies He Oversold Case for War With Iraq" (front page, July 31):
President Bush let slip some crucial information at his news conference when he said, referring to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, "In order to placate the critics and cynics about intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence."
If the Iraqi weapons exist, we need to find them not to placate critics but to prevent them from being used for devastating attacks on the United States! The weapons that the administration described before the war could be used by whoever now possesses them to kill us by the thousands or millions.
The fact that President Bush did not express concern about this prospect, but instead described the stakes as a matter of political credibility, indicates that he privately assumes that the weapons do not exist.
ALAN M. MACROBERT
Bedford, Mass., July 31, 2003
•
To the Editor:
President Bush maintains that we will find the weapons of mass destruction (front page, July 31).
Well, let's hope that they do not exist, because the question that raises the hairs on the back of my neck is, Who has access to them until we find them?
BOB LUPO
Old Greenwich, Conn., July 31, 2003
This is just something which has been so obvious from the beginning. They've never displayed the slightest bit of concern about finding whatever it is because it could be dangerous, but only because they need to justify their invasion.
Liars.
And, for those who are now claiming that the Bush administration was always talkings about "weapons programs" and not "weapons," don't you remember the final double dog ultimatums we kept giving Saddam? You know, we kept telling him that he had to "disarm" or we were going to invade? Disarm WHAT?
What is Wolfowitz talking about? Boehlert doesn't speculate, but I'm happy to. I would never presume to know the mind of the Wolfowitz, but I have a pretty good idea what is going on here: Wolfowitz is loyal to his friend Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie, for those who haven't come across her before, has long been kind of the "crazy aunt" of Iraq policy. Obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind most of the world's evil, Mylroie has spun an astonishing web in a series of articles and a very odd book to "prove" that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (you may have thought it was Timothy McVeigh, but hello - pay attention, okay?), the 1997 Luxor attacks in Egypt, the Cole bombing, the anthrax attacks, and the cancelation of Firefly (well, maybe not that last one, but he probably *wanted* Firefly canceled).
In her brand new book, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror" (yes, you read that title right), Mylroie goes even farther, entering into tinfoil hat-country. According to Mylroie, Iraq was responsible for September 11 - not working with al-Qaeda, not coordinating with al-Qaeda, but actually responsible for it, while cleverly setting al-Qaeda and bin Laden up to take the fall. Yes, Mylroie (who was invited to testify before the 9/11 commission, co-authored a book with Judith Miller, is affiliated with AEI, is good friends with Ahmad Chalabi as well as with Paul Wolfowitz) denies bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11: "On September 11, much of America was convinced that the shock and horror we suffered that day had been the work of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network"(p.43)... but, she asks, how did the US know so quickly that al-Qaeda was to blame? Wasn't this based on a lot of disinformation? You bet - "the information may have been calculated to direct the United States to look at one culprit rather another: at al-Qaeda, not Iraq." (p.51) The book repeats (again!) her Ramzi Yousef theories; and then extends the same analysis to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (really an Iraqi agent under deep cover). (She quotes - without a hint of self-awareness or irony, Admiral Hyman Rickover saying "we should not love our opinions like our children" (p.48). Most egregiously (although this is of course a tough call, given the bewildering web of hypotheticals, possibles, speculatives, and unsourced allegations), she argues that the CIA and the State Department (along with pretty much everyone else) intentionally covered this up for careerist reasons - they were all so wedded to defending Saddam (!) that they wouldn't admit the evidence put before them (it is true, of course, that these people wouldn't pay attention to Mylroie's theories or evidence, because, well they aren't insane or political hacks, which explains her resentment... but not why anyone else should take it seriously).
Posted by Atrios
I think both Left and Right should agree that when CNN can run promos for Bill Maher (on Larry King) describing him as "America's most controversial comic," we have a bit of a problem.
Posted by Atrios
We do have a bit of a Moron-American problem. To the Anchorage Daily News:
Finding weapons is irrelevant; Iraq's support of terrorism justifies war
All this controversy about faulty intelligence with regard to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is meaningless. To infer this war was not justified based on the lack of WMDs is shortsighted. Whether WMDs are found is irrelevant to me. Iraq openly supported and allowed these terrorist groups to flourish. The very lowlifes who caused more American deaths in one day -- Sept. 11, 2001 -- than Pearl Harbor. That in and of itself is justification enough for me to go into Iraq and remove the tyrant who allowed this, while at the same time hunt down the terrorists like the dogs they are.
-- Sam Albanese
Posted by Atrios
Let's suppose I were a member of the Datholic religion, one with a long and venerated history. Church doctrine of my particular religion clearly came down against women's suffrage and any participation by women in government. In fact, the head of my church, the Tope, came out very strongly against women voting, and in fact decreed that all Datholic members of government, to remain in good standing, must fight to end the immorality of female political participation in all its forms. Now, it's true that not all Datholics followed this particular doctrine, and definitely true that not all Datholics who followed it personally felt that the State should actually outlaw it. But, nonetheless the Tope thought this one was pretty important.
And me, being a 50 year old judge being nominated to the federal bench, had made it clear in numerous writings that I personally felt that it was abomination for women to be allowed to vote or play any role in legislative or judicial leadership positions of any sort. And, in my past as a judge I'd made some rather bizarre rulings with respect to employment gender discrimination suits filed by women against state and local governments. In addition, I'd made it fairly clear that I felt that God's law trumped that of the State. These two points together demonstrating to reasonable observers that I would be incapable of making legal rulings based on the law instead of my own religious beliefs.
Would it be appropriate to claim that people objecting to my nomination were discriminating against Datholics in government?
Posted by Atrios
"if you go back and read Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwah from 1998 where he calls for killing Americans, the two principal grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and our continuing attacks on Iraq. Twelve years of containment was a terrible price for us."
Conservatives would be howling about the fact that this person was part of the Blame America First crowd.
Posted by Atrios
I'm no lawyer, but if Andrew Sullivan thinks his desperate "compromise" with respect to a constitutional amendment would be anything but a nightmare he's nuts. I mean, what happens when states starting being able to refuse to recognize marriages - any marriages - made in other states?
How to avoid that nightmare? He could back an alternative amendment that says merely that no state should be forced to recognize the marriages in any other state. That essentially codifies federalism and prevents a nationalization of gay marriage through the courts (a highly unlikely scenario, in my view anyway). And it doesn't tell states what they can and cannot do for their own residents.
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Let me say a couple of things, Tim. People act as though the cost of containing Iraq is trivial. The cost of containing Iraq was enormous. Fifty-five American lives lost, at least, in incidents like the Cole and Khobar Towers, which were part of the containment effort. Billions of dollars of American money spent so...
MR. RUSSERT: Was Iraq linked to those?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Absolutely. Oh, no, not to the—I don’t know who did the attacks. I now that we would not have had Air Force people in Khobar Towers if we weren’t conducting a containment policy.
I know we wouldn’t have had to have the Cole out there doing maritime intercept operations. And worst of all, if you go back and read Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwah from 1998 where he calls for killing Americans, the two principal grievances were the presence of those forces in Saudi Arabia, and our continuing attacks on Iraq. Twelve years of containment was a terrible price for us. And for the Iraqi people, it was an unbelievable price, Tim.
On "Meet the Press" this week, Wolfowitz suggested that by trying to contain Iraq during the 1990s instead of invading to topple Saddam, at least 50 American lives were lost, in terrorist incidents like the bombings of the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. How were those related to Iraq? Incredibly, Wolfowitz told NBC's Tim Russert that he didn't know who was responsible for the Cole and Khobar Tower attacks.
But on that question, the agreement is all but unanimous: It wasn't Saddam, it wasn't Iraq. It was Osama and al-Qaida.
Posted by Atrios
Over at Oxblog someone has their knickers in a twist over supposed twisting of Blair's words. Oxblog says:
So, here's what Tony Blair said (as he responded to a question asking whether he would continue to serve as prime minister in a third Labour term in government): "There is a big job of work to do - my appetite for doing it is undiminished."
And here's what the BBC reported in its lede: "Mr Blair, who said his appetite for power remained 'undiminished'...."
And not to let a good distortion go, the website then links to the story thusly: "Tony Blair sidesteps questions on the David Kelly affair - but says his appetite for power is "undiminished"."
I really don't understand what the problem is here. The context, as Oxblog makes clear, is that he was responding to a timely question, given his record breaking length in office, and I really don't see how any reasonable reader would think the BBC was claiming that Blair was owning up to megalomaniacal tendencies.
Nits, nits, everywhere....
But, in any case, I wonder why there's very little comment by the right wing blogosphere about the undue influence of Spanish and Italian governments on their state run televisions. I'm always a bit amused by the tendency to simultaneously criticize the BBC for being anti-Blair while alluding to it somehow being a problem of state run television. Hello?! Whatever problems they seem to think the BBC has, it clearly has everything to do with their independence from the Blair government. On the other hand, under Aznar and Berlusconi the state run newscasts have increasingly become cheerleaders for their respective parties.
Posted by Atrios Troubletown shows us what liberal talk radio would be like if it were a mirror image of the current conservative wingnuts dominating the airwaves.
Posted by Atrios
Yeah, I know the html on this web page is a total mess. But, if anyone can figure out why this thing isn't displaying correctly for lower resolutions, let me know. THe issue is that on lower resolutions one needs to scroll left and right to get the full page and I can't figure out why.
UPDATE: problem found. thanks. But, while I'm asking these types of things, does anyone know how to get IE to default to opening new windows full screen? Every now and then it starts opening them up in little mini windows which I then have to expand and I can never figure out how to it to stop.
Posted by Atrios
As may be apparent I have returned from undisclosed freedom hating location to the land where they love freedom. Some woman, who clearly hates freedom, made the mistake of taking a picture while in line at immigration and was swiftly whisked away to be re-educated.
Ah, the smell of freedom. 'tis glorious.
Thanks to Leah, Lambert, Farmer, and Tresy who ran things beautifully while I was away. They'll be around a few more days if they wish as we transition back to "normality." I've been trying to think of some creative ways to increase the Power of My Mighty Blogs, so hopefully I'll have some success..
Posted by Atrios
A bug was fixed which was making my ads last forever, so now there is plenty of space over to the right. Can't beat these advertising rates...
Posted by Leah
No "I coulda been a contender" for Dr. Dean.
When you get this kind of extended, straightforward, chock full of information, down the middle story in the NYTimes, not reported exclusively through the prism of whether or not your electable, you are a contender.
The farmer already sent you to read Digby's thoroughly enjoyable flaying of the DLC's resent throat-clearings about Dean. Those of you who haven't yet, go.
Then think about this. It might make sense if we who disagree with the DLC about what Democratics need to do to get elected, let them know. Slow mail letters would be good, or emails to their website. Polite, articulate, specific would be best. If a hundred people bothered to take the time, they'd notice.
SIR – Faith in the American legal system has eroded to such an extent that not even the president can trust that justice will be served should terrorists stand trial in American courts. In fact, most Americans will take solace from knowing that terrorists will not have access to a legal system where justice is so rarely served.
American military officials acknowledged that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had been killed while under interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul – reviving concerns that the US is resorting to torture in its treatment of Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qa'ida operatives.
A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide", contradicting earlier accounts that one had died of a heart attack and the other from a pulmonary embolism.
The men's death certificates, made public earlier this week, showed that one captive, known only as Dilawar, 22, from the Khost region, died from "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" while another captive, Mullah Habibullah, 30, suffered from blood clot in the lung that was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury
UPDATE: Odd, this article is quite old. I remember the story, and had thought this was an update to it.
Posted by Leah
From reader Hobson, the entreprenurial suggestion that certain websites, like this one, might have marketing value as emetics for left-leaning bulimics.
For instnace, "If unable to induce vomiting manually, surf here."
A particular potent sample:
The Howard Dean campaign was forced to cancel events this week in response to events in Iraq. Donations to the Uday and Qusay Hussein Memorial Fund can be submitted directly to the Dean campaign.
I suspect that the effect of this little pill of bile would be equally as vomitous on most Americans.
So save it and start a file of the outrageous, to be made available to all interested friends who're are too well rounded to be as obssessed about politics as we are.
Time we let more Americans know what's being said and done in their patriotic name.
Posted by Leah
If a fence is to have even a shot at making good neighbors, it better not be built by one neighbor on the other neighbor's land.
The Palestinians call it a wall. Check out the picture of it in this BBC article; what would you call it? Bush seemed to understand why this fence/wall, depending on which side of it your standing on, is such a problem for Abbas, but according to this BBC report of the Bush/Sharon meeting, Bush stayed on the fence, if you will, for now.
I've mentioned before I don't doubt that President Bush wants his roadmap, a genuine achievement, it should be acknowledged, to lead to where he's promised it will, to a secure Israel, side by side with a viable Palestinian state. Or that he's willing to put forth the kind of personal committment without which nothing will genuinely change.
My skepticism that he can achieve what the roadmap promises is not wishful thinking. This dangerous, tragic conflict needs to get solved, for the sake of all of us. If solving it rebounds to President Bush's credit, so be it.
This conflict should have been at the center conceptually of how we viewed the Middle East in the context of 9/11 from the day after that attack. That was the consensus of Arab leaders, including, astonishingly, the Saudis. Remember, at that Arab summit in the Spring of 2002, for the first time since Israel's creation, the Arab world stood ready to extend recognition to a Jewish state, a possibility that was ignored. The administration already had its sights trained on Iraq.
Of course, it's now a fundamental administration talking point that regime change in Iraq has paved the way for inplementation of the roadmap. That may have been Sharon's demand, but we were not required to accept his view. But it wasn't only Sharon. His view is shared by the chief architects of policy in this administration. And as long as Bush brings those neo-con assumptions to solving this conflict, which is drenched in history, not in ideology, I fear he can't succeed.
An astonishing example of a policy based on those assumptions was flagged by the usually estimable Matthew Yglesias, who remarks that it's author, Michael Totten, is "making sense."
Wow, not to me. After explaining his roadmap skepticism, Totten lays out a different approach, one that places the Palestinian's in the larger matrix of international terrorism.
It is time to ask ourselves honestly: Is it possible to support a Palestinian state without encouraging terrorists elsewhere?
(edit)
Lest the Arab-Israeli conflict grind on indefinitely, Palestinians eventually need their own state. But we need to find a way to get them that state while discouraging bad actors elsewhere.
Though it looks good on paper, the current "road map" to peace won't cut it.
(edit)
The trouble with the road map isn't that Palestinians won't cooperate. The problem is there's no punishment if they don't.
(edit)
Here's the way an effective solution might work. First, defeat terrorism. Second, nurture democracy. Third, negotiate a settlement.
The first phase should be simple. Terrorism must be punished. And anti-terrorism must be encouraged. The Palestinian Authority should be given one last chance to eliminate terror. And if the PA refuses, the U.S. must do the following:
Classify the Palestinian Authority as a terrorist organization.
Declare "regime change" in the West Bank and Gaza the official United States policy.
Support to the hilt every anti-terror operation by Israelis short of war crimes.
The first phase would not be complete until the enemies of peace are defeated, deported, imprisoned, or killed. These include Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Yasser Arafat's Fatah, the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It may also include the Palestinian Authority.
Takes one's breath away, doesn't it? Why even bother with giving the Palestinian's that one last chance? In fairness, the analysis is a good deal more detailed than these quotes might suggest. But it's PNAC neo-con essence is contained in that italicized three step outline.
As Kevin Drum notices in an interesting discussion of the same Totten essay;
And while Michael does say that there would be subsequent phases in which we would dictate the terms of a Palestinian democracy, that only comes later. In the here-and-now, there's little question that his plan relies entirely on a massive application of military force, and the followup depends on a continuing military presence as well.
As Kevin rightly complains, whenever anyone questions this reliance on a kind of total war waged endlessly into the future as our chief means of defending ourselves against terrorism, even when the commentator is, like Kevin, mildly hawkish, he's told he's setting up a straw man.
What I take that to mean is that the Krauthammes and Kristols, and Tottens of this world aren't prepared to travel their own roadmap to it's logical conclusion. However, I think they do mean what they say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They, at least, view their approach as an alternate to the President's.
What worries me is that Bush himself retains those same PNAC assumptions, without realizing that they are incompatible, not only with his specific roadmap, but also with arriving anywhere that this country, Israel, the Palestinians and the rest of the world are going to be happy to find themselves.
Posted by Leah
I hope many of you were able to catch one of the several showings on C-Span of the grilling Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bolton got in front of the Senate Foreign Relatins Committee yesterday. Not that either man looked discomforted, especially Wolfowitz, who may turn out to be more the embodiment than either Perle or Cheney of the PNAC vision of America's future, as democratic beacon and overlord to the world.
As the administration will undoubtedly do in the case of N. Korea, Wolfowitz blamed the failed policy of containment, i.e., the Clinton administration's policy toward Iraq, (actually, the policy left to it by the previous Bush administration), for....tada...Osama Bin Laden and 9/11. I'm still looking for a trasncript, but that is, indeed, what Wolfowitz seemed to be saying, and fairly explicitly. Apparently, had Clinton heeded the neo-con letter sent rather publically to him at the time of the withdrawal of the UN inspection regime, and invaded Iraq then, in 1998, no 9/11.
Interesting to remember that Clinton's chosen response to Saddam's final refusal to cooperate with UNSCOM, four days of targeted missile attacks meant to destroy what WMD were left, and the dual use facilities where they might be manufactured or stored, was greeted by Republicans as a "wag the dog" scenario, meant to distract the nation from what was really important, and we all know what that was.
Doubtless the neo-cons would have you believe that had Clinton decided to go to war, he would have had Republican backing. Does anybody really believe that?
If Clinton's motivation was the personal one of creating a distraction, what better distraction, surely lasting more than four days, than announcing a war policy towards Iraq. Does anyone doubt that had Clinton made such an announcement, it would have ended up on the list of Impeachment particulars?
Old news, you say. Don't think so. The blame Clinton meme is going to be played louder and more often.
Yesterday, though, the Senators, Republicans as well as Democrats weren't buying.
I agree with the rest of the members of this committee that I think you, Mr. Bolten, should be more forthright in terms of what the costs are going to be so that we have some idea, and the American people [know], how long, how much," said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio).
The contentious three-hour hearing marked the second time in three weeks that the administration faced sharp congressional criticism of its performance in postwar Iraq.
Committee members from both parties also took aim at what they called the administration's "shifting justification" for the war....(edit)
"In the months leading up to the war, it was a steady drumbeat of weapons of mass destruction," said Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.). "All the testimony this morning . . . is about what a tyrant Saddam Hussein is, who brutalizes the people. . . . So I'll ask the question, Secretary Wolfowitz: What are we doing there?"
And that was just the Republicans. Even Joe "Miss Congeniality" Biden is fed up with this administration's uh, anal-retentive problems with truthfulness.
When Bolten said that the administration did not plan to ask for funds in the fiscal 2004 budget for sustaining 150,000 troops in Iraq and rebuilding the country because it didn't know what the precise costs would be, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the committee's ranking Democrat, erupted.
"Give me a break, will you?" he said. "When are you guys starting to be honest with us? Come on. I mean, this is ridiculous."
What filled that committee room yesterday was the sweet smell of oversight. What will be a more difficult problem for the White House than the passion they've raised among Democrats is the doubts they've raised among heavyweight Republicans in the Senate.
Sandra E. Jewell wanders right into a nest of the excitable little well-fixed pelfs right here:
"...a group of conservative students at UNC/Chapel Hill protested the summer reading assignment of 'Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America', by Barbara Ehrenreich. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0708-07.htm). The students said the book, which presents the lifestyles of minimum wage earners in several different jobs including one at WalMart, was one-sided and that the other side, apparently that of the super-rich, should also be required reading. As the appropriate antidote one student suggested the Sam Walton autobiography." See: The Class Wars: A Regal Obituary by Sandra E. Jewell
Outrageous! To the ramparts Chuzzlewits'! You there, fetch me my John Dickson & Son, Round Action 12 Gauge featuring standard Dickson rib with Princes Street Address and splinter forend of finest English walnut! This ignoble class warfare hooliganism must be halted, strangled in it's baseborn crib! Driver! Driver!..... to the Hunt Club!
At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots" that I call "corporate feudalism". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology. That ideology is pure hogwash, and you can prove it. [...] "Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell – which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
June 2003. Number of states in which Wal-Mart is the largest employer : 21 Statistic via: "Harper’s Index"
Important - Update!!!: Attention dangerous "far-left" subversives and malcontent helots of the Cheap-labor National Security State - Go read Digby's excellent post: Who Me ASAP.
Posted by Leah
Eric Alterman announces An Altercation Contest that asks that question, which, stop the presses, this WaPo editorial also wonders about.
His last such event was March 6 -- before the war with Iraq, before the passage of his tax cut, before the latest outbreak of violence in Liberia, before the release of the 9/11 report, before -- well, you get the idea. Nor is this lag time unusual for the Bush presidency: During his more than two years in office, Mr. Bush has held just eight solo news conferences. The last one before his March appearance took place four months earlier. By contrast, President Clinton had held 33 such events at this point in his term, and the first President Bush had held 61.
Mention of that March press conference pretty much answers the question, doesn't it. Click here to refresh your memory of some of the difficulties the President sometimes experiences in such situtations
Also, check out Eric's commendation of Nick Kristoff, alone among big-time pundits in being willing to hold the President to account for his promises to Africa.
And there's a special mid-week apperance by Charles Pierce in today's CORRESPONDENTS’ CORNER.
Posted by Leah
Turns out the Saudi Royals would prefer those twenty-eight pages be made public.
The White House has already rejected their request. Gee, that was quick.
We have nothing to hide," Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters in the White House driveway this afternoon as he indignantly denied any suggestions that his country has not been a full partner in the campaign against terrorism.
"We are disappointed," the prince said of the administration's refusal. "But we understand the reasons."
The prince's meeting with the president followed a hastily scheduled flight from Saudi Arabia to Washington amid a controversy over the administration's decision to keep part of the report under wraps.
"Anyone who believes that this president would cover up for anyone involved with 9/11 must be out of touch with reality," the prince said as he reasserted that his country is a full partner with the United States in battling terrorism
Well, if the White House isn't protecting the Saudis...
"There's an ongoing investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and we don't want to compromise that investigation," Mr. Bush said. "If people are being investigated, it doesn't make sense for us to let them know who they are."
(edit)
In defending the decision to keep the classified section under wraps, Mr. Bush said, "We have an ongoing war against Al Qaeda and terrorists, and the declassification of that part of a 900-page document would reveal sources and methods that will make it harder for us to win the war on terror."
So let me get this straight. We've got an on-going investigation and we've got an on-going war, and never the twain shall meet? Really? No way to redact just the references to those sources and methods?
If the point of keeping a portion of a 900 page report classified is to protect the Saudis, it certainly can't be said to be working.
Why Is Iraq So Central To TWOT? Because We're There
Posted by Leah
This brilliant insight is Billmon's.
This essay, in which you'll find it, provides the kind of clarifying insight that will become, I'm guessing, the foundation upon which all further arguments, about what to do next, how to define success, how to preempt the Republican and media assumption that the Bush administration owns the national security argument, will have to be based.
In the end, policy mistakes -- particularly big ones -- tend to produce a kind of circular reasoning -- in which those in charge try to justify the policy by citing the need to avoid, at all costs, the failure of the policy. So it was in Vietnam. So, too, with our latest misadventure in Iraq.
A prime example of this loopy logic comes from the father of the war himself, Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz....
This is what the conquering hero told Tim Russert:
I think winning the peace in Iraq is now the crucial battle in the war on terrorism.
And why is Iraq the crucial battle in the war on terror?
Not because of WMD, and not because of terrorist ties, as Billmon points out Wolfowitz now concedes.
If Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terrorism, it's because America is there -- or rather, because Wolfowitz and his crew put it there, in pursuit of their dream of a domesticated Arab world, reconciled to Western hegemony and living in peace and harmony with Israel and its soon-to-be-born Palestinian bantustan.
And so the circle is closed: Because America in Iraq, it must fight the "terrorists." And because it must fight the terrorists, America has to be in Iraq.
(edit)
The problems raised by such thought processes go way beyond the GIs who must die to keep Wolfowitz's logical loop from coming untied. Calling the war in Iraq the central battle in the war against terrorism ignores the distinct possibility that it is in fact a monumental diversion from the real struggle against terrorism -- a strategic distraction that will make huge demands on the American military and the American intelligence community for years, if not decades. (italics mine)
And that's just the beginning. Go, read, absorb, save to your hard drive, and then continue to think with the same clarity on the key political problem ahead, how to recapture the security issue, which has to be done if we're to outst Bush.
Posted by Leah
From reader, Dan, in the comments thread to Atrios' Christian Bauman post: this link to a site that will help you understand what it means to be among the wounded.
Be warned, this is graphic and wrenching. But these are our brothers and sisters serving in Iraq; the least we owe to them is to pay the profoundest attention to what the cost of their service is to them and to their friends and families.
We're lucky, here on the left, to have such intelligent and knowledgeable writers as Kos, and Steve Gilliard and Billmon, who have personal experience in the military. To that list, I'd like to add frequest Atrios commentator, YankeeDoodle, whose website, "War News," you can find here. I find myself checking in there regularly.
Sometimes the posts appear to be roundups of war news, but the juxtapositions are essays in themselves. And the extended discussions in a "rant" like this one, are among the best you'll find anywhere on this side of the online line.
Posted by Leah
I don't begrudge the DLC their desire to have a dialogue about where the Democratic Party needs to stand on various issues.
What bothers me is the self-defeating way they make their arguments. They don't seem to see it that way, which gives me the impression that they don't mind seeing Democratic failure when they can say they told us so. Which means that in some fundamental way, they don't really identify with the Democratic Party.
Chris at Interesting Times has some good thoughts on this dilemma here, here and here.
Posted by Leah
The gut reaction of "whaaaaat, are they nuts,"most of us had to the news that the Pentagon had it's thumbprints all over a plan to create a futures market in terrorism turns out to have been the right one.
Paul Wolfowitz, testifying to the Senate this morning, has announced that the program is being discontinued. Senators want more; they want to know who and how anyone entrusted with the defense policy of this country could have come up with such a nutball notion. Apparently, our old friend, John Poindexter had a lot to do with it.
Wolfowitz knows a loser when he sees it.
The approach he's taking in his testimony is as chilling as it is telling. Generally, he's setting up the Clinton administration as the ones who didn't get it, therefore the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers, and that all due goes to the Bushies for all progress against terrorism. Democrats seems prepared to fight back.
In the interim: At Maxspeak, the Sandwichman, Tom Walker, presents the essence of Wolfowitz.
Posted by Atrios
It´s rather disconcerting how little coverage the deaths of American soldiers are getting. Sure, the basic fact and numbers are reported, but the personal side - widely covered in the runup to the war - is gone.
This reminded me of some passages in Christian Bauman´s excellent novel The Ice Beneath You. It´s much less of a "war novel" than one might think from the marketing, but some of the pivotal events take place in Somalia during a time when most Americans were unaware that we even had troops there. I imagine there´s something about being in a hell hole with your friends getting killed and wondering why it doesn´t even make the evening news.
My anger over this subject is so deep and profound I have a hard time expressing it. It's one of the things (obviously) that led directly to the writing of my book, and continues (on a somewhat smaller scale) in my next book.
Americans forget about the troops serving because the media allows them to. Because the media is scared the public will lose interest and turn the channel. It's very, very frustrating.
What's happening right now in Iraq, this constant-24/7-fear-of-being-shot-by-every-person-I-see was life as usual for American soldiers in Somalia, the beginning of Haiti, Bosnia... Half the time Americans didn't know we had troops there, and if they did, it was easily brushed off. "Well, it's not a war, right?"
No. In some ways, psychologically, it's worse.
So now here we are, "major combat over," and I fear this is happening again. Army families were fun to film 6 months ago, when they were all teary goodbyes. Now, it's just unpaid bills and small kids developing behavior problems and ulcers forming -- and none of that is very interesting to network TV news.
Personally, I think this idea is technically sound, and it might save some lives. The concept's been around for years, and it has a reasonable track record; see the Iowa electronic markets. Alert reader Ian Kinman points to http://www.hsx.com/ for an additional precedent.
So Senator Wyden should stop grandstanding, already. (That is, unless he isn't "serious" about national security issues. Sheesh!)
COMMENT Some readers object that the market isn't ethical. But if the premise of the program is sound—i.e., that the market has predictive value, which the Iowa program seems to support—then it would seem to me unethical not to use it. After all, we can't have people flying airplanes into buildings or letting off dirty bombs in our cities, can we? And surely putting money into a market (as opposed to, say, torturing prisoners or abolishing civil liberties) is a reasonably harmless way to go about this task?
Others object that the market is merely a mirror for conventional wisdom; "garbage in." But the only question is whether the market has predictive value regardless of its inputs. This is a technical question, to be settled by empirical methods. Obviously, if it doesn't work, we shouldn't do it.
Alert reader Ebie makes the point that:
The IEM predicts the results of elections -- collective tallies -- not the results of a few individuals acting from a very different set of premises than most Terror Investors are going to be working with.
Which, to my mind, argues for expanding the program so it to functions as a collective tally. (Though Ebie says I'm wrong— read the thread.)
Others ask for citations. I think of this market as a subset of market-oriented knowledge engineering (e.g., here) where ideas like it are well known. As for the Iowa market, a little poking about the site yields several research papers, including this one (PDF). Alert reader Gabriel Demombynes provides an economist's perspective here.
By helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live, we are working in the best traditions of George Marshall.
(APPLAUSE)
Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings.
Well, to be fair—the misLeader doesn't actually call for a Marshall plan. But is it even "technically accurate" to say that an Afghanistan run by warlords is a moral victory?
Todd Pittman of the AP writes:
In a report released Monday night, Human Rights Watch accused soldiers and police loyal to powerful warlords many of whom are in the government of kidnapping, extortion, robbery and the rape of women, girls and boys. The New York-based group also detailed numerous death threats against Afghan journalists and low-level politicians who criticized authorities.
''If allowed to continue with impunity, these abuses will make it impossible for Afghans to create a modern, democratic state,'' the group said.
President Hamid Karzai's administration has been struggling to rebuild this war-shattered country and extend the central government's authority beyond Kabul, the capital. Most of Afghanistan is controlled by warlords who rule as they see fit and have private armies of their own.
Most of those now in power were backed by the United States and its allies in the war that toppled the Taliban in late 2001 and many still work as allies alongside American troops now in the country.
Karzai appointed many of the warlords as governors because they already controlled areas in the lawless wake of the Taliban's collapse.
His government is supposed to draft a new constitution in October and government officials are traveling through the countryside to solicit public views on what the charter should contain. National elections to choose a new head of state are scheduled for next June.
Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said the overall human rights situation appeared to be worsening, in part because of U.S. and other allied support for warlords.
''External support for warlords is destabilizing Afghanistan,'' Adams said. ''The United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, need to decide whether they are with President Karzai and other reformers in Kabul or with the warlords. The longer they wait, the more difficult it will be to loosen the warlords' grip on power.''
Sound familiar? Let's hope not. Suppose, just suppose, in Iraq, a truly democratic election were held, and the Shi'ites came in first... WWG1D? ("What would George I do?") The "reconstruction" of Afghanistan—remember when Bush forgot to put money for it into the budget?— may provide a clue.
Even now, after the arrests and the anger and the world media spotlight, the mystery for neighbors in this old steel town remains this: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?
"These knuckleheads betrayed our trust, and we're disgusted with their attendance at the camps in Afghanistan," Mohammed Albanna, 52, a leader in the Yemeni community here, said of the six men who have admitted to attending an al Qaeda training camp two years ago. "But the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or the government's rhetoric. It's ridiculous."
But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.
That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 61/2 to 9 years.
"We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us," said attorney Patrick J. Brown, who defended one of the accused. "So we just ran up the white flag and folded. Most of us wish we'd never been associated with this case."
Right.
So now we know that the execution chamber at Gitmo is destroying the entire American system of justice, too, not justmilitary justice. Given that George I has arrogated to himself the power to declare anyone an "enemy combatant." (Sounds rather like the lettre de cachet, doesn't it?)
Posted by Lambert
Seems Bush sloppiness extends to just about everything ....
Alan Berlow's Atlantic article on Bush's sloppy handling of clemency proceedings made it into WaPo today, in an article by Peter Carlson.
First , YABL:
"I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully," he said while governor of Texas.
Now the reality:
"A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute," Berlow writes.
Mr. Berlow's advocacy piece is more at home in his usual places of publication," Wassdorf wrote, such as "Salon.com, which is mostly regarded as a cartoon solely dedicated to Bush Bashing."
Gonzales' memos and half-hour briefings were not the entire clemency process, merely the end of it, [Pete Wassdorf, Gonzeles' deputy counsel] says. "Governor Bush's office was fairly informal," Wassdorf wrote in his letter, and "it was not at all unusual after a meeting on a different subject or during an ad hoc meeting to discuss upcoming executions."
Perhaps that's true. But is an informal bull session the best way to delve into the complex details of a murder case?
After reading Berlow's article, and Wassdorf's letter, it's hard not to conclude that both Gonzales and Bush were rather callous, even cavalier, about the most profound decision any government official can make -- the decision to kill another human being.
Dramatic erosion in support among white men has left the Democrats in a highly vulnerable position and unless the party strongly repositions itself, President Bush will be virtually impossible to beat in 2004, according to a new poll commissioned for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). ...
DLC leaders have criticized former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric fueled his rise to prominence in the Democratic presidential race, and today, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), the DLC chairman, warned that the party is "at risk of being taken over by the far left." The choice for Democrats, Bayh said, is, "Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?"
Leaving aside the issue of how the poll might have been designed...
The reality of "white men": The one constant with Dean is that he has the cojones to take it to the Republicans. Why the DLC thinks cojones aren't attractive to white men is beyond me. (Why aren't the DLC hammering on the Bush administration gutting overtime protection, if they want to appeal to men so badly?)
The reality of "anti-war": This is a tired old '60s label recycled by the mentally lazy. There's a perfectly reasonable case that the war on Iraq is bad for America on straight national security grounds. The Democrats can and should make it.
Dean the "far left"? That's truly an alternate reality ... Not that the Republicans won't make ample use of Bayh's little sound bite in 2004.
Get a grip, Al!
NOTE As a yellow dog Democrat, I support anyone who can beat Bush in 2004—even Lieberman. But the DLC isn't helping the cause in 2004 by pulling stunts like this.
At first we're led to believe that we're gaining ground in Iraq due to a simple shift in tactics, but a few days later we learn that what this really means is that we're kidnapping families and holding them hostage in order to increase the "quality and quantity of intelligence." This may seem like a good idea in the world of 24, but in the real world it's a war crime. It should end right now, and I hope everyone who linked to the first article links to the second as well and denounces these tactics as unworthy of us. The world should know that we're better than this.
y the way. I never want to hear another word about the alleged iniquities of Justin Raimondo, ANSWER, Robert Fisk, Patrick Buchanan, Lew Rockwell or even, god help us, the French. Not one more fucking word.
A few readers have pointed out that we never actually signed on to Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention. Absolutely correct. Apologies for the mistake Here´s Convention 4, articles 34 and 147.
Art. 34. The taking of hostages is prohibited
Art. 147. Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
The Bush administration said yesterday that former secretary of state James A. Baker III will not join the Iraq reconstruction effort, as some administration officials had hoped.
Baker was among several prominent figures some administration officials hoped to entice into taking charge of specific tasks related to the rebuilding process, such as seeking money from other countries or restructuring Iraq's debt.
State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said at his daily briefing that neither Baker nor Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "had ever heard about it -- it's a dead parrot."
Well, well... Wonder why not? Maybe Baker wants to keep spending time with his family? And who are the other "prominent figures" who just don't want to get involved?
Now the Bush administration was at least as guilty of hyping the case for war [as Blair's]. It was a campaign not so much of outright falsehoods — though there were some of those — as of exaggeration and insinuation. Here's what the public thought it heard: Last month, 71 percent of those polled thought the administration had implied that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
(Which we now know, from the 9/11 report, was YABL.)
And when it comes to domestic spin, Mr. Blair isn't remotely in Mr. Bush's league. Whether pretending that the war on terror — not tax cuts, which have cost the Treasury three times as much — is responsible for record deficits, or that those hugely elitist tax cuts are targeted on working families or that opening up wilderness areas to loggers is a fire-prevention plan, Mr. Bush has taken misrepresentation of his own policies to a level never before seen in America.
While Mr. Bush's poll numbers have fallen back to prewar levels, he hasn't suffered a Blair-like collapse. Why?
One answer, surely, is the kid-gloves treatment Mr. Bush has always received from the news media, a treatment that became downright fawning after Sept. 11. There was a reason Mr. Blair's people made such a furious attack on the ever-skeptical BBC.
Another answer may be that in modern America, style trumps substance. Here's what Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said in a speech last week: "To gauge just how out of touch the Democrat leadership is on the war on terror, just close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet on the deck of that aircraft carrier." To say the obvious, that remark reveals a powerful contempt for the public: Mr. DeLay apparently believes that the nation will trust a man, independent of the facts, because he looks good dressed up as a pilot. But it's possible that he's right.
What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that's all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.
Posted by Potato Head
A Forbes columnist begins his column thus:
More often than not, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can be found on the side of business, free enterprise and conservatism. He cast one of the deciding votes that made George W. Bush President.
Unless, of course, you believe in quaint "conservative" ideas of judicial restraint, states rights and, you know, counting votes. But it's nice of him to not bother patronizing his readership with the customary, Posner-esque apologias for the Court's powergrab, don't you think? "We stole it fair and square," as a Republican quoted by Bob Parry once put it, and the writer knows he's among friends. Must feel good, not having to lie all the time.
When Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean asked his supporters to match the fund-raising prowess of Vice President Dick Cheney, they stepped up to the plate, raising more than $450,000 over the Internet in a single weekend.
I've always liked this passage from Hunter S. Thompson's masterwork, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The good doctor is reading the sports pages in a North Vegas coffee shop, and comes upon
a speculative piece on page 46 about rookie sensation Harrison Fire, out of Grambling: runs the hundred in nine flat, 344 pounds and still growing.
"This man Fire has definite promise," says the coach. "Yesterday, before practice, he destroyed a Greyhound Bus with his bare hands, and last night he killed a subway. He's a natural for color TV. I'm not one to play favorites, but it looks like I'll have to make room for him." Indeed.
Posted by Leah
I suppose this Reuters report in the NYTimes that, according to General Sanchez, Iraq has become a "terrorist magnet" could be thought evidence in favor of Andrew Sullivans rhetorical justification of the President's "Bring 'em on" moment.
In case you missed it, Sullivan's take, went something like this: the President's words were not mere rhetoric; better to flush out the enemy there, in Iraq, where we have a considerable army, than in dispersed locations around the world, or, worse-case scenario, at home, as we found ourselves doing on 9/11.
A bigger surprise than the fact that some outsiders have been drawn to Iraq to oppose the American presence there, is the fact that this Sullovian addition to the ever-growing list of reasons purporting to explain what the hell we're doing in Iraq has gained enough traction not only to still be around, but to have been given a pet name.
At TPM we are given several samples of the meme, learn the pet name is "flypaper," the flypaper, presumably, being Iraq; , and finally, get Josh Marshall's withering analysis of all this foolishnes.
All I have to add is this fantasy; that Geroge Soros would take it into his head to offer Mr. Sullivan financial support for a trip around Iraq, so that Mr. Sullivan could share his theory with Iraqis of the majestic part, as terrorist flypaper, they are playing in our remaking of the Middle East, and so he could, as well, reassure those same Iraqis, not to worry, becuase he's quite sure they're going to love the makeover.
Posted by Potato Head
The house organ of rich whiners, Forbes, has published its latest Tax Misery Index. Take a look: The Bush tax cuts, Forbes exults, are dramatically alleviating tax misery in the United States, as can be seen by our dramatic improvement in the rankings over three years. Why, in just three years we've put at least a dozen countries between us and those tax hellholes, France, Belgium, Norway and the other Saddamite nations. And if Congress just has the spine to accelerate the tax cuts scheduled for 2006, it will just be us and a bunch of Third World Nations, as we race down to the wire of a taxless society. Go Seabiscuit!
The congressional report on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence calls into question answers that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave the public last year about the White House's knowledge of terrorism threats.
President Bush's adviser told the public in May 2002 that a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence briefing for the president on terrorism contained only a general warning of threats and largely historical information, not specific plots.
But the authors of the congressional report, released last week, stated the briefing given to the president a month before the suicide hijackings included recent intelligence that al-Qaida was planning to send operatives into the United States to carry out an attack using high explosives.
The Sept. 11 congressional investigators underscore their point three times in their report, using nearly identical language to contrast Rice's answers with the actual information in the presidential briefing.
"Dr. Rice's briefing was a full and accurate accounting of the materials in question without compromising classified material that could endanger national security," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Right. "It's full and accurate, with the single exception that what we told you is white, is black."
"Full and accurate"—I think that's going to get a plaque in the Orwell Hall of Shame right next to "technically accurate."
Posted by Leah
Better late than never is increasingly the essence of Bush administration policy.
Annouce a policy. Pronounce it bold. Then a success. Ignore contrary facts. Attack critics, and alternate policies. Then, when the inadequacy of the original policy is reaching political mass, do what your critics have been saying for months needs doing and pretend it was your idea all along.
The Bush administration will soon propose a $1 billion aid package for Afghanistan aimed at bolstering the government of President Hamid Karzai and countering criticism that U.S. officials have lost interest in rebuilding the country as their focus has shifted to postwar Iraq, senior administration officials said yesterday.
(edit)
The proposed $1 billion in aid resulted from "a comprehensive, strategic update on Afghanistan," said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, who confirmed accounts of the program provided by other officials but declined to provide further details.
"We noted that there's a lot that we're spending in Afghanistan and there's a lot at stake strategically," Feith said. "And we asked ourselves are we investing enough, given the expense of everything that we're doing, the importance of success and the benefits, strategic and financial, of completing our mission there sooner rather than later."
Just happened to notice, don't you know.
South Knox Bubbacalls this administration tendency, "Bush's struggle with reality." Cal Pundit calls it "George Bush VS The World, (it's a two-parter). Joe Klein to whom both link, considers it less a case of Bush deceiving us, than Bush deceiving himself, if that makes a difference to you.
Afghanistan needs looking to, no doubt about it. More money better spent on infrastructure and such, which is what is being promised, is doubtless, what's needed.
Excuse me if I wait to see what the implementation looks like, and not only because of the hollowness of past promises, like supporting AmeriCorps. The real question seems to me to be whether or not policy makers who continue to insist that Iraq is the key element in our "war" with terrorism can really get a handle on the true signifigance of Afghanistan.
The government's estimate of how much it expects to borrow from the credit markets this quarter has risen by a third to compensate for lower than expected income-tax payments and higher spending, the Treasury Department said Monday.
Treasury's latest $104 billion borrowing projection for the July-September quarter is larger than a previous estimate of $76 billion made in April.
The new projection would represent the largest amount ever borrowed during the July-September quarter.
A billion here, a billion there— pretty soon you're talking real money!
Declassifying more intelligence information, [Democrat Bob] Graham wrote ... "will permit the Saudi government to deal with any questions which may be raised in the currently censored pages, and allow the American people to make their own judgment about who are our true friends and allies in the war on terrorism," wrote Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The censored passages deal with information that suggest "specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States," according to a summary in the congressional report. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
Of course, the real question is what the White House knew and when they knew it, also censored from the 9/11 report, but it's good that Graham is dealing with getting the 28 pages uncensored. It takes a village to stomp a weasel...
The Florida Democrat has been among Bush's harshest critics of late. Over the weekend, Graham repeated his criticism that Bush "knowingly" misled the American people about the reasons for going to war in Iraq and said that was an impeachable offense.
"Clearly, if the standard is now what the House of Representatives did in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the actions of this president [are] much more serious in terms of dereliction of duty," the Florida Democrat said on Fox News Sunday.
Duh!
UPDATE From alert reader johnx: Graham was on Bill Maher's show, used the term "Osama Bin Forgotten." Hey, who says Graham is dull? Not me!
UPDATE Careful orchestration?
Tabassum Zakaria of Reuters here:
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister will meet President Bush on Tuesday and was likely to ask that portions of a Sept. 11 report related to Saudi Arabia be declassified, U.S. officials and diplomatic sources said.
Saudi Prince Saud al-Faisal requested a meeting with Bush and it was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, officials said.
Yep... The 28 pages could just be a news-cycle-sucking diversion (back). When will Graham call for all the White House material to be released?
Posted by Leah
Never, you say? Think again. It's okay if the person in question has received a fair trail, copious appeals, but not been allowed to take advantage of new DNA technology to establish actual innocence, thereby preserving our ignorance on that issue, so no one can say an innocent man has been executed.
Kevin Drum has the story, plus his own excellent comment, plus excellent and informative reader comments.
This is what justice will look like across the country if President Bush gets to reshape the Supreme Court.
Posted by Lambert
Michael Georgy of Reuters via WaPo:
"One 1st Armored Division soldier died and three others were wounded ... when an unknown number of individuals dropped an improvised explosive device from an overpass onto their convoy," U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
Two of the wounded had already returned to duty.
The incident highlighted the ease with which attackers target U.S. troops. The weapon was dropped on a heavily armed group and the assailant quickly melted away in an area that was not densely populated.
In the past 10 days alone, 17 have died at the hands of a largely unseen enemy, making it the bloodiest period for U.S. forces since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April.
"Mission accomplished" my Aunt Fanny.
Wonder how long before the administration gives up the "spike" spin and concedes that killing Saddam's sons had nothing to do with the Iraqi insurgency. And let's count our blessings, eh? The Shi'ites are quiet....
Forget The Red/Blue State Divide; They're All Red Ink States Now
Posted by Leah
It's taken a while, but the big guys, like the NYTimes have finally noticed:
Just three years ago, the states were still a plus for the economy. While the private sector had begun to limp, state spending had remained strong and so had revenues, despite cuts in tax rates in several states.
Today the opposite is happening, and that makes the states a net minus for the national economy. Without that reversal, some economists say, the economy would probably be growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent, enough to create jobs rather than eliminate them.
(edit)
The cuts in state spending are just starting to be felt, with the impact landing disproportionately on the poor. "We have been shifting a lot of spending for social services from the feds to the states," said Robert M. Solow, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate. "And that means the cuts that are taking place are hurting people at the bottom of the income distribution."
Not just the poor, though.
Does this administration even get that governtment workers pay taxes too, that they make purchases, and all those other activities that stimulate an economy? Or that kids who get kindegarten cut out from under them aren't ever going to be four or five years old again?
Has anyone even bothered to tell Bush that state revenues are tied to Federal tax rates, so those Bush tax cuts have meant reduced revenues for many states, especially for states with progressive income taxes. Whoops. Better not clue him into that one.
All of this was avoidable: Anyone remember revenue sharing? And avoiding it would have helped avoid this anemic recovery we're in. Cripes! This administration has figured out how to make lemons out of lemonade and thinks it's a good thing.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Lieberman on Monday faulted President Bush for a lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq while he assailed his rivals for opposing the conflict, saying, "they don't know a just war when they see it."
Critical of his foes for the party nomination but reticent to name names, the Connecticut senator defended his strong support for U.S.-led military action, arguing that 12 years of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime warranted the military campaign to oust him.
But he also criticized the Bush administration for its lack of preparedness in dealing with postwar Iraq and its distortion of intelligence.
Earlier, in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show, Lieberman said the U.S. military didn't move quickly enough to secure sites where weapons of mass destruction were being made.
"Some of them may have have been moved out on the market and may be moving around," he said. "We did not prepare to bring the Iraqis into control of their own government more quickly."
That the administration let WMDs loose on the black market—the very ones that it fought the war (supposedly) to control—that's an idea I can get behind propagating... Gives a whole new dimension to the concept of privatization, doesn't it?
Just war? I dunno.
Looks like a nastly little imperial skirmish to me, the sort of thing Kipling wrote of—the savage wars of peace—but, in today's globalized world, a skirmish with incalculably greater consequences. Like the nukes that the brass hats and the neo-con professors didn't secure, floating around...
Troll prophylactic: Saddam is evil.
NOTE: Notice Lieberman not forming circular firing squad by keeping the focus on policy, and on Bush.
They have frozen all redeployments, so no one is going anywhere anytime soon, and our Congress goes on vacation July 25 so nothing is going to happen until mid fall. Not what we all want to hear out here. We are under siege out here, without supplies, without a mission and we can only roll the dice so many times and not get our (expletive) shot. More and more body bags and amputees will be coming home.
Posted by Lambert
Texas Democrats stood up and won for the second time on the DéLay-driven gerrymandering because one principled Republican stood with them.
What's the Republican reaction? Change the rules! The AP via the Times here:
The [redistricting] bill stalled when a Republican senator, Bill Ratliff of Mount Pleasant, joined Democrats in opposing the measure, saying it would hurt rural areas. Republicans hold 19 Senate seats and Democrats hold 12. Ten Democrats had said they would vote to block a debate, so Mr. Ratcliff's vote gave them the 11 they needed, according to Senate rules, to stymie the measure.
The lieutenant governor has said that in a second special session he will remove the rule that requires two-thirds of the 31 members to agree to bring a bill up for debate, so that support from only a majority of senators will be needed to debate the bill.
Unbelievable. Even by Texas standards. Even by Republican standards. Or... wait! Aren't they changing the rules in California too?
Five protesters were arrested Wednesday after staging a sit-in at Sen. Jon Kyl's Phoenix office over Medicare legislation.
The action came after 50 citizens, mostly older citizens, marched in the blazing heat to influence Kyl's actions in Washington and to urge him to hold town meetings to explain proposed Medicare changes.
They say legislation has cleared both houses of Congress that would effectively privatize Medicare, create gaps in coverage, threaten employer-provided benefits while doing nothing to lower prescription drug costs. Kyl is on the conference committee that will combine the House and Senate bills, each longer than 600 pages, into one law.
Kyl's staff told the protesters they wouldn't be able to reach the senator or set up meetings at that moment. They told the protesters they would get back to them, and urged hem to leave because they were "impeding the business of this office."
Replied Ted Murphree, a 54-year-old Phoenix resident, "What we're prepared to do is stay here in this office until we get word from Sen. Kyl that he's willing to come back to central Arizona and hold town hall meetings."
After about 40 minutes, the building manager made a citizen's arrest for trespassing, and police cited all five protesters, who were ordered to appear in court.
Kimberly Wold, Kyl's state director, said the protesters were making unreasonable demands of office staff. "We had no advance notice that they were coming," she said. "It was nothing but a PR stunt."
But she noted it was the building manager, and not Kyl's staff, who had the protesters arrested.
"It's sad that you can get arrested in a public senator's office," said Doug Hart, 57, of Tempe, after he was cited. "It says something about the U.S. senator."
NOTE: Pre-emptive blameshifting note: Operative Wold says that the building manager called the cops. Oh, the manager didn't check with the tenant? That's what the 40 minutes were for....
Posted by Lambert
The media seem to think it's a problem that the Democrats don't parrot single-sourced talking points, and even (gasp!) may disagree among themselves. I don't know why this is—maybe covering a lot of candidates is too much like work.
Personally, I'm not worried about conflict in the Democratic party between the candidates, between the DLC and the "left" (Dean as a leftie? Har-de-har-har!), and so on.
If the Democrats form the ol' circular firing squad, that's a problem, but so far—despite "let's you and him fight" temptations from the SCLM—they've avoided doing this.
As long as the Democrats compete to find the best ways to bring Bush down, have at it, say I. It's not a problem.
The House version of legislation to expand the Medicare program would waive civil service hiring, job classification and pay scales for employees administering a proposed prescription drug benefit.
One of the things I've never been able to get clear in my mind is how far the wingers really want to turn back the clock. Sometimes I think it's back to the 1920s, before dangerous innovations like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, student loan programs.... Sometimes I think its back to the 1820s, before public education.
With this bill, it seems its back to the 1870s, before civil service protection. Then, we had this crazy notion that you could qualify for a government job by passing an exam, and after you got the job, there were really clear rules about what you could do, and what you got paid. Not like a business, sure, but the judgment was made that a civil service system was the best choice of alternatives because it prevented the delivery of government services from being corrupted by nepotism, cronyism, favoritism, and outright bribery.
Can anyone doubt that if this passes, and civil service protection is waived, the new agency will be immediately populated by Self-Identified Christians, wingers, Thugs Unka Karl wants to do a favor, coatholders from this or that House Republican's home state, tired old lobbyists, obscure Bush relatives, and privatizing insurance company moles? Not just political appointees in the top slots, mind you—that we expect—but the entire agency from top to bottom.
Posted by Lambert
This MTP transcript is certainly rich.... I'm not sure what Wolfie got his doctrine in—perhaps casuistry?
RUSSERT: Let me go back to Deutsche’s testimony and share this with you: “The next time military intervention is judged necessary to combat the spread weapons of mass destruction, for example, in North Korea, there will be skepticism about the quality of our intelligence.” Is that fair?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: If people keep treating every intelligence uncertainty as an example of failure, I guess we will have a problem.
Right. This is the "murky" spin. But as everyone knows, the issue is not that intelligence was murky. The issue is that intelligence was distorted. In fact, clear intelligence that didn't make the case for war was rejected, and murky intelligence that did was promoted. YABL, YABL, YABL ...
But I mean, stop and think. If in 2001 or in 2000 or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden and we had tried to say it’s because he’s planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, well, you don’t have any proof of that.
Hmmm... It would be interesting to see some serious analysis, rather than the assertion, that shows going to war in Afghanistan would have prevented 9/11, or another attack like it. This idea seems to be new to Wolfie. I mean, wasn't Atta living in Hamburg at that time? And isn't AQ a decentralized organization? And haven't they managed attacks after Afghanistan?
I think the lesson of September 11th is that you can’t wait until proof after the fact.
And this is the bottom line. What the administration is really claiming is the right to go to war, whenever they want, with whoever they like, for whatever reason they want, and without telling the American people why.
Clearly, the Republic can't survive such an arrogation of executive power. So people will have a choice to make....
Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later.
2. The following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever, whether committed by civilian or by military agents: (a) violence to the life, health, or physical or mental well-being of persons, in particular: (i) murder; (ii) torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental; (iii) corporal punishment; and (iv) mutilation;
(b) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form or indecent assault; (c) the taking of hostages; (d) collective punishments; and (e) threats to commit any of the foregoing acts.
Posted by Atrios
And why does the Bush administration like giving them contracts?
Remember this?
Critics have been howling since the announcement that the Department of Defense gave a no-bid contract for cell phone service in Iraq to a disgraced company called WorldCom. And with good reason. Competitors in the telecommunications business pointed out that WorldCom has no experience in building cell phone systems and objected to the fact that industry leaders were not even informed that such a contract was contemplated, much less given the opportunity to bid on it. Reform-minded watchdogs were appalled that any contract of any description was given to a bankrupt company whose $11 billion accounting fraud scandal was the largest in history, a company that is regarded as the poster child for everything that is dysfunctional about American corporations today. Budget-watchers were aghast at the outrageous cost. And then there is the sheer stupidity of it all.
NEW YORK, July 28 (Reuters) - AT&T Corp (T) will offer evidence on Monday that some telephone calls it says rival MCI diverted through Canada to avoid tariffs were placed by government agencies, a move lawyers say could pose national security risks, reports said on Monday.
...
AT&T will claim that WorldCom rerouted some calls made by the State Department and other government agencies through Canada, The Times said in a subsequent article on Monday, citing a senior AT&T executive.
...
If WorldCom rerouted calls through Canada to save money, the calls would not be protected from eavesdroppers who could compromise national security or other confidential information, the newspaper said, citing industry lawyers.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to May 1. And this was the scene on the USS Lincoln. President Bush arrived on it. And as he is walking to the podium, you see that banner, “Mission Accomplished.” Since that date, 400 U.S. soldiers have been wounded or injured, 107 killed, 48 from hostile fire. Was the president too premature in suggesting that the mission in Iraq has been accomplished?
DR. WOLFOWITZ: Look, the mission for those Navy pilots, and it was a magnificent mission, was accomplished, because, as the president said, major combat operations were over.
In his July 18 In the Loop column, Al Kamen says, "The White House wouldn't give permission to use the photo focusing on two cuff-linked forearms editing a speech draft."
Since when does an American newspaper need the permission of the White House to reproduce information on the White House Web site? The White House Web site is paid for by the American public. Everything that is published there is the property of the American public, and the White House should have no right to prevent its republication.
I cannot believe the same newspaper that fought the Nixon White House over Watergate and the Pentagon Papers would back down over something like this.
Posted by Atrios
I haven't been paying all that much attention to the California recall nonsense. The whole thing will quickly turn into a farce of epic proportions if it hasn't already.
Remember, all you California residents, you only need 65 signatures and $3500 to get on the ballot. Forget Davis's and Terry Mac's plan to try and keep any credible Democratic alternative on the ballot -- I say flood the zone! Get yourself on that ballot! I'm sure we can get over 500 names on that ballot!
Posted by Atrios
Minute Man thinks that the reason the press is so silent about the fact that TWO SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS revealed the identity of a COVERT CIA OPERATIVE, putting her LIVELIHOOD and perhaps HER LIFE in jeopardy is because reporters are more interested, as Mark Kleiman says, "are too busy sucking up to their sources and don't want to help stir up a leak hunt when they rely on leaks."
Ah, that liberal media. Somehow that never seemed to be a problem during the Clinton administration.
Ferruggia was sitting in the Capitol Hilton's lobby bar shortly after Rove's speech. There were three others with her -- another blond 19-year-old Georgetown student, Chris Sibeni, chairman of Hofstra College Republicans, and Jeffrey Chen, a recent Johns Hopkins graduate. Sibeni and Chen puffed on Fuente cigars.
...
Sibeni, who had spiky hair, glasses and a long face, is high-strung and given to rash pronouncements. He denounced assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for "dividing the country" and trying to help African-Americans "advance over the white society," and defended American support of the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. Chen, who went to high school with Sibeni in Great Neck, Long Island, is easy-going and quick to concede Republican mistakes, mocking his friend's more outré arguments.
While Sibeni declared that Bill Clinton had been more dangerous to America than Osama bin Laden, Chen defended the ex-president's economic program. Without him," Chen argued, "we would not have had globalization. He took a Republican idea, used it as a Democratic idea, and used it to become the most popular president of all time."
Chen seemed so mild and centrist that at one point I called him a closet Democrat. Taken aback, he replied: "How am I a closet Democrat? I'm racist, I love guns and I hate welfare."
Posted by Lambert
But the old-fashioned kind. Jill Barton of the AP writes:
Belle Glade, Fla. (AP) Not long after the family of Feraris ''Ray'' Golden found his dead body dangling from a tree outside his grandmother's home, ugly suspicions began to surface.
Latest victims of Bush bait and switch tactics: Veterans
Posted by Lambert
Steven Thomma of Knight-Ridder writes:
President Bush and his Republican Party are facing a political backlash from an unlikely group - retired veterans.
Normally Republican, many retired veterans are mad that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking remedies to two problems with health and pension benefits. They say they feel particularly betrayed by Bush, who appealed to them in his 2000 campaign, and who vowed on the eve of his inauguration that "promises made to our veterans will be promises kept."
"He pats us on the back with his speeches and stabs us in the back with his actions," said Charles A. Carter of Shawnee, Okla., a retired Navy senior chief petty officer. "I will vote non-Republican in a heart beat if it continues as is."
Hell, Bush is privatizing the military anyhow. He must be figuring, Who needs these guys?
Tell me again why the Republicans are so good at supporting the troops?
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you something that you wrote in your report on this very subject: “The White House determined, and the DCI and CIA agreed, that the Joint Inquiry could have no access to the [President’s Daily Briefing].”
This was the briefing President Bush was given in August of 2001.
“Ultimately, this bar was extended to the point where CIA personnel were not allowed to be interviewed regarding the simple process by which the PDB is prepared. Although the inquiry was inadvertently given access to fragments of some PDB items early on, this decision limited the inquiry’s ability to determine systematically what Presidents Clinton and Bush, and their senior advisers, were being told by the intelligence community agencies, and when, regarding the nature of the threat to the United States from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.”
And the very day I read that in the report, I read this in The Washington Post: “Cheney laid out a detailed rationale for the war Bush launched on March 20, quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. White House officials have cited the NIE as the basis for prewar pre-war speeches about Iraq. ... As part of an effort to rebut criticism that it had exaggerated the threat, the White House last Friday released eight pages of excerpts from the intelligence report,” which had been classified.
Senator Graham, why would we declassify the National Intelligence Report to buttress arguments about the war in Iraq but keep classified some information that could help us find out what our leaders knew was coming down before September 11?
Right straight down the middle!
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, I think one of the fundamental reasons for that is to avoid accountability.
And Senator Graham hits it out of the park!
How can we say there's no smoking gun if we can't look in every room of the house? What did the White House know and when did they know it? The 9/11 report leaves that part out.
Plenty of other good stuff in the MTP transcript, BTW. Have at it!
''I think as long as we're present here in Iraq, we will always have the threat of Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists coming to try to kill American and coalition soldiers, and that is something that we will have to contend with,'' [General Richard] Sanchez said.
''The key that we must not lose sight of is that we must win this battle here in Iraq. Otherwise America will find itself taking on these terrorists at home.''
Hello? America has already "taken on" these terrorists at home—that's what 9/11 was all about. And as the recently released 9/11 report shows, Iraq had nothing at all to do with that.
Posted by Lambert
Guess my question (back) on Rules of Engagement for Saddam is partially answered. Way down in this CNN story we read:
But a raid in Baghdad's upscale Mansour district turned tragic, according to witnesses and an Iraqi police officer who said he'd been briefed by U.S. military officials. There, witnesses described U.S. commandos dressed in black cordoning off the area around a house and then opening fire on several vehicles.
The Iraqi police officer told CNN that the civilians, apparently unaware the military had closed the area, began driving. Three civilians were killed, he said, and four others wounded.
He said U.S. military officials told him the operation targeted Saddam.
Coalition military spokesman Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons told CNN that the operation was conducted by Task Force 20, which is made up of special operations forces from the various branches of the armed services. But he would neither confirm nor deny the operation's target or the reports of civilian casualties.
Posted by Leah
Have you wondered what would have been the reaction of the media and the Republicans if it had been President Gore in the oval office, or Air Force One on 9/11. *
Wonder no longer. Read this material from "former CIA officials," posted at Free Republic on 9/12, and the comments thread that follows it and you'll have a pretty good idea.
Most interesting, and in some respects amusing, is how wrong some of the usual assumptions have proved to be.
The way you PREVENT things like this is just that: Prevention. You find out about these things and you defuse the situation. You knock on doors in the early hours of the morning and herd half-awake, half-clothed would-be suicide Jihad-ers into waiting police vans.
This is how we have always prevented the majority of these tragedies.
(edit)
This time NO ONE KNEW!!! NO ONE HAD A CLUE!!!!
That's why we can say with confidence that our intelligence capability has suffered so drastically under Clinton
There's a lot of scary stuff, too, and most of all, repetition of charges disproved again and again, but never acknowledged as such by the mainstream media.
I post this unpleasantness now, because Democrats and those of us who need them to deprive Bush of another four damaging years are going to have to deal with some of the assumptions here, that will be thrown at all Democrats as easily as they were thrown at the Clintons.
*(I'm leaving aside the increasingly plausible possibility that under President Gore the 9/11 plot might have been uncovered before it could take place, or more easily foiled on the day itself; that's for another post)
**Under the "knowledge is power" rubric, always informative reader, Sara, informs us that an excellent book on the Clinton administration's actual engagement with the issue of terrorism is Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's "The Age of Sacred Terror"
Posted by Lambert
William C. Mann of the AP writes:
The Bush administration should make public the facts about Saudi Arabia's complicity with terrorists rather than worry about offending the kingdom, lawmakers said Sunday.
One senator said 95 percent of the classified pages of a congressional report released last week into the work of intelligence agencies before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was kept secret only to keep from embarrassing a foreign government.
''I went back and read every one of those pages, thoroughly. ... My judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know,'' said Shelby, R-Ala.
The 28 Saudi pages look like a tar baby to me—"Please don't force us to expose the 28 pages on the Saudis!"
Meaning that the real issues are elsewhere. For example, how the White House was briefed.
UPDATE: Alert reader Lucille says I mean "red herring." Not "tar baby." Well, I mean tar baby, since focusing on the 28 pages will suck up investigative resources, news cycles, blog space, etc., that could otherwise be focused on more important issues (like what did the White House know?)
In the rising controversy over how the Bush administration built its case for war in Iraq, one curious fact stands out. Some who gave President Bush unwelcome information that turned out to be accurate are gone. Those who did the opposite are still around.
Loyalty, to Bush, means lying for him, to him, and enabling him in his own lies.
Posted by Leah
In Sunday's WaPo, the obvious questions about Condi Rice's competence and honesty suggested by her role in the runup to the war with Iraq are raised by Dana Milbank and Mike Allen.
She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.
(edit)
Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. NSC officials said each of Rice's public statements is accurate. "It was and is the judgment of the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program," said Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman.
Still, a person close to Rice said that she has been dismayed by the effect on Bush. "She knows she did badly by him, and he knows that she knows it," this person said.
(edit)
Bush aides have made clear that Rice's stature is undiminished in the president's eyes. The fault is one of a process in which speech vetting was not systematic enough, they said. "You cannot have a clearance process that depends on the memory of people who are bombarded with as much information, as much paperwork, as many meetings, as many phone calls," one official said. "You have to make sure everybody, each time, actually reads the documents. And if it's a presidential speech, it has to be done at the highest levels." (my italics)
Let us pause, for a moment, to ponder the raucous, sneering, skepticism, lasting a minimum of 7 news cycles, that such a response from the Clinton White House about any question raised, whether by Republicans or by the punditterati, however trivial, would have provoked. Compare, for instance, the case of Roger Altman and the miniscule transgression of congressional priviledge that forced his resignation.
Having said that, the story strikes me as both damning, and starting to feel old news-ish. I'm not being a pessimist. I agree with those readers who feel that a corner has been turned on the media's desire and ability to pre-exonerate this administration for every bad thing that happens on its watch.
I'm only observing that the time may have come to advance and enlarge this story into one that poses the essential question: Are this administration's answers to the challenge of 9/11 the right ones?
That it will fall to critics of the Bush doctrine rather than the mainstream media to do so is strongly suggested by the absence in this article of arguably the most crucial example of Ms. Rice's failure to tell the whole truth - her statement that there was no specific intelligence that could have led anyone in the Bush administation to so much as begin to imagine that anyone might be contemplating the hijacking of airliners for use as flying bombs to be crashed into major public buildings. No aspersion being cast here on either Milbank or Allen, but in a week in which the first comprehensive report on the wheres and the whyfores of 9/11, one might have hoped...
In lieu of that, see the italicized portions of this prior post, regarding Condi's Aug 6th, 2001 security briefing with the President in Texas, and put that information in this context, graciously provided by Paul of "Half-Baked Thoughts:"
2. Finding: During the spring and summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community experienced a significant increase in information indicating that Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida intended to strike against U.S. interests in the very near future.
Discussion: The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, reported at least 33 communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack in 2001
(edit)
Some Community personnel described the increase in threat reporting as unprecedented, at least in their own experience.
Fortunately, our side is so much better informed and organized than we were during the Big Dog's eight years. And he'd be the first one to say, don't look back and regret what wasn't done, look forward to what can and must be done.
I'd really like to see the Democratic Party come up with a responsible exit strategy for Iraq along the lines of calling for a UN takeover, termination of all Halliburton and Bechtel contracts with the country.
Is there anything to learn from the episode of killing Saddam's sons?
Suppose we get good intelligence and surround Saddam, just the way (in non-tinfoil-hat mode) we did his sons.
What should the rules of engagement be?
In particular, what should the goals of the operation be? Killing, or capture?
My view: Our national interest, and the interests of the Iraqi people, would best be served by capturing Saddam, doing the perp walk, and handing him over to the Hague for trial before the war crimes tribunal. The rules of engagement should be structured to optimize for this outcome.
''I think it is much better for the Iraqi people and for the world for Saddam to be caught alive and put on trial for the crimes he has committed against the people of Iraq, against neighbors of Iraq and against the world,'' he told the BBC.
And the flak this blog took, from Tacitus and others less nuanced in their modes of expression, for expressing a common-sense view that is now making its way toward becoming the CW ... Sigh ...
Ritual disclaimer and troll prophylactic. Saddam is evil. So were his sons.
Posted by Lambert
So how can we know there's "no smoking gun" when we can't look in every room in the house?
First, the 28 pages from the Saudis (with whom the Bush family has long had very tight relations) is redacted.
Second, we don't know what the White House knew and when they knew it.
Oh—and the biggest smoking gun of all—no AQ Iraq connection at all—YABL in the justification for the war.
As Carie Lenack of Families of September 11 told Jennifer Barret of Newsweek:
Carie Lemack: I was hoping we’d gain more information, but it doesn’t seem like we’re getting much more … I feel like, in an era where we’re holding CEOs accountable for losing $3 million, I’d hope we’d want to hold people accountable for losing 3,000 lives.
But the administration has still chosen to classify the part about who funded the terrorists. And the fact that President Bush has chosen to classify it for what he says is national security makes me question just whose security he is protecting: our nation’s or the Saudis’? (via Leah back)
There are three morals to the story in the 16 words fiasco:
First, the Bush administration has consistently distorted intelligence for political ends.
Second, Bush himself has problems taking responsibility when things don't work out well.
Third, Bush himself has problems with the truth.
The first two are all on full display in the handling of the 9/11 report. We'll have to see about the third.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz Sunday defended the invasion of Iraq as an example of how the United States had to be prepared to act on "murky intelligence" in its war on terrorism.
Wolfowitz was asked in several television interviews about widespread criticism that Washington's rationale for the war -- charges that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was collaborating with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group -- appeared to have been built on shaky foundations.
No such weapons have been found and little concrete evidence has been presented of an al Qaeda link.
"The nature of terrorism is that intelligence about terrorism is murky," Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.
Wolfie goes on Fox... That's courage!
Anyhow, as Wolfie must know, the issue is not that intelligence is "murky"—the issue is whether intelligence was distorted for political ends, which is exactly what happened. The 16 words kept floating to the top, even as the intelligence professionals tried to keep them out, exactly because Bush was determined to have his war, and sought to use any reason, no matter how flimsy.
Posted by Lambert
Dana Milbank and Mike Allen write:
But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.
The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.
Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt.
Funny how story of Saddam's sons sucked all the oxygen out of the 16 words fiasco, isn't it? (Not to mention the 9/11 report?)
Even though killing Uday, what's-his-face, and that 14 year old is likely to turn out to be a blip in the Iraqi insurgency, and both the 16 words and the 9/11 report go to the heart of this administration's abilities to keep the country safe.
Posted by Lambert
Christian Davenport of WaPo writes:
Susan Peacock thought that the 400th Military Police Battalion Family Readiness Group was there to provide solace and support for spouses of soldiers shipped to Iraq.
But when she read her e-mail July 15, she was appalled at what she saw. Group leaders were playing what one later called "hardball" with the Columbia mother of two and other 400th family members.
"OK this has gone far enough!" they wrote. The message said that "certain people are getting their soldiers in trouble" and that the unit's e-mail list had been sent to the Pentagon "for possible security violations and will be closely monitored."
A few days earlier, Peacock had heard a news report about an explosion outside Baghdad, near where the 400th, her husband's unit, was based. Since he'd left this spring, she'd grown skeptical of the military's unfailingly rosy accounts of the 400th's status.
Desperately worried, she tried to get information about the blast from family support staff and Army officials at Fort Meade, where the 400th is based. But after three days of inquiries, Peacock said she still knew nothing.
That's when she decided the other wives of the 400th might want to know about the incident. She sent an e-mail telling everyone what she'd heard.
"Evidently everything is not fine," she said she wrote.
Goodness!
Funny how it's OK to use the troops as extras for Republican campaign events like Bush's infamous carrier landing stunt, but it's not OK for the troops to raise real issues on matters of life and death.
Posted by Lambert
Richard Oppel of the Times writes:
Three American soldiers with the Fourth Infantry Division were killed and four were wounded here today after an assailant, who witnesses said was probably perched inside the children's hospital the troops were guarding, threw a grenade into a group of soldiers who were playing a game of cards next to the building.
Another American soldier was killed today and two others were wounded in an attack on an Army convoy in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, military officials said. And early Sunday, a soldier from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in a grenade attack. A military spokesman had no details on the location of the attack.
The attack is a blow to hopes that the slaying in Mosul on Tuesday of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, would weaken the resolve of Iraqi insurgents.
Well, what was killing Saddam's other than propaganda for the home front, anyhow? "It was a famous victory."
Ritual disclaimer and troll prophylactic: Saddam is evil, and so were his sons.
Posted by Atrios
Jeebus, what WILL we tell the children? I suppose it depends on the meaning of "about even."
While we´re on lies, I suppose it´s nice that after months of being accused of everything up to and including treason for daring to suggest that the bush administration was being dishonest about the justifications and reasons for invading Iraq, it´s nice to know that what was once conspiracy theory is now conventional wisdom. But, us little people who occasionally emerge from our basements shouldn´t worry our little heads about it. Our foreign policy, and our soldiers´s lives, is in the hands of savants like Commander Clueless who know what´s best for us.
There are a lot of debates that we´ve had since 9-11 which I thought we would never have in this country. You know, such as whether it´s okay to torture people. Whether it´s okay to arrest American citizens secretly, hold them without charges, and deny them any legal representation. Whether it´s okay to have parallel systems of justice at the whim of one man. Whether we should invade a country "pre-emptively" without any evidence of a threat. Whether it´s unpatriotic to criticize the president, and whether such criticism gives aid and comfort to our enemies.
And, whether it´s okay for the executive branch to send the our soldiers off to die, and deliberate deceive congress, the press, and the people, to do so.
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