Black Spot Gets His Posse On

Bush to Create New Unit in F.B.I. for Intelligence

President Bush on Wednesday ordered changes intended to break down old walls between foreign and domestic intelligence activities by creating a new national security division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation that will fall under the overall direction of John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence...

The White House announced the step as it accepted nearly all of the dozens of recommendations made three months ago by a nine-member presidential commission, headed by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, that reviewed the law that created Mr. Negroponte's post.

The law left Mr. Negroponte with clear control over the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies that operate abroad, but the commission warned in a report in March that the legislation left his influence over the F.B.I. "troublingly vague," hampering effective oversight of the nation's intelligence operations.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said the changes would allow Mr. Negroponte to wield influence and seek information down to the level of each of the F.B.I.'s field offices...

...the changes would "ensure that the F.B.I.'s intelligence elements are responsive" to Mr. Negroponte. It said that the new security division, the National Security Service, to be headed by a senior F.B.I. official, would include the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions, as well as its intelligence directorate, and that all would be "subject to the coordination and budget powers" of the new intelligence chief.

The change ordered by Mr. Bush will create a new, semi-autonomous service within a service, headed by a chief who will report both to Mr. Negroponte and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller...

One wonders where he's going to find his staff; possibly the same places he found help in the Honduras or Iraq..

Keep an eye out for Homeland Security outsourcing to these corporations:

* Aegis Defence Services
* AirScan Inc.
* AKE Limited
* Anteon International Corp.
* ArmorGroup
* Blackwater USA
* CACI International
* Cochise Consultancy Inc.
* Control Risks Group
* Cubic Corporation
* Custer Battles
* Defence Systems Limited
* Defense Security Training Service Corporation
* Diligence, LLC
* DynCorp
* Erinys International Ltd.
* Executive Outcomes
* Genric, Ltd.
* Global Marine Security Systems Company
* Global Options, Inc.
* Global Risk Strategies
* Golan Group
* Group 4 Securicor
* Hart Group
* Hill and Associates
* International Charter Incorporated of Oregon
* ISEC Corporate Security, Ltd.
* Janusian Security Risk Management Ltd.
* Keenie Meenie Services
* Kellogg Brown and Root
* Kroll, Inc.
* Levdan, Ltd.
* Management and Training Corporation
* Meteoric Tactical Solutions
* Meyer and Associates
* Military Professional Resources Inc.
* MVM
* Northbridge Services Group, Ltd.
* Pistris, Inc.
* Olive Security
* Pacific Architects and Engineers, Inc.
* Rubicon International Services, Ltd.
* Saladin Security
* Sandline International
* Science Applications International Corporation
* Silver Shadow
* Southern Cross Security
* Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group
* Special Ops Associates
* Steele Foundation
* THULE Global Security International
* Titan Corporation
* Triple Canopy Inc.
* Vinnell Corporation
* Vinnell Brown and Root (VBR)
* WVC3 Group, Inc.

These are all corporations who've worked to make a business of what used to be against international law.  ¶ 9:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Ideas from Old F(r)iends

The United Nations says it has learned of serious allegations that the US is secretly detaining terrorism suspects, notably on American military ships.

This was a real popular thing to do back when Pinochet ruled Chile.

There's another Company player. A Nixon favorite. Wonderful how the best gifts just keep giving and giving.  ¶ 10:45 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Like We Never Guessed

Peter Phillips says

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:

* New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark, Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi

* Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's

* Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels

* The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft, McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo

* News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments

* GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM, Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble

* Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette, Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo

* Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America

* Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target, Pepsi

* AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton

Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defense contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq? If we believe the corporate media give us the full un-censored truth about key issues inside the special interests of American capitalism, then we might feel that they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe - as increasingly more Americans do- that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information.

Now go back and count how many, like Citigroup, are affiliated with the Carlyle Group and individuals like Al-Waleed bin Talal.

Thanks to the nattering nabob at Eschaton.  ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It's All Good [APPLAUD HERE, SPECIAL FORCES]!

From a scant six months ago,
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."

...the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

He knew nothing about it, because he wasn't there at the planning, and even if he was, it didn't happen, because it's classified.

But the home boys were called in last year.

If Jose Miguel Pizarro has his way, he will recruit 30,000 Chileans as mercenaries to protect American companies under Pentagon contract to rebuild Iraq. And undoubtedly, within those ranks will be former members of death squads that tortured and murdered civilians when dictatorships ruled in Latin America.

"There is no comparison with what they can earn in the active military or working in civilian jobs, and what we offer," Jose Miguel Pizarro, Chile's leading recruiter for international security firms, says. "This is an opportunity that few in Chile can afford to pass up."

Pizarro's firm, Servicios Integrales, was contracted by Blackwater USA to recruit the first batch of Chileans in November 2003. By May 2004 he had placed 5,200 men who, after one week of training in Santiago, head to North Carolina for orientation with Blackwater, the private security firm that made headlines when four of its employees where killed in Falluja, their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge. After training, Blackwater flies the men to Kuwait City to await their assignments in Iraq...

They're finding dozens of fresh bodies at a time frequently now, although you don't hear much about it in the main$tream media. We're much more worried about the Runaway Bride. Or is that too last week?

It's not even clear who's killing them. Maybe every faction there is involved at this point: Sunni, Shiite, Baathist, Blackwater, DynCorp, Special Forces, Wahhabi Jihadist, Al Qaeda, CIA. They're killing whoever is in the wrong place at the wrong time or says the wrong thing to the wrong person or maybe is just in the way.

Hearts and minds. Bu$hCo is doing it's usual job keeping them.

The president's preference for friendly audiences is well established, demonstrated by Bush's repeated appearances before invitation-only "town hall" crowds to promote his Social Security plan. It's a pattern he followed in his 2004 re-election campaign.

Few audiences are as predictably friendly as military ones, duty-bound to show respect for their commander in chief, often bursting into raucous whoops.

Bush's audience Tuesday evening was unusually quiet while the president spoke, however, applauding in unison after one key passage, as if on cue, and then at the end.

They're the toughest people we have, but applauding the man who throws their lives away to enrich himself, his minions, and his owners?

That's one job I don't envy them.  ¶ 9:46 PM 1 comments links to this post

  The More Things Change, the More They Stay Real Strange

Looks like it's more of the shell game from the people that gave you Dick Nixon and secret wars in Cambodia and Colombia.

The White House has decided to reject classified recommendations by a presidential commission that would have given the Pentagon greater authority to conduct covert action, senior government officials said Monday.

The decision is a victory for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long been the principal architect and instrument of the secretive operations. The agency has been struggling to retain its authority in the power structure headed by John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, especially as the Pentagon has pressed for a greater role in intelligence operations.

The White House will also designate the C.I.A. as the main manager of the government's human spying operations, even those conducted by the Pentagon and the F.B.I., the officials said...

The decision marks the second time in a year that the White House has rejected a high-level recommendation to transfer some C.I.A. powers to the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 commission recommended that the agency's special paramilitary unit be transferred to the Pentagon, but the White House decided in November to maintain that capacity at the C.I.A., while also moving to strengthen the Pentagon's paramilitary capacities.

Under Mr. Negroponte, who took office in April as part of the biggest intelligence overhaul in four decades, the C.I.A. no longer has the pre-eminence it commanded for decades. The director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, no longer regularly attends either the daily morning briefings for President Bush or regular meetings of Mr. Bush's principal foreign policy advisers.

But in addressing the commission's recommendations, the White House appears to have decided to maintain the C.I.A.'s predominance in both covert action and human spying, the areas in which the agency has most rigorously defended its turf.

Under law, covert actions may be carried out only with presidential authorization and Congressional notification, and those operations are devised so that American government involvement is disguised and meant never to be acknowledged.

Poor Porter Goss, shut out of a tedious morning meeting with the Clueless-in-Chief.

Porter Goss, veteran of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assasinations, the Congressional support of Reagan's secret wars, and the NeoCon takeover of Congress.

The man who overtly left the CIA agency for Congress, claiming it was "too gun shy".

Sounds more like a blank check and plausible deniability to me.  ¶ 7:05 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Orwell Would Understand

The Rude Pundit observes well:

...We also know that what we see at Disney World is but a small, small glimmer of the truth of the place. Below Fantasyland and Tomorrowland are tunnels, vast mazes of tunnels, where the workers move between rides and spaces in the parks so they can magically appear. Once you fall from grace, like losing belief in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Uncle Sam, and you see the calculated, sweaty machine beneath Main Street, U.S.A., you can never be innocent again.

Not to belabor the point, but the Bush administration is the Disney World front of geopolitics. What were the appearances of Donald Rumsfeld on various and sundry Sunday morning gabfests but attempts to continue the illusions about Iraq. And what was the joint mini-press conference between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Jafaari but the mad charade of equivalence. Of course Cinderella really lives in the castle. Of course Jafaari is a sovereign leader.

Little actually needs to be said about the events themselves. (And the transcripts of the Meet the Press and Fox “News” Sunday interviews are tediously, frighteningly the same.) For little was spoken that was actually news. Yeah, yeah, Rumsfeld said the insurgency could go on for a dozen years. And he would not admit a single mistake or misstep or miscalculation or misstatement or missed opportunity or a motherfuckin’ thing about troop strength, “last throes,” pre-war plans, or Karl Rove’s belches of hate, other than that he didn’t know, he’s not “political,” and history will judge him. Rumsfeld sounded like nothing so much as a man who knows that history is going to drag him into a sodomy pit and fuck him ruthlessly, repeatedly, as one should be if one is dragged into a sodomy pit.

And as for that sham press conference where you couldn’t figure out where one lie ended and another one started? Well, no muss, no fuss, no dismembered corpses in Fantasyland. All teacups and submarines, and, for certain, it’s a small world after all...

Billmon also had a word or two to say this weekend about errors of perception :

...the media's probes, while timid, have revealed the administration's defenses. These consist of minimizing the importance of the contacts, denying that they're news ("hell, we've been negotiating with terrorists for years!") or trying to fob responsibility off on the Iraqi government. Rumsfeld apparently opted for the shotgun approach, scattering all three rationalizations at once.

This was predictable, but not nearly as amusing -- in the by-now creepily familiar Orwellian way -- as Rummy's attempt to create a fresh linguistic distinction between the Sunni insurgents and the foreign terrorists:

"They [contacts] go on all the time,” he added. “Second, the Iraqis have a sovereign government. They will decide what their relationships with various elements of insurgents will be. We facilitate those [relationships] from time to time."

But Mr. Rumsfeld said no negotiations are taking place with hardened terrorist elements belonging to al-Qaida or those, as he put it, "with blood on their hands." (emphasis added)

I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about this crucial difference in the weeks and months ahead. Hell, before you know it -- depending on how the talks go -- Rummy may be referring to them as Sunni "freedom fighters."

But such abrupt shifts in the party line are always jarring -- as in Orwell's famous description of Big Brother's security agents frantically ripping down propaganda posters that suddenly had the name of the wrong enemy on them. It wasn't too long ago (four months, to be exact) that our Cheerleader-in-Chief was lumping all "anti-Iraqi" forces together in the same Islamofascist stew:

"Terrorists and insurgents are violently opposed to democracy, and will continue to attack it. Yet the terrorists' most powerful myth is being destroyed. The whole world is seeing that the car bombers and assassins are not only fighting coalition forces, they are trying to destroy the hopes of Iraqis, expressed in free elections.

And the whole world now knows that a small group of extremists will not overturn the will of the Iraqi people."

This, of course, was the party line for many moons. It was not, however, the original line. In the good old days -- back when Bush was still posing in his flight suit -- the insurgents were usually painted as a motley crew of "former regime elements" and "Baathist dead enders," reinforced by "criminals and thugs" released from Saddam's jails. Foreign terrorists, when they were mentioned at all, were a distinctly secondary propaganda element.

All this changed in the spring of last year, when the insurgency exploded into full view of the folks back home. The tidal wave of bad news -- Americans burned alive in Fallujah, the revolt of Moqtada Sadr's Shi'a militia, Abu Ghraib, the failure of the WMD snipe hunt -- apparently convinced the White House spin doctors that the war in Iraq had to be tied much more closely to the war against Al Qaeda.

The result was a sudden, obsessive focus on the evil al-Zarqawi and his jihadi legions -- as when Dan Senor, the GOP campaign mouthpiece turned coalition spokesman, tried to blame Zarqawi for the entire Fallujah debacle:

The problem here is not with the Fallujans, the problem here is not with the coalition. The problem here is with foreign fighters, international terrorists, people like Zarqawi, who we believe to be in Fallujah or nearby.

Here's Rummy, banging on the same propaganda drum back at the Pentagon:

"The terrorists, assassins are threatened by the Iraqi's people's progress toward self-government, because they know that they will have no future in a free Iraq. They know, as al Qaeda associate Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi put it in his letter recently, that we intercepted: 'Democracy is coming.' "

From that point forward, administration officials usually made a special point of referring to the Iraqi resistance as "the terrorists" -- and even launched a mini-campaign to pressure the media into using either that word or the newly invented phrase "anti-Iraq forces" instead of the more neutral "insurgents" or "insurgency."

But now the whole world (or at least, that part which reads the newspapers) knows that "terrorists" and "assassins" are the administration's new negotiating partners. Since Bush has a rock-hard policy of never negotiating with such people, the only solution is a rhetorical one. The line must be changed again. New labels must be invented and applied to those insurgents who "don't have blood on their hands." (Roughly the gazillionth oxymoron created by the administration in this war. But whose counting?)

It's definitely going to be an Orwellian challenge. Even if Rummy and the gang drop the "terrorist" and "assassin" lingo and go back to "former regime elements," or "Baathist diehards," they still will have to explain the morality of negotiating with butchers who gas their own people and then bury them in mass graves (that is, when they aren't relaxing in their rape rooms.) Such is the problem with wartime atrocity propaganda: In a rapidly shifting situation, it may have too long a shelf life.

An Orwellian challenge, but one I'm sure the Cheney administration is up to meeting -- especially since the corporate media and a sizable fraction of the American people now seem to carry portable memory holes around in their own heads.  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Let the Jingoism Begin

When the Chinese offered to out bid one of the Carlyle Group's better performers for a smaller but highly profitable Central Asian oil-and-gas company also based in California it not only threw down the economic gauntlet to the capitalist free traders of the West, it must have stoked the fires of dissent on the board of the Group.

Today in The New York Pravda the NeoLiberal Nicholas D. Kristof leaves off his usual praise of Dear Leader's Wisdom.

"The biggest risk we Americans face to our way of life and our place in the world probably doesn't come from Al Qaeda or the Iraq war.

Rather, the biggest risk may come from this administration's fiscal recklessness and the way this is putting us in hock to China..."

Wrong on more counts than even Kristof realizes, he violates the Hitchhiker's First Rule.

He panics, big time.

Al Qaeda and the Iraq war may be genuine threats to America, but certainly not in any way Kristof has ever written about. Al Qaeda has been doing a stunningly effective job of turning America into an oligarchic theocracy. Iraq never threatened us for a moment until we decided to de-secularize its Arabic culture by invasion.

Even now, both of these threats could be ended in the length of time it would take the Cheney Administration to pack up their bags and leave Washington.

Many others firmly think as I do that China is no threat to America, but I will agree, as I have since Bill Clinton's Presidency, that one of Bu$hCo's talents has been to utterly wreck any budget they're put in charge of mismanaging.

From the panic reaction I'd say the Company, never impressed with the abilities of Poppy's errant son, has decided to get serious with the sloppiness of the War faction. Although this move by China is predictable. The Company seemed pretty happy for their Bank of America minions to get a $3 billion chunk of China Construction Bank or with their Citigroup deal for Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and a lien on Chinese credit.

No wonder Big Time Dick checked in to the hospital with a little shortness of breath last week.

But don't worry, the Soros faction minions might be gulping Maalox, but he checked out fine, he spent the weekend in South Dakota, huntin' an' fishin' and thinkin' 'bout his next moves for Global Domination.  ¶ 8:27 PM 7 comments links to this post

  Aghast and Adrift: a Change in the Current

Not neccessarily in the order the Editors would have liked.

...lawmakers stressed caution. "We must be thoughtful in our actions and get it right," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Finance Committee. "We can't afford to act rashly, and get it wrong."

Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, complained that the administration had made little progress in prodding China over its trade and currency policies. "They've kind of told us to take a hike," Mr. Bunning said.

"What the administration wants to do is avoid putting all these issues together into what some would want to call a single 'coherent' China policy,' " he said. "A 'coherent' policy would probably be one that sees China as an emerging adversary."

No it wouldn't, but that's what Karl Rove, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney would like you to think is the only kind of coherence America has.

The problem?

...the political debate about China is lagging behind events on the ground. The $18 billion bid for Unocal by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation ( CNOOC), China's third-largest oil company, was merely the latest and by far the biggest move by a Chinese company to buy a formidable American company.

The move represents an evolution for China from being a major exporter, using its earnings to acquire Treasury securities, to becoming a significant foreign investor in hard assets as well.

...For months, many lawmakers in both parties have become almost frantic about China's soaring trade surplus and its impact on American manufacturers. Anxiety is so high that Republican lawmakers from industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania are loath to vote for anything that sounds like a free-trade agreement.

But anxiety is at least as great about a disruption of American business ties to China.

"I think there is a reluctance to confront China," said Representative Phil English, a Republican from Pennsylvania and the leader of the Congressional steel caucus. "The problem is that many companies are depending on Chinese inputs and on imported goods to sell at retailers."

China is also a leading creditor of the United States; it acquired more than $200 billion of Treasury securities over the last year.

Moreover, China is already home to a growing number of American-owned factories, many of them exporting to the United States, and a large number of factories that are suppliers to American companies...

The negative trade balance is something the robber barons could care less about as long as they own the factories and exploit the cheap- often prison labor. The fat cats' problem is nicely summarized here. Unocal, the Company subsidiary of the Carlyle Group we gave Afghanistan to after 9-11, is basically an Asian company in China's back yard.

So they would like it themselves. They're being polite: they're offering more for it than Chevron did. Of course, if Chevron took over, it's still in the family.

That's the essence of the problem. The Chinese government directly backs all of its corporations, unlike the United States, where the corporations secretly control the government. So the Chinese government's been nibbling: "the committee permitted the $1.75 billion sale of I.B.M.'s personal computer business to Lenovo of China." Now Team Xinhua's starting to take big bites of the pie owned by the owners of Bu$hCo.

And if we piss them off, why, they simply cash in all their Treasury bonds.

Cleaning out the Treasury, and the cash cow the Carlyle Group depends on.

The Saudis are likely pissing blood right now and wondering about their hot date.

John Bolton is, too.

The rest of the world? If the United States insists on letting a crowd of oligarchs take it over, and the World has to choose between Chinese oligarchs and Bu$hCo 'Murikan oligarchs, it seems Team Xinhua wins the popularity contest in many circles.

Why?

It's something to do with the fact China doesn't start pre-emptive wars against other nations. Nor has it ever dropped an nuke on anyone. Things like that get you talked about.  ¶ 10:44 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Factoids From the Factbook

Facts from the CIA Factbook :

For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. After World War II, the Communists under MAO Zedong established an autocratic socialist system that, while ensuring China's sovereignty, imposed strict controls over everyday life and cost the lives of tens of millions of people. After 1978, his successor DENG Xiaoping and other leaders focused on market-oriented economic development and by 2000 output had quadrupled. For much of the population, living standards have improved dramatically and the room for personal choice has expanded, yet political controls remain tight...

Area:
total: 9,596,960 sq km
land: 9,326,410 sq km
water: 270,550 sq km

Area - comparative:
slightly smaller than the US
...
Land boundaries:
total: 22,117 km
border countries: Afghanistan 76 km, Bhutan 470 km, Burma 2,185 km, India 3,380 km, Kazakhstan 1,533 km, North Korea 1,416 km, Kyrgyzstan 858 km, Laos 423 km, Mongolia 4,677 km, Nepal 1,236 km, Pakistan 523 km, Russia (northeast) 3,605 km, Russia (northwest) 40 km, Tajikistan 414 km, Vietnam 1,281 km
regional borders: Hong Kong 30 km, Macau 0.34 km
...
Population:
1,306,313,812 (July 2005 est.)
Age structure:
0-14 years: 21.4% (male 148,134,928/female 131,045,415)
15-64 years: 71% (male 477,182,072/female 450,664,933)
65 years and over: 7.6% (male 47,400,282/female 51,886,182) (2005 est.)
Median age:
total: 32.26 years
male: 31.87 years
female: 32.67 years (2005 est.)
...
Independence:
221 BC (unification under the Qin or Ch'in Dynasty); 1 January 1912 (Manchu Dynasty replaced by a Republic); 1 October 1949 (People's Republic established)

Economy - overview:
In late 1978 the Chinese leadership began moving the economy from a sluggish, inefficient, Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented system. Whereas the system operates within a political framework of strict Communist control, the economic influence of non-state organizations and individual citizens has been steadily increasing. The authorities switched to a system of household and village responsibility in agriculture in place of the old collectivization, increased the authority of local officials and plant managers in industry, permitted a wide variety of small-scale enterprises in services and light manufacturing, and opened the economy to increased foreign trade and investment.

The result has been a quadrupling of GDP since 1978. Measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, China in 2004 stood as the second-largest economy in the world after the US, although in per capita terms the country is still poor. Agriculture and industry have posted major gains especially in coastal areas near Hong Kong and opposite Taiwan and in Shanghai, where foreign investment has helped spur output of both domestic and export goods.

The leadership, however, often has experienced - as a result of its hybrid system - the worst results of socialism (bureaucracy and lassitude) and of capitalism (growing income disparities and rising unemployment). China thus has periodically backtracked, retightening central controls at intervals.
The government has struggled to (a) sustain adequate jobs growth for tens of millions of workers laid off from state-owned enterprises, migrants, and new entrants to the work force; (b) reduce corruption and other economic crimes; and (c) keep afloat the large state-owned enterprises, many of which had been shielded from competition by subsidies and had been losing the ability to pay full wages and pensions.

From 100 to 150 million surplus rural workers are adrift between the villages and the cities, many subsisting through part-time, low-paying jobs. Popular resistance, changes in central policy, and loss of authority by rural cadres have weakened China's population control program, which is essential to maintaining long-term growth in living standards. At the same time, one demographic consequence of the "one child" policy is that China is now one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world.

Another long-term threat to growth is the deterioration in the environment - notably air pollution, soil erosion, and the steady fall of the water table especially in the north. China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development.

As part of its effort to gradually slow the rapid economic growth seen in 2004, Beijing says it will reduce somewhat its spending on infrastructure in 2005, while continuing to focus on poverty relief and through rural tax reform. Accession to the World Trade Organization helps strengthen its ability to maintain strong growth rates but at the same time puts additional pressure on the hybrid system of strong political controls and growing market influences. China has benefited from a huge expansion in computer Internet use, with 94 million users at the end of 2004.

Foreign investment remains a strong element in China's remarkable economic growth. Shortages of electric power and raw materials may affect industrial output in 2005. More power generating capacity is scheduled to come on line in 2006. In its rivalry with India as an economic power, China has a lead in the absorption of technology, the rising prominence in world trade, and the alleviation of poverty; India has one important advantage in its relative mastery of the English language, but the number of competent Chinese English-speakers is growing rapidly.
...
Military branches:
People's Liberation Army (PLA): Ground Forces, Navy (including marines and naval aviation), Air Force (including Airborne Forces), and II Artillery Corps (strategic missile force); People's Armed Police Force (internal security troops considered to be an adjunct to the PLA); Militia (2003)
Military manpower - military age and obligation:
18-22 years of age for compulsory military service, with 24-month service obligation; no minimum age for voluntary service; 17 years of age for women who meet requirements for specific military jobs (2004)
Military manpower - availability:
males age 18-49: 342,956,265 (2005 est.)
Military manpower - fit for military service:
males age 18-49: 281,240,272 (2005 est.)
Military manpower - reaching military age annually:
males: 13,186,433 (2005 est.)


Their available military manpower is far greater than the total population of the United States of America.

Think about that one, John Bolton.  ¶ 10:42 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Why Did We Go to Iraq?

William Rivers Pitt has it nailed.

...We need wars.

Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness and a planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the populace is not so easily controlled and manipulated.

Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do not refer to your average working man and woman on the street. The man running the shoe store or the woman managing the bar does not need war to remain economically viable. The "we" I speak of is that overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful few who have wired their fortunes into the manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of oil, and the collection of spoils through political largesse.

These are the people who need war. They need it to pile up the contracts from the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions that protect them, to pay the lawyers who defend them, to pay the lobbyists who sustain them, to purchase the politicians who champion them, and to buy up the media that hides them from sight.

Yet though this group is small in number, they are "we," for they are our leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the majority of this population that war is a necessity. They create the premises for combat and invasion, they convince and cajole and, when necessary, frighten us into line. All too often, almost every time, we buy into the fictions they manufacture, thus sustaining the "permanent crisis" mentality and the need for war after war after war.

The economic need for war creates the required excuses for war. The "permanent crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States to support the Shah in Iran, a decision that led to the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of Iran as a permanent enemy. The Cold War motivated us to support Saddam Hussein financially and militarily as a bulwark against Iran. The Cold War motivated us to establish the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia to ensure a steady supply of oil. The Cold War motivated us to support Osama bin Laden and the so-called "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders.

Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded Iraq for the second time in 15 years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that this nation's vast wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the birthing bed of international terrorism. We lost two towers in New York City at the hands of a group that we created in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. Put plainly, the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War created a cycle of military self-justification. We build enemies with arms and money, and then we destroy them with arms and money, thus keeping our wartime economy afloat.

The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but we still need war, and we need that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of military self-justification. If a legitimate war is not available, we will create one because we have to. We have our new "permanent crisis," which we call the War on Terror, another turn of the cycle created by an attack that our foreign policy and war-justifications of the last 50 years made almost inevitable.

We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This invasion and occupation of that nation has given our economy the war it needs, and has also created the justification for future wars by creating legions of enemies in the Mideast and around the world. Our wartime economy will tolerate no less.

Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of mass destruction, or about bringing democracy to the region, or about the dollar-to-Euro transfer, or about the midterm elections, is window-dressing. We invaded Iraq because we had to. This is the elephant in the room, the foreign policy reality nobody talks about.

If you want peace, work to change the underpinnings of our economy. Until that change is made, there will always be wars, invasions, and lies to brings such things about. It is what it is.

Develop an alternative for fossil fuel, and the cycle of endless wars to enrich the rich begun in the late 19th century will end.

It's quite possible.

It is so easily done with modern biotechnology and chemical engineering and a bit of re-tooling that the now falling fossil oil supply neccessitated the rush to oligarchy by that military-industrial machine known as the Carlyle Group.

If they don't grab power now, in 10-20 years there may be no need for the Princes of the desert and their mercer cadre of Western aristocrats.  ¶ 6:04 PM 5 comments links to this post

  You Only Thought Paying the Mortgage Meant It Was Yours

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses -- even against their will -- for private economic development.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.

And, incidently, enrich whichever local politicians the developers own.

After all, this is what Bu$hCo really means by an ownership society.  ¶ 1:37 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Profile Them Young, Profile Them Often

The farmer notices the Department of Defense has enlisted a private contractor to keep an eye on your children.

"The new database will include an array of personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying."

...According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to "those who require the records in the performance of their official duties." It said the data would be protected by passwords.

The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.

Some see the program as part of a growing encroachment of government into private lives, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"It's just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information," said James W. Harper, a privacy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don't need and shouldn't be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate."

Ethnicity? If you're a liberal progressive it's bound to get you the night patrol in Baghdad as your public service. Or a military prison, run by private contractors. Whichever you choose.

It's a free country, you know.  ¶ 6:39 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Takeover Bid

A Chinese state-controlled oil company made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid for Unocal today, igniting the first-ever takeover battle between corporations in China and the United States.

The bold bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC, may be a watershed in Chinese corporate behavior and demonstrates the increasing influence of Wall Street's bare-knuckled tactics in Asia. The offer also illustrates how crucial oil and gas resources are to China given its huge growth.

CNOOC's bid, which comes two months after Unocal agreed to be sold to the American energy giant Chevron for $16.8 billion, is expected to provoke a fierce debate in Washington about the nation's trade policies with China and the role of the two governments in the growing trend of deal making between companies in both countries...

That explains why Bolton and the AEI keep foaming at the mouth about China. Their Carlyle bosses don't like it when people not part of their club play their game. Especially when their competitors own all their markers.

Thanks to Scout Prime for the heads up.  ¶ 10:47 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Training Exercises

It's nice to know we're accomplishing something in the world.

WASHINGTON, June 21 - A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.

The assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several Congressional and intelligence officials. The officials said it made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict.

Congressional and intelligence officials who described the assessment called it a thorough examination that included extensive discussion of the areas that might be particularly prone to infiltration by combatants from Iraq, either Iraqis or foreigners.

They said the assessment had argued that Iraq, since the American invasion of 2003, had in many ways assumed the role played by Afghanistan during the rise of Al Qaeda during the 1980's and 1990's, as a magnet and a proving ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries.

The officials said the report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda...

But don't think it's all one sided.

Iraq is a fine training gound for the best private security contractors in the world.

The Pentagon is falling short on efforts to keep elite special forces units at full strength and now is fighting back dollar by dollar, offering up to $150,000 bonuses to commandos to keep high-paying private security firms from cherry-picking the teams.

Special operations units such as the Green Berets and Navy SEALs are running slightly below their authorized strength, in part because private firms are luring away those troops for work in Iraq and elsewhere by tripling or quadrupling their pay, military officials said...

Military officials seeing a drop in special-forces retention say they have little choice but to compete in the marketplace with companies like Blackwater Security Consulting and Halliburton, who advertise on their Web sites to recruit employees with U.S. special forces training...

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, and Halliburton, based in Texas, don't disguise their desire to lure the highly trained special-forces graduates for security work. Blackwater is a private security company that provides protection for dignitaries, among other duties. Halliburton provides services to U.S. military personnel in Iraq and is not a security company per se, but officials there say the company hires security personnel to consult on safety measures.

Halliburton spokeswoman Jennifer Dellinger said about one-third of Halliburton's employees in Iraq are former military personnel but could not provide figures on how many were former U.S. special forces members. Halliburton's workers in Iraq can make two to three times more than for comparable positions in the United States, she said...

The Company, indeed.

And, what goes around, comes around.

IRAQ: Private Contractors Train Much of the Fledging Police Force

At her confirmation hearing on Jan. 17, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the task of training Iraq's security forces -- its army, police, national guard, and smaller units -- falls to many partners: the U.S. military, NATO, Iraq, Jordan, and other nations. But neither Rice nor Administration officials has yet to mention the significant role being played by private contractors.

Just over 700 contractors -- more than previously disclosed -- are now training in excess of half the Iraqi Police Service, BusinessWeek has learned. In April, 2003, DynCorp announced it had won a $50 million contract to help train "civilian law enforcement, judicial, and correctional agencies." Now, Science Applications International and the United States Investigative Services [USIS] also are playing significant roles in training Iraqi police...

Iraq is a veritable hotbed of education.

To complete this circle of folly, the unthinkable and unspeakable possibility that the main$tream media buried almost as soon as anyone noticed:

Iraqi insurgents and their informants have been infiltrating US and coalition organizations, Iraqi security units, and political parties in growing numbers, posing a daunting challenge to efforts to defeat the guerrillas and create a stable Iraqi state, according to US military officials, Iraq specialists, and a new study of Iraqi security forces.

...and in many cases, they appear to be gathering better intelligence on US military movements and the activities of the new Iraqi government than coalition forces are gathering on guerrilla plans.

''Penetration of Iraqi security and military forces may be the rule, not the exception," according to a draft version of a study of Iraqi security forces by a senior Pentagon consultant.

Military analysts concur that such infiltration is a worsening threat that is undermining US and Iraqi efforts to stand up viable security forces and to protect coalition troops from increasingly deadly attacks.

It's doubtless because they're so well trained.

Remember: they don't get the Blank Check without the Endless War.  ¶ 9:46 PM 1 comments links to this post

  First Argue Validly

Skeptico deconstructs Kennedy's expose of the use of thimersol in vaccines I covered here.

He has some good points: sins of omission by Kennedy concerning the fact the CDC did eventually release the data.

Skeptico comes down on the there's no good proof side of the argument.

Sorry, although that's right. But then I'm less impressed with the impartiality of science and scientists, having worked in science for the last 25 years of my life. That's also a bias.

Still, I have a healthy respect for the toxicity of organmercurials. They're also impossible (or difficult) to elimnate from the body and tend to accumulate. They're also extremely dangerous in the young.

So there's no solid data on the danger of this traditional antiseptic as it is currently used.

So what?

It's toxic as hell, and unneccessary. Why use it?  ¶ 6:55 AM 4 comments links to this post

  Protecting Bu$hCo's Interests ... Whatever They Cost.

Porter Goss feigns nonchalance.

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?

Yes, those weak links, and those sanctuaries in sovereign states that don't happen to be Iran or Syria, but we'd like you to think Pakistan, although it's really the family qasbah in Riyadh.

What's good for Dear Leader is good for America, right?

Ex-FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has some issues with that...

Over four years ago, more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high- level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that:

1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities,

2) the attack was going to involve airplanes,

3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States,

4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.

The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing “302” forms, and the translator, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the Special Agent in Charge, Thomas Frields, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to ‘keep quiet’ regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice Inspector General. The press reported this incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004 stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001...

Read it all. This is from a woman who has seen the bowels of the beast. And thanks to Truthout for the link.

There we go again, as St. Ronald Rambo Reagan would say, basing our opinions on reality instead of taking account the sensitivities of our allies.

When you have a War on Terra you're trying to stoke into a real World War, you find allies and enemas in the strangest places.

Sorry for the scatological pun, but no shit, it's getting strange out there and the weird are definitely turning professional.

For example, the Chinese propaganda organ that I most often agree with really wants us to think Osama's right and tight in Pakistan. They don't leave it at that, either. They go into hairy detail about the Jihad Pakistan is packaging and exporting to all us infidels, too.

I certainly don't blame China for a little unease.

But they've got more problems coming down the pipeline than a little Holy War on their borders.

There's a genuine psychopath about to get appointed to the United Nations regardless of what the Congress says who foams at the mouth about China. Among other things.

But who knows, there may be peace yet in Asia, particularly if the Carlyle Group gets a piece of the action.  ¶ 6:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Agents of Another Flag

American Prospect raises the possibility that there is a reason the TheoCons are unwittingly dismantling the security of the United States.

They're being used.

Much of the funding for loudly and stupidly "Patriotic" organizations like the Wrepublican party and the American Enterprise Institute comes from multimillion-dollar donors like Sun Myung Moon.

Moon, in turn, has high connections in both Koreas.

"...on September 9, 1994, an unnamed DIA field analyst discussed the possibility that The Washington Times was serving the purposes of the North Korean government:

USING THE UNIFICATION CHURCH’S PERCEIVED INFLUENCE IN SUCH NEWSPAPERS AS THE SEIL [sic] DAILY NEWS AND THE WASHINGTON TIMES, ALONG WITH CHUCH AFFILIATED LOBBYISTS AND OTHER PERSONNEL LINKAGE, KN [North Korea] WILL TRY TO DELIVER ITS OPINIONS TO THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE WEST. THE INTENTION IS TO CREATE A FAVORABLE PUBLIC OPINION OF KN … .

DIA cables also noted certain explosive accusations that had made a big noise in the Japanese press. The respected Tokyo newspaper Weekly Asahi had reported that four men who had married into Moon’s True Family were possibly operating on the evangelist’s behalf when, in 1994, they emerged as the agents behind the controversial sale of decrepit Russian submarines to the North -- supposedly as scrap metal..."

Bu$hie is an inbred child of priviledge, surrounded by the corrupt and the disingenuous.

It is likely that he has no idea of the real consequences of any of his actions, and neither do his venal criminal cohort. They make lucrative deals with people they demonize. Once again, their actions seemed designed to keep the endless war alive and the blank checks being written.

Rumsfeld has profited from nuclear reactor sales to North Korea.

"The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories".'  ¶ 8:13 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Let the Good Times Roll

The Dark Wraith speaks:

...The following technical summaries are drawn from the income statements and balance sheets of Halliburton Holding Co.

Halliburton revenue from fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2004 rose from $12.498 billion to $20.466 billion, representing an annualized growth rate of 27.97 percent.

Gross profit (revenues less cost of revenues) for the same period rose from $119 million to $1.143 billion, for an annualized growth rate of gross profit of 209.92 percent.

Operating income (gross profit less operating expenses) rose from —$186 million to $837 million.

Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) rose from —$115 million to $880 million, and net income from continuing operations for the period climbed from —$346 million to $385 million.

The Company took charges against net income from continuing operations in 2002, 2003, and 2004, respectively, of $652 million, $1.151 billion, and $1.364 billion to report net income available for common stock for the three years, again respectively, of —$998 million, —$820 million, and —$979 million.

The Company's total assets rose from $12.844 billion to $15.796 billion, for an annualized growth rate of 10.90 percent; however, the current component of those assets grew from $5.560 billion to $9.962 billion, for an annualized growth rate of current assets of 33.86 percent, more than triple the growth rate of the Company's overall asset base.

Halliburton's liability structure largely mirrors the Company's shift toward a more liquid configuration, with current liabilities rising from $3.272 billion at year end 2002 to $7.064 billion at year end 2004 and total liabilities rising in the same time frame from $9.286 billion to $11.864 billion, meaning that current liabilities over the period grew on an annualized basis by 46.93 percent—again, better than three times the annualized growth rate through the same period of total liabilities, which grew on an annualized basis by only 13.03 percent...

You don't get the blank check unless you get the endless war.

The Dark Wraith usually has some interesting things to say at his own site here.  ¶ 6:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Creative Quotations

Spotted at Think Progress, yet another attempt to rewrite history.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked if “the Bush administration fairly [can] be criticized for failing to level with the American people about how long and difficult this commitment will be?” Rice responded:

[T]he administration, I think, has said to the American people that it is a generational commitment to Iraq.

That’s not true. To build support for the war the administration told the American people that the conflict in Iraq will be short and affordable.

Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/16/03:

[M]y belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly. . . (in) weeks rather than months

Donald Rumsfeld, 2/7/03:

It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

Former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, 3/28/03:

The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid…

Bu$hie was caught rewriting his story yet again:

President Bush In His Radio Address Today: “We went to war because we were attacked” [6/18/05]

President Bush In 2003: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th [attacks].” [9/17/03]
  ¶ 4:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  More on Bringing Good Things to Life with Prickly Heat

Awhile back there was a post here on the use of napalm in the Iraq war.

The main$stream media, among the French Englishmen anyway, has picked up on the fact that Bu$hCo lied about this to the British government.

American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.

Yesterday's disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets "away from civilian targets", he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets...

Hope that link works; they've changed it once since it first came out.

More on their use in the war here.

More on the difference between the MK-77 and the original napalm here.

The orignal napalm was kerosene and polystyrene; the new improved stuff is benzene, gasoline, and polystyrene.

Thanks again to Melissa McEwan for the heads up.  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Not Even Through the Service Entrance

The White House shows it has no use for Congress People who won't clean up for it.

And you thought American citizens had the right to petition.  ¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Welcome to the Machine

Paul Krugman deconstructs what's wrong with Ohio and the nation.

The Toledo Blade's reports on Coingate - the unfolding tale of how Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation misused funds - deserve much more national attention than they have received so far. For one thing, it's an entertaining story that seems to get weirder by the week. More important, it's an object lesson in what happens when you have one-party rule untrammeled by any quaint notions of independent oversight.

In April, The Blade reported that the bureau, which provides financial support for workers injured on the job, had invested $50 million in Capital Coin, a rare-coin trading operation run by Tom Noe, an influential Republican fund-raiser.

At first, state officials angrily insisted that this unusual use of state funds was a good investment that had nothing to do with Mr. Noe's political connections. An accounting investigation revealed, however, that Mr. Noe's claims to be running a profitable business were fictitious: he had lost millions, and 121 valuable coins were missing.

On June 3, police raided the Colorado home of Michael Storeim, Mr. Noe's business associate, and seized hundreds of rare coins. After changing the locks, they left 3,500 bottles of wine, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, in the home's basement.

On Monday, Mr. Storeim told police that someone had broken into his house over the weekend and stolen much of the wine, along with artwork, guns, jewelry and cars. As I said, this story keeps getting weirder.

Meanwhile, The Blade uncovered an even bigger story: the Bureau of Workers' Compensation invested $225 million in a hedge fund managed by MDL Capital, whose chairman had strong political connections. When this investment started to go sour, the bureau's chief financial officer told another top agency official that he had been told to "give MDL a break."

By October 2004, state officials knew that MDL had lost almost the entire investment, but they kept the loss hidden until this month.

How could such things happen? The answer, it has become clear, lies in a web of financial connections between state officials and the businessmen who got to play with state funds...

Now, politicians and businessmen are always in a position to do each other lucrative favors. Government is relatively clean when politicians are sufficiently afraid of scandal to resist temptation. But when a political machine controls all branches of government, and those officials charged with oversight are also reliably partisan, politicians feel safe from investigation. Their inhibitions dissolve, and they take full advantage of their position, until the scandals become too big to hide.

In other words, Ohio's state government today is a lot like Boss Tweed's New York. Unfortunately, a lot of other state governments look similar - and so does Washington.

Since their 1994 takeover of Congress, and even more so since the 2000 election, Republican leaders have sought to make their political dominance permanent. They redistricted Texas to lock in their control of the House. Through the "K Street Project" they have put lobbying firms under partisan control, starving the Democrats of campaign funds. And they are, of course, trying to pack the courts with partisan loyalists.

In effect, they're trying to turn America into a giant version of the elder Richard Daley's Chicago.

These efforts have already created an environment in which politicians from the right party and businessmen with the right connections believe, with good reason, that they have immunity.

And politicians who feel that they can exploit their position tend to do just that. It's a likely bet that the scandals we already know about, from Coingate to Tom DeLay's dealings with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The message from Ohio is that long-term dominance by a political machine leads to corruption, regardless of the policies that machine follows or the ideology it claims to represent.   ¶ 3:09 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Geek Tools

Check out BlogPulse and the Trend Tool.  ¶ 7:02 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Calvinball with the Columns

Truthout quotes verbatum a Washington Post article of Harry Reid asking if John Bolton was part of the manipulation of Intelligence leading to Iraq- but the Post changes the article.

Link drift is a normal part of life on the Internet, but this kind of drift is all too common on the New York Times and the Washington Post: a Manager decides that what's been written is too much for corporate policy, and changes the story completely after it's passed the editorial staff and been published on the Internet.

In this instance, content of about half the column's gone, and the gist of the story completely changes.

The title remains the same, but instead of being lifted from a Reuters story authored by Vicki Allen, they substitute an AP story from a nameless source.

The part omitted in the new improved version?

...Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid demanded a full accounting of whether Bolton exaggerated assessments of several countries' weapons programs, a key issue in the long-stalled nomination.

"All over the news the last few days has been concerns about weapons of mass destruction by virtue of the memo that was discovered," the Nevada Democrat said, referring to the so-called "Downing Street memo."

The July 2002 memo, prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair, said President Bush had already decided to invade Iraq and intelligence was being made to fit that policy.

"Concerns about this administration hyping intelligence and Great Britain hyping intelligence cannot be dismissed lightly," Reid said, adding that it "is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence."

Bush and his aides, including Bolton, justified the invasion by saying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States, but no such weapons have been found.

Bolton, the top U.S. diplomat for arms control and a fierce critic of the United Nations, is a favorite of conservatives and failure to get him confirmed would be a setback for Bush.

Procedural Vote

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said "some of the Democratic leaders who have already voted against John Bolton are not interested in a reasonable compromise. They are simply interested in continuing with stall tactics."

Republicans would need to pick up two more Democrats in the 100-seat chamber to get the 60 votes required to end debate on Bolton and go to a confirmation vote, if they kept all of the senators they had in a previous vote.

If they can get beyond the procedural hurdle, Republicans, who hold a 55-45 Senate majority, are confident they will have the simple majority needed to confirm Bolton.

Bush could appoint Bolton during Congress' July 4th holiday recess if the Senate remains deadlocked. That appointment would last through the end of this Senate session in 2006.

But a recess appointment would be viewed as a political retreat. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a key Bolton backer, said he had not heard that suggested by administration officials.

In a bid to get more support, Senate Republicans tried to act as intermediaries to get some information on Bolton that Democrats are demanding, but the administration has refused to turn it over.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said on Wednesday he confirmed with U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte that key officials known to have had confrontations with Bolton over intelligence assessments were not mentioned in classified National Security Agency intercepts Bolton had sought.

Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said that should answer Democrats' questions on whether Bolton sought the intercepts to spy on or punish bureaucratic rivals. Critics have accused Bolton of bullying subordinates.

But Democrats said they still did not have internal e-mails and memos leading up to testimony Bolton gave on Syria's weapons, and the information on the intercepts was inadequate.  ¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Some in Congress Find Their Vertebrae

Once again, I like Billmon's take on it:

...I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durbin of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. (link courtesy of Talk Left)

I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth.

(You know you're a cynic when you automatically suspect a politician is telling the truth for dishonest reasons.)

But as far as I can tell, Durbin had absolutely nothing to gain from this, other than the predictable smears from the GOP propaganda machine and the cave dwellers of the Neanderthal right. (Actually, in Limbaugh's case, I think even homo erectus would be ashamed to have to claim such an ape as a distant cousin.)

I have no idea what motivated Durbin to let it all hang out, except perhaps personal moral outrage and a clear understanding of the practical risks raised by the Bush regime's debasement of the American military.

The quote former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durbin included in his floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about the latter:

"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival . . . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us . . . We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."

As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and including murder....

But if Durbin had wanted to be completely honest, he would have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.

And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.

But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durbin can afford.

Does the name Black Spot ring a bell?

Predictably, Dick Durbin is already getting threats.  ¶ 10:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Biomedical Coverup

First, do no harm

Tom Tomorrow points to a fine piece of investigative reporting by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data -- and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.

June 16, 2005 | In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston...

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.

"We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled."

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism...

You need to read it all.

You know, people knew about this problem 15 years ago, but getting anyone to listen was impossible.

Tom Tommorrow has some things to say about Bill Frist, too:

...So Doctor Frist doesn't believe that states should even have the ability to warn people of the potential dangers of vaccines. And as we now know, his diagnosis-by-video of Terri Schiavo simply couldn't have been more wrong. In both instances, Doctor Frist is putting politics, ideology and campaign cash ahead of his basic duties as a medical professional. So when does this son of a bitch get called out on the carpet by his fellow doctors?

Probably about the same time his fellow doctors get the Big Pharma monkey off their backs, Tom.  ¶ 2:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Everybody Wants the Latest!

At Defense Tech today...

It's bad enough that Israel is selling weapons to China. But France? Quel horreur!

"A French company plans to display a tactical drone armed with advanced Israeli air-to-ground missiles at the 2005 Paris Air Show, in a bid to make France a leader in unmanned combat aircraft," Defense News reports.

"The Sperwer B, designed for battlefield reconnaissance, has been fitted with two Spike long-range, precision-strike missiles...

"Israeli government-owned Rafael Armament Development Authority makes the Spike ER (extended range) guided weapon. The missile carries an advanced electro-optic system with a combined daytime camera and infrared seeker and fiber-optic data link. The 33-kilogram Spike ER is designed for precision strikes against small, moving ground targets at ranges of up to eight kilometers...

"The Franco-Israeli cooperation on the drone marks a political turn for Paris, Jean-Paul Hébert, of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales, said. France sold Israel Dassault Mirage fighters used with devastating effect in the 1967 Six-Day War, but has not sold much military equipment to Israel since then."

France, already pushing ahead on several killer drone projects, isn't the only European country developing armed robots to roam the skies. According to Aviation Week, England's BAE Systems is working on a "classified low-radar-observable UCAV [unmanned combat aerial vehicle] project, dubbed Nightjar, for the British Defense Ministry."

The program, suggest industry sources, has a twofold purpose. The first is to ensure the technology base for the development of a low-observable UCAV; the second is to provide leverage should the U.K. decide to participate in any comparable U.S. effort...

Earlier this year the British Defense Ministry joined the Pentagon's Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems program. Work from Nightjar will inevitably inform the U.K. participation. While the ministry remains publicly noncommittal as to whether it will pursue a European or a U.S. path... all indications are that U.S. route is far more likely.

The joint work will conclude with "live and virtual manned and unmanned assets from both nations operating in a networked coalition warfare scenario." It's possible that a Nightjar UCAV could take part in [U.S. drone test flights] in 2009.

So sorry, Dr. Oberg, but this isn't paranoia. Maybe you'd be best off just not reading the newspapers or the internet(s), like a lot of other Wrepublicans. Watch your Faux News, and consume mass product quantities like the ads command.

It's state of the art.  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Don't Worry, Be Happy

To keep Mom and Pop Wrepublican happy with their Xanax...

"Now come the newest stories that echo down the interconnected corridors of the American mainstream media, about “killer satellites” and “death stars” and “Rods from God” bombardment systems — as if the Hollywoodized terminology wasn't a clue that most of the subject matter was equally imaginary.

"Take the opening paragraph of a recent Christian Science Monitor editorial that denounced what it portrayed as “the possible first-ever overt deployment of weapons where heretofore only satellites and astronauts have gone.” But history reveals an entirely different reality.

"Weapons have occasionally been deployed in space for decades, without sparking mass arms races or hair-trigger tensions. These are not just systems that send warheads through space, such as intercontinental missiles or the proposed global bomber. These are systems that put the weapons into stable orbits, circling Earth, based in space. And these systems were all Russian ones, by the way, most of them predating President Reagan's “Strategic Defense Initiative” to develop an anti-missile system..."

Really"? Name one, please. Before Ronald Reagan. Take your time. I don't think so.

"But it's not the equipment that's important (that's why the United States never responded to earlier Russian space weapons); it's the offensive capabilities the hardware is supposed to deliver. That's what must be considered foremost before considering the likelihood of responses.

"So scary tales about U.S. “death stars” hovering over target countries promising swift strikes from space rely merely on readers not understanding the basics of orbital motion in space. A satellite circles Earth in an ever-shifting path that passes near any particular target only a few times every 24 hours, not every 10 minutes. It's quicker and cheaper to strike ground targets with missiles launched from the ground.

"Nor is a space rendezvous robot, such as those under development by half a dozen nations and commercial consortia, a “space weapon” — despite media claims that one of them, the Air Force's XSS-11 satellite, could perform as a weapon. Plenty of productive peaceful rationales for these vehicles exist, from refueling to repair to resupply, and they are going to be deployed in large numbers in coming years.

"Raising unjustified fears about them and other so-far-totally-conceptual space vehicles may be politically or ideologically satisfying to some, but in the big picture, feeding foreign prejudices and stoking the insecurities of some naturally paranoid cultures is a dangerous game."

On the other hand, stoking the paranoid tendencies of our culture is perfectly acceptable.

The problem with lying about weapons of mass destruction in space before Ronald Reagan is that somebody might remember to ask who had the technology to put them there.

It's tough trying to rewrite the history books.

This being a multiverse, of course, there's another problem with the rose-colored It's All Good don't-worry-about-it-if-it's-not-your-problem attitude.

Even if we can't get Star Wars off the ground, even if they want to avoid actually testing all their wonderful toys because, you know, the failures make them look bad, they're still spending hundreds of billions of dollars on their technological nightmares, whether they're Rods from God, Death Stars, Akira-style space-based x-ray lasers, or Cylon fighter drones.

The money's being spent.

Whether it works or is real or even rational. The money's being spent. And my grandchildren will be paying for Rumsfeld's fantasies long after he and I and you are all dead.

So don't give me a lot of Patriotic Jingoist silliness about how people shouldn't speculate about the ramifications of DARPA's latest wet dreams, or worry about the cost, because it's giving aid and comfort to some hypothetical and likely mythological enemy.

Because in the post 9-11 world, USA Today, the only real enemies I see to America are friends of Bu$hCo. The 9-11 attack was planned by a CIA-trained family friend of George W. Bush. The companies that tried to arm Iraq after the Gulf War and sold nuclear reactors to the North Koreans are all controlled by men named Cheney or Rumsfeld.

People like me don't have to stoke the paranoid tendencies of other cultures.

John Bolton and the American Enterprise Institute do that quite well all by themselves, thank you.

Then there's the other issue: if DARPA and Rumsfeld go to press conferences and brag about all this technology, if Congress critters appropriate and paper pushers spend hundreds of billions on this stuff, technologically saavy folks from other cultures just as paranoid as ours might try to make a suitcase nuke. Or a neutron bomb. Or a working hand-held laser or a working civilian aircraft mounted laser that can take out a target 50 miles away.

Because, you know, the press releases say we have it, too.  ¶ 10:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Premeditated Road to War

The complete timeline for Iraq is here.

Thanks to Melissa McEwan for the tip.

Elsewhere, shades of Chalabi, Lauren Rozen notes Bu$hCo's developed an anonymous source warning us of all the plotting going on in Iran to Terra'ize us.

Operation Northwoods worked once, didn't it?

Elsewhere Wolcott quotes Chris Hedges here:

...""This myth, the lie, about war, about ourselves, is imploding our democracy. We shun introspection and self-criticism. We ignore truth, to embrace the strange, disquieting certitude and hubris offered by the radical Christian Right. These radical Christians draw almost exclusively from the book of Revelations, the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, peddling a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. They rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They relish the cataclysmic destruction that will befall unbelievers, including those such as myself, who they dismiss as 'nominal Christians.' They divide the world between good and evil, between those anointed to act as agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The cult of masculinity and esthetic of violence pervades their ideology. Feminism and homosexuality are forces, believers are told, that have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian Right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. The language is one not only of exclusion, hatred and fear, but a call for apocalyptic violence, in short the language of war."  ¶ 6:14 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Ministry of Truth, Managed by the Kruel Kids

In two great posts by Xan and Billmon, a window into the hundreds of millions of dollars being funded into private contractors to give us the Good News about the War in Iraq.

And quite possibly quite a bit else.

Even before the Iraq invasion, you may recall, Rummy and the gang were scheming to create their own in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. The program was nominally killed after the critics pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the domestic media. (This was back when the Democrats still had a foot in the door of power, and Rumsfeld had to back down every once in awhile.)

But the Donald soon made it clear he intended to push through the budgetary back door what he couldn't get through the front door. And after the Dems lost the Senate, he didn't even try too hard to conceal what he was doing. The occupation of Iraq -- and the money and lack of accountability it spawned -- put the Pentagon in the "strategic influence" business in a big way, with its own TV news operation (the Pentagon Channel), a Coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, I presume, but still powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a U.S. vendor) and a millions of dollars to hire PR firms and consultants to spin the coalition's propaganda to the Iraqi people.

The net benefit of all this in terms of strategically influencing the Iraqis -- or the rest of the Islamic world -- has been roughly zero, or maybe even a negative number. But the benefit to the Bush administration and the Republican Party is a different sum, harder to measure. For some time now, one of my pet suspicions has been that the Pentagon's psywar budget is also a hidden piggy bank and an R&D laboratory for the GOP's own political propaganda operations.

I have no proof of this. I didn't even have anything that could reasonably called evidence, until today, when I came across this story:

Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Effort

"The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military.

' "We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."

"He said SYColeman Inc. of Arlington, Lincoln Group of the District, and Science Applications International Corp. will help develop ideas and prototypes for radio and television spots, documentaries, or even text messages, pop-up ads on the Internet, podcasting, billboards or novelty items."

You got that right, folks. The Pentagon is going to spend $300 million a year on, among other things, internet spam for the war and pop-up window for all of you unfortunates who must use Explorer instead of Firefox. I wonder if the pop-ups will also scan your memory cache to determine if you've been visiting any unPatriotic sites like this?

Xan and Billmon penetrate the first layer of smoke to find the real psyops behind the photogenic young faces is run by a group known as the Lincoln Alliance.

Billmon again:

Lincoln Alliance apparently doesn't just serve the business community; it also has provided it's "oppo" capabilities to political candidates and campaigns -- or to certain ones, anyway:

Lincoln has developed a unique service which provides campaign managers and their staff with concise actionable information in order to understand their candidate's time and events, media planning, voter interest, issue positions and several other factors . . . This service is restricted and available only to select clients. (emphasis added).

It would be interesting to know more about those "other factors" that Lincoln provides "actionable information" on, and even more interesting to know which political campaigns in the past have qualified as "select clients." Considering what I've learned about the company -- although it's admittedly not much -- I'm going to bet the inhabitants of that charmed circle have a rather Republican coloration.

Lincoln also appears to have its fingers in several projects that have a strong intelligence community coloration to them. These include techniques for allowing analysts to process distributed bits of classified data -- without ever seeing the whole picture, as well as (shades of Admiral Poindexter) something called: Role Based Online Gaming for Unconventional Environments (ROGUE)

In essence, ROGUE is a massive multiplayer game that allows private individuals to compete against government and military forces in unconventional scenarios. ROGUE incorporates a motivation and e-commerce system that rewards successful gamers with money and fame.

(If Lincoln really is part of some Pentagon-funded political black op, at least someone has a sense of humor about it.)

So to sum up: We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing "private equity" deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda.

Now maybe that's just the way business is done in George Bush's government, but it doesn't make me any less creeped out by what I was able to dig up with a few online searches. You don't have to have too much of a taste for paranoid conspiracy theories to imagine scenarios in which such contracting relationships could prove very useful for the Bush administration and the GOP machine.

Comments on Billmon's piece of work here

An end-of-the-day Update by the farmer here.

Interesting how Christian Bailey's funds are capped at $300 million- precisely the number the Pentacle Pentagon is spending.  ¶ 6:35 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Rise of the Robber Barons

Paul Krugman notices:

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what's going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics, claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try to do something about the politics of greed.

Let's.

It's important to also notice that this policy isn't just some random drift into more venal behavior.

It's part of a disciplined, premeditated plan of control.  ¶ 6:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Rewriting Scientific Intelligence, Too

...a former employee of the government office that coordinates climate change research has released documents showing that a White House aide has been doctoring official reports on climate change precisely to avoid "acting" on the scientific evidence. The aide, Philip A. Cooney -- chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality -- is alleged to have made dozens of changes to official reports, inserting qualifiers designed to cast doubt on findings about climate change and to play down the link between climate change and industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

The result, though, is that the White House may soon be the last institution in Washington that doesn't believe that the threat of climate change requires something more than new adjectives.

...Now, however, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), the ranking Democrat on the Energy Committee, has prepared -- in consultation with Republican colleagues -- an alternative amendment, one that would set up a cap-and-trade system, somewhat less rigorously, but far more cheaply, than the McCain-Lieberman bill. It is beginning to attract a surprisingly broad level of Democratic and Republican support.


This new legislation is based on a proposal put together by the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group that includes industry chief executives, environmentalists and scientists. According to a recent Energy Department analysis, that group's cap-and-trade system would cause only a minimal rise in electricity prices, and would not, unlike the McCain-Lieberman bill, lead to a sharp reduction in the use of coal. The legislation would also allow Congress to continually reassess the national cap on greenhouse gases, depending on what measures are being taken in other countries. Those two measures go a long way to answer those critics who claim addressing this issue in any way will render the U.S. economy uncompetitive.

[Thanks to pie at Eschaton for the link.]

the White House editing and other actions threatened to taint the government's $1.8 billion-a-year effort to clarify the causes and consequences of climate change.

"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Mr. Piltz wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program."

A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist who works on climate questions said the White House environmental council, where Mr. Cooney works, had offered valuable suggestions on reports from time to time. But the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because all agency employees are forbidden to speak with reporters without clearance, said the kinds of changes made by Mr. Cooney had damaged morale. "I have colleagues in other agencies who express the same view, that it has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of frustration," he said.

Efforts by the Bush administration to highlight uncertainties in science pointing to human-caused warming have put the United States at odds with other nations and with scientific groups at home...

The American Petroleum Institute, where Mr. Cooney worked before going to the White House, has long taken a sharply different view. Starting with the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty in 1997, it has promoted the idea that lingering uncertainties in climate science justify delaying restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases.

I wonder how much of that $1.8 billion a year finds its way back into private contractor advisory groups too?  ¶ 6:09 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Looking for an Excuse

From Buzzflash and the London Times

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.   ¶ 10:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Howard Dean Speaks for Me

Just let the DINOcrats know where we stand.  ¶ 11:27 AM 0 comments links to this post

  More on Hot Rods from the Bu$hCo Gods

Defense Tech gives an update on the latest pusch from the Empire's Department of Defense of the Pork Barrel known reverentially among Rumsfeld's posse as "Rods from God".

Of all the far-fetched space weapons hyped by the Times last month, "Rods from God" are probably the most dubious. That doesn't stop the Weekly Standard from panting about how totally wicked awesome it would be if the Air Force really could drop giant tungsten slabs from orbit, however.

...It's not until the 9th paragraph (of a 12-graph story) that the Standard reveals, "the likelihood of the rods, or any other system, being deployed in space over the next decade [are] next to nil.'" What's never mentioned at all is the opinion of many physicists that the rods would only be a small fraction as effective as conventional bombs.

Much of the hype behind this in the main$tream media talks about dropping tungsten rods from space. The reality is the more likely metal they'll choose is depleted uranium. As discussed in detail in this .pdf from the RAND Organization, not only is depleted uranium denser, easier, and cheaper than tugsten to machine work, once you coat it with ceramic its resistant to atmospheric corrosion at high temperatures. And it's far better at penetration, it burns viciously on impact, and has a lovely characteristic for the pyschopaths of leaving a toxic radioactive residue.

And moreover, it's already being used extensively as an armor penetration kinetic device in places like Iraq.

They say tungsten when they want to Gee-Whiz the proles.

They use depleted uranium to do the dirty work.  ¶ 10:18 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Who Needs a Deep Throat When They Say It Themselves?

Wolfie talks too much.

"You were one of those who was most emphatic prior to going into Iraq that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction."

"I don't think so."

"I can quote you."

"Okay."

I read him a line from an op-ed article under his byline in the British newspaper The Independent for January 30, 2003: "There is incontrovertible evidence that the Iraqi regime still possesses such weapons." Wolfowitz had spoken in the same terms on numerous occasions.

"'Incontrovertible evidence' is a pretty strong way of putting it," I said. "How did you feel when you found out they didn't have such weapons?"

"Well, I don't think they don't," he said. "You say it turned out they didn't. By the way, read me the quote again."

I did so. Wolfowitz said he needed to go back and review his prior statements.

"But clearly you believed they had stockpiles of such weapons?"

"You are putting the word 'stockpiles' in," he said.

He was right: "stockpiles" was my word.

[Thanks to Digby for the tip.]


Piles of Smoking Guns

Juan Cole notices there was more than one memo, and more than one paper trail on fixing intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.

The Daily Telegraph for 18 September 2004 first quoted from a leaked memo by Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador in Washington, describing his meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in March, 2002.

The British memo is only the most decisive in a long list of documents that make it inescapably clear that Bush had decided to go to war long before. Indeed, Bush had decided as early as his presidential campaign in the year 2000 that he would find a way to fight an Iraq war to unseat Saddam. I was in the studio with Arab-American journalist Osama Siblani on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" program on March 11, 2005, when Siblani reported a May 2000 encounter he had with then-candidate Bush in a hotel in Troy, Mich. "He told me just straight to my face, among 12 or maybe 13 Republicans at that time here in Michigan at the hotel. I think it was on May 17, 2000, even before he became the nominee for the Republicans. He told me that he was going to take him out, when we talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq." According to Siblani, Bush added that "he wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and gathering threat against the United States." Siblani points out that Bush at that point was privy to no classified intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs and had already made up his mind on the issue.

Siblani's account of Bush's stance is virtually identical to the impressions Dearlove brought back from Washington a little over two years later: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." Iraq had long played the great white whale to W.'s Ahab, and the chance to move decisively against Saddam was intrinsic to his presidential ambitions.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described to Ron Susskind in "The Price of Loyalty" the first Bush national security meeting of principals on Jan. 30, 2001. He writes that after Bush announced he would simply disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "unleash Sharon," he made it clear that Iraq would be a priority. "The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone ... Rumsfeld and [Joint Chiefs chair Gen. H. Hugh] Shelton, he said, 'should examine our military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq ... Ten days in, and it was about Iraq." Bush hit the ground running with regard to Iraq, shunting aside key U.S. foreign-policy goals -- such as a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- in favor of exploring military options against Saddam Hussein. O'Neill reports a sense at the meeting that the reluctance to commit ground forces to an Asian war, a legacy of the Vietnam War, had ended with the advent of the Bush presidency.

An Iraq war might have been a hard sell, even for the skilled and highly manipulative Bush team. But Sept. 11 ensured that they could get congressional approval and public support for a war. Americans were angry and willing to lash out in any direction specified by the president. Former terrorism czar Richard Clarke related that on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, Bush "grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. 'Look,' he told us, 'I know you have a lot to do and all ... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way...'" When Clarke protested that it was clearly an al-Qaida operation, Bush insisted, "Just look. I want to know any shred ... Look into Iraq, Saddam." According to Clarke, Bush said it "testily."

Clarke reveals that Rumsfeld was already, on the afternoon of Sept. 12, "talking about broadening the objectives of our response and 'getting Iraq.'" Although early accounts of National Security Council meetings after the attacks highlighted the role of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in pressing for an immediate war on Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that he was only one such voice, and hardly the most senior.

Astonishingly, the Bush administration almost took the United States to war against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.

Meyer spoke again about the matter to Vanity Fair for its May 2004 report, "The Path to War." Soon after Sept. 11, Meyer went to a dinner at the White House, "attended also by Colin Powell, [and] Condi Rice," where "Bush made clear that he was determined to topple Saddam. 'Rumors were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq,' Meyer remembers." When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an "Iraq first" policy in Washington.

Meyer told Vanity Fair, "Blair came with a very strong message -- don't get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban." He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, "Bush said, 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'" Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear "that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions." In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign.

He also points to an excellent website maintained by a media service in a country where all the main$tream media isn't owned by Department of Defense contractors.

The lies documented are mostly how Tony Blair lied to Britain, but we know who owns this poodle.

...8 March 2002

A top secret government paper looks at the policy of regime change but cautions that there is not yet any legal justification. The paper advises that the only certain means of removing Saddam is by a massive ground invasion.

"... against the background of our desire to re-integrate a law-abiding Iraq into the international community, we examine the two following policy options:
# a toughening of the existing containment policy, facilitated by 11 September; and
# regime change by military means: a new departure which would require the construction of a coalition and a legal justification.

"A full opinion should be sought from the Law Officers if the above options are developed further. But in summary CONTAINMENT generally involves the implementation of existing UNSCRs [United Nations Security Council Resolutions] and has a firm legal foundation. Of itself, REGIME CHANGE has no basis in international law.

Despite sanctions, Iraq continues to develop WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction], although our intelligence is poor. Saddam has used WMD in the past and could do so again if his regime was threatened, though there is no greater threat now than in recent years that Saddam will use WMD.

All options have lead times. If an invasion is contemplated this autumn, then a decision will need to be taken in principle six months in advance..."

Defence and Overseas Secretariat (ODSEC), Iraq: Options Paper, marked "Secret UK Eyes Only"

14 March 2002

The dimensions of a new policy on Iraq become clearer - the Prime Minister will 'not budge' in his support for regime change, writes his senior foreign policy advisor:

"I had dinner with Condi [Condoleezza Rice, then US National Security Advisor] on Tuesday; and talks and lunch with her and an NSC [National Secutiry Council] team on Wednesday (to which Christopher Meyer also came).

We spent a long time at dinner on IRAQ. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."

David Manning to the Prime Minister, marked "Secret - Strictly Personal"

18 March 2002

The British Ambassador in Washington outlines the new Iraq strategy - the government will need a "clever" plan to convince the public and parliament of the threat from Saddam. Regime change would be a "tough sell" in Britain.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, came to Sunday lunch on 17 March.

"On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs [Security Council Resolutions] and the critical importance of the MEPP [Middle East Peace Process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy.

"If the UK were to join the US in any operation against Saddam, we would have to be able to take a critical mass of parliamentary and public opinion with us."

Christopher Meyer to Sir David Manning, marked "Confidential and Personal"...

This war is so good for the Empire in so many ways, but only as long as the people they need to carry it out want to keep on fooling themselves about it.  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  On Public MisEducation

Today I saw my daughter's graduation from a private middle school in Michigan. Truthfully, she had some excellent teachers, in a school far above the average of what I grew up with in the South. But truthfully again, although many of the kids there are very talented indeed, it is hard to see why the teachers and the standard of education should be so much better there than it was 40 years ago in Tennessee or is 30 miles away in Detroit.

Riggsveda at Corrente has a few things of her own to say about the propagation of an underclass in America.

What happens when education is no longer within reach of the poor, or even the middle-class? Why, you get Coolie America, a ready-made serving class without recourse or hope, glad to get what ill-paid, benefitless work it can, dulled by exhaustion and lack of opportunity, and clueless as to what the world may offer beyond one's day-to-day experiences. How perfect for the growing retail/service economy that relies increasingly on the availability of employees who will accept the bare minimum of workplace amenities, and will place no burdens on their management, no inconvenient unions, no fair labor demands! How else to compete with the sweatshops of the world but to create sweatshops of our own, and an uneducated gamma class to toil in them?

But you don't have to go as far as denying higher education to people in order to soften them up for cooliehood. We've got the American education system for that, and it's had scores of decades to dumb down the children it absorbs. We've seen the result coming to full fruition the last 30 years, and nowhere in the developed world do you find the hatred and fear of intellect and learning that you do in the United States. Book-bannings and -burnings, accusations of "elitism" hurled against political candidates who make the mistake of speaking a foreign language or having a liberal education, knowledge held in suspicion by people who are proud of their benightedness both in the countryside, where it becomes painted as "city liberal", and in the inner city, where it is labeled "acting white".

She points to this remarkable essay by John Taylor Gatto on the nature of education in America today, parts of which are reproduced here.

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia...

... compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform.

...Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.  ¶ 3:03 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Big Brass Alliance

The Big Brass Alliance is a coalition of bloggers agitating to get the Main$tream Media to wake up about the Downing Street Memo, and incidently, John Bolton's role in suppressing intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war.

One way we're doing this is to try to get everyone in America- who's with us- to sign John Conyer's letter asking the President to respond to 89 members of Congress over this issue: was there a disinformation campaign that led up to the war in Iraq as several sources now indicate?

Today Billmon gives an excellent summary of the state of the situation and some additional contact numbers you can use if you want to be a crank yanker about this.

He says: ...The corporate media is already predisposed against this story and will respond to public pressure the way it usually does -- by letting the flackcatchers (the omsbudsman or public editor, or whatever the hell he/she is called) catch it for them.

Unless (and this is a big unless) there are fresh developments in the story, or the editorial herd can be persuaded there are unexplored angles that can be developed into fresh stories. Big stories. The only reason the Nixon-era press eventually decided it had gotten Watergate wrong was because Woodstein kept pumping out the exclusives -- each one potentially more explosive than the last.

Whether that same potential exists with the Downing Street memo story isn't clear. Actually, strike that -- it's perfectly clear, but only if the focus is widened to include the entire policymaking process that led up to the invasion. The memo itself may be the smoking gun, but the story is the crime, or crimes rather -- the manipulation of the intelligence, the deliberate efforts to sabotage a diplomatic solution, the use of strategic disinformation (i.e. lies) against a domestic audience, the possible forging of evidence, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the cover up afterwards, which is still in progress.

Josh Marshall explores our national denial about Iraq, and suggests Bolton wasn't the only player out there trying to cover up the real situation about Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction.

The Memo itself has created relatively little stir in this country. And I suspect the reason is that if we're honest with ourselves -- across the political spectrum -- it's just not news, by the conventional definition. We already know it's true.

Similar in my mind is the Senate Intelligence Committee's hardly-discussed decision to end its promised inquiry into possible political manipulation of the intelligence that led to war. More recently there was the news that the Army intel analysts responsible for the biggest piece of bad intelligence -- the notorious aluminum tube story -- have gotten performance awards for each of the last three years.

(From my own reporting on the issue, I know that whole sections of last year's Senate Intel report contained knowingly-deceptive, up is down, portrayals of key events -- something that was impossible to see unless you knew what was under key redactions and important details that went unmentioned entirely.)

I'm with Josh. This makes the Senate Inetelligence Committee part of the cover-up. Warbucks are good for all the fat cats, Wrepublican or DINOcrat, non?

Juan Cole also agrees, and discusses some communications involving Wolfowitz and others.

Shakespeare's Sister, the woman who got the Alliance rolling in the first place, reports Conyers has scheduled Congressional hearings on the Memo.

But we're still waiting for John Kerry to make good on his promise.  ¶ 10:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Press Gang

Via Pharyngula, a report from Susan Paynter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer :

For mom Marcia Cobb and her teenage son Axel, the white letters USMC on their caller ID soon spelled, "Don't answer the phone!"

Marine recruiters began a relentless barrage of calls to Axel as soon as the mellow, compliant Sedro-Woolley High School grad had cut his 17th birthday cake. And soon it was nearly impossible to get the seekers of a few good men off the line.

With early and late calls ringing in their ears, Marcia tried using call blocking. And that's when she learned her first hard lesson. You can't block calls from the government, her server said. So, after pleas to "Please stop calling" went unanswered, the family's "do not answer" order ensued.

But warnings and liquid crystal lettering can fade. So, two weeks ago when Marcia was cooking dinner Axel goofed and answered the call. And, faster than you can say "semper fi," an odyssey kicked into action that illustrates just how desperate some of the recruiters we've read about really are to fill severely sagging quotas.

Let what we learned serve as a warning to other moms, dads and teens, the Cobbs now say. Even if your kids actually may want to join the military, if they hope to do it on their own terms, after a deep breath and due consideration, repeat these words after them: "No," "Not now" and "Back off!"

"I've been trained to be pretty friendly. I guess you might even say I'm kind of passive," Axel told me last week, just after his mother and older sister had tracked him to a Seattle testing center and sprung him on a ruse.

The next step of Axel's misadventure came when he heard about a cool "chin-ups" contest in Bellingham, where the prize was a free Xbox. The now 18-year-old Skagit Valley Community College student dragged his tail feathers home uncharacteristically late that night. And, in the morning, Marcia learned the Marines had hosted the event and "then had him out all night, drilling him to join."

A single mom with a meager income, Marcia raised her kids on the farm where, until recently, she grew salad greens for restaurants.

Axel's father, a Marine Corps vet who served in Vietnam, died when Axel was 4.

Clearly the recruiters knew all that and more.

"You don't want to be a burden to your mom," they told him. "Be a man." "Make your father proud." Never mind that, because of his own experience in the service, Marcia says enlistment for his son is the last thing Axel's dad would have wanted.

The next weekend, when Marcia went to Seattle for the Folklife Festival and Axel was home alone, two recruiters showed up at the door.

Axel repeated the family mantra, but he was feeling frazzled and worn down by then. The sergeant was friendly but, at the same time, aggressively insistent. This time, when Axel said, "Not interested," the sarge turned surly, snapping, "You're making a big (bleeping) mistake!"

Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car.

"They said we were going somewhere but I didn't know we were going all the way to Seattle," Axel said.

Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him.

He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an "apathy discharge" if he didn't like it. And he wouldn't have to go to Iraq if he didn't want to.

At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn't gotten a chance to read. "Just formalities," he was told. "Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about."

By then Marcia had "freaked out."

She went to the Burlington recruiting center where the door was open but no one was home. So she grabbed all the cards and numbers she could find, including the address of the Seattle-area testing center.

Then, with her grown daughter in tow, she high-tailed it south, frantically phoning Axel whose cell phone had been confiscated "so he wouldn't be distracted during tests."

Axel's grandfather was in the hospital dying, she told the people at the desk. He needed to come home right away. She would have said just about anything.

But, even after being told her son would be brought right out, her daughter spied him being taken down a separate hall and into another room. So she dashed down the hall and grabbed him by the arm.

"They were telling me I needed to 'be a man' and stand up to my family," Axel said.

What he needed, it turned out, was a lawyer.

Five minutes and $250 after an attorney called the recruiters, Axel's signed papers and his cell phone were in the mail.

My request to speak with the sergeant who recruited Axel and with the Burlington office about recruitment procedures went unanswered.

And so should your phone, Marcia Cobb advised. Take your own sweet time. Keep your own counsel. And, if you see USMC on caller ID, remember what answering the call could mean.  ¶ 10:29 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The End of the Beginning

Juan Cole once again was exactly right yesterday:

The main reason is that the Bush Administration established the prison at Guantanamo in hopes of gutting the Bill of Rights. They wanted the prisoners there to be beyond the law, outside the framework of judiciality. They would have no lawyers. They would be tried only if the administration wanted to try them. They would be held indefinitely. They would be outside the framework of US law and also of the Geneval Conventions-- though Rumsfeld keeps slipping and calling them prisoners of war.

Terrorists are dirty criminals who should be tried, and if found guilty, put away for life. Terrorists are criminals. They are not non-human, and any attempt to create a category of human beings to whom the protections of the law do not apply is an attempt to undermine the Republic. It is a return of the Bill of Attainder, a feature of absolute monarchy that the Founding Fathers stood against. It is something to which even Rehnquist is opposed.

Once it was established that these Muslims could be treated in this way, Bush would be a sort of absolute monarch over all such detainees (remember that some of them might be innocent for all we know) And then gradually others could be added to the category of the "rights-less." The Patriot Act II envisages stripping Americans of their citizenship for supporting terrorist organizations. Without citizenship, they would not be afforded the protections of the Constitution. And gradually, in this way, the American nationalist Right would be able to circumscribe that pesky Bill of Rights, which so interferes with Executive (i.e. Royal) Privilege. The legal minds on the American Right have clearly been annoyed with the Bill of Rights for some time and the speed with which they foisted the so-called PATRIOT Act (makes it kinda hard to oppose, calling it that, huh?) on an unwary Congress, which had no time to read it, suggests that they had a lot of these ideas on the shelf ready to go.

Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.

So much of what this administration is doing is blatantly destructive to America.

And not just the Constitution, either. It seems even the Carlyle-owned Board of Directors at the New York Times is getting antsy, as are evidenced by the blitz of Editiorials this week asking What Do These Dicks Think They're Doing?

But Bob Herbert has been saying it for awhile, so let's give him the money quote here:

The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who's winning.

A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they're getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions.

On the same day, in the business section, the paper reported that the chief executives at California's largest 100 companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. The paper contrasted that with the 2.9 percent raise that the average California worker saw last year.

The gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is fast becoming an unbridgeable chasm. David Cay Johnston, in the latest installment of the New York Times series "Class Matters," wrote, "It's no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everybody else behind is not widely known."

Consider, for example, two separate eras in the lifetime of the baby-boom generation. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002, Mr. Johnston wrote, each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000...

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the gap between the rich and the rest of us is not growing fast enough. An analysis by The Times showed the following:

"Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."...

What's going on here?

More than simple avarice, we're riding the slope of the oil supply curve down- and the New Dominionists feel exactly what their star student does. In the New Feudalism, when the fossil fuel bottoms out, the people on top stay on top.

They know if they don't move quick, some bright kid will figure out there are alternative ways to make enough hydrocarbon to run an industrial economy.

If alternative fuels become the norm, it will be much harder to base a hegemony on the control of fossil fuels.

So they don't have much time in their own minds, and that motivates their rush towards the economic precipice and the corporatist oligarchy.  ¶ 11:13 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Timeline

Here's a nice timeline showing that idiot Bolton's actions to squelch the UN weapons inspector, Jose Bustani, so Bu$hCo could get its war on.

1997—Bustani, a Brazilian arms-control specialist becomes founding director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Based in The Hague and operating under a 168-nation treaty banning chemical weapons, OPCW’s inspectors oversee the destruction of such weapons and to inspect chemical plants in the US, Russia, and elsewhere to ensure chemicals aren’t put to military use.

1998—Bustani steps up his initiative in an attempt to bring Arab nations, including Iraq, into the chemical weapons treaty. The article notes quite bluntly: “Bustani's inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq's chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.”

2000—“[O]ne year ahead of time and with strong U.S. support, Bustani was unanimously re-elected OPCW chief for a 2001-2005 term. Colin Powell, the new secretary of state, praised his leadership qualities in a personal letter in 2001.”

Sometime between 2000 and 2002, it was suggested that Bustani should be removed. The idea, according to Ralph Earle, a veteran US arms negotiator, and Avis Bohlen, a career diplomat and former Bolton deputy, was not Bolton’s, but “Bolton ‘leaped on it enthusiastically,’ Bohlen recalled. ‘He was very much in charge of the whole campaign," she said, and Bustani's initiative on Iraq seemed the "coup de grace.’”

2001—Bolton makes a menacing telephone call to Bustani, trying to interfere “in decisions that are the exclusive responsibility of the director-general” of OPCW. Additionally, Bolton “sought to have some U.S. inspection results overlooked and certain Americans hired to OPCW positions. The agency head said he refused.”

2002—A “white paper” from “Bolton's office said Bustani was seeking an ‘inappropriate role’ in Iraq, and the matter should be left to the U.N. Security Council -- where Washington has a veto.” The US then moved to terminate Bustani’s tenure. “On the eve of an OPCW Executive Council meeting to consider the U.S. no-confidence motion, Bolton met Bustani in The Hague to seek his resignation, U.S. and OPCW officials said. … In the Executive Council, the Americans failed to win majority support among the 41 nations. A month later, on April 21, at U.S. insistence, an unprecedented special session of the full treaty conference was called. … Only 113 nations were represented, 15 without voting rights because their dues were far in arrears. The U.S. delegation had suggested it would withhold U.S. dues -- 22 percent of the budget -- if Bustani stayed in office, stirring fears of an OPCW collapse. This time the Americans, with British help, got the required two-thirds vote of those present and voting. But that amounted to only 48 in favor of removing Bustani -- and seven opposed and 43 abstaining -- in an organization then with 145 member states.” Bustani appealed, but in the interim, a new director-general of OPCW was named.

2003—A three-member UN tribunal sternly rebuked Bustani’s dismissal and “said the U.S. allegations were ‘extremely vague’ and the dismissal ‘unlawful.’ It said international civil servants must not be made ‘vulnerable to pressures and to political change.’”

The AP also notes (emphasis mine):

The Iraq connection to the OPCW affair comes as fresh evidence surfaces that the Bush administration was intent from early on to pursue military and not diplomatic action against Saddam Hussein's regime.

An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help...

More on Memogate here.

Elsewhere, the mainstream media is getting a little antsy.

I wonder when the Board will decide that global thermonuclear confrontation with China is bad for business?  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Appeasing the Jaguar Gods of Political Discourse

The Rude Pundit on the tendency of the American public to drive with its eyes closed.

In a perfect world, crimes ought to be judged on their own intrinsic harm, whistleblowers' lives and motives ought to be insignificant, and the evil ought to be punished. Nixon had to be dragged up to the Capitol Rotunda and, before the statue of George Washington, sliced open, his cold guts spilled on the floor, like a worthless sacrifice at the end of Mayan civilization. We had to believe the gods needed to be appeased. We had to believe they were appeased. We were wrong, just as the Mayans were wrong to believe the crops would flourish because virgin blood nourished the earth and a heart was burned in honor of absent deities.

There's many reasons why the Downing Street Memo has gotten so little attention in America beyond Left Blogsylvania, despite the fact that it says that the Bush administration "fixed" the intelligence around its desire to bomb the living shit out of Iraq, "fixed" it like a cheap mafia thug fixes a warehouse boxing match. We could point to the corporate media, the post-Rather memo fake-out, and more. But remember: the Pentagon Papers were published in the middle of 1971. Nixon still got over 60% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes in 1972.

The Rude Pundit thinks this: the American public, in growing numbers, knows in its heart that they've been lied to, just like in Vietnam, and that Americans are being killed for those lies, just like in Vietnam. But fear is a powerful thing: deep, psychological, repressed fear - that if the truth is not held back, then the monsters of anarchy must be unleashed. It is better to take down a President for something a great deal more prosaic than war crimes and mass murder. Because what does it say about us if our leader is guilty of such things?

Which is why the Rude Pundit believes, hopes beyond rational hope, that other 'Gates are going to develop around George W. Bush, 'Gates that will move in tighter and tighter until they become increasingly strangling. And that's why this is a very interesting little development in the Jack Abramoff scandal: it seems that the White House was allowed to be used to fundraise for Abramoff's and Grover Norquist's various causes/pocketbooks.

Ahhh, the sweet relief of dirty money. Now there's something we can actually get our heads around.  ¶ 9:18 PM 1 comments links to this post

  A Perfect Storm Brewing: Bolton Privy to the Downing Street Memo

John Bolton's nomination is flaking away with evidence that he knew about the policy discussed in the Downing Street Memo, and acted on it by acting inappropriately to get a diplomat fired.

John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani ``had to go,'' particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

Bustani, who says he got a ``menacing'' phone call from Bolton at one point, was removed by a vote of just one-third of member nations at an unusual special session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), at which the United States cited alleged mismanagement in calling for his ouster.

The United Nations' highest administrative tribunal later condemned the action as an ``unacceptable violation'' of principles protecting international civil servants. The OPCW session's Swiss chairman now calls it an ``unfortunate precedent'' and Bustani a ``man with merit.'' ...

John Kerry is apparently bringing up the Memo in the Senate confirmation hearings next week.

"When I go back (to Washington) on Monday, I am going to raise the issue," he said of the memo, which has not been disputed by either the British or American governments. "I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."

He questioned Americans' understanding of the war and the sense that criticism equals disloyalty, saying, "Do you think that Americans if they really understood it would feel that way knowing that on Election Day, 77 percent of Americans who voted for Bush believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found and 77 percent believe Saddam did 9/11? Is there a way for this to break through, ever?"

Watch the mainstream media spin it, baffle it, and squelch it, if they report this at all.  ¶ 11:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Foresight: When You Know Right Is Wrong

What TBogg said last week.

Like Viet Nam, we are losing in Iraq. That's a fact. You cannot beat an insurgency that seems to have an unlimited amount of "martyrs" willing to walk into the public square and blow themselves up taking twenty or so citizens with them. The American military is bunkered into the Green Zone behind blast-proof walls and razor wire because; if they walk out into the streets...they're going to die. It's Fort Apache the Bronx. Those who are supposed to be in control of the streets are the Iraqi policemen, but if they are in control, then why do they have to wear masks? Because, if they don't the insurgents will come to their houses and kill them. Iraq is probably the only country in the world whose entire police force is in the Witness Protection Program.

With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can't meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.

Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.

So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat (only we won't admit defeat...we'll just call it a tie) and pull out of Iraq, and the power vacuum that ensues results in tribal warfare and more death and destruction, who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board.

No. They're going to blame us because we didn't wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV's and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that's why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands.

Grim but correct, alas.

Thanks to the Poor Man for the link.  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Connecting the Dots in Ohio

Lambert at Corrente is doing a good job lately at connecting the dots between the Ohio retirement fund scandal and the voting machine massage that occurred in the 2004 re-$election.

What we knew:

Dot 1: Precious metals are good for money laundering.

Dot 2: Tom Noe "lost" $10-14 million dollars in rare coins, good, like precious metals, for money laundering.

Dot 3: Diebold says they want to help Bush win, and Diebold programmers are known to have been convicted of fraud. (All from "Coin dealers, money laundering, and connecting the dots in Ohio".)

Now add this:

Dot 4: Tom Noe's wife got Diebold machines that don't leave a paper trail installed in Lucas County.

Dot 5: Lucas County was a statistical anomaly, Bush's way, on [cough] election Day.

Dot 6: Diebold programmers did something to the machines in Lucas County after the [cough] election, but they wouldn't show anybody what. I wonder why?

When is a reporter going to take Deep Throat's advice, and follow the money?

I'm still betting some of the laundered money ended up in the pockets of a rogue Diebold systems programmer, hacking the mother machine.

It's easier to hack if you're a Team player.

"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S.

As Thom Hartmann says, "Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots."  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Cylon Jet Fighters

From Defense Tech:

Northrop Grumman engineers have spent the last couple of years designing a killer drone for the Navy. Today, the company announced that it's starting to build the X-47B Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems plane. It's the first attack drone "that can operate from both land bases and aircraft carriers," according to a Northrop press release.

Or, at least, the X-47B will be the first, once it's completed. Putting the prototype robo-plane together should take about 18 months. A second X-47 should roll off of the assembly line about three to six months after that. And a third... well, we'll wait and see. Northrop wants the Defense Department to evaluate the first two before it builds another.

The Pentagon is giving Northrop a billion bucks for the three vehicles, which are designed to "suppress enemy air defenses, perform electronic attack, conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and perform precision strike attacks," according to the company. The drones will each have a pair of 2,000 pound, satellite-guided bombs to help in the missions. The military wants to test flights to start by the end of 2007.

Now you know what the cybernetic software's for.  ¶ 10:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Making Iraq Safe for Oil and Black Tar

Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Repeat yet again. Although Washington took the lead thirty years ago in the global anti-drug war, narcotics seem to stubbornly want to surge through the wake of the American Army.

Thus, in 2001, following the prohibition of poppy cultivation by the Taliban, Afghanistan had seen its opium production fall by 185 tons... to shoot up to 3,200 tons (or a 1,700% increase) immediately after the United States' intervention, a scenario that is finding an echo today in Iraq. According to the Iranian Hamid Ghodse, President of the OICS (Organe international de contrôle des stupéfiants, an expert group headquartered in Vienna charged with applying UN conventions relating to drugs), Iraq is in the process of becoming an important transit country on the route for Afghan heroin. Opiates and cannabis produced in Afghanistan "are brought through Iraq to Jordan from where they are sent on to the European markets of the East and West," he declared during a press conference given Thursday in Vienna.

This tendency is confirmed by the rise in narcotics seizures along the Iraqi-Jordanian border the last twelve months. "This situation is made possible by the domestic situation in Iraq, where border controls have been loosened and traffickers can come through disguised as pilgrims" going to the great Shiite cities, propounded Hamid Ghodse, for whom the situation is comparable to that of most countries emerging from a conflict situation...

Like Afghanistan.

Like Central America during the Reagan years. Like the Central America and its struggles for democracy against covert operations today.

Like Viet Nam, which is where the Black Ops folks first got their fondness for Black Tar.

Through an accident of history, the southern borders of China and the Soviet Union, a major fault line of Cold War confrontation, happened to parallel the Asian opium zone. Since the 18th Century, opium has been cultivated as a cash crop in a highland zone that extends for 5,000 miles across the southern rim of Asia from Turkey to Thailand. During the forty years of the Cold War, the coincidence super power confrontation and opium cultivation made geo-political pressures a real force in shaping the political economy of this zone.

As various national intelligence agencies mounted special operations along the Asian zone, they found that the region's opium brokers and ethnic warlords were their most effective covert-action assets. Surveying the steady increase in world opium production since the end of World War II, we can thus discern periodic surges in opium supply that coincide with ethnic conflicts or special operations in the drug zones.

The sudden growth of Golden Triangle opium production in the 1950s appears, in retrospect, a response to two stimuli. Reacting to international pressures, governments abolished legal opium sales and thereby created a sudden demand for illicit opiates in the Southeast Asia's cities.

Moreover, an informal alliance among four intelligence services--Thai, American, French and Nationalist Chinese--played a catalytic role in promoting the production of opium in northern Laos and the Shan Plateau of northern Burma. In particular, the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) occupation in 1950, combined with the Shan secessionist revolt after 1958, transformed the Shan States into a region of conflict that reduced government control and allowed a marked expansion in local opium production.

During the First Indochina War (1947-54), French intelligence officers integrated their covert warfare with the Golden Triangle opium trade through a motivation that seems, on its face, simple. Denied funds by National Assembly, French intelligence merged the opium supply of Laos with the drug demand of Saigon to fund covert operations against Vietnam's communists.

After the French colonial regime abolished the Opium Monopoly in 1950, military intelligence took control of the drug trade. French paratroopers fighting with Hmong guerrillas in Laos and Tonkin shipped their clients' opium south to Saigon on French military aircraft where it was sold in smoking dens run by the Binh Xuyen bandits, a criminal syndicate that controlled the city. Through this operation, French intelligence, particularly the SDECE, integrated narcotics into Indochina's political economy and its anti-Communist political forces.

Across the Mekong in Burma and Thailand, an alliance of intelligence services--Taiwan, Thailand, and US--fought a purer kind of covert warfare by operating indirectly through their local clients...

By the mid-1960s, Southeast Asia had a self-contained narcotics industry producing enough raw opium to sustain addicts in the region's cities. Following a pattern seen elsewhere, local demand raised the region's opium harvest to levels sufficient for an eventual entry into the world market, and then sustained it during periodic downturns in global demand. Although Hong Kong's chemists had been producing heroin from Southeast Asian opium since the mid 1950s, heroin laboratories did not open in the Golden Triangle until the US military presence in South Vietnam created a local demand for No. 4 heroin.

In 1968-1969, Hong Kong syndicate chemists opened a cluster of heroin laboratories at the epicenter of the Golden Triangle. Controlled by the Nationalist Chinese generals in Thailand and the Commander of the Royal Lao Army, these laboratories produced substantial quantities of 90 percent pure heroin.

Fueled by these nearly limitless supplies, heroin use among US troops in South Vietnam reached epidemic proportions. In September 1970, Army medical officers questioned 3,103 soldiers of the American Division and found that 11.9 percent had used heroin since their arrival in Vietnam.

In November, an Army Engineers battalion in the Mekong Delta reported that 14 percent of its troops were regular heroin users. In 1972, the White House Office for Drug Abuse Prevention interviewed 900 enlisted men who had returned from Vietnam in September 1971, the peak of the epidemic, and found that 44 percent had tried opiates while in Vietnam and 20 percent regarded themselves as having been addicted. The full extent of the problem was not revealed until 1974 when the Office for Drug Abuse Prevention published later surveys showing that 34 percent of US troops in Vietnam had commonly used heroin...

As American troops were withdrawing from Vietnam in 1972, President Richard Nixon inadvertently created a new market for Southeast Asian heroin by declaring a war on drugs in the Mediterranean.

As the progenitor of the three drug wars the US has fought over the past 20 years, Nixon's effort commands close attention. Despite a short-term victory, there were two long-term consequences of this drug war:
(1.) increased global opium production; and,
(2.) rising heroin consumption.

Acting on reports that Turkey's poppy fields and France's laboratories supplied 80 percent of America's heroin, Nixon pressed these two allies to eliminate the drug trade. By 1973, Turkey, supported by $35.7 million in U.S. aid, had eradicated all opium production and the French government had closed most of the heroin laboratories in the Marseilles region.

Within months, the street price of heroin in New York had tripled and purity dropped by half--both indicators of a serious shortage. Indeed, the DEA estimated that the U.S. addict population dropped from some 500,000 in 1974-1975 to only 200,000 by the end of the decade. Clearly, President Nixon had scored a major victory in his war on drugs.

Ironically, President Nixon's victory in Turkey increased global drug demand, unleashing market forces that would ultimately expand both production and consumption of illicit narcotics...

A curious relationship the CIA and their covert ops had with substance abuse. And have. And continue to develop as a matter of covert policy.  ¶ 10:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Oft Evil Will Evil Mar: The UnAuthorized Biography of Darth Cheney

In detail as only those Canadian Frenchmen could assemble, here is a biography of Big Time Dick that played on Canadian national television last fall. (Thanks to Avedon for the link.)

A summary of interesting stories may be found there, and included here are some flavorful bits.

Jacob Plotkin was Cheney's Yale roommate.

"It's hard to flunk out of Yale. It's something that one really has to put effort into. Yale at that time tried to make sure everybody who entered graduated.

Where others might spend some time on the weekend studying, Dick was either talking, drinking or playing cards with his football buddies."

The pass times of a draft-dodging Padwan. But that was before Lord Cheney was even an Apprentice to Master Rumsfeld. To give Balance to the story, go into the Murk of the fallen Sith, Darth Nixon. PBS, before it got Balanced, had a nice table telling the story this CBC link passes over in a few words of outline.

Cheney dodges out of the Nixon Empire before Darth Hoover's disgruntled apprentice can Deep Throat the Sith Lord Nixon. Still, he somehow continues to dodge the draft until a summons to service by the Ford administration.

Once there, the winsome waif of the military-industrial complex wins his heart. Alas, he can not bestow the full blessings of his power over the Force upon it yet. That will have to wait until his mentor and master Darth Rumsfeld can plant him into the Reagan- Bu$hCo operation.

There, the blessings of the Dark Side unfold for him. Back to the CBC outline:

...1990 AUGUST 2: Iraq invades Kuwait.
AUGUST: Cheney flies to Saudi Arabia to convince King Fahd to allow US troops into his country.

SEPTEMBER: The Pentagon says that 250,000 Iraqi troops with 1500 tanks are massed on the Saudi border. The photos are never made public.

Soviet satellite imagery taken that day shows no troops near the border...

1991
Journalist Jean Heller learns about the Soviet satellite imagery and presents them to Dick Cheney's office at the Pentagon. They ignore the story.

JANUARY: Operation Desert Storm begins.

In the wake of Desert Storm, Cheney hires Halliburton to put out 320 well-head fires and engage Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root to rebuild courthouses, schools, utilities, police stations, and computer systems in Kuwait.

JUNE 10: Cheney and the troops who fought in Desert Storm are honored with a ticker tape parade up Broadway in New York.

JULY 3: Secretary Cheney is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush for his work on the Gulf War.

1992
Cheney pays Halliburton, Brown and Root $8.9 million for two studies on how to downsize the military.

AUGUST: Halliburton is selected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do all the work needed to support the military for five years. This is the same plan it had itself drawn up...

1993
Cheney sets up Political Action Committee and ponders run for presidency. The CEO of Halliburton contributes to his PAC. Halliburton will later be awarded contracts after the invasion of Iraq.

1994
On a fishing trip with Halliburton CEO Thomas H. Cruikshank, and other captains of industry in New Brunswick, Cheney is asked if he would be willing to become Halliburton’s CEO.

1995
MARCH: President Clinton signs an order prohibiting "new investments [in Iran] by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets."

U.S. companies are prohibited from performing services "that would benefit the Iranian oil industry." Companies face fines of up to $500,000 and individuals may receive 10 years in jail for breaking the embargo.

MAY 6: President Clinton imposes a near total U.S. economic embargo on Iran.
OCTOBER: Cheney becomes CEO and Chairman of Halliburton.

During his five year stint at Halliburton, the company wins $2.3 billion in federal contracts, almost double the total of the previous five years, and another $1.5 billion in taxpayer-insured loans.

Halliburton is fined almost 4 million for selling products to Libya that could be used to trigger a nuclear program.

1996
Cheney, acting as head of Halliburton, says in a video for auditing company Arthur Andersen, "I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating, over and above just sort of the normal by-the-books auditing arrangement, They've got the traditional role to fill as our auditors...They do that extraordinarily well.” Arthur Andersen will collapse in the fallout of the Enron scandal five years later...

Although, once again, it pays to own judges on the Supreme Court.

But I digress. Back to highlights from the biography of our Sith Lord, where things move quickly:

2000
FEBRUARY: Halliburton opens an office in Tehran while Cheney is still CEO. At the same time, Halliburton ends its presence in Iraq.

SPRING: George Bush asks Cheney to help him find a vice-presidential running mate.

JUNE 13: Cheney tells the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary “we’re kept out of there primarily by our own government, which has made a decision that U.S. firms should not be allowed to invest significantly in Iran and I think that’s a mistake.

JULY: Cheney says he never voted against releasing Mandela from jail. He says he was only voting against imposing sanctions, even though sanctions were never mentioned in the House vote.

JULY 25: Bush tells the press that he has chosen Cheney to be his running mate.

JULY 30: Cheney says he actually wanted Mandela out of prison"Well, certainly I would have loved to have Nelson Mandela released. I don't know anybody who was for keeping him in prison. Again, this was a resolution of the U.S. Congress, so it wasn't as though if we passed it, he was going to be let out of prison."

AUGUST 16: Cheney quits Halliburton to run as Bush’s vice-president. He exits Halliburton with a stock payoff worth $30 million.

Don't forget the $80 million in stock options he got then, too.

It's such a target rich environment. It's so easy to digress.

2000
OCTOBER 24: Halliburton announces layoffs and assets sales because of weakness in its construction and engineering businesses. Analysts reduce Halliburton’s earning forecast.

OCTOBER 25: Halliburton announces it is under a grand jury investigation for over-billing the government of California.

NOVEMBER: Cheney suffers his fourth heart-attack.

NOVEMBER 13: It is reported that Halliburton stock has lost between $3 and $4 billion of its total market value.

Dressers Industries asbestos problem and weak engineering portfolio is blamed. Democrats question if Cheney had insider information when he sold his stock two months earlier for $30 million.

During the election campaign Cheney tells ABC News. “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.”

However, during his time as CEO, Halliburton was selling millions of dollars to Iraq in supplies for its oil industry. The deals were done through old subsidiaries of Dresser Industries. It was done under the auspices of the corrupt UN Oil for Food Program.

Halliburton worked with Iran and Libya as well, using its own subsidiaries.

2001
JANUARY 19: Dick Cheney is sworn in as Vice President of the United States.

JANUARY 29: President Bush announces the formation of the National Energy Policy Development Group in Cheney’s office. He announces that Cheney will chair the group.

FEBRUARY 2: Wall Street Journal publishes expose on Halliburton’s Tehran office. ( read the article )

Abdulamir Mahdi writes a letter to Cheney complaining that he is in jail for violating the Iranian embargo while the Vice President, who did the same thing, is free.

MARCH 5: Cheney has balloon angioplasty performed at George Washington University Hospital after suffering chest pains.

APRIL 19: Representatives John Dingell and Henry Waxman, Ranking Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, send a letter to the General Accounting Office, seeking to obtain information about National Energy Policy Development Group. They wanted to find out who had participated in the report.

MAY 16: Cheney presents to President Bush a report entitled National Energy Policy, which recommended the adoption of the national energy policy that had been developed by the NEPDG. (read the National Energy Policy )

JUNE 21: Cheney’s office sends 77 pages of miscellaneous documents supposedly as a responsive reply to GAO’s request for documents. The package of documents contain pages with dollar amounts but no indication of the nature of purpose of the expenditure. Also included was the executive director’s credit card receipt for a pizza. Requests by the GAO for additional information was denied.

AUGUST 2: Cheney sends a letter to the Senate and House of Representatives, stating “actions undertaken by an agent of the Congress, the Comptroller General, which exceeded his lawful authority and which, if given effect, would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch.”

Cheney says the GAO’s demand for documents compromise “the confidentiality of communications among a President, a Vice-President, the President’s other senior advisors and others.”

Cheney also states that he had provided "documents responsive to the Comptroller General's inquiry concerning the costs associated with the (Energy task force's work.)" Cheney was apparently writing about the 77 pages.

SEPTEMBER 11: Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington. In the wake of the attacks, Dick Cheney reportedly is taken to Raven Rock, a top-secret military base. He orders U.S. military fighters to shoot down any civilian planes that may have been hijacked.

2002
JANUARY: Sierra Club sues Cheney, et al, to get documents related to the National Energy Development Group...

FEBRUARY: Ambassador Joe Wilson is told by the CIA that Cheney is interested in an allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase Yellow Cake uranium from Niger. Wilson goes to Niger to investigate and concludes the rumour is false.

FEBRUARY 22: David Walker, the Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, files a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to get access to records relating to the activities of the National Energy Development Group....

JUNE 22: A memo written by INC (Iraqi National Council) lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. The letter shows Cheney's office was getting intelligence from a highly suspect source.

AUGUST 26: Cheney tells an audience of veterans "There’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and that he will use them] against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

Selling the nuclear threat became key to convincing Americans to support the war.

DECEMBER 9: U.S. District Court Judge John Bates dismisses the high profile lawsuit filed by David Walker, the Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, against Vice President Dick Cheney...

Alas, the article ends here. So much has happened since then, most happy for Darth Cheney, his minions at Halliburton and the American Enterprise Institute.

Of course, all that nonsense about there being only two Sith Lords, and that a Sith must kill his master is absolute silliness. Darth Rumsfeld hand fed Darth Cheney to make him the Beast he is today. And stepped aside to let the greater master of the Dark Side take his position leading Bu$hCo.

Again happily, most of the incipient criminal charges for war crimes may miss Darth Cheney, suggesting he is a Sith Lord indeed and Strong in the Force.

Tena at First Draft points to Matthew Rothschild's Alternet post for this.

General Sanchez, Attorney General Gonzales, Grand Moff Rumsfeld, and even Dear Leader himself may all face charges some day from the Hague. Not the real Power behind the machinations.

When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he "ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison."

Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Iraq, swore the answer was no. Under oath, he told the Senators he "never approved any of those measures to be used."

But a document the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained from the Pentagon flat out contradicts Sanchez's testimony. It's a memorandum entitled "CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," dated September 14, 2003. In it, Sanchez approved several methods designed for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee." These included "sleep management"; "yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock"; and "presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs."

On March 30, the ACLU wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging him "to open an investigation into whether General Ricardo A. Sanchez committed perjury in his sworn testimony."

The problem is, Gonzales may himself have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony this January.

According to a March 6 article in The New York Times, Gonzales submitted written testimony that said: "The policy of the United States is not to transfer individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United States." He added that he was "not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that policy."

"That's a clear, absolute lie," says Michael Ratner, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is suing Administration officials for their involvement in the torture scandal. "The Administration has a policy of sending people to countries where there is a likelihood that they will be tortured."

The New York Times article backs up Ratner's claim. It says "a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the September 11 attacks" gave the CIA broad authority to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogations. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that the United States has transferred between 100 and 150 detainees to countries notorious for torture.

So Gonzales may not be the best person to evaluate the allegation of perjury against Sanchez.

But going after Sanchez or Gonzales for perjury is the least of it. Sanchez may be personally culpable for war crimes and torture, according to Human Rights Watch. And Gonzales himself was one of the legal architects of the torture policies. As such, he may have been involved in "a conspiracy to immunize U.S. agents from criminal liability for torture and war crimes under U.S. law," according to Amnesty International's recent report: "Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power."

As White House Counsel, Gonzales advised President Bush to not apply Geneva Convention protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan, in part because this "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote in his January 25, 2002, memo to the President...

The Bush Administration's legal troubles don't end with Sanchez or Gonzales. They go right to the top: to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA say there is "prima facie" evidence against Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture. And Amnesty International USA says there is also "prima facie" evidence against Bush for war crimes and torture...

But not Lord Cheney.

It gets better.

The next Preznitial $election is in 2008, and already Bu$hCo is grooming awkward and stubborn young Jeb for the Job.

Of course, he will need the hand of experience to guide him in the Ways of the Force.  ¶ 8:03 PM 0 comments links to this post