Ambassador

It would be hard to find a more telling symbol of the contradictory nature of Saudi-American relations than Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudis' new ambassador to the United States. As head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until Aug. 31, 2001, he personally managed Riyadh's relations with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban. Anyone else who had dealings with even a small fraction of the notorious characters the prince has worked with over the years would never make it past the immigration counter at Dulles Airport, let alone to the most exclusive offices in Washington.

... at the very least, his appointment should stimulate serious discussion of the darker aspects of Saudi Arabia's historic relations with the world of Islamic extremists and terrorists. This is an issue that the Bush administration, like its predecessors, has been reluctant to confront. With Prince Turki as the official face of Saudi Arabia in Washington, the charade should at last be over.

Saudi Arabia is an unregenerate absolute monarchy whose kings and princes live lives of limitless luxury but are publicly dedicated to upholding and propagating the teachings of the puritanical and militantly intolerant Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. It also happens to sit on top of vast petroleum reserves that the modern industrial world seems unable to learn to live without.

... What particularly frightened and galvanized Saudi Arabia's ruling Sunni royalty was the 1979 Shiite and republican revolution in Iran. Riyadh responded by subsidizing the export of its own Wahhabi brand of Sunni fundamentalism. Saudi billions poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980's, financing local mujahedeen fighters and Arab adventurers, like Osama bin Laden, who flocked to join them. Saudi Arabia also financed hundreds of madrasas, or religious schools, that taught combative strains of Islam and sent graduates to Afghan training camps for instruction in armed jihad. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Riyadh started to view these foreign adventures as a useful safety valve for the increasingly independent and disillusioned Arab guerrilla veterans who might otherwise direct their energies and anger at the Western-allied Saudi royal regime. During these years, the Saudis also poured money into building a network of Wahhabi mosques, schools and bookstores in the impoverished Muslim suburbs of Western Europe.

Prince Turki's long tenure in the intelligence job abruptly ended less than two weeks before 9/11 under unexplained circumstances. Private lawsuits alleging links between Prince Turki and the 9/11 attacks have since been dismissed by an American court...

The New York Pravda goes on to opine that of course al-Faisal is completely Westernized, and so must have nothing to do with the cabal of Princes who carried out the 9/11/2001 attacks.

Him being the youngest son of King Faisal, and so most likely to end up with, you know, the shortest end of the stick. Relatively speaking, on the billion dollar scale, of course.

That wouldn't ever motivate Turki bin Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud to shake things up. Especially as head of Saudi Intelligence and contact of Osama himself.

Oh, one other nice thing about this Turki.

He was a buddy of Poppy Bu$h involved in the BCCI scam. You know, the one that young John Kerry exposed.

BCCI became the focus in 1991 of the world's worst financial scandal and what was called a "$20-billion-plus heist" (Beaty 1993). It was found by regulators in the United States and United Kingdom to be involved in money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism, arms trafficking, the sale of nuclear technologies, the commission and facilitation of tax evasion, smuggling, illegal immigration, and the illicit purchases of banks and real estate. The bank was found to be worthless, with at least $13 billion unaccounted for.

Investigators in the U.S. and UK revealed that BCCI had been organised to avoid centralized regulatory review and to commit fraud on a massive scale. The bank was found to have its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps, and shipping and commodities trading companies.

In Drugs, Oil and War, Peter Dale Scott wrote:

"BCCI's inside connection to the CIA appears to have been strengthened in 1976, when under CIA Director George Bush "the CIA strengthened its relationships with so-called friendly Arab intelligence agencies. One of the most important of these was Saudi Arabia's intelligence service [the Istakhbarat], run by Kamal Adham, Prince Turki [al-Faisal], Abdul-Raouf Khalil, all of whom were BCCI insiders."

Prince Turki was Osama bin Laden's friend and liaison for more than two decades. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan was directed by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's ISI, the CIA and oil interests (Unocal), and its fall (and 9/11) was directed by the same, and only after the Taliban regime refused to cooperate with larger interests.

Here are excerpts from Ahmed Rashid's Taliban, on Prince Turki:

"Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General [Hameed] Gul were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause."

"The ISI had long wanted Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, to provide a Royal Prince to lead the Saudi contingent in order to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad."

" ... the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal, deferred Afghan policy to his younger brother, Prince Turki and Saudi intelligence."

...During Osama bin Laden's stay in a Dubai hospital, after the 9/11/2001 attacks, mind you, he met with CIA agents as well as Prince Turki. The Guardian (11/1/01) reported that bin Laden met with:

" ... several members of his family and Saudi personalities, including Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence."  ¶ 8:20 PM 4 comments links to this post

  The Aristocrats

Over at Seeing the Forest they notice that Supreme Court nominee Roberts, like most people running things these days, is a multi millionaire.

Funny how that works.

I wonder if that includes his wife's fortune. After all, she's a private contractor.

Give it a read.  ¶ 9:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Full Metal Jacket Energy Rant

The first posts here were concerning the abundance of marine bacteria producing methane and the fact that hydrocarbons are produced by biological sources.

Biotechnology already makes use of the genes of such bacteria, and using such organisms for energy production would be an intelligent application of biotechnology.

There are naturally a class of microorganisms that use photosynthesis to produce hydrogen, and their utilization would be a far cheaper and environmentally friendly source of hydrogen than the industrial processes advocated by Bu$hCo to enrich its backers like Halliburton.

There is no reason not to develop such alternative energy sources. These organisms could be easily and inexpensively used by any country in the world. Their availablilty would end the energy monopolies we have today.

There are political reasons why alternative energy production isn't being developed discussed here. The fall of fossil fuel availability over the next 50 years will consolidate world economic and political power in the hands of a minority as much of the world returns to a pre-industrial feudal state. The development of cheap energy even third world countries could use would disrupt the plans of those who want the chaos.

Cheap clean renewable energy derived from the sun by photosynthesis has the potential of producing enough energy to allow the expansion of humanity off of this world. It would not be controlled by just the American Department of Defense with the "guidance" of a certain private investment group. There would be less Star Wars and more Star Trek.

The best way to fight Bu$hCo is to change the territory it must try to control.

Just like the advent of microcomputers placed computing in the hands of everyone who wanted it and out of the control of the military industrial complex, the development of cheap alternative energy will transform this world for the better.

It will effectively disrupt the drive of the Company towards hegemony.  ¶ 7:45 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Plan on the Inevitable

Molly Ivins notices that Roberts fits right in the Bu$hCo team.

He's a liar.

Cornyn, who I would have sworn is not this stupid, apparently signed off on having the nominee "forget" he was a member of the Federalist Society, and Roberts obliged, which is strange considering his reputation for brilliance and a spectacular memory.

Turns out the guy is listed in the society's 1997-98 "Leadership Directory" as a member of its steering committee in Washington. How many steering committees have you been on that you've forgotten about?

The reason that matters is that the Federalist Society is the alpha-primo ultraconservative legal group in the whole country. Since we have only two years worth of Roberts' decisions on the bench (in itself unheard of for nominations to the Supremes), the information about how this society plans to steer the country can be very revealing of his positions.

So Roberts already looks disingenuous at best, and then the White House up and decides it's entirely too risky to let the public in on his record as a government lawyer and refuses to release documents requested...

The society is funded by millions of dollars from right-wing and libertarian foundations. It attempts to influence legal education and works with right-wing legal advocacy and litigation organizations.

Alfred Ross, of the Institute of Democracy Studies, explains that "through its own 15 practice groups, the society is busy developing new legal theories for every area of American jurisprudence, from civil rights law to national security law, international law, securities regulations law and so on. And if one goes through the publications of their practice groups, one can only gasp not only at the breadth of their agenda, but the extremism of their ideology."

The society has argued for the abolition of the Securities and Exchange Commission, severely limiting the Environmental Protection Agency, and rolling back gender equity laws (Title IX) and voting rights law. Its publications have criticized teaching evolution and attacked the principle of separation of church and state.

According to Ross, they recently launched a state judicial selection project to try to dominate the state, as well as federal, bench. This is all standard, ultra-right-wing claptrap. It's all about control.

If we can't shake loose the actual records on John Roberts, we certainly should pay attention to the group he's most identified with.

I get the distinct impression Molly Ivins is not as surprised as she acts.

There seems we've reached the point where everything coming out of Washington is suspect.

Jeff Wells captures the feeling :

It's difficult to watch the perpetual dashing of hope in America amongst those who still think politics matters, and that political action is sufficient to reverse America's fascist course. To them, it remains a race. C'mon gang - we can win this thing! But their opponent is more than a competitor: he is also the track official, and what a bloody-minded bastard he is. He has neither conscience nor fear of reprisal for tripping them up, tying together their shoelaces and moving the finish line. If he's seen to be running, it's simply to be seen. And so he's not even a true competitor, because there is no competition.

After the Supreme Court rubber-stamped the coup of 2000, I heard "wait until '02!" After Wellstone was murdered and the black boxes began swallowing invisible votes, I heard "wait until '04!" And even before Ohio and the bizarre Skull and Bones shadowplay, I started hearing "wait until '06!" And I tell you, I just can't hear anymore.

Lewis Lapham wonders, in July's Harper's, "why so many people continue to insist that we're living in a democracy that somehow would have been recognizable to Franklin D Roosevelt or even to Richard M Nixon. The belief is bad for the health and mental stability." Perhaps if Kubler-Ross had been a political scientist she would have described it as the first stage of grief upon the death of a republic. Either that, or they are simply inattentive, and still don't know enough to be in denial.

Listen, America. I've been there. The bully won't let you win, even when you do, as you have a number of times now. As soon as you rise to his bogus challenge, you give up your power, and he's got you...

Time for a change in tactics.  ¶ 10:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Biggest Die-Off Since the End of the Mesozoic

The variety of species in the world's oceans has dropped by as much as 50 percent in the past 50 years, according to a paper published today in the journal Science.

A combination of overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change has narrowed the range of fish across the globe, wrote biologists Boris Worm and Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and three other scientists. In some areas, such as off northwest Australia where a wide variety of tuna and billfish used to thrive, diversity has declined precipitously...

Mass extinction? "Bring it on..."  ¶ 8:58 AM 2 comments links to this post

  All Your Skills Are Ours

It's official.

Individuals now have no control over where they work.

Microsoft (Quote, Chart) won a temporary restraining order to keep high-level search researcher Dr. Kai-Fu Lee from defecting to search rival Google (Quote, Chart).

The latest legal maneuver keeps Redmond's search trade secrets and China business strategy out of the hands of its rival -- for now.

On Wednesday, a King County Superior Court judge in Seattle ordered that Lee be enjoined from joining Google. The order said Dr. Lee was prohibited from taking a job that that might be "competitive with or engaging in any activities competitive with any product, service or project (including actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development)," according to the order by Judge Steven Gonzalez...

But you knew that already...  ¶ 8:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  $tealth

Some people in the Pentagon and the industry wonder if the F-35 will be the last manned fighter the U.S. will ever build. ...watch UCAVs [unmanned combat aerial vehicles, or killer drones] and the possibility for deploying a UCAV/manned combination (1 plane, 1 or more UCAVs).

...The backseater would fly a companion aircraft. That would increase the deliverable payload per sortie and give the manned craft the option of letting the UCAV do things that seemed unacceptably risky. You can think of other scenarios where this could be handy. It's a step beyond the idea of UCAV as a more capable UAV, operated by someone on the ground far away.

The technology is not there yet, but better UAV's (that automate more of the routine tasks for flying that pilots do almost without thinking) and code from gaming software make this a possibility. Think of it not as independent flying robots but a new kind of forward air control (and the military implications of game technology deserve its own entry)...

I would never think of this as an independent flying robot...  ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments links to this post

  When You Own the Government, You Don't Need No Stinkin' Approval

Sources: White House Intends End Run Around Congress Next Week for Bolton Nomination

President Bush intends to announce next week that he is going around Congress to install embattled nominee John Bolton as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, senior administration officials said Friday.

Bush has the power to fill vacancies without Senate approval while Congress is in recess. Under the Constitution, a recess appointment during the lawmakers' August break would last until the next session of Congress, which begins in January 2007.

Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the president had not made the announcement and Congress wasn't in recess yet, said Bush would exercise that authority before he leaves Washington on Tuesday for his ranch...

These are criminals we are dealing with.

Bu$hCo realizes if they back down, if they bow to the rule of law, they will all end up prosecuted. Their only chance now is to squeeze tighter. Oh, and incidently, if they squeeze tighter, they think they win.

Bolton will go to the UN.

Rove will not resign. Nor, if indicted, will he step down. Nor will the Supreme Court allow the indictment to stand.

Roberts will go to the Supreme Court, too.

I'd love to be proved wrong.  ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  That "Should" Rip It- But Don't Count On It

Via the Guardian via Truthout:

State Dept. Now Says Bolton Interviewed
John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for UN ambassador, mistakenly told Congress he had not been interviewed or testified in any investigation over the past five years, the State Department said Thursday.

Bolton was interviewed by the State Department inspector general as part of a joint investigation with the Central Intelligence Agency into prewar Iraqi attempts to buy nuclear materials from Niger, State Department spokesman Noel Clay said.

The admission came hours after another State Department official said Bolton had correctly answered a Senate questionnaire when he wrote that he has not testified to a grand jury or been interviewed by investigators in any inquiry over the past five years.

The reversal followed persistent Democratic attempts to question Bolton's veracity just days before Bush may use his authority to make him United Nations ambassador after Congress adjourns for its summer recess. For months, Democrats have prevented the Senate from confirming the fiery conservative to the post...

Wonderful how much media play this has in America this morning. Or is it no wonder?

Amazingly, Joe Biden (D-MBNA) yesterday fired off a letter to Rice saying basically, look, we caught this guy with his pants down. One can imagine the fate of the luckless minion that informed her of this note.s

Or not so amazing. Remember this isn't simply a Wrepublican vs. Democrat (or in Biden's case, DINOcrat) issue. The split goes to the top of the Company board: Empire and Caliphate vs. broader business interests.

While there's some evidence Dominion benefits all the robber barons, hot shooting war to bring about Dominion benefits only a few.  ¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "We Got Your Energy Policy Right Here"

For the same reason the space program is doomed to oblivion under Bu$hCo, we might as well forget about alternative energy:

In a letter to Speaker Hastert, Rep. Waxman writes that after the energy legislation was closed to further amendment in the recently concluded conference, a $1.5 billion provision benefiting oil and gas companies, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas, was mysteriously inserted in the text.

The text of the letter is below:

The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
H232 Capitol
Washington, DC 20515-6501

Dear Mr. Speaker:

I am writing to draw to your attention a provision in the Energy Conference Report that raises serious procedural and substantive concerns. At its essence, this provision is a $1.5 billion giveaway to the oil industry, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas. The provision was inserted into the energy legislation after the conference was closed, so members of the conference committee had no opportunity to consider or reject this measure. Before the final energy legislation is brought to the House floor, this provision should be deleted.

The provision at issue is a 30-page subtitle called "Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Natural Gas and Other Petroleum Resources." This subtitle, which was taken from the House-passed energy bill, was mysteriously inserted in the final energy legislation after the legislation was closed to further amendment. The conferees were told that they would have the opportunity to consider and vote on the provisions in the conference report. But the subtitle was not included in the base text circulated to conferees, and it was never offered as an amendment.

Instead, the new subtitle first appeared in the text of the energy legislation only after Chairman Barton had gaveled the conference over. Obviously, it would be a serious abuse to secretly slip such a costly and controversial provision into the energy legislation.

On the merits, the subtitle is an indefensible giveaway to one of the most profitable industries in America. The provision establishes a $1.5 billion fund, up to $550 million of which would be dedicated direct spending, which is not subject to the normal congressional appropriations process. Although the name of the subtitle refers to "ultra-deepwater and unconventional natural gas," it appears that the $1.5 billion fund created by the subtitle can in fact be used for many oil and gas projects. According to the language of the subtitle, oil and gas companies can apply for funds for a wide variety of activities, including activities involving "innovative exploration and production techniques" or "enhanced recovery techniques." While oil and gas companies could be required to contribute to the costs of their projects, the subtitle expressly provides that the Department has discretion to reduce or eliminate any such contribution.

The subtitle appears to steer the administration of 75% of the $1.5 billion fund to a private consortium located in the district of Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Ordinarily, a large fund like this would be administered directly by the government. The subtitle, however, directs the Department to "contract with a corporation that is constructed as a consortium." The leading contender for this contract appears to be the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) consortium, housed in the Texas Energy Center in Sugar Land, Texas. Halliburton is a member of RPSEA and sits on the board, as does Marathon Oil Company. The subtitle provides that the consortium can keep up to 10% of the funds - in this case, over $100 million - in administrative expenses.

The subtitle further provides that members of the consortium, such as Halliburton and Marathon Oil, can receive awards from the over $1 billion fund administered by the consortium.

In short, the subtitle provides that taxpayers will hire a private consortium controlled by the oil and gas industry to hand out over $1 billion to oil and gas companies. There is no conceivable rationale for this extraordinary largess. The oil and gas industry is reporting record income and profits. According to one analyst, the net income of the top oil companies will total $230 billion in 2005. If Congress has an extra $1.5 billion to give away, the money should be used to help families struggling to pay for soaring gasoline prices - not to further enrich oil and gas companies that are rolling in profits.

In recent years, Congress has been repeatedly embarrassed by the mysterious insertion of provisions in omnibus legislation. Last year, for example, we learned only after House action that the 3,000 page, $388 billion omnibus spending bill allowed members and staff of the Appropriations Committee to examine the tax returns of ordinary Americans. We should not allow this to happen again. The Energy Conference Report should not be brought to the House floor until this objectionable provision is deleted and there is ample opportunity for members to read the legislation and delete any other problematic provisions.

Thank you for your attention to this problem.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Ranking Minority Member

cc: The Honorable Nancy Pelosi

The plundering of the Treasury continues apace.

Thanks to Truthout for the heads up.  ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Using Pork Barrel Engineering ManDated by Cracker Barrel Bureaucrat$

NASA grounds future shuttle flights
Foam insulation flew off fuel tank but did not hit Discovery

The shuttle Discovery, like Columbia, lost a large chunk of foam debris during liftoff that could have threatened the return of the seven astronauts, NASA said Wednesday.

While there are no signs the piece of insulation damaged the spacecraft, NASA is grounding future shuttle flights until the hazard can be fixed.

“Call it luck or whatever, it didn’t harm the orbiter,” said shuttle program manager Bill Parsons. If the foam had broken away earlier in flight — when the atmosphere is thicker, increasing the acceleration and likelihood of impact — it could have caused catastrophic damage to Discovery...

Again, Bu$hCo demonstrates its willingness to use the lives of the most dedicated Americans like they were toilet paper. I hope they make it back down in one piece. I most sincerely hope the Wrepublicans aren't in control when the next manned moon or Mars mission is sent.

They'll never make it back alive with all the pork barrel engineering. If it's not Star Wars or a Kool DARPA toy, the man in charge of NASA now isn't interested in it. We're talking about a man who invested money for the CIA and headed the corporation that owns DynCorp before he became the head of NASA.

When NeoCon spooks get physical, they tend to ignore reality-based science in favor of their own political agenda- like Bu$hCo's current public relations blitz for it's new manned space policy.

Like Porter Goss in the CIA, Michael Griffin is turning NASA upside-down getting rid of competent professionals and replacing them with more right thinking people.

Of course, when 20 year old fuel gauges break down for "unknown" reasons, Michael Griffin's new professionals in charge don't let that stop them. They have a time table. While reality-based engineers are dealing with problems, they're making up whole new realities for the engineers to deal with.

Besides, Darth Rumsfeld has this thing about people who report failure.  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Choices

¡El Gato Negro! knows a fool when he sees one.

A lot of noise is beginning to be made again about an alternative to the DINOcratic party.

Greens? As long as they're getting piles of money from Wrepublican sources, they might as well be DINOcrats. Or Wrepublicans.

As long as the only vision the Greens have is to return the world to a pre-industrial agrarian state, count me out. That's what the Dominionists want. A post-industrial world that looks like the Middle Ages is just fine for the feudal lord wanna-bes.

Greens think technology is only a tool for the robber barons. Technology is the hope of the human race as much as it has been the bane of the human race. Every one of us in the progressive blogsphere knows without it we might as well be living in a Christianized version of Shiite Iran.

Without modern technology, I would be dead. As would many beautiful people I know. Don't give me that midieval silliness.

Why do you think the Wrepublicans are so anti-science? Why do you think they want to bring down the Hubble, or that they won't run a space program for anything other than a pork barrel project? Why to you think they've eviscerated the mechanism for isolating new viruses and producing effective vaccines for everyone?

Show me a Green who's interested in the econonmy, or education, or fighting the social roots of poverty.

Show me a Green with a clue, show me a Green with a plan, and you have my vote.

Until then I vote Democrat, because I have no choice.  ¶ 8:19 AM 0 comments links to this post

  There are Idiot$ in Charge of the DINOcrat Leadership Council

The only animal as stupid as a NeoCon is a NeoLiberal.

Witness, thanks to Atrios and Lambert.

Here's a novel idea: The war on terror should be, above all, a liberal's war.

Think about it: The jihadist campaign is not some generic explosion of terrorism, but rather a calculated attack on all that liberals hold dear: tolerance, diversity, women's rights, the fundamental freedoms and protections of democracy, even trade unionism. In short, liberal values. That's why the liberal left makes a profound mistake if it concedes this war to George W. Bush and the right...

No, you idiots. You don't make War on a tactic. You develop a counter tactic to make it ineffective. You don't just toss $500 billion and hundreds of thousands of troops at it blindly- no matter how happy it makes some of your richer campaign donors.

You don't fight terror by making more terrorists. You don't plow the field and sow the seed. You don't fight terror by supporting the people who finance the terror.

Digby says:

...I'm a baby boomer but I'm 48 and my formative political experience was probably Watergate, in which patriotism was shown to be a willingness to put the country above politics when the chips were down. Republicans Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater ranked as major patriots for me. Indeed, Watergate was one of those moments when I think the entire country was impressed (and surprised) by the incredible resiliency of its system of government and the integrity of men and women who rose to the occasion. To me patriotism isn't about fighting wars, it's about love of country.

People born in 1970 are now in their mid-30's. Are they scarred by their parents' youthful beliefs in "anti-patriotism?" Their formative political years were during the Reagan era, hardly a period of anti-americanism. Flag waving was a fetish.

My friends' mother is 80 years old. She's a child of the depression and she's a Democrat who was adamantly against the Iraq war. It had nothing to do with Vietnam; it was because she didn't believe in "wars of aggression." That was the reflexive foreign policy belief of cold war liberals who learned their lessons from the two world wars. I have another friend who is 22 and was against the war in Iraq because he believes it distracts from the War on terrorism. I was against it because I gravely mistrust the neocon vision of American global hegemony and I wanted them to do the minumum possible until we could get sane people in office to assess the threat properly. We are not all singing kumbaya from the 60's campus radical manual.

He talks about liberals (or maybe just the unbearable bi-coastal elites he describes in such loving detail) as if we are from Mars. I have no doubt that there are quite a few who really disdain the military and would be shocked to see one of their friends' children from the elite private school choosing to join the marines instead of going to an Ivy League College as expected. But really, can we call this a particularly Democratic or liberal response? Considering the remarkable problem the military is having with recruitment, I'd have to say it's a pretty common American response, rather than any comment on Democrats. It's not as if Republicans are all rushing out to join up either. If it's a lack of patriotism that's causing that reaction I think you would have to say that most Americans are unpatriotic.

He worries that the military itself is too Republican and laments that the Democrats are not better represented. His evidence is two polls which show that the majority of officers are Republicans. Can everyone see what might be wrong with that picture?

The salient point in all this is that there are no national Democrats who are anti- military and very, very few rank and file Democrats who are anti-military. Even the hated Michael Moore shows a tremendous affinity for the grunts in his movies in which he focuses on the sacrifices of working and middle class families who are being treated terribly by the government in thanks for their sacrifice. This thing that Marshall and his DLCers see is not anti-military; it's anti-Washington and that's not the same thing at all...

Furthermore, it's entirely possible that at least some Democrats realize that al Qaeda isn't something you can just "dismantle" with a ripping good show of military might because it's morphed into a constantly changing, moving concept, rather than a single entity you can "end." And while terrorism is scary and we need to do all we can to protect people from it, it is not any more threatening than Leonid Bresznev potentially getting into a pissing match or losing control of his military or any other thing that could have resulted in an accidental nuclear exchange during the cold war. We lived for many years under an unimaginable threat (still do, actually) and we managed to keep our heads for the most part and not turn ourselves inside out over it. This threat of terrorism is real and it's important, but we simply have to stop overreacting like we did with Iraq or we really are going to turn it into the existential threat these people seem to desire so fervently...

Being lectured all the time by effete DC Democrats on "patriotism" because I don't back their reflexively hawkish foreign policy is not only insulting it's dumb. It plays into stereotypes that only serve the Republicans by turning this into a dick measuring contest when we should be turning the conversation into who can get the job done. I would submit that if anyone's been traumatized by the Vietnam experience it's the tired Democratic national security hawks who are always rushing to support military action, no matter how insanely counterproductive, because some Republican somewhere might call him a pussy. They've been around since the 60's too. Hell, they've been around forever.

Could the real reason the Senator from MBNA and his friends in Ohio support the War Against Terra be because they love Daddy Warbucks?  ¶ 9:18 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Mars, Beotches

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House Friday overwhelmingly endorsed President Bush's vision to send man back to the moon and eventually on to Mars as it passed a bill to set NASA policy for the next two years.

The bill passed 383-15 after a collegial debate in which lawmakers stressed their commitment to not just Bush's ambitious space exploration plans but also to traditional NASA programs such as science and aeronautics.

There is some tension between Congress and the White House over the balance between Bush's vision for space exploration and other NASA initiatives. Originally, the measure would have shifted $1.3 billion in funds from exploration to other NASA programs. But after administration objections lawmakers added the money back to the budget for exploration during floor debate. That was done by adding to the bill's bottom line -- now at $34.7 billion -- not at the expense of science and aeronautics.

Democratic Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee said Bush's ambitious moon and Mars missions "should not be done by cannibalizing other NASA missions.''

The bill is the first NASA policy measure -- its budget is funded by a separate bill -- to pass the House in five years. It advanced as the space agency tries to rebound from the Columbia disaster in February 2003 with the launch of the space shuttle Discovery next Tuesday.

The measure permits but does not explicitly endorse retiring the space shuttle fleet by 2010, as the administration would like to do. It directs the agency to launch a new crew exploration vehicle -- which would lack the full capabilities of the shuttle but could travel to the International Space Station -- as close to 2010 as feasible.

NASA's plans call for a new vehicle to be ready by 2014, which unnerves lawmakers who do not want the United States to have to rely on other countries to catch a lift to the space station.

A companion Senate measure approved by the Commerce, Science and Transportation panel last month would bar NASA from retiring the shuttle before a replacement vehicle is ready.

Both House and Senate bills also endorse a servicing and repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Without such a mission, the Hubble will fail when its gyroscopes and batteries wear out in the next few years, but the agency has not announced whether to let the telescope fail or whether it will undertake a costly manned repair mission.

"Congress endorses the President's Vision for Space Exploration,'' said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y. "The United States will work to return to the moon by 2020, and then will move on to other destinations.''

The full Senate has yet to act on the NASA measure.

Regardless of the ringing endorsement Friday, NASA must still compete with other agencies for its budget in the annual appropriations process, which moves on a separate track. That promises to make it difficult to fulfill all of the policy recommendations made by the House on Friday...

They're doing this by simply adding what should be done scientifically to what the boys at Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and GE want to do to bring good things to their life.

People like Barney Frank say ...'"day after day ... we're told we can't do enough for housing and we can't do enough for health care.''

"This is a fundamental debate the country ought to have ... about whether or not to commit these untold billions ... at the expense of other important programs,''

So stop the War on Terra, Barney. Call For It Immediately. Get up and say it out loud. Stop the Treasury raid by Halliburton and friends. Break up the energy monopolies.

Break Al Qaeda at its source, its base of Saudi finance.

Give us an alternative to fossil fuels.

Yes, the Bu$hCo plan to Return to Space is inevitably another con job.

But no token opposition. Don't offer us homilies on what people need while you let the Masters of the Universe rip off the budget. Let's use science for what it's best at.

The creation of new technologies can drive economies.

If we only could find someone like Al Gore who turned the technology of the Internet from a DARPA toy into the base of the dot com boom of the '90s.

Are there any Democrats left, or are we left only with DINOcrats?  ¶ 10:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Get Your War On

Granny notes a few interesting items I feel worth reiterating.

Essentially we are already in a state of war with Iran.

The Islamic world already sees this.

Last winter the BBC echoed reports that the Special Forces are working within Iran.

So in essence, we're supporting a pro-Iranian Shiite majority government in Iraq, while planning war on Iran.

While a lot of progressives will condemn Bu$hCo for its manifest stupidity, let me suggest this bit of idiocy may be intentional.

The other piece of information from her site I'd like to share is this bit about a military drill off the coast of South Carolina in August. The focus of this drill is about the deployment of a nuclear weapon. Let's keep in mind that there's a recurring pattern of terrorist attacks while drills are taking place.

Let's keep our eyes open, be prepared, and not get fooled again.  ¶ 9:07 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Of Course There Are Other Uses

Will DOD Recall Pain Ray?

Last year, Noah wrote about a Defense Department nonlethal "pain ray" called the Active Denial System (ADS).

Now, British magazine New Scientist reveals that investigators testing the system are insisting tons of safety precautions that "raise concerns about how safe [ADS] would be if used in real crowd-control situations...

"The experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers' clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.

"The ADS weapon's beam causes pain within 2 to 3 seconds and it becomes intolerable after less than 5 seconds. People's reflex responses to the pain is expected to force them to move out of the beam before their skin can be burnt.

"But Neil Davison, co-ordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at the University of Bradford in the UK, says controlling the amount of radiation received may not be that simple. 'How do you ensure that the dose doesn't cross the threshold for permanent damage?' he asks. 'What happens if someone in a crowd is unable, for whatever reason, to move away from the beam? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?'

"During the experiments, people playing rioters put up their hands when hit and were given a 15-second cooling-down period before being targeted again. One person suffered a burn in a previous test when the beam was accidentally used on the wrong power setting....."

What will the D. o'D. and the boys at the PentagramPentagon do?

They've spent all this money, and now they have a microwave ray weapon that might hurt or kill somebdy. Cook people at a distance. Invisible, with no giveaway report. If you made hand held pistol-sized emitters, that might even be used a weapon.

What will they possibly do with this?

Well, for one thing, you can bet the NRA will lobby for everyone's right to have one.  ¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Guilty Until Proven Innocent

...Police identified the man who was chased down in a subway and shot to death by plainclothes officers as a Brazilian and said Saturday they no longer believed he was tied to the recent terror bombings...

Friday's shooting before horrified commuters prompted criticism of police for overreacting and expressions of fear that Asians and Muslims would be targeted by a "trigger-happy culture" after two well-coordinated attacks in two weeks.

Police expressed regret for the death of the man at the Stockwell subway station, identified Saturday as Jean Charles de Menezes, 27. Witnesses said he was wearing a heavy, padded coat when plainclothes police chased him into a subway car, pinned him to the ground and shot him about five times in the head and torso.

Hours after the shooting, Police Commissioner Ian Blair said the victim was "directly linked" to the investigations into attacks Thursday and July 7. In the latter, suicide bombings on trains and a bus killed 56 people, including four attackers...

"He was then followed by surveillance officers to the station. His clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions," police said Friday.

But Saturday, a police official said on condition of anonymity that Menezes was "not believed to be connected in any way to any of the London bombings."

"For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets," a spokesman said on condition of anonymity, which is police policy...

Brazilian media reported that Menezes was an electrician who had been legally living and working in England for the past three years. He originally came from the small city of Gonzaga, some 500 miles northeast of Sao Paulo in the state of Minas Gerais.

"He spoke English very well, and had permission to study and work there," Menezes' cousin Maria Alves told the O Globo Online Web site from her home in Sao Paulo.

Menezes' family was Roman Catholic. When asked if he had become Muslim in Britain, Agostino Ferreira Rosa, a policeman in Gonzaga said: "According to his family, he had nothing to do with Muslims or Islamism. He was Catholic."

"There was no reason to think he was a terrorist," Menezes' grandmother, Zilda Ambrosia de Figueiredo, told the Globo TV late Saturday. "He was very easygoing and very communicative with everybody. It's terrible what they have done to him."  ¶ 10:38 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Scenario

Patrick J. Fitzgerald finds that in John Bolton's perusal ("rifling" might be a better adjective) of NSA communications, Bolton discovered Valerie Plame was investigating WMD in Iraq and reporting there were none.

The Walrus had Rice send out a "classified" memo that all the Kool Kids saw, and immediately started talking about among themselves, and leaking to various Company disinformation agents (a.k.a. "journalists").

So a couple of dozen people were all talking, and breaking the law, and lying to everyone else, since they all stood to make billion$ off of this caper.

They figure they've got the Congress, the Courts, and the voting machine. Oh yeah, and the Mandate of the Dominion of Christ, but only Norquist takes that seriously...

Patrick J. Fitzgerald builds an airtight case, and prepares to release it in late September, before his mandate runs out. He fully realizes Congress will likely end his appointment in October, and although he is Republican at heart, the Bu$hCo syndicate is the biggest racket he's ever encountered, and by God this is the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to make History.

However, in late August, terra'ists ignite a small nuke or a lot of C4 somewhere in America.

Code Red.

Immediately on its release, his report is "Classified", Fitzgerald is held in Protective Custody, and Homeland Security proceeds to arrest "rogue elements" in the Agency.

Including Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

The Company consolidates itself, preparing for $elections 2006.  ¶ 2:53 PM 3 comments links to this post

  Fighting Hard for Fundamentalism

Back to the Future.

Assuming, of course, the future is the 19th century...

Billmon writes a good piece about how we've managed to serve up Iraq on a silver platter to the Iranian fundamentalists, as I noted here.

Billmon also lifts this passage from the print version of American Conservative (paleocons just don't trust electrons- you can see the article's title under the August 1 Table of Contents "News/Deep Background"):

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.

Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.

Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing -- that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack -- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Bu$hCo is certainly not above setting up a polarizing situation in Iran, getting the Mullahs back into firm control, and then trying to Shock and Awe them into submission. Especially if they can divert attention from their Special Prosecutor problems at home. After all, Fitzgerald's hunting license expires in October, and you can bet whatever wants and warrants he decides to initiate will be taken with all appropriate seriousness by Justice.

Especially if there's a National Security situation at the same time.

Corrente notes a disinformational counterstrike against the Agency building. It's important to note that the CIA has been far from a monolithic entity since Bu$hie stole his election, and probably before that as well. For every honest operative trying to protect the national interests like Valerie Plame, you have obvious Company moles like Porter Goss working in the system.

Then you have Clinton appointees like Tenet was, who did his damn'dest to warn Bu$hCo about both Al Qaeda pre-911 and the fallacy of the Iraqi-WMD story. But after Big Time Dick's multiple visits in 2002 and early '03, Tenet became quite the Bu$hCo enabler.

I guess shares in Halliburton will do that to a man.

Still, despite the PentagramPentagon's assurances they can Shock and Awe their way back into control of the Iraqi-Irani situation, there are bound to be a few analysts that eschew the NeoCon cocaine-laced Kool-Aid. You can count on a few worried heads about the consequences of setting off nukes in the Middle East. You can count on Porter Goss watching these analysts closely, too.  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The I of the Hurricane

Steve Clemmons at TWN:

SCOOP: John Bolton Was Regular Source for Judith Miller WMD and National Security Reporting

TWN has just learned from a highly placed source -- and in the right place to know -- that John Bolton was a regular source for Judith Miller's New York Times WMD and national security reports.

The source did not have any knowledge on whether Bolton was one of Miller's sources on the Valerie Plame story she was preparing, but argues that he was a regular source otherwise...

Thanks to Atrios. And in his comments...

Din't I tell Y'all? Fer what, three weeks???

Bolton's the guy at the center of it...

his (illegal, which nobody is saying) NSA intercept requests included spying on Wilson, which revealed Valerie Plame...

Good call.  ¶ 9:28 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Terror Futures

Grannyinsanity points to a realization by the cunning realist that ...temporary liquidity hit a multi-year high on July 5th, which was Tuesday, and it remained highly elevated on Wednesday and Thursday. And the second chart indicates that "securities lending"---another way for the Fed to create liquidity in the financial system---saw a huge spike on June 30th.

It is important to understand that the Federal Reserve does not make these charts available. It only provides the raw data on its operations, and leaves it to the public to calculate the actual amount of continuing liquidity from day to day. Financial professionals generally consider this "man behind the curtain" stuff. Those who are aware of it don't like to discuss it, because it implies that stocks rise and fall based on something other than fundamentals and their own acumen. You will almost never see this discussed in the mainstream financial media, for example. And that's just fine with the Fed.

I watch these charts every day as a function of my job, and have for many years. What appears above is extraordinary activity---particularly the size of the "temporary" pool, which the Fed almost doubled to $40 billion in just a few days leading up to last Tuesday, despite the fact that oil was trading over $60. And since all that money provided by the Fed can be leveraged, the effect on the financial markets is magnified.

Why the need for all that easy money all of a sudden? The Fed doesn't take this sort of action for no reason, particularly when the price of oil is already at an all-time high. It does so in response to circumstances it predicts will create a need for liquidity, or when it specifically wants to support the stock market as it did after 9/11.

The terrorist attacks in London took place on Thursday. The Fed dramatically increased the pool of liquidity available for stocks to a multi-year high 48 hours before that---an ideal amount of time for that liquidity to filter into the market---and kept it elevated for the next few days. And indeed, it worked. The stock market saw heavy buying right at the opening bell on Thursday and has shot straight up since then.

Why did the Fed do this? Was it just another coincidence in our financial markets that somehow managed to immediately precede a major geopolitical event?

One person can give us some answers easily and quickly: Alan Greenspan. Doesn't it behoove him to do so before he rides off into the sunset a few months from now?

The Cunning Realist is a conservative, finance oriented blogger, not a fringe element. There were big movements of capital before the London bombing, and there were bigger movements just before 9/11/2001. Somebody knew something was up.

Of course, they picked up on this immediately at Rigorous Intuition, where they've never met a conspiracy theory they didn't like. Including the ones where Dick Cheney is a puppet of occult Powers. No wonder kos wants to distance himself from the tinfoil hat crowd. No wonder Bu$hCo tries to equate them with UFOlogy, they're easy targets.

The thing is, sometimes the blips on the conspiracy theory radar really aren't airplanes. But they aren't flying saucers either. They're storms and turbulence caused by real weather that you should be on the lookout for.  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  A Bill of Rights is a Terrible Thing to Lose

Societas via Billmon:

Karl Rove, for political revenge and to buttress a false case for war with Iraq, betrayed not merely the CIA but the American people. Whether Rove can be found technically guilty as a criminal under one narrowly defined law is besides the point. His actions amount to treason.

John Roberts, who might serve on the Supreme Court for the next thirty years, could roll back progress on concerns from women’s reproductive rights to corporate accountability. His nomination demands exacting scruntity.

But let’s have a moment of harsh honesty here...

This, as the saying goes, is a limited opportunity. Congress will vote to renew and possibly expand the Patriot Act today, tomorrow or early next week. This will all be over long before Roberts has a hearing, before Fitzgerald finishes his investigation.

If Congress renews or expands Section 215, as they seem intent on doing, you can kiss the 4th Amendment good-bye. (More details here and here). What two World Wars and a Civil War could not accomplish, al-Qaeda and the cowardly leadership of George Bush will.

Please e-mail and/or call Congress. Please spread the word. Protect the 4th Amendment and your other rights. We are in the final hours for the Patriot Act. Take a brief break from the Rove-Roberts controversies, just a few hours, and defend your rights as American citizens.  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Joe Wilson's Wife was CIA, but John Roberts' Wife is Company

Sounds like Dread Justice Roberts might have an in on the world of private contractor-based intelligence.

Via rorschach via Margie Burns:

Yet another first for our boundary-breaching White House: for the first time in American history, we’re going to have a justice on the high court whose spouse facilitates financing and putting together global satellite systems.

Also, the company in which she is a partner, Shaw Pittman, emphasizes among other things its expertise in facilitating business in Iraq:

“We offer one-stop service to clients pursuing projects in Iraq, from solicitation and RFP counseling to working with key government and multilateral agencies, and from initially penetrating the Iraqi marketplace to final project implementation. Our attorneys are recognized as leaders in their fields, and at the cutting-edge in a variety of disciplines relevant to Iraq reconstruction. A number have served in senior government positions in key agencies – including the Departments of Transportation, Navy, Justice and Commerce, as well as the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”

Iraq has not yet been able to achieve an integrated communications service (many Iraqis don’t even have their electricity back, yet.) By numerous accounts, satellite communications/networks loom as a large unfilled need in Iraq. Jane Sullivan Roberts’ credentials are solid, and business-wise, her walk in life is largely helping clients put together and get financing for satellite systems, according to her company bio:

“Ms. Roberts practices with the firm’s communications and global sourcing groups, concentrating in representing clients in sophisticated transactions involving technology. She has extensive experience in representing clients in the buying and selling of space-related goods and services, including companies involved in the development of multi-billion dollar global and regional satellite systems. Ms. Roberts' experience also includes representing clients in information technology outsourcing transactions; software licensing, development, and maintenance contracts; and professional services arrangements. Prior to 1992, Ms. Roberts practiced litigation in a wide variety of matters before various courts and decision-making bodies, including large international commercial arbitrations involving nuclear power plants before the International Chamber of Commerce.”
...

Perhaps it will surprise few people that Shaw, Pittman, where Ms. Roberts is a partner, is offering its services for a newly privatized Iraq:

“Pillsbury’s Iraq Reconstruction Practice is mobilized to offer clients strategic legal advice in their postwar reconstruction efforts. Comprised of lawyers from several offices and backgrounds with relevant legal, industry and regional experience, the team is well poised to support virtually every endeavor in post-war Iraq, including:

· Infrastructure development, construction and procurement

· Intellectual property, technology and outsourcing services...

The company’s web site does not indicate that Ms. Roberts is on its Pillsbury Iraq Reconstruction Team. A call to the company to inquire whether she has yet had clients/projects in Iraq has not yet been returned. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the nominee husband’s numerous investments also include Shaw Pittman. One wonders whether a Justice Roberts would have to recuse himself on any cases involving Iraq, including cases about profiteering; procedure re “detainees” rounded up in Iraq; Iraq contract fraud; and/or regulatory or other violations by satellite systems companies that hired his wife’s firm or his wife herself.  ¶ 10:38 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Missing the Point

Molly Ivins on main$tream media myopia and Karl Rove:

...Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke. They went after Gen. Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it. After they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections to Al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for democracy. Urp.

We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI's time on this idiocy? I don't pretend to be an expert on counter-terrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn't start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups either. Your pacifists, you see -- oh, just look it up.

I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being "un-American," but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And claiming the mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is cuckoo -- and such an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money that whoever thought up this idiocy should be fired yesterday.

But even that is superseded by what lies at the heart of Plamegate and that is lying in order to get this country into war. If the Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, they could have exposed this years ago: the lies so often directly contradict one another. Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: After the war, it was all the CIA's fault, they had exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction. And so on and so on.

The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even agree on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's not that we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same library. They read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves they don't mean what they say. I really don't understand: Is it that hard to admit you're wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?

If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair while he was president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had anything to do with the way he was running the country. You can't dismiss this. You can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care about American soldiers.  ¶ 11:56 AM 0 comments links to this post

  $hariah

Five hundred billion dollars, two thousand American lives, twenty thousand American wounded, a hundred thousand secular Iraqi dead, and it comes down to this:

A working draft of Iraq's new constitution would cede a strong role to Islamic law and could sharply curb women's rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.

The document's writers are also debating whether to drop or phase out a measure enshrined in the interim constitution, co-written last year by the Americans, requiring that women make up at least a quarter of the parliament.

The draft of a chapter of the new constitution obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday guarantees equal rights for women as long as those rights do not "violate Shariah," or Koranic law.

The Americans and secular Iraqis banished such explicit references to religious law from the interim constitution adopted early last year.

The draft chapter, circulated discreetly in recent days, has ignited outrage among women's groups, which held a protest on Tuesday morning in downtown Baghdad at the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by American marines in April 2003.

One of the critical passages is in Article 14 of the chapter, a sweeping measure that would require court cases dealing with matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to the law practiced by the family's sect or religion.

Under that measure, Shiite women in Iraq, no matter what their age, generally could not marry without their families' permission. Under some interpretations of Shariah, men could attain a divorce simply by stating their intention three times in their wives' presence.

Article 14 would replace a body of Iraqi law that has for decades been considered one of the most progressive in the Middle East in protecting the rights of women, giving them the freedom to choose a husband and requiring divorce cases to be decided by a judge.

If adopted, the shift away from the more secular and egalitarian provisions of the interim constitution would be a major victory for Shiite clerics and religious politicians, who chafed at the Americans' insistence that Islam be designated in the interim constitution as just "a source" of legislation. Several writers of the new constitution say they intend, at the very least, to designate Islam as "a main source" of legislation...

It's pretty much what you'd expect from a bunch of Dominionists who like what the Wahhabi and Shiites do to "their" women.

It's like ¡El Gato Negro! said last night: Eet seems to me the language here, she ees confused, no?

thees ones who seek to treat women as pets, as property, they are no "Pro-Life". They are how-joo-say Anti-Woman.

I weel fight for women to be treated as people.

I, ¡El Gato Negro! am how-joo-say Pro-woman.

Absolutely agrrreed.  ¶ 9:41 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Banality of Bu$hCo

U.S. President George W. Bush selected John G. Roberts Jr., a Washington federal appeals court judge with a limited public record on social issues, to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court...

Roberts is one of the country's most experienced Supreme Court practitioners. He argued 39 times at the high court on behalf of the U.S. government and private clients. He is a former law clerk to then-Justice William H. Rehnquist and former deputy solicitor general under the first President Bush.

One issue certain to be scrutinized is a brief he signed, while in the solicitor general's office, that included a footnote calling for the high court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that granted women a right to abortion.

As a private litigator, Roberts often served corporate clients, among them Toyota Motor Corp. and the American Gaming Association. Roberts also argued at a lower court for a group of states suing Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations.

On the appeals court, Roberts has signaled he favors at least some limits on the power of Congress to regulate commerce. He voted to reconsider a three-judge panel's ruling that applied the Endangered Species Act...

Roberts last week joined a 3-0 opinion upholding the use of military tribunals to try terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba...

Liberal groups said they are concerned about Roberts's work in the Justice Department as deputy to Solicitor General Ken Starr.

He ``helped craft legal policies that sought to weaken school desegregation efforts, the reproductive rights of women, environmental protections, church-state separation and the voting rights of African Americans,'' said Nan Aron, head of the Alliance for Justice in Washington...

Roberts graduated from Harvard University with highest honors and Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Law Review, with high honors.

Another James Watt Christian, possibly:

Roberts has often, both in his public and private work, taken a position against government environmental regulation. Roberts argued against the private citizen's right to sue the federal government for violations of environmental regulations in Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation.

Roberts has also argued on behalf of the National Mining Association in support of the legality of mountaintop removal, in the case Bragg v. West Virginia Coal Association.

Think about it: the main$tream media would never have had the Rovefest last week if some faction of the Company wasn't a bit worried about the Dominionist pro-Apocalypse blather that the TheoCons are constantly foaming about.

A worried and fearful populace works harder, but the robber-barons realize too much Terra is bad for the biz.

So, a business-like younger Scalia with James Watt overtones. No flaming John Birch Theocrat (albeit a black woman) or John Bolton mad dog for Armageddon. The Company would approve. The Joe Biden DINOcrats won't freak.

And Bu$hCo gets control.  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Google Bomb: "Rove" and "Treason"

Buzzflash

...The Democrats should stop calling for Rove to resign and instead take a page from the GOP/Luntz playbook. Just keep saying Rove and treason together in as many possible media forums as possible. Everyone knows the Democrats want Rove to resign. That's not a message that gets embedded in the public mind. It's only a tactic that feeds into the Rove strategy of throwing up enough flak to confuse people and have the media report on this as a partisan fight, rather than an act of betraying the national security interests of the United States of America.

Rove's outing of Plame has made us all less safe, seriously less safe. Because she specialized in the tracking the illicit sales of Weapons of Mass Destruction. People's lives have been endangered as a result of the White House's betrayal...   ¶ 6:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Pre-emptive Fixing

If there were any Doubts, Seymour Hersch just settled them.

... By the late spring of 2004, according to officials in the State Department, Congress, and the United Nations, the Bush Administration was engaged in a debate over the very issue that Diamond had warned about: providing direct support to Allawi and other parties seen as close to the United States and hostile to Iran. Allawi, who had spent decades in exile and worked both for Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat and for Western intelligence agencies, lacked strong popular appeal. The goal, according to several former intelligence and military officials, was not to achieve outright victory for Allawi-such an outcome would not be possible or credible, given the strength of the pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties-but to minimize the religious Shiites' political influence. The Administration hoped to keep Allawi as a major figure in a coalition government, and to do so his party needed a respectable share of the vote.

The main advocate for channelling aid to preferred parties was Thomas Warrick, a senior adviser on Iraq for the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who was backed, in this debate, by his superiors and by the National Security Council. Warrick's plan involved using forty million dollars that had been appropriated for the election to covertly provide cell phones, vehicles, radios, security, administrative help, and cash to the parties the Administration favored. The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor resisted this plan, and turned to three American non-governmental organizations that have for decades helped to organize and monitor elections around the world: the National Democratic Institute (N.D.I.), the International Republican Institute (I.R.I.), and the National Endowment for Democracy (N.E.D.)...

Over the summer and early fall of 2004, the N.G.O.s arranged meetings with several senior officials, including John Negroponte, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. A pattern developed, the participant in the discussions said. The N.G.O.s, he recounted, would say, "We're not going to work with this if there's people out there passing around money. We will not be part of any covert operation, and we need your word that the election will be open and transparent," and the officials would reassure them. Within weeks of a meeting, the N.G.O.s would "still hear word of a Track II-a covert group," the participant said. "The money was to be given to Allawi and others."...

"The goal was to level the playing field, and Allawi was not the sole playing field," he said. Warrick was not operating on his own, the State Department official said. "This issue went to high levels, and was approved"-within the State Department and by others in the Bush Administration, in the late spring of 2004. "A lot of people were involved in it and shared the idea," including, he claimed, some of the N.G.O. operatives working in Iraq. He added, "The story that should be written is why the neoconservatives and others in the U.S. government who were hostile to Iran had this blind spot when it came to the election"-that is, why they endorsed a process that, as Warrick and his colleagues saw it, would likely bring pro-Iranian parties to power.

In any case, the State Department official said, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, put an end to Warrick's efforts in the early fall. Armitage confirmed this, and told me that he believed that he was carrying out the President's wishes. "There was a question at a principals' meeting about whether we should try and change the vote," Armitage recalled, and the President said several times, "We will not put our thumb on the scale."

Nonetheless, in the same time period, former military and intelligence officials told me, the White House promulgated a highly classified Presidential "finding" authorizing the C.I.A. to provide money and other support covertly to political candidates in certain countries who, in the Administration's view, were seeking to spread democracy...

Sometime after last November's Presidential election, I was told by past and present intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided to override Pelosi's objections and covertly intervene in the Iraqi election. A former national-security official told me that he had learned of the effort from "people who worked the beat"-those involved in the operation. It was necessary, he added, "because they couldn't afford to have a disaster."

A Pentagon consultant who deals with the senior military leadership acknowledged that the American authorities in Iraq "did an operation" to try to influence the results of the election. "They had to," he said. "They were trying to make a case that Allawi was popular, and he had no juice." A government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon's civilian leaders said, "We didn't want to take a chance."

I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that the activities were kept, in part, "off the books"-they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress. Some in the White House and at the Pentagon believed that keeping an operation off the books eliminated the need to give a formal briefing to the relevant members of Congress and congressional intelligence committees, whose jurisdiction is limited, in their view, to officially sanctioned C.I.A. operations. (The Pentagon is known to be running clandestine operations today in North Africa and Central Asia with little or no official C.I.A. involvement.)

"The Administration wouldn't take the chance of doing it within the system," the former senior intelligence official said. "The genius of the operation lies in the behind-the-scenes operatives-we have hired hands that deal with this." He added that a number of military and intelligence officials were angered by the covert plans. Their feeling was "How could we take such a risk, when we didn't have to? The Shiites were going to win the election anyway."...

What Iraqi free elections?

Creating wars to profit themselves and their sugar daddies. Fixing "free" elections to play better here at home. What American free elections?

Of course it would be unthinkable that Bu$hCo would do the same here...

But fixing the Iraqi elections to keep the Iranians out? When the anti-Ba'ath majority is Shiite? Like Iran?

That worked really well, didn't it?

A quarter-century after Iraq's invasion of Iran launched the Middle East's bloodiest modern war, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari arrived in Tehran on Saturday for a three-day visit that officials on both sides said signals a new alliance that could change the religious and political balance of power in the region.

Jafari and more than 10 other Iraqi cabinet ministers are scheduled to work with their Iranian counterparts on closer security and economic cooperation, particularly on counterterrorism, control of their porous 900-mile frontier, and oil, gas and manufacturing deals. Jafari, a Shiite Muslim who spent almost a decade of exile in Iran while President Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, is the first Iraqi head of government to visit Shiite-ruled Iran in more than a dozen years.

"This is a new chapter in relations with Iraq. In the future, we will witness a sharp change and promotion in relations," said Iran's first vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who met with Jafari after his arrival Saturday, the Associated Press reported. Jafari, in turn, said a bond with Iran was an "inseparable part of Iraq's foreign relations."

On Sunday, Jafari is scheduled to meet Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as outgoing President Mohammad Khatami and President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Iran, which President Bush dubbed one of three nations in an "axis of evil," has become Iraq's closest ally after the United States, and the countries' new relationship is a dramatic turnabout after decades of tension, highlighted by the 1980-88 war that resulted in more than a million casualties. It is a major shift even from the tentative ties established last year by the U.S.-appointed interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, which often charged that Iran was meddling in Iraq....  ¶ 12:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Next Link in the Bu$hCo Chain

Follow the Uranium

...To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it's set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself...Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

It's Frank Rich at his best.

It signals a powerful faction of the Company tires of Bu$hCo, because the Company has a Managing Editor on the Board of the Times.

Cooper's piece today in Time is reproduced in its entirety at Truthout.

As I told the grand jury--and we went over this in microscopic, excruciating detail, which may someday prove relevant--I recall calling Rove from my office at TIME magazine through the White House switchboard and being transferred to his office. I believe a woman answered the phone and said words to the effect that Rove wasn't there or was busy before going on vacation. But then, I recall, she said something like, "Hang on," and I was transferred to him. I recall saying something like, "I'm writing about Wilson," before he interjected. "Don't get too far out on Wilson," he told me. I started taking notes on my computer, and while an e-mail I sent moments after the call has been leaked, my notes have not been.

The grand jury asked about one of the more interesting lines in that e-mail, in which I refer to my conversation with Rove as being on "double super secret background," a line that's raised a few eyebrows ever since it leaked into the public domain. I told the grand jury that the phrase is not a journalistic term of art but a reference to the film Animal House, in which John Belushi's wild Delta House fraternity is placed on "double secret probation." ("Super" was my own addition.) In fact, I told the grand jury, Rove told me the conversation was on "deep background." I explained to the grand jury that I take the term to mean that I can use the material but not quote it, and that I must keep the identity of my source confidential.

Rove went on to say that Wilson had not been sent to Niger by the director of the CIA and, I believe from my subsequent e-mails--although it's not in my notes--that Rove added that Dick Cheney didn't send him either. Indeed, the next day the Vice President's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, told me Cheney had not been responsible for Wilson's mission.

Much of my grand jury session revolved around my notes and my e-mails. (Those e-mails and notes were given to the special counsel when Time Inc., over my objections, complied with a court order.) Owing to my typing, some words were a jumble. For instance, I wrote "don't get too war out on Wilson," when I clearly meant "far out." There were some words in my notes that I could not account for--at one point they read, "...notable..." I didn't know if that was Rove's word or mine, and one grand juror asked if it might mean "not able," as in "Wilson was not an able person." I said that was possible, but I just didn't recall that. The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings.

As for Wilson's wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name and that, indeed, I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak's column or Googled her, I can't recall which. Rove did, however, clearly indicate that she worked at the "agency"--by that, I told the grand jury, I inferred that he obviously meant the CIA and not, say, the Environmental Protection Agency. Rove added that she worked on "WMD" (the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction) issues and that she was responsible for sending Wilson. This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife.

Rove never once indicated to me that she had any kind of covert status. I told the grand jury something else about my conversation with Rove. Although it's not reflected in my notes or subsequent e-mails, I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, "I've already said too much." This could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else. I don't know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years.

So the chain continues on to the Office of the Vice President as Lewis Libby becomes the next focus of the investigation.

None of this crew seems inclined to do the Nixon thing and step down. Will Congress be inclined to Impeach? The one run by Tom DeLay's House and Frist's Senate? If they were, would it be possible that only Cheney gets slapped with Articles?  ¶ 6:47 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Building a Better Phaser

For you geeks out there, thanks to Defense Tech for the link.

...The main hitch early on was that ordinary lasers do too good a job at inducing ionization, which then makes the air opaque to the light beam. But more promising results have been achieved using lasers that emit extremely short pulses...

Just as Ackermann's paper was being published, an Arizona company named Ionatron demonstrated the use of laser-guided electric discharges in something it calls a "portal denial system," which can be set up in a corridor and switched on to prevent intruders from passing through. Three beams in this system create a virtual electric fence that spans the width of a hallway. Steve McCahon, Ionatron's executive vice president for technology and engineering, explains that the company's system demonstrated nonlethal levels of deterrence but "that doesn't mean you couldn't turn it up."

Are guns next? According to the boldly written claim on its Web site, "Ionatron intends to use our compact, non-lethal LIPC [laser-induced plasma-channel] technology to replace guns as the weapon of choice in close-range defense." McCahon confirms that "the thrust is extending range." Exactly how much range Ionatron has been able to achieve with such a weapon is being kept secret. And it's unclear whether the sophisticated lasers needed could ever be made very small. Still, it seems reasonable to anticipate that in the not-so-distant future, military or law-enforcement officers might be caught uttering the phrase "phasers on stun" in all seriousness.

Similar physical principles are behind a second Star Trek-like technology now coming into use, something called the "plasma window," which is the brainchild of Ady Hershcovitch, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Hershcovitch conceived of the plasma window to serve in electron-beam welding, a technique used to fashion metal welds that are narrower and deeper than what can be accomplished with conventional tools.

The chief drawback of this technique is that the electrons used for welding must be accelerated in a vacuum (just like, for example, the electrons that light up the front of a television picture tube). Hence the objects being welded together must normally be placed within a sealed chamber from which the air has been extracted. With that constraint, one cannot make welds to, say, the deck of a battleship. Even for small work pieces, pumping down the vacuum chamber each time an object is inserted is time-consuming, making this form of welding rather costly.

To get around this difficulty, some have tried a variation of electron-beam welding that has the electrons accelerated in vacuum but the welding done at atmospheric pressure. Such systems rely on bulky, energy-hungry vacuum pumps to maintain the pressure differential between the source of electrons and the work piece. So they are awkward and costly to operate. What is more, the electron beam has a troubling tendency to spread out once it passes into the air, negating the fundamental advantage of electron-beam welding in the first place. Last May, Hershcovitch and colleagues at Acceleron, a company in Connecticut licensing his invention, described in the journal Physics of Plasmas how to sidestep these problems, making electron-beam welding that much more practical.

The trick is to send the electrons out of the welder through a window that is made up of nothing more than an electric discharge channeled through a length of ionized gas—that is, a plasma. The temperature of the plasma is searing (about 15,000 kelvins), so it can counterbalance atmospheric pressure even though its density is only two percent of normal air. The low-density plasma offers little resistance to speeding electrons passing through it, making it the perfect window for an electron-beam welder...

Perfect sense to me: if a sustained pulse increases the opacity of the air to the synchronized photons, simply use a train of millisecond pulse/ recovery cycles. There's probably an optimal number of cycles depending on the atmospheric conditions, too.

Of course if this was a .mil site it'd be classified. Academics talk about things, though. But even if they didn't, anybody going to the private contractor's site could figure out what was going on- or buy into it.  ¶ 5:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Peeling the Onion

The people behind the White House Iraq Group, thanks to a post from the farmer:

The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence and a fine – this is a question of possible espionage.

What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked to Novak, and half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the leakers?

This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When
What if Karl Rove isn't guilty of knowingly leaking Valerie Plame's name as a covert CIA agent involved in nuclear proliferation issues? What if Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, is correct when he says that he's been assured by prosecutors that his client is not a target of the ongoing investigation into Plame-gate? I'm going to swim against the tide, here, and against the expectations of my readers, by suggesting that this investigation isn't about Rove – and, furthermore, that Rove is a victim, in an important sense, someone who was used and abused by the real culprits. And who are these mysterious culprits? We'll get to that in a moment, but first some background…

One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair – and I wasn't the only one – is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her maiden name? After all, most married women – even in this era of Women's Liberation – defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brief moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?

The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with a CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in tracking and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her name was made public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted to a grave breach – far more of a crime than merely violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has only had a single prosecution since its passage in 1982...

Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove.
After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from Cheney: "Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!", there was only one logical place for Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of "weapons of mass destruction" – the somewhat irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.

Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah, also worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having played a key role in all this:

"Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said. … The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."

Hannah is Cheney's Middle East policy point-man, and before that was director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle East expert Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what's under that particular rock:

"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.…"

The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the center of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the United States, with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for passing classified information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and his aide Keith Weissman, with an Israeli embassy official, chief political officer Naor Gilon, directly involved. In both cases, which involve the unlawful dissemination of sensitive U.S. secrets, the defense is claiming that "everyone does it" and that the classified information they're accused of leaking – or, in AIPAC's case, directly handing over to the Israeli government – is supposedly "common knowledge."

Treason is nothing to these people, because their real allegiance is not to the U.S., but to their own cause, which is perpetual war. Libby and Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the government. Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA headquarters, along with his boss, and, as Juan Cole writes:

"[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came – Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it."...

Read it all and follow the links.

It's not about Iraq, or Israel, or Saudi Arabia.

It's about a network of corporations propagating war as the Golden Path.  ¶ 7:36 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Hard Cop, Soft Cop, and Rummy's Buddy, Clueless Zhu

China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday.

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," the official, Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing.

General Zhu, considered a hawk, stressed that his comments reflected his personal views and not official policy. Beijing has long insisted that it will not initiate the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict.

But in extensive comments to a visiting delegation of correspondents based in Hong Kong, General Zhu said he believed that the Chinese government was under internal pressure to change its "no first use" policy and to make clear that it would employ the most powerful weapons at its disposal to defend its claim over Taiwan.

"War logic" dictates that a weaker power needs to use maximum efforts to defeat a stronger rival, he said, speaking in fluent English. "We have no capability to fight a conventional war against the United States," General Zhu said. "We can't win this kind of war."

Whether or not the comments signal a shift in Chinese policy, they come at a sensitive time in relations between China and the United States.

The Pentagon is preparing the release of a long-delayed report on the Chinese military that some experts say will warn that China could emerge as a strategic rival to the United States. National security concerns have also been a major issue in the $18.5 billion bid by Cnooc Ltd., a major Chinese oil and gas company, to purchase the Unocal Corporation, the American energy concern...

Either the Chinese General is a political novice, or he's part of the dance.

Remember, there is no Blank Check without Endless War.

The problem for the Cowboys on all sides is that they don't understand the guns they're playing with. They don't know what they don't know. And so they constantly reveal it.

The reality is with a standing army the size of the entire American population, they're better prepared for a conventional war than we are.

This is a known that Zhu acts like is an unknown.

He's not stupid or Clueless, General Zhu Chenghu, so who's he dancing with?  ¶ 10:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  More Lies for the Crusade

An Army general who has been criticized for his role in the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has contradicted his sworn congressional testimony about contacts with senior Pentagon officials.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004 that he had only filed a report on a recent visit to Abu Ghraib, and did not talk to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or his top aides about the fact-finding trip.

But in a recorded statement to attorneys three months later, Miller said he gave two of Rumsfeld's senior aides - then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone - a briefing on his visit and subsequent recommendations.

"Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone," Miller said in the statement on Aug. 21, 2004, to lawyers for guards accused of prisoner abuse, a transcript of which was obtained by the Tribune.

"I went over the report that we had developed and gave them a briefing on the intelligence activities, recommendations, and some recommendations on detention operations," Miller said.

Specific interrogation techniques, he said, were not discussed.

Miller's statement about the meeting, if true, suggests that officials at the very top of the Pentagon may have been more involved in monitoring activities at the prison than previously disclosed. Abu Ghraib was later at the center of a scandal surrounding prisoner abuse, which has led to punishments for U.S. soldiers.

Miller, Cambone and Wolfowitz, who is now acting director of the World Bank, declined to respond to written questions about Miller's contradictory statements. Rumsfeld, Cambone, Wolfowitz and Miller have denied any knowledge of prisoner abuse.

In the Aug. 21 statement, Miller says that he never spoke directly to Rumsfeld about his Abu Ghraib visit or his subsequent recommendations for new, tougher interrogation tactics there.

Miller's name came up again this week, when he was named in a military investigation made public Wednesday into FBI allegations that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were being mistreated. The report recommended that Miller be reprimanded for not monitoring the interrogation tactics used on one detainee, Mohamed al-Qahtani, who allegedly intended to be the 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot.

Miller's superior officer, Gen. Bantz Craddock, overruled the reprimand, arguing that there was no evidence that laws had been broken.

Cambone has asserted that he was not briefed by Miller after the general returned from Abu Ghraib. During his appearance on May 11, 2004, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cambone said he and Miller did not speak about Abu Ghraib after Miller's return from the September 2003 fact-finding mission.

Wolfowitz, who also testified before Congress in May 2004 about prisoner abuses, was not asked during the hearings whether he had been briefed by Miller...

Thanks to Digby for the tip. Digby also has a good read on this:

Here's the thing. After artillery officer Miller showed such pluck and spunk down at Gitmo with his novel interrogation techniques, they sent him to Iraq to see what he could do. See, the Iraqis weren't behaving like the grateful liberated people they were expected to be. He made an evaluation and then sent his "best guys" from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to implement his techniques. We have recently had it confirmed that many of the techniques authorized by Miller at Gitmo were of the same ilk as those captured in the pictures at Abu Ghraib.

And in a bizarro world decision worthy of Wil E Coyote, after the scandal broke they sent Miller in to "straighten things out."

...It looks now as if he was doing all this with the express knowledge and permission of Rumsfeld's top brass and presumably Rumsfeld himself. (Remember Rumsfeld weighed in on "interrogation" techniques in some detail --- "why shouldn't they have to stand for longer than four hours, I do!") This is not surprising either.

These guys picked a sadistic amateur to run both Gitmo and Abu Ghraib because his predecessors were insufficiently willing to "take the gloves off." This is in keeping with their over-arching theory about how to fight the War on Terror. It's worked out awfully well.

Today, we know that Bush administration loose lips are sinking ships all over the place, and their zeal to fear monger at home combined with their desire to treat the wogs with maximum ferocity has resulted in the US actively encouraging terrorism. It's a f*cking miracle we've escaped another hit, and it's no thanks to anything these clowns have done.

I know Digby would disagree, largely because it's irrational to think anyone could be this stupid, but it's all going according to the Dominionist plan.  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Theory Like Gravity or Evolution

Conspiracy theory:

Finally we've got some names. The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was in charge of "fixing the facts and the intelligence around the policy." The ringleaders are Hughes, Libby, Card, Matalin, Wilkinson, and, of course, Rove.

Joe Wilson saw it firsthand awhile back, but it's because Valerie Plame was their target. At the beginning of the Administration, Wilson was a Colin Powell State Department Republican, too. He's seen the WHIGs from both sides.

Billmon sees the diversion and the ramifications of the current crisis to the WHIG.

...if Rove isn't indicted, then the game is over -- even if a few low-level "bad apples" have to take a fall. Rove will be damaged goods, but he'll be damaged goods that still have their own office in the West Wing.

Nothing the Reptiles say about the Wilsons, and nothing we say in their defense, is going to change that. What's more, Left Blogostan doesn't have nearly enough collective firepower to protect them. Joe Biden and the Republocrats aren't even going to try. So it's really up to the corporate press to decide whether it will let itself be used, once again, as Rove's political vegomatic (It slices! dices! grates! etc.)

In the end, it probably will -- even if some of the cutting edges on the vegomatic are a little pissed right now at the shoddy treatment they've been getting. The institutional pressures are just too strong...

Since the main$tream media is owned by the same robber barons that own Bu$hCo, there may be some noise to sell the corporate product about the accusations, but the drama of it all as Patriot Rove emerges Righteous will sell nicely too.  ¶ 7:56 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Spelled Out Again for the Main$tream

Krugman:

...What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.

Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering...

Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.

And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.

But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.  ¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Protecting Al Qaeda's Interests Worldwide

From AmericaBlog:
Bush admin may be responsible for botching effort to thwart London bombing

ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year.

1. The London bombers, per ABC, are connected to an Al Qaeda plot planned two years ago in Lahore, Pakistan.

2. Pakistani authorities recovered the laptop of a captured Al Qaeda leader, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, on July 13, 2004. On that laptop, they found plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway. According to an expert interviewed by ABC, "there is absolutely no doubt that Khan was part of a worldwide Al Qaeda operation, not just in the United States but also in Great Britain and throughout the west."

3. ABC reports that names in the computer matched a suspected cell of Britain's of Pakistani decent, many of who lived near the town of Luton, England. According to ABC, authorities thought they had stopped the subway plot with the arrest of more than a dozen people last year. Obviously, they hadn't.

4. Those arrests were the arrests that the Bush administration botched by announcing a heightened security alert the week of the Democratic Convention. Because the US let the cat out of the bag, the media got a hold of Khan's name, his Al Qaeda contacts found out he was co-opted, and they fled. The Brits had to have a high speed chase to catch some of them as they fled, and, according to press reports, the Brits and Pakistanis both fear that some slipped away.

Again, these were guys involved with the plot to blow up the London subway last week. Some may have escaped because of Bush administration negligence...

Read it all, for links to Juan Cole on this, and stories from CNN and the NY Daily News from when the leak happened in the summer of '04.

Atrios has more.

Lambert at Corrente has been all over this for awhile.

Now do I think this will be enough for Rove to resign? In a rational world, yes, but Bu$hCo is not reality-based. They're busy making the reality they want.

That reality is their Dominion, and by the time most realize it, there will be nothing most can do about it.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Hubri$

Bolton May Accept Recess Appointment
Stalemate Continues on U.N. Nomination

John R. Bolton's nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations was the hottest issue in Congress a few months ago. But it has virtually evaporated this summer, eclipsed by speculation over a Supreme Court nominee and the fate of the president's top political adviser.

With neither the White House nor Senate Democrats showing any sign of yielding in their long-running dispute over documents related to Bolton's State Department work, speculation is rife that Bolton is prepared to accept a recess appointment good through the end of 2006, despite warnings from some GOP senators that it would weaken his influence and effectiveness...

"He'll take the recess" appointment, said the administration source, who is familiar with Bolton's thinking. "The president has made his selection, and the president is asking the Senate to confirm the selection, and if the Senate refuses to do that, then most assuredly [Bush] will make a recess appointment."

The president is constitutionally empowered to fill vacancies when the Senate is in recess, and the appointments are effective through the final adjournment of the sitting Congress...

Bolton? He's going to go to the U.N. anyway.

Rove? There is no Bu$hCo without him. Or Cheney. Or Rumsfeld. Or a dozen others, who will not back down, because if they don't hang together, separately they will be hung by a court of law.

There's no rational reason for me to think this, just a hunch.

The gunboats are circling Ft. Sumpter.

Darth Cheney is worried about the security of the Wrepublic.

Look for a big one, and martial law soon, if they can't get Gonzales to fire Fitzgerald legally.  ¶ 10:34 PM 1 comments links to this post

  If It Ain't Broke, Don't De-regulate It

Molly Ivins says There Goes the Electrical Grid:

The trouble with deregulation is that it always takes some disaster like Enron before we realize there was a reason for the regulation to begin with.

We are about to repeat one of the huge mistakes of the 1920s and '30s because we have forgotten why PUHCA (pronounced Pooka) was instituted in the first place. PUHCA is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, passed in 1935, which prevents concentration of ownership of power plants. Both the House and Senate versions of the energy bill contain a repeal of PUHCA.

As Kelpie Wilson pointed out in an article for Truthout, "For 50 years we have had reliable, cheap electric power that has allowed strong economic growth, and no PUHCA-regulated energy holding company has ever gone broke."

PUHCA was partially repealed in the '90s, and even that much deregulation was part of what led to Enron, Westar and other slight mishaps.

PUHCA puts utilities under strict regulation by both state and federal governments. It restricts ownership of utilities to public or private companies that are in the business of producing power.

The most likely candidates to take over power companies are the big oil companies, now awash in cash. There goes the electrical grid: Why fix it when you can charge more for doing nothing?

Lynn Hargis, an attorney who spent 10 years at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and is now with Public Citizen, says repeal means a repeat of the same dreary mistakes. In the 1920s, three huge companies owned half of the nation's power plants and built them into speculative power-holding companies that used the reliable money from utilities for flights of fancy in the stock market.

When you are paying your electric bill to Exxon/Mobil, Halliburton or some Chinese firm, you will see why this is a monumentally bad idea...

Read it all.  ¶ 1:40 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Conspiracy Fact

A classic piece of CIA disinformation was a pornographic movie made in the 1960s with an actor pretending to be President Sukarno of Indonesia. It was meant to undermine Mr. Sukarno with Muslims.

The subject of disinformation is back with a report that it was one of the tools considered by the Pentagon's short-lived Office of Strategic Influence. The office circulated classified proposals for aggressive campaigns using the foreign media to improve America's standing abroad.

History teaches that this kind of "black" propaganda cannot be confined to the foreign media. In 1986, national security adviser John Poindexter wrote for President Reagan a "disinformation program" aimed at destabilizing Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi by false reports in the foreign press about an impending conflict between the two countries.

But the false information reached an American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal - a phenomenon known in the trade as "blowback."

And, with no effort by the White House to steer it away from the phony story, the Journal headlined that Libya and the United States were on a collision course. Soon, the Poindexter memo was revealed in The Washington Post, and in the ensuing flap about a policy of lies, Bernard Kalb resigned as assistant secretary of State...

... in Salt Lake City, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "The Pentagon is not issuing disinformation to the foreign press or any other press," and he gave assurance that "what we tell the public is accurate and correct."

Maybe that rules out disinformation as a policy.

But, then how do we know?

Guess who knowingly released this into media for the Party?

I wonder how much money she's made over the years doing this? Or is that Classified? And is that fact, and who paid her, why she went to prison rather than talk?

Thanks to rorschach for the link.  ¶ 7:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Coincidence Detector

SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2005
CRISIS PLANNING
When there is an emergency like the London bombings, the public instinctively turns to professionals for help. We speak to two experts who are in Toronto today for the World Conference on Disaster Management. Adrian Gordon is the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness, and Peter Power is Managing Director of a London-based consulting firm that specializes in crisis management, Visor Consultants - which on the morning of July 7 was co-incidentally running a security exercise for a private firm, simulating multiple bomb explosions in the London Underground, at the same stations that were subsequently attacked in real life.

Note: temporary link. You have to pay for a transcript.

Thanks to Rigorous Intuition for the link.

This may get me banned in some places, but once again, Jeff Wells has some disturbing points to make. Like kos, I will say that many of Jeff's untestable ideas do not seem grounded in reality.

Then again, mine don't either, possibly because I test everything I can. My untestable ideas can be quite radical. Perhaps the difference is I don't take my untestable ideas seriously.

Many of Jeff Wells' testable ideas are good questions.

Count on Oliver Stone using Jeff's Coincidence Theorists Guide to 9/11 for his upcoming storyline.

Let's ask a question here: is someone, in a position to observe, setting attacks like 9/11 and the London bombing into motion at a time when emergency personnel would be likely to discount them as part of a drill?  ¶ 10:29 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Bolton-Rove-Plame Connection

Steve Clemmons may have the right idea:

I would like some of you in the intelligence industry to send me notes as to whatever you might know -- or might have an educated guess -- regarding the likelihood that such a brief, held by Powell, would have come from the Bolton/Fleitz shop.

Fleitz continued to hold a CIA portfolio while working at State as Bolton's acting Chief of Staff. He is clearly the person who empowered Bolton's abilities to cherry-pick intelligence and to outmaneuver on some occasions and intimidate other State Department intelligence analysts.

Henry Waxman, in March 2005, sent Chris Shays a letter documenting concerns about Bolton's office's role in promulgating the Niger/Uranium story in the administration. Bolton tried to cover his tracks as this post on TWN works through -- but there may be links to the Rove/Plame story that are worth sniffing out. Any assistance from intel observers would be helpful however.

One thing that bothers me about the potential link is that Fitzgerald has not sought to subpoena or interview either John Bolton or Fred Fleitz. He's a smart guy -- and if there was a connection between Bolton and Plame -- one would think we would have seen inclusion of these personalities in the grand jury investigation.

Alternatively, Fitzgerald might not want to stampede Bolton or Fleitz- yet.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Bu$hCo Continues to Hire the Best Money Can Buy

Confessed Iran-Contra Figure Lands Sensitive Pentagon Post

Robert Earl, who helped in the failed coverup of the '80s scandal, is now chief of staff to Gordon England, acting deputy secretary of Defense.

In 1987, Robert L. Earl told a grand jury that he had destroyed and stolen national security documents while working for Lt. Col. Oliver L. North during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Now, he sits in one of the most coveted offices in the Pentagon as chief of staff to Gordon R. England, acting deputy secretary of Defense. Earl has clearance to review the kinds of classified documents he once destroyed.

As England goes through his Senate confirmation process, his hiring of Earl has drawn criticism from government ethics watchdogs. But congressional sources said it was unlikely to affect support for England, who was popular on Capitol Hill but whose nomination was tied up over an arcane financial rule.

President Bush nominated England to replace Paul D. Wolfowitz, who left the deputy secretary's post this spring to head the World Bank.

England's chief of staff is the latest figure from the Iran-Contra scandal to play a role in the Bush administration.

Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras during the Reagan administration, serves on Bush's National Security Council as head of the Mideast bureau.

Retired Adm. John M. Poindexter, who as national security advisor under Reagan also was implicated in the scandal, has periodically served as a consultant to the Pentagon.

The Iran-Contra case involved the U.S. supplying arms to Iran as part of a complicated deal to fund anti-Sandinista Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Congress had forbidden direct U.S. aid to the Contras.

A report to Congress by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh stated: "Earl attempted to conceal evidence regarding the arms sales to Iran and the diversion of profits…. He destroyed [National Security Council] documents, assisted North in the destruction of documents … and made false statements to the FBI."

He was granted immunity for his testimony in the Reagan administration's most damaging scandal and was never prosecuted.

Common Cause spokeswoman Mary Boyle noted that some of President Clinton's nominees got into trouble for hiring illegal immigrants for domestic work.

Boyle said of Earl: "Allowing this guy to become the chief of staff to England sends a message … that paying your nanny under the table is grounds not to get a job, but deceiving the FBI and destroying documents will get you a job."

Thanks to Laura Rozen for the link.  ¶ 10:17 PM 3 comments links to this post

  It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

Steve Clemmons seems a little premature:

Perhaps the Bush administration is trying to send a signal to Mr. Bolton that he should withdraw his name.

TWN believes that time has come. There are better candidates to send to the United Nations, and Mr. Bolton can only harm American interests by going to the U.N. by way of recess appointment. This would send a tremendously negative message to the rest of the world.

Many Republicans in the Senate would be seriously disturbed as well because this really would harm the standing of America in a valuable international institution.

There are now so many complicating factors building that the White House can ill afford to allow this nomination-ulcer to keep bleeding.

The White House must deal with Karl Rove's complicity in the Valerie Plame outing. This issue could easily backfire on President Bush who -- at the time -- demanded to know who the villain among his staff was who would compromise American national security by this petty and vindictive exposure of Plame's CIA identity.

The administration also has three weeks to push through a mountain -- a real huge pile -- of important appropriations bills and other legislation that it hopes to get through before the August recess, which will probably mark the definitive beginning of Bush's lame duck presidency.

On top of that, the battle over Sandra Day O'Connor's seat is only just beginning -- and will dominate the news for the weeks ahead.

And yet on top of that drama, we have a major terrorist attack in London -- another tremendous tragedy. That too will take attention and time and calls for the White House to send a constructive, bridge-building personality to the U.N. to strengthen the league of those who stand against this type of violence and want to build an "ideology of hope," to use President Bush's words.

The White House's intense obsession with winning all battles at nearly any cost -- which so offends moderates in both parties -- will undo its larger goals, and Bolton is the most obvious battle for Bush to concede if he hopes to maintain support from moderates and not whip those Democrats who smell blood into a tenacious, obstructionist fury.

Are we talking about the same group of people? Headed by Joes Lieberman and Biden?

What you haven't learned about Bu$hCo is their realization there's no going back.

There have been serious crimes committed by this administration, and as long as Bolton remains a committed soldier, they will continue to push him through. As a matter of Principle, if unscrupulous scoundrels can be said to have principles beyond hoisting the Jolly Roger. They realize they have to have Total Victory or many of them will end up in jail. That, and the Blank Check for Endless War has to keep coming in to keep up the bar tab.

Similarly, there's a lot of joy among us about the revelation of the Rove-Cooper link in the Plame affair.

But look at what's being said here:

In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

In this communication Rove is simply advising caution about something Cooper and apparently many people in Washington already knew: of the Wilson-Plame marriage, Plame was the real Company cowboy, Wilson was simply the official front.

Note the communique itself works as dis information to insist the non existent weapons were there and that Plame-Wilson were acting on their own.

Even though Wilson had State Department orders to check it out, Rove is insisting Plame overran her course and acted outside of orders from Tenet.

Tenet, enjoying his Medal of Freedom and doubtless Company fringe benefits will doubtless testify in support of Rove, because these days the Group owns the Company.  ¶ 7:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Bombing the Subway in Order to Save It

Thanks to granny, a link from the Nov. 5 2002 Asia Times:

"Run away from the light": Such might be the motto of a new, covert policy that the Bush administration is considering implementing. According to recent news reports, it would be the largest expansion into the world of black ops and covert action since the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

And that's saying quite a lot, considering that since Vietnam the Pentagon has not exactly been dormant in this area.

As well-known military analyst William Arkin pointed out in an October 27 column in the Los Angeles Times, the development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the US intelligence community, and follow through with covert military action. Today, it operates under the code name Grey Fox. In Afghanistan it operated alongside the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) paramilitary Special Activities Division and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command...

I think Ollie North headed that, right?

... Yet the Pentagon wants more. Its Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a 2002 "Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism". Excerpts from that study, dated August 16, were leaked and obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, which posted them on their website. The report was produced by a 10-member panel of military experts that included Vice Admiral William O Studeman, former director of the National Security Agency...

... Although the study is filled with lots of the usual buzzwords and phrases that Pentagon planners love, such as "robust connectivity, agile ground forces, adaptive joint command and control and discriminant use of force", one thing that does stand out is its call for "preemption/proaction/interdiction/disruption/quick-response capabilities".

This is consistent with the administration’s new National Security Strategy, which called for preemption; indeed, since the DSB study preceded the release of the strategy, it is possible that the strategy was written to incorporate some of its aspects.

The study urges the Pentagon to "take the terrorist threat as seriously as it takes the likelihood and consequences of major theater war", urging officials to launch secret missions and intelligence operations to penetrate and disrupt terrorist cells abroad. Some of those operations should be aimed at signaling to countries that harbor terrorists that "their sovereignty will be at risk".

...It recommends the creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception. For example, the Pentagon and CIA would work together to increase human intelligence (HUMINT) forward/operational presence and to deploy new clandestine technical capabilities.

To bolster government HUMINT capabilities, the task force advances the idea of an intelligence "surge/unsurge" capability - a "robust, global cadre of retirees, reservists and others who are trained and qualified to serve on short notice, including expatriates". This group could be pressed into service during times of crisis.

P2OG would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to "quick-response" attacks by US forces. The means by which it would do this is the far greater use of special operations forces.

Responsibility and accountability for the P2OG would be vested in a "Special Operations Executive" in the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC would plan operations but not oversee their execution in order to avoid comparisons to past abuses, such as the Iran-Contra operations run out of the NSC by Oliver North during the Reagan administration. Under the board's proposal, NSC plans would be executed by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Costs would include developing new means to enable "deep penetration of adversaries" ($1.7 billion annually); exercises and gaming ($100 million annually); development of technical capabilities and the hiring of 500 new staff ($800 million annually); establishment of centers of excellence to handle increased workload ($500 million annually); and expansion of the Joint Forces net assessment activity ($100 million annually). The total cost is envisaged as $3.3 billion.

The DSB study also provides tantalizing glimpses of new capabilities already in the works, referring to new high-tech sensors in development that would enable the United States more closely to track the movements of vehicles or even individuals by satellite. Some of these capabilities are already advanced, such as high-altitude airships, thermobaric weapons and improved urban assault capabilities. Other new projects are being executed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

If the DSB proposal is adopted, it would only reinforce recent Pentagon activity. The Washington Post reported last month that the Pentagon was preparing to consolidate control of most of the global war on terrorism under the US Special Operations Command...

Just sayin', but does a terrorist strike on a London line between two predominantly Arab neighborhoods represented by George Galloway precipitate action or result from precipitation among terrorist cells?

Does it keep Dear Leader from answering difficult questions at the G-8 summit?

Like maybe questions regarding climate change the NOAA has lost the funds to warn us about anymore?

Like whether the record number of tropical storms this early in the season or the Level 4 hurricane bearing down on the Gulf at this moment are related to fossil fuel generated climate change?

One thing's for sure: after the attack, nobody's griping about the weather anymore.  ¶ 9:44 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Bu$hie's Kanny Knew Know Such Agency Head

Amidst the unexpected inevitable retirement of O'Connor, the Great Patrotic Festival of Bursting Bombs in Air last weekend, the mayhem of the Olympic Choice, and the general panic over the bombs bursting on the ground for real in London today, most of what passes for media has neglected to report that Bu$hCo has nominated a new Director for the National Security Agency.

The agency has been without a director since mid-April, when Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden left to become the first deputy director of national intelligence. That is the longest vacancy for the top post in the spy agency's history, said Matthew Aid, who is writing a history of NSA.

Alexander, a newcomer to the agency, was selected with the approval of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, and despite apparent reservations of Alexander's predecessor...

One of the programs, known as Ground Breaker, is an internal effort to upgrade NSA's computer systems, to improve communications with each other and other government agencies. A second initiative, Trail Blazer, is geared toward modernizing NSA's eavesdropping methods, so they can better track newer communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail...

Earlier, as head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., Alexander oversaw the flow of intelligence from Iraq and Afghanistan...

... a 1974 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he holds four master's degrees, including master of science degrees in electronic warfare and national security strategy from the Naval Post Graduate School and the National War College, respectively. He also earned a master's degree in business administration at Boston University.

I guess we're all entitled to a mistake or three. Some of us seem more entitled than others. Being a long time team player doubtless helps.

What exactly is the NSA?

According to the Wikipedia,

The National Security Agency / Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is a United States government agency responsible for both the collection and analysis of message communications, and for the security of government communications against similar agencies elsewhere. It is a part of the Department of Defense. Its eavesdropping brief includes radio broadcasting, both from organizations and individuals, the Internet, and other intercepted forms of communication, especially confidential communications. Its secure communications brief includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications. Despite having been described as the world's largest single employer of Ph.D. mathematicians, the owner of the single largest group of supercomputers, and having a budget much larger than that of the CIA, it has had a remarkably low profile until recent years. For a long time its existence was not even admitted by the US government. It has even been referred to as "No Such Agency." ...

NSA/CSS, in combination with the equivalent agencies in the United Kingdom (Government Communications Headquarters), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate), and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), and otherwise known as the UKUSA group, is believed to be responsible for, among other things, the operation of the ECHELON system. Its capabilities are suspected to include the ability to monitor a large proportion of the world's transmitted civilian telephone, fax and data traffic...

In the past, there have been alleged instances of improper violations of USSID 18 that occurred in violation of the NSA's strict charter prohibiting such acts. In addition, ECHELON is considered with indignation by citizens of countries outside the UKUSA alliance, with widespread suspicion that the United States government uses it for motives other than its national security, including political and industrial espionage. The chartered purpose of the NSA/CSS is solely to acquire significant foreign intelligence information pertaining to National Security or ongoing military intelligence operations...

So Dear Leader nominated one Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander to head what has to be the only legitimate competitor for Bill Gates in the world.

Alexander is serving as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence/G-2, the service’s top intelligence official...

Alexander became the Army’s top intelligence official in 2003 after serving as commanding general of the service’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He graduated from West Point and holds three master’s degrees in physics, business administration and systems technology.

If confirmed as NSA’s director and chief of its Central Security Service, Alexander will oversee the ultra-secretive intelligence agency whose traditional mission has been making and breaking codes and eavesdropping on foreign governments’ communications. In addition, he will direct NSA's growing activities involving computer network defense and attack under the U.S. Strategic Command.

Aside from his academic and INSCOM credentials, Alexander was apparently the boss of the boss of the boys and girls at Abu Ghirab.

Despite having all those newfangled toys his posse does seem to use downright midieval methods for information gathering. Maybe that's what made him appeal so much to Negroponte and Rumsfeld. He doubtless has a strong feeling for tradition.

And what I said about MSN competing with the NSA? Don't worry your head about it.  ¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Information Hegemony

Lambert at Corrente has some good recent posts on the disinformation strategery of Bu$hCo.

The Farmer remembers some details about the secret wars and "perception management" during the Reagan years.

One of the worst things Bu$hCo has done is to bring all discussion of facts to a "he said- she said" level, while playing Calvinball with the data. From evolution to the environment, from mercury to Mars, nothing is sacred to Bu$hCo except the needs of the moment.

Billmon among others have noted how Orwellian these tendencies are.

The best you can say about the situation is that it seems to be a recurrent dilemma.

While this has been a problem in the past, the scale of the current situation can only be called Texan.

When the State owns the information sources, it's bad enough in the old Soviet way. When the Company owns both the State and the Media, it's Morning in America, and the Boss is always right. Until, of course, the Management changes.  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Because the Faster It Goes Around, the Faster It Comes Around

In his June 28 speech, President Bush asserted that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken as part of "a global war against terror" that the United States is waging. In reality, as anticipated, the invasion increased the threat of terror, perhaps significantly.

Half-truths, misinformation and hidden agendas have characterised official pronouncements about US war motives in Iraq from the very beginning. The recent revelations about the rush to war in Iraq stand out all the more starkly amid the chaos that ravages the country and threatens the region and indeed the world.

In 2002 the US and United Kingdom proclaimed the right to invade Iraq because it was developing weapons of mass destruction. That was the "single question," as stressed constantly by Bush, Prime Minister Blair and associates. It was also the sole basis on which Bush received congressional authorisation to resort to force.

The answer to the "single question" was given shortly after the invasion, and reluctantly conceded: The WMD didn't exist. Scarcely missing a beat, the government and media doctrinal system concocted new pretexts and justifications for going to war.

...The Downing Street memo, published on May 1 in The Sunday Times of London, along with other newly available confidential documents, have deepened the record of deceit.

The memo came from a meeting of Blair's war cabinet on July 23, 2002, in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, made the now-notorious assertion that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war in Iraq.

The memo also quotes British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime."

British journalist Michael Smith, who broke the story of the memo, has elaborated on its context and contents in subsequent articles. The "spikes of activity" apparently included a coalition air campaign meant to provoke Iraq into some act that could be portrayed as what the memo calls a "casus belli."

Warplanes began bombing in southern Iraq in May 2002 — 10 tons that month, according to British government figures. A special "spike" started in late August (for a September total of 54.6 tons).

"In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq," Smith wrote.

The willingness of top planners to risk increase of terrorism does not of course indicate that they welcome such outcomes. Rather, they are simply not a high priority in comparison with other objectives, such as controlling the world's major energy resources.

Because controlling the world's energy resources brings oh-so-much more money into the Company than developing energy alternatives that everyone can use.

Thanks to rorsach for the link.  ¶ 10:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Strategery for a Change in the Weather

A few months ago this little ballon floated out of the Pentagram Pentagon.

...weather forecasters are giving us the biggest "Uncertain" in history. They say that there might, just might, be a catastrophic climate change in the next few decades. Global warming might suddenly trigger a massive global cooling.

They've heard this forecast in the Pentagon, too. So they are drawing up contingencies plans for the worst case scenario: a long era of deep freeze, raging storms, and massive drought that leaves billions of people struggling for the necessities of life.

This is no secret. Fortune magazine just published a summary of the report. What you can read there may seem perfectly sensible or perfectly insane. It all depends on your basic assumptions.

The Pentagon planners assume that the future cannot be any different from the past. "History shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid." So we must assume that, after the great climate change, "an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies... Warfare may again come to define human life." Or so they hope in the secret councils of the Pentagram Pentagon. In the past, the report notes, wars killed about 25% of each side's adult males. This time, though, a dozen or more nations might have nuclear weapons, and "nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable."

But is anything in human life "inevitable"? Couldn't we decide to do it different this time? Why not start planning for global cooperation rather than competition? Apparently, this possibility is off the Pentagon's radar screen. In the past, scarcity usually made nations compete, not cooperate. Safest to bet that the future will be just like the past. Is that crazy? Or is it just common sense?

Of course, what looks crazy in one place can look like common sense somewhere else. If you are in a weak little country, hunkering down to weather the global storm might seem crazy. But this is the greatest military power in world history talking.

The Pentagon report does say we should "explore ways to offset abrupt cooling." But that is only a minor theme. Mostly it urges us to take care of Number One and keep the U.S. Number One, through an era of death and suffering beyond our wildest imaginings.

"The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations," the report says reassuringly. The U.S. has more "wealth, technology, and abundant resources" (not to mention military hardware). "That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America."

Finger-pointing is the least of it, in the Pentagon's vision of a catastrophic future: "Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources." U.S. borders are "strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands -- waves of boat people pose especially grim problems." ...

This morning, of course, there was a little press release.

As usual, it's mixed here not quite the way Pravda might like.

..."what we need for conventional victory is different from what we need for fighting insurgents, and fighting insurgents has relatively little connection to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. We can't afford it all."

Guess what Bu$hCo wants to drop. And it isn't fighting the insurgents who happen to have a more legitimate claim to their country's oil and future than Halliburton.

The Pentagon's most senior planners are challenging the longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at a time. Instead, they are weighing whether to shape the military to mount one conventional campaign while devoting more resources to defending American territory and antiterrorism efforts...

What's this American territory stuff?

...An official designation of a counterterrorism role and a shift to a strategy that focuses on domestic defense would have a huge impact on the size and composition of the military.

In a nutshell, strategies that order the military to be prepared for two wars would argue for more high-technology weapons, in particular warplanes. An emphasis on one war and counterterrorism duties would require lighter, more agile forces - perhaps fewer troops, but more Special Operations units - and a range of other needs, such as intelligence, language and communications specialists.

Civilian and military officials are trying to decide to what degree to acknowledge that operations like the continuing presence in Iraq - not a full-blown conventional war, but a prolonged commitment - may be such a burden that it would not be possible to also fight two full-scale campaigns elsewhere...

After years of saying American forces were sufficient for a two-war strategy, "we've come to the realization that we're not," said another Defense Department official involved in the deliberations, who was granted anonymity because he could not otherwise discuss the talks, which are classified. "It's coming to grips with reality."

Senior leaders are trying to develop strategies that will do a better job of addressing the requirements of antiterrorism and domestic defense, while acknowledging that future American wars will most likely be irregular - against urban guerrillas and insurgents - rather than conventional...

So, you just wonder exactly where besides Iraq are we going to be fighting urban guerillas?

Do you ever get the feeling the plans of the Pentagram Pentagon are so arcane that the Planners really don't know what they are?

But that some how Big Time Dick is going to get a cut?  ¶ 9:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  On Independence Day

Not Dominion, but Liberty

... America was founded in opposition to empire. The Declaration of Independence was a manifesto against colonialism. And the founding generations abhorred imperialism.

Their opposition to empire was not merely rooted in their own bitter experience. It was, as well, rooted in a faith that American freedoms and democracy would suffer if the nation embarked upon a career of empire.

So, while Bush suggests that other lands must be occupied to preserve liberty at home, the patriots of our time will do well to recall words spoken on another July 4...

"... Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

"But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

"She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

"She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

"She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

"She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

"The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....

"She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....

"[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."

Thanks to Truthout for the link.  ¶ 4:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Killer Klown Klassification

Increase in the Number of Documents Classified by the Government

Driven in part by fears of terrorism, government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like "sensitive security information."

A record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Meanwhile, the declassification process, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990's, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year.

The increasing secrecy - and its rising cost to taxpayers, estimated by the office at $7.2 billion last year - is drawing protests from a growing array of politicians and activists, including Republican members of Congress, leaders of the independent commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks and even the top federal official who oversees classification...

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the failure to prevent the 2001 attacks was rooted not in leaks of sensitive information but in the barriers to sharing information between agencies and with the public.

"You'd just be amazed at the kind of information that's classified - everyday information, things we all know from the newspaper," Mr. Kean said. "We're better off with openness. The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public."

With just about every Top Secret Star Wars Death Ray Cylon device easily found on the DARPA website and every Top Secret lab in the country depending on Chinese nationals to do their most sophisticated work, the Top Secret designation really only hides the details from Americans. Every other government in the world already knows what America has. The Saudis bankroll and own big chunks of the Defense industry, so Osama knows too.

But the ultra cool Alien Tripod Laser weapons Darth Rumsfeld wants aren't the reason for the increase in Classified material.

The increase is due in large part to the dire needs of the Vice President, a Presidential Advisor, and others to cover their tracks.

The motivations get murkier the more you look at them.

But once again, how can you classify what you've been bragging about the whole time?  ¶ 8:14 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Use the "King of Pain" Setting

For years, the Air Force and the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate have been working on the Active Denial System, or ADS. It's a real-life ray gun which shoots 95 GHz millimeter waves. They penetrate a 64th of inch beneath the skin, where nerve receptors are concentrated. And when the waves hit, they produce an "intense heating sensation [which] stops only if the individual moves out of the beam’s path or the beam is turned off," a Sandia press release explains. "The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan."

It's a pretty damn persuasive way to get people to clear out of the way. And unlike, say, an M-16 fired into a mob, the beam's only lasting effects seem to be bad memories. No wonder folks are calling ADS "the Holy Grail of crowd control."

Raytheon has built a Humvee-mounted model, which is currently being tested before a likely trip to Iraq. The Air Force is developing an airborne version of the pain ray.

And those are doubtless the lowest settings.

This would be why a laser would be a lousy weapon, particularly in night situations with a high degree of smoke or fog, where a coherent visible light path would be both dissipated and tracable.

It's hard to use a weapon that gives away your position.

On the other hand, microwaves are invisible.

Of course, the Pentagram Pentagon will doubtless Classify this for National Security purposes at the same time they brag about it along with the Raytheon sales reps, who are doubtless also getting a good price for the technology from the Chinese, the Russians, the British, the French, and the Germans.

The Japanese doubtless have a smaller more efficient model they built ten years ago for their Godzilla flicks.

The North Koreans already bought theirs from the Pakistanis who obtained the plans from bin Laden and bin Talal.  ¶ 8:17 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Sing, Karl, Sing

Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

This raises some interesting possibilities.

Let's go to Digby's post and comments to examine a few.


Karl Rove couldn't have known on his own Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent. Somebody would have had to leak it to him, so the scandal might well spread to many, many others. I wonder if the rot from this case alone could implode the WH.

You'd think. But there's always this:

Oh, puhleeze. It's not like he lied about sex or anything...

These guys truly just don't think this is a very important crime. That's all. Not a crime like getting a hummer, that is. Don't expect to see Rove doing the perp walk. (I hope I'm wrong.)

There you have it, in a nutshell. Unlike the situation the last time a fascist ran the White House, the main$tream media is owned by the same groups that own the White House itself. Even if perjury or other charges result for Gannon's boyfriend, the squelch is turned up on your radios.

A very big tree is falling in the forest, and there will be every effort to keep any attempt at a revolution from being televised.

If you in fact do hear it, and tell anyone, Negroponte will have your name on his list for future reference.

Will this administration pardon itself for National Security reasons?

Dear Leader's clothes remain immaculate.  ¶ 7:01 AM 0 comments links to this post

  What Big Al Says

What Iraq needs is a Walter Cronkite

President Bush went on the air this week to pretend again that things are OK in Iraq. Shades of President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam nearly 40 years ago.

The most important similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is that both Democratic and Republican presidents lied to us in wartime. To refresh your memory, here's how we got out of the Vietnam quagmire:

• Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV news anchor known as "the most trusted man in America," after a combat tour of Vietnam in 1968 declared, "There is no way this war can be justified any longer."

• Johnson lamented to aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." He announced he would not run for re-election.

The crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that there is no Cronkite to call Bush's bluff. Without a strong, trusted, non-political voice, too many of us remain Bush-blinded. Bush tried keeping the wool over our eyes again Tuesday on national TV by repeatedly tying Iraq to 9/11. That charge is as phony as his discredited prewar claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Most of us who have had personal war experiences strongly believe this great country is worth fighting for at risk of lives. My World War II Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman's Badge on the wall behind my desk remind me of that daily.

They also remind me that war is hell, that we must fully support our servicemen and women and put their lives at risk only for honest and just and noble causes.

That's why I'm convinced the best way to support our troops in Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later.

I absolutely agree.

And maybe it's found one, or at least someone smart enough to realize the honest reporting of the facts is good for the news business.

Thanks to Atrios for the tip.  ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Birds of a Feather

Via Eschaton from Kos:

Fox spins it for the poor mercenary, hated by the U.S troops around him.

Kos says

This unaccountable mercenary, profiting from the misery of war, whines that the US Army hates him. Well they do -- these "security contractors" act as they're not beholden to any laws, they shoot at our troops, they make more money in a month or two than many soldiers make in a year, and their cowboy antics generate resentment and put our troops in even greater risk.

Gilliard says:

"Mercenaries have no rights under the laws of war. The colonel is under no obligation to help a rich mercenary live in safety. If Iraq is too dangerous for him, he has the option that every 11B would love to have. He can go home. The Colonel can't, the MP's manning the guardposts can't. The Trauma nurses can't. But he can go home at any time of his choosing."

Of course our soldiers hate them, regardless how much the wingers might idolize and defend them.

Our soldiers hate paid killers? Best news I've had all day. Even though Dear Leader and his cronies are a pack of crooked liars, it's good to know there are people in our government- and soldiers are the arms of our government- who have their heads in the right place.  ¶ 9:22 AM 0 comments links to this post