You'd Think, Wouldn't You?

Democrats: It’s the War
By Dennis Kucinich

Ending the war in Iraq is right for a lot of reasons. The war was unjustified, unnecessary and unprovoked. It is counterproductive, strengthening al-Qaeda and weakening the moral authority of the United States. It is deadly: Many Americans, and many, many more Iraqis, have been killed or injured as a result of the fighting. And it is costly: Well over $250 billion in taxpayer funds have already been spent, with no end in sight.

It is also increasingly unpopular. For all these reasons, plus the increased spotlight that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita put on how much the war is draining resources desperately needed at home, Democrats should clearly call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. If Democrats do not make this the centerpiece of their campaign in 2006, they risk repeating recent history, in which they failed to recover seats in the House and Senate.

National Democratic leaders have already tried, and tried again, to ignore the war, and it didn’t work politically. During the 2002 election cycle, when Democrats felt they had historical precedent on their side—the president’s party always loses seats in the mid-term election—the Democratic leadership in Congress cut a deal with the president to bring the war resolution to a vote, and appeared with him in a Rose Garden ceremony. “Let no light show” between Democrats and President Bush on foreign policy was the leadership’s strategy, and it yielded a historic result: For the first time since Franklin Roosevelt, a president increased his majorities in both houses of Congress during a recession.

Then, in 2004, with the president vulnerable on the war, the Democratic Party again sacrificed the opportunity to distinguish itself from Bush. Members avoided the issue of withdrawal from Iraq in the Party platform, omitted it from campaign speeches and deleted it from the national convention.

Why is it an unconscionable political blunder to sweep the war and occupation of Iraq under the rug? Because the war is one of the most potent political scandals of all time, and it has energized grassroots activity all over the country.

President Bush led the country into war based on false information, falsified threats and a fictitious estimate of the consequences. His war and the continuing occupation transformed Iraq into a training ground for jihadists who want to kill Americans, and a cause célèbre for stoking resentment in the Muslim world.

Bush’s war and occupation squandered the abundant good will felt by the world for America after our 9/11 losses. He enriched his cronies at Halliburton and other private interests through the occupation. And he diverted our attention and abilities away from apprehending the masterminds of the 9/11 attack. Instead, we are mired in an occupation which has already cost over 2,000 American lives and the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The issue of the war clearly distinguishes what is wrong with Republican rule. Republicans in Congress won’t extricate the United States from the quagmire the president has gotten us into. They have refused to investigate what role the White House played in manipulating pre-war intelligence. They refused to investigate the Downing Street memo. Democrats, on the other hand, mostly voted against the war: Two-thirds of House Democrats and half of Senate Democrats opposed the war in Iraq. Democrats can draw no clearer distinction with the president and the Republican Congress than over this war.

Every major poll confirms that the war is a loser for the president and his party. Consider one of the most prominent: The ABC/Washington Post poll, which has surveyed public opinion on the war regularly since March 2003. Responses to all pertinent key questions clearly show eroding support for the war. Support for the president’s handling of Iraq has steadily fallen; belief that the war was worth fighting has fallen; belief that the number of U.S. casualties are an acceptable cost of the war has steadily fallen; belief that the war has contributed to U.S. long-term security has steadily fallen, and support for keeping forces in Iraq has steadily fallen. There are no exceptions to this trend.

Right is on our side, and public opinion is trending our way. In 2006, Democrats must break from the past and run on the issue of quick withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. The stakes are high: Unless Democrats stand for ending the war in Iraq, this country will not leave Iraq, and Democrats their minority status in Washington, for a long time to come.

Of course, no party can win votes on the strength of one issue. Ending the war in Iraq must be at the centerpiece of a campaign that includes standing for national health care and preserving Social Security. This is the constellation of issues with which Democrats can take back the country.

The Company really hates the Democrats, because despite being so cheaply bought, the Democratic establishment can't control the Party.

Examples: George McGovern, 1972; Jimmy Carter, 1976; Bill Clinton, 1992. Outsiders who touched a raw nerve and beat the system to win the Party. It almost happened with Dean in 2004, but Dean, the first Democrat to understand the potential of the internet, made the mistake of listening to the Party insiders and the main$tream media.

Fatal error, that. Just ask Al Gore.  ¶ 9:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Dear Leader Goes Down on the Dominion

If he can't have a crony he'll have a Scalito.

The AmeriTaliban feel much better being able to hate the 21st century all together again instead of sniping at Cheneyburton.

Billmon has a good take-down on this.

Having finally tracked down and read Judge Alito's 3rd Circuit dissent in Planned Parenthood v Casey, I certainly hope that over the next several weeks pro-choice voters in Maine (Snowe, Collins) Rhode Island (Chafee) Ohio (Voinovich, DeWine) and the other haunts of "moderate" Republicans are made aware of the fact that Bush's nominee believes husbands have a vested property right in their wives' uteruses...

...the fact that Justice O'Connor -- whose various balancing tests Scalito relies heavily upon in his dissent -- basically slapped him down cold ("Section 3209's husband notification provision constitutes an undue burden, and is therefore invalid." full stop) suggests she at least thought he was full of it.

True, there are no "gotcha" lines -- Little Scalia apparently doesn't share Big Scalia's tendency to showboat -- but his legal reasoning in Casey can easily be reduced to a few viscerally offensive points, suitable for 30-second ads:

* Scalito equates Pennsylvania's spousal notification laws with the parental notification requirements upheld by the O'Connor court. Women are children, in other words, and stand in relationship to their husbands as minors stand to their legal guardians:

"Justice O’Connor has also suggested on more than one occasion that no undue burden was created by the statute upheld in H.L. v. Matheson . . . which required parental notice prior to any abortion on an unemancipated minor . . .These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209 (the PA spousal notification requirement.)"

* Because the vast majority of married women tell their husbands before they have an abortion, those who don't are not worthy of the law's protection:

"In the trial testimony on which the district court relied, the plaintiffs’ witness stated that in her experience 95% of married women notify their husbands. Second, the overwhelming majority of abortions are sought by unmarried women. Thus, it is immediately apparent that Section 3209 cannot affect more than about 5% of married women seeking abortions or an even smaller percentage of all women desiring abortions."

* The risk that a husband might retaliate against a wife with psychological torment -- or by hurting her children -- is too insignificant to qualify as an "undue burden," even though plaintiffs established that such behavior is frequent in spousal abuse cases:

"The plaintiffs . . . do not appear to have offered any evidence showing how many (or indeed that any actual women) would be affected by this asserted imperfection in the statute."

* The fact that pregnancy notification has been documented as a flashpoint for spousal abuse is also irrelevant:

"This proof indicates when violence is likely to occur in an abusive marriage but provides no basis for determining how many women would be adversely affected by Section 3209."

* It's OK if some women get beaten up by their husbands, because others wouldn't:

"Of the potentially affected women who could not invoke an exception, it seems safe to assume that some percentage, despite an initial inclination not to tell their husbands, would notify their husbands without suffering substantial ill effects."

Scalito's reasoning becomes even more of an exercise in the defense of masculine property rights when he tries to determine if the state of Pennsylvania has a "legitimate" state interest in requiring spousal notification...

From this, he concludes:

"It follows that a husband has a “legitimate” interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife."

Got that guys? You own the sperm, you have parental rights over the child, ergo, you've got a miner's claim on the missus's uterus, too. So have a cigar on Little Scalia...

having sampled Scalito's intellectual wares in the Casey case, I think I can say unequivocally that this is a battle that has to be fought to the bitter end -- up to and including nuclear war. Little Scalia has to be attacked with any and every legal tool at the left's disposal, and for my money, Casey is a pretty good place to start.

And if that be Borking, let us make the most of it.

May this attitude spread out everywhere.  ¶ 5:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  No Jolly Green Giant

Time for the Vice President to Explain Himself
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 30, 2005

It's time for Dick Cheney to give the nation "a stiff dose of truth."

In calling for Cheney to resign, it reads:

First, Democrats should wipe the smiles off their faces. This is a humiliation for the entire country, and their glee is unseemly. Moreover, the situation is not that neocons are all crooks, but that one vice-presidential aide must be presumed innocent of trying to cover up conduct that may not have been illegal in the first place.

Not all NeoCons are crooks, unless you count things like subversion of the Constitution, war profiteering, and repressing the American people. Or supporting a couple of stolen elections in order to get your own way.

Sounds like Kristof just wants a Con he can trust...

No, we're not out of the woods by a long shot. Bu$hCo is just going to start playing it smarter. Instead of an absolute patsy in the Supreme Court, he'll nominate a Robert Bork clone blowhard that will vote pretty much the same way.

Here's one symptom of the underlying disease that infects all of us. The progressive delusion that "...the US bestrode the world like a radiant colussus, admired by its many friends and feared by its enemies."

The Jolly Green Giant we have never been. Somebody seems to have slipped some Kool-Aid into our orange juice. Even the most benevolent colossus tends to walk like Godzilla on the little people it can't see, and that includes almost everyone in its way.

Part of it is the Clinton NeoLiberalism that is basically the same thing as NeoConservatism except, you know, we feel their pain.

No, under Clinton we didn't invade Iraq. We just bombed the hell out of it and let Al Qaeda establish bases where Saddam didn't go. We just starved several hundred thousand children to death. And profited under the table from oil-for-food. Which is admittedly a whole lot better than we're doing right now- to them or ourselves. The NeoLibs like the Clintons don't want to end Iraq now that we're there, they just want to improve our management of it.

Watch out about that Kristof cat. He actually believes the stuff he writes. So you get the worst disinformation mixed seamlessly with the facts from him.  ¶ 2:38 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Where's Harry Seldon When We Really Need Him?

The wave of darkness and iniquity spreading across the land doesn't require a Dr. Evil to be behind it.

All it requires is a convergence of interests, as Shystee points out.

Similarly, even if Dr. Evil and the bad boys (and girls) behind him do the frog-march, it's not going to do more than skim the foam off of the tsunami.

For a real fun read on the physical principles behind the scene go read the posting on Emergence.

To complement the portion that Shystee quoted, I'd like to add this note:

Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. This can be a dynamic process (occurring over time), such as the evolution of the human brain over thousands of successive generations; or emergence can happen over disparate size scales, such as the interactions between a macroscopic number of neurons producing a human brain capable of thought (even though the constituent neurons are not themselves conscious). For a phenomenon to be termed emergent it should generally be unpredictable from a lower level description. Usually the phenomenon does not exist at all or only in trace amounts at the very lowest level...

It should be emphasized that in each of these cases, while an emergent phenomenon at the macroscopic scale does not directly exist at the microscopic scale, its existence at macroscopic scales can still be explained (perhaps after a substantial amount of rigorous or semi-rigorous mathematical analysis) by the laws of physics at microscopic scales, taking into account the interactions between all the microscopic components of a macroscopic object. Thus, emergent phenomena can demonstrate why a reductionistic physical theory, viewing all matter in terms of its component parts, which in turn obey a relatively small number of laws, can hope to model complex objects such as living beings. However, by the same token, emergent phenomena serve to caution against greedy reductionism, because the microscopic explanation of an emergent phenomenon may be too complicated or "low-level" to be of any practical use...

Speaking of the physical description of things you can't do a lot about, check out the link on Kondratiev Waves.

By this measure, the peaks and nadirs of modern human economic activity come in 50 year cycles. The last lowest point?

Fall of 2001. I agree entirely.  ¶ 6:17 AM 0 comments links to this post

  That Was Then. This is Still Pretty Much the Same.

All the Vice President's Men
By Juan Cole

As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called "a cabal" that "on critical issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove.

Although the investigation has focused on Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who are these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the Bush administration's foreign policy?

Most of the members of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. This does not mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is undeniable that Israeli concerns played an important role. The actual motivation behind the war was complex, and Cheney's team was not the only one in the game. The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces - country club Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate interests, evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and neoconservative Jews allied with Israel's right-wing Likud party. Each group had its own rationale for going to war with Iraq.

Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.

None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes - or, in this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction - Cheney and Bush's underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations.

"Cheney Assembles Formidable Team," marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single staffer on security affairs.

The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using US troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international security environment.

Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 signaled a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself with the neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The James Baker branch of the Republican Party had long been critical of Israel for causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East with its expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West Bank, and Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not vote Republican.

Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on speaking terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal felt by his old colleagues was summed up by Bush I's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who told the New Yorker he considered Cheney a friend, "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." As time went on, however, he increasingly chose to ally with neoconservatives and the Jewish right in the US and Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and constituents for his vision of a post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged American hegemony that would be backed by a vast military-industrial establishment fed by US tax dollars. He continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a democratic Iraq would benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice president demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives.

But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview - in which the US battled an evil enemy - and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire." And the neocons' dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns," offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible military threat menaced the US Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense" against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.

Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no US constituencies for such wars in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed American militarism, given that the US public held deep prejudices against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it.

A key, but less well-known, Cheney advisor on the Middle East is John Hannah, a former Soviet expert. He had been part of a policy group assembled by Cheney when he was secretary of defense, in 1989, under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. Hannah was distinguished for his distrust of Soviet reformist Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the New Republic.

Hannah then came to head the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a stridently pro-Israel think tank that has gained enormous influence in Washington. WINEP had been founded in the 1980s with the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the legendarily powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings Institution were felt to be insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to support the government in power in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of the right-wing, expansionist Likud Party.

WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a contract from the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the future of the main political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was specifically instructed, as part of his contract, to depend on the material at the WINEP Web site. State Department officials and US military officers are detailed to WINEP to learn about the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers' expense. Despite its highly political activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a nonprofit charitable foundation.

When Hannah was at WINEP, he was still deeply concerned with post-Soviet Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East. The Soviets had been major patrons of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria and Iraq, all of whom Hannah viewed as enemies. In a 1993 interview with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, another pro-Israel, right-wing organization, Hannah expressed anxiety about the rise of Russian nationalists who, he claimed, sought to undermine United Nations sanctions against Libya and to position Russian companies to invest in Iraq should the sanctions on that country begin to slip. For figures such as Hannah, Russian nationalism and Middle Eastern rogue states like Libya and Iraq represented unfinished business left over from the Cold War. For the Israeli hawks and their American supporters, the Cold War was not really over as long as the former Soviet allies in the Middle East continued to express enmity to Israel.

As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked, the US State Department probably owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key personnel. From the institute, Hannah came to work for Christopher (who served from 1993 to 1997). During this period, Hannah cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, an expatriate group funded by the CIA and the State Department to overthrow Saddam. One of the things that made Chalabi attractive to Hannah and other neocons was that he promised them that if he came to power he would recognize Israel and take Iraq in the same direction as Turkey, a Muslim country allied with the Zionist state.

We next meet Hannah as an aide to John Bolton. Bolton, a curmudgeonly lawyer who helped stop the Florida recount in 2000, was rewarded by Bush by being made undersecretary of state for arms control and international proliferation. Bolton detailed Hannah to Cheney's office as chief adviser on the Middle East. (Hannah actually knew little about the Middle East and knows no Arabic, being primarily an old Russia hand.)

Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David Wurmser, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in international relations. He served as project officer at the congressionally funded US Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 1994. He then moved for two years to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was director of institutional grants until 1996. In the latter year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," that advocated a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the Shiites of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel. Since post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some actual knowledge.

The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than Iraq, since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, "A Clean Break" advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which - and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows - is King Hussein."

This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein's branch of the Baath Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I's coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Wurmser is married to Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East programs at the right-wing Hudson Institute. She was listed as a co-author of "A Clean Break." She had also co-founded, with a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, the MEMRI translation service, which cherry-picks Arabic newspapers for the more outrageous articles and political cartoons, and translates them into English for the purpose of creating a negative view of the Arab world.

In 1999 David Wurmser published "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein." In 2000, Wurmser authored a paper urging the US government to push Syria out of Lebanon and to refuse to engage with Damascus that was published by the Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes. The Middle East Forum advisory board is primarily composed of leaders of right-wing organizations such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Zionist Organization of America.

Wurmser was picked by fellow neoconservative and Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith (whom the departing Colin Powell denounced to George W. Bush as a "card-carrying member of the Likud") after Sept. 11 to form part of the notorious Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia division of the Department of Defense. That unit cherry-picked intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaida, singling out unreliable, single-sourced accounts and stripping them of any context that would show where they came from. These were then stove piped to Libby and Hannah in Cheney's office, so as to go directly to Bush and make an end run around the professional intelligence agencies. When allegations emerged that corrupt Iraqi businessman and longtime expatriate politician Ahmad Chalabi had been given classified information about US intelligence efforts against Iran, and had promptly passed it on to Tehran, Wurmser was among the officials the FBI interviewed searching for the leak.

When the OSP was dissolved after the Iraq war, Wurmser went back to work for Bolton. Although Wurmser only came to Cheney's shadow national security council in September 2003, after the Plame leak, he had been in close contact with Libby and Hannah all along. Close observers noted a distinct turn toward belligerency against Syria in White House pronouncements soon after Wurmser's advent. (He replaced old Soviet hand Eric Edelman, who was sent as ambassador to Turkey.)

On Sept. 10, 2002, the Boston Globe had reported that ascendant hawks in the Bush administration saw the overthrow of Saddam as a first step toward democratizing and transforming the Middle East. John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid wrote, "The argument for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has been pushed for years by some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. It is now being considered as a possible US policy with the ascent of key hard-liners in the administration - from Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the Pentagon to John Hannah and Lewis Libby on the vice president's staff and John Bolton in the State Department, analysts and officials say."

Cheney and other advocates of this policy promised that an Iraq war would break the deadlock between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Donnelly and Shadid quote Meyrav Wurmser, "Everyone will flip out, starting with the Saudis ... It will send shock waves throughout the Arab world ... But if we can get a democracy in the Palestinian Authority, democracy in Iraq, get the Egyptians to improve their human rights and open up their system, it will be a spectacular change. After a war with Iraq, then you really shape the region." Since both Wurmsers and their circle had argued forcefully for the destruction of the Oslo peace process and against the surrender by Israel of any of the Palestinian territories captured in 1967, it seems most likely that they hoped that getting the US to produce chaos in the Middle East by undermining its allies would give hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a free hand to annex most of the West Bank, and perhaps other Arab lands, rather than that it would lead to a just peace. Weakened by the loss of their backers in Baghdad and Damascus, the Palestinians would be forced to make peace on Sharon's terms.

Libby, Hannah and Wurmser were at the center of the production and purveying of bad intelligence on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Hannah received intelligence directly from the Iraqi National Congress, according to a leaked memo from that organization. He was also a liaison with Wurmser when the latter was in the Office of Special Plans.

According to a Newsweek article of Dec. 15, 2004, "a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a US Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'US governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department." The article explains that the program arranged for the raw information coming from defectors and other sources to be "reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.'" The memo explicitly mentioned Hannah as "a principal point of contact" for the program. The other point of contact, according to Newsweek, was William Luti, who headed the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon under Feith. (Luti, also known as "uber-Luti," was such a zealot that he denounced retired Gen. Anthony Zinni as a "traitor" for expressing reservations about the impending Iraq war.) Chalabi's lie factory thus had two main customers, both of them wholesalers to Cheney. (These alleged contacts are an apparent violation of the National Security Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in unauthorized intelligence gathering.)

These, then, were the key neocon players gathered around Cheney. Cheney's office was key to the manufacturing of the bogus case for Iraq being close to having a nuclear bomb (it had no nuclear weapons program at all after the mid-1990s) and for it having a biological weapons program on wheels (biological weapons labs require clean rooms and cannot be mounted in Winnebagos). Cheney's office was among the originators of the smears against critics of such allegations, such as Joseph Wilson. Wilson's attack on the integrity of their intelligence gathering deeply threatened them. At the time he began speaking out, no high US government official had dared name their fantasy for what it was - a tissue of innuendo and falsehoods fed to them by the ambitious and swallowed by the greedy and the gullible. That he was connected to the CIA's own unit on weapons proliferation through his wife, Valerie, made him all the more dangerous in their eyes, once Cheney had ferreted out that link.

The New York Times reported on Oct. 24, 2005, that it was Cheney who told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. White House chief of staff Karl Rove also learned of Plame's identity, although it is not known how. Both of them shared the information with the press, including Matt Cooper of Time magazine, Robert Novak of CNN and Judith Miller of the New York Times. Their aim was to discredit Wilson in official Washington as a tool of CIA disinformation, someone determined to make the White House the fall guys in the intelligence scandal, so as to spare the Company criticism. Some have a dark suspicion that they may also have wished to disrupt the CIA unit on anti-proliferation, which continued to doubt the case they were making about the rogue Middle East states. When confronted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby and Rove seem to have claimed that they did not reveal the name of Valerie Plame Wilson. In fact, they had called her "Joe Wilson's wife." This denial, however, is strikingly disingenuous and unconvincing.

Clearly Cheney's men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to destroy Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons in Cheney's inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it could be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and Wilson and Plame were getting in the way of the next projects.

With the war in Iraq a disaster, possible indictments looming and polls showing that 80 percent of Americans believe that revealing Plame's identity was either illegal or unethical, those dreams of world domination have crumbled to dust.

Informative, but the good Professor reveals himself as naive. He was a credulous supporter of the War to can Saddam when it started. Now he thinks a Special Prosecutor is enough to stop the NeoCons cold.

Tell that to the American boys and girls dying in Baghdad. Or the Iraqis for that matter. The War has no end in sight.

Cheneyburton and Darth Rumsfeld still run the Empire.

Maybe a little more circumspectly.

All the Opposition is Company, as far as I can tell.

Past tense, Professor? Crumbled to dust, Sir? Wrong on both counts, alas.

Why are the Movement's leaders so simple? Even the best educated ones? Even the ones that have been burned?  ¶ 6:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Squeal, Pig

Karl Rove had better stay away from small airplanes.

Does Rove Have a Secret Plea Deal?

As I noted earlier, the news reports on Rove are conflicting. But this statement by one "non-legal" member of his team, who I assume is the P.R. specialist Mark Carballo who signed on to Rove's team the other day, leads me to believe Rove took a deal and Fitzgerald has agreed not to announce it immediately:

"A person outside the legal profession familiar with recent developments in the case said Thursday night that Rove's team does not believe he is out of legal jeopardy yet but likely would be spared bad news Friday when the White House fears the first indictments will be issued. Fitzgerald signaled Thursday he might keep Rove under continuing investigation, sparing him from immediate charges, the person said."

...Once again, my post, How Karl Rove Could Walk.

Things are probably pretty chilly for Karl in the Vice-President's office.

Now that Cheney's competitors in the Company have a pigeon in the Oval Office, you might see a number of odd and inexplicable occurences. For example, there will likely be an increasing disconnect between NeoCon policy and its implementation designed to keep Karl's sweet bottom away from the Pen. Of course, once Dear Leader realizes which worm has turned, he's left with his role model's alledged advice: he can only hold him closer.  ¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Tip o' the Iceberg for Cheneyburton?

Via firedoglake:

It just keeps getting better and better.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.

Tomorrow's the day. Up to 5 indictments and the announcement of a new Grand Jury. One hopes.  ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Does Macy's Out Gimbel's?

...I saw Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison say that she hoped Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald would not bring a charge like perjury, which would be a sign that he could not discover a real crime, or words to that effect. She was speaking off the current Republican Party talking points aimed at spinning this scandal.

So let's get this straight. The Republicans roiled the country for two years and impeached Clinton for lying about sex under oath, but now all of a sudden perjury is a minor crime not worth bothering about. Remember that 1998 was a period when Clinton needed to focus on the threat of al-Qaeda, but he was being distracted by the Republican bulldogs and everything he did about al-Qaeda was dismissed as "wag the dog." Vicious partisan politics was put before the benefit of the nation. (Many of the major Republican figures who impeached Clinton had themselves had affairs and covered them up, and besides, who cared or cares?)

But what Cheney, Libby and Rove did was not just a private impropriety. The leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity did enormous harm to US national security, since it blew the cover of the dummy corporation the Company was using to investigate weapons of mass destruction proliferation...

Let's just say Big Time has a unique way of eliminating the competition.  ¶ 11:47 AM 0 comments links to this post

  ...and he wants more.

...And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I
wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and
guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,
KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and
he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down
yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me,
sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

Didn't feel too good about it.

But He does.

Negotiators on Torture Bill Feeling Heat
By Liz Sidoti
The Associated Press

Tuesday 25 October 2005

Washington - Congressional negotiators are feeling heat from the White House and constituents as they consider whether to back a Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in US custody or weaken it as the White House prefers.

Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Bush administration is floating a proposal that would allow the president to exempt covert agents outside the Defense Department from the prohibition...  ¶ 8:44 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Proliferation

Behind the saber rattling: Bu$hCo tries to play chess with the inventors of the game.

Oct 26, 2005
A vote, a strike and a sleight of hand
By Conn Hallinan

For the past six months, the United States and the European Union (EU) have led a full court press to haul Iran before the UN Security Council for violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by supposedly concealing a nuclear weapons program. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to declare Iran in "non-compliance" with the treaty, but deferred a decision on referral to the Security Council until November 25.

The strike:
On September 30, more than a million Indian airport and banking workers took to the streets to oppose a plan to downsize financial establishments and privatize airports, but also to denounce the ruling Congress Party as "shameful" for going along with the September 24 "non-compliance" vote in the IAEA. The strikers were lead by four left parties that are crucial allies of the Congress-dominated United Progressive Alliance government.

The alliance controls 270 votes in parliament. The left holds 64 seats to the Congress Party's 145. The alliance's other 61 seats come from a diverse group of small parties.

Why was India lining up with the US and the EU against Iran, especially since it risked alienating essential domestic allies? Why would India jeopardize its relations with Iran while it is engaged in high-stakes negotiations with Tehran over a $22 billion natural gas deal, and a $5 billion oil pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan?

To sort this out one has to go back to early this year when Central Intelligence Agency director Porter Goss and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress that China posed a strategic threat to US interests. Both men lobbied for a "containment" policy aimed at surrounding and isolating China.

One key piece on this new Cold War chessboard is India, which under the previous right-wing government saw itself as a political and economic rival to Beijing. But there was an obstacle to bringing India into the ring of US allies stretching from Japan in the East, to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia .

In 1974, using enriched uranium secretly gleaned from a Canadian - and US - supplied civilian reactor, India set off an atomic bomb. New Delhi was subsequently cut off from international uranium supplies and had to fall back on its own rather thin domestic sources. Yet another set of barriers was erected following India's 1998 nuclear blasts.

But the Bush administration realized that if it wanted India to play spear bearer for the US, the Indians would need to expand and modernize their nuclear weapons program, an almost impossible task if they couldn't purchase uranium supplies abroad. India produces about 300 tons of uranium a year, but the bulk of that goes to civilian power plants.

According to the 2005 edition of Deadly Arsenals, India presently has between 70 and 110 nuclear weapons, plus 400 to 500 kilograms of weapons grade uranium on hand. Given India's present level of technology, a stockpile of that size can produce about 100 atomic weapons.

Those weapons, however, are fairly unsophisticated, and too big and clunky for long-range missiles. Nor are Indian missiles yet capable of reaching targets all over China , although the Agni III, with a range of 2,000, miles is getting close.

So here comes the sleight of hand.

On June 28, Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee met with Rumsfeld to sign the US-India Defense Relationship Agreement, which gives India access to sophisticated missile technology under the guise of aiding its space program.

The defense pact was denounced by the Communist Party of India/Marxist - one of the parties in the alliance's governing coalition - as "fraught with serious consequences", that would end up making India like "Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all traditional military allies of the United States".

The June agreement was followed by a July 18 meeting of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush that ended US restrictions on India's civilian nuclear power program, and allowed India to begin purchasing uranium on the international market.

While the Bush administration is telling the US Congress that the pact will encourage civilian over military uses of nuclear technology, Manmohan told the Indian parliament, "There is nothing in this joint statement that amounts to limiting or inhibiting our strategic nuclear weapons program."

Indeed, by allowing India to buy uranium on the open market, the pact will let India divert all of its domestic uranium supplies to weapons production. That would allow it to produce up to 1,000 warheads, making it the third largest arsenal in the world behind the US and Russia.

Of course there was a price for these agreements: India had to vote to drag Iran before the Security Council. The Americans were quite clear that failure to join in on the White House's jihad against Tehran meant the agreements would go on ice. "India," warned US representative Tom Lantos, will "pay a very hefty price for their total disregard of US concerns vis-a-vis Iran."

So that explains the vote. But is the Congress Party really willing to hazard its majority in parliament and endanger energy supplies for the dubious reward of joining the Bush administration's campaign to isolate Iran and corner the dragon?

Well, a sleight of hand can work both ways.

Right after the September 24 vote in the IAEA, according to the Indian newspaper, Frontline, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA told the Indian delegation the natural gas deal was off. Then President Mahmud Ahmadinejad gave an incendiary interview to the United Arab Emirates-based newspaper, the Khaleej Times , threatening retribution against any country that voted against Iran.

A few days later, the Iranians reversed themselves, claiming that their president had never actually talked with the Khaleej Times, and the Indians quickly announced that the gas and pipeline deal was still on. New Delhi also began hinting that it might change its vote come November 25 (one suspects from "yes" to "abstain"). So either the Indians gave Tehran a wink and a nod following their "yes" vote, or Iran's shot across their bow had an effect.

The September 24 vote was 22 "yes", one "no" and 12 abstentions. China and Russia abstained, but have publicly said that they are opposed to sending Iran to the Security Council. Two of the "yes" votes are rotating off the 35-member IAEA board to be replaced by Cuba and Belarus. And much to the annoyance of the US, Britain, France and Germany (EU-3) met earlier this month to discuss restarting direct talks with Tehran. In short, it is unlikely that Iran will end up being referred to the Security Council.

Will an "abstain" vote by India be enough to open the gates for US technology to ramp up New Delhi's nuclear weapons programs? Probably, but that depends on whether the administration can get it by Congress and people like Lantos.

Does this mean India joins the US alliance against China? The answer to that question is a good deal more complex.

In April of this year, India and China signed a "Strategic and Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Prosperity", and trade between the two up-and-coming Asian giants is projected to reach $20 billion by 2008.

Following the July agreement with the US, Manmohan reported to parliament that "we see new horizons in our relationship with China", and that the pact "is not at the cost of China".

In fact, in the end, the US may just end up getting snookered. The Indians feel they need to modernize their military in order to become more than a regional power. If the Americans will help them do it, fine. But that doesn't mean signing on for the whole program.

As analyst Lora Saalman writes in Japan Focus , "The technical and military hardware provided by the United States promises to expand India's political, strategic and military footprint even beyond China," but that rather than pitting the two huge Asian powers against one another, "the United States may be setting up India to instead serve as a future strategic counterweight to US interests in Asia and abroad."

Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments links to this post

  May Big Time Do Time

We can only hope for a Fitzmas present.

October 24, 2005
Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Notes Show
By DAVID JOHNSTON, RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 - I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers involved in the case, who described the notes to The New York Times, said they showed that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby's notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson's undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent's identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent's undercover status.

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby's legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday, when the term of the grand jury expires. Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, both face the possibility of indictment, lawyers involved in the case have said. It is not publicly known whether other officials also face indictment.

The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.

But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald's possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson - who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said...

Since Libby, contrary to his dated notes, told the Grand Jury that he heard of Valerie Plame's identity from a journalist, they can nail him and Karl (we hope) for perjury.

Minimum.

Hopefully the whole cabal will get hammered for criminal conspiracy charges as well.

Minimum.

No one in the world is safe until these criminals are out of power. War crimes of convenience and fabricated intelligence make no one safe. It's a matter of National Security, indeed.  ¶ 8:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Cheneyburton Press Gang

U.S. cash fuels human trade
Chicago Tribune (IL)
October 9, 2005
Author: Cam Simpson and Aamer Madhani, Tribune staff reporters. Cam Simpson reported from Nepal, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Washington. Aamer Madhani reported from Iraq's Camp Liberty and Baghdad.

American tax dollars and the wartime needs of the U.S. military are fueling an illicit pipeline of cheap foreign labor, mainly impoverished Asians who often are deceived, exploited and put in harm's way in Iraq with little protection.

The U.S. has long condemned the practices that characterize this human trade as it operates elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet this very system is now part of the privatization of the American war effort and is central to the operations of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the U.S. military's biggest private contractor in Iraq.

To document this system, the Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepalese men kidnapped last year from an unprotected convoy en route to an American military base in Iraq. The Tribune's reporting found that:

To maintain the flow of low-paid workers key to military support and reconstruction in Iraq, the U.S. military has allowed KBR to partner with subcontractors that hire laborers from Nepal and other countries that prohibit citizens from being deployed in Iraq. That means brokers recruiting such workers operate illicitly.

The U.S. military and KBR assume no responsibility for the recruitment, transportation or protection of foreign workers brought to the country. KBR leaves every aspect of hiring and deployment in the hands of its subcontractors. Those subcontractors often turn to job brokers dealing in menial laborers.

Working in tandem with counterparts in the Middle East, the brokers in South and Southeast Asia recruit workers from some of the world's most remote areas. They lure laborers to Iraq with false promises of lucrative, safe jobs in nations such as Jordan and Kuwait, even falsifying documents to complete the deception.

Even after foreign workers discover they have been lured under false pretenses, many say they have little choice but to continue into Iraq or stay longer than planned. They feel trapped because they must repay brokers' huge fees.

Some U.S. subcontractors in Iraq--and the brokers feeding them--employ practices condemned by the U.S. elsewhere, including fraud, coercion and seizure of workers' passports.

The State Department has long expressed concerns about the treatment of foreign workers in the same Middle Eastern nations the U.S. relies on to supply labor for bases in Iraq. In June, the department added four of these nations--Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates--to the top tier of its human trafficking watch list for not undertaking "significant efforts to combat forced labor trafficking."

U.S. law calls for sanctions in such cases. But last month, citing Kuwait's and Saudi Arabia's efforts in the "Global War on Terror," President Bush waived the sanctions against them. This allowed more than $6 billion in combined military sales to go forward. One reason laborers from developing countries are sought for work in Iraq is the U.S. military fears that hiring Iraqis would allow insurgents to infiltrate its bases.

Halliburton would not say whether it includes such laborers in its public tallies of contractor casualties in Iraq. But figures compiled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a private group, indicate that third-country nationals--neither Iraqis nor citizens from U.S. coalition members--account for more than 100 of the roughly 270 contractor fatalities in the country since the start of the war. Those numbers are based on the group's tracking of Defense Department releases and media accounts.

Halliburton declined to make KBR executives available for an interview, agreeing to respond only to written questions from the Tribune. In a written statement, Halliburton said it outlines the "legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work."

The U.S. military has outsourced vital support operations in Iraq to KBR at an unprecedented scale, a deal that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $12 billion. KBR, in turn, outsources much of that work to more than 200 subcontractors, many of them based in the Middle East...

The subcontractors employ an army of workers from developing countries to dish out food, wash clothes and clean latrines. About 35,000 of the 48,000 people working for those subcontractors are not Americans, KBR has said.

According to salary statements obtained by the Tribune, the pay for such workers can range from about $65 to $112 weekly--a fortune to those scratching a living from the farm fields and brick factories of Nepal, where the per capita annual income is about $270.

The Nepalese government must grant permission before workers can legally go abroad or brokers can legally send them. It has refused to do so for Iraq, because of the dangers there.

Some Nepalese job brokers have been raided or shut down, but it is unclear how vigorously authorities have pursued those involved. The government, consistently ranked among the world's most corrupt, has little incentive to do so because the Nepalese economy is reliant on the estimated $1 billion sent home each year by citizens working overseas.

Many Nepalis willingly assume the risks of working in Iraq, although their knowledge of its dangers before leaving home is questionable. Only 16 of every 1,000 Nepalis even had a phone line when the war broke out in 2003.

The U.S. military and KBR do not screen workers to determine whether they come from Nepal and other nations that prohibit their citizens from working in Iraq. But the military could easily do so, because it issues the badges listing each worker's nationality, name, job and the subcontractor employing him.

Asked what it was doing to stop the flow of workers from these nations or to monitor its subcontractors, KBR said questions "regarding the recruitment practices of subcontractors should be directed to the subcontractor."

The U.S. Army, which oversees the contract, said much the same. "Questions involving alleged misconduct towards employees by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues."

KBR said it does not tolerate subcontractors that abuse their workers. But it declined to cite any specific actions taken against any of its subcontractors since the onset of the war.

The company did not respond to several questions about the case of the 12 Nepalis or any other specific abuses uncovered by the Tribune.

An estimated 10,000 of their countrymen are now in Iraq despite policies restricting such work. Many are employed at American bases where KBR runs support operations, according to Prakash Mahat, who was the Nepalese foreign minister until February.

The Philippines, originally a partner in the U.S.-led coalition, instituted a ban last summer after attacks against Filipino workers in Iraq. Before that, the nation had an arrangement that helped protect workers from exploitation because it effectively cut out the job brokers. Filipinos willing to risk working in Iraq went through official channels, which ensured that they didn't have to pay broker fees and helped guarantee contract terms.

But since the Philippine ban, Filipino workers hoping to go to Iraq go through agencies that operate illegally and charge exorbitant fees. The agencies deliver workers through neighboring Middle Eastern nations, said Ricardo Endaya, who was a senior official with the Philippine Embassy in Baghdad until recently.

Many of the same firms engage in practices condemned by the U.S., including luring workers with false promises or contracts, then switching jobs or terms upon arrival.

Even after they learn they'll be in a combat zone--or their wages will be less than promised--some feel compelled to go into Iraq or stay longer than planned so they can repay the money their families borrowed to send them.

"If I could leave now, I would, but I have not yet even paid off my loan," said Sahib Yadev, a 24-year-old from Uttar Pradesh, India, who was working at the American base called Camp Liberty near Baghdad International Airport when the Tribune interviewed him earlier this year.

A Tribune reporter embedded this summer with U.S. forces at Camp Liberty, which comes under fire almost daily, was taken to the base's living area for foreign workers operated by subcontractor Prime Projects International, or PPI, which has offices in the United Arab Emirates.

Several other workers interviewed shared Yadev's sentiment, but like most who work under KBR at U.S. bases in Iraq, they are not supposed to speak with journalists and did so only on condition of anonymity. An American employee for KBR escorted the reporter to the camp, where the reporter interviewed several laborers...

All of the South Asian workers said PPI took their passports upon arrival. Western supervisors for PPI at the camp said the company keeps workers' passports for safety reasons. The supervisors said they feared if documents were lost, it would be difficult for laborers to get new ones, as most of their countries do not have embassies in Iraq.

Veerus, an Indian laborer who spoke on agreement that his last name not be used, said workers insisted they could care for their passports. But Veerus said PPI responded with an ultimatum: They would not be paid until PPI had their passports. Other workers at the camp suspected the firm kept the documents for another reason.

"We might transfer to another company," said another Indian laborer for PPI, who asked not to be identified. "They are paying very little salary, and other companies may be paying very good salaries. Without passports, they know we cannot leave..."

Thanks to Truthout for the heads up.

I wonder what CSC/DynCorp is doing these days?  ¶ 8:05 AM 0 comments links to this post

  It Only Looks Like a UFO

Check it out.

Imagine an aircraft that could lift 1-2 million pounds of cargo, then fly it up to 12,000 miles nonstop without needing a runway to land on. DARPA has. DID has too via our in-depth coverage of their WALRUS HULA (Hybrid Ultra Large Aircraft) airship program. Now a new congressional report is imagining it as well.

The WALRUS may be an airship, but isn't exactly a traditional blimp. The Army Times reports that the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan analytical arm of the US Congress, "likes the heavy-lift airship concept because it could do more than the airlift aircraft and surge sealift capabilities currently used when U.S. forces deploy." DID went and found that report, which offers some interesting conclusions.

"Options for Strategic Military Transportation Systems" notes that developing and buying 15 WALRUS-class airships and operating them for 30 years would cost about $11 billion over 30 years, roughly as much as the 21 additional C-17s the USAF is seeking. The report then goes on to note that even at their lowest level of desired performance (500 tons capacity), this set of aircraft would be able to deliver 3 times as much cargo per day as 21 C-17s...

They use a whole lot less fuel than jets which will get more important to industry with the passage of time.

Airships aren't as fast as jets, but they use helium for lift these days, and not hydrogen alone. So they're a lot safer. A lot more energy efficient. And the experimental WALRUS-class would use a vacuum aerogel, less dense than the atmosphere, and totally nonexplosive.

Expect a lot more of these in the future moving people around potentially much less expensively.

Now this is what we pay taxes for DARPA to do for us. Like the internet, new technology can drive the economy and make life better for all.  ¶ 8:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Top Secret. Sort Of. Except for the Advertising

Some things are really hard to hide.

The mighty Titan -- a pillar in American rocketry for five decades -- flew into orbit for the final time Wednesday, capping a distinguished career of heavy-lifting that has spanned the nation's space age.

The 16-story vehicle roared off its Vandenberg Air Force Base launch pad in California at 11:05 a.m. PDT (2:05 p.m. EDT; 1805 GMT) carrying a top-secret spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

Less than 10 minutes later, the Lockheed Martin-built rocket completed its job by deploying the spacecraft payload. The new satellite will be operated by the NRO, a hush-hush government agency responsible for the country's spy satellite fleet. Details of the Titan's payload and its mission were not revealed to the public.

However, experts say the craft was placed into an orbit that coincides with imaging satellites. Such spacecraft are telescopes that point back at Earth with powerful vision to see objects as tiny as just inches across, observers believe...

...Known for its complexity and stiff price tag, at least $411 million for Wednesday's rocket, military leaders took the first steps to retire the big booster a decade ago with creation of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. The new-generation EELV rockets -- Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 and Boeing's Delta 4 -- are supposed to be less expensive and offer a tailored-feel for a payload's weight...

Top secret except for free advertising for the companies involved.

The first "last" Titan launch occurred with the Apollo missions.

This will be the last, until the D.o'D. or the National Reconniasance Office or somebody decides it really wants to do something again in space. At which point they will tell their Congressional oversight about it after it's already done.  ¶ 7:02 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Do You Like Your Coups Cold or Hot?

CorrenteWire and Billmon point to a little discussion with Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, that adds a whole new layer of tension to the Spy Vs Spy situation going on in Washington right now.

I guess you don't fire top Generals in a purge, then make one of their top minds a patsy who had to fall on his own sword to support a policy he didn't believe, and make friends with your troops.

NeoCons vs Realists. Economists vs. Dominionists. If the lid stays on the situation, and only the mouthpieces do the frogmarch, the pressure will only build.

Update: it seems like the Mouth of Poppy is widening the rift into a family feud (thanks again Billmon).

Looks like Babs is going to have him sleeping on the couch again...  ¶ 7:18 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Backstory

As Rove and Libby start to pull out the knives on each other (via Atrios), and the Spy vs. Spy between the Agency and its Company (or the Company and its Agents, it's all smoke and mirrors anyway) heats up, you might like the chance to step back and take the longer view.

Part of that longer view is discussed here, via firedoglake.

For more than a decade, Dick Cheney has tussled with the CIA, first as secretary of Defense and later as vice president. Now that long and tortured history forms the backdrop of a federal probe into who named an undercover agency officer — an inquiry that is centering in part on Cheney's office...

Cheney and Libby have worked together for years. As secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush, Cheney hired Libby in a senior role. As vice president, Cheney brought Libby on as his top aide and national security advisor. The two are said to be so close personally and ideologically that some refer to Libby as "Cheney's Cheney."...

Cheney's skepticism of the CIA dates to the late 1980s, when the agency failed to predict the Soviet Union's breakup, according to a source familiar with Cheney's thinking. When then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and the first Bush administration began to ponder its military options, it became clear to Cheney that the intelligence community had a poor understanding of Iraq's arsenal.

Libby, who was working for Cheney, assigned an aide to conduct a secret investigation of Hussein's biological warfare capabilities and his likely reactions to a U.S. invasion.

"Libby's basic view of the world is that the CIA has blown it over and over again," said the source, who declined to be identified because he had spoken with Libby confidentially. "Libby and Cheney were [angry] that we had not been prepared for the potential in the first Gulf War."

In the view of the officials who went on to form George W. Bush's war Cabinet, the CIA continued to blunder through the 1990s. In 1998, for example, the CIA failed to anticipate India's testing of a nuclear weapon.

After President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, Cheney immediately established the vice president's office as a second base of foreign policy and intelligence inside the White House, in addition to the National Security Council. Cheney not only received a daily briefing from the CIA, he frequently sat in on the president's briefing and the "principals' meetings" held to assess serious foreign policy and national security issues.

Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney worked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to challenge CIA findings that countered their expectations or that disagreed with information they had received through their own intelligence channels.

Cheney traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a dozen times, most often to discuss Iraq's possible links to nuclear weapons and terrorism. Agency veterans have said that Cheney's visits were more frequent than those of any other president or vice president, including the first president Bush, a former director of the agency.

When Cheney visited the CIA, Iraq was his main focus, particularly in the months before the war. Unlike Libby and others working with the vice president, Cheney was reportedly always polite. But in his quiet way, he was insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with the CIA.

Cheney's visits perked up agency analysts who often worked anonymously, said one former official. Many reportedly enjoyed the challenge of a smart questioner and appreciated his interest. But Cheney's visits and his clinging to certain views became noticeable and drew expressions of concern, according to the former official.

For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks.

Nonetheless, the agency continued to receive dozens of inquiries on the topic from top officials — several times from Cheney himself. Despite the agency warnings, Cheney made reference to the Atta meeting as if it were a sure thing.

"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The allegation was not backed up with reliable intelligence, as Cheney and his staff had been repeatedly told, according to a former CIA official. The matter was addressed in public when senators asked CIA Director Porter J. Goss during his confirmation hearings last year to assess the accuracy of Cheney's allegations.

"I don't think it was as well-confirmed perhaps as the vice president thought," said Goss, a Florida Republican who had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "But I don't know what was in the vice president's mind, and I've certainly never talked with him about this. So I don't know how we came to that conclusion."

Asked by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) whether the assertion was "worthy of correction," Goss said he might have intervened had he been in charge at the time. "If I were confronted with that kind of a hypothetical, where I felt that a policymaker was getting beyond what the intelligence said, I think I would advise the person involved," Goss said.

Cheney also frequently spoke with certainty throughout 2002 about Iraq and its pursuit of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Addressing Korean War veterans in Texas that August, he predicted that Hussein, armed with nuclear weapons, would "be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, to take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, and to directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

"Simply stated," Cheney continued, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us."

A presidential commission on intelligence led by senior federal Judge Laurence H. Silberman concluded that questioning of intelligence analysts by outsiders was healthy, and said in March in its final report on the Iraq war that the "intelligence community did not make or change any analytical judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion."

Nonetheless, the tensions between the vice president's office and the CIA increased as investigators failed to find weapons of mass destruction. White House staffers feared they would be blamed by the CIA for encouraging misleading intelligence estimates, one former official said.

Then, Wilson's account of his CIA mission to Niger embarrassed the White House by undermining the administration's claim that Iraq had sought nuclear materials from Africa.

Fitzgerald has been told that Wilson's public disclosure of his findings in Niger reminded Libby and other neoconservatives in the White House of their longtime battles with the CIA, according to someone familiar with the case. And it led some to fear that the agency was trying to shift the blame to the White House for intelligence failures before the war.

Trying? That's no big deal to do.  ¶ 12:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Cold War in the Company is Heating Up


Dick Cheney's Covert Action
Larry C. Johnson
October 19, 2005

[Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).]

Face it, America. You’ve been punk'd.

It is now quite clear that the outing of Valerie Plame was part of a broader White House effort to mislead and manipulate U.S. public opinion as part of an orchestrated effort to take us to war. The unraveling of the Valerie Plame affair has exposed their scam—and it extends well beyond compromising the identity of a CIA officer. In short, the Bush administration organized and executed a classic “covert action” program against the citizens of the United States.

Covert action refers to behind-the-scenes efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to plant stories, manipulate information and shape public opinion. In other words, you write stories that reporters will publish as their own, you create media events that tout a particular theme, and you demonize your opponent. Traditionally, this activity was directed against foreign governments...

Revelations during the past week about the Plame affair make it clear that the Bush administration used covert action against its own citizens. Consider, for example, the charge that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The key event in this disinformation campaign was the intelligence manufactured by the Italians. The Italian intelligence service, SISME, provided the CIA with three separate intelligence reports that Iraq had reached an agreement with Niger to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium (October 15, 2001; February 5, 2002; and March 25, 2002). The second report, from February, was the subsequent basis for a DIA analysis, which led Vice President Cheney to ask the CIA for more information on the matter. That request led to the CIA asking Ambassador Joe Wilson to go check out the story in Niger.

We learned last May that in the summer of 2002, the Bush administration told our British allies that they would "fix the facts" around the intelligence. In other words, the United States sought to manufacture a case that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear capability. Note, not only did bogus intelligence reports and fabricated documents surface, but senior administration officials—Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney—went to great lengths to try to convince Americans that the United States would soon face the wrath of Iraqi attacks. Remember the smoking mushroom cloud?

Despite repeated attempts by the Italian intelligence service to help us cook the books, the senior CIA intelligence analysts resisted the administration’s effort to sell the bogus notion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger. Even in the much-maligned October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the entire intelligence community remained split on the reliability of the Iraq/Niger claim. During briefings subsequent to the publication of the NIE, senior CIA officials repeatedly debunked the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. They also dismissed as unreliable reports from Great Britain, which also were derived from the faulty Italian intelligence reports...

Although some in the intelligence community, specifically analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy, believed the report, the intelligence community as a whole did not put much stock in the reports and forged documents, and repeatedly told policy makers that these reports were not reliable. Yet the Bush administration ignored the intelligence community on these questions, and senior policymakers—like Vice President Cheney—persisted in trying to make the fraudulent case...

Notwithstanding repeated efforts by intelligence analysts to downplay these intelligence reports as unreliable, DOD officials fanned the flames. This, my friends, is one example of “cooking intelligence.” These facts further expose as farce the Bush administration’s effort to blame the CIA for the misadventure in Iraq. We did not go to war in Iraq primarily because of bad intelligence and bad analysis by the CIA. The Bush administration started a war of choice.

While CIA did make mistakes, and while some key members of the National Intelligence Council were willing to drink the neocon Kool-Aid and go along with the White House, when it came to questions of whether Iraq was buying uranium in Niger or if Saddam was working with bin Laden, CIA and INR analysts consistently got it right and told the administration what they did not want to hear. It was policymakers, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, NSC Chief Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored what the analysts were saying and writing.

The evidence of the White House effort to manipulate and shape U.S. public opinion is now overwhelming. Just last week, President Bush appeared in a pathetic scripted “dialogue” with hand-selected U.S. troops. We also know that male escort Jeff Gannon Guckert was granted special access to White House press briefings and that pundits like Armstrong Williams sold themselves to the White House. The Bush administration had an organized campaign to manipulate the U.S. media to get its message out. Unfortunately, the corporate media played along.

The attack on Valerie Plame Wilson was not an isolated incident. It was part of a broader pattern of manipulation and deceit. But this was not done for the welfare of U.S. national security. Instead, we find ourselves confronted by an unprecedented level of terrorist attacks and a deteriorating military situation in Iraq. At the same time, we now know that the Bush administration gladly sacrificed an undercover intelligence officer in order to keep up the pretense that the war in Iraq was all about weapons of mass destruction.

Americans have died because of the Bush deceit. The unmasking of Valerie Plame was not an odd occurrence. It was part of a pattern of deliberate manipulation and disinformation. At the end of the day, American men and women have died because of this lie. It is up to the American people to hold the Bush administration accountable for these actions.

Meanwhile, it's not getting easier for the man who wants to hand-deliver the entire Agency over to the Bu$hCo faction of the Company.  ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  They're running out of letters.

A new Category 5 is now off Yucatan.

The most intense storm in history, and the rapidest developing.

Thank Cheneyburton for melting our icecaps.  ¶ 12:09 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Agent, Patsy, or Idiot?

This fool Judith Miller thinks she's living in a Tom Clancy novel.

But she must know on some level that no one bothers to read it, or she'd keep her stories straight.

Even Tom Clancy thinks the NeoCons are morons.

Thanks to Eschaton for the tip.  ¶ 6:34 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Feverish Behind the Stone Wall

You wouldn't know it to watch MSGOP or FAUX or even to read the New York Pravda, but things in Washington this week are little high strung.

Perhaps some of the best day to day summaries of the story are found at firedoglake.

Start here. I agree with Reddhedd. The Company has rules, and Bu$hCo, after all, is a subsidiary of the Company, not the other way around.

The WHIG is about to be spanked.

The next post concerns what Karl Rove sang about last Friday.

Jane Hamsher notices that buried within last Sunday's Mea Culpa is the real land mine: Judy admits to having more than one source- although she can't remember who the other one was.

But no worries, campers. Just because The Queen of All Iraq doesn't want to sleep with the fishes- she knows the kinds of people her old boyfriend works for, after all- doesn't mean there isn't somebody willing to join the witness protection program. Even better: the disinformation reported by the leakers seems to point to the same place.

That just brings us up to this week.

Now that it's clear that the Company- sorry, Porter Goss, but you've been Brownied, it seems- is going after Cheneyburton, and the entire WHIG, the mud is really starting to fly.

But Fitzgerald trained busting the Chicago political combine, and let's face it: he probably figures he won't be in any worse dangers from hired DynCorp thugs than he might be from anyone the Daley family might send after him.

What's even more delicious is this: thanks to what the Republicans did to Bill Clinton, if Wilson and Plame start a civil action once the criminal charges are settled, Dear Leader and Lord Cheneyburton may have to testify. In open court. Under oath.

Without a wire.

As I've said, I’m just curious how far Fitzgerald’s going to go with this. Or how far the Company lets him go with it. If it were up to Negroponte and Goss, I'm sure Fitzgerald would be dropped from a helicopter over Nicaragua. In unrecognizable pieces.

I don’t think for a minute the entire Company will be effected by the dissolution of the WHIG, although it could be. Especially if the Company wasn't behind the dissolution of the WHIG. And it is, make no mistake about it.

I think rather that the whole Jeff Gannon incident pointed out the unreliability of Rove and of Junior himself to the Company Board.

Rove and Scooter and Judy maybe are being made examples. At this point, Junior himself could be superfluous to the whole enterprise. The Company owns the government, and Poppy’s errant son has served his purpose.

Certainly his arrogant advisors have.  ¶ 9:05 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Curse of the NeoLiberal (Clinton, We're Talking to You!)

Partisan War Syndrome

By David Sirota October 17, 2005

A disease is running rampant through the American left these days. Its symptoms are intense and increasingly pervasive in every corner of the self-proclaimed "progressive" coalition. A good name for the disease could be "Partisan War Syndrome" - and it is eating away at what remains of progressives' ideological underpinnings and the Democratic Party's ability to win elections over the long haul.

The disease is simple to understand: It leads the supposedly "ideological" grassroots left to increasingly subvert its overarching ideology on issues in favor of pure partisan concerns...

The main symptoms of Partisan War Syndrome are hallucination, delirium and obsessive compulsive behavior, with those afflicted losing almost all perspective about what winning politics really is all about. Washington, D.C., of course, could be declared a Hot Zone outbreak area, with this disease afflicting virtually every self-described strategist, operative, and lawmaker that operates in the progressive name...

Certainly, this disease can be difficult to detect. The mainstream media regularly portrays the so-called Democratic base as a highly ideological, "liberal" or "progressive" monolith, supposedly pressing an insulated, spineless D.C. Democratic establishment to move to the "left." This portrayal creates the image that there really is a cohesive, powerful ideological force on the left, one that is committed to convictions and issues before party-much like there is on the right. This image is reinforced by the mainstream media's constant characterization of Internet blogs and the "netroots" as an extension of this monolith-as if a medium automatically equals an ideology.

As proof that such a monolith exists, the media writes stories about this or that Democratic politician-no matter how conservative he or she is - pandering to or courting the "left" by once in a while taking a mundane Democratic Party position and then blogging about it. We also see an entire counter-industry to this mythical monolith in the form of organizations like the Democratic Leadership Council, which raise corporate money, put out reports attacking the supposedly all-powerful "left," and commission polls to discredit what, in reality, is a straw man.

...But look no further than the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries to see that the ideological movement as a whole is in tatters. In that race, primary voters - supposedly a representation of this "ideological" base -supported John Kerry on the basis of his personal profile as a Vietnam War veteran and his supposed "electability." It was the most non-ideological of choices in what we were supposed to believe was the most ideological of races.

This blunting of the left's ideological edge is a result of three unfortunate circumstances. First, conservatives spent the better part of three decades vilifying the major tenets of the left's core ideology, succeeding to the point where "liberal" is now considered a slur. Second, the media seized on these stereotypes and amplified them - both because there was little being done to refute them, and because they fit so cleanly into the increasingly primitive and binary political narrative being told on television.

And third is Partisan War Syndrome - the misconception even in supposedly "progressive" circles that substance is irrelevant when it comes to both electoral success and, far more damaging, to actually building a serious, long-lasting political movement. This is the syndrome resulting from the shellshock of the partisan wars that marked the Clinton presidency. It is an affliction that hollowed out much of the Democratic base's economic and national security convictions in favor of an orthodoxy that says partisan concerns and cults of personality should be the only priorities because they are supposedly the only factors that win elections. It is a disease that subverts substance for "image" and has marked the last decade of Democrats' repeated failures at the ballot box.

Again, just look at 2004 for proof of Partisan War Syndrome's negative effects: Kerry's "profile" and "electability" - venerated by the supposed "ideological" base as the most important asset - were made impotent by the vicious attacks on his military service, and more importantly, by the fact that his lack of an ideological rudder allowed him to be vilified as a "flip-flopper."

...The first major symptom of Partisan War Syndrome is wild hallucinations that make progressives believe we can win elections by doing nothing, as long as the Republican Party keeps tripping over itself. You can best see this symptom each time another GOP scandal comes down the pike. The scandal hits, Republicans respond with a pathetic "I am not a crook" defense, and both Democratic politicians and grassroots activists/bloggers berate a "culture of corruption." Yet, then these same critics largely refuse to demand concrete solutions such as public funding of elections that would actually clean up the system, and would draw a contrast between the left and the right. We see hallucinations of a victory in the next election as long as we just say nothing of substance, as we have for the last decade. But like a mirage in the desert, it never seems to materialize...

The next most obvious symptom of Partisan War Syndrome is delirium. Out of power for so long, the left is desperate for anyone that has the appearance of an electoral winner, no matter what the actual positions of that winner are. Other than maybe the war in Iraq or abortion, it increasingly does not seem to matter to the Democratic base where a candidate stands on much of anything, as long as that candidate has the so-called right "profile." Intangibles like a candidate's personal background and charisma - while certainly important - are now seen by parts of the grassroots as the penultimate asset for a candidate. In vogue today are macho males - tomorrow, who knows? As long as you are the "in" thing and put a "D" behind your name, much of the supposedly "ideological" base doesn't really care what positions or record you have. It is as if progressives believe Democrats have been losing elections only because their candidates aren't out of Central Casting...

The third symptom of Partisan War Syndrome is a version of obsessive compulsive disorder that focuses on incessantly on "framing," "narrative" and building "infrastructure." No matter what you read about Democratic politics these days, everything seems to come back to these concepts - as if the left's problems are rooted exclusively in how politicians, activists and leaders talk about issues, and how these folks can get out that rhetoric, rather than the actual positions - or lack thereof - they are taking.

No one doubts that "framing," "narratives" and "infrastructure" are important. Republican pollster Frank Luntz, long considered the master of the trade, has certainly helped Republicans frame their odious agenda in the most effective ways. And the slew of right-wing think tanks and talk radio venues has certainly helped get Luntz's propaganda out. Similarly, University of California, Berkeley, Professor George Lakoff, who has also done some groundbreaking work on the subject, has been an invaluable asset to Democrats, as has the new group of left-leaning talk radio, blogs and think tanks.

But the idea that the left's big problems are all about rhetoric and delivery systems and nothing about substance is a defense mechanism designed to deny the deeper questions of conviction and guts. Obsessive focus on "framing" economic policy negates a bigger question about why large swaths of the Democratic Party and the "progressive" base aren't bothered by corporate-written trade deals that sell out American jobs, and are too afraid to support new regulations on Corporate America for fear of being labeled "anti-business." Similarly, obsessive focus on "framing" Democrats' current national security policy avoids more serious inquiries into why many Democrats still stand in lock-step with neoconservatives and President Bush on the War in Iraq...

Why should this be troubling to the average progressive? First, it is both soulless and aimless. Partisanship is not ideology, and movements are not political parties - they are bigger than political parties, and shape those parties accordingly through pressure. As much as paid party hacks would argue otherwise, the most significant movements in American history did not emanate from the innards of the Democratic or Republican Party headquarters, and they did not come from groups of activists who put labels before substance: They spawned from millions of people committed to grassroots movements organized around ideas - movements which pushed both parties' establishments to deal with given issues. Without those movements transcending exclusively partisan concerns, American history would be a one-page tale of status quo.

Second, even for those concerned more about electoral victories than ideology, this Partisan War Syndrome that subverts ideological movements ultimately hurts electoral prospects. Today's Republican Party, for instance, could not win without the corresponding conservative ideological movement that gets that party its committed donors, fervent foot soldiers and loyal activists. That base certainly operates as an arm of the GOP's party infrastructure - but few doubt it is fueled less by hollow partisanship, and more by their grassroots' commitment to social, economic and religious conservatism.

This is why resisting Partisan War Syndrome and doing the hard work of rebuilding an ideological movement is both a moral imperative and a political necessity for the left. A grassroots base that is organized around hollow partisan labels rather than an overarching belief system - no matter how seemingly energized - will never defeat an opponent that puts ideological warriors ready to walk through fire on the political battlefield. If we do not rekindle that same fervor about actual issues on the left, we will continue living in a one-party country, losing elections into the distant future, and most disturbing of all, watching as our government serves only to protect those in power.  ¶ 8:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  If You Weren't, You Will Be If You Ask About It...

Dump the database
by Rachel Neumann
If you're between 16 and 25 years-old, you've probably heard that the U.S. Army wants you, but did you know how bad? The Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) Recruiting Database is a Department of Defense project that collects tons of previously private information from schools, Internet service providers, and private information collection agencies, and stores it in one place with the sole purprose of helping military recruiters.

The database would contain Social Security Numbers, race, religion, income status, and educational information on up to 25 million people as young as 16 years old. According to Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the hundred organizations opposing JAMRS, the database would be operated by a commercial data marketing company, and individuals would not be able to opt-out.

The Dump the DOD Database Coalition is asking the Department of Defense to drop the database and is asking Congress to review whether the database is in violation of the Privacy Act.

If you want to find out if you or your child is in this database, you can write a letter requesting access to your file under the Privacy Act. This letter must contain your full name, Social Security Number, date of birth, current address, and telephone number. Send your request to "The Department of Defense, Defense Human Resources Activity, c/o JAMRS, Direct Marketing Program Officer, Defense Human Resources Activity, 4040 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 200, Arlington, Virginia 22203-1613.

Of course, writing a letter to the Department of Defense requesting information is probably just anti-patriotic enough to get you listed on another database, the infamous "no-fly" list.  ¶ 8:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Duncan Black and Graham Allison discuss nuclear terrorism.

The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.

... DUNCAN BLACK: Tell us about Dragonfire . That was actually news to me. Remember after September 11th, Vice President Cheney went to his famous or infamous ‘undisclosed location’, and we never really were given a clear reason why that happened or what purpose that would serve aside from general security concerns. But in your book you talked about this Dragonfire , can you tell us what that was about?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, this was an actual incident, and as you say it motivated the President to decide to have Cheney evacuate Washington and with him almost a thousand people from various agencies of the U.S. government on the proposition that the U.S. government thought Al Qaeda may, might have succeeded in acquiring a nuclear bomb out of the former Soviet arsenal and might have that bomb in the U.S. already. The Dragonfire story goes like this. It was actually coincidental. One month to the day after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Tenet, the director of CIA, George Tenet walks into the Oval Office for the president’s morning daily intelligence briefing and informs President Bush that Dragonfire , a CIA agent, has reported that Al Qaeda has gotten a small nuclear bomb out of the former Soviet arsenal and now has that bomb in New York City. So there’s a couple of minutes …

DUNCAN BLACK: Of panic.

GRAHAM ALLISON: … to catch your breath and then actually a very good interrogatory that goes something like the following. Did the former Soviet arsenal include weapons of that description, what Dragonfire had said? Yes. Were all those weapons adequately accounted for? Tenet’s answer: No. Could Al Qaeda have acquired one of these weapons? Yes. Could Al Qaeda have brought that weapon to New York and have it now ready to detonate in New York City without our otherwise knowing anything about it? Answer: Yes. So, bottom line from that interrogation was no basis for dismissing Dragonfire’s report that there was now a live nuclear bomb in New York City about to be exploded. So Bush I think rightly said, Wait a minute, well, it could be in Washington. They could have two bombs. So Cheney and this group of people left and they were gone from Washington for quite a lot of time, if you remember back, you know, after 9/11. Actually the nuclear NEST teams, which are a group of nuclear ninjas or experts from the labs were dispatched to New York City to look for any sign of radioactivity, and I tell in the story Giuliani was not informed about any of this, so he was an unhappy camper, you know, after, I mean, after a week it was determined that this was most likely a false alarm, because some of the other things that Dragonfire had reported about the way that bomb had been brought to the U.S. turned out not to be confirmed. But in any case I think the reason for us to take this into account is that there was no basis, and there is no basis, in science or technology or logic for dismissing a report if we got a good intelligence report today that Al Qaeda had a nuclear bomb in New York or DC or LA or Boston.

DUNCAN BLACK: All right, so this was a completely plausible scenario, given the fact that these weapons exist, they are not all accounted for, and they are relatively easily transportable.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Right, it kind of worked, and that we know that there’s somebody who seems pretty motivated.

DUNCAN BLACK: Right.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Especially after 9/11, if you had any doubts before that, to kill a lot of Americans...

DUNCAN BLACK: So, I mean about how many of these roughly sized warheads, you know, the suitcase nukes or their equivalents, I mean, how many of them exist and how many of them have rather poor security guarding them?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, it’s a complicated story, and the answer is we don’t really know. In fact I quote in the book the testimony of a director of CIA who says, “It’s not what I know that worries me so much, it’s what I know that I don’t know”. So here, to give the broad picture, there were created in the high cold war some 50 or 60 thousand nuclear warheads, the U.S. about half, the Soviet Union about half. From that peak, both parties have come down, been demobilizing and even abolishing a significant number of these weapons. So as today you would think that there are probably 40 or 45 thousand nuclear warheads globally.

DUNCAN BLACK: Okay.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Of those warheads, about half would be strategic and about half would be tactical. And tactical weapons go from something like an artillery shell, which is only this big, to something that would be a tactical nuclear warhead that would go in a rocket launcher, that could be this big. All right? So they go in various sizes. And then in addition there’s the kind of miniature versions, and the miniature versions, referred to sometimes in the past as backpack or suitcase nuclear bombs, were mainly designed to be small, have a pretty substantial blast, and as I mentioned before, they were to be used by a group of two men who would parachute in behind enemy lines to try to blow up, you know, the command and control structures or to blow up an airport, or to blow up a bridge, or otherwise. And both the U.S. and Russia, or the Soviet Union, had such weapons, and indeed had such weapons that were to be deployed by special forces or intelligence operatives. So it was a mission for doing something that looks rather like blowing up a building or blowing up a, you know, a city, parts of a city, or blowing up a political leader, and there was a means for doing that. That was these nuclear bombs. Now, there then comes to be a long story about what happened to all these weapons.

DUNCAN BLACK: Right.

GRAHAM ALLISON: And I try to advance that story a little bit in the book on nuclear terrorism. Basically I would say at this stage that we don’t, we never pinned it down adequately. The Russians currently say that all those weapons – first they said no such weapons ever existed. Then they said all of them had been destroyed. Then they said all of them were under control. So there’s been a kind of series of, Well, I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, Well, I didn’t hit her that hard, or you know, all these inconsistent stories. But they, my current thought about it is that there is no question, 100% in my view that they had such weapons...  ¶ 7:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Deep Field

Or, Why the TheoCons Hate the Hubble

A little information courtesy of the Wikipedia:

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region of the sky, based on the results of a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 144 arcseconds across, equivalent in angular size to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres, lying in the constellation Ursa Major. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 400 scientific papers since it was created.

Three years after the HDF observations were taken, a region in the south celestial hemisphere was imaged in a similar way and named the Hubble Deep Field South. The similarities between the two regions strengthened the belief that the universe is uniform over large scales and that the Earth occupies a typical region in the universe (the cosmological principle). In 2004 a deeper image, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, was constructed from a total of eleven days of observations.

The field selected for the observations needed to fulfil several criteria. It had to be at a high galactic latitude, because dust and obscuring matter in the plane of the Milky Way's disc prevents observations of distant galaxies. The target field had to avoid known bright sources of visible light (such as foreground stars), and infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray emissions, to facilitate later studies at many wavelengths of the objects in the deep field, and also needed to be in a region with a low background infrared 'cirrus', the diffuse, wispy infrared emission believed to be caused by warm dust grains in cool clouds of hydrogen gas (H I regions)...

The field that was eventually selected is located at a right ascension of 12h 36m 49.4s and a declination of +62° 12′ 48″[1]...

Images of the target area in the chosen filters were taken over ten consecutive days, during which Hubble orbited the Earth about 150 times. The total exposure times at each wavelength were 42.7 hours (300 nm), 33.5 hours (450 nm), 30.3 hours (606 nm) and 34.3 hours (814 nm), divided into 342 individual exposures to prevent significant damage to individual images by cosmic rays, which cause bright streaks to appear when they strike CCD detectors...

The final images revealed a plethora of distant, faint galaxies. About 3,000 distinct galaxies could be identified in the images, with both irregular and spiral galaxies clearly visible, although some galaxies in the field are only a few pixels across. In all, the HDF is thought to contain fewer than ten galactic foreground stars; by far the majority of objects in the field are distant galaxies.

There are about fifty blue point-like objects in the HDF. Many seem to be associated with nearby galaxies, which together form chains and arcs: these are likely to be regions of intense star formation. Others may be distant quasars. Astronomers initially ruled out the possibility that some of the point-like objects are white dwarfs, because they are too blue to be consistent with theories of white dwarf evolution prevalent at the time. However, more recent work has found that many white dwarfs become bluer as they age, lending support to the idea that the HDF might contain white dwarfs [2].

The HDF data provided extremely rich material for cosmologists to analyse and as of 2005, almost 400 papers based on the HDF have appeared in the astronomical literature. One of the most fundamental findings was the discovery of large numbers of galaxies with high redshift values.

As the universe expands, more distant objects recede from the Earth faster, in what is called the Hubble Flow. The light from very distant galaxies is significantly affected by doppler shifting, which reddens the radiation that we receive from them. While quasars with high redshifts were known, very few galaxies with redshifts greater than 1 were known before the HDF images were produced. The HDF, however, contained many galaxies with redshifts as high as 6, corresponding to distances of about 12 billion light years [3]. (Due to redshift the most distant objects in the HDF are not actually visible in the Hubble images; they can only be detected in images of the HDF taken at longer wavelengths by ground-based telescopes.)

The HDF galaxies contained a considerably larger proportion of disturbed and irregular galaxies than the local universe; galaxy collisions and mergers were more common in the young universe as it was much smaller than today. It is believed that giant elliptical galaxies form when spirals and irregular galaxies collide.

The wealth of galaxies at different stages of their evolution also allowed astronomers to estimate the variation in the rate of star formation over the lifetime of the universe. While estimates of the redshifts of HDF galaxies are somewhat crude, astronomers believe that star formation was occurring at its maximum rate 8–10 billion years ago, and has decreased by a factor of about 10 since then [4].

Another important result from the HDF was the very small number of foreground stars present. For years astronomers had been puzzling over the nature of so-called dark matter, mass which seems to be undetectable but which observations implied made up about 90% of the mass of the universe. One theory was that dark matter might consist of Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) — faint but massive objects such as red dwarfs and planets in the outer regions of galaxies. The HDF showed, however, that there were not significant numbers of red dwarfs in the outer parts of our galaxy...

References

[1] Williams RE et al. (1996), The Hubble Deep Field: Observations, data reduction, and galaxy photometry, Astronomical Journal, 112:1335
[2] Ferguson HC (2000), The Hubble Deep Fields, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IX, ASP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 216, N Manset, C Veillet, and D Crabtree (eds). Astronomical Society of the Pacific, ISBN 1-58381-047-1, p.395
[3] Hansen BMS (1998), Observational signatures of old white dwarfs, 19th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, J Paul, T Montmerle, and E Aubourg (eds)
[4] Hornschemeier A et al.. (2000), X-Ray sources in the Hubble Deep Field detected by Chandra, Astrophysical Journal, 541:49–53
[5] Connolly AJ et al. (1997),. The evolution of the global star formation history as measured from the Hubble Deep Field, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 486:L11


More on how they do it here.

More on what they see here and what they zoom in on in the .mpeg here.

The universe is infinitely larger and older than we can imagine. The known age of the universe and its size are limited by the distances we can observe. Or understand. This fact, in and of itself, gives us no information about what any Creator might be. But it strongly suggests any Creator isn't the jealous, petty, small fantasy overtly worshipped by the TheoCons who would rule us all.  ¶ 6:25 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Gore Vidal on Independent World Television

Go watch it.  ¶ 9:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Don't Uncork the Champagne

Yet.


Like chicago dyke says over at Correntewire:

...I’m not one of the champagne drinking crowd. I’d add “yet,” but I’m not convinced I should.

Here are a few names for you: Bush v. Gore. Thomas White. Ken Lay. Ahmed Chalabi. The Anthrax Killer. Katrina Leung. Bill Frist. “Bugman” DeLay. If I knew how to get to Findlaw or Nexis/Lexis, I’d make that list longer. Much, much longer...

Fitz seems like a good guy, and from what I understand, he’s taken on Big Dogs in the past and won. The Mob. The other mob. Various gov’t officials. He’s a republican. People talk about him like he’s an Untouchable. All I know is that he’s no Ken Starr, and has been pretty good controlling leaks and keeping all of us guessing.

But the facts are bleak to me. Do you expect a Republican-controlled Congress to call for impeachment? I don’t. Do you expect the ~22 Dems voting for Roberts to step up with the noo-kwoo-lar option if this proves to touch Bush and Cheney directly? I don’t. Do you expect CNN and the NYT to offer daily, in-depth, factually based coverage of this in ways most time-pressed Americans can understand? Again, me- not so much. Do you think that this administration will waver from its pattern of obfuscation, denial, and subject changing, and focus on responding to these (as yet only speculative) indictments honestly? Hahahahahahaha…. Did I mention Roberts, Bush v. Gore and expensive lawyers yet?

Anyway, this isn’t a TV show. Jack isn’t going to swoop in like a hawk and grab a fat, quivering mass of obviously guilty prey that Lenny has just broken in the LT’s conference room. More importantly, this case represents a set of threads that, if pulled firmly, would unravel practically the entire empowered Federal gov’t. There’s hardly a Republican in DC today who isn’t somehow connected to this scandal and cover-up.

Dems are included in the list of lying, guilty parties...

Plame’s outing may be have been against the reality-based Intel community. Recall that Poppy, ex-CIA head under Ford himself, represents one big faction of the Company. The Company itself while uniform at the bottom line (Power, Money, and Hegemony) differs in the world vision of it’s faction members.

Call one faction the Dominionists. Call another the Economists. For convenience, realizing these are overlapping oversimplifications and hence mislabels.

The Economists realize they live in a dynamic world. Soros, a founding member of the Carlyle Group, represents this. Their underlying philosophy is that given a large degree of individual freedom, the average person will produce and consume enough, with the proper guidance by the Company, to enrich everyone, including the individual.

Call their philosophy: “A place for every man”.

The Dominionists don’t like that dynamic world unless they own it. They are willing to use religion, fascism, whatever it takes to ensure that everyone is in their place. With the Company on top.

The Empire’s functioning credo was summarized by Herbert, of course:

“A place for every man, and every man in his place”.

What of the Fitzgerald findings?

I submit that if Cheneyburton is to be brought down, it will only be because the Economists check the Dominionists in the Company.

Any change in the system, when change does occur, will be superficial, and will be to allow for a more profitable business structure for the Company.  ¶ 8:24 AM 0 comments links to this post

  You Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

Here's a good one.  ¶ 10:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  When Are Capitalism and Free Enterprise, Not?

Answer: when the Government supports it.

NEW YORK - Farmers in rich countries get $1 billion per day in subsidies. To be fair, we've rounded up the numbers, counted agribusinesses and small farmers, and defined subsidies broadly to include tariffs, export credits and other supports. But, give a million or two a day, the order of magnitude is right.

By that measure, agriculture is the most protected industry. And that is the single biggest reason that the current round of world trade talks under the World Trade Organization (WTO) is stalled. Not surprisingly, farmers don't want to give up that sort of money.

Farmers and agribusinesses such as Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra Foods, General Mills and the privately owned Cargill, which in the U.S. get 80% of farm subsidies, have tremendous political clout--as do their counterparts in Europe and Japan--way beyond their numbers or economic size...

Cheneyburton is another great example.

There is nothing like Free Enterprise, and what these people do is nothing like free enterprise.  ¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Business is Booming

Microwaves, Lasers, Retired Generals For Sale
William M. Arkin

Friend's tell me that this week's Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting & Exposition at the Washington Convention Center was all that an orgy of self-congratulation can be. Contractors galore, beltway bandits, luncheons, awards, howitzers, all topped off with a speech by Dick Cheney.

The buzz on the floor was "directed energy" laser, high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons that are getting a boost from the prolonged fighting in Iraq. Supporters are hoping that these new exotic technologies will help in the battle against improvised explosive devices and in countering snipers and hidden insurgents.
Directed energy is also the star of this week's Air Force Futures Game 05, being held at Booz Allen Hamilton in Herndon. The game, which posits a major war in the 2025 time frame, has high powered microwave and laser weapons zapping the bad guys.

Highly controversial directed energy weapons have been pushed for almost two decades as the next silver bullet. It's been two decades because along the way, they have run into complications, some having to do with the technology itself -- aim and controllable effects, compact power sources, military ruggedness -- but mostly their problem has been moral principles. Military leaders have been concerned about legality. Commanders have been hesitant or skeptical about new technologies with uncertain effects.

Those concerns are being brushed aside as the weapons advance along the familiar development path of boosters and patrons feeding information to war gamers who feed study participants who feed researchers who feed manufactures. At the end of the day, it is hard to tell whether high powered microwaves and laser came into being because someone conceived it out of need or because its existence in the laboratory created the need.

This week, for example, one of my favorite directed energy patrons -- retired General Ron Fogleman -- received appointments at two corporations, as a "senior advisor" to the Galen Capital Group, LLC; and as a member of the board of advisors of Novastar Resources.

The former chief of staff of the Air Force is a military-industrial legend, head of his own consulting company Durango Aerospace Inc. with a client list that includes Boeing, FMC, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and RSL Electronics.

A quick check on the web shows that Fogleman also serves on the boards of no few than 14 corporations: AAR Corp, Alliant Techsystems, IDC, Mesa Air Group, MITRE Corporation, Rolls-Royce North America, Thales-Raytheon Systems, First National Bank of Durango, International Airline Service Group, ICN Pharmaceuticals, DERCO Aerospace, EAST Inc., World Airway, and North American Airlines. He is also Senior Vice President of something called Projects International, a DC consultancy and is or was a partner in Laird and Company, LLC. And he is a member of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, on the NASA Advisory Council, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Board, chairs the Falcon Foundation and the Airlift/Tanker Association. This guy is busy!

Fogleman gave up the job as the most powerful man in the Air Force on principle when he could no longer serve Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Since leaving, however, he has dispensed so much wisdom one wonders how much principle could be left.

One of Fogleman's first jobs upon leaving the Air Force was to chair the 1998 Directed Energy Applications for Tactical Airborne Combat study (known as "DE ATAC") which identified 65 concepts, particularly microwave weapons, selecting 20 for further analysis. The laboratory then awarded short-term concept development contracts for the five most promising to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Coherent Technologies, and Sanders.

All during the 1990's, money flowed into continued development of directed energy weapons, but frankly not much happened. Everyone talked about an E-bomb being used in Iraq in 2003, but once again for a variety of technical and ethical reasons, and because the real world intervened, the silver bullets remained on laboratory benches or in the world of "black" super-secret contracts, waiting for an opportunity.

And with the quagmire in Iraq, that opportunity came. So it just a coincidence that Fogleman's company Alliant Techsystems was awarded a contract earlier this year to develop the Scorpion II high powered microwave weapon "capable of defeating … improvised explosive devices (IEDs) currently threatening U.S. and allied troops in Iraq." Maybe Fogleman had nothing to do with the directed energy work already flowing to Boeing and Raytheon.

The introduction of a completely new weapon -- particularly one that could cause excruciating pain, blindness, and hearing loss -- requires the most deliberate process, and the unintended consequences -- humanitarian, public relations, the possibility of the same weapon ending up in the hands of our enemies -- needs to be carefully weighed. The United States may indeed have within technological reach the ability to disperse rioters with a beam and not a bullet, and it might be able to cripple a modern society with the push of a button, but then again, so too does the United States possess the technology to turn Baghdad into a radiating ruin.

More on the efforts to develop energy weapons here and here.

Even if the jubilation in Left Blogistan is justified (see here and here) and this is the beginning of the end for Cheneyburton- something I doubt given the state of the $upreme Court- the damage these pirates have done to this nation won't go away.

One of the worse things they've done is re-made War into the biggest business America has.

Make no mistake: if we catch the big fish, there's still an ocean full of sharks out there.  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Having a Chip on Your Shoulder

It's one of the cutest of those cute IBM Corp. TV commercials, the ones that feature the ever-present help desk. This time, the desk appears smack in the middle of a highway, blocking the path of a big rig.

''Why are you blocking the road?" the driver asks. ''Because you're going the wrong way," replies the cheerful Help Desk lady. ''Your cargo told me so." It seems the cartons inside the truck contained IBM technology that alerted the company when the driver made a wrong turn.

It's clever, all right -- and creepy. Because the technology needn't be applied only to cases of beer. The trackers could be attached to every can of beer in the case, and allow marketers to track the boozing habits of the purchasers. Or if the cargo is clothing, those little trackers could have been stitched inside every last sweater. Then some high-tech busybody could keep those wearing them under surveillance.

If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through ''shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc." An IBM spokeswoman insisted the company isn't really prepared to go this far. Patent applications are routinely written to include every possible use of a technology, even some the company doesn't intend to pursue. Still, it's clear somebody at IBM has a pretty creepy imagination.

And it's not just IBM. A host of other companies are looking at ways to embed surveillance chips into practically everything we purchase -- and even into our bodies. It's a prospect that infuriates Harvard graduate student Katherine Albrecht.

''I think the shocking part is they've spent the past three years saying, oh no, we'd never do this," Albrecht said. But instead of taking their word for it, Albrecht and her colleague, former bank examiner Liz McIntyre, began reading everything they could find on the subject. Now they're serving up the scary results of their research in a scathing new book, ''Spychips."

That's Albrecht's preferred name for a technology called radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. If you use a Mobil Speedpass to pay for gasoline, you're already using RFID. Your Speedpass contains a microchip and a small antenna that allows it to broadcast information to a receiver. The chip has no power source of its own. Instead, it picks up radio signals from an RFID chip reader, turns these radio waves into electricity, and uses the power to broadcast data to the reader.

Because they need no batteries, RFID chips can be made small enough to attach invisibly to practically anything. One company is even working on a way to print RFID chips onto newspapers, using electrically conductive ink.

Why is this so scary? Because so many of us pay for our purchases with credit or debit cards, which contain our names, addresses, and other sensitive information. Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers.

''Spychips" reveals a US government plan to order RFID chips embedded in all cars sold in America. No big deal -- until you realize the police could then track your comings and goings by putting inexpensive RFID readers at key intersections.

Then there are the RFID pajamas from a California maker of children's clothing. It's a clever way to prevent kidnapping: Just put RFID readers in your home, to alert you if Junior's taking an unauthorized trip. It's easy to imagine parents buying into this idea, but they'll now have to install RFID readers in their homes. ''There's the nose in the camel's tent," said Albrecht. At first, companies will just scan your kids' jammies. But later they'll ask permission to scan the tags on your groceries and your clothes. The consulting company Accenture has patented a design that builds an RFID reader into a household medicine cabinet, to make sure you're taking all your medications.

There are countless applications for RFID, and viewed in isolation, some are downright appealing. It would be nice for the medicine cabinet to send you an e-mail -- ''Time to buy more Viagra."...

Speak for yourself, sir. Spam I have too much of. Viagra is not a drug for healthy people.

... But what if it's also sending that data to consumer marketing companies, eager to bombard you with unwanted advertising? Worse yet, what if they're sending the data to government investigators, or to hackers who've figured out how to break into the system?

Thanks to Defense Tech for the tip.  ¶ 10:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Great Game: Why Halliburton Doesn't Care If the Poles Melt

[Bold emphasis mine]

CHURCHILL, Manitoba - It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap - finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded - is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe's calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey...

In 2001, Russia made the first move, staking out virtually half the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole. But after challenges by other nations, including the United States, Russia sought to bolster its claim by sending a research ship north to gather more geographical data. On Aug. 29, it reached the pole without the help of an icebreaker - the first ship ever to do so...

Increasingly, big corporations, the eight countries with Arctic footholds and other nations farther south are betting on the possibility of a great transformation. Energy-hungry China has set up a research station on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and twice deployed its icebreaker Snow Dragon, which normally works in Antarctica, to northern waters to conduct climate research.

Interest in Arctic-hardy vessels has picked up so much that in January, Aker Finnyards, a giant shipbuilder based in Helsinki, created a subsidiary just to develop ice-hardened ships. Its new double-ended tanker slips smoothly through open water bow first but can spin around and use an icebreakerlike stern to smash through heavy floes. A Finnish energy company bought two for about $90 million apiece, and after buying one Russia licensed the design and is building two more.

In January, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research held a closed two-day meeting to hear from experts on the implications of a warming, opening Arctic...

Just like Bu$hCo, to try to classify something everyone else already knows.

Back to the story:

...A look at a map of the globe with the North Pole at its center explains why a new frontier matters. Some countries that one might think of as being half a world part appear as startlingly close neighbors, and relatively speaking, they are.

In the days of empire, Rudyard Kipling called jockeying among world powers in Central Asia the Great Game. Christopher Weafer, an energy analyst with Alfa Bank in Moscow, says this new Arctic rush is "the Great Game in a cold climate."

...Charlie Lean easily recalls when he realized that big changes were sweeping the fish stocks along the northern shores of Alaska.

Just over 10 years ago, when Mr. Lean was the state's fisheries manager for the northwest region, a call came in from the tiny Eskimo outpost of Kivalina, on the Chukchi Sea 150 miles northeast of the Bering Strait. A village elder was reporting "a massive fish kill" in the Wulik River, Mr. Lean said. Everyone assumed it was from some toxic spill upriver at the giant Red Dog zinc mine.

"I rounded up a plane and blasted off and flew up there," he said. "Flying overhead I could see right away it was the end of a pink salmon run. They were dying of natural causes as they always do once they spawn."

The elders had never seen a run of this salmon species. But they have shown up every year since.

The colonization of new rivers by pink salmon is just one of many changes in fish and crab stocks that appear linked to retreating sea ice and warming waters in the Chukchi Sea and, farther south, the Bering Sea. The changes are important because the Bering is rich with pollock, salmon, halibut and crab, already yielding nearly half of America's seafood catch and a third of Russia's.

Recent studies have projected that in a few decades there could be lucrative fishing grounds in waters that were largely untouched throughout human history.

In a 2002 report for the Navy on climate change and the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic Research Commission, a panel appointed by the president, concluded that species were moving north through the Bering Strait. "Climate warming is likely to bring extensive fishing activity to the Arctic, particularly in the Barents Sea and Beaufort-Chukchi region where commercial operations have been minimal in the past," the report said. "In addition, Bering Sea fishing opportunities will increase as sea ice cover begins later and ends sooner in the year."

...physical features matter enormously to nations seeking to expand their undersea territory under a murky clause, Article 76, in the Law of the Sea. With only fragments of the Arctic ever surveyed, by icebreaker or nuclear submarine, various countries are mounting new mapping expeditions to claim the most territory they can.

The exclusive economic zone controlled by a country generally extends 230 miles from its shores. But under Article 76, that zone can expand if a nation can convince other parties to the treaty that there is a "natural prolongation" of its continental shelf beyond that limit.

The shelf is the relatively shallow extension of a landmass to the point where the bottom drops into the oceanic abyss. But in many places, the drop-off is a gentle slope or is connected to long-submerged ridges that, if precisely mapped, might add thousands of square miles to a country's exploitable seabed.

Claims of expanded territory are being pursued the world over, but the Arctic Ocean is where experts foresee the most conflict. Only there do the boundaries of five nations - Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States - converge, the way sections of an orange meet at the stem. (The three other Arctic nations, Iceland, Sweden and Finland, do not have coasts on the ocean.)

"The area does get to be a bit crowded," said Peter Croker, chairman of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which assesses claims. It is composed of experts appointed by countries that ratified the treaty.

Disputes over overlapping claims must be worked out by the countries involved, but the commission weighs control over areas that would otherwise remain international waters.

Countries that ratified the treaty before May 13, 1999, have until May 13, 2009, to make claims. Other countries have 10 years from their date of ratification.

Russia adopted the treaty in 1997, and four years later laid claim to nearly half the Arctic Ocean. The commission's technical panel rejected the claim, and now Russia hopes the recent voyage of its research ship Akademik Fyodorov to the North Pole will yield mapping data in its favor.

In June, Denmark and Canada announced that they would conduct a joint surveying project of uncharted parts of the Arctic Ocean near their coasts.

Denmark is particularly interested in proving that a 1,000-mile undersea mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge, is linked geologically to Greenland, which is semiautonomous Danish territory. If it finds such a link, Denmark could make a case that the North Pole belongs to the Danes, Danish officials have said.

Canada could also claim a huge area, and then face challenges from the other Arctic nations. The United States could petition for a swath of Arctic seabed larger than California, according to rough estimates by Dr. Mayer and other scientists. But while the government financed Dr. Mayer's survey, it has not made a definitive move toward staking a claim.

American ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty has repeatedly been blocked by a small group of Republican senators, now led by Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. They say, among other things, that the treaty would infringe on American sovereignty.

In a Senate hearing last year, Mr. Inhofe said, "I'm very troubled about implications of this convention on our national security." The deadlock has persisted even though the Bush administration in 2002 described ratification of the Law of the Sea and four other treaties as an "urgent need."

Many proponents of the treaty, including the Pentagon, the American Petroleum Institute and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, say this paralysis leaves the United States on the sidelines while others carve up an ocean.

"We need to be in the game, at the table, talking about fisheries management, mineral extraction, freedom of navigation," said Adm. James D. Watkins, a retired chief of naval operations who is chairman of the United States Commission on Ocean Policy.

Mr. McCain said, "I think what it would require really is a hard push from the president."

Treaty or no, territorial disputes ultimately imply questions about a country's ability to defend its interests. Here, too, the United States has shown less urgency while Canada has acted more aggressively to ensure sovereignty over a fast-changing domain it had long neglected...

Once again, Poppy's son is a day late, a dollar short, and slow on the draw. All hat and no cattle, he takes a side on a treaty his own military tells him he's going to lose with. No wonder the Saudis love this guy.

Back to the story:

... The advantage of maritime shortcuts across the top of the world can be startling. For example, shipments from Murmansk to midcontinental North America by the well-worn route through the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes to Thunder Bay, in western Ontario, typically take 17 days. The voyage from Murmansk to Churchill is only 8 days under good conditions, and from Churchill, rail links snake down through Manitoba, the American Midwest and points south all the way to Monterrey, Mexico.

For Murmansk, an extended shipping season in Arctic ports that are now frozen much of the year could mean a boon in traffic - to the west and, perhaps once again, to the Far East.

The city was once the anchor of the Soviet Union's Northern Sea Route, which stretched to nearly 3,500 miles to the rich nickel mines at Norilsk and on to newly established Arctic colonies at Dikson, Khatanga, Tiksi and Pevek before reaching the Bering Sea.

At its height, in 1987, more than seven million tons of cargo traversed the icy route. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Northern Sea Route. Today it handles only 1.5 million tons.

The Murmansk Shipping Company, newly privatized, now uses its icebreakers for tourist cruises to the North Pole - $15,000 to $20,000 a ticket, depending on the cabin.

The same way an Arctic Bridge could drastically cut the distance to Canada, a revived Northern Sea Route could shorten the journey for goods and raw materials from Northeast Asia to Europe by 40 percent.

Vladimir M. Chlenov, the transportation minister from the Siberian republic of Sakha, a vast region that borders the Laptev Sea, envisions dozens of ships carrying gold, timber and other resources up the Lena River to the port of Tiksi, and from there through ice-free seas to Europe and Asia.

...some Canadian officials, eyeing what will happen in 20 years, say it is all the more justification for investing in the rebirth of Churchill.

"We're gearing up for the future," said Mr. Lemieux, the Manitoba transportation minister. "We look to be the gateway, the logistical hub of the world for circumpolar navigation."

A lucky winner would be Pat Broe, the American who bought the Port of Churchill in 1997 almost as an afterthought, for a token $10 Canadian. Looking to expand his railroad company, OmniTrax, he had already paid $11 million for 810 miles of denationalized tracks in Manitoba. He acquired the port at auction, figuring he would rather own it than have someone else use it as a "toll booth" for his railroad.

Mr. Broe, a private man, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Since his acquisitions, OmniTrax estimates it has spent $50 million modernizing the port to accommodate big ships carrying exports like grain and farm machinery to Murmansk, and incoming Russian products, including fertilizer and steel. By some hopeful estimates, Churchill's shipping season could eventually grow to 8 or even 10 months a year, compared with the current 4.

Michael J. Ogborn, OmniTrax's managing director, said he could see a future for Churchill when "the activity at the port will be as busy as an anthill, with machines, people, freight and ships at dock."

For now, though, there is a problem. While the port has continued to ship grain to Europe and North Africa, it is still waiting for its ship to come in - any ship from Russia, to demonstrate the advantages of the Arctic Bridge.

"There is still a huge marketing effort needed to educate shippers why they should ship through Churchill," Mr. Ogborn conceded.

And in an arena where sharp elbows are often the norm, there is great cooperation between Canada and Russia, not least through Russia's ambassador to Canada, Georgy E. Mamedov. A spreader of good will, the ambassador has even suggested using decommissioned nuclear submarines to transport cargo under the ice. On a visit to Churchill last year, he appointed his local driver honorary Russian consul, and stopped at the "jail" for polar bears that wander into town, laying his hand on the big black nose of one anesthetized inmate and addressing it fondly in Russian.

In the months since, Mr. Mamedov has talked ebulliently of the Arctic Bridge in meetings with Canadian officials, business groups and reporters. "Go to Churchill," he said in one interview. "Go there."  ¶ 8:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Weather Report

Lambert sees this on his radar:

According to the Republican Playbook, the first step in privatizing is you always underfund and trash a government agency. Then, you can privatize the agency—and hand out the contracts to your contributors! Nice work if you can get it…

But you’d think the Republicans would have some stopping points; some ethical constraints; some limit where they’d say, “We can’t do this, it’s just not decent. Money’s one thing, but people’s lives could depend on this!”

But n-o-o-o-o-o!

After Katrina—or Andrew, for that matter—you’d think the Republicans, as the governing ruling party, would be doing their best to defend American citizens at risk from hurricanes. Think again:

While hurricanes relentlessly pound America’s coastlines, breakdowns in crucial weather-observing equipment are thwarting forecasters at the National Hurricane Center … a Miami Herald Investigation has found.

”It’s almost like we’re forecasting blind,” said Pablo Santos, who has pressed for years for more buoys as science officer at the National Weather Service’s Miami office, which supports the Hurricane Center during storms.
(Miami)

During Katrina, a smoking gun:

NOAA’s high-flying Gulfstream jet is … important because it swiftly relays information to forecasters about weather conditions in the environment around hurricanes. During Hurricane Isabel in 2003, forecasters used the jet to resolve a complex steering flow pattern, and with dead-on precision, predicted Isabel’s North Carolina landfall. The Gulfstream is so effective that NOAA scientists say it has improved storm-track prediction in the computer models as much as 25 percent.

But the jet is budgeted to fly only 250 hours this season, not nearly enough to get a continuous read on shifty storms. In fact, as Katrina bore down on Florida on Aug. 25, researchers were riled over the Hurricane Center’s decision not to fly the jet in the hours before landfall.

”I didn’t want to break the bank,” [Hurricane Center Director Max] Mayfield, said.

Researcher Black said the reluctance to fly likely weakened the forecast. ”The jet,” he said, “might have made a difference.”

Beyond the Florida forecast, Mayfield acknowledges he may have been able to give New Orleans greater advance warning had the [Gulfstream] been flown more than once in the early stages of Katrina to detect steering currents.

It wasn’t until Aug. 26 — about 2 ½ days before the storm’s landfall — that New Orleans was included in the potential strike zone.

But how could this be? How could it be that nobody has brought this state of affairs to Dear Leader’s attention?

Going public with such problems would have consequences, said former Hurricane Center Director Neil Frank. ”Woe be to me if I phoned a senator,” said Frank, now a television meteorologist in Houston. ‘There was all this internal pressure. I wasn’t free to call and say, `We need more money down here.’ ”

A 2004 agency memo drives the point home: NOAA chief Conrad Lautenbacher told employees not to talk with lawmakers about budget issues without explicit approval, saying the agency must provide “a unified message.”

Mayfield, a 33-year NOAA employee, said he has been told repeatedly to work within the bureaucracy’s budget process. He’s chosen his words carefully, at times drawing criticism from some who say he should have been more outspoken.

”I could be fired,” Mayfield said.

And, as the Republicans like to remind us ad nauseum, actions have consequences:

”They didn’t have a chance with those bad forecasts,” said former Hurricane Center Director Jerry Jarrell, who retired in 2000. “It’s frustrating. You’re seeing people die because what you did was not good.”

Assuming The Clenis—isn’t to blame… Who could be?

Next summer in the height of hurricane season, one of NOAA’s hurricane hunter planes heads to Texas — to study air pollution.

And who’s at the forefront of the effort to privatize the National Weather Service? Why, our own Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, of course! Small world….

With very small people. Who don't want the government warning you about things like hurricanes or tornados, either. Seems like the people get a little agitated about things like that, and the Department of Commerce says it's bad for business.

Forget the Weather Channel, go to the Weather Underground for the hard geek stuff anyway.  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

  No Hell Below Us, Above Us Only Sky

There is No God (And You Know It)
Sam Harris

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.
The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe -- at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheistdoes not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources -- is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at www.truthdig.com in December.  ¶ 6:03 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Beware of Presidents Who Drink Their Own Kool-Aid

For educational purposes only:

The Faith-Based President Defrocked
New York Times, The (NY)
October 9, 2005
Author: FRANK RICH

TO understand why the right is rebelling against Harriet Miers, don't waste time boning up on her glory days with the Texas Lottery Commission. The real story in this dust-up is not the Supreme Court candidate, but the man who picked her. The Miers nomination, whatever its fate, will be remembered as the flashpoint when the faith-based Bush base finally started to lose faith in our propaganda president and join the apostate American majority...

"The president's 'argument' for her amounts to: Trust me," George Will wrote in the op-ed column that last week galvanized conservative opposition to the nomination. He then went on to list several reasons why he doesn't trust Mr. Bush. As if to prove the point, the president went out to the Rose Garden and let loose with one whopper after another in his first press conference in four months...

BUT Mr. Bush's dissembling wasn't limited to his Supreme Court nominee. Asked how he was going to pay for Katrina recovery, the president twice said he'd proposed $187 billion in budget cuts over 10 years -- but failed to factor in his tax proposals and other budget increases. The real net total for proposed Bush cuts is $103 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and even less according to some independent number crunchers. Turning to Iraq, Mr. Bush once again fudged our "progress" there with a numerical bait-and-switch, bragging about "30 Iraqi battalions in the lead." (Translation: in the lead with American military support.) Less than a week earlier his own commanders had told Congress that the number of Iraqi battalions capable of fighting unaided had dropped from 3 to 1 since June. (Translation: 750 soldiers are now ready to stand up on their own should America's 140,000 troops stand down.) For good measure, Mr. Bush then flouted credibility one more time to set the stage for the next administration fiasco. In the event of a bird flu epidemic, he said, one option for effecting a quarantine would be to use the military. What military? Last week The Army Times reported that the Pentagon, its resources already overstretched by Iraq, would try to bolster sagging recruitment by tapping "a demographic long deemed off limits: high school dropouts who don't have a General Educational Development credential."

Like most Bush fictions, the latest are driven less by ideology than by a desire to hide incompetence. But there's a self-destructive impulse at work as well. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president told Brit Hume of Fox News two years ago. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Thus does the White House compound the sin of substituting propaganda for effective action by falling for the same spin it showers on the public.

Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers. "The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Such naked presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for news are members of your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home. You can even believe that Brownie will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate four days after the storm's arrival -- and only then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser, Dan Bartlett, asked the president to turn away from his usual "objective sources" and instead watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news reports.

Mr. Bartlett's one desperate effort to prick his boss's bubble notwithstanding, the White House as a whole is so addicted to its own mythmaking prowess that it can't kick the habit. Seventy-two hours before Ms. Miers was nominated, federal auditors from the Government Accountability Office declared that the administration had violated the law against "covert propaganda" when it repeatedly hired fake reporters (and one supposedly real pundit, Armstrong Williams) to plug its policies in faux news reports and editorial commentary produced at taxpayers' expense. But a bigger scandal is the legal propaganda that the White House produces daily even now -- or especially now.

As always, much of it pertains to the war in Iraq. On Sept. 28, to take one recent instance, the president announced the smiting of a man he identified as "the second most wanted Al Qaeda leader in Iraq" and the "top operational commander of Al Qaeda in Baghdad." As New York's Daily News would quickly report, the man in question "may not even be one of the top 10 or 15 leaders." The blogger Blogenlust chimed in, documenting 33 "top lieutenants" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who have been captured, killed or identified in the past two and a half years, with no deterrent effect on terrorist violence in Iraq, Madrid or London. No wonder the nation shrugged at the largely recycled and unsubstantiated list of 10 foiled Qaeda plots that Mr. Bush unveiled in Thursday's latest stay-the-course Iraq oration...

This Saturday is supposed to bring new victories on both these troubled fronts: Oct. 15 is the day that Iraqis vote on their constitution and the day that the president set as a deadline for all hurricane victims to be moved out of shelters. Chances are that the number of Americans who still have faith that the light is at the end of either of these tunnels is identical to the number who believe Harriet Miers is the second coming of Antonin Scalia and that Tom Cruise has found true love.  ¶ 11:53 AM 2 comments links to this post

  "evidence the enemy is inside the U.S. perimeter"

Request for Domestic Covert Role Is Defended

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 8, 2005; Page A04

As part of the expanding counterterrorism role being taken on by the Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agency covert operatives need to be able to approach potential sources in the United States without identifying themselves as government agents, George Peirce, the DIA's general counsel, said yesterday.

"This is not about spying on Americans," Peirce said in an interview in which he defended legislative language approved last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The provision would grant limited authority for DIA agents to clandestinely collect information about U.S. citizens or emigres in this country to help determine whether they could be recruited as sources of intelligence information.

"We are not asking for the moon," Peirce said. "We only want to assess their suitability as a source, person to person" and at the same time "protect the ID and safety of our officers." The CIA and the FBI already have such authority, he added, and the DIA needs it "to develop critical leads" because "there is more than enough work for all of us to do."

The legislative proposal has been controversial on Capitol Hill and has drawn criticism from groups concerned with privacy and civil liberties. The House's intelligence authorization bill, which passed in June, does not include the provision, which is similar to a proposal that was eliminated last year from the legislation.

The Senate intelligence panel approved the new authority for the DIA last week and forwarded it to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which reviews sections related to the Defense Department. One senior Armed Services Committee staff member said yesterday that the DIA provision "will get close review here."

"I'm pretty alarmed" by the proposal, said Timothy Edgar, the American Civil Liberties Union's national security policy counsel, saying it could conceivably be used by Pentagon intelligence officers "as a loophole to attend political or other meetings as part of an initial assessing contact."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Securities Studies, said the language in the Senate intelligence committee bill is part of a Pentagon effort to loosen already weak legal restrictions that "are meant to ensure that Americans' privacy is not threatened by Pentagon spying." Martin said she is concerned that the language was approved without hearings that could explore "the actual practices and necessity and justification for the program."

In the interview, Peirce said the new authority "would not be used very often and only on an exceptional basis." He pointed out there are requirements in the Senate committee language that the intelligence sought be "significant" and that it "cannot be reasonably obtained by overt means." It also dictates that collecting the information may not be undertaken "for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of any U.S. person."

Noting that there are large emigre and expatriate populations in the United States, Peirce described as a hypothetical case a situation in which the DIA learns that a new U.S. citizen is about to be visited by close relatives who are high-ranking officers in a foreign military service. To assess whether the new citizen would serve as a source of information obtained from the relatives, or even to attempt to recruit him, the DIA might feel that an open approach, in which an intelligence officer identifies himself as such, would not work. "We want to protect the identity and assess his willingness to help," he said.

The DIA and other Pentagon agencies are increasing their human intelligence activities in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and threats to U.S. military bases and facilities at home and abroad. Peirce said one reason the new authority is needed is that there is "evidence the enemy is inside the U.S. perimeter."

Indeed.

Although perhaps the Nemesis of the Republic, Democracy, and the Constitution of the United States is not the same entity Rumsfeld, Negroponte, or Cheney might name to their DynCorp mercenaries operating in the United States.

[Thanks to Lambert for the tip.]  ¶ 10:22 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Predictable Chaos

Often what appears chaotic depends on the template.

Tom Englehardt asks: has the Age of Chaos begun?

Much of this is spurred from an American Geophysical Union report highlighted by the Guardian:

...Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month dipped some 20% below the long term average for September - melting an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free well before the end of this century.

Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the Colorado centre, said melting sea ice accelerates warming because dark-coloured water absorbs heat from the sun that was previously reflected back into space by white ice. "Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold. We could see changes in Arctic ice happening much sooner than we thought and that is important because without the ice cover over the Arctic Ocean we have to expect big changes in Earth's weather."

The Arctic sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent each September at the end of the summer melting season. On September 21 the mean sea ice extent dropped to 2.05m square miles, the lowest on record. This is the fourth consecutive year that melting has been greater than average and it pushed the overall decline in sea ice per decade to 8%, up from 6.5% in 2001.

Walt Meier, also at the Colorado centre, said: "Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short term anomaly."

Surface air temperatures across most of the Arctic Ocean have been 2-3C higher on average this year than from 1955 to 2004.

The notorious northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic from Europe to Asia - where entire expeditions were lost in earlier centuries as their crews battled thick ice and bitter cold - was completely open this summer, except for a 60 mile swath of scattered ice floes. The northeast passage, north of the Siberian coast, has been ice free since August 15.

Springtime melting in the Arctic has begun much earlier in recent years; this year it started 17 days earlier than expected. The winter rebound of ice, where sea water refreezes, has also been affected. Last winter's recovery was the smallest on record and the peak Arctic ice cover failed to match the previous year's level...

Just Sayin'.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  To the DINOcrat Leadership

A Blank Slate And A Crony
(posted Oct. 3 11:30 PM ET)

Bush, concluding that a right-wing nominee must have hidden views to get on the Supreme Court, followed the Roberts Model and put up Harriet Miers.

Yet the first 24 hours of the Miers nomination didn’t go as smoothly as the Roberts nomination, as elements of the conservative base expressed disappointment.

Does it mean that Miers isn’t as conservative as Roberts? Does it mean liberals should get behind Miers?

No, and No.

With Roberts, you had a nominee that was part of the Reagan Administration and was well known in the Beltway GOP Establishment – and yet, the Bushies still had to stroke the social conservatives far in advance of the nomination to ensure a smooth roll-out.

With Miers, they apparently tried to do similar advance outreach, putting her name out as a trial balloon.

But the base was eager to get an out-of-the-closet conservative, so they pushed hard for someone else.

Part of it is a lack of trust. They want to know for sure that the next judge won’t disappoint them like David Souter did.

The other part is they want to win on the merits. They want to win because the person has a right-wing judicial philosophy, not despite of it.

Because that will grease the path for the next generation of right-wing judges. They don’t want the best and brightest to feel obliged to refrain from writing down their views in order to succeed.

Bush obviously concluded differently, that going for an overt right-winger wasn’t a politically feasible option.

But he had a dearth of candidates like Roberts that lacked a paper trail and were pre-accepted by the base (despite Bush’s best efforts to stroke).

Of course, picking a real moderate judge does not serve the Bush/Rove vision.

They are thinking long-term GOP majority, and they have longed believe they need a strong base to get it.

Kicking the base in the teeth on its number one issue doesn’t help the cause.

Temporary agita? That's more palatable than a serious kick. The base's whining will fade once the judge starts voting on cases.

So he had no choice but to pick a conservative that lacked a paper trail. Miers was one of the few options available that fit the profile.

That just requires some post-nomination stroking so things don’t get totally out of hand.

(The stroking is in full effect, and is starting to work. During Fox News’ 6 PM show, Dr. James Dobson said “The more we know about her and find out about her, the more we are impressed with her” including “things I’m not prepared to talk about here.”)

And that’s why “disappointed base” does not equal “moderate judge.”

And should not equal “Dem support.”

Amazingly, the initial spasm of conservative consternation did to Miers what was not done not to Roberts, give her a bad first 24 hours.

Dems never got their footing against Roberts because they stood down during that critical period, while GOPers spun hard how “brilliant” Roberts was.

With Miers, both sides stood down on the spin war, and the line on Miers is “blank slate” and “crony.”

That “blank slate” frame is exactly what you need to defeat a stealth pick. The “crony” tag helps to drive home the importance of nominees with stellar records, not more of the Bush practice of picking political pals with no experience.

Dems and liberal activists got all that without even trying, despite just confirming a guy who was pretty much a blank slate.

But will they realize the gift that conservatives just gave them?

Doesn’t look like it.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid signaled his support for Miers in advance, for reasons that are not adequately explained.

And some liberals are already assuming that anything that right-wingers whine about must be good for us.

Without leadership at the top, and without energy from the grassroots, we will likely have the same floundering, ineffectual opposition that we saw in the Roberts process – if we have any opposition at all.

Some may say, so what? Miers is probably the best we can do. If we defeat Miers, whoever comes next would have to be worse.

This is faulty, short-sighted logic.

If there’s enough criticism coming from the left and right to sink the nominee (a coalition David Corn suggests putting together), Bush ends up in his weakest political position ever.

If he then feels compelled to pick an overt right-winger to rehab his base, then that pick can be beat with a unified Democratic party backed by public opinion, completely boxing Bush in – unable to get a stealth pick or a overt right-wing pick.

Dems then would have the political leverage to force a real moderate pick.

Of course, it is highly doubtful that there will be enough conservative opposition in the Senate, despite the whining from parts of the base, to block Miers in the first place.

The point is simply that a Miers defeat does not strengthen Bush’s ability to confirm an overt right-winger, so it is not dangerous to make that an ideal goal.

And there is a larger strategic goal as well.

To articulate to the public why this nomination is so important; how our workplaces, our environment and our privacy will be impacted by this one vote; and how Democrats and liberals would do a better job in shaping our judiciary and protecting our rights.

To stand down on Miers, as was done on Roberts, is to fail in explaining to the public what Democrats and liberals stand for.  ¶ 8:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Lords of War

Statistics

* Value of Conventional Arms Transfers in 2004 (Deliveries, Worldwide): $34.75 billion
(Source: Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1997-2004, Congressional Research Service, 29 August 2005)

* Top Five Arms Exporters (Worldwide, 2004)
o #1 - United States ($18.55 billion)
o #2 - Russia ($4.6 billion)
o #3 - France ($4.4 billion)
o #4 - United Kingdom ($1.9 billion)
(Source: Congressional Research Service)

* Authorized Small Arms Sales (Worldwide, Annual): $4 billion (estimate)
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2004, p. 100)

* Illicit Small Arms Sales (Worldwide, Annual): 10-20% of the total trade in small arms (estimate)
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2001, p. 167-168)

* Number of Known Small Arms-Producing Countries (Worldwide, 2003): 92 (estimate)
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2004, p. 9)

* Number of Known Small Arms-Producing Companies (Worldwide, 2003): 1,249 (estimate)
(Source: Small Arms Survey 2004, p. 10)

America produces more small arms than every other country in the business, over half of those made every year.

That would be a stack of $100 bills over 9 miles high. Every year. For American companies alone.

Almost 80% of the arms sold are not authorized by any government, sold to private groups.

Almost 20% of the arms deals are illegal.

Terra'ism is a good business, and what's good for business is good for America, right?  ¶ 8:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Atrios and Pharyngula Discuss Evolution

...and how random and beautiful it all is, here.

Transcript here.  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

  May I Suggest RICO, Mr. Fitzgerald?

How Rotten Are These Guys?

By Robert Parry
October 5, 2005

The separation of the Bush political machine from organized crime is often like the thin layer of rock between a seemingly ordinary surface and volcanic activity rumbling below. Sometimes, the lava spews forth and the illusion of normalcy is shattered.

In the weeks ahead, a dangerous eruption is again threatening to shake the Bush family’s image of legitimacy, as the pressure from intersecting scandals builds.

So far, the mainstream news media has focused mostly on the white-collar abuses of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for allegedly laundering corporate donations to help Republicans gain control of the Texas legislature, or on deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove for disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer to undercut her husband’s criticism of George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq.

Both offenses represent potential felonies, but they pale beside new allegations linking business associates of star GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff – an ally of both DeLay and Rove – to the gangland-style murder of casino owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2001.

These criminal cases also are reminders of George H.W. Bush’s long record of unsavory associations, including with a Nicaraguan contra network permeated by cocaine traffickers, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s multi-million-dollar money-laundering operations, and anti-communist Cuban extremists tied to acts of international terrorism. [For details on these cases, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Now, George W. Bush is faced with his own challenge of containing a rupture of scandals – involving prominent conservatives Abramoff, DeLay and potentially Rove – that have bubbled to the surface and are beginning to flow toward the White House.

Mobbed Up

On Sept. 27, 2005 – in possibly the most troubling of these cases – Fort Lauderdale police charged three men, including reputed Gambino crime family bookkeeper Anthony Moscatiello, with Boulis’s murder. Boulis was gunned down in his car on Feb. 6, 2001, amid a feud with an Abramoff business group that had purchased Boulis’s SunCruz casino cruise line in 2000.

As part of the murder probe, police are investigating payments that SunCruz made to Moscatiello, his daughter and Anthony Ferrari, another defendant in the Boulis murder case. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly collaborated with a third man, James Fiorillo, in the slaying. [For more on the case, see Sun-Sentinel, Sept. 28, 2005.]

The SunCruz deal also led to the August 2005 indictment of Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud over a $60 million loan for buying the casino company in 2000. Prosecutors allege that Abramoff and Kidan made a phony $23 million wire transfer as a fake down payment.

In pursuing the casino deal, the Abramoff-Kidan group got help, too, from DeLay and Rep. Robert W. Ney, R-Ohio, the Washington Post reported. Abramoff impressed one lender by putting him together with DeLay in Abramoff’s skybox at FedEx Field during a football game between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.

Ney placed comments in the Congressional Record criticizing Boulis and later praising the new Abramoff-Kidan ownership team. [Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2005]

After the SunCruz sale, tensions boiled over, as Boulis and Kidan got into a fistfight. Kidan claimed that Boulis threatened his life. Two months later, however, Boulis was the one who was shot to death when a car pulled up next to him and a gunman opened fire. Lawyers for Abramoff and Kidan say their clients know nothing about the murder.

Police, however, are investigating financial ties between the Abramoff-Kidan group and Moscatiello and Ferrari.

In a 2001 civil case, Kidan testified that he had paid $145,000 to Moscatiello and his daughter, Jennifer, for catering and other services, although court records show no evidence that quantities of food or drink were provided. SunCruz also paid Ferrari’s company, Moon Over Miami, $95,000 for surveillance services.

Kidan told the Miami Herald that the payments had no connection to the Boulis murder. “If I’m going to pay to have Gus killed, am I going to be writing checks to the killers?” Kidan asked. “I don’t think so. Why would I leave a paper trail?”

Kidan also said he was ignorant of Moscatiello’s past. In 1983, Moscatiello was indicted on heroin-trafficking charges along with Gene Gotti, brother of Gambino crime boss John Gotti. Though Gene Gotti and others were convicted, the charges against Moscatiello – identified by federal authorities as a former Gambino bookkeeper – were dropped.

White House Ties

Abramoff’s influence has reached into Bush’s White House, too, where chief procurement officer David H. Safavian resigned last month and then was arrested on charges of lying to authorities and obstructing a criminal investigation into Abramoff’s lobbying activities.

Rep. Ney and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed were among influential Republicans who joined Safavian and Abramoff on an infamous golf trip to Scotland in 2002. Safavian is a former lobbying partner of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, another pillar of right-wing politics in Washington and another longtime Abramoff friend. [Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2005]

Abramoff also has boasted of his influence with Bush’s top political adviser Karl Rove.

While helping the scandal-plagued conglomerate Tyco International Ltd. fend off new taxes and insure continued federal contracts, Abramoff cited his influence with Rove as well as powerful congressmen, including DeLay, according to a written statement by Tyco general counsel Timothy E. Flanigan.

Abramoff told Tyco officials that “he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove” about Tyco’s concerns, said Flanigan, who made the disclosures to the Senate during his confirmation hearing as Bush’s nominee to be deputy attorney general.

A White House spokesman said Rove had no recollection of a discussion with Abramoff about Tyco, but Rove’s personal assistant Susan Ralston had previously worked as Abramoff’s secretary. [Washington Post, Sept. 23, 2005]

College Republicans

The roots of these latest scandals reach back a quarter century to the early days of the Reagan Revolution. During that heady period for young conservatives, Abramoff and Norquist won control of the College Republicans organization in Washington, with Abramoff as chairman and Norquist as executive director.

In the book, Gang of Five, author Nina Easton wrote that the Abramoff-Norquist leadership transformed the College Republicans into a “right-wing version of a communist cell – complete with purges of in-house dissenters and covert missions to destroy the enemy left.”

Under Abramoff and Norquist, the College Republicans also allegedly began tapping into Rev. Moon’s mysterious well of nearly unlimited cash. In 1983, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, then chairman of the GOP’s moderate Ripon Society, released a study saying the College Republican National Committee “solicited and received” money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981.

Leach said the Korean-based Unification Church has “infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.”

Before Leach could finish the press conference, Norquist disrupted the meeting with accusations that Leach was lying. For its part, Moon’s Washington Times dismissed Leach’s charges as “flummeries” and mocked the Ripon Society as a “discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the Republican Party.”

To this day, largely through lavish spending on right-wing causes, Moon has made his cult-like movement a political powerhouse within conservative circles. However, evidence has continued to mount that Moon’s operation is a complex web of secretive businesses and groups that launder millions of dollars from suspicious sources in Asia and South America into the U.S. political system.

Moon has subsidized not only media outlets, such as the pro-Republican Washington Times, but conservative infrastructure, including direct-mail operations, think tanks and political conferences. Moon’s organization also has funneled money directly into the pockets of former President Bush and other leading politicians. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]

Abramoff and Kidan, the co-defendants in the SunCruz fraud case, also became friends from their time with the College Republicans.

After leaving the College Republicans, Abramoff and Norquist moved over to a Reagan-support organization called Citizens for America, which sponsored a 1985 “summit meeting” of anti-communist “freedom fighters” from around the world.

The Nicaraguan contras – who were gaining a reputation for brutality, corruption and drug trafficking – were represented at the summit, as was Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who was condemned by human rights groups for gross abuses, including widespread murders, rapes and mutilations.

As the Cold War was ending in 1989, Abramoff tried his hand at movie producing, churning out an anti-communist action thriller called “Red Scorpion,” which was subsidized by South Africa’s white-supremacist regime. [For details, see Salon.com’s “The Tale of Red Scorpion.”]

In Power

The Republican conquest of the U.S. Congress in 1994 gave Abramoff’s career another twist as he found himself in position to exploit his close ties to hard-line conservatives, such as DeLay and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Abramoff signed up with the lobbying firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds before moving to Greenberg Traurig.

Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the Republican takeover, conservative writer Andrew Ferguson lamented Abramoff’s key role in getting Republicans to forsake their rhetorical war on big government and corruption, in favor of dividing up the spoils.

“For 25 years Abramoff has been a key figure in the conservative movement that led to the 1994 Republican Revolution, which once promised ‘to drain the swamp’ in Washington, D.C.,” Ferguson wrote.

But instead, Abramoff became “the first Republican to discover that pretending to advance the interests of conservative small-government could, for a lobbyist, be as insanely lucrative as pretending to advance the interests of liberal big-government,” Ferguson wrote. “The way a winner knows he’s won is by cashing in his chips.”

Abramoff scored big by representing Indian tribes that needed political clout for their gambling operations.

Ferguson wrote, “Abramoff's ingenuity quickly earned him a reputation as the premier lobbyist for Indians in Washington – though he only worked for casino-owning tribes, who were, after all, the only ‘free market laboratories’ that could afford Washington lobbyists. He regularly arranged fact-finding trips for congressmen and their staffs to the casinos, especially those with golf courses.”

Branching out, Abramoff represented the textile industry in the Marianas islands, a U.S. protectorate that could stick “Made in the USA” labels on clothing produced in sweatshops free from U.S. labor regulations. Abramoff flew in congressmen for tours and a chance to play golf at a scenic course. DeLay was so impressed that he hailed the islands as “a perfect Petri dish of capitalism.” [Weekly Standard, Dec. 20, 2004]

Abramoff had learned the flexible ethics of Washington politics during the final days of the Cold War when ideology justified rubbing shoulders with corrupt “freedom fighters.” But he and his legion of protégés managed to adapt those dubious lessons to the “free market” era of Republican rule.

The end result has been a noxious “crony capitalism” that has seeped into nearly all U.S. government policies, from the War on Terror to the Iraq War to the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort.

Now the ground under George W. Bush and the Republican congressional majority is beginning to shake as fissures crack the surface, warning of a volcanic eruption that could transform the political landscape of Washington.

We can only hope.

Thanks to the farmer for the heads up.  ¶ 12:49 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Another Front in the War on Terra

Dear Leader apparently gave a stock speech today of the usual fear mongering sort. It was both a prelude for the later announcement (once again) that the Terra'ists are gonna hit New York and a follow-up of the announcement that a lot of folks just might die of the H5N1 flu this year.

Riggsveda does a factual and thorough job discussing what the bird flu is and what it all means.

The Good News: there is a Vaccine.

The Bad News: the Rabble may not get it, since the Federal government is having trouble with the contractors producing even its’ routine vaccine [thanks, Quiddity ].

You can count on Dear Leader, Jenna, and Babs getting the Vaccine, certainly.

Notice Bu$hCo is already trying to get power to “Quarantine” an infected area.

The Cheneyburton never heard of Terra it couldn't exploit for its own agenda.

Obviosuly you can't fight a virus with a gun, but you can count on these people to try it.

If you're one of the Rabble, consider that there are several good things you can do:

1) Get a flu shot if they become available. Even if the most dangerous H5N1 strain isn't covered by the shot, and you do contract it, it will keep you from contracting the other (currently) more common strains. And that might just save your life.

2) Take regular vitamin supplements, particularly those rich in vitamins C, E, and flavonoids, which can keep you healthy and repairing damage the virus and your rattled immune system might do to you.

3) Pay attention to what the doctors say. Wash your hands. Stay active all winter outside as much as you can. Watch who you kiss, what you kiss, and when you kiss it.

4) Consider antivirals. If you can afford them. Keep enough anti-inflammatories and fruit juice or an electrolyte supplement on hand in case you're sick and can't get out of the house for a couple of weeks. Enough for you AND your family. Keep a stock of aspirin- I remember meeting old timers who swore that aspirin was what kept them alive in the pandemic of 1918.

5) Consider flavonoid supplements (like quercetin). These can be toxic if overdone, but may be effective in blocking oxidative damage in acute inflammation. Since much of the damage in influenza is due to your body's own over-reaction, these may have a therapeutic basis. These compounds are also found in green tea.

6) Don't let yourself be talked into moving into the Superdome for shelter this winter if they turn off your heat.

You're really better off roughing it on your own.  ¶ 9:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Military Police: You Have the Flu If We Say You Do

Bush Wants Right to Use Military if Bird Flu Hits
By Charles Aldinger
Reuters
Tuesday 04 October 2005

Washington - President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic.

He said the military, and perhaps the National Guard, might be needed to take such a role if the feared H5N1 bird flu virus changes enough to cause widespread human infection.

"If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference.

"It's one thing to shut down airplanes. It's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu. And who best to be able to effect a quarantine?" Bush added.

"One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move. So that's why I put it on the table. I think it's an important debate for Congress to have."

Bird flu has killed more than 60 people in four Asian nations since late 2003 and has been found in birds in Russia and Europe.

Experts fear that the H5N1 bird flu virus, which appears to be highly fatal when it infects people, will develop the ability to pass easily from person to person and would cause a pandemic that would kill millions.

"And I think the president ought to have all ... assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant," Bush said.

He noted that some governors may object to the federal government commandeering the National Guard, which is under state command in most circumstances.
...

"But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the president to move beyond that debate. And one such catastrophe or one such challenge could be an avian flu outbreak," Bush said.

The active duty military is currently forbidden from undertaking law enforcement duties by the federal Posse Comitatus Act.

That law, passed in 1878 after the US Civil War, does not prohibit National Guard troops under state control from doing police work. But, unless the law is changed, it would keep them from doing so if they were activated by Washington under federal control...

Thanks to Truthout for the link.

While you're chewing on that, mosey on over to Farm Runoff and think about the Corporative State.

When you've finished that, go checkout Paul Bigioni's recent post:

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970’s leads to an inescapable conclusion: the vast bulk of legislative activity favors the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the last 25 years. Digging deeper into twentieth century history, one finds this steadfast focus on the well-being of big business in other times and places. The exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity. These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America’s most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. His answer was, “Yes, but we will call it anti-fascism”...

It'll be for our own good, of course.

The Company exists to serve man...  ¶ 9:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

  National Security Experience a Plus

Miers Briefed Bush on Famous Bin Laden Memo, But Newspapers Handle the AP Photo Quite Differently

By E&P Staff

Published: October 04, 2005 10:45 AM ET

NEW YORK On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch “in August 2001,” the caption reads.

USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply “2001,” but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001.

Does that date sound familiar? Indeed, that was the date, a little over a month before 9/11, that President Bush was briefed on the now-famous “PDB” that declared that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to attack the U.S. homeland, perhaps with hijacked planes. But does that mean that Miers had anything to do with that briefing?

As it turns out, yes, according to Tuesday's Los Angeles Times. An article by Richard A. Serrano and Scott Gold observes that early in the Bush presidency “Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial 'presidential daily briefing' hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.”

So the Aug. 6 photo may show this historic moment, though quite possibly not. In any case, some newspapers failed to include the exact date with the widely used Miers photo today. A New York Times spokesman told E&P: "The wording of the caption occurred in the course of routine editing and has no broader significance."

The photo that ran in so many papers and on their Web sites originally came from the White House but was moved by the Associated Press, clearly marked as an “Aug. 6, 2001” file photo. It shows Miers with a document or documents in her right hand, as her left hand points to something in another paper balanced on the president's right leg. Two others in the background are Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and Steve Biegun of the national security staff.

The PDB was headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” and notes, among other things, FBI information indicating “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”  ¶ 12:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Disclaimer for Right Blogistan: Don't Blame Us.

Billmon says you all are a little riled right about now.

Just so you understand it, we don't like Harriet E. Miers either.

There's a lot of things going on we both don't like.

To repeat a theme sounded often right here: the Liberal vs. Conservative beat that the Republican and Democratic leadership keep drumming is a lot of noise to distract you from what's really happening to the country.

For that matter, virtually every Democrat I know (qualification: that makes less than $100,000/year) is royally pissed over things like this:

The expected political brawl over President Bush’s second Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers might not ever take place – because it was a powerful Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who had urged her selection.

The senator from Nevada first hinted that he thought highly of Miers shortly before Bush announced the nomination of John Roberts for a seat on the Court.

Bush phoned Reid to tout Roberts, and Reid took the opportunity to tell the president that had had enjoyed working with Miers, the White House legal counsel, during the search for a nominee.

A few days earlier, Reid had met with Miers and suggested ways to avoid a divisive confirmation process, according to a report published in August in The New Yorker magazine...

Both Roberts and Miers are terrible choices for the future of America, but great choices for the future of the Company.

A good rundown of Meirs' complicity in some of the dirtiest deals of Dear Leader's career can be found here.

Let's skim through them.

*Harriet Miers headed the law firm Locke, Liddell & Sapp which has been linked to TRMPAC and questionable donations related to Tom DeLay... and here and here.

*Alberto Gonzales was recommended to Bush as counsel in the Texas Governorship by Harriet Miers, who has replaced Gonzales as White House counsel. Referred to by Bush as a "pit bull in size 6 shoes'', Miers is a former President of Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell and former chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell have given at least $65,000 to Bush campaigns and are major backers of tort reform. One case involved a unique law - passed under former Gov. George Bush - that blocked Texas consumers from recovering $6 billion in overcharges on car loans and allowed dealers to keep kickbacks secret. Two consumer groups have called on the Texas Legislature to repeal it. Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell were defendants of the litigation, which included auto dealers in Texas. Miers was also Chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission and responsible for a chain of events involving GTech, which ran the Texas Lottery, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, and accusations of kick-backs and illegal contracts. Yes, that Ben Barnes, who says he helped George Bush get into the National Guard. His original deposition on that subject was given in 1999, during this Texas Lottery Commission investigation, and has been permanently sealed.

*Miers is a Dallas-based lawyer and chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. The former president of the State Bar of Texas and Dallas City Council member has done legal work for Bush and his political committee. As chair of the lottery commission, Miers came under fire when former commission executive director Lawrence Littwin sued the state's lottery operator, GTECH, for allegedly pressuring Miers to fire Littwin. Littwin and his attorneys have suggested throughout the proceedings that GTECH was allowed to keep its state lottery contract in exchange for former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes' silence. Barnes, a former GTECH lobbyist, stated under oath that he helped George W. Bush enlist in the Texas Air National Guard as an alternative to going to Vietnam 31 years ago.

*Was Harriet Miers the one who scoured and scrubbed the President's National Guard record?
...Bush Aides Possibly Altered National Guard Records To Conceal Grounding and Missed Duty...They paid "hard-nosed Dallas lawyer named Harriet Miers" $19,000 to review the records. According to Newsweek, one result of her work was to deflect charges that former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes helped Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard despite low qualifications and a long waiting list. Barnes was later forced to testify under oath that he helped Bush.

*Harriet Miers contributed "$5,000 to the Bush-Cheney Recount Fund in the post-election struggle that finally sealed his victory over Al Gore."

This is the moderate that Harry Reid suggested Bush select.

The Company couldn't have done better themselves. But who are we kidding. Reid, like Clinton, has become awfully close to Citigroup since those mean Chinese started picking on Citigroup. And look who his top contributors are: casinos, Citigroup, and the Petroleum Marketers Association.

With friends like Reid, progressives need no enemies, but I think we have them anyway.  ¶ 8:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Rumors and the Suggestion of Terra

NEW ORLEANS - Among the rumors that spread as quickly as floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina, reports that gunmen were taking potshots at rescue helicopters stood out for their senselessness.

On Sept. 1, as patients sweltered in hospitals without power and thousands of people remained stranded on rooftops and in attics, crucial rescue efforts were delayed as word of such attacks spread.

But more than a month later, representatives from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard say they have yet to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters...

Thanks to Atrios for the link.  ¶ 12:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Firefly

Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free.
You can’t take the sky from me.

Take me out
to the black.
Tell ‘em I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea.
You can’t take the sky from me.

Have no place
I can be
Since I found Serenity.
But you can’t take the sky from me.  ¶ 12:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Abramoff-Al Qaeda Connection

It seems Al Qaeda spent a lot of time in a few Abramoff-linked casinos before 9-11.

Hijackers' Tracks in Las Vegas Gambling Strip Combed for Evidence of Several Terrorists
LAS VEGAS -- Additional FBI agents are being brought to this city to chase down hundreds of leads and track the movements of terrorists who repeatedly visited here in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohamed Atta, a suspected ringleader of the terrorist attack that left more than 5,000 people dead, made at least two trips here. In addition to Atta, authorities also believe that Marwan Al-Shehhi, Nawaf Alhazmi, Hani Hanjour and Ziad Samir Jarrah also visited the city. All five men were killed in the attacks in New York and Washington.
By William Booth Washington Post Staff Writer 9/14/01

Terrorists had no apparent reason to visit Las Vegas ... So why did they?
On June 28 at Boston’s Logan Airport, Mohamed Atta boarded a United Airlines flight and flew first class nonstop to San Francisco, where he bypassed the bohemian North Beach district and didn’t take the cruise to Alcatraz. Instead, Atta took the first of two side trips to Las Vegas.
On Aug. 10, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi used first-class tickets for a United flight from Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles International Airport, then on to Las Vegas. Las Vegas FBI Special Agent in Charge Grant Ashley candidly admitted that the whole story of the terrorists’ Las Vegas connection may never be known. Authorities on the hijackers’ sponsor, Osama bin Laden, note that counterfeiting has been one of the al-Qaida terrorist network's signatures. Were the hijackers passing off funny money? Spies and arms dealers have made this a second home for more than a generation.
11/4/01 Las Vegas Review-Journal COLUMN: John L. Smith

SunCruz Casinos turns over documents in terrorist probe
TAMPA, Fla. - SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.
Michael Hlavsa, chairman of the gambling cruise company, said Wednesday two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida's gulf coast.
9/26/01 By VICKIE CHACHERE Associated Press Writer and Florida Times-Union


Terror suspects spent $100,000 in casino scam Buffalo duo likely tried to launder cash
HAMILTON — Two members of an alleged Al Qaeda cell arrested in Buffalo last week spent at least $100,000 (U.S.) at Casino Niagara in what Ontario officials suspect were money-laundering attempts. Federal prosecutors in Buffalo, where the American-born suspects are in a bail hearing this week, have painted the men as wily members of an Al Qaeda "sleeper" cell, based in the suburb of Lackawanna. American anti-terrorism officials allege that some of the men seem to have secret sources of funds, the type of money needed to carry out acts of Al Qaeda terrorism on U.S. soil. "Terrorists will take full advantage of whatever means they can," said David Harris, an anti-terrorism consultant in Ottawa. "They know the art and science of laundering money. Casinos are just another avenue for that."
Thestar.com Toronto star 9/20/02 By Joan Walters

Thanks to Lambert at CorrentWire for the tip.  ¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  They Have Hearings- On What Sounds Right

At Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann cover US Senate hearings on Global Warming.

What expert does the United States Senate trust on this issue?

Why, Michael Crichton of course.

...Today we witnessed a rather curious event in the US Senate. Possibly for the first time ever, a chair of a Senate committee, one Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), invited a science fiction writer to advise the committee (Environment and Public Works), on science facts--in this case, the facts behind climate change. The author in question? None other than our old friend, Michael Crichton whom we've had reason to mention before (see here and here). The committee's ranking member, Senator James Jeffords (I) of Vermont, was clearly not impressed. Joining Crichton on climate change issues was William Gray of hurricane forecasting fame, Richard Benedick (a negotiator on the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals), and David Sandalow (Brookings Institution). As might be expected, we paid a fair bit of attention to the scientific (and not-so-scientific) points made.

Many of the 'usual suspects' of half-truths and red herrings were put forth variously by Crichton, Gray, and Inhofe over the course of the hearing:

* the claim that scientists were proclaiming an imminent ice age in the 1970s (no, they weren't),
* the claim that the 1940s to 1970s cooling in the northern hemisphere disproves global warming (no, it doesn't),
* the claim that important pieces of the science have not been independently reproduced (yes, they have),
* the claim that global climate models can't reproduce past climate change (yes, they can)
* the claim that climate can't be predicted because weather is chaotic (wrong...)


This is definitely a good read, but longer than I can post here.

Crichton is a "popular" science fiction writer whose penchant for technophobic sensationalism seems to have drawn back a bit from criticism of any oil industry- related negative effects. Real Climate pins him down as basically a Luddite hack, but I think it's a little deeper than that. After all, there are any number of conservative science fiction writers who play the same schtick, write equally well, but make far less money at it. There are conservative science fiction writers who doubt global warming, but are far from anti-technology in their philosophy, and who write far better than Crichton. Larry Niven, for example.

If somebody writes mediocre science fiction, or for that matter performs a poor job in any medium, in order to be successful they have to please the promoters of that medium.

And there is Michael Crichton: media ho.  ¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Bring It On

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday threatened to veto a $440.2 billion defense spending bill in the Senate because it wasn't enough money for the
Pentagon and also warned lawmakers not to add any amendments to regulate the treatment of detainees or set up a commission to probe abuse...

Call his bluff, Democrats. Like he's really going to cut off cash flow to the Company. Oppose this bill.

Unfortunately the Congressional Democrats are trying very hard not to appear Uppity.  ¶ 7:58 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Does Macy's Love Gimbel's?

As far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, Iraq is definitely Mission Accomplished.

The major oil fields in Iraq seem to have been permanently damaged according to a Company energy official. Remember, the economics of oil extraction: even if the oil is there, if it costs more money to extract it than produce it, it is no longer useful. Perhaps the Company considers Iraq oil as effectively banked until the price per barrel soars significantly.

The secular Sunni minority in Iraq turn increasingly to Wahhabi Islam.

Bu$hCo has certainly delivered substantial bang for Saudi bucks.  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Zeitgeist

Yo Ho

September 30, 2005
The Way It Is
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is under investigation by the
Securities and Exchange Commission. He sold all his stock in HCA, which his
father helped found, just days before the stock plunged. Two years ago, Mr.
Frist claimed that he did not even know if he owned HCA stock.

According to a new U.S. government index, the effect of greenhouse gases is
up 20 percent since 1990.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a 33-year-old Wall Street insider with little experience
in regulation but close ties to drug firms, was made a deputy commissioner
at the F.D.A. in July. (This story, picked up by Time magazine, was
originally reported by Alicia Mundy of The Seattle Times.)

The Artic ice cap is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Two of the three senior positions at the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration are vacant. The third is held by Jonathan Snare, a former
lobbyist. Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog group, reports that he
worked on efforts to keep ephedra, a dietary supplement that was banned by
the F.D.A., legal.

According to France's finance minister, Alan Greenspan told him that the
United States had "lost control" of its budget deficit.

David Safavian is a former associate of Jack Abramoff, the recently indicted
lobbyist. Mr. Safavian oversaw U.S. government procurement policy at the
White House Office of Management and Budget until his recent arrest.

When Senator James Inhofe, who has called scientific research on global
warming "a gigantic hoax," called a hearing to attack that research, his
star witness was Michael Crichton, the novelist.

Mr. Safavian is charged with misrepresenting his connections with
lobbyists - specifically, Mr. Abramoff - while working at the General
Services Administration. A key event was a lavish golfing trip to Scotland
in 2002, mostly paid for by a charity Mr. Abramoff controlled. Among those
who went on the trip was Representative Bob Ney of Ohio.

It's not possible to attribute any one weather event to global warming. But
climate models show that global warming will lead to increased hurricane
intensity, and some research indicates that this is already occurring.

Tyco paid $2 million, most going to firms controlled by Mr. Abramoff, as
part of its successful effort to preserve tax advantages it got from
shifting its legal home to Bermuda. Timothy Flanigan, a general counsel at
Tyco, has been nominated for the second-ranking Justice Department post.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is awash in soldiers and
police. Nonetheless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired
Blackwater USA, a private security firm with strong political connections,
to provide armed guards.

Mr. Abramoff was indicted last month on charges of fraud relating to his
purchase of SunCruz, a casino boat operation. Mr. Ney inserted comments in
the Congressional Record attacking SunCruz's original owner, Konstantinos
"Gus" Boulis, placing pressure on him to sell to Mr. Abramoff and his
partner, Adam Kidan, and praised Mr. Kidan's character.

James Schmitz, who resigned as the Pentagon's inspector general amid
questions about his performance, has been hired as Blackwater's chief
operating officer.

Last week three men were arrested in connection with the gangland-style
murder of Mr. Boulis. SunCruz, after it was controlled by Mr. Kidan and Mr.
Abramoff, paid a company controlled by one of the men arrested, Anthony "Big
Tony" Moscatiello, and his daughter $145,000 for catering and other work. In
court documents, questions are raised about whether food and drink were ever
provided. SunCruz paid $95,000 to a company in which one of the other men
arrested, Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari, is a principal.

Iraq's oil production remains below prewar levels. The Los Angeles Times
reports that mistakes by U.S. officials and a Halliburton subsidiary, which
was given large no-bid reconstruction contracts, may have permanently
damaged Iraq's oilfields.

Tom DeLay, who stepped down as House majority leader after his indictment,
once called Mr. Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." Mr.
Abramoff funneled funds from clients to conservative institutions and
causes. The Washington Post reported that associates of Mr. DeLay claim that
he severed the relationship after Mr. Boulis's murder.

Public health experts warn that the U.S. would be dangerously unprepared for
an avian flu pandemic.

As Walter Cronkite used to say, That's the way it is.   ¶ 7:09 AM 0 comments links to this post