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Archive: POLITICS

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David Corn reprints the damning testimony of a former CIA case officer.

What is important now is not who wins or loses the political battle or who may or may not be indicted; rather, it is a question of how we will go about protecting the citizens of this country in a very dangerous world. The undisputed fact is that we have irreparably damaged our capability to collect human intelligence and thereby significantly diminished our capability to protect the American people.

Understandable to all Americans is a simple, incontrovertible, but damning truth: the United States government exposed the identity of a clandestine officer working for the CIA. This is not just another partisan "dust-up" between political parties. This unprecedented act will have far-reaching consequences for covert operations around the world. Equally disastrous is that from the time of that first damning act, we have continued on a course of self-inflicted wounds by government officials who have refused to take any responsibility, have played hide-and-seek with the truth and engaged in semantic parlor games for more than two years, all at the expense of the safety of the American people. No government official has that right.

...Before you shine up your American flag lapel pin and affix your patriotism to your sleeve, think about what the impact your actions will have on the security of the American people. Think about whether your partisan obfuscation is creating confidence in the United States in general and the CIA in particular. If not, a true patriot would shut up.

Read the whole testimony here.

Sidney Blumenthal provides a comprehensive–and devastating– summary of the Plame/Wilson/Rove affair.

Bush's right-hand man is dispatching his troops to smear Joe Wilson–and save himself. He may win in Washington, but the special prosecutor will have the last word.

This is Karl Rove's war. From his command post next to the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House, he is furiously directing the order of battle. The Republican National Committee lobs its talking points across Washington, its chairman forays the no-man's-land of CNN. Rove's lawyer, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are sent over the top. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay man the ramparts, defending Rove's character.

For two years, since the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, President Bush and his press secretary, Scott McClellan, have repeatedly denied the involvement of anyone in the White House. "Have you talked to Karl and do you have confidence in him?" a reporter asked Bush on Sept. 30, 2003. "Listen, I know of nobody," he replied. "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action."

Bush backed himself into that corner because of a sequence of events beginning with the ultimate rationale he offered for the Iraq war. Public support for the war had wavered until the administration asserted unequivocally that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire and build nuclear weapons. Its most incendiary claim was that he had tried to purchase enriched yellowcake uranium in Niger. An Italian magazine, Panorama, had received documents appearing to prove the charge. Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was secretly sent by the CIA to investigate, and he found no evidence to substantiate the story. The CIA subsequently protested inclusion of the rumor in a draft of a Bush speech, and Bush delivered it on Oct. 7, 2002, without it.

But a month earlier, a British white paper had mentioned the Niger rumor. And in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." These 16 notorious words had already been proved false, however (debunked by three separate reports from administration officials, which were apparently ignored ahead of Bush's speech). On March 7, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the Niger documents were "not authentic." The following day, the State Department concurred that they were forgeries. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20.

After the war began, the administration refused to acknowledge those 16 words were false. To set the record straight, Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article on July 6, 2003, in the New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." It was the first crack in the credibility of the administration's case for the war, suggesting that the underlying intelligence had been abused, distorted and even forged. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later admitted, "It was information that was mistaken." And CIA Director George Tenet said the lines "should never have been included in a text written for the president."

A week after Wilson's Op-Ed appeared, on July 14, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that Wilson's "wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." The revelation of Plame's identity may be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 -- a felony carrying a 10-year prison sentence. Apparently, the release of Plame's identity was political payback against Wilson by a White House that wanted to shift the subject of the Iraq war to his motives.

On July 30, the CIA referred a "crime report" to the Justice Department. "If she was not undercover, we would not have a reason to file a criminal referral," a CIA official said. On Dec. 30, the Justice Department appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for northern Illinois, as the special prosecutor.

Read the full article at truthout.org

New Hampshire, of course!

live free or move

You probably read about the folks who are protesting the Supreme Court decision on Kelo (the eminent domain decision which allows local governments to seize property and turn in over to anyone who thinks they can make more money for the local government with it) by attempting to buy Mr. Souter's house and build a hotel on the property.

It seems as if the township where Mr. Souter's house is located is seriously considering the offer...

Read the full, delicious story at Sisphus Shrugged

There are many excellent recent commentaries on the growing Plame scandal...

but Hilzoy really hits the main points hard:

A few comments. First, whether or not Rove knew that Valerie Plame was a covert operative may matter for the legal case, but it is completely irrelevant both to the moral questions raised, and to the question whether or not Rove should resign or be fired. Suppose it occurs to me to fire a gun into a house, and I kill someone. It may be that I didn't know whether there was anyone home -- maybe I just wanted to shoot out the windows for fun. But that's no excuse: before I go shooting at a house, I have to find out whether there is anyone inside, and the fact that I didn't shows only that I was criminally reckless, not actually malicious. Likewise here: according to me, people shouldn't go around outing CIA agents at all. But if someone decides he has to do so, it is incumbent on that person to find out whether the agent in question is undercover, whether she has networks whose exposure would place people or operations at risk, and so on. Failing to do this is every bit as wrong as exposing an undercover agent deliberately. And no one who outs a CIA agent without checking these questions first should be allowed to work in our government. Period.

Read the full post at obsidianwings.com

How perfect!

The lawyer respresenting Karl Rove (and changing the story on behalf of Rove rather frequently) is Robert D. Luskin. Josh Marshall, doing the sort of basic investigative journalism which is now virtually non-existent in the mainstream media, reveals the following gem from Ruskin's past.

Eventually the Feds got the idea that the money Saccoccia had paid Luskin and his other attorneys for their services was itself part of the $137 million in drug money they were ordered to forfeit. Now, on the face of it this seems a bit unfair since under our system everyone is entitled to good representation and how was Luskin to know it was tainted money.

Well, the prosecutors thought he should have gotten some inkling when Saccoccia started paying Luskin's attorney's fees in gold bars.

Yep, you heard that right. Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney's fees in gold bars from his client who was trying to appeal his conviction on charges that he laundered drug money through precious metals dealers. Who woulda thought that was drug money?

Read the full account at talkingpointsmemo.com

The London bombings: Juan Cole goes directly to the heart of the matter.

Juan Cole, the erudite (yet accessible) professor from the University of Michigan, has, since 9/11, been a consistent source of sober, realistic, and penetrating insights into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as Al-Qaida and the broader implications of the U.S. "war on terror". In the wake of yesterday's attacks in London, Cole provides the sort of perspective which was disgracefully lacking in the insidiously simplistic and misleading (if not dishonest) public reactions of both Tony Blair and George Bush.

"The United Kingdom had not been a target for al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But in October 2001, bin Laden threatened the United Kingdom with suicide aircraft attacks if it joined in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In November of 2002, bin Laden said in an audiotape, "What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia." In February of 2003, as Bush and Blair marched to war in Iraq, bin Laden warned that the U.K. as well as the U.S. would be made to pay. In October of 2003, bin Laden said of the Iraq war, "Let it be known to you that this war is a new campaign against the Muslim world," and named Britain as a target for reprisals. A month later, an al-Qaida-linked group detonated bombs in Istanbul, targeting British sites and killing the British vice-consul.

The global anti-insurgency battle against al-Qaida must be fought smarter if the West is to win. To criminal investigations and surveillance must be added a wiser set of foreign policies. Long-term Western military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is simply not going to be acceptable to many in the Muslim world. U.S. actions at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah created powerful new symbols of Muslim humiliation that the jihadis who sympathize with al-Qaida can use to recruit a new generation of terrorists. The U.S. must act as an honest broker in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Bush and Blair must urgently find a credible exit strategy from Iraq that can extricate the West from bin Laden's fly trap.

Chicago political scientist Robert Pape argues in his new book, "Dying to Win," that the vast majority of suicide bombers are protesting foreign military occupation undertaken by democratic societies where public opinion matters. He points out that there is no recorded instance of a suicide attack in Iraq in all of history until the Anglo-American conquest of that country in 2003. He might have added that neither had any bombings been undertaken elsewhere in the name of Iraq.

George Bush is sure to try to use the London bombings to rally the American people to support his policies. If Americans look closer, however, they will realize that Bush's incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous, not less. "

Read the full article at Salon.com

Billmon ties market theory and the current state of the American "punditocracy" together in interesting fashion.

Asset bubbles, like foreign policy debacles, usually spring from what the behavorial scientists call "thought contagion" -- the tendency of trend-following humans to believe that what the rest of the crowd believes must be true. What makes the contagion so virulent is the fact that even when an individual does understand the crowd is wrong, rational self interest (short-term self interest) often dictates playing along with the error.

A speculator who realizes that stocks are overvalued, and bets accordingly, can and will lose his or her shirt if the crowd believes they can become even more overvalued. Likewise, a columnist who questions the wisdom of invading a large Arab country without a clear plan for the postwar occupation may eventually be proven right -- but could lose an awful lot of newspaper syndications and speaking engagements in the process.

The classic Darwinian remedy for this problem is supposed to be the "marketplace of ideas," in which bad theories and really dumb mistakes (both, in Glassman's case) are weeded out once correct ideas have a chance to prove their superiority. But the marketplace for ideas now suffers from many of the defects that have undermined competitive market theory in general: It assumes all participants have access to the same information at the same time; that risk preferences are symmetrical (that is, fear of loss is as strong as desire for gain) and, most importantly, that no one participant or group of participants has enough market power to permanently restrict competition.

If these conditions ever applied in the marketplace of American ideas, they certaintly don't now. Establishment pundits may not have preferential access to real information any more, thanks to the Internet, 24-hour financial market coverage, cheap video cameras with direct satellite uplinks, etc., but they still have preferential access to the off-the-record musings of senior officials and CEOs and the nuggets of insider intelligence they sometimes hand out. This stuff rarely has all that much analytical value, but it impresses the hell out of the rubes -- and their intellectual inferiors, the newspaper editors -- thus marking the bearers of such secrets as members of the pontificating elite.

And since the elite, like the mafia, tends to regard made guys as made for life, membership in the punditocracy creates a natural risk bias -- a kind of journalistic "moral hazard." Since being wrong is a far less serious career risk than being out of step with ideological fashion (which these days means the bizarre designer outfits worn at the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) pundits have a powerful incentive to take fashion to the extreme, even if that means extreme stupidity -- just as a generation of S&L bankers had a powerful incentive (deposit insurance) to bet the ranch on whatever trend seemed to hold the most promise of easy riches, as long as it was the same trend that every other S&L banker was betting on.

When the odds are heads you win, tails somebody else loses, that's always the smart way to bet.

Read the full article at Billmon's excellent Whiskey Bar.

Simple, true, and in context, devastating: Failure is an option.

Under the circumstances, the mindless chants of "failure is not an option" are starting to sound like the desperate prayers of the terminally ill. Failure is always an option -- particularly for morons who launch a war of choice under the impression that they can't possibly lose it.

Credit to Billmon for the insight which has been staring us all in the face. Read the full post here.

Bombing Run

I finally had a chance to watch a few clips of Bush speaking. And there was something almost uniquely contemptible about the way the Rovians used the troops as political props -- worse, even, than the flight deck follies on the Abraham Lincoln.

Back then, Bush was basking in what he thought was a famous victory, and sharing a little of his reflected glory with the swabbies. He was happy to be there and they were, too. It may have grated on those of us who understood how many unwritten constitutional rules Bush was breaking by dressing up in a military costume. But the sailors genuinely seemed to enjoy it.

Last night, by contrast, seemed about as enjoyable as a root canal for all parties concerned. When the only way you can get a hand from a handpicked military audience is by having a ringer in the audience start clapping, you know you're bombing (so to speak.)

The problem, I guess, is that while Bush was using the troops as a visual backdrop, politically speaking he was trying to hide behind them. And it showed.

A good actor, like Ronald Reagan, could appear before a crowd of Marines under somewhat similar circumstances -- after the Beruit bombing -- and play the commander in chief, rallying his warriors. Even greater actors, like Mussolini, or the dictator of a certain Central European country in the '30s and early '40s, could use military audiences to make themselves look larger than life, and even larger than their assembled legions -- with the help of a llttle stagecraft.

Bush can't do that. At his best, when the going is good and he's relaxed and confident, he can come across as one of the boys -- or as their biggest cheerleader, the Turkey Server in Chief. But he can't make himself larger than life, and neither can his cult followers, no matter how hard they try. Compared to St. Ronnie, Shrub is the child of a lesser God. Reagan, like Mussolini and that other guy, always -- always -- knew he was the star of his own movies. Bush isn't sure. And at times like last night, such doubts are fatal. The speech may have done him even less good than I originally thought.

Reprinted from the invariably thoughtful and interesting Billmon.

An excellent commentary on the extreme hypocrisy of the Republican Party (as expressed by the Bush Administration) when it comes to "moral relativism".

For at least 30 years now, the right has fought against, the Republican Party has run against, and more recently, the Bush administration has claimed victory over the "moral relativism" of liberals, the permissive parenting of the let-them-do-anything-they-please era, and the self-indulgent, self-absorbed, make-your-own-world attitude of the Sixties. Since September 11th, we have been told again and again, we are in a different world... finally. In this new world, things are black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You are for or you are against. The murky relativism of the recent past, of an America in a mood of defeat, is long gone. In the White House, we have a stand-up guy so unlike the last president, that draft dodger who was ready to parse the meaning of "is" and twist the world to his unnatural desires.

In his speeches, George Bush regularly calls for a return to or the reinforcement of traditional, even eternal, family values and emphasizes the importance of personal "accountability" for our children as well as ourselves. ("The culture of America is changing from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else, to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.") And yet when it comes to acts that are clearly wrong in this world -- aggressive war, the looting of resources, torture, personal gain at the expense of others, lying, and manipulation among other matters -- Bush and his top officials never hesitate to redefine reality to suit their needs. When faced with matters long defined in everyday life in terms of right and wrong, they simply reach for their dictionaries.

The full article can be found here at Tomdispatch.com.

Frank Rich provides a useful summary of the Bush Administration's efforts to undermine the independence of Public Broadcasting.

Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and "anti-administration" was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.

"It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president," Senator Dorgan said. "It's unbelievable."

Read the full article at The New York Times.

While the Bush Administration's failures relating to Iraq are deservedly attracting a great deal of attention...

there are many other examples of bad or failed policies for which average Americans will ultimately pay a price. It's quite possible that no price will more steep than the one we will pay as a result of the failure of this Administration to recognize the importance of the Internet and broadband access. The story is particularly sad when considering that Clinton and Gore had emphasized this incredibly important economic component. If only those in control for the past five and a half years had simply picked up the ball and carried on...

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only "basic" broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.

Thomas Bleha of Foreign Affairs covers the topic thoroughly.

Lobbying: perhaps the most acute symptom of the cancerous game played by Washington politicians and businesses.

Lobbying firms can't hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to "move downtown" from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen's Congress Watch.

Political historians don't see these as positive developments for democracy. "We've got a problem here," said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. "The growth of lobbying makes even worse than it is already the balance between those with resources and those without resources."

Read the full Washington Post article here.

Is there a more despicable politician than Jeb Bush anywhere in the U.S.?

In the wake of an autopsy which rendered his earlier pronouncements (and those of Frist, GWB, et al) total embarassments, he pulls this stunt:

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) -- Gov. Jeb Bush asked a prosecutor Friday to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, calling into question how long it took her husband to call 911 after he found her.

What a disgraceful human being. Link

Digby punctuates his commentary on U.S. media complicity re: Iraq with a pungent Christopher Isherwood quote:

"You have never seen inside a film studio before?"

"Only once. Years ago."

"It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is an insane extravagance, which is a sham; and horrible squalor behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no-one speaks of. There are even one or two honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, tear their hair privately and weep."

The political press became a ranking member of the entertainment industrial complex some time ago. And the full flavor of the court Isherwood describes has returned to the seat of power in Washington DC. I'll leave it to you to decide in today's media and political world, which are the courtiers and which are the fools.

Read the full article here.

And the hits just keep on coming...

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

What is most disturbing about these kind of reports is that the frequency of them has a strong desensitizing effect. It therefore strikes me that one of the most insidious aspects of the current administration's contempt for those with differing views is that their repeated outrages have a cumulative effect which actually works in their favor.

Furthermore, much like what happened recently with the phony filibuster affair, the opposition can be worn down by such tactics. In that example, the Democrats gave the administration confirmation of two rather extreme judicial nominees as a "compromise". But that so-called compromise was based on the totally phony argument that the Democrats were being obstructionists, when, in fact, the Bush record with judicial appointments compares very favorably when contrasted with the success rate of the Clinton administration's appointments.

The full article on this most recent massaging of the facts can be found at the New York Times.

James Wolcott reviews the damage left in Rumsfeld's wake.

Donald Rumsfeld, whose Steely Resolve more and more resembles aluminum siding, is a man unafraid of confronting the full spectrum of America's enemies from Al Qaeda to Amnesty International. Some say he is too zealous in defending our freedom. Too candid. Too cocksure. Too unwilling to accept counsel and criticism. Too wedded to his overriding vision of military transformation.

Those some sayers are right.

Read the full post here.

Josh Marshall comments intelligently on a scandal for which, he rightly points out, all Americans are becoming increasingly responsible.

Some folks just can't let this drop. One of them is Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. And God bless him for it. In today's paper, Pincus has an article detailing how two intelligence analysts responsible for what is probably the single greatest screw-up about Iraqi WMD (the aluminum tubes issue) have received job performance awards in each of the last three years.

Read the full post here.

David Corn puts the most recent example of the Administration's hypocrisy into sharp focus.

After it seemed that Newsweek's 10-sentence Quran-in-a-john item triggered lethal rioting in Afghanistan, Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman blasted the magazine's errant source: "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said." White House spinner Scott McClellan exclaimed, "People have lost their lives." Bush critics—including me—have made the obvious point: that the Bushies, in bringing the country to war on the basis of flimsy WMD allegations, showed little regard for accuracy and standards of veracity and that many people are dead because of this. But allow me to suggest another illuminating contrast. Place the self-righteous indignation the Bush gang displayed pertaining to the Newsweek piece alongside the administration's reaction to the recent massacre in Uzbekistan.

Read the full column at TomPaine.com.

Juan Cole, who has (in stark contrast to the Administration) been consistently illuminating and accurate in his analyses on Iraq, provides a sobering and clarifying summary of where we now stand.

US military tactics, of replying to attacks with massive force, have alienated ever more Sunni Arabs as time has gone on. Fallujah was initially quiet, until the Marines fired on a local demonstration against the stationing of US troops at a school (parents worried about their children being harmed if there was an attack). Mosul was held up as a model region under Gen. Petraeus, but exploded into long-term instability in reaction to the November Fallujah campaign. The Americans have lost effective control everywhere in the Sunni Arab areas. Even a West Baghdad quarter like Adhamiyah is essentially a Baath republic. Fallujah is a shadow of its former self, with 2/3s of its buildings damaged and half its population still refugeees, and is kept from becoming a guerrilla base again only by draconian methods by US troops that make it "the world's largest gated community." The London Times reports that the city's trade is still paralyzed.

Read the full post here.

Wow!

What a refreshing–make that bracing–change of pace. George Galloway's testimony during the Senate hearing on the U.N. "Oil-for-Food" scandal has been scathing, as he has turned himself impressively from accused to accuser. Early on, in response to the committee's assertion that he had "many meetings with Saddam Hussein", here's what Galloway had to say:

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as many meetings. In fact I've met him exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns."

Here's the full Times (U.K.) report.

Whether or not you have been following the chilling recent events at PBS (and, to a lesser extent NPR)...

the transcript of this recent speech by Bill Moyers is required reading. There is no more knowledgeable, eloquent spokesman on this extremely important topic, and the searing irony is that Moyers' perspective is, in stark contrast to his critics, fair-minded and balanced.

I mean it when I say that this is required reading, as it is crucial that reasonable people–Democrats and Republicans–become outraged by what is happening, and that they express their outrage in ways which will, collectively, produce practical results.

The transcript and audio/video can be found here.

Worth another mention.

About a week ago I referred to a terribly insidious bill sponsored and "authored" by James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis). It would be too mild to characterize this bill as frightening. Consider, for example, this:

The bill provides for a two year jail sentence if you observe or come across information about drug distribution near colleges and do not report it to authorities within 24 hours and provide full assistance investigating, apprehending, and prosecuting those involved.

Think about that. Everyone attending a party "near" a college, at which a joint is passed between as few as two people, could be arrested and jailed for two years if they fail to report the crime within 24 hours.

It would be nice if we could chalk this bill up as the ravings of a single insane politician, but what is truly frightening is that Sensenbrenner is the CHAIRMAN of the House Judiciary Committee, and that this is the companion bill to the so-called "youth gang" act which passed the House 279-144 last week.

For a fuller report and important related links, see TalkLeft.

A very interesting–and important–juxtaposition between the perspectives of the British and American military.

Based in large part on decades of experience in Northern Ireland, the British (no doubt accurately) argue that the U.S. is using too much force in Iraq. From the (U.K.) Telegraph:

They attempted to explain that in their experience of post-war counter-insurgency operations it paid to adopt a low-key and less aggressive stance.

American officers were told that when the British Army had made mistakes, such as in Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1972 when troops shot dead 13 civilians during a civil rights march, the political and military consequences had been disastrous.

The full article can be accessed here.

James Howard Kunstler, an author with especially interesting insights into the myriad problems relating to urban planning in the U.S., had this to say recently:

When exactly the American public entered the Rapture is a little hard to say -- maybe as long ago as the Reagan years -- but it is not the same Rapture as the Born Agains are gleefully awaiting -- the absurd cosmic vacuuming up to heaven that leaves behind all the rest of us sinners. No, the Rapture I speak of is the stupendous complacency of a people convinced that the future is going to be just like the past.

Everywhere I look I see things that are not going to work in the years ahead, and see people making plans for conditions that will no longer exist. State DOT officials in Texas are planning to build a new statewide super-mega highway network just as the global oil peak forecloses a future of easy motoring. Where I live, at the rural edge of New York's Capital District, suburban housing pods are springing up in every cow pasture in complete faith that supernaturally cheap mortgages and long commutes will continue to be the norm. Municipalities everywhere are investing in multi-million dollar parking structures in the belief that we will be using cars in 2019 exactly the way we do now. Even the enviros are enraptured. I get letters every day from bio-diesel fans who plan to run the interstate highway system and Disney World on oil derived from algae farms.

The collective consciousness is amazingly resistant to the fact that things change. Over in Syracuse, New York, a town sinking into the economic sclerosis of a former soviet-style backwater, the locals have approved perhaps the most idiotic project ever conceived by a free and sovereign people -- a hyper-super-giant-mega-mall to be called DestNY USA (sic) that would include 400 stores, 4,000 hotel rooms, a saltwater aquarium, a 65-acre park under a Biosphere-like dome, and a food court based around a miniature Erie Canal.* The idea is that people will flock to Syracuse by car from places with equally sclerotic economies (Worcester, Mass., Scranton, Pa.) in order to go on shopping sprees for new sneakers and cargo pants, which for some reason may be in short supply where they live.

The near-imbecile governor of New York, George Pataki, showed up to grandstand at the "groundbreaking" for this dumb-ass boondoggle (which has garnered tons of tax credits and other windfalls), though not a darn thing has been built since that symbolic shovelful of dirt was turned over. The developer behind DestiNY USA, one Robert Congel, was the CEO of a predatory shopping mall company, Pyramid Inc., which raped the local retail economy of many an upstate city since the 1970s. For all of its grandiosity, DestiNY USA is still minor league stuff compared to the plans afoot for Las Vegas, where the Rapture is in its most florid and terminal stage, and aggravated by yet another collective mental disorder: the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing.

I'd go as far to say that a public as complacent and clueless as America's is these days deserves to be played for fools. It's not pretty, but life is tragic. History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck. Plenty of other societies have before us. The real sin in the real world is the failure to pay attention to the signals that your environment sends you. The signals aimed at us now tell us the following: the oil age is entering an unstable permanent decline; suburbia and all its usufructs is finished; the blue-light special shopping economy is about to end; easy motoring will shortly be a thing of the past; the middle class will be replaced by a new former middle class; and all bets are off as to how violently American politics will shudder when the fog finally lifts.

*As reported in Sunday's NY Times Metro Section

In my view, this is an extremely important topic which currently attracts an outrageously small amount of attention. I am not principally referring to the mainstream press, but rather to the common American mindset to which Kunstler alludes. The combination of ignorance and unwillingness to consider the implications of rapid change is, as he suggests, a dangerously combustible mixture. Here's a link to his blog.

James Wolcott at his best (which is really, really good):

Standards and Practices

The New York Times is concerned in that mushy oatmeal way only the Times can be concerned about the accuracy and reliability of this exciting new craze, "blogging."

Of course, we're all concerned about getting it right. I try to maintain this blog to the highest standards of borderline libel.

But I would politely suggest that the Times fire Judith Miller before it presumes to lecture lesser mortals in a mealy-mouthed manner.

If the general public only understood the extremity of these...

recent devlopment, perhaps the White House would be held accountable. Steve Clemons remains on top of the story:

TWN thinks it is fascinating that John Bolton, an Under Secretary -- not a Deputy Secretary or Secretary -- could access with little resistance the nation's most secret secrets, possibly to spy on colleagues, or waging a foreign and national security effort at odds with Powell's policies, or even engaged in vendettas or personal vanity issues -- and yet Senators with Constitutional responsibilities in this matter cannot see the same material he did.

The full post can be found here.

The L.A. Times has an appropriately damning editorial today...

relating to the efforts by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and the Republicans to push the envelope on the already over-the-top drug laws currently on the books.

The bill, now before the House Judiciary Committee, would require five-year terms for the sale or distribution of every illegal drug, no matter how small the amount or the penalty under state law. Share a line of cocaine with a friend or give away a single tab of Ecstasy and you may join the 900 or so new inmates marched behind bars each week in recent years. Offenders with a prior conviction on almost any drug charge would automatically get 10 years. Adults who sold to minors could get life.

The full editorial found here

The indispensable Steve Clemons provides a remarkable update on the Bolton affair (with an assist from Sidney Blumenthal).

Here is a hint of just how serious and far-reaching the matter has become:

The White House may be deploying new and cynical tactics, but those moderate Republicans and progressives working behind the scenes -- as Sid Blumenthal points out -- are profoundly resolved to restore integrity to American foreign policy and to protect the system of checks and balances that are being smeared and violated by the Cheney-Bolton machine.

The full post can be found here.

Billmon once again displays...

his remarkable skills in a recent post relating to the influence of Leo Strauss on the neocon movement. As usual, his incisive commentary is laced with biting humor:

What strikes me most about the Straussians – and by extension, the neocons – is that they’ve pushed the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy of American politics back about 150 years, and moved it roughly 4,000 miles to the east, to the far side of the Rhine River. Their grand existential struggle isn’t with the likes of Teddy Kennedy or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, it’s with the liberalism of Voltaire, John Locke and John Stuart Mill – not to mention the author of the Declaration of the Independence.

The full post is well worth reading, and can be found here.

Eli sums it up well:

The power of the state

Today [April 26th] the final report on the state of WMD in Iraq was released. There were none. Since 1992. We've all known that for quite some time, of course. But the release of the final report is an occasion to reflect on the meaning of all this. Iraq had not had any weapons of mass destruction since 1992. Yet in 2003, eleven years later, the power of the U.S. government, combined with (or perhaps using is a better word) the power of the media, in the complete absence of anything remotely resembling proof (which would have been impossible, since what they were trying to "prove" wasn't actually true), was enough to convince a substantial portion of the American public, not to mention many (though certainly not a majority) of the world's governments, that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction but that they had them in such quantities and were such an imminent danger that, even though U.N. inspectors were still busy verifying what this report confirms two years later, it was necessary to immediately invade and overthrow the government of that country.

And if the government and media can do that, they can pretty much do anything they want. When and if the U.S. government decides they need to bomb Iran, or invade Syria, or blockade North Korea, or sponsor a coup in Venezuela, they'll turn up the verbal heat and in no time the bogeyman-du-jour will be established. And that's why independent media is so important. Because it's one of the necessary links in the only chain that can put a stop to this madness. Of course people who listen to, and learn from, independent media, and act on what they know, is another necessary link.

His blog, left i on the news, can be found here.

One of the most obvious symptoms of the diseased state of our political system is the perverted relationship between the mainstream press and the current administration.

It is tempting to cite a lack of journalistic integrity as the source of the problem, but, without excusing the individual reporters, the problem stems principally from the insidious symbiosis which exists between corporate media and the White House.

An especially nauseating example of this relationship are the so-called Press Briefings given regularly by the White House. The questions posed are, by in large, carefully formulated to assure the favored position of the reporter and (more importantly) his or her media outlet. Any serious attempt to learn something or, God forbid, challenge the administration's actions or policies, are very rare.

The Press Secretary will either respond to the softball questions in unilluminating fashion, spouting the day's talking points, or will duck, dive, or obfuscate when hit with an all-to-rare tough question.

There is, however, one glorious exception to this otherwise predictably depressing spectacle: Helen Thomas. The 84 year-old veteran White House correspondent is the only member of the press corp who regularly fires off serious, direct and, from the administration's standpoint, inflammatory questions. Today was classic:

Q Back to the report on the botched WMD intelligence, have the massive intelligence failures documented in the report caused the President to rethink his policy of preventive war?

MR. McCLELLAN: You know, September 11th taught us a very important lesson, and that lesson was that we must confront threats before it is too late. If we had known of those attacks ahead of time, we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent them from happening.

This President will not hesitate when it comes to protecting the American people. And in the post-September 11th world that we live in, the consequences of underestimating the threat we face is too high. It's tens of -- possibly tens of thousands of lives.

Q What about the cost of overestimating?

MR. McCLELLAN: Are you talking about the Iraq situation?

Q Going into Iraq, yes, with bad intelligence.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think we've talked about this before. The world is safer with Saddam Hussein's regime removed from power. The Iraqi people are serving as an example to the rest of the Middle East through their courage and determination to build a free future.

Q The ones that are alive, you mean?

Juan Cole provides a blistering and incisive critique of Bush's recent speech.

This campaign is not really about life at all, as the examples of the raped woman or the woman whose pregnancy puts her life in danger demonstrate. It is about control, and the imposition of a minority's values on others.

And that is why the Iraq war is the perfect symbol for the anti-abortionists. Colonial conquest is always a kind of rape, but now the conquered country must bear the fetus of Bush-imposed "liberty" to term. The hierarchy is thus established. Washington is superior to Baghdad, and Iraq is feminized and deprived of certain kinds of choices.

The full post can be found here.

One of the very best bloggers (in my view) is back in business.

Billmon, as he calls himself, was never really out of business, but he did reduce his production to a trickle for a while. He's back now, though, and with a vengence. He is an excellent journalist who writes well, is very smart, and often presents his viewpoints in an interesting manner. He can also be amusing at times, as he is in recent post in which he justifiably lambasts the Washington Post. My favorite part is, in order to illustrate a point, his use of an old Dilbert comic strip:

Dogbert: Now the first thing you need to understand is that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Client: OK. So what's your investment strategy?

Dogbert: I'm going to take all your money and buy myself a luxury condo in Cancun.

Client: Has that strategy ever worked before?

Dogbert: Jeez, it's like I'm talking to a wall here!

Billmon's blog can be found here.

This type of obfuscation on the part of the government is truly outrageous.

There was an outcry when the so-called RFID chips were under consideration for use in U.S. passports. These chips, like those in EZ-Pass type car toll devices, allow a remote sensor to read information imbedded in the chip. The government initially appeared to have backed down, but it now looks as if they simply decided to use a similar technology–which, in effect, does the same thing–and to re-name it.

The full report from Wired can be found here.

Excellent work by Steve Clemons.

Steve Clemons has, single-handedly, produced ample reasons why John Bolton's nomination as Ambassador to the U.N. should be rejected. He recently reprinted an eloquent letter, signed by 59 former ambassadors (many of whom worked for Republican administrations), urging the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to do just that.

Read the letter here.

A damning summary of Alan Greenspan's career...

or, more accurately, of the monumental miscalculations he has made during his career, can be found here. (thanks to The Cunning Realist)

If you haven't seen John Bolton (the man nominated to to be the next Ambassador to the U.N.) in action...

take a look at this.

Frank Rich writes thoughtfully on the Schiavo affair.

Within hours he [Bush] turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.

Read the article here.

Interested in Washington politics?

Josh Marshall and Steve Clemons are, in my view, the best bloggers reporting regularly on Washington politics. The information found in their blogs is both vastly superior to, and more honest than what one finds (with few exceptions) in the mainstream media. Furthermore, they are both careful and remarkably fair, given their obvious partisan leanings. In a recent post, Clemons offers a damning insite into why Bolton is such an outrageous and bad choice as Ambassador to the U.N. To read the post, click here.

It is remarkable how the "liberal" NY Times allows reporters like Judith Miller and Adam Nagourney to author front-page stories. Who better to expose the latter's recent work than JW?

"In a Polarizing Case, Jeb Bush Cements His Political Stature," reads the Times hed.

The headline could have read "blah blah blah Jeb Bush Raises His Political Visibility." That's neutral-sounding, accurate. But by using the statesmanlike word "stature," the hed makes it sound as if Jeb Bush is having a Profile in Courage crisis moment with the Terri Schiavo case (when, more likely, he and his brother have blundered through overpandering, but let that go for the moment).

Now, Nagourney isn't responsible for the headline, of course, but it's faithful to the awed gulp of his latest exhibition in political naivete.

Here's a link to Wolcott's full post.

The most acerbic political cartoonist I've come across weighs in on the Schiavo frenzy.

To view the whole strip (and many more), click here.

remember the outrage spewed toward those who wondered whether the Iraq war was really about oil?

From Greg Palast, one of the better investigative reporters, who, like Seymour Hersh, writes for the Guardian (UK) because the American newspapers apparently can't stomach the harsh truth.

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