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Archive: POLITICS

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Where are the rest?

Steven Grey, author of Ghost Plane: the inside story of the CIA's secret rendition programme, raises a very important question in a recent article in New Statesman online:

More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America's war on terror. Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA's "black sites", what happened to the rest?

Sana'a, Yemen. By the gates of the Old City, Muhammad Bashmilah was walking, talking, and laughing in the crowd - behaving like a man without a care in the world. Bargaining with the spice traders and joking with passers-by; at last he was free.

A 33-year-old businessman, Bashmilah has an impish sense of humour; his eyes sparkled as he chatted about his country and the khat leaves that all the young men were chewing. But when I began my interview by asking for the story of his past three years, his mood shifted. His face narrowed, his eyes calmed, and he stared beyond me - as if looking directly into the nether world from which he had so recently emerged.

For 11 months, Bashmilah was held in one of the CIA's most secret prisons - its so-called "black sites" - so secret that he had no idea in which country, or even on which continent, he was being held. He was flown there, in chains and wearing a blindfold, from another jail in Afghanistan; his guards wore masks; and he was held in a 10ft by 13ft cell with two video cameras that watched his every move. He was shackled to the floor with a chain of 110 links.

Read Grey's full article here

Vietnam Visits: Clinton and Bush

The blog Bag News Notes regularly looks at political imagery, and often provides interesting insights in the process. A particularly impressive example is their recent juxtapostion of the official visits taken to Vietnam by Presidents Clinton and (in recent days) George Bush. Here's a peek:

You can view the rest of the excellent series here

Cheney, Iran, and (dishonest) Business as usual

From Seymour Hersh:

A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting “shorteners” on the wire—that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put “shorteners” on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

The White House’s concern was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to keep it from getting the bomb. “They’re afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, à la Nicaragua in the Contra war,” a former senior intelligence official told me.

In late 1982, Edward P. Boland, a Democratic representative, introduced the first in a series of “Boland amendments,” which limited the Reagan Administration’s ability to support the Contras, who were working to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government. The Boland restrictions led White House officials to orchestrate illegal fund-raising activities for the Contras, including the sale of American weapons, via Israel, to Iran. The result was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-eighties. Cheney’s story, according to the source, was his way of saying that, whatever a Democratic Congress might do next year to limit the President’s authority, the Administration would find a way to work around it. (In response to a request for comment, the Vice-President’s office said that it had no record of the discussion.)

Read Hersh's full article in The New Yorker

Incomprehensible

The life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe is 34, and we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary wars.

The Independent has the story

Guantanamo Show Trials

The U.S. military called no witnesses, withheld evidence from detainees and usually reached a decision within a day as it determined that hundreds of men detained at Guantanamo Bay were “enemy combatants,” according to a new report.

The analysis of transcripts and records by two lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, aided by more than two dozen law students, found that hearings that determined whether a prisoner should remain in custody gave the accused little opportunity to contest allegations against him.

“These were not hearings. These were shams,” said Mark Denbeaux, an attorney and Seton Hall University law professor who along with his son, Joshua, is the author of the report.

[snip]

Among their findings:

The government did not produce any witnesses in any hearing.

The military denied all detainee requests to inspect the classified evidence against them.

The military refused all requests for defense witnesses who were not detained at Guantanamo.

In 74 percent of the cases, the government denied requests to call witnesses who were detained at the prison.

In 91 percent of the hearings, the detainees did not present any evidence.

In three cases, the panel found that the detainee was “no longer an enemy combatant,” but the military convened new tribunals that later found them to be enemy combatants.

“No American would ever consider this to be hearing,” Denbeaux said. “This is a show trial.”

Read the full Associated Press article

"They want us to suffer, not to die."

Jennifer Loewenstein, a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre, and free-lance journalist, has written a powerful piece in Counterpunch. She writes about the Gaza Crossing (Erez), and how Israel, ostensibly for security reasons, has made it hellishly difficult to traverse. Here's an excerpt:

This monstrosity is not for your security. This neo-fascist, Stalinist, gulag Guantanamo is there to keep you out, to keep you from even trying, from even wanting, to go in. It is there so you will not see the torn up streets, and ruined land; the bombed-out buildings and poisoned soil; the bull-dozed houses and bullet-holed refugee camps; the back-up generators chugging away; the destroyed central power transformer, the wrecked factories and shops; the caved-in mosques and unfinished clinics; the pressure-less water pumps; the lots full of rubble and trash; the wretched horse and donkey-carts and beggar-children; the worn out mothers, the humiliated fathers, the unemployed young men; the young girls holding whole families together; the exhausted teachers, the pay-less civil servants, the street vendors with last week's produce; the heaps of rust and stench of rot, the overcrowded book-and-desk-deprived schools full of troubled youth, bed-wetters, ptsd children; the travesties-of-hospitals; the wards of the sick and wounded; the morgues full of the dead; the merciful, silver-trayed freezers in the morgues where rest finally takes you unaware.

The prison compound of Gaza was built to push half a nation to the brink of death, to suck out its resistance, to squeeze out its breath. "They want us to suffer, not to die." The words of the mayor of Rafah sound like a broken record in my head. "And they are succeeding", he said without emotion.

Read Loewenstein's full article here (be sure to scroll down a bit)

Good summary

"Did you hear John McCain ate his dessert with a salad fork? What a maverick."

–Stephen Colbert

Unanswered questions about Bob Gates

Bob Gates will almost certainly be confirmed quickly as Donald Rumsfeld's replacement. And while he does represent a somewhat preferable alternative, troubling questions remain about his past government service. Robert Parry, who broke many important Iran-Contra stories, provides detailed background supporting the argument that Gates confirmation hearings should be more than a formality. Here's an excerpt:

On the question of Gates and the Iraqi arms shipments, former National Security Council aide Howard Teicher swore out an affidavit in 1995 detailing Gates’s secret role in shepherding military equipment via third countries to Iraq.

Teicher said the secret arming of Iraq was approved by President Ronald Reagan in June 1982 as part of a National Security Decision Directive. Under it, CIA Director William Casey and his then-deputy, Robert Gates, “authorized, approved and assisted” delivery of cluster bombs and other materiel to Iraq, Teicher said.

Teicher’s affidavit corroborated earlier public statements by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian-born businessman Richard Babayan, who claimed first-hand knowledge of Gates’s central role in the secret Iraq operations.

In 1995, however, Teicher’s affidavit embarrassed President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, which had just tried to dispose of the so-called Iraqgate scandal with a report that found no evidence to support allegations that the Reagan-Bush administration had illegally armed Saddam Hussein.

Clinton’s Justice Department apparently wanted to clear the decks of these complicated historical scandals from the Reagan-Bush years. Clinton found those old controversies a distraction from his goal of focusing on the nation’s domestic needs.

The Clinton administration’s debunking report about Iraqgate had been so determined to see no evil that the Clinton lawyers didn’t even object to the discovery that the CIA had been hiding evidence from them.

“In the course of our work, we learned of ‘sensitive compartments’ of information not normally retrievable and of specialized offices that previously were unknown to the CIA personnel who were assisting us,” wrote John M. Hogan, counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno.

Without further skepticism or curiosity, Hogan added, “I do not believe this uncertainty severely undermined our investigation.”

In other words, the CIA had withheld “sensitive compartments” of information from the Justice Department and – rather than conclude that this concealed evidence might be worth seeing – the Clinton investigators assumed that the hidden “compartments” must not be very significant.

A rookie detective would be kicked off a small town police force if he had applied such logic to the search of a drug suspect’s house – “look anywhere you want, except in the closet” – but that was the way Reagan-Bush investigations were handled in that period.

Read Parry's full piece at consortiumnews.com

"No one is guilty in Israel."

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can't claim he didn't mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can't claim he didn't mean to kill innocent inhabitants.

Therefore it takes considerable gall and cynicism to dare to claim that the Israel Defense Forces did not intend to kill inhabitants of Beit Hanun. Even if there was a glitch in the balancing of the aiming mechanism or in a component of the radar, a mistake in the input of the data or a human error, the overwhelming, crucial, shocking fact is that the IDF bombards helpless civilians. Even shells that are supposedly aimed 200 meters from houses, into "open areas," are intended to kill, and they do kill. In this respect, nothing new happened on Wednesday morning in Gaza: The IDF has been behaving like this for months now.

But this isn't just a matter of "the IDF," "the government" or "Israel" bearing the responsibility. It must be said explicitly: The blame rests directly on people who hold official positions, flesh-and-blood human beings, and they must pay the price of their criminal responsibility for needless killing. Attorney Avigdor Klagsbald caused the death of a woman and her child without anyone imagining that he intended to hit them, but nevertheless he is sitting in prison. And what about the killers of women and children in Beit Hanun? Will they all be absolved? Will no one be tried? Will no one even be reprimanded and shunned?

GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant will say with exasperating coolness that apparently there was "a problem with the battery's targeting apparatus," without moving a facial muscle, and will that be enough? Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh will say, "The IDF is militarily responsible, but not morally responsible," and will he thus exculpate himself?

And who will bear the responsibility for the renewal of the terror attacks? Only Hamas? Who will be accused of the tumble in Israel's status and its depiction as a violent, leper state, and who will be judged for the danger that hovers over world Jewry in the wake of the IDF's acts? The electronic component that went on the blink in the radar?

No one is guilty in Israel. There is never anyone guilty in Israel. The prime minister who is responsible for the brutal policy toward the Palestinians, the defense minister who knew about and approved the bombardments, the chief of staff, the chief of command and the commander of the division who gave the orders to bombard - not one of them is guilty. They will continue with the work of killing as though nothing has happened: The sun shone, the system flourished and the ritual slaughterer slaughtered. They will continue to pursue the routine of their daily lives, accepted in society like anyone else, and remain in their posts despite the blood on their hands.

Read Gideon Levy's full commentary in Haaretz

Guts

Something that the mainstream American media still lacks.

Investigative Congressional Hearings

Now that the Democrats have control, what should be the initial focus of any hearings? I'd say a good place to start would be fraud and corruption in Iraq, with Halliburton as a principal focus. Watch this video and see if you don't agree.

Rumsfeld's Replacement

Ray McGovern and James Ridgeway put Bush's nominee, Robert Gates, into perspective:

Mother Jones (Ridgeway)

Tom Paine (McGovern)

Enough celebrating

Red State Son and Chris Floyd offer sobering – some would say realistic – reactions to the election results. You won't find anything like Floyd's perspective in the mainstream media. Here's a taste:

Ordinarily, the elevation of a gaggle of corporate bagmen, spine-free time-servers and craven accomplices of tyranny and aggression to the control of Congress would not be a cause for rejoicing. With a few notable exceptions, the Democratic Party has displayed nothing but cowardice and cluelessness over the past five years, betraying the interests of the American people at every single gut-check point in the long march to the self-proclaimed "Unitary Executive" dictatorship of George W. Bush. Whenever it really counted – Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts for the rich, the class-warfare nuclear bomb of the Bankruptcy Bill, the appointment of sleazy, third-rate officials such as torture-enabler and Constitution-gutter Alberto Gonzales to high office, and of course, the eager goose-stepping into the war crime of Iraq (which was, let us remember, approved by a Democratic-controlled Senate) – the Democrats folded, would not even go down fighting.

Is there any greater example of this than the vote, just a few weeks ago, on the "Military Commissions Act," the republic-killing measure that gave the president virtually unlimited, unchecked, unappealable powers over the life and liberty of every citizen? The Democratic "leadership" – now suddenly basking in media lionization – would not even mount a filibuster to defend the Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta). Many Democrats actually voted in favor of ending the American Republic. (Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee was one of these – and now he has reaped his reward: defeat. That's how it goes, Harold; you can make a deal with the devil, but he'll always cheat you in the end. You sold out the nation for nothing – and now Bob Corker, yet another feckless, faceless, money-grubbing tycoon will pollute the Senate chamber.) The MCA debacle was the last full measure of fear and servility from a group whose collective record is one long tissue of shame.

And yet, and yet…this is indeed a time – a brief, brief time – for celebration. For the fact remains that the Republican Congress is – as Matt Taibbi has detailed so forcefully – the worst in American history: corrupt, incompetent, dysfunctional, lazy, and ignorant almost beyond measuring. As often mentioned here, they are the very picture of the Roman Senate described by Tiberius, after they'd voted him yet another grovelling set of honors and powers: "Men fit to be slaves." The damage they have done to the nation, and the world, as the bootlicking handmaidens of George W. Bush and his militarist mafia is incalculable, and will go on producing foul repercussions for years, perhaps generations.

Glenn Greenwald on the election:

The Great Victory - crushing the developing myths

The outcome of this election -- even with the not-yet-fully-finalized Senate victories in Virginia and Montana -- is as resounding and clear as it gets. For exactly that reason, all sorts of devastated Bush followers and confused and desperate media mavens are busy spawning myths about what happened -- often, in the case of the mindless pundits, unwittingly, even unconsciously. Most Americans know exactly what happened here, but it is nonetheless vital that these myths be smashed from the start and the clear lessons of this election be safeguarded...

Read Glenn's full piece here

Juan Cole on what it means for Iraq

And while Many celebrate the election results...

At least 19 Palestinians were killed and 40 wounded when five Israeli shells hit a row of houses in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun this morning.

The dead and injured - including nine children, four women and six men - were sleeping when the first shell hit at around 6am local time. Many of the victims were taken to hospital in their pyjamas.

In response to the attack, Hamas called for attacks on the US. “America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nation all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons,” the Islamist group said in a statement sent to the Associated Press.

Israeli army sources said that the army fired a volley of artillery shells at the northern Gaza Strip which missed their target, probably because of a human or technical error. Officially the army said it was still investigating the incident.

The full article in The Guardian (U.K.)

The Courage to tell the truth

"The contempt for human life starts with the lives of Arabs and end with the lives of Jews"

From Gideon Levy's commentary in Haaretz:

A bloodbath is taking place in Beit Hanun, the Israel Defense Forces runs rampant and kills at least 37 people in four days - and Israeli public opinion yawns with indifference. A brigade commander tells his soldiers, who killed 12 people in one day: "You've won 12:0," and the soldiers grin broadly. This is the moral nadir we have reached, following a long slide down a slippery slope: Human life has become cheap.

Proof of this came at the end of the week from the big mouth of Major General Elazar Stern, the head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, who occasionally says true things. "The IDF's excessive sensitivity to human life led to some of the failures in the Lebanon war - and this should not happen," Stern told Channel 7. Stern should be praised for these forthright words: Those who embark with unbearable lightness on a futile war of choice cannot allow themselves the luxury of showing sensitivity for the lives of their soldiers. In war, soldiers not only kill, but are also killed. This should have been stated in advance.

But the general's remarks are also tainted with hypocrisy: Those who over a few months kill more than 1,000 Lebanese and 300 Palestinians for dubious reasons do not have the right to speak about sensitivity to human life. The fact that the public protest against the war did not take off demonstrates that after having lost all sensitivity for the lives of others, we are also gradually losing sensitivity for the lives of our children who are killed in vain. The contempt for human life starts with the lives of Arabs and ends with the lives of Jews.

What a long way we have come since the talk, as hypocritical as it may have been, about "the purity of arms." This concept has been totally deleted from the lexicon. What a long way we have come since the time when we took pride in the fact that, unlike the Arabs, we tried not to kill innocent civilians. And now we have arrived at the shocking reality of the second Lebanon war. For example, the number of people Israel killed is not only almost 10 times higher than the number of people Hezbollah killed, but the number of soldiers Hezbollah killed is three times higher than the number of Israeli civilians they killed, while the number of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel is about three times the number of Hezbollah fighters. So whose arms are purer? A journalist from The Guardian who is currently in Israel was shocked to hear that these figures have not been the subject of public discussion here.

The current stage of the moral decline began with the targeted assassinations in the territories. When they began, there was still an argument over their legality and justness. Who remembers that the assassinations were once limited, declaratively at least, to "ticking bombs"? The High Court of Justice, in its cowardice, has evaded taking a stance on this issue for years, despite the petitions on its doorstep. And the assassination project grew and expanded until it reached monstrous proportions.

In recent months, almost no day has gone by without Palestinians being killed in Gaza. Instead of asking why, we get a prime minister who boasts to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee about "300 terrorists" dead within four months, as if killing in itself were an enormous achievement. This is the lesson from Ehud Olmert, and it is immeasurably more grievous than all his alleged corruption affairs.

Read Levy's full piece here

Molting Hawks and Afghan Hounds

The ascerbic Paul William Roberts strips away the veneer from our Iraq misadventure.

All over the media, there are so many molting hawks around these days that those of us allergic to feathers are breaking out in hives. Remember, these are the same merchants of misinformation who, three years ago, sang you hymns of praise about the wonders of modern military technology as they thundered into Baghdad, unsure themselves if they were reporting this war or fighting it. For an accurate assessment of the Fox News audience ratings now, all you need do is check the polls to see how many Americans still believe the US is winning the war in Iraq. It’s down to 20% this week, half of whom probably don’t know who won the Civil War either.

Over in the Green Zone, oasis of Central Hell, Paul Wolfowitz’s faithful Afghan hound, Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American Ambassador (though to what and where he isn’t sure) clambered out of his bomb-proof kennel briefly for a joint press conference with the performing quisling-du-jour, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who can barely control a quarter of Baghdad, let alone all of Iraq. Stressing what was at stake, without stressing what was really at stake – the rubber-stamp Congress, neoconservatism, corporate profits, American pride and credibility as planetary potentate -- Mr Khalilzad called Iraq "the defining challenge of our era" which would "profoundly shape... the future of the world." Well, we know that because you said it ten years ago, when Überfuhrer Wolfowitz and the other neoconmen were trying to shove it down Bill Clinton’s throat, while he was busy trying to shove something else down almost anyone’s throat. Perhaps if Khalilzad ventured beyond Fort Rumsfeld’s concrete cocoon he’d notice the future of the world doesn’t look so good, if the current condition of Iraq is its shape, and it’s painfully clear to six billion of us that America obviously wasn’t up to the defining challenge of our era. It’s just as well the Age of Irony gave way to the Age of Bullshit, otherwise someone might make more of the fact that the most powerful and well-financed military force in history has so far never won a war.

Read Roberts' full piece at Atlantic Free Press

America's Global Decline

Steve Clemons makes an important observation, which in turn illustrates an even more important trend:

Frequently, critics of the war in Iraq restrict their tallies of the consequences to the country thus far in terms of military consequences in the Middle East -- and many actually trumpet how fortunate Americans are to still have high quality, mostly secure lives in this nation despite the hellish conditions in Iraq, Gaza, Darfur, and other strife-addled regions.

But what is not connected enough to America's tragic encounter in Iraq is how it has undermined American power and prestige in other ways. The collapse of the Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations and the frequent harrassment from Venezuela President Hugo Chavez are other benchmarks of American political decline and of power voids being left for others to fill.

And today we have the likely victory of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua's national elections as another indicator of tides turning against American interests. Ortega, a former leftist guerilla, may have just won the election over the US-backed Eduardo Montealagre.

The race results are not final, but election returns are tilting towards an Ortega win.

When I was in Germany recently, I spoke before the FDP Foreign Policy Parliamentary Group, chaired by Werner Hoyer, in the Bundestag. One of Hoyer's chief concerns has been Nicaragua and this election -- and he is down there now attempting to suppor Montealegre.

But what Hoyer and many others who have watched these elections have reported is that America is not only weaker in the eyes of Latin American citizens, citizens are motivated to actually help roll back American power.

As one German politician told me, "It is remarkable that Ortega is bouncing back without a superpower sponsor competing with America. This is what is troubling. The opposition to American interests is winning in many place and there is no global rival."

When the mystique of American power was wrecked in Iraq and President Bush showed our military and financial limits -- allies stopped counting on as much and enemies have moved their agendas forward.

The costs of Iraq that Bush has unleashed aren't anywhere close to a clear tally yet.

Steve's Washington Note

Perfectly within their rights?

The Talking Dog, one of many fine liberal bloggers, has just posted an interview with Eric M. Freedman, a Professor of Law at Hofstra University School of Law, and noted author. Here's a taste:

Eric Freedman: One must understand that all of the Administration's policies begin with the conclusion and the attempt to concoct post hoc legal rationalizations was an effort to give a veneer legality to actions that had already been determined upon without consideration of their legality. The initial policy determination was to apply unconstrained force against "terrorists". Since our society has no legal framework permitting the executive "liquidate enemies of the state" -- our government needs to abide by either a war paradigm, or a criminal justice paradigm -- the Administration needed to rewrite the necessary legal terms and principles to conform to the original policy decision.

That was why the first instinct was to call the situation "a war", even though it was, of course, NOT "a war" in any recognized sense. But then, even the term "war" proved to be not good enough, because then - under the legal ramework applicable to wars - there would be privileged belligerents; soldiers for the other side would be entitled to combat immunity. After all, such a soldier is just doing his duty, like our soldiers. Indeed, that recognition was one of the major advances of civilization.

Hence, the term "enemy combatant" was designed to obscure the difference between privileged and unprivileged belligerents, and make it a war crime simply to fight against the United States of America. Until the passage of the Military Commissions Act, the Administration took the position that everyone who is hostile to the interests of the United States is "aiding the enemy" and can be charged with that...notwithstanding, of course, that if they ARE the enemy they are supposed to be aiding it!

Language has been twisted into a pretzel in a reflection of the desperate effort needed to conceal the fact that this Administration wishes to be bound by no legal constraints, of any kind whatsoever, and so it is trying to invent a law free zone, where neither criminal law nor law of war limits on its activities exist. Of course, in our system, the American executive does not have unconstrained power... the legal result has ended up being a failed Rube Goldberg device.

The Talking Dog: Let me follow that thought up, a second...
President Ford famously issued an executive order barring assassinations. I'm not aware that has been rescinded. Does that in any way effect the non-existent "liquidate enemies of the state" issue?

Eric Freedman: Look at it this way. We have launched Predator
missiles in Yemen-- not a country in a war zone-- to kill passengers in a car. If this IS a war against "terrorists", and we can legally do that, then why aren't the terrorists equally legally at war with us? So would they then be acting perfectly within their rights to assassinate one of our generals in London-- or Washington?

Read the rest of the Freedman interview here

Need yet another reason to vote on Tuesday?

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Vote the bastards out of office.

Full article at the NY Times

Lone Wolf

While there are, thankfully, many intelligent, honest voices to be found on the internet, there are, with respect to political commentary, woefully few in the mainstream media. For quite some time, as many of you know, Keith Olbermann has stood out from the overpaid, enabling, often stupid crowd. His scathing regular commentaries have served as an important outlet for the justifiable rage felt by so many Americans.

Olbermann's most recent diatribe is outstanding. Here's an excerpt:

This, is our beloved country now, as you have re-defined it, Mr. Bush.

Get a tortured Vietnam veteran to attack a decorated Vietnam veteran, in defense of military personnel, whom that decorated veteran did not insult.

Or, get your henchmen to take advantage of the evil lingering dregs of the fear of miscegenation in Tennessee, in your party's advertisements against Harold Ford.

Or, get the satellites who orbit around you, like Rush Limbaugh, to exploit the illness — and the bi-partisanship — of Michael J. Fox — yes, get someone to make fun of the cripple.

Oh, and sir, don't forget to drag your own wife into it.

"It's always easy," she said of Mr. Fox's commercials — and she used this phrase twice — "to manipulate people's feelings."

Where on earth might the First Lady have gotten that idea, Mr. President?

From your endless manipulation of people's feelings about terrorism?

"How ever they put it," you said Monday of the Democrats, on the subject of Iraq , "their approach comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."

No manipulation of feelings there.

No manipulation of the charlatans of your administration into the only truth-tellers.

Download and watch Olbermann's full commentary at crook and liars

Cut And Run? Precisely, according to General Odom

THE UNITED STATES upset the regional balance in the Middle East when it invaded Iraq. Restoring it requires bold initiatives, but "cutting and running" must precede them all. Only a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops — within six months and with no preconditions — can break the paralysis that now enfeebles our diplomacy. And the greatest obstacles to cutting and running are the psychological inhibitions of our leaders and the public.

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; creating democracy there; preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; making Israel more secure; not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain; and others.

But reality can no longer be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent bloody sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq. All of these things and more became unavoidable the day that U.S. forces invaded.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

Read Odom's full editorial in the LA Times

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