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Archive: POLITICS

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Sarkozy

As you may know, there was a recent Presidential election in France, and the winner was Nicolas Sarkozy. There has been a lot written about him, but the most insightful article which I have read comes from Bernard Chazelle. His piece begins:

The story has been all over the media: Nicolas Sarkozy might not be an easy man to like but France is the “sick man of Europe” and tough love is what it needs. If its new president’s odes to the liberating power of work and paeons to “the France that gets up early” grate on the ears of his 35-hour-work-week nation, so be it.

Yeah, yeah, Sarko made few friends in the riot-prone banlieues when he called the locals “scum” and threatened to clean up the projects with a Kärcher power hose (a German brand, no less). But at least he promised them jobs and not more empty socialist rhetoric. Having missed the train of globalization, the French economy is collapsing under the strain of a creaky welfare system and a chronic incapacity to create jobs.

By rejecting the neoliberal creed, France has turned its back on modernity. Aware of its decline, the nation pines for its lost grandeur, a risible notion so quintessentially Gallic English doesn’t even have a word for it. The pro-US, pro-Israel, tax-cutting, union-busting Sarko is France’s best hope for breaking with the gloomy years of the past.

Nice story. Too bad it bears so little connection to reality. France faces serious problems but they are none of the above. Oddly, to get the country all wrong seems a bit of an art form in the U.S. media. On any given day, Tom Friedman can be found berating the French for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Friedman’s genius is to suppress in the reader the commonsense reaction—Indian engineers have no life—and improbably redirect the pity toward the French. That takes some skill.

Chazelle's full piece

Deliberate Lies

Glenn Greenwald catches Bush's "intelligence czar," Mike McConnell, in howlingly flagrant lies in a Washington Post op-ed about the need to "update" the secret FISA court's powers over government surveillance. Greenwald does a masterful job of demolition -- but in the end, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. All he does is go back to Bush's own public statements after the FISA system was, er, updated in October 2001, and show how the Dear Leader himself contradicts every statement McConnell makes in his new piece. Greenwald writes with his usual passion and flair; but it's a job that any first-year journalism student could have done -- and a job that Post editorial honcho Fred Hiatt should have done. For McConnell was not simply voicing opinions, or giving his interpretation of events; he was stating as fact things that were demonstrably false -- falsehoods that could have been detected through a quick check of the Post's own files. It is precisely as if Hiatt gave editorial space to someone claiming that Saddam Hussein had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Well, the strange political proclivities of Mr. Hiatt are well known, and too banal to merit any serious attention. The man treats anything out of the mouths of the powerful as holy -- and uneditable -- writ, although it's true that he also publishes the occasional "dissenting" piece. After all, Post readers like to flatter themselves that they are big-picture people, seeing "all sides" of an issue and making their weighty judgments accordingly. They like to spice up the unrelenting flood of servile gruel that Hiatt dishes out with a bit of contrarian horseradish now and then.

What is most important about the McConnell piece -- as Greenwald notes -- is that it underscores, yet again, that the Bush Faction tells knowing lies in pushing its agenda, and always has. It's not a question of "spin," of "putting the best face on things," or being "clearer than truth," in Dean Acheson's sinister Cold War phrase -- gilding the lily, exaggerating for effect. Nor, conversely, is it a case of self-deception, of "true believers" unable to take off their blinders, of "idealists" unwilling to bend their dreams to mucky reality, or even of fourth-rate dullards too stupid to see the filth and ruin caused by their own cretinous policies. They are not just spinning, they are not deceiving themselves, they are not too stupid to know what's going on.

They are lying -- lying deliberately -- lying brazenly and cynically, as in McConnell's case. They are lying because their causes are evil and cannot be spoken of openly: aggressive war for loot and domination; the callous rape and despoiling of their own nation for the profit and power of their wealthy cronies; the construction of a global gulag of secret prisons, eternal captives, carefully refined and officially approved torture; the deliberate, systematic destruction of the Constitutional system of government in favor of arbitrary, militarized tyranny; the deliberate, systematic sowing of division and rancor and hatred and fear among the people, to keep them disunited, weak, scattered, unable to resist the depredations of a small, criminal elite. If these be your gods, then of course you must lie to do them service.

Chris Floyd's full piece

The Lawbreaking Bush Administration: Exposed

The house of cards began to fall some time ago, but with the testimony of James Comey at yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, the collapse has begun in earnest. And needless to say, the mainstream media is slow (at best) to pick up on the devastating significance of Comey's testimony. Both Glenn Greenwald and Marty Lederman have covered the ramifications of the testimony in typically thorough fashion.

I'd recommend reading the latter first, though both are outstanding. And if you don't yet understand just how corrupt and dishonest the people who hold the highest offices of government in this country are, do yourself a favor and read both.

Finally, if you'd like to watch the most import video excerpts of Comey's testimony, here's a good version courtesy of Josh Marshall.

Cockburn on America's Nightmare in Iraq

May 14, 2007 | ARBIL, Iraq -- At 3 a.m. on Jan. 11, 2007, a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and Gen. Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in Arbil, the Kurdish capital. There was nothing covert about the meeting, which was featured on Kurdish television.

In the event, the U.S. attack failed. It was able to net only five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office, which had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad. The Kurdish leaders were understandably furious, asking why, without a word to them, their close allies had tried to abduct two important foreign officials who were in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi president. Kurdish troops had almost opened fire on the American troops. At the very least, the raid showed a contempt for Iraqi sovereignty, which the United States was supposedly defending. It was three months before officials in Washington admitted that they had tried and failed to capture Jafari and Frouzanda. The U.S. State Department and Iraqi government argued for the release of the five officials as relative minnows, but Vice President Cheney's office insisted fiercely that they should be held.

If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war. In the event, the U.S. assault on Arbil attracted bemused attention inside and outside Iraq for only a few days before it was buried by news of the torrent of violence in the rest of Iraq. The United States understandably did not reveal the seniority of its real targets -- or that they had escaped.

The Arbil raid is noteworthy because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the United States a few hours earlier on Jan. 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the hand-over of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.

Read Patrick Cockburn's full piece at Salon.com

The Wall

It is like no other wall.

It is nine meters high—the concrete slabs have the measurement stamped on them. It dwarfs anyone who stands near it. There is an insufferable hubris about the way it arrogates the land to itself, splitting Abu Dis down the middle. But it is the pernicious aspect that strikes you most forcefully once your eyes adjust to the new reality. It twists and turns and loops. There is a rather pleasant hilltop covered with cypresses—slotted for a new Jewish settlement, in the heart of this Palestinian town—and the wall slithers around it to ensure that this extra little piece of land, which no doubt belongs, or belonged, to someone, will now become Israel. Palestinian houses nearby are, as a result, squeezed right against the wall, which shuts out their light, renders windows and doors irrelevant.

We walk along it, first on the Jewish side, then, where there is still a gap, unfinished, along the Palestinian side. There are graffiti growing up everywhere. “Sharon knows only war.” “Welcome to the ghetto of Abu D”—in big red letters; the painter, Angela, a friend of ours, was arrested by the police before she could finish the sentence that is, after all, “anti-Semitic,” or anti-Zionist—anyway, a crime, unlike the wall itself. Perhaps even more poignant is the verse from Malachi (2:10–11), which they say was the first text to be painted on the newly finished barrier: “Have we not all a single father? Did not one God create us all? Why does one man betray his brother, to desecrate our fathers’ covenant? Judah has betrayed, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and Jerusalem.” In black letters covering four or five whole slabs; the anonymous writer managed to finish the verse. Who, I wonder, is this hidden hero, who knows the Bible, knows what words are for?

The above is an excerpt from Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman, published by the University of Chicago Press. Read more here

For an intimate glimpse at how the wall has affected one Palestinian family, I can recommend a sober documentary film directed by Carolina Rivas called The Color of Olives

Ireland and Israel

Yes, yes, I know, Northern Ireland and the Middle East are entirely different situation, and things that worked in one place are not going to necessarily work in the other. Nonethless, in this week’s historic Northern Ireland unity agreement, there are certain universal principles from which anyone looking to broker a peace deal anywhere ought to learn.

The original Good Friday agreement ten years ago was brokered by very different parties to the ones who have now joined a unity government. On the Catholic side, it was the SDLP of John Hume who was the dominant voice at the table, while the Ulster Unionists of David Trimble represented Protestant loyalists. But the electorate eventually rejected those parties, and each community chose more uncompromising parties — the Sinn Fein on the nationalist side and the Democratic Unionists on the loyalist side — to represent them at the table.

The government of Tony Blair did not flinch or give up hope, it pressed on, pushing the chosen representatives of both communities into a process that led to agreement. And the agreement may be far stronger than its predecessor, in that it was brokered by hard men on both sides and that has left no significant rejectionist constituency on either side.

The implications for the Middle East should be obvious: Palestinian voters have chosen Hamas to represent them; imagining that Hamas could be excluded from any peace process is not only absurd, it is self-defeating and dangerous.

The grownups of Europe and the Arab world understand that; that’s why they’ve backed the unity government that has drawn Hamas and Fatah together in a single administration. But the hard-line Likudniks who still write the Bush Administration’s policy are still hard at work on schemes designed to split the Palestinians in the naive hope that Hamas can be sidelined.

Tony Karon's full commentary

Gunboat Diplomacy

Looking down from the captain's deck some six stories high, the flight deck of the USS Nimitz is an impressive sight indeed: 80 sleek warplanes armed with bombs and missiles are poised for takeoff at any minute, day or night. The sight of these planes coming and going from that 1,100-foot-long flight deck is almost beyond description. I can attest to this, having sailed on the Nimitz 25 years ago as a reporter for Mother Jones magazine.

Today, the Nimitz is rapidly approaching the Persian Gulf, where it will join two other U.S. aircraft carriers and the French carrier Charles De Gaulle in the largest concentration of naval firepower in the region since the launching of the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years ago.

Why this concentration now? Officially, the Nimitz is on its way to the Gulf to replace the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is due to return to the United States for crew leave and ship maintenance after months on station. But the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which exercises command authority over all U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf area, refuses to say when the Eisenhower will actually depart—or even when the Nimitz will arrive.

For a time, at least, the United States will have three carrier battle groups in the region. The USS John C. Stennis is the third. Each carrier is accompanied by a small flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support vessels, many equipped with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (TLAMs). Minimally, this gives modern meaning to the classic imperial term "gunboat diplomacy," which makes it all the stranger that the deployment of the Nimitz is covered in our media, if at all, as the most minor of news stories. And when the Nimitz sailed off into the Pacific last month on its way to the Gulf, it simply disappeared off media radar screens like some classic "lost patrol."

Rest assured, unlike us, the Iranians have noticed. After all, with the arrival of the Nimitz battle group, the Bush administration will be—for an unknown period of time—in an optimal position to strike Iran with a punishing array of bombs and missiles should the President decide to carry out his oft-repeated threat to eliminate Iran's nuclear program through military action. "All options," as the administration loves to say, remain ominously "on the table."

Michael T. Klare's full piece can be read at TomDispatch

Facilitating the coverup

The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents.

Robert L. Wilkie , a former Bush administration national security official who left the White House to become assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs last year, has outlined a half-dozen guidelines that prohibit most officers below the rank of colonel from appearing in hearings, restricting testimony to high-ranking officers and civilians appointed by President Bush.

The guidelines, described in an April 19 memo to the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, adds that all field-level officers and enlisted personnel must be "deemed appropriate" by the Department of Defense before they can participate in personal briefings for members of Congress or their staffs; in addition, according to the memo, the proceedings must not be recorded.

Wilkie's memo also stipulated that any officers who are allowed to testify must be accompanied by an official from the administration, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his top-level aides.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress see the move as a blatant attempt to bog down investigations of the war. But veterans of the legislative process -- who say they have never heard of such guidelines before -- maintain that the Pentagon has no authority to set such ground rules.

The full article appears in the Boston Globe

A Blast From The Past

Courtesy Jonathan Schwarz, quoting Robert Parry:

How quickly the investigative space was closing down hit home to me on March 10, 1987. I had been asked to attend a dinner at the home of bureau chief Evan Thomas in an exclusive neighborhood in northwest Washington. The guests that night were retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was one of three members of the Tower Commission [set up by Reagan to investigate Iran-contra], and Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., who was the ranking House Republican on the congressional Iran-contra committee.

At the table also were some of Newsweek's top executives and a few of us lowly correspondents. As the catered dinner progressed and a tuxedoed waiter kept the wine glasses full, the guests were politely questioned. Scowcroft, a studious-looking man, fidgeted as if he wanted to get something off his chest. "Maybe I shouldn't say this but," he began with a slight hesitation. He then continued, "If I were advising Admiral Poindexter and he had told the president about the diversion, I would advise him to say that he hadn't."

I quietly put down my fork. Not fully cognizant of the etiquette of these affairs, I asked with undisguised amazement in my voice: "General, you're not suggesting that the admiral should commit perjury, are you?" My question was greeted with an embarrassed silence around the table.

Scowcroft hesitated as if contemplating his answer. But Newsweek editor Maynard Parker came to his rescue, tut-tutting my impertinence. "Sometimes," Maynard boomed, "you have to do what's good for the country." From around the table, a chorus of guffaws ended the uncomfortable moment. Scowcroft never answered my question.

Jonathan's Tiny Revolution

Rich on Condi

Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. "But that statement wasn't true," Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.

Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We're all supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam's nukes. Besides, there's a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.

On ABC, she pushed the administration's line portraying Iraq's current violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006. But that Qaeda isn't the Qaeda of 9/11; it's a largely Iraqi group fighting on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had already been gathering steam for 15 months - in part because Ms. Rice and company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had ignored the alarms about bin Laden's Qaeda in August 2001.

Ms. Rice's latest canard wasn't an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up for the president's outrageous statement three days later. "The decision we face in Iraq," Mr. Bush said Wednesday, "is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it's whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11." Such statements about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive - and no less damaging to our national interest - than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11 connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn't get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice.

That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House's Oversight Committee, whose chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about the uranium hoax since 2003.

Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin's questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn't recall or didn't know.

Frank Rich's full piece

A Letter to The President

Dear Mr. President,

Today, in your veto message regarding the bipartisan legislation just passed on Operation Iraqi Freedom, you asserted that you so decided because you listen to your commanders on the ground.

Respectfully, as your former commander on the ground, your administration did not listen to our best advice. In fact, a number of my fellow Generals were forced out of their jobs, because they did not tell you what you wanted to hear -- most notably General Eric Shinseki, whose foresight regarding troop levels was advice you rejected, at our troops' peril.

Major General Paul D. Eaton's full letter

The DOJ Scandal widens

And it's much worse than most imagined.

Murray Waas has a really important story in the National Journal. It's worth reading in its entirety, since Waas reports that Alberto Gonzales first took complete control of all hiring and firing authority of DoJ political appointees who don't need Senate confirmation -- which is to say, large swaths of the upper levels of the DoJ -- and then delegated that authority to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling. Recall that both Sampson and Goodling are in their thirties, neither has much legal experience at all, and Goodling was the White House liaison.

What I think this means is that the political operation at the White House was taking over the upper levels of the Department of Justice in a way that goes far, far beyond the sorts of politicization that are usually regarded as scandalous. It's scandalous if the DoJ decides to prosecute someone Just because that person is a political enemy, or not to prosecute someone because he or she is a political ally. It's way, way past scandalous if the White House political operation tries to make the DoJ into its enforcement arm.

Hilzoy's full post

All you need to know...

about the Democrats' digraceful performance when it counted the most:

Mad Theorists

In Iraq, the eruption of popular energies came after the collapse of the regime that had kept such a tight cap on them. The explosion took two trajectories: one directed inwards, as previously repressed conflicts between diverse social forces erupted; the other directed outwards, in the form of resistance against the occupation. Both trajectories influence and feed off each other, of course. Resistance under conditions of an intense and bloody domestic power struggle quickly descends to a conflict over the reading of the past and, hence, the definition of the future. This conflict, in turn, contributes to the deconstruction of existing identities and the reconstruction of new identities shaped by the current political struggle and by attendant images of the self as victim and the other as interloper or proxy of the interloper, all reinforced by the spiralling cycle of violence, vengeance and retribution. These volatile forces may inflict great moral and material damage on the occupation, as they are doing in Iraq, but they do not offer a viable national alternative to a united Iraq.

In like manner, today's sectarian conflict in Iraq has assumed the guise of a conflict between those with and those opposed to the occupation. Tomorrow, it may assume the shape of a race to oust the occupation and claim the laurels for liberating Iraq -- or for achieving the partition of Iraq, which appears to be the way the current dynamics are heading.

Perhaps the foregoing underscores why it is important to home in on the role and condition of the government and the army when studying the fall of Baghdad. After all, current social circumstances and the resistance have put paid to all studies and theories that preceded the war and that foresaw a victorious entrance of American troops, the clouds of dictatorship dispelled by the purifying forces of aerial and naval bombardment, and the rise of democracy from the devastation, like a phoenix from the ashes.

Democracy is not borne from chaos or from the destruction of a nation, that's for sure. Democracy in Germany and Japan did not emerge from the destruction of those countries, contrary to the ridiculous myth. Democracy is an expression of the sovereignty of a nation and a form of exercising this sovereignty -- the most ideal form of exercising sovereignty, according to advocates of democracy, because it reflects the will of the people. Democracy cannot come into effect by manacling the sovereignty of a nation and dismantling a country as is currently taking place in Iraq and as some mad theorists had envisioned.

Azmi Bishara's full piece in Egypt's Al-Ahram

The Mainstream Media: Still enabling and dishonest

You've no doubt heard, if only in passing, about President Bush's threat to veto the bill which fulfills the request for further funding of the war, but which also includes a timetable for the beginning of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. And if you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention, you will have noticed that Bush and Cheney have loudly and regularly used the disgustingly dishonest arguments that such a bill is "defeatist", and that authorizing it would "harm the troops".

Of course it comes as no surprise that those two and their lackeys would lie to the American public about a profoundly important matter; they've been doing it regularly for the last six and a half years. But what is truly disturbing is that the mainstream media, in spite of the '06 election results, in spite of the tenor of public opinion, and in spite of the truth, continues to broadcast the Administration's lies in a breathtakingly uncritical manner.

Luckily for those of us who use non-mainstream media sources, it is possible to cut through the obfuscating fog. Marty Lederman, of the always excellent Balkinization blog, looks at the actual language of the appropriations bill:

The House and Senate conferees have agreed on a supplemental appropriations bill, H.R. 1591, the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007. The House voted for it yesterday (largely along partisan lines), and the Senate is expected to do likewise today.

The President has already announced that he will veto it.

Why?

Because in addition to providing much more support and funding to the troops than the President himself proposed, the bill would also establish a presumption that redeployment of troops from Iraq is to begin by this July, if the Iraqis are not meeting the President's benchmarks, and if the President is unable to make the case to delay the beginning of redeployment to a later date.

Let's recap: In budget request after budget request over the past few years, the President has failed to ask Congress for resources sufficient to fund the Iraq War. (This has presumably been intentional; it allows the President to avoid publicly acknowledging the true cost of the war.) Therefore, it has been necessary for Congress repeatedly to enact supplemental appropriations bills to fund the war -- seven in total.

Congress is on the verge of passing the latest supplemental appropriations bill, which would provide $124.2 billion, primarily for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for improving the health care for returning soldiers and veterans, for continued Hurricane Katrina recovery for the Gulf Coast, to fill major gaps in homeland security, and to provide emergency drought relief for farmers.

The bill would give the armed forces, and returning veterans, more than what the President requested. Among other things, the bill would include a billion-dollar increase for the National Guard and Reserve equipment and $1.1 billion for military housing; $3 billion ($1.2 billion more than the President’s request) for the purchase of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (which can withstand roadside bombs); more than $5 billion to ensure that returning troops and veterans receive the health care that they have earned with their service; and $6.9 billion for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

What's not to like?

Well, the bill would also require the Executive branch to begin (though not to complete) a redeployment of troops from Iraq -- and the President has concluded that such a directive warrants his veto, notwithstanding the bill's generous funding of the troops, veterans and flood victims.

[snip]

...President Bush would be required to certify whether the Iraqi government is meeting the diplomatic and security benchmarks that he himself has prominently insisted upon. If he certifies that all the benchmarks are being met, the Secretary must begin to redeploy the troops from Iraq no later than October 1st of this year; and if -- as is more likely the case -- the President does not certify that each of the benchmarks is being been met, then the Secretary must begin to redeploy the troops no later than July 1st.

But in either case, there is no directive about how the troops shall be redployed, the rate at which they shall be redeployed, or by when the troops must be completely redeployed. The statute would only require that the Secretary of Defense have the "goal" of completing redeployment within 180 days after it begins, which is most likely by December 28th. And the bill specifically provides that there is no funding limit at all for the contemplated "safe and orderly" redeployment: "[F]unds appropriated or otherwise made available in this or any other Act are immediately available for obligation and expenditure to plan and execute a safe and orderly redeployment of the Armed Forces from Iraq, as specified in subsections (b) and (c)."

Read lederman's detailed post here

The WoLfowitz Scandal

If this particular scandal is of interest to you, then you should read the (currently) definitive story by Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardian (UK). Here's the intro:

Paul Wolfowitz's tenure as president of the World Bank has turned into yet another case study of neoconservative government in action.

It bears resemblance to the military planning for the invasion of Iraq, during which Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense, arrogantly humiliated Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki for suggesting that the US force level was inadequate.

It has similarities to the twisting of intelligence used to justify the war, in which Wolfowitz oversaw the construction of a parallel operation within the Pentagon - the Office of Special Plans - to shunt disinformation directly to the White House without its being vetted by CIA analysts, about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaida and his weapons of mass destruction, and sought to fire Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, for factually reporting before the invasion that Saddam had not revived his nuclear weapons program.

Wolfowitz's regime also uncannily looks like the occupation of Iraq run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, from which Wolfowitz blackballed state department professionals - instead staffing it with inexperienced ideologues - and to whom Wolfowitz sent daily orders.

Wolfowitz's World Bank scandal over his girlfriend reveals many of the same qualities that created the wreckage he left in his wake in Iraq: grandiosity, cronyism, self-dealing and lying - followed by an energetic campaign to deflect accountability. As with the war, he has retreated behind his fervent profession of good intentions to excuse himself. The ginning up of the conservative propaganda mill that once disseminated Wolfowitz's disinformation on WMD to defend him as the innocent victim of a political smear only underlines his tried-and-true methods of operation. The hollowness of his defense echoes in the thunderous absurdity of Monday's Wall Street Journal editorial: "Paul Wolfowitz, meet the Duke lacrosse team."

Blumenthal's full piece

The Gonzales Hearings and the other Whitehouse

I watched the full hearing yesterday, and have already provided a link to Glenn Greenwald's excellent summary (three posts below). But I want to focus on something which has been conspicuously absent in the analyses which I've thus far read. That is that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, asked questions which were by far the most thoughtful, fundamentally important of the entire hearing. Here was his opening:

Here's what concerns me, Attorney General Gonzales. The administration of justice in our country is controlled within structures. Some of them are constitutional structures. Some of them are statutory structures.

But some of them are structures that have developed over time, that amount to tradition and practice, but they're there for good and important reasons.

And my concern, after reading your testimony and hearing your testimony today, is that you don't seem to be aware of the damage to those structures that this episode has caused.

And I'd like to run a few by you, just to let you know where I'm coming from.

The two areas where you ask us to agree with you, in your testimony: The first is that U.S. attorneys can be fired at will by the president. That's undeniably true, but I think its use as a rhetorical point in this discussion is highly misleading, deeply misleading.

Because I think you and I both know that, for years, for decades, there has been a tradition of independence on the part of United States attorneys.

Once they're appointed, unless there is misconduct, they're left to do their jobs. And that rule, that practice, has existed for good and meaningful reason. And it can't be overlooked by just blithely saying, well, the president has the power to remove these people.

That misses the point. These people make tough decisions. They're out there on their own very different. Very often, the Department of Justice and the political environment that surrounds it is one that you want to protect them from.

And the idea that, willy-nilly, senior staff people can come out and have the heads of U.S. attorneys -- I think it's highly damaging to that peace of structure.

This was not customary practice. We can agree on that, can we not?

Now, that may not seem earth-shattering at first glance, but when you take into account just how ingrained the canard about the U.S. Attorneys serving at the pleasure of The President has become in the mainstream media, along with the dishonest claim that firing these attorneys was business as usual ("Clinton dismissed all 93!"), then you can appreciate how masterfully Whitehouse exposed those two talking points for what they are. And he did it in such a way that Gonzales could only stammer in response:

Senator, I think that that's -- I do agree on that. And I do agree with you that structures and traditions are important. I agree with that as well.

Whitehouse went on to brilliantly make some other fundamental (and very important) points during the questioning, so I encourage you to read the transcript at The Washington Post

SeriAl Liar; Loyal Servant

Although Gonzales began with a combative tone, he quickly abandoned it, because it is not his natural approach. He has neither the instincts nor the abilities to engage in a full day of verbal combat with anyone. He is far more comfortable with highly practiced, slippery, evasive buzzphrases which he simply repeats -- with a psuedo-respectful and borderline-smug tone -- over and over and over. And he quickly reverted to form.

It was apparent by the end that most of the Committee members, even including traditionally stalwart Bush-supporting Republicans (other than the blindly loyal Hatch and Cornyn), did not believe what Gonzales was saying and were not going to defend him vigorously (in fact, Coburn expressly called for him to resign and Graham all but accused Gonzales of being untruthful, labelling his key explanations a "stretch"). And the Judiciary Committee Democrats were far more emboldened and aggressive than they ever were before at one of these Gonzales hearings. So those are all encouraging signs, I suppose.

But it is hard not to have some mixed feelings over all of that, because what Alberto Gonzales did today -- and what he has done in this scandal since its inception -- is what he has been doing for the last six years, and particularly, during the last two years during his tenure as Attorney General. He has repeatedly lied to Congress, evaded their questions, concealed wrongdoing, expressed contempt for oversight and checks, particularly when it comes to the actions of the Leader, whom -- even as Attorney General -- he still plainly sees as his client and whose interests are his paramount, really his only, priority.

That is what Alberto Gonzales is -- he is a supremely loyal servant of George Bush and he was installed as the nation's chief law enforcement officer precisely because of that attribute. There really is very little he would not do, if there is anything, in service to the White House. And that has been evident for quite some time.

Nor is there anything unique about Gonzales himself. His conduct is the conduct of this administration, and his mindset is its mindset. The U.S. Attorneys scandal is merely illustrative, not unique in any way -- except that Bush's weakened state and subpoena power in the hands of Democrats have combined to produce slightly more oversight and scrutiny than before.

Glenn Greenwald's full take at Salon.com

"With 100,000 plus employees, it's easy to see how something could slip by."

Orrin Hatch (R-UT), embarrassing himself deeply while engaged in a pathetic and futile attempt to rehabilitate the nation's highest law enforcement officer, Alberto "Would you like a different story? Ask me again tomorrow." Gonzales

John Robb on The Surge

A beguiling false narrative currently circulating throughout the media, is that the US surge in Baghdad may work given time (or at worst keep violence in check at current levels). In reality, things in Iraq are about to get much worse over the next year and approach what could be called a second front. The main reason for this is that the Petraeus/Nagl/Kilucullen approach to counter-insurgency is antiquated/misguided and will, soon, radically increase the level of resistance rather than lessen it.

Robb's full piece at his globalguerrillas.com site

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