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Archive: POLITICS

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Glenn Greenwald puts the Iraqi election into perspective

Greenwald, one of the most thoughtful political observers to have appeared in the blogosphere in recent months, has a powerful response to those using the election as a weapon with which to attack those who opposed the war.

Left unsaid amidst all of this sloganeering and melodramatic genuflecting to purple ink is what, exactly, these elections are supposed to have proven in the greater debate over the Iraqi War. Aside from the emotional manipulation which these elections afford – nobody raised in the U.S. and instilled with an appreciation for democracy can help but feel some pleasure for Iraqis as they vote to choose their leaders – exactly what arguments advanced by war critics are supposed to be undermined by these elections, and what pro-war justifications are bolstered? The answer is none.

Read the full post at Greenwald's site

Bill Moyers on the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy

The excerpt below is taken from an address delivered by Moyers on December 9, 2005, for the 20th anniversary of the National Security Archive. Moyers–as courageous a journalist as we have in this country–was scathing in his criticisms of the Administration. And given how important the issue is to all of us, you owe it to yourself to read it in its entirety.

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes, "The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it." And he backs this up with evidence. For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more, 64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming

It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the corruption.

Read the address here

John Bolton: Even worse than expected

Of the numerous stupid, arrogant moves made by this Administration, using the end-around recess appointment to make Bolton the U.N. Ambassador stands out. If you want background, go to Steve Clemons' site, The Washington Note, where for weeks he warned loudly, articulately, and often that Bolton was the wrong man for the job.

It's no surprise that the concerns expressed by Steve and others, including many in Congress (hence Bush's end-run), have already proven to have been warranted. In fact, it really couldn't be any worse. Mark Leon Goldberg updates us with a terrific, though infuriating article just published on The American Prospect website. Here's an excerpt:

When Bolton was nominated in March 2005, the Bush administration seemed invincible at home and abroad. Having won an election based on his handling of a war to which the UN had refused to grant its imprimatur, Bush started his second term with a self-proclaimed mandate to impose his aggressive doctrine to the far reaches of the globe. Flying high, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sent Bolton, a combative State Department official and longtime Cheney confidant, to do to the UN what their two previous ambassadors to Turtle Bay could not: make the world body a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush foreign policy.

That was the plan. But over the past 10 months, Bush’s poll numbers have plummeted while Iraq has taxed every ounce of American diplomatic and military resources. Bolton, meanwhile, never seems to have gotten the memo that times have changed; he remains a fire-breathing caricature of Bush’s first-term, “shoot first, do diplomacy later” outlook. And that approach is no longer sustainable. At least one comparatively saner Bush administration official knows this. And so the tension between Rice and Bolton has grown dramatically in several areas, most notably with regard to Syria: The Prospect has learned that Bolton was the source of an October leak to the British press that submarined sensitive negotiations Rice was overseeing with that country.

Read the full article at prospect.org

A very cool, Google map-based interactive NYC transit map

It's stunningly fast, though accuracy remains an open question. Try it here

Thanks to Jason Kottke

David Brooks, via Arianna

Arianna Huffington has created a vibrant and very worthwhile website, if you hadn't noticed. There are a number of interesting and intelligent contributors on a regular basis, and she, herself, produces plenty of sharp, often humerous observations.

While slamming the ineffectual (at best) Tim Russert and his Meet The Press program, she focuses her lens on David Brooks, who was analyzing President Bush:

BROOKS: Yeah. He's ruled out, you know, being a Lincoln. You know, he's ruled out being a mediocre president. You know, he's either going to be a great president if Iraq works, or he'll be a terrible president if it fails.

AH: Thanks, David. I'm pretty sure even his friends consuming large quantities of spiked eggnog at the Christmas parties had ruled out Lincoln. But it's nice to see David has such a low threshold for greatness and such a high threshold for failure in Iraq.

Visist her site at huffingtonpost.com

Unrest in Paris

Elaine Sciolino has wriiten an insightful article for the NY Times about the underlying causes of the recent riots on the outskirts of Paris. Not Surprisingly, economics plays the major role.

Djamila has built her life around her sons. An Algerian-born nurse's aide who left the two husbands who abused her, she has soldiered on in the housing projects of this tough town near Paris, long confident that her four children would reap the benefits of being born French.

Yet each son found it harder to make his way in this world. And now, at 58, Djamila is caught between a determination that her youngest son will succeed and a sense of foreboding that he will not. "I was happier than my children are," she said over tea and biscuits in her well-scrubbed, lace-curtained, two-bedroom apartment in one of France's roughest housing projects. "This is a place where gangrene has set in."

Her son, who goes by the nickname Looping, is 22 and jobless. He uses a simpler metaphor to describe his life. "The sun never shines," he said. "The buildings are gray. The people are gray. Everything is gray. It's the same people and there is nothing to do, nothing to do. You wake up every morning looking for work. But why? There isn't any."

Read the full article here

21st Century Politics

I've spent a good deal of time and space on this site documenting the outrageous actions of the Bush Administration. I think that it is very important to note, however, that such Orwellian behavior does not portend a protracted dark period in American politics. Why? Several reasons, chief among them being the ability of enlightened politicians to use cutting edge technology in order to interact directly with their constituencies.

Russ Feingold, one of the few politicians with a discernable backbone to have served in Washington during the past few years, is doing just that over at Josh Marshall's TPM cafe´. The post, and reaction to it, are well worth reading, especially because it helps to shed light on Patriot Act issues which are extremely important to all of us.

The TPM Cafe´

Eugene McCarthy and Howard Dean

Glenn Greenwald, a particularly thoughtful blogger, just wrote an excellent post using a comparison of Howard Dean and the recently deceased Eugene McCarthy to help illustrate how Dean has been badly smeared by the right-wing machine.

One of the most profoundly dishonest media distortions over the last decade was the almost instantaneous transformation of Howard Dean from what he really is and has long been – a non-ideological, sensible, solidly mainstream, and highly rational medical doctor, Vermont Governor and American citizen whose politics are decidedly moderate and even, with regard to many issues (such as states’ rights, government spending, gun control, and many others), quite conservative – into a freakish cartoon whose insanity and emotional instability are matched only by his rabid affection for socialism and Islamic terrorism. That patently false illusion persists today and will likely never be expunged from many minds.

But whatever else one thinks of Dean, it is impossible to praise McCarthy’s candidacy without praising Dean’s candidacy as well.

Read the full post here

Harsh? Undoubtedly. Inappropriate? Absolutely not.

See all of the "Get Your War On" strips here

Syriana

There is, of course, an ironic aspect to the observation which I made (directly) below, and that is that even though someone like Harold Pinter may have greater intellectual depth than, say, the actor George Clooney, the latter is in a position to do far more in a practical sense. So, for example, Clooney's most recent project, the film Syriana, is, irrespective of its quality, already causing worldwide buzz about the urgency of the need of the U.S. to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. Yet Pinter's speech, as moving as it may have been to those receptive to its message, is unlikely to have much practical impact at all.

"Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay."

I am not much of a theater goer, as I tend to prefer film, and have no doubt that I miss out on a good deal of thought provoking writing as a result. While I am not making a simplistic value judgment on the relative quality of the minds of those who devote their lives to the theater, as opposed to those who choose film, it is interesting to note the sharp contrast in both the depth and standard of political commentary which eminates from the former and the latter. A good illustrative example is the recent speech given by playwright Harold Pinter in Sweden.

Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, Pinter seized the opportunity to give a scathing speech in which he denounced both American and British politicians for (among other things) their roles in the Iraq war. While arguably a bit over the top, the speech is well worth reading in its entirety. Here's an excerpt:

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

The full transcript of Pinter's speech can be found here.

Bless the New Yorker...

for the cartoons, especially.

Tom Delay's effort to get the charges against him dismissed.

Whether you've followed the story closely or not, most of you are at least peripheraly aware of Tom Delay's legal troubles. You may recall that his first defense was to attempt to have the charges dismissed. The judge rules recently, and did, in fact, dismiss one of charges (on absurd grounds, but that's another story), while refusing to do so with respect to the money laundering charges. I came across the following interesting summary of the grounds on which Delay sought to have the latter charges dismissed. It really is remarkable.

Regarding the status of Delay and his recent attempt to get charges against him dismissed, here is a post by cleanshaven I came across on a Texas based website :

"A friend of mine who read the judge's ruling said that one of DeLay's primary reasons, in fact it was the main argument, as to why the money laundering charges should be dismissed indicated to him that DeLay's in a pickle.

The argument wasn't that there was no probable cause, or the evidence was insufficient, or nothing procedural that most MTD are pled on. Rather, DeLay's argument was that the Texas money laundering law does not apply to funds that were laundered in the form of a check; rather, the statue only applies to coins or paper money...."cash"....that was laundered. And since the indictment states that the funds in question came in the form of a check, the statute doesn't apply, and therefore the money laundering indictment must be dismissed.

Let me repeat: DeLay's argument is that case should be dismissed because that statute doesn't specifically include the word "check" but only says "money", and "money" means tender in the form of bills and coins, not checks.

In other words, it is perfectly llegal for DeLay...and everyone else for that matter.... to launder funds that come in the form of check, and are issued back in a check, because "checks" are not technically "money." Rather, "money" means "cash."

The out of control, activist judge refused to dismiss the money laundering counts, and commented in his ruling that checks "are clearly funds and can be the subject of money laundering."

Now, if that doesn't tell you whether the laundering charge has merit and indicate what DeLay is up against, nothing will.... "

The Abramoff scandal: some useful background.

The huge, unfolding lobbying scandal, which is likely to rock Washington to the core, is worth considering from many angles. Barry Yeoman of Mother Jones does an excellent job telling the story of the scandal's common denominator.

ON THE FIRST MORNING of the Republican National Convention, the stocky former weightlifter waited nervously for his turn to speak. Just 25 years old, he was impeccably dressed in a dark gray suit and red tie. But he had slipped some contraband past security: a handful of note cards, hastily compiled the night before and now stashed in his sleeve. He mounted the podium, looked over the crowd, and noticed how few delegates were paying attention. "Fellow Republicans," he began predictably, "I come before you representing American students." Then, suddenly, he veered wildly from the approved text. He looked up and noted the teleprompter operator's panicked expression, with glee.

Read the full article at motherjones.com

Wolcott simultaneously eviscerates the Wall Street Journal and Rich Lowry (of The National Review) .

It's truly remarkable how biased and, in this case, either sloppy and/or dishonest the Wall Street Journal has been. And Lowry, the silver-tongued conservative commentator (who actually does sound reasonable at times), comes away looking quite bad as well. The dust-up revolves around the devastating Atlantic Monthly article written by James Fallows to which, in large part, Bush's most recent speech was a response.

Lowry reports:

"The Wall Street Journal reports in its Iraq editorial today that the public affairs shop at the Multinational Security Transition Office Command in Iraq--they do the training--says Fallows never visited nor did he ever contact them during the course of the reporting for his piece."

Cullen Murphy, Managing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, responds:

"That is untrue. Mr. Fallows had extensive email correspondence, starting last August, with the Public Affairs Officer for that organization, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Wellman, who arranged an interview with its commander, Lieutenant General Dave Petraeus, in September. Mr. Fallows spoke with General Petraeus by phone for more than an hour, and checked quotes from that interview via Lt. Col. Wellman before using them in his article.

"He also interviewed one of Petraeus's deputies, Colonel John Martin, and had not-for-attribution discussions, via phone and email, with other members of the organization. As Mr. Fallows pointed out in his article, and as he has records to demonstrate, the Pentagon's press office turned down his requests to interview Major General Paul Eaton and others who had been involved in the training effort."

Read the full post at Wolcott's site

"A Short Play Starring Christopher Hitchens"

Written by Jonathan Schwartz, and found on his site tinyrevolution.com, I can pretty much guarantee that any of you who know of Hitchens and have followed his sad path in recent years will enjoy this play immensely! Jonathan was apparently sparked to write the play after coming across this recent quote:

"Stop the taunting, and let's have a real debate about the Iraq war"

—Christopher Hitchens, Nov. 22, 2005

Read the play here

Cheney guilty of war crimes?

A question posed, not by some raving left-winger, but one of the best newspapers in the world. Needless to say, it's not an American paper.

Vice-president Dick Cheney's burden on the Bush administration grew heavier yesterday after a former senior US state department official said he could be guilty of a war crime over the abuse of prisoners. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC's Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument "that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions".

Read the full article in The Guardian

Progress in the Middle East.

There have been big changes in Israeli politics recently, including Sharon quitting the Likud party, and Amir Peretz becoming the new chairman of the Labor Party. To my mind, even more promising, if not important, are the changes reflected in stories like this one, by Akiva Eldar in The Haaretz Daily.

Ahlama Peretz, wife of the new chairman of the Labor Party, attended the workshop together with Al-Hajaji. They met 30 times during the last academic year, seven residents of Sderot with a similar number of Bedouin from the area. They are still in contact. She remembers Al-Hajaji sharing his experience near the courthouse with the other participants. "The settler was also exposed there to the 'other,'" Peretz says. "Who knows, maybe he found that the Arabs are people like him, and that they are even willing to listen to his troubles."

She herself did not need a workshop to make that discovery. Peretz relates that she became acquainted with Israel's Arab minority many years before she met her husband. The feeling of being equal human beings was shaped nearly from the day she was born.

"My parents' home was near Wolfson Hospital in Holon," recalls Peretz, "between the orchards, olive groves and houses of Arabs who did not abandon them in the War of Independence. I drank the milk that my mother got from the goat of our neighbor Abu-Ali. His son would from time to time light our kerosene stove when it went out on Shabbat."

In the early '80s, when Amir Peretz was head of a local council in a politically right-wing outlying town, they would frequently invite over students from Taibeh, who were guests of the local high school. Ahlama Peretz relates that many people in Sderot were not happy about the new alliance between the Jewish children from the Negev and the Arab children from the Triangle. She was also at her husband's side in Shemesh − a movement whose name ?(meaning "sun"?) is the Hebrew acronym for "neighbors talking peace." "We made a connection with education and media people from the Gaza Strip and devised joint projects between various groups of adults and children. We hosted them here, and they hosted us there."

This positive, optimistic attitude toward Arabs is natural among the Peretz family. Ahlama relates that her sister-in-law, Dalia Peretz, is the principal of the bilingual school in the Katamonim low-income neighborhood in Jerusalem, at which Jewish, Muslim and Christian children celebrate the holidays of all three faiths. Inspired by her experiences in the workshop, Ahlama Peretz herself recently initiated similar encounters at the academic pre-college preparatory center at Sapir College of the Negev, where she serves as deputy director. The facilitators are mixed couples − Jews and Arabs − who completed the AJIK-Kolot Banegev workshop.

Peretz did not originally enroll in the workshop as part of a search for her identity. "I have always lived in peace with my identity," she explains. "If Amir's success in reaching the top boosts the pride of members of the Sephardi community, I consider that added value." The desire to get to know "otherness" and respect it is what attracted her to the meetings with the Bedouin. Most of all, she was moved by the situation of the Bedouin women in the group, who, "in spite of being educated, successful and assertive women, vacillate between a tradition that is sometimes at odds with their worldview and their own lifestyle, and are in great need of empowerment."

"Polarization in our society spurred me to find out whether it is possible to find what differentiates and sets apart various population groups, and what the common denominators are that unite them. I wanted to see if I could contribute anything to an attempt to mediate between them."
The most interesting revelation that came out of the series of encounters, she says, is that "Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, women and men, all live in a vicious circle of fear of one another. The fear of the 'other' is identical for all of them. All of a sudden, the participants discovered that the person who for years was portrayed as an enemy is actually afraid of them no less than they are afraid of him. This shared revelation and the attempt to build a bridge together helped everyone to defuse their fears."

Read the whole thing here

"redolent of guilt" indeed.

At least some (British) politicians have the guts to risk honesty. An MP by the name of Boris Johnson has said that he is willing to risk jail in order to expose the "secret" document which minimally contains the explosive material pertaining to Bush having suggested the bombing of the Al-Jazeera headquarters.

The Attorney General's ban is ridiculous, untenable, and redolent of guilt. I do not like people to break the Official Secrets Act, and, as it happens, I would not object to the continued prosecution of those who are alleged to have broken it. But we now have allegations of such severity, against the US President and his motives, that we need to clear them up.

If someone passes me the document within the next few days I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. The public need to judge for themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies.

Read the full text at Johnson's site

How did Dick Cheney, the primary culprit in this disastrous Administration, gain and control power? Sidney Blumenthal explains.

The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" -- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.

Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.

Read the full post at salon.com

Perspective on safety in Iraq.

Unless you happen to listen exclusively to Bush, Cheney and Fox News, you already know that things aren't going well in Iraq. But even if you are reasonably well-informed, Robin Wright brings the alarming trajectory into sharp focus in this terse Washington Post article.

My latest trip to Iraq, on Nov. 11, 31 months after the fall of the capital, was kept secret even from some of the people on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's plane. The dozen members of the traveling press were summoned to the State Department the day before we left on a trip to the Middle East and sworn to secrecy after a briefing about the additional stop.

We could tell an editor and a family member, but we were asked not to mention it to anyone else, particularly our bureaus in the Iraqi capital -- and not on the phone or by e-mail to anyone, at all, anywhere. If word got out, the trip would be canceled. A leak had forced the postponement of a similar trip in the spring.

The road between the airport and the Green Zone was officially considered safer, but we still flew in armed Black Hawks moving in diversionary patterns through the sky.

On this latest trip to Baghdad, the bubble shrank even more. No roaming the Green Zone. Not even a stop at the convention center. The press corps, including veteran war correspondents, was sequestered in Hussein's old palace for most of the seven-hour stay. We were discouraged from wandering the palace and were provided escorts to go to the bathroom.

Our one venture out was a short hop to the nearby prime minister's office, also in the Green Zone. All we saw were new barricades trimmed with razor wire, concrete blast walls, roadblocks and time-consuming identity checks. No Iraqis. No vendors.

Why the Jose Padilla case is so incredibly important.

Lawyer and First Amendment specialist Glenn Greenwald expounds powerfully...

Of the many abuses of power by the Bush Administration, the most disturbing, dangerous, and under-publicized one is the fact that the Administration has arrogated unto itself the power to single out U.S. citizens and unilaterally imprison them indefinitely and without a trial of any kind. The Administration has brought to life and is now defending what is literally the worst totalitarian nightmare: being locked away by your own Government indefinitely -- without being charged with a crime, without a trial, and without any recourse to challenge your imprisonment.

And, the decision yesterday by the Administration to finally bring charges against U.S. citizen Jose Padilla -- who has been kept incarcerated in a military prison for three years solely on George Bush’s order, in solitary confinement and indefinitely -- was done not in order to signal a retreat by the Administration with regard to its claimed right to imprison U.S. citizens without any judicial processes, but instead, to protect and solidify that power by ensuring that its patent unconstitutionality cannot be ruled upon by the U.S. Supreme Court in the pending Padilla case. Almost certainly, the Administration wants to have its claimed power to unilaterally and indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens endorsed by the Supreme Court only once the highly deferential Sam Alito has replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, and the Court is safely comprised of a majority of justices with an almost absolutist reverence for unchecked Executive power.

By all means read the full article here

Steve Clemons on Al-Jazeera.

In the wake of the recent flap about Bush having suggested that the U.S. bomb the headquarters of the major Arab news organization Al-Jazeera, Steve Clemons provides some interesting insight.

Just about every government in the Middle East has been ticked off at the reporting by Al-Jazeera. This fact, more than anything else, indicates that Al-Jazeera is doing a lot right.

I have made no secret of my respect for Al-Jazeera and its ability to dominate the Middle East media market with its reporting. I have appeared on several Al-Jazeera shows and was recently interviewed in a major production underway on the subject of "rendition."

The forthcoming Al-Jazeera production on rendition is a dicey one for its chief producer, Yosri Fouda -- a brilliant Egyptian senior Al-Jazeera investigative reporter based in London -- because there are usually three types of nations involved in the "rendering" of detainees: American CIA planes that allow transiting from or through other countries, to a final destination -- that is frequently in the Middle East -- including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Egypt.

Though I don't know how that show will turn out, the productions will reveal practices America engages in with the complicity of other national governments, particularly Middle Eastern governments. I think that this is high quality reporting and runs counter to those who think that Al-Jazeera is a flack for any particular Arab interests.

Read the full article at Steve's site

Surprised by the recently revealed, questionable actions of Bob Woodward?

You shouldn't be. His poorly handled–to put it mildly–role in the Plame affair has finally shined an unflattering light on the widely revered "investigative" reporter whose name is inextricably linked to Watergate. But those who were paying attention saw through the facade long ago. Read this review of one of Woodward's recent books, written by Robert Kuttner at Prospect.org back in June of 2004.

Further insights into Woodward can be found in the New York Review of Books, where Joan Didion wrote about him in 1996. This powerful article is discussed and quoted extensively here, at the TPM cafe.

Of all the damning evidence, this really does stand out.

Most of you know that I've followed, and to some extent chronicled the pattern of distortion and deceipt by this administration as it relates to the Iraq war. The specific aspect of this pattern which is finally being discussed and analyzed in the mainstream media and therefore by the greater public, is the deception practised by the White House in the run-up to the war. There is, I am sad to say, a very large body of evidence which confirms the deception. But of all of the damning evidence, this scathing editorial written by former Senate Intelligence committee chairman Bob Graham in The Washington Post, takes the cake.

Here's the crux:

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

If, by chance, you aren't yet fully outraged, bear in mind that this damning revelation comes within days of the President having lied through his teeth during (what else?) a Veterans Day speech. In a desperately defensive mode, Bush said that "a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate . . . had access to the same intelligence" as he did and voted "to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

White Phosphorous Bombs(hell).

While the story has yet to fully play out, my reading of the available information is that the U.S. Army (through spokesmen) has been lying, and continues to lie about both the use of, and practical definition of White Phosphorous in Iraq.

By any reasonable standard, White Phosphorous is a chemical weapon. The Army's attempt to parse (in the wake of previous outright denials now proven to be lies) is almost impossible to accept at face value. For a detailed description of the chemical White Phosphorous, see this Wiki entry.

The recently released Italian documentary which has forced the Army to admit the use of White Phosphorous, not only as a smoke screen agent, but an incendiary device, can be seen here (requires Windows Media Viewer).

Further context, debate and interviews can be found in both video (well worth watching) and transcript form at Democracy Now!. Other resources include this BBC report, and this from The Guardian (U.K.).

Even the Pentagon refers to White Phosphorus as a "chemical weapon"—when used by our enemies, that is.

The astonishing hypocrisy of our government exposed by the use of such weapons only begins to tell the story. Just imagine how anyone close to those innocent people who were killed and/or maimed by White Phosphorous in Fallujah now views the U.S.

Does anyone truly believes that the Iraq war has made us safer?

The Bush administration has not only set new standards for secrecy, hubris and mendacity, but (presumably) unintentional irony as well.

Josh Marshall reminds us that the National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley has become the key White House spokesman to deflect blame for "the president's dishonest road to war."

Well, it just so happens that Hadley was also the one who "pushed the CIA to sign off on the president using the Niger uranium claims in speeches dramatizing the danger Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. In December 2002 he failed. In January 2003 he succeeded."

Josh ties the sordid details together at TPM.

A non-partisan investigative arm of Congress finds that the FDA decision to reject the morning-after pill was "unusual in several respects." If only it was a rare anomoly...

rather than the most recent of many outrageous efforts by the Bush administration to ignore science in order to impose its political will.

Top agency officials were deeply involved in the decision, which was "very, very rare," a top F.D.A. review official told investigators. The officials' decision to ignore the recommendation of an independent advisory committee as well as the agency's own scientific review staff was unprecedented, the report found. And a top official's "novel" rationale for rejecting the application contradicted past agency practices, it concluded.

Read the full NY Times article.

Juan Cole provides a very interesting exposition on one of the victims of the recent terrorism in Jordan.

The ironies and dangers of globalization are tragically epitomized in the death last week of Hollywood director Moustapha Akkad at the Radisson SAS in Amman at the hands of an Iraqi suicide bomber. Akkad was there with his daughter to attend a wedding.

Akkad was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1935. Syria was at that time under French rule, and so he was a child of empire, with all the ambivalences of identity such experiences inspire. At the age of 19, in 1954, he came to the United States, and studied theater arts at UCLA. He later also did a Master of Arts degree at the University of Southern California. He got his start in Hollywood as a production assistant for Sam Peckinpah on a Western, "Ride the High Country," in 1962. Peckinpah's fascination with violence and ambiguity would work itself out in Akkad's own oeuvre in unexpected ways.

Read the full post at Cole's Informed Comment site.

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