Worst President Ever! [Archive] - It's Happening Forums

NYer

09-06-2005, 09:23 AM

FUBAR ...

Plenty of blame to go around ... at all levels of govt ...

AMERICAN MORNING

Grim Mission in New Orleans

Aired September 5, 2005 - 07:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Carol. I'm Miles O'Brien.
A grim mission in New Orleans. Teams going house-by-house to find the victims of Katrina who couldn't escape in time. The death toll expected to be in the thousands. How high could it go? Frightening to imagine. We're live in New Orleans this morning -- Soledad.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Soledad O'Brien on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. This morning, you're going to hear my interview with the city's mayor. He'll tell us very candidly about his response before Katrina hit. Is he responsible for some of the blame? Also, we'll hear some details of the conversation that he had with the state's governor and President Bush on Air Force One. That's ahead -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: And President Bush in the disaster zone again Friday and will be back there today. That's on this AMERICAN MORNING.

S. O'BRIEN: Good morning. And welcome, everybody. We're coming to you live from New Orleans this morning right near Bourbon Street. And you're looking at something we really haven't seen here before lately, and that is the Sheraton. And it's got power. They've got some massive generators working finally, and that means that they also have air-conditioning and lights, clearly you can see. The security there is working around the clock. They're trying to bring in a limited water supply as well in a city that has none of these things.

Also, we're told that the Sheraton has and had port-a-potties well before they had port-a-potties at the Superdome.

We also want to show you what they're working on today. You can see the water level here right by Bourbon Street. The entrance to Bourbon Street is still pretty high. And that means that in the neighborhoods that are even more low-lying, Miles, it's a massive problem.

They are going to be focusing on search and rescue again today, but really the focus is on recovering the bodies.

We went out yesterday with a search team to try to see who could be rescued. The neighborhoods are so eerily quiet that it's pretty clear that now we've entered another phase. And that phase, of course, is recovery of the bodies. And I have to say it's going to be a high count, one can tell as you just go through some of these neighborhoods -- Miles. M. O'BRIEN: Well, as the mayor said, Soledad, you just have to do the math on that one. Thank you very much. We'll be back to you shortly.

We begin with some of the mission critical issues facing Katrina survivors as we speak. President Bush making his second visit to the storm-ravaged Gulf region today. He'll make stops in staging areas in Baton Rouge and Poplarville, Mississippi.

The recovery and count of the dead has begun in New Orleans, as Soledad mentioned. The first confirmed numbers since the storm a week ago now, 59 bodies recovered, including 10 at the Superdome. But city and state officials say the count will ultimately be in the thousands.

Also in New Orleans, reports that police have shot eight people, killing at least five. Authorities say gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors crossing a bridge on their way to make repairs. Police then returned fire.

A plane carrying evacuees from Louisiana arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, overnight. It's the first group of evacuees to arrive in that state. About a quarter-million displaced people are already housed in Texas shelters, as we have been telling you. But officials say the shelters are overwhelmed there. The governor of Texas is asking other states to take some evacuees as well -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Yes, clearly that is going to be part of this massive problem. The other fork, I think it's fair to say, Miles, in this problem is the sheer number of bodies, because, frankly, here in New Orleans, they really have no idea. The official number is quite low. What people are actually predicting will be the final number, though, astoundingly high.

Let's get right to Nic Robertson. He's been on this story.

No one has any idea, because there are so many people trapped in neighborhoods that no one has been able to access.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And they don't know until they knock on the doors of the houses, are they find somebody living there? Are they going to find somebody really sort of on their last gasp of breath upstairs? Or are they going to find a body inside a house?

And what we are finding, they are going on and they are finding bodies. And at the moment they can't do anything with the bodies. They just have to leave them there in the house, mark the house for a team to come back.

Those teams to recover the bodies are coming in now. The disaster mortuary operation response teams, they are coming back, 3 by 31-member teams. They are going to consist of coroners, medical examiners, morticians. They are going to be responsible for finding those bodies, getting information of where they are, finding the bodies, putting them in refrigerated trucks, moving them to a mortuary. At that mortuary there, a sort of formal identification process can be gone through.

And this is also going to be a very big and very slow and very cumbersome process. DNA analysis, dental records, fingerprints if possible. None of this, it seems, is going to happen quickly. And as we both know from watching the operation rescue and relief going on here, it's a massive area that they have to go through. And it's clearly going to take a long time. Nobody is out there saying, hey, come to this house, there is somebody here. They just don't know.

S. O'BRIEN: They have no idea, because they people are displaced everywhere. In addition, I think water is so destructive. As we saw in the tsunami, it really -- I mean, it's grizzly. But it destroys evidence of human bodies, and that's going to really compromise their ability to identify people. I mean, they had people -- floating bodies, floating down the streets, which basically were rivers.

ROBERTSON: And the longer they are left in the water -- yesterday, the mayor was talking about his concerns about disease with the bodies being in the water. But the other concern, as you say, is, you know, the longer the bodies are in the water, in these temperatures here, decomposition. And, you know, you lose the fingerprints. So that's -- one of the quick analysis is gone.

Then you're going to have to perhaps go to dental records or DNA. These things take a lot of time. You've got a lot of cross- referencing matching to be done. So, yes, very slow.

S. O'BRIEN: There will be some influx back into the city, because some people will be allowed to come back into their homes. And that's going to be a whole other huge problem, I think.

ROBERTSON: Jefferson parish today, 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., curfew lifted for families who lived here. They have to have photographic I.D. and show they have residency in the area. They've been advised to bring cash, bring food, bring water with them. They won't find any of that here. But it is a hard curfew. They have to be out by 6:00 p.m.

S. O'BRIEN: I think that's going to be tough certainly for those families. Nic Robertson, thanks as always.

Let's get right back to Miles -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Thank you, Soledad. Thanks, Nic.

An hour from now, President Bush will leave Washington, head to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He'll also stop in Mississippi today.

National correspondent Bob Franken at the White House.

Bob, what is the president's mission today?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he was stunned by the charges that his administration had at least initially indifferent response to the tragedy that unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. So, he's making his second trip in three days. The president is going to be showing the presidential flag as he stops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the capital of the state. He's going to be meeting with some of the people involved in the massive rescue operation.

Of course, we now know that there's a blame game going on of sorts, and the administration discussed with officials of Louisiana at least a partial takeover. That was rejected by the state, a federal takeover of some of the state functions.

In any case, after all that, the president will move to Poplarville, Mississippi. He'll be taking a helicopter flight to Poplarville. There are many people in Mississippi who believe that there just hasn't been enough attention to their plight. The president will be appearing at Pearl River Community College in that area. We know of 17 who died.

So, the president is now trying to provide reassurances, to provide the symbol of leadership that many people say was lacking at the beginning. He is now trying to, in the words of many administration people, make up for lost time and end the discussions of the past and try and move forward -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Bob, let's talk about this federalization of this whole effort. Clearly, the federal government is the entity that can best afford and handle this kind of a scope of a problem. We know the president asked the governor of Louisiana, apparently has been in some talks with the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour. Is that going nowhere with both governors?

FRANKEN: Well, there is a lot of dynamic involved here. First of all, the state of Louisiana makes the argument that the local officials, the state officials best know their areas. They should be the ones who maintain the tradition of being in charge.

But there is also the question of who is to blame for what now many people believe was an inadequate response. And federal officials are now saying they were at the mercy of state officials and local officials who didn't do the job. And the state and local officials are saying that's absolutely not the case. There was an inadequate federal response. So all of that is going on.

At the moment, everything is staying the same. And at the moment, the White House officials are telling us they don't need to impose the powers they have under the Insurrection Act, under the ability of FEMA, to expand its powers if it wants to, saying that there is a belief now they can work with state officials.

M. O'BRIEN: Bob Franken at the White House, thanks.

Let's check some weather for you now.

(WEATHER REPORT)

M. O'BRIEN: Now let's go to Indonesia, where a passenger jet has crashed into a residential area. A Mandela Airlines jet crashed just after takeoff from the city of Medan. It was heading for Jakarta. Conflicting reports this morning on whether anyone survived. The jet was carrying 112 passengers, 5 crew members. Residents on the ground expected to be among those killed.

Still to come on the program, tough words from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Find out what he has to say about Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and how she handled the crisis. And later, what kind of progress is the military relief effort making? We'll talk with the man in charge, the raging Cajun, Lieutenant General Russell Honore, ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHERYL HARDIN, LOOKING FOR UNCLE: I'm Cheryl Hardin. I'm out of Houston, Texas. And I'm looking for my Uncle Henry Smith Jr. He's out of Louisiana. And he's been missing for some days now. And if you could, give us a call if you see him at 713-614-6900.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: One week after Hurricane Katrina struck, we're in New Orleans. And you can still see the damage, and you can still see the rescues that are continuing to be under way often with volunteers, often with the police department as well. It is a big problem. They're getting some people off the roofs, but in many cases when you're talking about an elderly population that cannot possibly pull themselves up on the roof or wave to a helicopter, you are certainly to see at this point now people dying. They cannot survive without water and food for this long, especially the older populations.

Mayor Ray Nagin says the big problem too, now, is disease, because the bodies that are, frankly, in these homes and in the water, along with the sewage, could breed some disease. We got a chance to speak with the mayor yesterday, and asked him very bluntly, how much blame should he shoulder for all of these problems now?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

S. O'BRIEN: There are people who say your evacuation plan, obviously in hindsight, was disastrous.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN, NEW ORLEANS: Which one?

S. O'BRIEN: Your evacuation plan before -- when you put people into the Superdome. It wasn't thought out. You got 20,000 people in there. And that you bear the brunt of the blame for some of this, a large chunk of it.

NAGIN: Look, I'll take whatever responsibility that I have to take. But let me ask you this question: When you have a city of 500,000 people, and you have a category 5 storm bearing down on you, and you have the best you've ever done is evacuate 60 percent of the people out of the city, and you have never issued a mandatory evacuation in the city's history, a city that is a couple of hundred years old, I did that. I elevated the level of distress to the citizens.

And I don't know what else I could do, other than to tell them that it's a mandatory evacuation. And if they stayed, make sure you have a frigging ax in your home, where you can bust out the roof just in case the water starts flowing.

And as a last resort, once this thing is above a category 3, there are no buildings in this city to withstand a category 3, a category 4 or a category 5 storm, other than the Superdome. That's where we sent people as a shelter of last resort. When that filled up, we sent them to the Convention Center. Now, you tell me what else we could have done.

S. O'BRIEN: What has Secretary Chertoff promised you? What has Donald Rumsfeld given you and promised you?

NAGIN: Look, I've gotten promises to -- I can't stand anymore promises. I don't want to hear anymore promises. I want to see stuff done. And that's why I'm so happy that the president came down here, because I think they were feeding him a line of bull also. And they were telling him things weren't as bad as it was.

He came down and saw it, and he put a general on the field. His name is General Honore. And when he hit the field, we started to see action.

And what the state was doing, I don't frigging know. But I tell you, I am pissed. It wasn't adequate.

And then, the president and the governor sat down. We were in Air Force One. I said, 'Mr. President, Madam Governor, you two have to get in sync. If you don't get in sync, more people are going to die.'

S. O'BRIEN: What date was this? When did you say that? When did you say...

NAGIN: Whenever air Force One was here.

S. O'BRIEN: OK.

NAGIN: And this was after I called him on the telephone two days earlier. And I said, 'Mr. President, Madam Governor, you two need to get together on the same page, because of the lack of coordination, people are dying in my city.'

S. O'BRIEN: That's two days ago.

NAGIN: They both shook -- I don't know the exact date. They both shook their head and said yes. I said, 'Great.' I said, 'Everybody in this room is getting ready to leave.' There was senators and his cabinet people, you name it, they were there. Generals. I said, 'Everybody right now, we're leaving. These two people need to sit in a room together and make a doggone decision right now.'

S. O'BRIEN: And was that done?

NAGIN: The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, "No, you guys stay here. We're going to another section of the plane, and we're going to make a decision."

He called me in that office after that. And he said, "Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor." I said -- and I don't remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O'BRIEN: You're telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

NAGIN: Yes.

S. O'BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?

NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the -- I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

S. O'BRIEN: And the governor said no.

NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn't happen, and more people died.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

S. O'BRIEN: The mayor making it clear that much politicking was going on, even as people here were continuing to suffer. The mayor clearly thinking that the governor did way too little, way too late for her part.

We put a call into Governor Blanco's office. They declined to come on our show this morning and talk to us. Her spokesperson did say, though, that it was a -- this was a tragedy now that was being reduced to politics.

I think, though, Miles, there is certainly lots and lots and lots of blame to go around. The mayor, of course, for his part, advising elderly people to be sure to grab an ax and be able to climb out on your roof and cut your way out. Obviously, not going to be feasible. Many of the people, it is believed, who perished in the subsequent flooding were elderly.

And we've seen entire neighborhoods where the bulk of the population is elderly. No way they're going to grab an ax and stand on their fridge and cut their way out of their house, and then lift themselves up and flag down a chopper as it flies overhead. That's just not going to happen.

Today, we're seeing a lot of blame, again, going around.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0509/05/ltm.01.html

experiencediz

09-06-2005, 05:47 PM

FUBAR ...

Plenty of blame to go around ... at all levels of govt ...

AMERICAN MORNING

Grim Mission in New Orleans

Aired September 5, 2005 - 07:00 ET

But there is also the question of who is to blame for what now many people believe was an inadequate response. And federal officials are now saying they were at the mercy of state officials and local officials who didn't do the job. And the state and local officials are saying that's absolutely not the case. There was an inadequate federal response. So all of that is going on.

Today, we're seeing a lot of blame, again, going around.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0509/05/ltm.01.html

Plain and Simple: There is no blame game! This is about top leadership! "TAKEOVER" ! Unless he was drunk or high for the first two days and missed out, any sane person would have done that.

In Bushie language it means that a simple 7-11 store manager knows how to handle certain situations better and will not leave it to the store clerk!

The President has the power (by state request or unilaterally) to federalize National Guard troops and put down civil unrest under the Insurrection Act.

US Code collection:TITLE 10 > Subtitle A > PART I > CHAPTER 15- INSURRECTION (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode10/usc_sup_01_10_10_A_20_I_30_15.html)

President Bush could have "federalized" the National Guard in an instant. That's what his father, President George H.W. Bush, did after the Los Angeles riots in 1992.... But after Katrina, a strange paralysis set in. For days, Bush's top advisers argued over legal niceties about who was in charge, according to three White House officials who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Beginning early in the week, Justice Department lawyers presented arguments for federalizing the Guard, but Defense Department lawyers fretted about untrained 19-year-olds trying to enforce local laws, according to a senior law-enforcement official who requested anonymity citing the delicate nature of the discussions (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/4/03840/59266).

What Went Wrong: Devastating a swath of the South, Katrina plunged New Orleans into agony. The story of a storm—and a disastrously slow rescue (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179587/)...

Bman

09-07-2005, 02:04 AM

Clinton lied for his own personal PLEASURE (http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/e-gov/e-politicalarchive-Clintonimpeach.htm)! We had to go to a stupid WAR (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0713-01.htm) because Bush lied!

There's no denying this.. you're right

friqid

09-07-2005, 07:33 AM

experiencediz
get a fuckin grip. Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins.
the federal goverment tried to get Governor Kathleen Blanco to sign over the power to federal gov. to take over after Katrina . She said no, she would stay in control. She should be kicked out of office.
besides to build a city under sea level with a lake on one side and the ocean on the other was extremely stupid, and to rebuild will be more stupid than the first time!

experiencediz

09-07-2005, 08:14 AM

experiencediz
Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins.
the federal goverment tried to get Governor Kathleen Blanco to sign over the power to federal gov. to take over after Katrina . She said no, she would stay in control. She should be kicked out of office.

Not 48Hrs., or 5 days later! Just like George W Bush you missed out on details, "TAKEOVER" In events like this you pour,you don't ask! And if you ask better be the first day. (http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home2.jsp)

Department Of Homeland Security

Emergencies & Disasters

Preparing America

In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. The new Department will also prioritize the important issue of citizen preparedness. Educating America's families on how best to prepare their homes for a disaster and tips for citizens on how to respond in a crisis will be given special attention at DHS.

"One team, one goal...a safer, more secure America" (http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0566.xml)

DHS

BTW
No worries...hurricane victims are doing very well!

Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans
By E&P Staff
Published: September 05, 2005 7:25 PM ET updated 8:00 PM

NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George
H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in
Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the
poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this
evening on American Public Media's "Marketplace"
program.

She was part of a group in Houston today at the
Astrodome that included her husband and former
President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son,
the current president, to head fundraising efforts for
the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack
Obama were also present.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of
evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost
everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to
Houston."

Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of
scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she
chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

Audio Available Here (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/09/05/PM200509051.html)

•Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054719)

Klaus

09-07-2005, 09:54 AM

When we spend another 100 million dollars investigating why all this happened, it will clearly show that for that same 100 million dollars, the levees in New Orleans could have been braced, made taller, and stronger, and this never would have happened. But, now we get to pay the 100 BILLION instead. Oh, wait, our grandkids will pay it......

Nobody to blame except ourselves, really.

The American people have lost the will to govern themselves.... OR EVEN DO ANYTHING ABOUT A GOVERNMENT THAT IS OUT OF THE CONTROL EITHER "OF THE PEOPLE OR BY THE PEOPLE"............
This was confirmed when we didn't kick Clinton out of the whitehouse.
We have become sheep, incapable of independent thought or action.

Now, we simply do as we're told.

NYer

09-07-2005, 11:39 AM

"... If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency."

Thomas Friedman
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html?oref=login

" ... But weep not for Bush. A disaster like Katrina is just what a president needs to anchor his second term and give him relevance and popularity far into his tenure. Not that he wanted it. Not that he handled it well to begin with. Not that he didn't mess it up at the start. But this story will have a happy ending for Bush — and, we all hope, for the people of New Orleans."

Dick Morris
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/53016.htm

lpn40

09-07-2005, 10:48 PM

Can some one explain how 1 man can destroy a city and kill maybe 1000's of people.What a powerful man,Just think of all the millions of dollars we can save,We don't need bombs,bullets and fighter jets.We have 1 powerfull man.We should let Iran know he does not need a nuke,Just get 1 powerfll man like we have,I think the Dems are secretly happy they could not find a way to destroy are president,Though they did try hard everyday,They think they found there chance,But there wrong, No one man can do this much damage,There's plenty of blame to go around. :

experiencediz

09-08-2005, 03:14 AM

Can some one explain how 1 man can destroy a city and kill maybe 1000's of people.
"Sure! (http://home.earthlink.net/~rdmadden/webdocs/Arrogance_of_Ignorance.html)"

experiencediz

09-08-2005, 03:42 AM

Can some one explain how 1 man can destroy a city and kill maybe 1000's of people.

Let's dig a little deeper...

Just because when you type in 'worst president' (http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Worst%20President%20Ever%21%20) at Google my name comes up on the top the list don't prove a goddamn thing!

experiencediz

09-08-2005, 10:04 PM

Dick Cheney: "Go F--k Yourself" (http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Cheney_090805.wmv)

experiencediz

09-10-2005, 01:30 AM

Katrina and George; Where's the Outrage?
Updated: Fri, Sep 9, 2005

A friend of mine, knowing the low regard I have for the president, said to me this week, "I suppose you blame Bush for the hurricane." No, of course Bush didn't cause the hurricane. Hurricane Katrina was an act of God – although, seeing as how the president is "connected" with the man upstairs, you'd have thought he might have put in a request to spare all those folks.

But I do blame the Bush administration for the unfortunate series of events that led to the catastrophic flooding and the woefully inadequate measures to provide relief.

I was really touched by the photo of W., thoughtfully gazing out his window at Louisiana as Air Force One descended to 2,000 feet. At least he got closer to the hurricane victims than he did to Cindy Sheehan. "It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground," Bush observed. Probably more than doubly for the folks clinging to rooftops while corpses and hungry alligators floated by.

Where were the rest of our leaders, you ask? Dick Cheney (http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/OPED/09-2005/Article-20050909-3b633a58-c0a8-10ed-0037-a04c7bc1126e/story.html) was, as usual, at an undisclosed location (on vacation in Wyoming). Bush's brain, Karl Rove, was at a party thanking the anti-Cindy Sheehan protesters in Crawford. Condoleezza Rice (http://www.gawker.com/news/condoleezza-rice/index.php) was vacationing in New York. After enjoying a performance of "Spamalot" and working on her backhand with Monica Seles, she spent several thousand dollars at the Ferragamo shoe boutique. When a woman demanded to know why she was shoe shopping when thousands were dying and homeless in New Orleans, Dr. Rice had her security guards toss the woman out (Rice finally made it to Mobile nearly a week after the hurricane, in order to defuse accusations that the administration's lackadaisical response had anything to do with the color or economic status of the victims).

Now I'm not suggesting that the Secretary of State shouldn't wear nice shoes (although those dominatrix boots are kind of creepy). But talk about Nero fiddling while New Orleans drowned!

Bush finally made it to the Gulf coast on the fifth day after the hurricane hit, only after stopping to speak at a VJ Day memorial in San Diego, where he compared the Iraq war to WWII and posed playing a guitar (couldn't find a fiddle, I reckon). Only then did the cavalry come.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, long known for inefficiency, became recognized as an effective agency with the appointment of James Lee Witt by President Clinton in 1993. Bush reduced FEMA to a component of the Department of Homeland Security (which is nothing more than a means of disempowering federal employees) and put Michael Brown in charge, an idiot who was fired from his previous job as Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. He wasn't even aware that 15,000 desperate victims were dying in the New Orleans Convention Center.

The primary mission of the National Guard is to provide disaster relief and security at home. But 5,000 Louisiana National Guardsmen are in Iraq. Even the Guard's high-water vehicles are in Iraq – someone explain to me why we need high-water vehicles in a desert? President Bush has the National Guard occupied in the quagmire in Iraq, when they should be home to protect our citizens.

There was the incredulous statement by Bush – "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." No one except FEMA, who, pre-9/11, listed a hurricane striking New Orleans and breaching the levees as one of the three greatest threats to the U.S. (along with a major earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack on New York). A theoretical depiction of the hurricane envisioned by FEMA and published in National Geographic in 2003 is eerily identical to the present disaster. The Army Corps of Engineers had initiated a project on the 1990s to rebuild and reinforce the levees. But flood control efforts by the Corps, including work on the levees, was sharply curtailed after 2003. The Corps' budget was slashed by the Bush administration to accommodate tax cuts and the Iraq war. The chief of the Corps was forced to resign for daring to complain.

Michael Chertoff was still on the news a week after the storm, blaming the victims for the tragedy – "they were warned to evacuate." This administration just doesn't get it – these are people with nowhere to go and no means of getting out. Not everyone is able to jump in the SUV and race to the vacation house.

What is most disgusting is that the crisis responses by the Bush administration that we've seen on the news are apparently staged photo ops, just like the famous plastic Thanksgiving turkey. The German news network ZDF witnessed how the food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was immediately torn down after the president and the news media had left. And Senator Mary Landrieu, flying over what she had thought was an effort to repair the breach of the 17th street levee, said, "it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment."

This president doesn't believe in "big government." So the cries of people trapped in their attics as the water rose to their necks went unanswered.

Many lives are being saved in New Orleans by the heroic efforts of emergency response personnel and ordinary citizens. But the slow and inefficient response to people in crisis by this callous, inept, deceitful, and arrogant administration is appalling.

BY MICHAEL LARKIN

•Katrina and George; Where's the Outrage? (http://www.eastbayri.com/story/298134185207573.php)

experiencediz

09-12-2005, 07:38 AM

Horse shows?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

•To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush (http://www.bushflash.com/)

experiencediz

09-14-2005, 01:47 AM

Gee!He got it! This time...
Bush takes the blame
13/09/2005 18:20 - (SA)

Washington - US President George W Bush on Tuesday said he took responsibility for the federal government's slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capabilities at all levels of government.

"And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush told a White House news conference.

"I want to know what went right and what went wrong," he added.

Bush spoke a day after the head of the federal emergency management agency (Fema), Michael Brown, resigned following a torrent of attacks on his performance after the August 29 superstorm that devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region.

The president said the authorities had to find out how capable it is of responding to a natural disaster of Katrina's size or a new September 11 attack.

"Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm?" said Bush.

"And that's a very important question. It's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on and - so we can better respond."

"One thing's for certain," he added.

"Having been down there three times and having seen how hard people are working, I'm not going to defend the process going in, but I will defend the people on the front line of saving lives.

"Those coast guard kids pulling people out of the floods did heroic work.

"The first responders on the ground whether they be state folks or local folks did everything they could."

•Bush takes the blame (http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Hurricane_Katrina/0,,2-10-1942_1769850,00.html)

NoFate

09-14-2005, 07:18 AM

experiencediz
besides to build a city under sea level with a lake on one side and the ocean on the other was extremely stupid, and to rebuild will be more stupid than the first time!
and a river on the third side

experiencediz

09-14-2005, 08:36 AM

President's speech Thursday

He's said he doesn't want to do any finger-pointing -- but now, President Bush is pointing at himself. He says he'll take responsibility for any mistakes that were made in dealing with Hurricane Katrina. And he says the failures raise questions about the government's ability to handle other disasters. Bush said the storm "exposed serious problems" at "all levels of government." The blunt admission of error came in a joint news conference with Iraq's visiting president.

Facing sharp criticism and the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, Bush scheduled a speech to the nation from Louisiana for Thursday evening. It will be his fourth trip to the Gulf Coast since the storm struck two weeks ago.

It was the closest Bush has come to publicly faulting any federal officials involved in the hurricane response, which has been widely criticized as disjointed and slow. Some federal officials have sought to blame state and local officials for being unprepared for the disaster.

President's speech Thursday (http://www.suntimes.com/output/hurricane/cst-nws-hurr14.html)

NYer

09-14-2005, 12:26 PM

"The buck stops here."

Harry S. Truman

experiencediz

09-14-2005, 07:40 PM

Newsview: 3 Crises Define Bush Presidency
Wednesday September 14, 2005 4:48pm

Washington (AP) - It's August in Crawford, Texas, and President Bush (website - news - bio) (http://beta.abc3340.com/search.hrb?s=key&k=bush) is on vacation. His poll ratings are slumping. He hears warnings of a looming crisis that will soon change the course of his presidency. Is this August 2001? Or August 2005? The answer is both. Historians will ultimately judge Bush's presidency based on his leadership through two tragedies - the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, plus a conflict of his own design: The war in Iraq.

Katrina's lethal aftermath revealed that the Bush administration didn't learn valuable lessons from the 2001 attacks about responding to disasters. As for the president himself, since the Sept. 11 terror strikes, Bush seems to have lost his touch for connecting with an anxious public.

"This is someone who has staked his presidency on strong leadership through crises, and now he has faced three major challenges," said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political science professor. "Sept. 11 fundamentally altered what this administration is going to be remembered for, which is the response to terrorism, the Iraq war and now obviously Katrina and the aftermath."

The Iraq war is linked to both Sept. 11 and Katrina, a bridge of sorts between the two crises. It began as part of the Sept. 11-inspired war on terrorism - and is now a competitor with the Gulf Coast for money, manpower and public support.

Back in August 2001, Bush was seven months into his presidency and trying to figure out why his job approval rating had declined by up to 10 percentage points since his inauguration. Voters still didn't know much about Bush, and were getting restless.

On Aug. 6, he was given a secret document warning that al-Qaida (website - news) (http://beta.abc3340.com/search.hrb?s=key&k=al-Qaida) hoped to attack the United States with hijacked airplanes. Delivered to his Texas ranch, the memo referred to evidence of terrorists possibly casing buildings in New York.

Critics now accuse Bush of not making terrorism a priority before Sept. 11. Supporters say he could not have prevented the attacks.

Either way, Bush's initial response to the strikes was shaky, capped by a grim-faced address to the nation that night. He quickly gained his footing and won favor with Americans when he stood atop a charred fire truck in New York and vowed vengeance.

That bullhorn-waving event occurred four years ago Wednesday.

Bush could use a defining moment like that now. Katrina caught him flatflooted in Texas. He seemed slow at the levers of power and took more than two weeks to acknowledge his own responsibility for the government's sluggish response.

Then came this stunning concession from Bush: Four years after Sept. 11, Katrina makes him wonder whether the country is ready for the next terrorist strike.

"Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That's a very important question and it's in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond," he said.

Several Sept. 11 commission members said it looks like little has changed in federal disaster planning since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. A Senate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, said the Katrina response was plagued by confusion, communications failures and widespread lack of coordination - all of which should have been addressed by expensive post-Sept. 11 reforms.

This could be Bush's legacy. According to various independent polls:

_Two-thirds of the public think he could have done more to help Katrina's victims. More than half say he deserves blame for the slow response.

_Fewer than half say Bush has strong leadership qualities, down from 63 percent in October 2004.

_More than half say they don't trust Bush's judgment in a crisis.

And then there's Iraq.

Amid recent progress in the Gulf Coast and Bush's planning for a prime-time address on Katrina, the public's attention was shifted back to Baghdad on Wednesday. More than a dozen explosions ripped through Iraq's capital, causing hundreds of casualties.

The Iraq war did not instantly transform the country as did Sept. 11. It can't match Katrina's ability to deliver a bone-jarring emotional punch. But the war is a gathering political force, its fate linked to the two disasters.

As the death toll rises in New Orleans and Baghdad, more Americans may question Iraq's role in the war on terror.

Six in 10 are telling pollsters the U.S. should cut back spending on Iraq to help pay for relief and recovery from Katrina. Almost that many favor a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq to help with storm damage.

Bush's challenge is to convince Americans that the war on terror, the war in Iraq and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast can be tackled together. "I can do more than one thing at one time," he said defensively Tuesday.

His case is tougher now that growing numbers of people are wondering whether he can lead the nation in crisis. The last time that was an issue was August 2001.

---

EDITOR'S NOTE - Ron Fournier has covered politics for The Associated Press since 1993.

Written By RON FOURNIER

•Newsview: 3 Crises Define Bush Presidency (http://beta.abc3340.com/news/stories/0905/260231.html)

malum

09-14-2005, 07:53 PM

Having not read this entire thread, I apologize if this has already been pointed out, but this statement on the first page is misleading as it relates to the particular topic:

President Bush could have "federalized" the National Guard in an instant. That's what his father, President George H.W. Bush, did after the Los Angeles riots in 1992...

It is worth noting that Pres. Bush Sr. did not federalize troops until 3 days into the LA riot situation.
In contrast, Louisiana Guard troops were on the scene at the Superdome, albeit in small numbers at first, immediately following the storm.

experiencediz

09-14-2005, 08:32 PM

experiencediz

09-15-2005, 07:58 AM

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
~Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

Bush could end up with deadly legacy
First published: Thursday, September 15, 2005

President Bush's legacy will be one of death: thousands killed in Iraq and thousands killed in Louisiana and Mississippi. I trust that those who voted for him will ponder this disgraceful, inept performance and contemplate what their actions have done to this country.
Perhaps he will not wiggle out of this latest disaster as easily as he has wiggled out of other bungled situations. It seems as though even some in his own party are beginning to see the light. We shouldn't hold our breaths.

PAMELA OPPEN

Bush could end up with deadly legacy (http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=398941&category=OPINION&newsdate=9/15/2005)

NYer

09-15-2005, 09:24 AM

Bush could end up with deadly legacy

OTH ...

The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed

Sunday, September 11, 2005

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question -- which few journalists ask -- is why weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05254/568876.stm

NoFate

09-15-2005, 01:17 PM

Manee Kiana

09-16-2005, 09:01 AM

I keep thinking it is time to turn the ARMYes of earth into a grand emergency meassures relief operations. That each soldier ought have the choice as to which camp. . ah, it so time to let the fight for or gainst melt from the face of earth, think I'll toss a pinch o salt over me shoulder for insuring the idea begins creep through the consciousness of humanity.

When we consider that most of the battles fought on earth today, were begun long before. . . if not generations before we ever began peak over the sides of our cradle. . . it like with each new concept and gadget from flying to the moon. . . which seems be easier to do than tending to your own back garden

and as such wishing. . . this forum would and could be turned into a huge resource and idea site. . . instead of cussing and quibbling. . which only energizes what we no longer wish be about.
war and peace are like frowning versus smiling frowning takes round 50 muscles while smiling only twelve. . . war, by the same token costs us huge.
while peace. . . leaves me think we can all live a 100 times as well for a tenth of the cost. Cause a smile is charmingly disarming. .

what really troubles me, is that Americans see themselves as the best in the world, and granted, generally speaking, America is stocked with the earth's inventive, most adventurous and aggressive people on one hand and most desperate and once displaced, on the other . One would think they would be the benevolent big brother, to the countryes their peoples once arrived from.

Instead of the bare arms, pick up a shovel, turn the sod and plant a blooming garden to sweeten the poisoned and soured air from all the toxic wastes we have spewed in our wake since we've become addicted to speed. . . flying really send the blankits of toxic fumes over vast areas. . .

we have taken earth from the tranquil blue jewel of the solar system into a livid cauldron of extremes of have to's and must do's overriding the gentle and quiet ways. . . until we began crowd others and tempers rose where once we smiled and chuckled our way through.

toss in the fact that REAL GAMBLERS play & ply the stock market with such greed and the generation of people who grew up in the depression who began play monopoly around the kitchen table. have been practicing it in the boardrooms of the nations and world. its been a winner take all. .
maybe it time to stop and remind ourselves of Mum's basic training. . .
put a rattle in our hands and have our motordevelopmend go in automatic as we begin trash the crib on taking such delight in making music
maybe it time to make a list of choicess available to us
about doing it the hard. . or easy way
be right. . . or happy
fight for or gainst or simply retreat from fields of conflict and 'gin making music
for music is the universal language of creation and like laughing, opens the arteryes by 20 percent. . . and speaking of opening the arteries. . I near think traffic died down by as much when the price of gas went up. .

and yes, the vision of the destiny of earthling is their turning earth, into a tapestry of cultures and customs . . . in garden setttings. . a celebration of innovations and traditions, and where ever so much as a hint of trouble brew make music nuff to melt it fast as once it flared up.

like what on earth legacy are we leaving in our wake . . as it stands ?
how will this age be seen in retrospect. . . hell on earth. . on having trampled heaven in the ground and hot wired the rivers of babble on into the world wide web waiting for the humAN Developmend Injuneering DeepARTmend to take the work out of living and have the FunERAl begin. . cheers
for yes, it is time to laugh and let ourselves experience the internal jogging it takes to clear the air and have life work, like a charm. . . once again.

The 801

09-17-2005, 02:41 PM

Media Matters for America: NYT's Brooks Revealed That 'From Day One,' The Bush White House 'Decided Our Public Relations Is Not Going To Be Honest'

( Note - media matters is the liberal news watch website, and David Brooks is the Conservative columnist in the NYT, who has long time and deep connections to the Bush White house - 801)

Distribution Source : U.S. Newswire

Date : Monday, September 12, 2005

To: National Desk

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- On the September 11 edition of NBC's syndicated The Chris Matthews Show, New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed that he has learned from private conversations with Bush officials who "represent" what "Bush believes" that from its earliest days, the Bush administration adopted a policy of shielding itself from political damage by never publicly admitting any mistake -- even if it meant lying to the media and the American public. The fact that Bush doesn't admit mistakes has been reported by the media for years. For instance, in the September 11 edition of The New York Times, David Sanger reported, "Mr. Bush, his aides acknowledge, is loath to fire members of his administration or to take public actions that are tantamount to an admission of a major mistake." Brooks himself has previously noted the Bush administration's unwillingness to admit to mistakes. But what Brooks's September 11 account adds is that Bush is being intentionally dishonest -- in Brooks's words, "totally tactical and totally insincere" -- in resisting such public admissions and in blaming others when failures are too obvious to deny.

Moreover, on the Matthews Show, Brooks disclosed that "from Day One," the Bush White House "decided our public relations is not going to be honest," and that "privately they admit mistakes all the time." Brooks's revelation would appear to be of major significance, particularly in light of recent attempts by Bush administration officials to shift culpability in the Hurricane Katrina disaster away from the White House. But while he claimed on the Matthews show to have debated this strategy with administration officials "since Day One" -- indicating that he has known about it from the beginning -- a review of his columns and television appearances since Katrina struck reveals that Brooks has refrained from telling viewers and readers that the administration's campaign to rehabilitate its public image over the poor handling of the Katrina crisis by blaming others was apparently another manifestation of this dishonest strategy.

Knowing this strategy earlier might have provided readers and viewers with additional insight into an incident regarding a September 4 Washington Post article that prompted Media Matters for America president and CEO David Brock to write to the Post ombudsman. In that letter, dated September 6, Brock questioned the September 4 article's reliance on a quote from an anonymous "senior Bush official" falsely claiming that "(a)s of Saturday (September 3), (Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux) Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency." The Post ran a correction noting that Blanco had in fact declared a state of emergency on August 26. But in that correction the Post did not explain why it had relied on an anonymous administration source to report a fact that could have been easily checked, nor did it note reports that blaming Blanco was part of an administration strategy to deflect blame off of Bush and the federal government for the catastrophic situation in New Orleans.

In his September 11 column, acknowledging Media Matters' letter and "hundreds of critical e-mails, many of them undoubtedly provoked" by the letter, Post ombudsman Michael Getler wrote, "The outlines of the criticism were valid." But, responding to Media Matters' suggestion that the senior Bush official's lie might have constituted a justification for disclosing the source, Getler quoted assistant managing editor Liz Spayd saying, "It's impossible for us to read the person's mind to really know" if that person was "intentionally misleading us." Had the Post been armed with Brooks's September 11 revelation that lying was part of the administration's PR strategy, the paper would have had a pretty strong reason to think that the source was, in fact, lying.

Brooks himself previously addressed the Bush administration's refusal to admit error -- both in his Times column and on PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on which he makes weekly appearances. In his November 2, 2004, column, Brooks wrote: "I'm exasperated at the Bush communications strategy. His advisers came in with one rule: no concessions to elite opinion. They decided not to be open on how they make decisions. They would never admit mistakes." In his September 9, 2003, debut as a Times columnist, he noted: "The Bush administration has the most infuriating way of changing its mind. The leading Bushies almost never admit serious mistakes. They never acknowledge that they are listening to their critics. They never even admit they are shifting course. They don these facial expressions suggesting calm omniscience while down below their legs are doing the fox trot in six different directions." On the November 14, 2003, broadcast of the NewsHour, Brooks said of the Bush administration: "Well, the good news about them is that they won't admit mistakes, but they are ruthlessly pragmatic when forced to be." In none of these instances, however, did Brooks indicate -- as he did on September 11 -- that deception was premeditated, or that he had "since Day One" discussed with White House officials their strategy to engage in deception rather than admit mistakes.

Brooks has written four Times columns since Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, commenting on how the hurricane will affect the American political landscape (9/1/05); the loss of American confidence in government institutions (9/4/05); the racial and economic dynamics of a rebuilt New Orleans (9/8/05); and the future of government bureaucracy (9/11/05).

Claiming in his September 4 column that "(a)uthority was diffuse and action was ineffective" in response to Katrina, Brooks wrote: "Leaders spun while looters rampaged." Now we know -- and know that Brooks knew all along -- that, at least in the case of the Bush administration, leaders were probably doing more than spinning.

Brooks also appeared on the September 2 broadcast of the NewsHour, commenting, as he did in his September 4 column, on "the de-legitimization of institutions." Notably, in both his NewsHour appearance and his September 4 column, Brooks cited as instances of institutional failures the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the lack of postwar planning in Iraq -- all instances in which the Bush administration has ducked responsibility, and all seemingly perfect touchstones for Brooks to disclose the White House's dishonest public relations strategy.

Admittedly, the context under which Brooks spoke with White House officials about their dishonest public relations campaign and refusal to publicly admit to error is unknown. They may have discussed these matters off the record, which would explain Brooks's prior silence on the matter. But if such discussions were off the record, one wonders what has changed. His sources aren't likely to have told him those conversations are now fair game. But now that he has disclosed this information on national television, it is on the record, and it merits further discussion.

From Brooks's September 11 appearance on NBC's The Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: Do you think there's a problem with this? I remember when the president wrote in his diary -- his father, President Bush senior -- "you know, I picked (former Vice President Dan) Quayle the first time around, and I wish I hadn't. But I'm stuck with him, and I can't admit it." Is there a problem with this president simply admitting, "I put the wrong people at certain jobs, I didn't get back fast enough to the White House, I wasn't calling the orders fast enough?"

BROOKS: From Day One, they had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest. Privately, they admit mistakes all the time. Publicly -- and I've had this debate with them since Day One; I always say admit a mistake, people will give you credit --

MATTHEWS: Who do you debate this with?

BROOKS: With people who work in the White House.

MATTHEWS: I thought you were talking about with the president in the back room.

(laughter)

BROOKS: Not with him, but they represent what he believes, which is, if you admit a mistake, you get no credit from your enemies, and then you open up another week's story, because the admission of a little mistake leads to the admission of big mistakes and another week's story. It's totally tactical and totally insincere.

------
http://press.arrivenet.com/pol/article.php/691875.html

You may view this Chris Mathers program at:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509120003?is_gsa=1&final=1

NYer

09-19-2005, 10:55 AM

In his November 2, 2004, column, Brooks wrote: "I'm exasperated at the Bush communications strategy.

Whew ... and here I thought there was NO communications strategy. W will doubtless be remembered as the Great Non-Communicator.

experiencediz

09-20-2005, 10:28 PM

"George" is worst natural disaster to hit country
By Beth Quinn
Times Herald-Record
bquinn@th-record.com

Well, folks, the only thing left up in the air now is whether George Bush is the worst president ever. Herbert Hoover has held the title since 1933.

It's been neck and neck for a while, but I think Bush pulled ahead with his spectacular failure in handling Katrina.

George Bush is a walking catastrophe. Far more than even Katrina, he is one of the worst disasters to ever hit America. His performance these past two weeks seemed a showcase for his utter stupidity and indifference, complete with flood, fire and floating bodies.

It was an epic performance that, more than anything else thus far, has revealed his true, craven self.

And now he wants to lay it on us. Soon we'll be seeing bumper stickers that say, "Buy gasoline or the hurricane will have won." :mad_01:

Somehow, all Americans are now "in this together" and we have to make up for his bumbling incompetence, beginning with picking up the tab for rebuilding the Gulf states.

To paraphrase the words of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, "Holy bullcrap!"
I've got to tell you, I get a lot of e-mails from folks who claim they're offended when I criticize this guy. But now I'm the one who's offended. Really.

I'm offended that Bush has only just now discovered that there are poor, black people in America. I'm offended by the entire Bush family, who have established a culture of greed in this country and have been unable to disguise their contempt for the poor – an attitude evidenced in all its wild glory by George's mama (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054719) when she said a week after Katrina hit:

"So many of the people in the (Houston) arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this (she chuckled slightly) is working very well for them."

Oh those greedy poor people who just want to take advantage of living like cattle in an arena.

I'm offended that Bush, upon his return to the White House – finally! – two days after Katrina hit, spent his first few hours back making yet another recess appointment of a federal judge, one whom the Senate had already rejected as too weird.

I'm offended that, when Bush finally realized he should at least pretend some concern for the dead and dying in the Gulf states, he carefully rolled up his sleeves for his photo op as though he were going to be fishing dead bodies out of the water his very own self.

I'm offended that, somehow, Halliburton won again when one of its subsidiaries was automatically granted a $29.8 million government contract to clean up New Orleans. Don't we have a bidding process in this country anymore? Everything has to go to Cheney's cheating company?

I'm offended by Bush's unwillingness to name a bipartisan panel to investigate just what – what! – the hell went wrong in our hurricane response.

I'm offended that those who lost everything in Katrina will be unable to declare bankruptcy because they can't possibly gather up all their drowned and burned paperwork to prove they've got nothing left.

I'm offended that Bush went on television to lay out a $200 billion rebuilding plan without saying a single word about how that might get paid for – just as the No Child Left Behind Act is unfunded; just as the Medicare prescription plan is unfunded; just as his insane war in Iraq is unfunded and raising our deficit to dizzying heights.

I'm offended that Bush has bankrupt our nation of money, goodwill and morality.

I'm offended that no one in Congress has yet called for his impeachment.

Most of all, I'm offended by those Americans who still insist that this sociopath is a swell guy, a terrific leader, a fine thinker. What is wrong with you people?!

And if this column offends you, I don't care. Anyone offended by the truth is living in a bubble world, kind of like the Superdome. And we all know what happens when the roof gets blown off a bubble world.

Reality. Yuck. How offensive.

Beth Quinn's column appears on Monday. Talk to her at 345-3147 or at bquinn@th-record.com.

•"George" is worst natural disaster to hit country (http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/09/19/bethcols.htm)

experiencediz

09-21-2005, 07:21 AM

A little late but too good to pass...
Bush-Lovers should not read any further. It makes too much sense for most republicans.

"Take a Hint"
By Bill Maher

"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard is bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

"Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could
involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

"But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.

"On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City ofNew Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

"So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.'"

•"Take a Hint" (http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/gwb_the_beloved_leader_/2005/09/advice_for_the_beloved_leader.php)

The Bush Regime Rules of Acquisition and for Maintaining Power

Rule 001 Once you take their oil, other natural resources, or cheap labor, you never give them back.

Rule 002 The best oil deal is the one that brings the most profit.

Rule 003 Never spend more for oil or land than you have to.

Rule 004 A politician telling the truth is like an Republican saying I made a mistake. Do neither.

Rule 006 Never allow truth to stand in the way of making money or obtaining power.

Rule 007 Keep your mouth always open in order to cover your behind.

Rule 008 Small wars lead to perpetual war.

Rule 009 Controlling ballot boxes plus the Supreme Court equals the presidency.

Rule 010 Power is eternal. Be eternal.

Rule 011 Even if it's free, you can always confiscate it anyway.

Rule 012 Anything worth doing is worth doing for maintaining power.

Rule 013 Anything worth doing is worth doing over and over again.

Rule 014 Keep your family close, keep your oil closer.

Rule 016 A treaty is a treaty (until it is no longer useful).

Rule 017 A treaty is a treat is a treaty - but only between consenting CEOs, countries can screw themselves.

Rule 018 A Republican without profit is no Republican at all.

Rule 019 Working class satisfaction is irrelevant.

Rule 020 Only give money to people you know you can bribe or steal from.

Rule 021 Never place anything before profit, not even Jesus Christ.

Rule 022 A wise man can feel war profit in the wind, and the wind always blows.

Rule 024 Wealth can't buy happiness, but you can sure have fun with the illusion while awaiting Armageddon.

Rule 025 There's always a way to make more money.

Rule 026 As the oil goes, so goes the empire.

Rule 027 There's nothing more dangerous than a Bill of Rights adherent.

Rule 028 Lie your way to success.

Rule 029 What's in it for me and my crime family?

Rule 031 Never make fun of a Capitalist's workers. Insult something he cares about, instead.

Rule 033 Always suck up to the anyone higher up in the chain of command.

Rule 034 War is good for business. Export it often!

Rule 035 Peace is good for nothing.

Rule 037 If it's free, capitalize on it and never worry about ethics.

Rule 039 The people are temporary; profit made off of them is a birthright, until they die. When they do find others to exploit.

Rule 040 Let them shake your hand, but never your profit.

Rule 041 Greed is its own reward.

Rule 042 My oil is mine, and your oil is mine too.

Rule 044 Never confuse ethics with opportunity

Rule 045 Greed knows no conscience.

Rule 046 Make your fraud difficult to expose.

Rule 047 Don't trust anyone preaching the Sermon on the Mount.

Rule 048 The bigger the oil field, the greater the Shock and Awe.

Rule 049 All oil is worthy of stealing, or, at least, for overthrowing a foreign government.

Rule 050 Gratitude can bring on weakness. Encourage it in others.

Rule 051 Reward everyone who adds to your profits then seize their assets.

Rule 052 Never make deals when you can steal instead.

Rule 057 Good Capitalists are as rare as new oil finds, exploit both.

Rule 058 There is no substitute for wealth.

Rule 059 Helping others without profit is worthless.

Rule 060 Keep your lies consistent, constant and repeat them often.

Rule 062 The riskier the war, the greater the profit.

Rule 065 Win or lose, there's always God on our side.

Rule 068 Bribery will get you anything you want.

Rule 069 Republicans are not responsible for their own stupidity.

Rule 072 Never trust anybody outside the owning class.

Rule 073 Send other's children to wars for oil, never send your own.

Rule 075 Home is where the heart is, but the love is where the oil is.

Rule 076 Every once in a while behave irrationally. It confuses the hell out of the people. If no one is around to do it, ask George W. to be himself.

Rule 077 Never swallow your pride, blame Clinton and ask Monica how it's done.

Rule 078 When the going gets tough, the tough do it illegally.

Rule 079 Beware of the calls for social justice.

Rule 082 The poor eat too much. Do away with all nourishment entitlements and the greater the profit.

Rule 084 A friend is not a friend if they reject wars of choice.

Rule 085 Never let the people know what you're thinking, even if you know how.

Rule 087 A foreign country in need means five times the profit potential.

Rule 089 Ask not what your children can do for your country, as what other's children can do for oil.

Rule 092 There are many ways to profit from a hurricane tragedy.

Rule 093 Act without delay! The truth may be catching up.

Rule 094 Females and Board Rooms don't mix.

Rule 095 Increase wealth or die.

Rule 096 For every law, there is a way of breaking it undetected.

Rule 097 Enough wealth... is never enough.

Rule 098 Anyone who is not with us can be eliminated.

Rule 099 Trust is a mistake.

Rule 100 If they take your threat seriously, ignore it and attack anyway.

Rule 101 The only value of ethics is to accuse opponents as not having any.

Rule 102 Life ends, but Power lasts forever.

Rule 103 Work can interfere with exercise, take a vacation often, preferably on a ranch in Texas that has no cows.

Rule 104 Faith moves nothing. Don't tell the believers.

Rule 105 Don't trust anyone who is poor, or a minority.

Rule 106 There is no humanity in poverty. Eliminate the poor.

Rule 107 Responsibility is valid only if they catch you.

Rule 109 Dignity and an empty purse is worth the purse.

Rule 111 Treat people in your regime like family, exploit them ruthlessly.

Rule 112 Never have sex with a non-Capitalist. It may spoil the gene pool.

Rule 113 Always have sex with Capitalists. Inbreed!

Rule 115 The best contract can always be made null and void by decree. Issue decrees often.

Rule 116 There's always an escape clause.

Rule 117 Everything is a commodity. Sell everything and everyone.

Rule 119 Always judge a friend by the size of their wallet, better still through their Swiss bank account records.

Rule 121 Everything is for the taking. Take everything.

Rule 123 Even a blind man can recognize the smell of oil. Have them look for it for you.

Rule 125 You can't invade countries if you're dead. Stay alive.

Rule 126 Count the barrels.

Rule 127 Arm the world. Incite war. Always back the side with the oil.

Rule 135 Never trust a country with a nationalized oil industry. Better still, invade them and liberate their oil.

Rule 139 Wives provide. Keep them barefoot, cooking and pregnant.

Rule 141 Only fools play fair.

Rule 142 There's no such thing as International law.

Rule 143 Lying is part of the game. Lie for all it's worth.

Rule 144 There's nothing wrong with sacrifice... as long as the working class does it.

Rule 146 War is the mother of profit. Greed is the father. The children inherit both.

Rule 152 A lie is a way to tell the truth to someone who doesn't know the truth. The lie doesn't matter.

Rule 153 Sell the image, not the person.

Rule 162 Especially in the worst of times, when many suffer, turn a profit off of the suffering.

Rule 168 Kiss up as a way to success. Better still, arrange your birth into a wealthy family.

Rule 169 Responsibility and failure are mutually exclusive.

Rule 171 Blood is thicker than water, and oil is thicker than both.

Rule 172 Millions of dollars aren't what they used to be. Acquire billions.

Rule 177 Know your own shortcomings and then cover them up.

Rule 181 Nothing can tarnish the shine of profit, not even murder.

Rule 188 A country and its oil is the best candidate for stealing both.

Rule 189 Let others keep their ethics. You keep their money.

Rule 190 Hear only what you want others to hear.

Rule 191 A Republican doesn't hesitate to back a Republican president, even if he can't read, nor speak coherently.

Rule 192 Never cheat another Republican... unless you're sure you can get away with it.

Rule 194 It's always good politics to have dossiers ready about new partners before they walk in your door. Better still, have dossiers on everyone.

Rule 200 If you're losing money, never admit it.

Rule 202 The justification for oil profit is profit.

Rule 203 Oil sheiks are like cesspools, they stink, but are easy to use.

Rule 204 It takes a Republican to cheat a Republican.

Rule 208 The only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer. Have Scot McLellan give the answers.

Rule 211 Workers are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.

Rule 214 Never begin a war on an empty stomach, nor with a country that can actually fight back.

Rule 216 Never gamble with a non-Swiss bank account.

Rule 217 You can't free a worker from their toil. Why would you want to?

Rule 218 Always know what you're stealing. And if you don't, steal it anyway.

Rule 219 Possession of oil fields is 11/10 of the law.

Rule 223 Beware of people who don't exploit.

Rule 229 Power lasts longer than lust. Get aroused often.

Rule 231 There's a religious sucker born every minute; be sure you're the first to give them religion.

Rule 236 There is no shame in screwing up, only in admitting having screwed up.

Rule 239 Never be afraid to spin the truth.

Rule 241 Never trust a do-gooder.

Rule 242 More is best. Having everything is better.

Rule 253 Alcohol is the lubricant of choice when watching football and eating pretzels..

Rule 255 A smart wife is a contradiction; a smart accountant, a necessity. Never have both be one and the same.

Rule 256 Blowing the job is less costly politically than getting a blow job. Ask Clinton.

Rule 260 Politics is not fair. How else would you run the world?

Rule 261 A religious man doesn't let facts get in the way of belief.

Rule 262 Giving one's word isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Rule 263 Never allow doubt to tarnish your lust for oil.

Rule 265 Foreign countries should be tolerated... until their oil wells run dry.

Rule 266 When in doubt, do it anyway, or lie.

Rule 267 If you say a lie often enough, the people will believe the lie, and you will believe they believe you.

Rule 270 In making oil deals with countries, Shock and Awe can be very persuasive.

Rule 277 Anything worth fighting for is worth hiding from, but never worth dying for. Hide!

Rule 284 Deep down, everyone's a Republican!

Rule 285 No good deed ever makes a lot of money.

Rule 286 When Condi is unavailable, ask Uncle Dick. He can be found in an underground cave.

Rule 299 Whenever you exploit a nation, it never hurts to thank them. That way, it's easier to exploit them the next time.

Rule 300 Make any rule up at any time to insure increased wealth and power!

© 2005 Jozef Hand-Boniakowski

•Bush Regime Rules of Acquisition and for Maintaining Power (http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2005/09/bush-regime-rules-of-acquisition-and.html)

DC Penguin

09-21-2005, 09:52 AM

Bush sucks as a President. No argument.

The Democrats failed to offer anything but someone far worse. Pretty sad.

Now they rant about how dumb the Republicans are?

Who are you running in 2008? Hillary?

The nation's leadership was a choice between continuing the failed Presidency of George Bush or permitting the failed life history and disgusting series of egotistical antics of John Kerry to take over.

When someone finally runs a candidate who cares about America over his own interests, we'll have a chance. (Hint: That person will NOT bear the name Bush, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, or Cheney.)

NYer

09-21-2005, 12:12 PM

"Take a Hint"
By Bill Maher

Bill Maher was on the Scarborough show of all places and Joe asked where he stood on capital punishment. Bill replied that he was in favor of capital punishment in certain instances. "In fact," Maher announced," I'm Pro - Death. I favor capital punishment, abortion on demand, and physician - assisted suicide."

Joe, still chuckling, offered that this would make an interesting campaign platform.

The 801

09-22-2005, 02:11 PM

Now you have seen it all. 801 placing a ROBERT NOVAK, FOR GODS SAKE editorial in Itshappening for your review.

Couldn't help myself. More Right wing hysteria....

Bashing Bush in Aspen
September 22, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend

ASPEN, Colo. -- For two full days, George W. Bush was bashed. He was taken to task on his handling of stem cell research, population control, the Iraq war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina. The critics were no left-wing bloggers. They were rich, mainly Republican and presumably Bush voters in the last two presidential elections.

The Bush-bashing occurred last weekend at the annual Aspen conference sponsored by the New York investment firm Forstmann Little & Co. Over 200 invited guests, mostly prestigious, arrived Thursday night (many by private aircraft) and stayed until Sunday morning for more than golf, hikes and gourmet meals. They faithfully attended the discussions presided over by PBS's Charlie Rose on such serious subjects as "global poverty and human rights" and "the 'new' world economy." The connecting link was hostility to President Bush.

"All discussions are off the record," admonished the conference's printed schedule. Consequently, I will refrain from specifically quoting panelists and audience members. But the admonition says nothing about personal conversations outside the sessions. Nor do I feel inhibited in quoting myself. Even if I am violating the spirit of secrecy rules, revealing criticism of Bush by this elite group, and the paucity of defense for him, is valuable in reflecting the president's parlous political condition.

The Forstmann Little Aspen Weekend is made possible by the generosity of Theodore J. Forstmann, a doughty supporter of supply-side economics and longtime contributor to the Republican Party. Invited guests are drawn from government, diplomacy, politics, the arts, entertainment and journalism.

I was surprised that the program indicated the first panel, on stem cell research, consisted solely of scientists hostile to the Bush administration's position. In the absence of any disagreement, I took the floor to suggest there are scientists and bioethicists with dissenting views and that it was not productive to demean opposing views as based on "religious dogma." The response was peeved criticism of my intervention and certainly no support.

I do not see myself as a defender of the Bush presidency (who Bob? You? you don't say....- 801) , and I am sure the White House does not regard me as such ( oh no, never....- 801). But as a member of the second panel consisting of journalists, I felt constrained to argue against implications that Hurricane Katrina should cause the president to rediscover race and poverty. My comments again generated more criticism from the audience and obvious exasperation by Charlie Rose. Indeed, after the closing dinner Saturday night, the moderator made clear he was displeased by my conduct.

After the first two panels, I feared I was the odd man out in accepting Teddy Forstmann's invitation. But during a break, one of the president's closest friends -- who had remained silent -- thanked me profusely for my comments. That set a pattern. Throughout the next two days, men and women who were mute publicly thanked me privately for speaking up. When I said nothing during one panel discussion, some people asked me why I was silent.

Longtime participants in Forstmann Little conferences (this was my first and, after this column, probably my last) told me they had not experienced such hostility against a Republican president at previous events. Yet, they were sure a majority of the guests had voted for Bush.

This analysis was reported to me over lunch by a financier who regularly attends these events. When he thanked me for my comments and said he shared my sentiments, I asked why he did not express them publicly at a session. He replied that he did not feel able to articulate what he felt. Critics of the president who are vocal and supporters who are reticent comprise a massive communications failure.

U.S. News & World Report disclosed this week, with apparent disdain, that presidential adviser Karl Rove took time off from the Katrina relief effort to be at Aspen. He was needed as a counterweight. I settled in for serious fireworks, expecting Bush-bashers to assault his alter ego at the conference's final session. However, direct confrontation with a senior aide must have been more difficult than a remote attack on the president. It would be a shame if Rove returned to Washington without informing George W. Bush how erstwhile friends have turned against him.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050922.shtml

The 801

09-22-2005, 02:20 PM

NYer

09-22-2005, 03:09 PM

And if we had followed the Powell Doctrine in Iraq, well..... who knows

Judging from the EU's backing down on the Iranian nuclear issue and the UNSCAM revelations, I'd suggest that the sanctions against Saddam's regime would have been lifted.

DC Penguin

09-22-2005, 03:51 PM

This is a discussion group, so here is an opinion..

DC Penguin, I suggest that the last name of the next president be either McCain, or Powell.

I still want to know why McCain folded for Bush last time around.

And if we had followed the Powell Doctrine in Iraq, well..... who knows

I like both your choices, but neither has indicated any clear desire for the Presidency. Powell won't run, and McCain never has gone very far before withdrawing.

I'm hoping Mark Warner will be the Democratic nominee.
I don't know who to select on the Republican side. I can't even think of a strong governor that's eligible.

NYer

09-22-2005, 04:18 PM

I like both your choices, but neither has indicated any clear desire for the Presidency. Powell won't run, and McCain never has gone very far before withdrawing.

I'm hoping Mark Warner will be the Democratic nominee.
I don't know who to select on the Republican side. I can't even think of a strong governor that's eligible.

How about George Allen? Or a certain former NYC mayor?

Alli

09-22-2005, 04:22 PM

How about George Allen? Or a certain former NYC mayor?
Heh, there are rampant rumors amongst the bloggers that Dashole might be thinking about running. :mad_08:

DC Penguin

09-22-2005, 04:51 PM

How about George Allen? Or a certain former NYC mayor?

If Rudy ran, I think he'd have major problems. He was never a party darling, partly because he is too pro-gun control to keep those lobbies happy.

If George Allen and Mark Warner were to run, then it would be a former VA Governor versus a former VA Governor. No clear state of origin to take the prize. I live in VA and liked both of them, so I'd enjoy that competition, but I think Warner had the harder job and pulled it off as a Democrat leading Republicans. I don't know that the competition would fly at the national level, but not a bad idea.

experiencediz

09-25-2005, 07:48 AM

‘Bush greater threat than Bin Laden’
Web posted at: 9/25/2005 2:27:17
Source ::: AFP

WASHINGTON: A panel reporting to the US State Department has warned that President George W. Bush is seen in some Arab nations as a greater threat than Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a US newspaper (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301880.html) reported yesterday.

The report by the congressionally mandated advisory panel, which found that “America’s image and reputation abroad could hardly be worse”, has been seen by senior officials but not yet released publicly, The Washington Post said. A fact-finding mission to the Middle East last year found that “there is deep and abiding anger toward US policies and actions,” according to The Post.

The Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy cited polls that found that large majorities in Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia “view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the world order than Osama bin Laden.”

Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0316/p03s01-usfp.html), a longtime presidential adviser, prepares to leave this weekend on a “listening tour” (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23668378.htm) of the Middle East.

The panel’s report warns that televised images of US policy choices—such as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the invasion of Iraq—reverberate across the Arab media and will “long haunt the image of the United States,” the paper said.

The committee recommended a series of steps, including increased funding and staffing, to rebuild efforts to promote US culture and ideas—an essential task that it said has been eroded through bureaucratic shuffling and indifference.

In much of the world, the report said, the United States is viewed as “less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered,” according to The Post.

The advisory committee was created by the US Congress in 2004 and charged with advising the secretary of state on how to advance cultural diplomacy.

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Americas&month=September2005&file=World_News2005092522717.xml)

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=70654&d=25&m=9&y=2005)

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_25-9-2005_pg7_3)

NYer

09-25-2005, 02:14 PM

Personally, my issues with the current administration include it's inexplicable indifference to illegal immigration. Any democrat who hasn't swallowed the Kos Kool-Aid could have a field day with this issue.

‘Bush greater threat than Bin Laden’
Web posted at: 9/25/2005 2:27:17
Source ::: AFP

WASHINGTON: A panel reporting to the US State Department has warned that President George W. Bush is seen in some Arab nations as a greater threat than Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a US newspaper (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301880.html) reported yesterday.

The report by the congressionally mandated advisory panel, which found that “America’s image and reputation abroad could hardly be worse”, has been seen by senior officials but not yet released publicly, The Washington Post said. A fact-finding mission to the Middle East last year found that “there is deep and abiding anger toward US policies and actions,” according to The Post.

The Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy cited polls that found that large majorities in Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia “view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the world order than Osama bin Laden.”

Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0316/p03s01-usfp.html), a longtime presidential adviser, prepares to leave this weekend on a “listening tour” (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23668378.htm) of the Middle East.

The panel’s report warns that televised images of US policy choices—such as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the invasion of Iraq—reverberate across the Arab media and will “long haunt the image of the United States,” the paper said.

The committee recommended a series of steps, including increased funding and staffing, to rebuild efforts to promote US culture and ideas—an essential task that it said has been eroded through bureaucratic shuffling and indifference.

In much of the world, the report said, the United States is viewed as “less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered,” according to The Post.

The advisory committee was created by the US Congress in 2004 and charged with advising the secretary of state on how to advance cultural diplomacy.

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Americas&month=September2005&file=World_News2005092522717.xml)

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=70654&d=25&m=9&y=2005)

•Bush as greater threat than Bin Laden (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_25-9-2005_pg7_3)

NYer

09-25-2005, 04:16 PM

If Rudy ran, I think he'd have major problems. He was never a party darling, partly because he is too pro-gun control to keep those lobbies happy.

The recent Katrina debacle, however, put a premium on leadership ... witness Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. Rudy exudes leadership. Remember this?

Al-Waleed, the nephew of the late Saudi King Fahd, was in the news when he visited the World Trade Center’s remains just after the September 11th attacks and offered then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check for relief efforts. Al-Waleed then released a statement blaming US foreign policy and support for Israel for the attacks.

Giuliani returned the prince’s check with a statement that, “There is no moral equivalent for this attack. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification when they slaughtered ... innocent people ... Not only are those statements wrong, they’re part of the problem.”

Interestingly, Prince Al-Waleed just purchased a boatload of sales in Fox News.

Klaus

09-27-2005, 02:06 AM

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/26/bush.military/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush said he wants to make it easier for the military to take charge after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, but the White House acknowledged Monday the proposal raises "a lot of issues" that need resolution.

Critics argue that putting active-duty troops on American streets would violate a long-standing tradition that keeps the military out of domestic law enforcement.

__________________________________________________ _______________

Uh,..... it's not a TRADITION, it's a fucking LAW! :happy_01:

experiencediz

10-01-2005, 12:52 PM

George Bush in Hell
By David Michael Green
Sep 29, 2005 -

You would not want to be George W. Bush right now.

Not that you ever would anyhow, but especially not now. Indeed, there are indications that not even George W. Bush wants to be George W. Bush right now.

That second term in office, the one that just a year or two ago seemed so precious that he was willing to launch a war just to obtain it, now feels like a life sentence. Plans for four years spending political capital now look a lot more like endless months of capital punishment.

The Bush Administration has nowhere to go but down, and that is precisely where it is headed. Poll data show that even members of his solid-to-the-point-of-twelve-step-eligibility base are now deserting him as his job approval ratings plunge like so much Enron stock, lately crashing southward through the forty percent threshold. With almost his entire second term still in front of him, Bush is poised to set new records for presidential unpopularity. That scraping noise you hear? It's the sound of sheepish voters creeping out to the garage late at night, furtively removing "Bush-Cheney 2004" bumperstickers from the back of their SUVs when no one is looking.

Meanwhile, as the scales fall from the eyes of the hoi polloi, even the one constituency which could plausibly make the claim that Bush has been good for America (read: their wallets), is speaking the unspeakable as well. Robert Novak, of all people, wrote a column last week chronicling his experience watching rich Republicans at an Aspen retreat bash the idiocy of Bush administration policies on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, stem-cell research and more. Perhaps these folks realized when they saw Trent Lott's house go under that Mother Nature doesn't care whether you're rich and well-connected any more than does al Qaeda. You may be on Karl Rove's Rolodex, but now Bush is taking you down and your yacht too, not just forgotten kids from the ghetto who enlisted in the Army as the only alternative to a life of poverty.

Even conservative columnists like David Brooks (though not Novak) are writing articles nowadays accurately describing the changed mood of the American public. Where those powerful currents are heading is unclear, but given the radical right experiment of the present as their point of departure, there would seem to be only two choices. We can either go completely off the deep-end and finally constitute the Fascist Republic of Cheney, or we can turn to the left, toward some semblance of rational policymaking. The latter seems far more likely, especially as America increasingly regains its senses after a long bout of temporary insanity. These are bad bits of news for poor George, but worse yet is that they are only the first signs of the coming apocalypse. The real fun stuff is just around the corner. I'll confess to more than a little schadenfreude as I contemplate the ugly situation staring Republicans officeholders in the face right now. They are tethered to a sinking ship, and have only two lousy options to choose from as November 2006 approaches. One is to stay the course and drown. The other is to start renouncing Bush and his policies, appear to voters as the complete hypocrites and political whores many will prove to be, and then still drown anyhow. Nobody could be more deserving of such a fate, with the possible exception of Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry who have been even more hypocritical yet in facilitating many of the president's disastrous policies.

Watching these GOP opportunists jump ship will certainly be fun, but the greatest fun awaits the president himself. Bush has now lost everything that once sustained him. That includes 9/11, now safely in the rearview mirror for most Americans. That includes his wartime rally-around-the-flag free pass, as he has failed to capture America's real enemy, while lying about bogus ones to justify an invasion pinning our defense forces down in an endless quagmire. That includes, post-Katrina, the ridiculous frame of Bush as competent leader, and the former reality of the press as frightened presidential waterboys.

And that's the good news for W. The bad news is all the chickens coming home to roost. The economy is anemic and fragile, and yet Bush has played the one card in his deck ostensibly (but never really) intended to remedy the country's economic woes. (Remember during the 2000 campaign when times were flush and tax cuts were the prescription? Remember in 2001 when the economy was in a recession and tax cuts were still the prescription?). In any case, Bush's one-note economic symphony has succeeded in producing precisely the cacophony of disaster that progressive commentators have predicted all along: massive deficits, little or no economic boost, a hemorrhaging of jobs overseas, and a vastly more polarized America of rich, poor and a disappearing middle class.

Another angry chicken, of course, is coming home in the form of devastating storms and a grossly incompetent administration to deal with them. Bush is not entirely responsible for Hurricanes Katrina or Rita, of course, but he is partially responsible for them by his willful ignorance of the global warming issue. And he is more than a little responsible for the carnage and damage done, because of his budget-slashing on preventative structural projects, because of his deployment of needed-at-home Guard forces to Iraq, because of his staffing of the government with completely incompetent crony hacks, and because of his and their astonishingly lame performance in responding to a known crisis. Where I come from, a president who remains on vacation during possibly the worst natural disaster to hit this country, praises his FEMA chief for doing a "heckuva job" when the guy doesn't know what any American with a TV set has known for 24 hours about New Orleans, and then later fires him for poor performance, is a president who should be impeached for those reasons alone.

The other demons awaiting George W. Bush just around the bend are multiple and grim. One of these days (right?), Patrick Fitzgerald is actually going to move on the Treasongate story, and signs suggest that multiple heads will roll within the White House. The political damage will be even worse than the legal, though, as Bush's clean and patriotic image will be smashed beyond repair, as no one will believe that he himself didn't know all along who committed treason by outing an American spy, and as he will likely lose the key magicians who have kept him afloat for five years and more. Oh well. W's loss will be Leavenworth's gain.

And there is more. The Jack Abramoff investigation has now been tied to the White House. There are also presumably an infinite number of other scandals waiting to explode (can you say 'Halliburton'?) should the Democrats capture either branch of Congress next year, not least of which being those concerning the Downing Street Memo revelations. Gas prices are off the charts and home heating bills are supposed to soar this winter. Jobs are disappearing, along with pensions and healthcare coverage, inflation is likely to rise, and voters are surly already.

But, of course, the biggest cross for Bush to bear is the one he built for himself, and thus the most richly deserved. In Iraq, simply put, there are no good options. None for America, that is, but even fewer for George W. Bush.

What can he do?

He can't win. America (or, more accurately, America's oligarchy) is clearly losing the war as it is. It is a fantasy to imagine that, at this late date, more troops could pacify the resistance. But even if that were so the political consequences to Bush, especially given his promise of no draft on his watch, would be devastating and rapid. American public opinion has already turned decisively against the war. Imagine if there were a draft and all the bumper-sticker patriots across the land had to actually make a sacrifice for their president's transparent lies. All hell would break loose, and the Republican Party would be dead for a generation.

He can't lose. The major downside to wrapping yourself in the flag, landing on aircraft carriers, labeling yourself a "war president", and being marketed in an election campaign as the reliable national security choice is that you had better deliver. Egged on by the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle, Bush no doubt thought Iraq would be a fine little walk in the park from which he would benefit politically for the rest of his presidency. (Nor, assuming this president possesses anything resembling a conscience, need he have concerned himself with resulting deaths, since he told Pat Robertson "we're not going to have any casualties", and he may have even believed it.) Unfortunately for all concerned - most especially the Iraqis and American soldiers - Bush's presidency would be one very real casualty indeed should he decide to pick up his marbles and leave the arena, and so he will not, no matter the carnage or the futility. Doing so would be effectively admitting that there was no legitimate reason for the war in the first place. Everyone now knows that, of course, but were Bush ever to even hint at it, he would be committing instant political suicide. He can't draw. One option is to find some - any - kind of stability, declare victory and go home, saying we got Saddam, we brought democracy, yada, yada, yada. But how many Americans are now going to be fooled by calling an Iraq ruled by militants of one stripe or another a victory, after all the hooey about fighting for democracy in the Middle East? How many think replacing Saddam with a brutal dictator of another name is worth the price of 2,000 American troops and two or three hundred billion dollars? How many will be convinced that Iraqi women having fewer rights than they did under Saddam Hussein, of all regimes, represents a win for the home team? How many will still be unschooled enough to look at a Iranian-dominated theocracy in Iraq and call that a triumph? Moreover, even these total disasters presume a stability of some sort which may be little short of fantasy at this point. When the Saudi foreign minister goes public with his concerns that Iraq is careening toward civil war, you know you're in deep, and no amount inanities sanctimoniously uttered by Scotty McClellan can keep the truth at bay.

He can't get help. Now there's a good one. Maybe the French have finally seen the light and realized what a mistake they made by not bringing something to the party in 2003, eh? No doubt there's a long queue of countries behind them wanting to commit forces to the farces that are decomposing in the Cradle of Civilization. Luckily for George Bush you can still thumb your nose at the rest of the world and have them come to your rescue afterwards. Just think of what a pickle he would be in if that weren't the case...

He can't divert attention. Time was, a government in trouble at home could throw a little war in some hell-hole abroad and divert public attention away from their domestic or other foreign failures. Kinda like Reagan in Grenada, or the Argentinians in the Malvinas, or Thatcher in the Falklands. Yet, while the American public has managed to massively and repeatedly disappoint still sane observers in recent years, it doesn't appear to be in any mood for more of Mr. Bush's Fun With Foreign Policy antics. Not that the country any longer has the available military force to pull it off anyhow, but it hardly seems that an invasion of Iran right now would have much effect diverting attention from Iraq, even if it could somehow successfully be done, another fantasy in its own right.

In short, George W. Bush is toast, as is the whole regressive conservative movement of which he is but the most egregious exemplar. Not even another 9/11 would be likely to help him, as the security president who fails to provide security is the nothing (but simply failed) president. The demise of the right is now likely be true even if Democrats continue hurtling down their current path toward breaking all world records for political cowardice by a major party. Indeed, the worst of the Democrats may now also be in trouble amongst the base - as well they should be - for their cozy associations with the right, enabling its destructive march to the sea these last years.

It is thus too bad, as we emerge from the nightmare of the last quarter-century, that so many of us lefties are atheists, agnostics or otherwise debauched secular humanists. Not only have we had to suffer the reign of Bad King George here on Earth, we can't even have the satisfaction of knowing that he'll be spending the rest of eternity rotting in Hell.

The good news, though, is that he's already there, and the flames are only beginning to warm him up. Perhaps that is why Time describes the dry heaves of a young staffer who had to breach the fantasy bubble and tell this "cold and snappish" president the unhappy truth about an issue, or the National Enquirer's report that Bush, who according to a family member is "falling apart", is back to drinking.

Thus does a new possible ending to the Bush administration suddenly emerge as a real possibility. Previously, I had assumed that our long national nightmare would be over in one of three ways, either with Bush somehow managing to finish his term, with him being impeached, convicted and run out of Washington, or with him being impeached, convicted and then refusing to leave, precipitating a constitutional crisis and even, possibly, a civil war. Now I see a fourth very real possibility.

It was all fun and games when everybody loved him. When the guy who had failed at everything in life except having the right last name all of a sudden was showing those elitist snobs who was tops after all. When the man with a Texas size inferiority complex got to be adored by millions as if he were some kind of religious icon.

But what if that all changes? What if Diminutive George, just like LBJ before him, can't leave the completely scripted bubble his staff manufactures, just as such set-pieces become increasingly difficult to sustain? What if the Peevish President can't escape - even by going to Crawford or Camp David - the mothers of dead children, the baby-killer taunts, the stinging-because-they're-so-accurate chickenhawk accusations, the calls for his own daughters to go to Iraq, the possibility that everyone was right about him all along when they dismissed him as the family clown? What if all of a sudden, it sucks being president? Why bother, then?

It is clear now that one way the Bush administration might end would be with the president's resignation, in order for him to duck into more tranquil quarters. Who knows, maybe he could spend his days getting tanked in Crawford, not writing another book, or going into exile, perhaps in the south of France.

Of course, a pardon deal would have to be prearranged with Cheney, if they haven't convicted him yet, or with Hastert if they have. And, equally certainly, the resignation would be put down to "the president wanting to spend more time with his family", or some such ludicrous McClellanism, no more or less plausible than the rest of his daily fare. But the truth would be plain for all to see. The frat-boy party-time president who condemns kids less than half his age to the hell of futile battle in support of his lies would himself be deserting as commander-in-chief when the fun part ended. Kinda like he did last time he wore a uniform.

History, it would seem, all too rarely delivers justice. The privileged few go out of this life richer than they came into it, while the poor often leave even poorer, not to mention sooner. Those who commit unspeakable crimes sometimes become presidents or prime ministers, while those who dare speak truthfully of those deeds are crushed owing to the threat posed by their honesty.

Even more rare yet are the cases in which history delivers justice with a deliciously deserved irony. But George Bush has provided us with just such a case. And the very delicious irony is that he is now being undone by a cynical choice he himself made to go to war in Iraq with other people's blood and other people's treasure, for the purpose of enhancing his tenuous self-esteem and the power of his presidency.

Goodbye, George. May you know precisely the rest and precisely the peace someone who would do such a thing deserves.

Copyright (c) 2004 - 2005
Yemen Observer Newspaper

•George Bush in Hell (http://www.yobserver.com/news_8298.php)

NYer

10-01-2005, 07:39 PM

Yemen Observer Newspaper

Now there's an eclectic byline...

The 801

10-02-2005, 01:08 AM

Ya know, I have been posting for years here, and this is my first National Enquire sourced story. I have never seen this souce before, but I think it is a lot like Debka. I like how, rather then stating that the president has started drinking again, that he has "started boozing". - 801

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS

By JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

"Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare — especially now whe

n it's such tough going for her husband."

Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.

"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

Age 26 in 1972, he reportedly rounded off a night's boozing with his 16-year-old brother Marvin by challenging his father to a fight.

On November 1, 2000, on the eve of his first presidential election, Bush acknowledged that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Maine. Age 30 at the time, Bush pleaded guilty and paid a $150 fine. His driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine.

"I'm not proud of that," he said. "I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson." In another interview around that time, he said: "Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom (to start) going to AA. I don't think that was my case."

During his 2000 presidential campaign, there were also persistent questions about past cocaine use. Eventually Bush denied using cocaine after 1992, then quickly extended the cocaine-free period back to 1974, when he was 28.

Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great.

"I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."

Published on: 09/21/2005

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426

I highly recommend Bush on the Couch. Very informative.- 801

NYer

10-02-2005, 07:39 AM

http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9803/11/lloyd.bridges.obit/link.airplane.jpg

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking.

experiencediz

10-02-2005, 08:27 PM

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426

"I don't think that was my case (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2000/bush/ellis.html)"

:add07: :mad_06:
By George's own admission he drank too much
http://2004.georgewbush.org/images/bios/dwi1.gif

It wasn't working in any part of his life
http://2004.georgewbush.org/images/bios/dwi2.gif

experiencediz

10-04-2005, 06:54 PM

Even his own generals do not know what the hell is going on!

•Exposing The Lies Of The Bush Administration (http://videos.informationclearinghouse.info/TDS-Iraq-Generals-MCain-10-03-05.wmv)

experiencediz

10-05-2005, 07:13 AM

The Axis Of Evil:Prophetic and Visionary
OCTOBER 4, 2005
AFFAIRS OF STATE
By Stan Crock

When President Bush first uttered the phrase "Axis of Evil" in his 2002 State of the Union Address, many experts thought it was laughable. While the countries referred to -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- were all malevolent, "axis" implied the kind of linkage that existed in World War II between Italy and Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan.

But it simply wasn't believable that the mullahs in Iran would work with Saddam Hussein after eight savage years of war and bloodletting between Iran and Iraq -- the wounds were far too deep for a Shiite-Sunni rapprochement. Similarly, the idea that insular North Korea would join forces with either of these countries was nonsense. Once again, it looked as if President Bush had tortured the English language and intellectual discourse.

MUTUAL AID. Yet strangely enough, President Bush's policies, designed to thwart these countries, actually created what hadn't existed when he first broached the topic. Iran and Iraq haven't been as close in decades as they are now. And while I don't think North Korea and Iran are in cahoots, they do in effect aid each other when they negotiate over their nuclear programs. The nightmare Bush described in 2002 is now a reality, thanks to him.

Let's look at Iran and Iraq. Iran is exerting influence in Iraq far beyond what it ever could do in the past. Instead of Saddam's secular, Sunni-led government, Baghdad is now dominated by Shia with close ties to Tehran. Indeed, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, arguably the most powerful man in Iraq, was born in Iran. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, one of the most popular parties in Iraq, also has close ties to Iran.

Iran is infiltrating Iraq with money and political operatives. When a permanent government is in place in Baghdad, it could well be Islamist because secular moderates have all but vanished. While Islamist rule may not be as strict as it is in Tehran, the two governments will be closely aligned rather than at each other's throats, as in the past. Iraq no longer will be a counterbalance against Iran.

NUCLEAR LEVERAGE. In fact, Peter Galbraith, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace, argues that the proposed Iraqi constitution, while flawed, is the only thing that limits an Iranian power grab. Tehran controls the southern part of Iraq and has great influence in Baghdad. By apportioning control over three sectors to the Kurds, Shia, and Sunni, the constitution "stops Iran from taking over all of Iraq," Galbraith says. "Under the constitution, they'll be running just half of it."

Iran also could have an unintended impact on the six-party nuclear negotiations with North Korea -- and the six-party talks could have an effect on Iran's negotiations. With its oil and economic ties to the West, Iran has leverage to argue that it should not be denied its sovereign right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to nuclear technology, and it may well win that debate. China and Russia seem likely to veto any move toward sanctions at the U.N. Security Council despite ample evidence that Iran has been hiding information about its program for nearly two decades.

What's more, the principles the six parties have agreed to in the North Korea negotiation contemplate a light-water reactor for Pyongyang at some point. If it's O.K. for North Korea, why not Iran?

GOALS VS. RESULTS. The reverse is true as well. The discussion of a light-water reactor for Pyongyang is supposed to take place at an "appropriate time," which the Bush Administration probably thinks means never. But if Iran takes a hard line and is allowed to get its hands on nuclear technology, that will make it harder to deny North Korea its reactor. What would be the principle for doing so? That Iran has oil and North Korea doesn't? Indeed, energy-poor North Korea would have a stronger argument that it needs an energy source than petroleum-rich Tehran. North Korea and Iran may not be working formally in tandem, but they might as well be.

It surely wasn't Bush's intent to create an Axis of Evil. But he has done precisely that when his goal was to defang those nations. The President is proving prophetic and visionary -- but not at all the way he wanted to be.

•The Axis Of Evil:Prophetic and Visionary (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2005/nf2005104_6172_db056.htm)

al-Canine

10-05-2005, 09:31 AM

I love reading this thread! :mad_01:

NYer

10-05-2005, 10:02 AM

I love reading this thread! :mad_01:

Me too!

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/americavotes/carter-shirt.jpeg

NYer

10-05-2005, 01:32 PM

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

"According to the National Enquirer, President Bush has started drinking again. Boy, he'll do anything to get Ted Kennedy's support for that Supreme Court nominee. ... You know who I feel sorry for—Barbara Bush. Her son's hitting the bottle and her husband's hanging out with Bill Clinton. She's the one who should be drinking!" - Jay Leno

al-Canine

10-05-2005, 01:37 PM

"According to the National Enquirer, President Bush has started drinking again. Boy, he'll do anything to get Ted Kennedy's support for that Supreme Court nominee. ... You know who I feel sorry for—Barbara Bush. Her son's hitting the bottle and her husband's hanging out with Bill Clinton. She's the one who should be drinking!" - Jay Leno
:add09:

Klaus

10-06-2005, 04:58 PM

Q: Why does Bush give a "speech billed by the White House as a major policy address" at 10:00am on a Thursday?

A: So the majority of hard working Americans will not be able to hear it!

Brilliant!

NYer

10-06-2005, 05:04 PM

Q: Why does Bush give a "speech billed by the White House as a major policy address" at 10:00am on a Thursday?

A: So the majority of hard working Americans will not be able to hear it!

Brilliant!

Don't worry - it will give Chris Matthews and all the other pundits plenty of time to dissect it.

The 801

10-06-2005, 05:32 PM

God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers

Category: News

Date: 06.10.2005

This press release is embargoed until 2230 hours on Thursday 6 October. Before that time it is only available through the link which you have been sent.

President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The series charts the attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999/2000 to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August.

Norma Percy, series producer of The 50 Years War (1998) returns, with producers Mark Anderson and Dan Edge, to tell the inside story of another seven years of crisis.

Presidents and Prime Ministers, their generals and ministers tell what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.

Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace - Mondays 10, 17 and 24 October, from 9.00 to 10.00pm on BBC TWO.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml

( Where do I start? God told him to invade Iraq? Does he hear voices in his head? Isn't Religous Preoccupation ( no pun intended) the most common mental illness symptom in Mental Hospitals?

I think I am going to be ill..... God told me to be ill....-801)

experiencediz

10-06-2005, 10:32 PM

He does not remember...

White House denies Bush God claim

The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series that President Bush claimed God told him to invade Iraq.
"He's never made such comments," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The comments were attributed to Mr Bush by the Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath in the upcoming TV series Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs.

Mr Shaath said that in a 2003 meeting with Mr Bush, the US president said he was "driven with a mission from God".

Holy war?

"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did.

"'And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who attended the meeting in June 2003 too, also appears on the documentary series to recount how Mr Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The TV series charts recent attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from former US President Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999-2000 to Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip this year.

It seeks to uncover what happened behind closed doors by speaking to presidents and prime ministers, along with their generals and ministers.

Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace will be broadcast on BBC Two on Monday 10, 17 and 24 October at 2100 BST.

•White House denies Bush God claim (White House denies Bush God claim )

See Also Bush puts God on his side (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2921345.stm)

The 801

10-07-2005, 10:48 AM

Hey, Experiancediz, how about a link please....

I took the liberty of checking that other link:

"Bush puts God on his side
By Tom Carver
BBC Washington correspondent

Before September 11, President George W Bush kept his evangelical Christian beliefs largely to himself.

President Bush speaks to marines and their families at Camp Lejeune in the US
Bush convinced God wants him to engage the forces of evil
He had turned to God at the age of 40 as a way of kicking alcoholism, and his faith had kept him on the straight and narrow ever since, giving him the drive to reach the White House."

Here, in a nutshell, is the "Dry Drunk" scenario, spelled out. Black and white thinking, rigid daily schedual, plenty of vacation time..... and to think america was frightened by a Clinton because he smoked some weed.

experiencediz

10-07-2005, 05:00 PM

experiencediz

10-07-2005, 11:05 PM

Correction: Bush's 'hotline to God'

http://www.itn.co.uk/news/story876477.jpg

Nabil: Bush was misreported

NABIL Shaath, the Palestinian deputy prime minister, has denied that George Bush, the US president, said God told him to invade Iraq.

Mr Bush told him he was "driven with a mission from God", but "we never thought he literally had God speaking to him".

•Nabil: Bush was misreported (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2056842005)

DC Penguin

10-08-2005, 01:52 AM

It was me. My phone number and God's differ by 1 digit (it's a 7 in my phone number and a 1 in God's). Bush misdirected the call to me and I had to prank him. I'm really sorry it got so far out of hand.

I can't believe he only told you that I said he should attack Iraq. Did he also have the televised water balloon battle with Laura and the girls like I suggested? Did he carve George + Laura on all the trees on the White House lawn like I told him? Did he give away money for nothing to everyone he could find?

Gee . . . I guess he got half of it.

Sorry. I thought he realized it was a joke.

The 801

10-08-2005, 08:58 PM

Weren't Jake and Elwood also driven with a mission from god? Do you think Bush could be plagiarizing the Blues Brothers Movie to justify the war in Iraq?

Oh my.....

experiencediz

10-08-2005, 11:25 PM

If the International Atomic Energy Agency & Dir, Mohamed ElBaradei can win Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way, some group or body should look into the other side of the coin to put Bush & Blair on trial like Nazis for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

•More On Accountability (http://www.freedomtocare.org/page313.htm)

The 801

10-09-2005, 03:21 AM

Looks like bush might lose his compass....

CIA Leak: Karl Rove and the Case of the Missing E-mail

Oct. 17, 2005 issue - The White House's handling of a potentially crucial e-mail sent by senior aide Karl Rove two years ago set off a chain of events that has led special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to summon Rove for a fourth grand jury appearance this week. His return has created heightened concern among White House officials and their allies that Fitzgerald may be preparing to bring indictments when a federal grand jury that has been investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity expires at the end of October. Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, tells NEWSWEEK that, in his last conversations with Fitzgerald, the prosecutor assured Luskin "he has not made any decisions."
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

But lawyers close to the case, who asked not to be identified because it's ongoing, say Fitzgerald appears to be focusing in part on discrepancies in testimony between Rove and Time reporter Matt Cooper about their conversation of July 11, 2003. In Cooper's account, Rove told him the wife of White House critic Joseph Wilson worked at the "agency" on WMD issues and was responsible for sending Wilson on a trip to Niger to check out claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But Rove did not disclose this conversation to the FBI when he was first interviewed by agents in the fall of 2003—nor did he mention it during his first grand jury appearance, says one of the lawyers familiar with Rove's account. (He did not tell President George W. Bush about it either, assuring him that fall only that he was not part of any "scheme" to discredit Wilson by outing his wife, the lawyer says.) But after he testified, Luskin discovered an e-mail Rove had sent that same day—July 11—alerting deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadly that he had just talked to Cooper, the lawyer says. In the e-mail, Rove said Cooper pushed him on whether the president was being hurt by the Niger controversy. "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote Hadley, adding that he warned Cooper not to get "far out in front on this." After reviewing the e-mail, Rove then returned to the grand jury last year and reported the Cooper conversation. He testified that the talk was initially about "welfare reform"—a topic mentioned in the e-mail—and that Cooper then changed the subject. Cooper has written that he doesn't recall a discussion of welfare reform.

Why didn't the Rove e-mail surface earlier? The lawyer says it's because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right "search words" weren't used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.) But the e-mail isn't the only belatedly discovered document in the case. Fitzgerald has also summoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller back for questioning this week: a notebook was discovered in the paper's Washington bureau, reflecting a late June 2003 conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, about Wilson and his trip to Africa, says one of the lawyers. The notebook may also be significant because Wilson's identity was not yet public. A lawyer for the Times declined to comment.

—Michael Isikoff
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9630676/site/newsweek/

experiencediz

10-09-2005, 05:54 AM

Looks like bush might lose his compass...
His compass has been going crazy for a while now!
You can run but you can't hide!

Signs of a lame duck president?
By Bill Schneider
CNN Political Unit
Friday, October 7, 2005; Posted: 5:10 p.m. EDT (21:10 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- When ambitious members of the president's own party score points against him, it's a sign the president may be becoming a lame duck.

It's also the Play of the Week.

Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a leading conservative, may run for president in 2008. You'd think a potential Republican contender would support president Bush down the line.

Think again.

Brownback did not exactly rush to support Harriet Miers, Bush's pick for the Supreme Court.

"We don't know the nominee, or what this person will or won't do. And there's a great deal of frustration with that," he said.

Many conservatives share that frustration. They want assurances -- up front -- that the new justice will move the court to the right.

Brownback is making himself a spokesman for those doubters. That may not hurt him if he decides to run for the Republican nomination.

Because the 60-year-old Miers spent her career in private practice and as a member of Bush's White House staff, conservatives outside the nation's capital have little to hang their hopes on except the president's word that she would be a judge in the mold of Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

Doesn't the president's word that Miers is a true conservative count for anything? Well, yes.

"I do think she reflects the president, and I think that's the strongest thing, really, that she has going for her," Brownback said Friday.

But apparently not enough.

"It would be better to -- let's have someone we know the record on," Brownback said.

Other conservatives admonish their colleagues not to leap to conclusions about Miers.

"Just shut up for a few minutes and give the lady a chance to find out who she is," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said.

But conservatives looking for someone to speak for them may turn to Brownback, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He's betting that loyalty to the cause will outweigh loyalty to the president. Could be a good bet. Definitely the Play of the Week.

Brownback voted to confirm John Roberts as chief justice without knowing a lot about his views. But Roberts was not replacing a swing vote on the court.

If confirmed, Miers would replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate whose vote has been critical on issues including abortion and affirmative action.

And anyway, Brownback said, ``John Roberts is a rock star,'' while Harriet Miers is ``following Elvis.''

•Signs of a lame duck president? (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/07/miers.brownback/index.html)

The 801

10-12-2005, 08:33 AM

This is just the style of Bush, crappy thoughtless behavior. Didn't he originally run as the CEO / personal responsibility president? You can tell that Rove is not involved in this behavior. He really has no compass, does he? - 801

Miers to face hostile queries from both sides of aisle
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 12, 2005

Harriet Miers, unlike previous Republican nominees, will face hostile questioning from both Democrats and Republicans when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Several Republican senators -- including committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas -- have said they won't be cutting her any slack just because she's a Republican nominee. And Republican staffers say privately that they're researching her background as if she were a "third-party nominee."
Meanwhile yesterday, a leading Christian conservative said the White House told him that some prospective Supreme Court nominees conservatives would have preferred withdrew their names from President Bush's "short list" before the nomination -- raising the possibility that Miss Miers wasn't Mr. Bush's first pick.
James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said he spoke with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove on Oct. 1 -- two days before the Miers nomination -- and was told that "Harriet Miers was at the top of the short list."
Also on that list were several candidates that many conservatives say they would have preferred, Mr. Dobson said on his radio program that was recorded yesterday and will be broadcast today.
"Well, what Karl told me is that some of those individuals took themselves off that list," he said, according to a transcript obtained last night. "They would not allow their names to be considered because the process has become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter that they didn't want to subject themselves or the members of their families to it."
White House officials could not be reached for comment last night.
Mr. Dobson also said that no one gave him any assurances that Miss Miers would rule any certain way in specific court cases but only that her judicial philosophy "was consistent with the promises that President Bush had made when he was campaigning."
Mr. Specter had suggested he might call Mr. Dobson and Mr. Rove to testify before his committee about any inside knowledge they might have about Miss Miers -- a threat that has only heightened the angst many conservatives feel about the nomination.
Republican staff lawyers on the committee -- normally the ones building the case to confirm a Republican nominee -- say they are despondent over Mr. Bush's choice and some are actively working to thwart her.
"I don't know anybody who is buying what the White House is selling here," said one Republican staffer.
"They're putting out a bunch of positive rhetoric, but they're not putting any substance behind it," said another.

Since her nomination last week, Republican staffers privately have complained bitterly that Miss Miers isn't verifiably conservative. In one staff meeting last week in the office of Judiciary Committee chief counsel Michael O'Neill, a staffer reportedly cried in disappointment.
Mr. O'Neill sent out an e-mail yesterday warning staffers to tread carefully when talking about their dissatisfaction.
"I really cannot stress enough (as I did at our last meeting) that we need to be careful about what we say to the press. I obviously don't control your access to the media, but I do care about you guys and don't want anyone to get themselves in a tough spot," Mr. O'Neill wrote. "We should not want to be out in front of our clients on an issue that is important to the President & Leadership."
In that e-mail, Mr. O'Neill told staffers: "If your member wants you to circulate negative talking points or to talk to the press, that's one thing." But he warned against making negative comments "without your client's permission. We're all in this together."
Still, numerous staffers have spoken about their dissatisfaction -- but only on the condition that they not be named.
One Republican said Mr. Bush "promised us a Scalia or a Thomas, not a Souter," referring to conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who have been praised by Mr. Bush, and Justice David H. Souter, the "stealth nominee" nominated by Mr. Bush's father who usually sides with the liberal wing of the court.
A second meeting last week between staffers and White House officials devolved into a confrontational affair. Republican Senate aides who attended that meeting say the White House no longer returns their phone calls and e-mails seeking information about Miss Miers.
Republicans also say they were angered by some of the White House "spin," such as the argument that Miss Miers is similar to conservative icon and former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist because neither had previous experience as a judge.
"That's just grossly offensive," said an aide.
Staffers also said many of them chuckled over a biographical "pocket card" of talking points about Miss Miers that the White House distributed for use by any senator wishing to praise the nominee. "They had to double-space it," said one aide, laughing.
That attitude is shared by other Hill conservatives. A conservative lobbyist for Republican judicial nominees said that fighting for the Miers nomination has been "utterly joyless."
"I don't even want to be in politics anymore," said the lobbyist. "Why don't I just give up and move to suburban Maryland and work in communications for some big corporation?"

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20051011-115020-4053r.htm

experiencediz

10-13-2005, 05:03 AM

What Two Thousand Looks Like (http://theunitedamerican.blogs.com/Movies/2000A/2000.html)

experiencediz

10-13-2005, 11:25 PM

Maybe Bush could go to Iraq and have an unscripted meeting with an IED. I don't mean that, of course. :add09:

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers "Staged"
Posted: Thursday, Oct 13, 2005 - 03:51:20 pm PDT
By DEB RIECHMANN

WASHINGTON - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you."

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit _ the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

"If the question comes up about partnering _ how often do we train with the Iraqi military _ who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit _ the hometown _ and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

"So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

"You've got tremendous support here at home," Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday's event was coordinated with the Defense Department but that the troops were expressing their own thoughts. With satellite feeds, coordination often is needed to overcome technological challenges, such as delays, he said.

"I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect," he said, adding that the president wanted to talk with troops on the ground who have firsthand knowledge about the situation.

The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.

The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.

"Thank you very much for everything," he gushed. "I like you."

On preparations for the vote, 1st Lt. Gregg Murphy of Tennessee said: "Sir, we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make this thing a success. ... Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We're really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they're doing everything."

On the training of Iraqi security forces, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo from Scotia, N.Y., said to Bush: "I can tell you over the past 10 months, we've seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. ... Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations."

Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq.

"I thought you looked familiar," Bush said, and then joked: "I probably look familiar to you, too."

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

•Bush Teleconference With Soldiers "Staged" (http://www.cdapress.com/articles/2005/10/13/ap/headlines/d8d7dm682.txt)

The 801

10-14-2005, 12:26 AM

Very sloppy amature stuff this. Who is guiding the president with this advice? That is the problem here, Bush is pure marketing with no substance. We see it again and again. Reality frightens him. I pray for the Union.

experiencediz

10-14-2005, 07:25 AM

Poor guy was bored,just needed an action somewhere, Poor laura !

Bush wanted "to go beyond Iraq", mentioned Pakistan

New York: Two months before the Iraq invasion, US President George W. Bush had told British Premier Tony Blair that he "wanted to go beyond Iraq" in dealing with the spread of weapons of mass destruction and mentioned Pakistan as one of the countries posing problems, a US daily said.

Bush's comment, made during a private telephone conversation on January 30, 2003 and mentioned in notes taken by Matthew Rycroft, then the private secretary to Blair, have been cited in a new book, The New York Times said. The reference is confined to one sentence in a two-page document, which says that Bush "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan," the daily said.

The notes do not provide any indication of what Bush meant by including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the list of concern over so-called weapons of mass destruction. The comment reported in an American edition of "Lawless World," by Philippe Sands, a professor at University College, London, could be significant because it appeared to add Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to a list that previously had included public mentions only of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which Bush had called an "axis of evil", the paper said.

The British government has not questioned the authenticity of the documents described in the book. The White House declined to comment, saying any telephone conversation between Bush and Blair at that time would have been private and personal. A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington also declined to comment.

•Bush wanted "to go beyond Iraq", mentioned Pakistan (http://www.manoramaonline.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=manorama/MmArticle/CommonFullStory&c=MmArticle&channel=News&cid=1129277282418&colid=1002258272837&count=10&p=1002366458817&WebLogicSession=Q02EJqGlt0pjRfP22dX3zGzR399WfBQUGP 9AK8hdattukHI2nGxx|88)

True Lies
Friday, October 14, 2005

In response to Jim Posmer's letter of Sept. 25 ("Bush Made No Saddam Claim"), I believe Mr. Posmer is missing the point. Whether or not Bush explicitly said that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 is immaterial. Polling data show that in the fall of 2002, about one-third of Americans believed that Iraq had some involvement in the 9/11 attacks. So Bush & Co. developed a strategy for selling a war to a recalcitrant public.

In statement after statement, administration officials created the impression that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It worked. Polling data taken around the time we invaded Iraq shows that 70 percent of Americans believed that the war was an effort to avenge the 9/11 attacks. A year later, faced with the 9/11 Commission concluding that there is "no credible evidence" for a connection between Iraq and 9/11, the lack of weapons of mass destruction, and the mounting accusations of repeated lies during the buildup to invasion, Republicans switched to startlingly Orwellian tactics by telling us they did not say what most Americans bought into.

The Republicans are simply employing their time-honored tradition of maintaining plausible deniability. Of course Bush & Co. never directly lied, technically. What they did was much more calculated and insidious. For example, on Sept. 25, 2002, Bush said "you can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." Well, if Saddam was not involved in 9/11 and al-Qaida was, that would be a clear way to distinguish them. But again, technically, I guess you could argue from that statement that Bush was not tying Saddam to 9/11.

What is most disturbing, however, is that Republicans would stand on this extremely weak argument to somehow deflect criticism of our invasion of a sovereign nation, and that liberal patriots are somehow "un-American" for expecting our government not to lie to us. The fallback argument of this sad administration is that all of Bush & Co.'s lies are true. Technically.

RYAN E. FLANNERY

Mulberry

•Bush Pulls Off True Lies (http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051014/NEWS/510140357/1037/EDIT)

NYer

10-14-2005, 08:48 AM

Personally, I'd prefer Iran - something this president (http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/12/164726.shtml) should have done in November 1979.

experiencediz

10-14-2005, 05:39 PM

10/14/2005
Free Fall

•George W. Bush:Free Fall (http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm)

NYer

10-15-2005, 07:49 PM

Someone else is in Free Fall today ...

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/media-pictures/i_saddam.gif

al-Canine

10-16-2005, 12:47 AM

WOW, isn't this cool.... NYer's 1000th post! YEA!!!!! :happy_02: :happy_10: :happy_03:

Congratulations. :happy_01:

NYer

10-16-2005, 11:43 AM

Thanks 10^6 to All! And an especial tip of the Mets Cap to A-C whose tireless efforts have kept the ship afloat. Give yourself a big pat on the back ...

http://www.karenscreativebaskets.com/thankyou1.jpg

al-Canine

10-16-2005, 01:40 PM

Oh Dahling! Thanks for the kind words, but it is Cbaby who keeps things afloat around here. I just try to keep a handle on the all the drama and excitement here in the NEWS section! :D

But seriously, NYer, I think I can speak for many IH citizens in thanking you for your--now--over a thousand posts, all of which are a wonderful contribution to this little space in the universe. :)

The 801

10-19-2005, 03:44 PM

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Wanted, dead or alive: Where's bin Laden now?
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Columnist | October 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- It's been four years since President Bush, in the first days after the worst terrorist attack on US soil, declared: ''I want justice. And there's an old poster out West . . . I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.' "

That ringing call referred to Osama bin Laden, whose desire to destroy the United States has now been the basis for billions of dollars in security planning, a war in Afghanistan, and nuclear nightmares that continue to disturb the sleep of millions of Americans.

Bin Laden, of course, has not been caught. Nor has Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who harbored bin Laden as he plotted the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nor has Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's top lieutenant. Nor has the anthrax terrorist who paralyzed Washington in 2001. Nor has Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for beheadings in Iraq.

The United States, of course, has captured many other Al Qaeda leaders, the most important being Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the leading 9/11 plotter, who was widely considered to be Al Qaeda's third-ranking leader. The United States also has tracked down most of the Iraqi leaders pictured on playing cards distributed everywhere from Tikrit to gas stations on I-95.

Tomorrow, the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, is scheduled to go on trial, in an event that is considered crucial to healing Iraq's wounds.

But the failure to capture so many of the people responsible for attacks on Americans has to be considered a disappointment. As years have passed, with few reports of progress in the inquiries involving bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and the anthrax killer, high-ranking officials largely have stopped talking about them. And the public, from talk-radio shouters to the most devout Internet conspiracy theorists, has been strangely muted as well.

It's as if all of America recognizes the stakes in capturing these terrorist leaders, yet it doesn't want to confront the fact that so many hunts have been fruitless.

But as Hussein's trial proves yet again the cathartic effect of bringing a wrongdoer to justice, Americans will no doubt have occasion to wish for the capture of other demons.

And it may be useful to bring the manhunt for bin Laden and others back into the spotlight, since specific factors seem to be undermining each case.

Dan Benjamin, a former National Security Council official in the Clinton Administration and a coauthor of the new book ''The Next Attack," argues that the search for bin Laden has been hampered by a diversion of resources to Iraq, and by some measure of deference to Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding. ''Given the diversion of resources early in 2002, given the way we've played the relationship with Pakistan, it's not surprising that we haven't found bin Laden," Benjamin said in an interview.

The same factors would have hampered the search for al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar.

The anthrax attacker, however, is now believed by most authorities to be unrelated to Islamic fundamentalism, a domestic terrorist who sought to capitalize on the wave of fear following Sept. 11, 2001.

That fact puts him or her in a different category -- one made all the more mysterious as the attacks have stopped, and as the trail, apparently, has grown cold.

The failure to capture Zarqawi is less a mystery than proof of the difficulty of tracking down a stealth warrior.

Back when Hussein was in charge of Iraq, Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad for two months of medical treatment.

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell has cited Zarqawi's visit to Baghdad as proof of Iraq's complicity with Al Qaeda, presumably because Hussein's regime could easily have captured him, if it weren't secretly cooperating with terrorists.

''Iraq officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaeda," Powell told the United Nations, referring to Zarqawi. ''These denials are simply not credible."

But the United States has been in Iraq for 2 1/2 years and still hasn't been able to collar Zarqawi, who, far from hiding out, has been conducting brazen attacks on Iraqi citizens and coalition forces.

His continued ability to menace US and Iraqi citizens reveals how badly Americans underestimated the difficulty of capturing terror leaders.

But the difficulty, and the discomfort it causes to all Americans, are not reasons to allow these manhunts to fade into the fringes of national debate: One way to celebrate Hussein's coming to justice would be to redouble efforts to capture other mass murderers.

Dead or alive.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/10/18/wanted_dead_or_alive_wheres_bin_laden_now/

I guess Bush left the CIA in charge of getting him. - 801

NYer

10-19-2005, 04:01 PM

According to this Military Medical Consultant...

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/davane-web/herosdeseries/images/mccoy.gif

"He's Dead, Jim."

The 801

10-20-2005, 09:01 AM

Cheney 'cabal' hijacked US foreign policy
By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.

“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”

The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."

Among his other charges:

■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.

Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.

“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”

www.newamerica.net

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/afdb7b0c-40f3-11da-b3f9-00000e2511c8.html

Here is the transcript of his speech:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c925a686-40f4-11da-b3f9-00000e2511c8.html

NYer

10-20-2005, 09:06 AM

[Speculation alert]

No indictments result from the Fitzgerald probe.
Fitzgerald issues a long report touching on the issues of the use and abuse of pre-war intelligence.

[/speculation alert]

The 801

10-21-2005, 01:18 PM

Now, from our friend Pat Buchanan.......

Money for Nothing

Billions of dollars have disappeared, gone to bribe Iraqis and line contractors’ pockets.

by Philip Giraldi

The United States invaded Iraq with a high-minded mission: destroy dangerous weapons, bring democracy, and trigger a wave of reform across the Middle East. None of these have happened.

When the final page is written on America’s catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure—corruption. Large-scale and pervasive corruption meant that available resources could not be used to stabilize and secure Iraq in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), when it was still possible to do so. Continuing corruption meant that the reconstruction of infrastructure never got underway, giving the Iraqi people little incentive to co-operate with the occupation. Ongoing corruption in arms procurement and defense spending means that Baghdad will never control a viable army while the Shi’ite and Kurdish militias will grow stronger and produce a divided Iraq in which constitutional guarantees will be irrelevant.

The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

Some of the corruption grew out of the misguided neoconservative agenda for Iraq, which meant that a serious reconstruction effort came second to doling out the spoils to the war’s most fervent supporters. The CPA brought in scores of bright, young true believers who were nearly universally unqualified. Many were recruited through the Heritage Foundation website, where they had posted their résumés. They were paid six-figure salaries out of Iraqi funds, and most served in 90-day rotations before returning home with their war stories. One such volunteer was Simone Ledeen, daughter of leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen. Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training, she nevertheless became a senior advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. Another was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s older brother Michael who, though utterly unqualified, was named director of private-sector development for all of Iraq.

The 15-month proconsulship of the CPA disbursed nearly $20 billion, two-thirds of it in cash, most of which came from the Development Fund for Iraq that had replaced the UN Oil for Food Program and from frozen and seized Iraqi assets. Most of the money was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 “cashpaks,” each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills. Twelve billion dollars moved that way between May 2003 and June 2004, drawn from accounts administered by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The $100 bills weighed an estimated 363 tons.

Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money “off the books,” including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or “meter” oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering.

Thus the country was awash in unaccountable money. British sources report that the CPA contracts that were not handed out to cronies were sold to the highest bidder, with bribes as high as $300,000 being demanded for particularly lucrative reconstruction contracts.

The contracts were especially attractive because no work or results were necessarily expected in return. It became popular to cancel contracts without penalty, claiming that security costs were making it too difficult to do the work. A $500 million power-plant contract was reportedly awarded to a bidder based on a proposal one page long. After a joint commission rejected the proposal, its members were replaced by the minister, and approval was duly obtained. But no plant has been built.

Where contracts are actually performed, their nominal cost is inflated sufficiently to provide handsome bribes for everyone involved in the process. Bribes paid to government ministers reportedly exceed $10 million.

Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him.

Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA. Sources suggest that a deliberate attempt was being made to run down the balance and spend the money while the CPA still had authority and before an Iraqi government could be formed.

The only certified public-accounting firm used by the CPA to monitor its spending was a company called North Star Consultants, located in San Diego, which was so small that it operated out of a private home. It was subsequently determined that North Star did not, in fact, perform any review of the CPA’s internal spending controls. Today, no one can account for billions of those dollars or even suggest how the money was spent. And as the CPA no longer exists, there is also little interest in re-examining its transparency or accountability.

Bremer escaped Baghdad by helicopter two days before his proconsulship expired to avoid a possible ambush on the road leading to the airport, which he had been unable to secure. He has recently been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor he shares with ex-CIA Director George “Slam-dunk” Tenet.

Considerable fraud has been alleged regarding American companies, much of which can never be addressed because the Bush administration does not regard contracts with the CPA as pertaining to the U.S. government, even though U.S. taxpayer dollars were involved in some transactions.

Many of the contracts for work in Iraq were awarded on a cost-plus basis, in which an agreed-upon percentage of profit would be added to the actual costs of performing the contract. Such contracts are an invitation to fraud, and unscrupulous companies will make every effort to increase their costs so that the profits will also increase proportionally.

Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, has a no-bid monopoly contract with the Army Corps of Engineers that is now estimated to be worth $10 billion. In June 2005, Pentagon contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional committee that the agreement was the “most blatant and improper contracting abuse” that she had ever witnessed, a frank assessment that subsequently earned her a demotion.

Halliburton has frequently been questioned over its poor record keeping, and critics claim that it has a history of overcharging for its services. In May 1967, a company called RMK/BRJ could not account for $120 million in materiel sent to Vietnam and was investigated several times for overcharging on fuel. RMK/BRJ is now known as KBR or Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been the focus of congressional, Department of Defense, and General Accountability Office investigations. Defense Contract Audit Agency auditors have questioned Halliburton’s charges on a $1.6 billion fuel contract, claiming that the overcharges on the contract exceed $200 million. In one instance, the company charged the Army more than $27 million to transport $82,000 worth of fuel from Kuwait to Iraq. Halliburton has also been accused of billing the Army for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers, though it was only actually serving 14,000. In another operation, KBR purchased fleets of Mercedes trucks at $85,000 each to re-supply U.S. troops. The trucks carried no spare parts or even extra tires for the grueling high-speed run across the Kuwaiti and Iraqi deserts. When the trucks broke down on the highway, they were abandoned and destroyed rather than repaired.

Responding to complaints, Halliburton refused to permit independent auditing and inspected itself using so-called “Tiger Teams.” One such team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel while it was doing its audit, running up a bill of more than $1 million that was passed on to U.S. taxpayers.

Another U.S. firm well connected to the Bush White House, Custer Battles, has provided security services to the coalition, receiving $11 million in Iraqi funds including $4 million in cash in a sole-source contract to supply security at Baghdad International Airport. The company had never provided airport security before receiving the contract. It also received a $21 million no-bid contract to provide security for the exchange of Iraqi currency. It has been alleged that much of the currency “replaced” by Custer Battles has never been accounted for. The company also allegedly took over abandoned Iraqi-owned forklifts at the airport, repainted them, and then leased them back to the airport authority through a company set up in the Cayman Islands. Custer Battles reportedly set up a number of shell companies in offshore tax havens in Lebanon, Cyprus, and the Cayman Islands to handle the cash flow.

Two former company managers turned whistleblowers have charged that the company defrauded the U.S. government of at least $50 million. The Bush administration’s Justice Department has only reluctantly, and under pressure from a Newsweek exposé, supported the rights of the plaintiffs in the case. The White House has indicated that it is not interested in assisting other investigations of fraud in Iraqi contracting, preferring to regard the CPA as a “multinational entity” and thereby limiting its vulnerability in American courts.

Another American contractor, CACI International, which was involved in the Abu Ghraib interrogations, was accused by the GAO in April 2004 of having failed to keep records on hours of work that it was billing for and of routinely upgrading employee job descriptions so that more could be charged per employee per hour. Both are apparently common practices among contractors in Iraq, and audits routinely determine that there is little in the way of paperwork to support billings. The GAO report also confirms that many private security contractors in Iraq have been charging the U.S. government exorbitant fees for their services, frequently because the contracts allow security costs to be rolled into the overall cost of the contract without being itemized. In one case, contract security guards were effectively being billed at $33,000 per guard per month while the average rate for a security specialist worked out to between $13,000 and $20,000 per month.

The CPA also spread its largesse around the U.S. armed forces, distributing over $600 million in cash to four regional commanders to fund reconstruction projects as part of the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program. An audit of one region disclosed that 80 percent of the funds could not be accounted for, and more that $7 million in cash was missing. It is widely believed that many of the contracting agents working under the regional commands literally stole the money. In one reported instance, an American contracting officer doubled the price of a multimillion-dollar contract and brazenly explained that the extra money would be for his retirement fund.

Unfortunately, the corruption of the occupation outlived the departure of Paul Bremer and the demise of the CPA. A recent high-level investigation of the Iraqi interim government concluded that the corruption is now so pervasive as to be irreversible. One prominent businessman estimates that 95 percent of all business activity involves some form of bribery or kickback. The bureaucrats and fixers who live off of bribery are referred to by ordinary Iraqis as “Ali Babas,” named after the character in The Thousand and One Nights who was able to access riches from a treasure cave by saying “open sesame.” For the average Iraqi businessman, there was formerly only one hand out, that of Saddam’s designated minion. Now every hand is out. The educated and entrepreneurial are leaving the country in droves, as is most of the beleaguered Christian minority. Huge government appropriations are approved by Iraqi lawmakers and then simply disappear. Meanwhile, life for the average Iraqi does not improve, and oil production, water supplies, and electricity generation are all at lower levels than they were when the U.S. took control in 2003. The only thing that everyone knows is that all the money is gone and daily life in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein.

The undocumented cash flow continued long after the CPA folded. Over $1.5 billion was disbursed to interim Iraqi ministries without any accounting, and more than $1 billion designated for provincial treasuries never made it out of Baghdad. More than $430 million in contracts issued by the Petroleum Ministry were unsupported by any documentation, and $8 billion were given to government ministries that had no financial controls in place. Nearly all of it disappeared, spent on “payroll,” wages for “ghost employees” in the Ministries of the Interior and Defense. In one case, an Army brigade receiving money to support 2,200 men was found to have fewer than 300 effectives. 602 actual guards at the Ministry of the Interior were billed as more than 8,200 for payroll purposes.

Iraqi Airways carried 2,400 employees even though it had not operated for over a year and had no planes. The airline itself was sold to an unidentified buyer without any paperwork to show for how much it was sold and what assets were included. It has been alleged that the buyer might well have been Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi.

Nearly all payrolls in the national guard and national police were also inflated, leading to uncertainty over how large the security forces actually were—still an open question. Absentees from the nominal rolls of police and soldiers provided by government ministries are believed to number in the tens of thousands, and as the United States Congress has figured out, frequently cited figures on available trained manpower are largely imaginary.

Even the “coalition of the willing” partners have been quick to cash in. Polish helicopters purchased as part of a $300 million deal with arms maker Bumar Ltd. were found to be obsolete, largely unflyable, and were actually rejected by the Iraqis. Bullets purchased from Poland by the Defense Ministry cost three times the normal international price. Five Polish peacekeepers have been arrested for demanding $90,000 in bribes. Both British and American soldiers have also demanded bribes from shopkeepers and travelers.

In yet another instance of take-it-while-you-can, a senior Interior Ministry official flew to Beirut in a helicopter accompanied by $10 million in newly printed Iraqi dinars. He has yet to return. Interim Iraqi President Iyad Allawi’s Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan transferred $500 million to a bank account in Lebanon, allegedly to buy weapons, in a case that continues to be murky. Shaalan is reportedly vacationing abroad and has not returned to Iraq. A Bremer favorite at the Defense Ministry, Ziad Tareq Cattan, was responsible for a number of shady arms-procurement deals. A warrant has been issued for his arrest, an unusual occurrence, and he is avoiding detention by staying with family in Erbil in Kurdistan.

Countless billions will never be accounted for, and the full cost of corruption has yet to be tallied. Sources report that much of the money that was designated for the development of a national army and police force is actually going to units that are exclusively Kurd or Shi’ite in expectation of a day of reckoning over the country’s oil supplies. The Kurds have made no secret of their desire to continue their autonomy-bordering-on-independence and have stated that they regard Kirkuk as their own. The Shi’ites have possession of the oil-producing region to the south and are using their control of the Interior Ministry to fill police ranks with their own pro-Iranian Badr Brigade members as well as militiamen drawn from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army. The Sunnis are the odd men out, virtually guaranteeing that, far from becoming the model democracy the U.S. set out to build, Iraq will descend deeper into chaos—aided in no small part by the culture of corruption we helped to fortify.
_______________________________________________

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.

October 24, 2005 Issue

http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_10_24/cover.html

NYer

10-21-2005, 01:47 PM

According to The Gallup Organization (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KVD/is_1_3/ai_109025096/pg_4) Bush's low approval ratings ( 39.5 %) are still higher than the low points for all commanders in chief dating back to Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s.

The low points for recent commanders in chief are as follows:

Bill Clinton: 37 percent

George H. W. Bush: 29 percent

Ronald Reagan: 35 percent

Jimmy Carter: 28 percent

Gerald Ford: 37 percent

Richard Nixon: 24 percent

Lyndon Johnson: 35 percent

To find presidents with higher low-point approval ratings than Bush, one has to go back to John Kennedy at 56 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower at 48 percent.

NYer

10-21-2005, 03:21 PM

America had enough of Jimmy Carter, now if he would just go away

Prentiss Davis
October 20, 2005

"When I studied history in college we were taught that James Buchanan was the worst president of the United States and we will not see the likes of him again; but no-one could have foreseen Jimmy Carter."

So wrote columnist Joseph Alsop. No matter how hard the left tries, facts are facts and Carter remains the most inept president of the post-war period.

For those of us who endured Carter's four years in office no amount of revision can alter the bleak memory of unemployment, gas lines, runaway inflation, sky-high interest rates, amateurish foreign policy and the declining military strength that lost us the respect of our friends and earned the contempt of our adversaries.

The ineptitude of his administration was nowhere more apparent than when his Department of Energy, by pure bureaucratic incompetence, created a gasoline shortage where none existed. Those of us driving 100-plus miles to work each day were not amused. One of the policies of the Carter administration abandoned by Reagan was the geographic allocation of gasoline supplies by government bureaucrats rather than the oil companies. I can't recall seeing any gas lines in America since Carter left office.

So what was "Carter's brave vision on energy" (Oct. 14, Sierra Sun syndicated column by David Morris)?

First, America would be forbidden from importing any more foreign oil than we did in 1977. Given our inability to develop our domestic resources, mostly thanks to opposition from environmental extremist, that sounds like a sure prescription for a return to the great depression. Carter spoke of using coal, shale oil, gasohol, sun and wind, all of which are impractical or raise environmental objections today.

Second, Carter proposed subsidizing the energy cost of the poor. What better way to discourage energy conservation than subsidize its waste? When I upgraded the insulation in my home two winters ago, I did it not to save the environment but to save some money.

Third, apply punitive taxes on energy producers. How better to discourage production and insure a shortage of energy than by crushing taxes on those companies and individuals who actually supply energy? Who will invest in energy companies and where will the capital come from if energy company profits are taxed away? Was Carter really that stupid?

David Morris ends his column with an apparent criticism of the Bush administration for not demanding that the car companies build more energy efficient vehicles or allowing the states to order the same. Is it true that all liberals believe that the government can wave its magic wand over the car companies and presto, 100-mile-per-gallon SUVs appear by magic, physics not withstanding?

Apparently, Toyota, Honda, BMW and all the other manufacturers are being paid by Exxon Mobil and that crowd to build mostly gas guzzlers. This reinforces my long-standing belief that few liberals could actually change a flat tire if they had to.

Incidentally, Carter's big energy speech was called the "malaise" speech not only by Republicans but the press and everyone else. In his speech, Carter blamed all America's troubles on a malaise that was affecting Americans; certainly nothing was his fault. More than a few hard-working and overtaxed Americans were not too happy to hear that.

As president, Carter was clearly out of his depth but as ex-president he is free to gadfly around the world, undermining American foreign policy (including Bill Clinton's) and monitoring elections in third-world hell holes, often telling us how much better democrats they are than us.

Carter has managed to even pick up a Nobel Peace Prize, which was clearly intended as a slap in the face to America. If he had an ounce of integrity, Carter would have refused that Nobel Prize. Clearly, the legacy of the Carter Presidency is the hatred Jimmy Carter has for the America that refused him a second term.

Late on election night in 1980, my best friend and I ducked into the bar of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York to catch the election returns. Likely, the two of us were the only Republicans in the room. Up on the TV screen, obviously distressed was reporter David Brinkley. Brinkley, who appeared near tears or perhaps uncontrolled anger, was reporting a landslide victory over Carter by Ronald Reagan.

America had clearly had enough of Jimmy Carter. Now if he would just go away.

http://www.sierrasun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051020/Opinion/110200015&template=printart

experiencediz

10-21-2005, 05:27 PM

Shock and Horror in America

Inside Walter Reed Army Hospital is the horrible reality of the Iraq War, a reality that few Americans see, and fewer want to see.
By Stewart Nusbaumer

Washington, DC -- In the dining hall is a family of three. The mother’s shirt says “Thank a Soldier,” the father’s hat says “Vietnam Veteran,” and the son’s T-shirt says “Seattle Sonics.” A normal family, except the son has no legs.

The tough talking lions of the Bush Administration proclaimed “shock and awe” would destroy the Iraqi will to fight and then it would be a simple “cakewalk.” So the cocky civilians unleashed the “mother” of all air assaults on Baghdad and then our strutting commander in chief -- decked out in a fine flight suit -- proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.”

But the flight-suit President dodged the Vietnam War, hiding in the Air National Guard’s “Champagne Unit,” strongly supporting the war from Texas. The Vice-President “had other options,” although he insisted other Americans had no option but to fight the war. The Secretary of Defense enrolled in Princeton University instead of the Korean War; after the war he enrolled in the Navy. All the hawkish Neocons were too busy arguing for the Vietnam War to actually fight in that war. Shame, they missed their “noble” causes. So when it came to Iraq, none of these men had a clue about the will to fight.

I see in the halls of Walter Reed hospital soldiers with leg braces and neck supports, soldiers with faces slashed by bombs and stitched up by doctors. Soldiers with legs terribly mangled, soldiers with no legs -- amputees with short stumps, with long stumps, without any stumps since entire limbs are missing. A man walks by without an arm. I suddenly travel back in time to another war, to another hospital when I was one of those young men without a limb. But the human carnage and waste in Walter Reed is too overwhelming to escape for more than a flash of time.

At the Army’s flagship medical facility, where thousands of wounded soldiers pass through, there is no political spin, no media filter, no presidential lies, and no patriotism without cost as there is in America. There are only the wounded and mangled from Iraq. There is the ground zero for ugly war reality. For these men and women there was no safe “Champagne Unit,” no other options, no Ivy League hiding, no just talking while others did the fighting. At Walter Reed there are not Chickenhawks.

Dining Made Difficult

In the large dining room, mothers prepare their son’s food, applying ketchup to hamburgers, cutting pork chops, raising tables for their wheelchairs to clear. Fathers mostly sit with slight smiles on their faces. The conversations are mundane, and sedate. Talk about family, talk about the weather, talk about the future. Recuperating from serious wounds is slow so it’s best not to go too far into the future.

In a wheelchair, a young man who barely looks 17 years old rolls by with a pair of ugly “road kill” legs -- the spaghetti I’m eating rumbles in my stomach -- followed by a soldier on crutches, doing a Frankenstein walk with stiff legs thrown outward. Several tables away, a slightly older soldier, in his early 30s, with a nasty looking scarred leg propped up on a chair, rubs his fingers over the smooth surface of his Purple Heart Medal. This is the medal given for combat wounds, to everyone wounded by enemy fire. This is the medal that delegates at the Republican Party mocked.... I need some fresh air.

In front of the hospital a man in his mid-20s sits down on the bench next to me. His right leg is bloated to at least double its normal size. Most of the top layer of skin had been removed, it’s raw reddish. Puss glistens in the sun light, or maybe it’s some kind of ointment.

“Looks like you had a bad day” I wisecrack gently.

“Yeah,” he snickers.

“An IUD?” (Improvised Explosive Device, roadside bomb or land mine.)

“Nope, bullet, it splattered bone.”

The sergeant has been back from Iraq since January, nine months in Walter Reed, and his leg remains ugly looking. It will probably always be ugly looking. But in Walter Reed looks mean nothing, what matters is walking. I remember my obsession to walk, an obsession that overcame the pain and the blood, anything to be able to walk again. And the sergeant is walking, with crutches. But I doubt this sergeant will do much walking in his lifetime.

Sometimes it’s best to just cut the leg off, but doctors can not always do what is best. The sergeant stands up, struggles to walk five feet, stops for a rest. He looks over his shoulder and says, “I’ll make it, I have to make it.”

“Yes you will,” I say, knowing clearly that as the years pass his walking will become even more difficult, until there is no walking. All this sergeant from North Carolina ever wanted was a normal life, with a normal family, a boy and a girl. A smile broke his straight face when he said, “a boy, and a girl.” But his normal life is gone and all he has is the dream of returning home to North Carolina, and hopefully that boy and girl.

The Rules of War

In America’s shock and horror at Walter Reed there are rules. I will give you the four that I believe are most important.

■Rule 1: talk to the person and not to the wound. This can be difficult in the beginning since ugly wounds tend to overwhelm. But the bearer of ugly wounds remains much more than a wounded person, and this you need to respect. You can ask about the wound, but you cannot talk to only the wound.

■Rule 2: allow wounded soldiers to do what they can do themselves. Give them the space and the opportunity to have control over their lives, even when severely dependent upon other people.

When I was in Bethesda Navel hospital in the late 1960s, leg amputated and bed ridden, frustrated with my constant dependence on others, a visitor asked me for a cigarette -- in those days you could smoke right in the hospital -- and I was ecstatic to hand him one. It felt great to do something on my own, in this case hand another human being an simple item.

■Rule 3: forget your moral questions about the war. Morality is for those who support the war and for those who oppose the war, not for those in the war. Those seriously wounded are still fighting the war so clam up about the immorality of this stupid war.

A corollary to this rule is never protest against a war in front of a military facility, especially a military hospital. That is a no-brainer. You demonstrate against those who made the policy to go to war, not against those who are sworn to carry out the order to go to war.

■Rule 4: don’t assume this is a sad time for these recuperating men. For most their physical pain is receding or is being managed by drugs, and the true mental anguish has yet to sink in. They are focused on their future which after a close call with death looks darn rosy.

“Hey, man how you doing?” a soldier greets another stepping into the elevator.

“Great,” he replies. I notice out of the corner of my eye he is missing a chuck of his cheek, it’s ugly.

“Guess what, man? Smithy’s coming up!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he’s driving up this weekend.”

“That’s great, man.”

This is the spirit that America sees when it sees anything of these wounded soldiers. It makes Americans feel good, proud of their country, confident about their military. But it is only part of the truth. There is a hidden truth. It is ugly.

The “For What” Questions

With spirits high -- hey, they just “cheated” death -- surrounded by fellow soldiers day and night, with family and friends visiting and attentive, life is not bad. But this is the easy middle, coming after the initial shock of being seriously wounded and before the tortuous work of transforming one’s identity to accept the new reality. The easy middle is relatively easy.

When discharged from the hospital, their tight support network disappears and the strong optimism in the wake of a close call begins to wane. There is now time and space to think, and to ask questions. Sitting alone in an apartment, probably a spartanly furnished apartment, maybe in a dingy bar with their back against the wall, the questions start. They always do, for those severely wounded. Those “for what” questions: for what do I have to put on an artificial limb every morning? For what must I live with this horrible pain every day? For what did my buddy die? For what was all the horror for?

Some will attempt to evade these questions, but that’s not possible. They paid too high a price. Some will turn to stock replies, such as, “It was for God, country, and family.” To the degree this works is the degree that they cut themselves off from reality. Vietnam was not for God, America, and family, and neither is Iraq. Most of the wounded will learn this, and then they will demand a real answer to, “For what?”

The only satisfactory answer is for defense of country. Nothing else justifies the sacrifices, sacrifices Americans quickly forget but endure a lifetime for these men and women. The other answers, to rebuild another country, to stay the course so others won’t perceive America as weak, to fulfill a president’s fantasy of a great legacy, to fill our vehicles’ gas tanks, to save the world from the latest new evil, they cannot withstand the ugly questions that come from horror and suffering. “For what?” is too strong for weak answers.

Barbara Porchia, whose son Jonathan was killed in Iraq, said if he had died in Afghanistan that would have probably been easier to accept -- still horribly difficult, of course, but easier than Jonathan dying in the worthless Iraq War. In defense of country is the only justification for our dead and wounded soldiers and marines, nothing else is acceptable in the long run. Nothing else is ever acceptable.

I am walking through Ward 57, the amputee ward, walking on the 5th floor. There are grisly sights here. Sights that the dinning room and outside benches do not want to see, that I do not want to see. Bodies wrapped in blood soaked bandages. Eyes covered in agony. Nurses’ huddled over broken bodies. The air is thick on the 5th floor, hard to breath. The flag of patriotism is less intensely displayed here. The pain of war is stronger. I feel a deep anger at America rising in me. Then I see -- I walk quickly, I need some fresh air.

But at Walther Reed, ground zero for ugly war, there is no break from horror. A young man sits down on the bench next to me -- “blew the lower part of my leg off … an IUD … getting my first leg next week … going to college when I get out … girl friend visits ….”

Whether the “For what?” is answered with a closed mind, or with an honest answer, many seriously disabled veterans will in time turn bitter and cynical. But others will swallow hard, refusing to let the injustice crush them, and move on in life. But all will be deeply scarred. If their sacrifices were truly for the defense of our country, that helps a lot. That cause can justify the sacrifices, but an unworthy cause justifies nothing.

A veteran with Iraq Veterans Against the War recently commented that after the guys return home and realize that on the home front Americans barely cared about the war, that here patriotism is an empty gesture because no one sacrifices anything, they will be become angry.

To this day, some 38 years later, when I hear someone on the radio discuss the World Series in 1967, or some similar remark about 1967, I cringe. That was the year I was fighting in Vietnam. That was the year thousands of young Americans were dying and losing limbs and their minds for, supposedly, their country. But our country was excited about the World Series, and…. If a war is important enough for soldiers to be maimed and to die for, it is important enough for all Americans to sacrifice something. Something!

The World Series of baseball should have been cancelled in 1967, as it should be cancelled today, because America has young men fighting in a war.

But Americans are barely paying attention and would refuse to give substance to their patriotism, a clear indication this is not a war for the defense of America. We have an administration that won’t fully fund veterans’ health care, while it does not properly equip our troops in war. And we are a people not insisting our veterans have adequate health care and our soldiers have proper equipment. This is wrong, America. Wrong to those with “road kill” legs, wrong to those with partial faces, wrong to those with missing limbs.

I stand up from the bench, it’s hard for me to sit for too long, and it’s hard for me to walk for very far. Instead of returning to the 5th floor, I return to my car. Driving through the gate of Walter Reed and onto Connecticut Avenue -- a cab whizzes by, a speeding van honks, a couple on the sidewalk hugs -- my head shoots back as pain rips through my stump, just as fast it leaves. But I know the pain will be back. This is for a lifetime. What's inside Walter Reed is also for a lifetime.

Stewart Nusbaumer is editor of Intervention Magazine. You can email Stewart at Stewart@interventionmag.com.

:add05: Shock and Horror in America (http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1190&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0&POSTNUKESID=33636a44788c3049b2f8042efa985de4)

The 801

10-25-2005, 01:50 PM

Disaster used as political payoff

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has done it again.
Already under fire for its woeful response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal disaster agency appears to have turned hurricane relief donations into a political payoff - until it was challenged.

All last week, FEMA bureaucrats gave prominent placement on the agency's Web site to Operation Blessing, the Virginia-based charity run by controversial right-wing evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

For anyone wishing to donate only cash, the agency's site listed the names and phone numbers of three groups: the Red Cross, Operation Blessing and America's Second Harvest, a national coalition of food banks.

That first list was followed by a second, longer list of several dozen religious and nonsectarian charities. This second list was for anyone who wanted to give either cash or noncash gifts.

Just as in an ordinary election, however, top ballot position makes it far more likely you'll get noticed and chosen.

The same FEMA list was then disseminated by state and local governments throughout the country. Both Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, for example, placed the same top three FEMA charities on their Hurricane Katrina press releases and Web sites last week.

Those familiar with Robertson and his charity were flabbergasted.

Operation Blessing, with a budget of $190 million, is an integral part of the Robertson empire. Not only is he the chairman of the board, his wife is listed on its latest financial report as its vice president, and one of his sons is on the board of directors.

Back in 1994, during the infamous Rwandan genocide, Robertson used his 700 Club's daily cable operation to appeal to the American public for donations to fly humanitarian supplies into Zaire to save the Rwandan refugees.

The planes purchased by Operation Blessing did a lot more than ferry relief supplies.

An investigation conducted by the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in 1999 that the planes were mostly used to transport mining equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit company called African Development Corp.

And who do you think was the principal executive and sole shareholder of the mining company?

You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself.

Robertson had landed the mining concession from his longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator of Zaire.

Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements ..."

After the investigation began, Robertson placated state regulators by personally reimbursing his own charity $400,000 and by agreeing to tighten its bookkeeping methods.

Separating Operation Blessing from Robertson's many politically oriented endeavors is not that easy, however.

The biggest single U.S. recipient of the charity's largess, according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2004.

Robertson uses that Christian network for some markedly unchristian purposes.

A few years back, he repeatedly defended Charles Taylor, the former brutal dictator of Liberia who is under indictment by a UN tribunal for war crimes.

As with Mobutu in the Congo, Robertson had a personal stake in the matter: He had millions invested in a Liberian gold mine, thanks to Taylor, according to press reports.

Recently, Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those who know Robertson's record raised such an uproar that on Sunday FEMA suddenly rearranged its entire Web site for hurricane donations.

Gone was Operation Blessing's name and choice location. Replacing it was an alphabetical list of nearly 50 national relief organizations.

At FEMA, they take a while to get things right.

Originally published on September 6, 2005

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/343813p-293471c.html

The 801

10-25-2005, 02:41 PM

Worst Vice President Ever Too!

Cheney drawn into CIA spy leak investigation
By Times Online

A senior White House aide at the centre of a CIA leak investigation learnt the identity of an undercover agent from his boss, Dick Cheney, it was claimed today.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice-President's chief of staff, gave evidence to a grand jury that he first heard the name of covert agent Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, from journalists at around the time that her name was printed in a newspaper column.

But according to The New York Times today, lawyers involved in the case say that notes in Mr Libby's own handwriting show that in fact he first heard of Mrs Wilson from Mr Cheney.

Patrick Fitzgerald, a special prosecutor who is leading the investigation, has heard allegations that Mrs Wilson's name was leaked to the press by the White House as revenge against her husband, a retired diplomat, for a scathing article he wrote about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

There is nothing illegal in Mr Cheney and his chief of staff, discussing a CIA agent. Publicising the name of a covert CIA agent is a criminal offence only if the person who reveals it knows that that the spy is an undercover agent.

Lawyers close to the case, who described the notes to The New York Times, say that there is nothing to show that either Mr Cheney or Mr Libby knew that she was an undercover agent or that her identity was classified.

But the appearance of the Vice President's name in the leak inquiry is likely to increase the pressure on the Bush Administration, which is trailing in the opinion polls.

The role of both Mr Libby and of Karl Rove, President Bush's senior policy adviser, in possibly revealing Mrs Wilson's name during conversations with journalists has come under scrutiny.

The notes suggest that it was George Tenet, the head of the CIA, who told Mr Cheney about Mrs Wilson. Her name appears to have cropped up because of her alleged role in sending her husband to Niger on a mission to investigate White House claims that Saddam Hussein tried to buy raw uranium for a nuclear weapons programme.

Mr Wilson concluded that there was no evidence, and annoyed the White House by writing a newspaper article saying so.

Both Mr Tenet and Mr Cheney gave evidence privately on oath to the special prosecutor last year, and have not appeared before the grand jury.

Mr Libby's notes have been given to Mr Fitzgerald as part of his inquiry. He is expected to decide by Friday, the day that the grand jury's remit expires, whether to bring charges against anyone in the White House.

The White House has refused to comment, as has Mr Libby's lawyer, according to The New York Times.

Mr Libby and Mr Rove attended a Cabinet meeting with President Bush yesterday, as the White House sought to portray the impression of business as usual. It is likely however that any aide who is indicted by Mr Fitzgerald will have to quit their job.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1841797,00.html

experiencediz

10-29-2005, 01:08 PM

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Real George W. Bush
By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real.

For three more years America is going to be led by not just a lame duck president, but a totally discredited president.

In a poll (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/25/cia.leak/)conducted Oct 21-23 and released on Tuesday, 90 percent of those asked said they believed top Bush administration officials are guilty of either illegal or unethical behavior in the CIA leak case.

So where does that leave an un-indicted George W. Bush? There really are only two explanations, and neither reflect well on him. First, he can claim his closest aides conspired behind his back while he was otherwise occupied. I call that the "Exxon Valdez Defense" -- the captain was not at the helm when a careless crewman ran the ship of state aground. Unfortunately for Captain Bush, that defense did not wash for the real captain of the ill-fated tanker. Because, you see, the captain is always responsible.

The other explanation is worse: that the President of the United States knew what was going on, maybe even participated in it.

Either way, Bush is finished as a force in American politics. How he ever got to become president in the first place -- not once, but twice -- will remain a subject social scientists will study and debate for decades to come. Because there was plenty of evidence that George W. Bush was a made man. He had accomplished nothing in his adult life on his own -- not one thing. (Click here for more (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html).)

Of course, for those of us who have covered the Bush family for years, it's no mystery at all. The best way to think of George W. Bush is as a beard for others. At every step in his career, individuals of wealth or power groomed him, and then used him as their front man.

These benefactors had learned long ago that there was more money and more power to be had in the shadows than in the limelight. All they needed was the right person to front for them -- someone with a name, a smile, a confident swagger. Vision, dreams, hopes and ethics were not only unnecessary, but liabilities in a beard. All they needed was a person they could program, wind up and send out into the public spotlight and deliver for them.

That's George W. Bush. He fit the bill to a T. Texas oil men -- and companies with international agendas and voracious appetites for government contracts -- had found their perfect front man in GW: a kind of Forrest Gump from the Dark Side. A man ignorant and proud of it, and willing to take direction from those he considered friends.

They began by nurturing Bush's pathetic efforts to become a high-rolling Texas oil man. Though his companies failed, they made sure he never did. Then they were able to further his ascendancy by indulging his playful side, buying him his own baseball team -- a Texas baseball team. That raised Bush's public profile to just a notch below their ultimate goal: public office.

Fully groomed and programmed, they finally steered Bush towards the goal. And it worked, probably beyond their wildest expectations. As governor of Texas, their beard kept state regulators out of their hair on dollar and cents issues critical to the oil drilling and processing industries, like air quality. That alone would have been sufficient payoff for their years of cleaning up Bush's business messes.

Bagging the United States presidency was an unexpected super-bonus. Still, they knew it was a development ripe with as much danger as opportunity. After all, they knew the real George W. Bush. There was no way they could send that hayseed off to the Big Show unattended. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were tasked with keeping their idiot prince both on message and on a short leash. God forbid he should ever make a speech, take a position, or make a decision on his own.

All went very well for the first four years. From day one, their boy delivered, delivered and delivered again. He was a gift that just kept giving:

•$1.6 trillion in tax cuts, the bulk of which went to people like them;
•Environmental laws watered down; expanded logging allowed in national forests
•A push to open protected Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling;
•Iraqi oil fields suddenly within reach;
•Plenty of cheap labor flooding across our southern border.

And just as it looked as if he was on the way to fulfilling another assignment -- the elimination of the estate tax -- his beard fell off. It was the thing they had always feared most: the real George W. Bush went public. There it was, for the whole world to see: a chuckling, twitching dope of man standing in front of the American people, unleashed and unscripted. Worse yet, he was making his own decisions. He chose his friend and admirer, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

What went wrong? Where were his handlers? Busy. They dropped Bush's leash when handed subpoenas. Junior was unleashed and home alone.

It's a moment new to America -- a leader who needs to be led, and now unled. And the world is watching. It's as if the police had come and dragged Edgar Bergin offstage in the middle of a show, leaving Charlie McCarthy, wide-eyed, mouth agape and slumped alone on his stool.

So, what now?

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

:mad_08: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Real George W. Bush (http://www.alternet.org/story/27385/)

DC Penguin

10-29-2005, 02:20 PM

If we had a process for a vote of no confidence, then I'm sure we'd be holding that now. It's sad that we're struck with him now. Then again, I still think Kerry would have been worse.

The 801

10-31-2005, 12:27 AM

This getting too easy now. That scares me, big time. Follow the link and read the interesting comments. Yes, it is the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-frank/bushs-saturday-address_b_9834.html

Bush's Saturday Address

By Justin Franks

This is the first of a series of analyses of President Bush's Saturday radio addresses to the nation.

Recently Administration critics and political commentators have started to apply psychological concepts to much of what Bush says -- the most common one being projection. Projection involves attributing an unwanted thought, motive, or character trait to someone else and disavowing that feeling in oneself.
Moreover, people who project excessively often forcefully evacuate their own feelings into other people, making others feel what they are afraid to feel.

Spreading fear is not simply a tactic to stay in power, as so many critics of Bush think. It is a natural reaction of a person already afraid -- Bush has had to surround himself with people who exclusively see things his way in order to quell his mounting fears. He exercises and prays and runs to Crawford for the same reason. This week I expect he will again avoid Cindy Sheehan who continues to pressure him to explain to her the "noble cause" for which her son Casey died.

Despite people like David Brooks telling us to forget about Bush -- he said as much on Sunday (October 23) on ABC TV -- we need more than ever to pay attention to what Bush says and does and the gap between. It's hard to dismiss our president who has three more years to serve and who continues to promote people like Harriet to high positions. How can we "forget" about the President who has it within his power to br

Ting our troops home from Iraq, to reverse massive deficit spending, to pay attention to the environment?

Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of listening with the third ear, of paying attention to meaning and feeling lurking beneath the manifest message. Now we all need to listen carefully -- not only to the discrepancies between what Bush says and does (Katrina relief being a recent example) but also to the illuminating power of attending to the undercurrents of his public appearances.

In his last Saturday's radio address to the nation (October 22) Bush focused on new immigration laws. Two statements in particular caught my eye. He said, "If an employer has a job that no American is willing to take, we need to find a way to fill that demand by matching willing employers with willing workers from foreign countries on a temporary and legal basis." All good and well, perhaps -- but I think that what lurks beneath is a plan to get illegal aliens to join the military since recruiting is down and a draft politically unthinkable.

The other statement is so self-revealing as to be laughable, given Fitzgerald and other investigations of Bush's circle. He said, "America is a country of laws: we must not allow dishonest employers to flout those laws." In Bush on the Couch I wrote, "This flagrant flouting of authority -- of the law -- took place before he essentially became the law, first as governor and then as president" (page 91).

experiencediz

10-31-2005, 07:05 AM

This getting too easy now. That scares me, big time.

Bush urged to reshuffle top team
Monday, 31 October 2005, 07:18 GMT

Senior figures from President George W Bush's party have urged him to revamp his White House team after a traumatic week that saw his lowest ever ratings.

Republicans called for new blood after an inquiry into the unmasking of a covert CIA agent led vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby to quit.

The inquiry also put trusted Bush aide Karl Rove's position in jeopardy.

Mr Bush was also hit by the withdrawal of his Supreme Court nominee amid bipartisan opposition.

'Apology'

Republican Senator Trent Lott said on Sunday Mr Bush had to address his problems.

"You should always be looking for... new blood, new energy, qualified staff, new people in administration. I'm not talking about wholesale changes, but you've got to reach out and bring in more advice and counsel," Mr Lott told the Fox News Sunday TV programme.

A staunch Bush ally, Senator John Cornyn, said: "The president does have an opportunity now after admittedly a very bad week to turn things around."

Other Republicans urged Mr Bush to gain momentum by quickly finding a replacement for Harriet Miers as nominee for the Supreme Court post.

The BBC's Clive Myrie in Washington says Mr Bush's supporters want some new ideas and a fresh start after the worst week in his political life - and a difficult 12 months.

An opinion poll on Sunday showed 58% were unhappy with Mr Bush's performance. Only 39% approved.

But, our correspondent says, refocusing the agenda on the issues Mr Bush wants to talk about - pension reform and tax cuts - will not be easy in the current political climate.

The Democrats have turned their guns on the president.

One lawmaker said the office of the vice-president should be investigated. Another that Mr Rove should be fired.

Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, told the ABC network's This Week programme: "[Rove's] still around. He should be let go."

He added: "There has not been an apology to the American people for this obvious problem in the White House. This has gotten way out of hand and the American people deserve better."

The CIA case involved the leaking of the identity of agent Valerie Plame - whose husband had criticised the Iraq war - to a US reporter in 2003.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said Lewis Libby committed perjury to investigators about how and when he learned and disclosed to reporters classified information about Ms Plame.

Mr Libby resigned but said he was confident he would be exonerated.

Mr Rove was not charged but the investigation remains open.

:add03: Bush urged to reshuffle top team (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4391316.stm)

The 801

10-31-2005, 08:17 PM

Hey E,
I mean it. We are in the middle of a war, the middle class is getting smaller, the rich get richer, the govenment proves again and again it cannot govern,the united state is losing it status as a moral superpower and we are about to go adrift, if we already are not. I don't like Bush, but the administration these guys are not tending to the business of governence. It's like the neocons have some other agenda, and they are going to cut the rest of the nation adrift. I am very afraid. This is the time for our enemies to strike. We are improperly lead. I don't mean this as a Bush Bash, but our govenment is failing us, and our children. And as I understand the inertial of govenment, we haven't hit bottom yet. May the goddess protect us.

The "not a pessimist, but a realist," 801

experiencediz

10-31-2005, 11:30 PM

Hey E,
I mean it...
The "not a pessimist, but a realist," 801

I hear You!
"They" Know it too,

http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/afp/20051026/capt.sge.ute10.261005151040.photo00.photo.default-261x384.jpg

Why I love Bush
By Sarah Carr
October 31, 2005

Nothing makes me prouder to be an American than our commander in chief. His poise, intelligence and compassion are second-to-none.

Since today is Halloween, I thought I'd write something scary. At first I thought I'd write about the avian flu or global warming.

Instead, I thought I'd tell you why President Bush is much scarier than haunted houses or corn mazes: He believes that he is poised, intelligent and compassionate.

It's no wonder the rest of the world thinks Americans are uneducated, wasteful and self-centered. When George is on the television, I have to turn the sound off to avoid bashing in the screen.

He's a guy who would be fun to shoot pool with or play softball with. His down-home euphemisms would be funny at a bar, but on CNN, they're less than amusing.

But to create fear and panic, I am writing today about what is so great about our president. If you have any sense about you, as I like to think that I do, this is a daunting task.

I mean, Bush is Iraq's savior. They have a constitution, have voted in free elections and, with our help, they'll have a standing army in about 15 years. With any luck, our military presence there means fuel costs will have to go down sooner or later.

Thank God Kerry wasn't elected; our military wouldn't have any wars to fight.

Or if the Iraqis won't hook us up with some cheap oil, we could always drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to get an extra two billion barrels of oil, enough to satisfy our consumption needs for 100 days.

We have zoos, so is killing wildlife in their natural habitat such a big deal?

The vocabulary of our children is greatly expanded, containing such Bushisms as "misunderestimated," "uninalienable," and "Hispanically." Obviously Bush was lucky enough to finish school before the "No Child Left Behind" act was passed.

I can feel safe knowing that if a natural disaster strikes in Seattle, the response time of the government will be quick for whites, and all the minorities can be safely crowded into Key Area or Qwest Field. It's precisely this leadership that led to such success for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Since my parents are in the upper-middle class, they'll probably get some great tax breaks thanks to Bush. Because they're well-off, they would understand what extra money really means, compared to the working poor who are taxed into oblivion.

Thankfully, our president has a diverse staff to assist him. Moral, upstanding individuals like Karl Rove, John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney. They represent diverse groups of conservative Christians and serve the interests of every American.

And by God, Bush has used his brand of Christianity to inspire millions to flock to the polls. Because he has inspired these millions of Americans, awful laws, like those that mandate evolution is taught in public schools, may be overturned. Biology classes can be replaced with theology and scripture study, and I doubt no one will be the wiser.

Finally, our president speaks out against immoral research that would possibly cure diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Since he has imposed his own code, stem cell research may die an early death.

For these reasons and so many more, I love George Bush.

Halloween may get your pulse racing, but this is a different situation altogether. It's okay to be scared for a night, but this is a fright-fest that won't end for another three years.

:mad: Why I love Bush (http://thedaily.washington.edu/all.lasso?-database=DailyWebSQL&-table=Articles&-response=opinionpage.lasso&-keyField=__Record_ID__&-keyValue=14240&-search)

The 801

11-01-2005, 05:41 PM

The White House Stonewall

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; 2:40 PM

The indictment of Scooter Libby on Friday was not just an embarrassment for the White House -- it also raised serious questions about the way President Bush's inner circle does business.

But rather than addressing any of these questions, Bush and his aides are stonewalling. Rather than taking steps to rebuild their credibility, they are trying to change the subject. Rather than apologize, they are refusing to admit anything is wrong.

And yet something is wrong. Their credibility is damaged. And the questions won't go away.

Consider if this was happening anywhere else. If you ran a company, for instance, and one of your top officers was indicted by a federal grand jury, would you just act like it hadn't happened? Not if you wanted your company to survive.

Bush, in his brief statement about the indictment on Friday, said the "ongoing legal proceedings are serious," but that "each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial." He said the news made him sad.

Vice President Cheney, in his statement , was even more combative: "Mr. Libby has informed me that he is resigning to fight the charges brought against him. I have accepted his decision with deep regret," he said. Cheney also cited the presumption of innocence, and concluded: "Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has repeatedly refused to answer any questions on the topic -- citing the presumption of innocence and the ongoing investigation.

But the presumption of innocence hasn't stopped White House officials from talking about indictments before -- for instance when it comes to suspected terrorists.

And answering some basic questions about who knew what when will not in any way hinder an investigation that, by all accounts, is very nearly complete.

Kristof and Dionne

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes in the New York Times (subscription required): "Come on, Mr. Vice President, tell us what happened.

"A federal indictment charges that criminality swirled around your office, and it demeans this administration and the entire country when you hide in your bunker and refuse to say whether you knew of any such activities.

"Five lawyers I've consulted all agree that there is no compelling legal reason why you should not discuss the situation. It's urgent that you clear the air. . . .

"If you had nothing to do with any of this, then say so. But don't cower behind your lawyers. As it is, you're pleading 'no contest' in the court of public opinion, and that's painful for all of us who want to believe in the integrity of our government."

Columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. writes in The Washington Post: "Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those 'legalisms' that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years.

"The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/11/01/BL2005110100876.html

experiencediz

11-05-2005, 10:11 PM

Bush rebuked by the hand of God
By Phil Davison
Published: 06 November 2005

George Bush presumably knew before this weekend that the "hand of God" could be merciless. He certainly does now. Maradona, rather than Iraq, was uppermost on the US President's mind this weekend as he attended a summit of leaders from the Western hemisphere in the Argentinian beach resort of Mar del Plata.

As domestic polls informed him that he was increasingly mistrusted by his fellow Americans, Mr Bush was clearly mortified to be called "human trash" by Latin America's equivalent of Michael Jordan - the Argentinian football legend Diego Maradona.

Despite being a compatriot of Ché Guevara, Maradona is an unlikely revolutionary. He cheated at football but was forgiven on account of his genius on the field. He also screwed up with drugs and was forgiven for that, too, because he fought it and, so far, is overcoming it. But could he be a nail in George Bush's political coffin? Don't rule it out.

Anyone who has spent time in Latin America recently knows Mr Bush is the least popular US president among Latin Americans in history. Five Latin American countries have voted in left-of-centre governments since he took office. From the indigenous people through to the middle classes and even among the elite, Latin Americans increasingly seek not the American dream, but the Latin American dream. They are disillusioned with what Maradona yesterday called "the American Empire".

The so-called Fourth Summit of the Americas on Friday and yesterday was supposed to be about eradicating poverty and spreading democracy. With all respect to the diplomatic envoys and the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on making the summit happen, little significant was ever going to come out of it. As it turned out, the theme of "Bush, get out!" was eerily reminiscent of the "Yanqui, go home" of the Eighties in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where the US attempted to prop up military-backed regimes.

While Mr Bush jetted in with an entourage of advisers, diplomats, soldiers and secret service men of unheard-of proportions, Maradona and Mr Bush's new nemesis, Hugo "the new Castro" Chavez, President of oil-soaked Venezuela, rumbled in on a "peace train" from Buenos Aires. Mr Chavez, who calls Bush Señor Peligro (Mr Danger) and has accused him of planning to invade Venezuela for its oil, made his point by first attending a parallel, anti-Bush "People's Summit".

"If [Mister Bush] is desperate enough to invade us, he will find himself in a 100-year war," Mr Chavez, a retired army colonel, said. Behind Mr Chavez in the city's multi-sports stadium was an enormous portrait of Guevara. In front of him were 25,000 people and banners telling Bush that "YOU are the terrorist" and comparing him with Hitler for his policies in Iraq.

Even the mayor of Mar del Plata, Daniel Katz, was upset that Mr Bush was there. "Bush probably doesn't even know that people here are so solidly against him," he said. Mr Katz earlier this year described the American President as "the most disagreeable man on the planet".

Before Mr Bush left last night for Brazil, around 1,000 protesters, ostensibly separate from the "People's Summit" of Maradona and Mr Chavez, burned US flags and smashed shop windows in Mar del Plata.

:add37: Bush rebuked by the hand of God (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article325146.ece)

The 801

11-07-2005, 08:29 AM

November 6, 2005
Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi's statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration's misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence.

A White House spokeswoman said she had no immediate comment on the D.I.A. report on Mr. Libi. But Senate Republicans, put on the defensive when Democrats forced a closed session of the Senate this week to discuss the issue, have been arguing that Republicans were not alone in making prewar assertions about Iraq, illicit weapons and terrorism that have since been discredited.

Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the C.I.A. , a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.

The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi's claims.

But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.

In outlining reasons for its skepticism, the D.I.A. report noted that Mr. Libi's claims lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.

"It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," the February 2002 report said. "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing "the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda."

At the time of Mr. Powell's speech, an unclassified statement by the C.I.A. described the reporting, now known to have been from Mr. Libi, as "credible." But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time went on to state that "the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place."

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to another portion of the D.I.A. report, which expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence agencies but was a pillar of the administration's prewar claims.

"Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. "Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

At the time of his capture, Mr. Libi was the most senior Qaeda official in American custody. The D.I.A. document gave no indication of where he was being held, or what interrogation methods were used on him.

Mr. Libi remains in custody, apparently at in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was sent in 2003, according to government officials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.html?ei=5090&en=5a216116a0310ce1&ex=1288933200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

The 801

11-11-2005, 10:08 AM

You know, this is all not just heavy sledding of depressing facts and figures. Sometimes we just gotta lighten up a bit. So, now for a bit of levity from the stand up comic of the Bush administration.....

This is the Bush administrations version of "who's on first?"

White House Briefing: McClellan Deflects Questions on Torture Exemption A Couple Dozen Times

By E&P Staff

Published: November 08, 2005

NEW YORK At today's White House press briefing, Scott McClellan was hit with a number of questions about the "ethics classes" the president's staffers are now attending. But much of the briefing featured efforts by Helen Thomas, at the start, and then other reporters to get McClellan to explain the apparent contradiction between his claims that the U.S. does not torture anyone and Vice President Cheney's request for an exemption in this matter.

Here are the exchanges from the transcript:
*

Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.

Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you're mischaracterizing things. And I'm not going to get into discussions we have --

Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never --

Q I'm asking about exemptions.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged --

Q That's not the answer I'm asking for --

MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer -- because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th --

Q He didn't ask for an exemption --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are going to --

Q -- answer that one question. I'm asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do --

Q You're not answering -- yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts.

Q -- the American people every day. I'm asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You've had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I'm going to respond to it.

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Q Did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.

Q Is that the answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.

Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we're asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.

Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple -- this is a very simple question.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.

Q What are we asking for?
Q Would you characterize what we're asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: We're asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that's what we --

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?

MR. McCLELLAN: David, let's talk about people that you're talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You're talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.

Q I'm asking you --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you're talking about.

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only --

Q What does that mean --

MR. McCLELLAN: What I'm telling you right now -- not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place. And, you bet, when we capture terrorist leaders, we are going to seek to find out information that will protect -- that prevent attacks from happening in the first place. But we have an obligation to do so. Our military knows this; all people within the United States government know this. We have an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and values.

Now, the people that you are bringing up -- you're talking about in the context, and I think it's important for the American people to know, are people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh -- these are -- these are dangerous killers.

Q So they're all killers --
Q Did you ask for an exemption on torture? That's a simple question, yes or no.

MR. McCLELLAN: No. And we have not. That's what I told you at the beginning.

Q You want to reserve the ability to use tougher tactics with those individuals who you mentioned.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, obviously, you have a different view from the American people. I think the American people understand the importance of doing everything within our power and within our laws to protect the American people.

Q Scott, are you saying that Cheney did not ask --
Q What is it that you want the -- what is it that you want the CIA to be able to do that the U.S. Armed Forces are not allowed to do?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to get into talking about national security matters, Bill. I don't do that, because this involves --

Q This would be the exemption, in other words.

MR. McCLELLAN: This involves information that relates to doing all we can to protect the American people. And if you have a different view -- obviously, some of you on this room -- in this room have a different view, some of you on the front row have a different view.

Q We simply are asking a question.
Q What is the Vice President -- what is the Vice President asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's spelled out in our statement of administration policy in terms of what our views are. That's very public information. In terms of our discussions with members of Congress --

Q -- no, it's not --

MR. McCLELLAN: In terms of our members -- like I said, there are already laws on the books that we have to adhere to and abide by, and we do. And we believe that those laws and those obligations address these issues.

Q So then why is the Vice President continuing to lobby on this issue? If you're very happy with the laws on the books, what needs change?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, you asked me -- you want to ask questions of the Vice President's office, feel free to do that. We've made our position very clear, and it's spelled out on our website for everybody to see.

Q We don't need a website, we need you from the podium.

MR. McCLELLAN: And what I just told you is what our view is.

Q But Scott, do you see the contradiction --

MR. McCLELLAN: Jessica, go ahead.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001436211

Man, you gotta love this stuff.

JustAVoice

11-12-2005, 03:11 AM

Hmmm....his response seemed pretty clear to me:

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged

What are you griping about??

The 801

11-12-2005, 02:30 PM

JustAVoice

11-12-2005, 02:53 PM

Well, maybe I don't really get it, but seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction if Cheney wants the CIA exempt from torture, and Bush does not.

But I would be curious if you think that if Cheney wants it, and Bush does not, is McClelland telling the truth about Bush, but not Cheney.

I would also be curious if Bush will not authorize torture, then is it OK for Military Contractors, such as Blackwater, to do it for us? Does that represent our values, or does it represent some sort of sophistry?

The " ever notice that politicans don't tell the truth unless they are under oath" 801

Let me point out 2 things

First, these comments from McClellan regarding the VP:

Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.

Second, it is ACCEPTED that the CIA can and does engage in illegal activity overseas with the FULL KNOWLEDGE of the President, the Congress, and the American people. THIS IS A FACT.

The CIA, for decades, has been involved in spying activities in almost every country and yet to spy in another country is illegal. It is illegal and yet we (as do many countries) do it with the acceptance by the American people.

So, keep that in mind when discussing the CIA and it's activities overseas. The CIA is a wholly different organization from the Military and the context of this discussion has to take this into account.

The 801

11-12-2005, 03:06 PM

So you are saying that the CIA represents your values by tortureing overseas?

The "I have to back up Senator McCain on this one, because I have no personal experiance with torture" 801

JustAVoice

11-12-2005, 04:34 PM

So you are saying that the CIA represents your values by tortureing overseas?

The "I have to back up Senator McCain on this one, because I have no personal experiance with torture" 801

First, the President and the VP and Scott McClellan have made it clear: "The U.S. does not torture" This is official U.S. policy.

If a military soldier or a CIA agent engages in torture, they do so on their own and without approval by our government.

Second, one has to discuss exactly WHAT is considered torture and differentiate that from degrading or rough treatment.

While the Military cannot do certain things (even though they don't equate to torture) because of Military law....the CIA can. That is a fact.

btw, do you concede that there are instances where the CIA can and does engage in "illegal" activity with the full support of the American people and the American government???

Can you at least concede to that one point?

And one last point: I'm not naive.....

While the U.S. officially declares that we do not torture I know that we (CIA and Military) sometimes do....

You take a CIA agent and tell them, "I want you to do whatever it takes to defend and protect this country"

The CIA agent then takes it upon his/her self to do that....if he/she decides to break the law in that effort...then so be it. If caught, they know they will face consequences. The same happens to spies who are caught.

I was watching CNN the other day and they were talking to one of their Military analysts...a retired General, I believe, who said that it IS and SHOULD be U.S. policy to ban torture. He was asked if he would torture a suspect who was known to have vital information that could save hundreds, thousands perhaps millions of lives. Without hesitation he said, "Absolutely, I would stick a knife in the guys leg..."

It's not black and white....

The 801

11-13-2005, 12:33 PM

The 801

11-13-2005, 12:46 PM

Todays Softball....

The crowning indignity for Bush by Robert Novak.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush was furious with the staff preparation for last week's inter-American summit in Argentina where his trade proposals ran into unexpected opposition.

The president was reported as particularly unhappy with the work by his National Security Council staff in getting ready for the meeting. That added to Bush's distress in Buenos Aires, dealing with violent street demonstrators and hostile fellow presidents led by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and including Argentina's Nestor Kirchner.

The crowning indignity for Bush was the Friday night state dinner starting at 10 p.m., an hour when the president normally is in bed. He left the dinner early, but it was midnight by then.

http://townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2005/11/12/175201.html

This Novak is hard to figure out, as to who's side he is on.

JustAVoice

11-13-2005, 05:26 PM

So your saying that torture does represent your values?

I will concede that the CIA engages in Illegal activities. But that doesn't represent our values either, or they wouldn't be illegal, would they?

The "this is starting to sound like McClelland's press briefings" 801

Torture as a policy DOES NOT represent mine or America's values. That is why the President, VP and Scott McClellan said we DO NOT ENGAGE IN TORTURE.

Does torture happen? YES.

Does the CIA engage in illegal activity with the FULL ACCEPTANCE of the American people, the President and Congress? YES.

Let me give you an example of the "thinking/reasoning" I'm inferring here....

Jimmy Carter recently appeared on Hardball and was asked if the U.S. should engage in military action against a country who hasn't attacked the U.S. and is not a threat to the U.S. Carter adamantly said NO. Then he was asked...well what about in the case of genocide happening in the country....and he said YES. Even Carter admits that there could be extenuating circumstances which would make us disregard our policy.

See, things are not black and white.

The 801

11-13-2005, 07:40 PM

OK, now I understand you. Bush, Cheney and McClelland say we don't engage in torture, because it is against our values. But we do anyway.

I think they call that hypocrisy. This administrations specialty, no? That is why we are in this mess today. Say one thing, do another. Look at how they treated that fuck Chalibi yesterday (I believe he said that his misinformation was an "urban myth") or that we will free Afghanistan for human rights, then, we say sorry women, human rights except for you, we only pay lip service to our values.

But please do not think that they do it with the full acceptance of the public. Full indicates complete, yes? I believe the public record would belie that.

Or maybe Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield all have what I call wealthy morals. You know, rich people don't have to live by the same morals the rest of us foolish humans must live by. You know, like confusing obsequious subservience with skill and talent.(Like that Meires nomination) Sorry I judge them by what I was raised to believe was right or wrong. A hypocrite is not to be trusted or bothered with.

The "can't quite figure out those rich peoples morals, but it must have something to do with needing more money" 801

The 801

11-14-2005, 07:16 PM

Cheez, Just a voice, the issue is "Do they torture, or do they not".

And what's up with the personal attack? I've been here since about 5 days after 911, and that's the first time anyone ever said that about me. Is that your style? No wonder I stay out of rant and rave, and just stick to the facts. Like the contradictory statements on torture. ugh.

White House declines to totally rule out torture

Sun Nov 13, 6:36 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - In an important clarification of
President George W. Bush's earlier statement, a top White House official refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture, arguing the US administration was duty-bound to protect Americans from terrorist attack.

The comment, by US national security adviser
Stephen Hadley, came amid heated national debate about whether the
CIA and other US intelligence agencies should be authorized to use what is being referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract from terror suspects information that may help prevent future assaults.

The US Senate voted 90-9 early last month to attach an amendment authored by Republican Senator John McCain to a defense spending bill that would prohibit "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees in US custody. But the White House has threatened to veto the measure and has lobbied senators to have the language removed or modified to allow an exemption for the
Central Intelligence Agency.

During a trip to Panama earlier this month, Bush said that Americans "do not torture."

However, appearing on CNN's "Late Edition" program, Hadley elaborated on the policy, making clear the White House could envisage circumstances, in which the broad pledge not to torture might not apply.

"The president has said that we are going to do whatever we do in accordance with the law," the national security adviser said. "But... you see the dilemma. What happens if on September 7th of 2001, we had gotten one of the hijackers and based on information associated with that arrest, believed that within four days, there's going to be a devastating attack on the United States?"

He insisted that it was "a difficult dilemma to know what to do in that circumstance to both discharge our responsibility to protect the American people from terrorist attack and follow the president's guidance of staying within the confines of law."

The CIA is reported to be operating a network of covert prisons in eight countries around the world, including
Afghanistan, Thailand and several former Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe, where terror suspects are questioned.

Republican Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Newsweek magazine that "enhanced interrogation techniques" had worked with at least one captured high-level Al-Qaeda operative, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to thwart an unspecified plot.

But officials have been mum about interrogation techniques used on other detainees, drawing sharp criticism from members of the Senate.

A compromise with senators was in the works, Hadley assured, saying the White House was holding consultations with them about the McCain amendment.

He offered no specifics about the administration's goals in these talks. But McCain, who appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation" program, said White House negotiators led by Vice President Richard Cheney were pushing to safeguard the option of using the enhanced interrogation techniques in order to get information from detainees in extraordinary circumstances.

The senator said he disagreed with that approach because he was worried about the damage to the image of the United States.

"I hold no brief for the terrorists," he said. "But it's not about them. It's about us. This battle we're in is about the things we stand for and believe in and practice. And that is an observance of human rights, no matter how terrible our adversaries may be."

Americans at large don't seem to have a clear-cut position on the use of torture. The latest Newsweek opinion poll found that 58 percent of the public would support torture to thwart a terrorist attack.

But the same survey showed that 51 percent of Americans believe it is rarely or never justified, while 44 percent said torture is often or sometimes justified to obtain important information.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051113/ts_afp/usattackstorture_051113232322

Umm, looks pretty much down the middle, don't it? 51 percent moronic belief.

Look. This is controversial. I say be a man. Say what you believe. The administration is waffling. And we all know what the public thinks about that in a politician. Bush wouldn't want to waffle, would he?

If they torture, then say so, if they don't, then they should say they don't. My point is that they want it both ways. I was raised to stand up for what I believe. And to be proud of it. I'm saying these guys want it both ways. That shows a personality flaw. Or a wealthy persons morals.

And above all, it feeds our enemies. We are in a psychological war with these assholes. It’s like Iraq. We are given the jihadists just what they wanted. And this behavior gives AQ ammo to feed the people to hate us.

But the personal attack? In a place of public discussion? You embarrass me and yourself.

The "let the facts speak for themselves, and lets point out the hypocracy" 801

JustAVoice

11-14-2005, 07:22 PM

Maybe I'm not being clear on this...I'll try again.

Torture IS NOT U.S. policy.

If a person takes it upon his/her self to engage in torture, then they do so of their own accord.

Rational people ALSO realize that there might be extreme circumstances where torture might be used anyway....

Let me ask you this: Can you envision a scenario (extreme as it may be) where you would accept the use of torture??

If the very existence of the country depended on it?

What about if the existence of the entire human population depended on it?

The 801

11-14-2005, 07:41 PM

OK, this is it. I can't stand this. We are argueing at cross purposes. For no purpose at all.

Your argument : Torture is not US policy. Sometimes we must torture. You make no personal stand for or against.

My argument: The administration says one thing and does another. Or can't keep thier story straight. All the time. Like pledging a certain amount of money for tsumai relief and delivering a small fraction of that. This is an example that type of behavior. I don't really care if they torture AQ. They killed my cousin and his whole department in the North tower. I wish them a hellish death. But I don't believe in torture. Experts speak against it. Those who know more than me say it doesn't work well. It is immoral. I don't condone it. I don't want to be like them. But that is me.

This thread is to delineate the follies of the present administration that takes advantage of people because they are poorly informed. If you disagree, I would be more than pleased if you started a Best President Ever! thread. And I promise I won't post.

The "Sorry everyone to bore you with this circular reasoning when there is so much more thoughtful and fun stuff to post" 801

JustAVoice

11-14-2005, 07:45 PM

The 801

11-14-2005, 07:46 PM

Like this fun editoral from James Follows:

What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq

It would be nice if, even once, the Bush administration addressed the strongest version of the case against its Iraq-and-terrorism policy, rather than relying on bromides ("fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here") and knocking down straw men ("some say Iraqis don't deserve freedom...").

It probably won't happen.
On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who raised exactly this concern in the famous leaked memo of two years ago warning that the United States might be creating terrorists even faster than it was killing them. But Rumsfeld has locked himself into permanent wise-guy mode, and it is hard to imagine him sitting still for a question long enough to answer it seriously.

Paul Wolfowitz's answer would also be fascinating to hear -- but he is off to other projects now. It offends the rules of karma that Wolfowitz should have received Robert McNamara-style job of absolution, tending to poor nations at the World Bank, without undergoing obvious McNamara-style torments about the effects of his grand vision to liberate a particular poor nation with U.S. troops. Colin Powell has also made a sweet karmic deal: he can be known as the most principled internal dissenter, without the muss and fuss of public dissent. And in a different way, Condi Rice has an attractive situation: she resolutely (and without nuance) defends the policy, without usually being blamed for it.

As for an answer from Dick Cheney, dream on.

So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.

But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.

The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if they would not be in Iraq thorugh many summers!). This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I.

The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.

This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time. There would be more chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.

The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-fallows/what-bush-isnt-addressin_b_10621.html

Yea, its huffpo....

JustAVoice

11-14-2005, 07:56 PM

al-Canine

11-15-2005, 11:08 AM

Message from Moderator

Please, let's not make personal attacks or call each other denigrating names here. We would like to keep these discussions civilized. Thank you.

The 801

11-15-2005, 06:23 PM

Thanks Al, it was dumb of me to get into that, and I want to apologize to one and all.

I'm not sure if this fits here, but drudgereport posted it, and I think it points out Bushes dependence on his "grandmas"..

Bush rarely speaks to father, ‘family is split’
Tue Nov 15 2005 11:23:51 ET

President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, INSIGHT magazine claims in a new report.

The president’s reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.

“The atmosphere in the Oval Office has become unbearable,” a source said. “Even the family is split.”

INSIGHT: Sources close to the White House say that Mr. Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key officials in the wake of plunging domestic support, the continued insurgency in Iraq and the CIA-leak investigation that has resulted in the indictment and resignation of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.

http://drudgereport.com/flash4.htm

Kinda Sad...

The "now Bushes policy problems are going to effect him personally and I don't think he has the character to take it, so it's gonna be hard to watch" 801

DammitBoy!

11-17-2005, 01:56 AM

3) I don't really care if they torture AQ. They killed my cousin and his whole department in the North tower. I wish them a hellish death.

B) But I don't believe in torture.

Ummmm, you're confusing me. Which sentence is true and which is a lie?

The 801

11-18-2005, 01:32 AM

Colin Powell Breaks with Bush Administration

“History is often best served cold.” That’s how former Secretary of State Colin Powell answered PBS interviewer Charlie Rose’s question about whether Powell would one day write a book on his service to George W. Bush. Secretary Powell’s paraphrase of “revenge is a dish best served cold” foretold the other observations he would reveal for the first time regarding the Bush Administration’s handling of the war in Iraq.
Admitting that the nation is going through a “rough spot,” Powell defended the White House’s reliance on intelligence that led up to the Iraq War while appearing to lay blame on the intelligence community for any inaccuracies. He did, however, directly criticize the White House’s planning and execution of the war. No one currently in the Bush leadership has yet to admit any failures in this area.

Powell’s criticism comes at a time when President Bush and Vice President Cheney are personally engaged in direct attacks on anyone who questions the war. In Korea on Wednesday, President Bush fired another shot when he accused his critics of rewriting history, calling them irresponsible.

On intelligence, Secretary Powell dynamited the White House’s apparent pre-war certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq. He admitted that the conclusions about stockpiles of WMDs were only “inferential” because, he explained, the government had no one on the ground in Iraq. Regarding his own famous 2003 testimony before the United Nations Security Council, Powell asserted that he felt at that time that all of his testimony was credible because each
piece of evidence he presented was backed by several sources.

Powell offered that the President did get more daily intelligence information than the Congress – despite current protestations by the White House to the contrary – though he said that this additional information would not have led to different pre-war conclusions about the existence of the stockpiles. Powell laid the blame squarely outside Bush’s war cabinet, saying, “I think the intelligence community let us all down.” Yet he also defended the integrity of the intelligence operatives, “These are dedicated people who mean nothing but the best for our country.”

On Iraq, Powell was less circumspect. He stated unequivocally that the United States did not have enough troops to impose order after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow and that the White House should have been more aggressive in going after the insurgents early in the conflict. Powell also took issue with the elimination of Iraq’s military, questioning specifically the dismissal of the officer corps in the process known as de-Baathification.

On the torture issue, Powell expressed support for John McCain’s anti-torture legislation (passed 90-9 by the Senate two weeks ago) that the White House is currently threatening to veto. The White House, led by Cheney, has fought against this legislation and aggressively sought an exception for the CIA. Powell said that the U.S. cannot start “cutting corners” when it comes to finding and eliminating terrorists and their leaders. Not only would this compromise some of our nation’s own deeply held ideals, he said, but a no-compromise policy on torture “also protects our soldiers” when they themselves are taken prisoner. Senator McCain’s legislation, Powell insisted, “says to the world … we’re now making a moral statement.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donnie-fowler/iraq-colin-powell-public_b_10845.html

The 801

11-24-2005, 11:26 AM

A lot of meat here. Wonder if historians will look back and see this administration as driving a nail into the end of the American Century? It is a sad time for our country and culture, my friends....801

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Is
lamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online.

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm#

The 801

11-27-2005, 11:32 AM

Help Wanted: Academic Economists, Pro-Bush

By DANIEL ALTMAN
Published: November 27, 2005

IT'S no secret that hurricanes and wars have swamped the economic agenda that George W. Bush planned for his second term. In the commotion, however, one fact has gone largely unnoticed: much of Washington's expert economic team has disappeared.

The chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisers will soon be vacant, and two spots on the Federal Reserve Board that were recently filled by academic economists already are. There is no assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy, and the director's chair at the Congressional Budget Office, currently occupied by Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, will soon be empty, too.

The White House and Congress need as many as five academic economists of high caliber, and it's not obvious where they will come from. The Republican Party may be facing something of a shallow bench.

"Bush's reputation in at least the academic community is about as low as you can imagine," said William A. Niskanen, who was a member of the council during President Ronald Reagan's first term and is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group. "A lot of people would not be willing to give up a good tenured position for a position in the White House."

Back in 2003, the choice of N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, to head the council initially provoked some wonderment from economists. He had condemned supporters of some Reagan-era tax cuts as "charlatans and cranks" in the first edition of his basic economics textbook, and he had suggested replacing part of the income tax with higher taxes on gasoline - a nonstarter in this White House. But it's possible that the administration had few other options.

"It has been true, typically speaking, that Republican administrations have found it harder to find senior, more prominent academic economists for the C.E.A. members and chairman than have Democratic administrations," said Michael L. Mussa, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, who was a member of the council during President Reagan's second term.

Mr. Mussa explained that the problem was partly one of specializations. "In the economics profession, on the microeconomic and regulatory side, there you find a substantial number of Republicans," he said, "but macroeconomists tend to lean a bit more to the Democratic side, on average."

And politics do matter for the appointments. "If you have written publicly in strong opposition to the current administration, they will be less likely to be interested in you," said Kristin J. Forbes, a veteran of the council who is now an associate professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "On the Council of Economic Advisers, the priority is a very good economist who supports most of the president's economic policies."

The same is likely to be true for the positions at the Treasury, the Fed and the Congressional Budget Office. Two of the three spots being vacated by academic economists - Ben S. Bernanke and Edward M. Gramlich at the Fed, and Mr. Holtz-Eakin at the budget office - could well be filled with more of the same, Mr. Mussa said. (Mr. Bernanke is expected to become the Fed chairman; Mr. Gramlich has returned to the academic world, and Mr. Holtz-Eakin will join the Council on Foreign Relations.) Mr. Mussa added, however, that the economist at the budget office should have experience in policy and management.

That's something that many academics lack. "Generally, economists are not very slick," said Alicia H. Munnell, a professor of management sciences at Boston College who served on the Council of Economic Advisers when Bill Clinton was president and spent years working in the Federal Reserve system.

Economists may not want to be political, either, she added. The reason has to do with incentives. "Everybody wants to go back into academia and be respected, so you don't want to say anything too foolish that people are going to laugh at you afterward," Professor Munnell explained.

Professor Forbes recounted that she and her colleagues on the council had pledged never to support policies that they didn't believe in themselves. Nevertheless, the role of the council's chair can take on a decidedly political tilt. That much was clear when Professor Mankiw, the last chairman to serve for more than a few months, appeared before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in February of last year.

At times Professor Mankiw, who has returned to Harvard, sounded more like Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, than an economic adviser. "The president is very focused on putting people back to work, at creating jobs," he said. "The president has said that he wants to make the tax cuts permanent. He believes that is important for economic growth."

Once he even caught himself, but the result ended up the same: "The president has - we've worked with Congress in the past to extend unemployment benefits. The president will continue with Congress on that issue."

Quite a few economists might have a hard time acting as the president's mouthpiece today. Plenty of academics, even some who have supported Republicans in the past, have condemned the White House's current policies. In particular, the enormous federal deficit has elicited ire from both left and right.

"There are a number of Republicans, both the right-wingers and the moderates, who are very uncomfortable about the deficits, and particularly about the spending that we saw in the first four years," Mr. Mussa said.

Dismay about the war in Iraq could also prompt many academics to turn down the White House on principle, Mr. Niskanen said.

One hint that the labor pool is drying up may be in the ages of some recent appointees. Professor Forbes was only 33 when she joined the council in 2003. Katherine Baicker and Matthew J. Slaughter, two academics confirmed as members this month by the Senate, are 34 and 36, respectively. Before taking up their new posts, both were associate professors, as Ms. Forbes is now - not full professors, like the vast majority of their predecessors.

Mr. Niskanen suggested that this change could stem from a perceived drop in the prestige of the council. "Bush has centralized policy decision-making much more than any president in years," he said. "The Council of Economic Advisers has been somewhat bypassed."

Mr. Niskanen said that there were now fewer meetings between members of the council and members of the president's cabinet than there were during his term. The council's offices have even been moved to a building farther from the White House.

ALL of these tensions may have resulted in a sort of Catch-22. The president's inability to move forward with much of his second-term economic agenda - dealing with Social Security, the tax system, immigration and tort rules - may have dulled economists' eagerness to work with him. Yet he may need them in order to start the wheels moving.

"John Snow has talked about turning the tax commission report into legislation," Mr. Niskanen said of the Treasury secretary, "but he does not have the skills on board to do that."

Professor Forbes, who also spent time at the Treasury, said that working in Washington demanded heavy sacrifices and large commitments of time. Her colleague there, Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton, added that spouses were often unwilling to move for short-term stints.

But Professor Munnell praised the experience as "extraordinary," adding that it also had a tendency to change the outlook of academic economists: "Once you taste the real world, it's really hard to ignore it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/business/yourmoney/27view.html

There goes the NYT again, running down the president, just because no one wants to work for him. -801

friqid

11-29-2005, 07:53 PM

experiencediz

if i were you i would be afraid, very afraid:add16:

The 801

12-02-2005, 09:38 AM

Sorry Friqid, comment not appropriate without clarification. Kindly explain. Thanks. - The "that bastion of accuracy " 801

The 801

12-02-2005, 09:41 AM

Yesterday About Iraqi Security Forces

Yesterday, President Bush claimed that Iraqi security forces “primarily led” the assault on the city of Tal Afar. Bush highlighted it as an “especially clear” sign of the progress Iraq security forces were making in Iraq.

The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year’s assault in Fallujah. In Fallujah, the assault was led by nine coalition battalions made up primarily of United States Marines and Army — with six Iraqi battalions supporting them…This year in Tal Afar, it was a very different story. The assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces — 11 Iraqi battalions, backed by five coalition battalions providing support.

TIME Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who is embedded with the U.S. troops in Iraq who participated in the Tal Afar battle, appeared on Anderson Cooper yesterday. He said Bush’s description was completely untrue:

" I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them"

Sen. John Warner (R-VA) who was also on Anderson Cooper yesterday said “I respect those journalists that embed themselves and I accept as a credible description what you’ve just put forward.”

Full Transcript:

COOPER: You know this is not one of the shows where we take sides. I really try to just look at facts on the ground, and the President in his speech talked about the battle of Tal Afar. And in his speech today, he said that it was led primarily by Iraqi security forces, eleven Iraqi battalions, backed by five coalition battalions providing support. He used this as compared to the battle of Fallujah as an example of how much better the Iraqis are doing. Earlier, I talked to Time Magazine’s Michael Ware, the Baghdad bureau chief who was embedded during the entire battle. I want to play you what he said about the Iraqi units he saw.

WARE: I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them. Green berets who were following an American plan of attack who were advancing with these Iraqi units as and when they were told to do so by the American battle planners. The Iraqis led nothing.

COOPER: Do you think the president was correct in saying that this was an Iraqi victory, that the Iraqis were leading the way?

WARNER: Well, I’ll let the commanders sort that out but I - first I respect those journalists that embed themselves and I accept as a credible description what you’ve just put forward. But you didn’t hear him say they cut and run like they did in Fallujah. You didn’t hear him say that the Iraqis dropped the arms. He said they were fighting. Now it may well have been that the battle plan was drawn up by the coalition forces, probably the U.S. leading.

Slightly edited ( added quotes to deliniate statements)
Quicktime streaming also avalible at:

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/01/embedded-time-reporter/

V For Vendetta

12-02-2005, 10:40 AM

A few quick points:

- Bill Clinton went to War with Iraq in 1998 by bombing the country based on WMD intelligence and Saddam's non-compliance with UN Resolutions. At which point between 1998 and 2003 did the WMD intelligence change and did Saddam become compliant with UN Resolutions?

- The U.S. has not been attacked by terrorism since 9-11....including 2 1/2 years since the Iraq War began. Sorry if I sound selfish, but I would rather terrorism and our fight with Al-Qaeda happen 'over there' than here.It didn't change outright, though progress was being made. Clinton did not go to war, he sent in retaliatory punitive strikes. He didn't send in ground troops and have no exit strategy.

The issue isn't "one side black, one side white" like you're trying to make it. Clearly, Iraq and Saddam was a problem. But the contention is, a ground war leading to a quagmire is not the answer. This mess is the result of an incompetent administration.

The first part of the mission was a no brainer: topplling Saddam. Did anyone have any illusions about whether or not the US would win that? No, it's pretty obvious the US was going to do it and it happened effectively "overnight" (metaphor).

The real issue is, "NOW WHAT?" The "NOW WHAT?" seems to be: Install demoncracy at the point of a rifle. Do you know what the result of such a policy is? Look at Iraq today for your answer.

The best possible solution to 9/11 doesn't even include Iraq, and your next comment, suggesting that we haven't had any terrorist attacks here because we felled Saddam in Iraq is a non-sequitor since not until WE created the vaccuum in Iraq was al-qada in any way involved with Iraq!

We haven't had any attacks for a few reasons, those most likely being:

Increased security
Osama bin Laden forced into hiding-- or, he might be dead.
Terrorist willingness to lie low for years while developing new strategies.

Another reason is likely that Osama stood as the primary motivation force in leading attacks on the US, and one of his key demands was that the US get its base out of Saudi Arabia -- which is now the case (thanks, Bush! Never hurts to give in to the demands of a terrorist, now, does it?). It could be that Osama's wish granted, his agenda is something completely different.

There was a better way. I was all for toppling the Taliban and al-Qada, but to not pursue and capture Osama was a huge, stupid and iditotic mistake on the part of Bush (yes, he is personally responsible for this). Everyone is always so worried about how the US looks in these scenarios, yet I don't hear the right wing ever complain that their hero "W" abandoned the hunt for the primary architect of the worst act of terrorism in this countries' history. None of you seem to care!

It was ESSENTIAL for us to capture him, and show the world the penalty for fucking with American lives like he did. Out and out revenge, BUT tempered with justice and mercy -- the ideals of American brought down on it's worst detractor. Instead, we walked away from it, and that incompetent boob in the white house publicly proclaimed, "I don't think about him at all," and went off to sink us in a quagmire in Iraq, sacrificing American lives.

Why did he do it? Why the almost purposeful lack of any strategy other than "stay the course and not leave until victory is ours" platitudes?

Well, follow the money to get your answer. Find out who stands to gain. Find out who makes money on the nation-building that Bush emphatically crowed he was against. Are the Iraqis the ones employed in rebuilding that country? Are they reaping the benefits from the tearing out of their infrastructure? Who benefits? Who's making the biggest profit from this?

To one side of the aisle, the answer to this is obvious. To the other side, I see apologetics and a bizarre, fanatical loyalty to an administration that is bending over its primary supporters and slamming it home dry.

Frankly, other than Jim Jones and David Koresh examples, I've never before witnessed a group of people getting fucked so badly by their leader, yet falling down on their faces to worship him as I have the modern right wing.

But hey, while there are some die-hard holdouts, even most of the right wing is starting to abandon this scuttled ship.

BenDover

12-02-2005, 11:10 AM

I believe Clinton was impeached not because he got a BJ, but rather because he lied.

LOL....if lying was the only requirement to impeach a President, all of 'em would be guilty as hell.

:add09:

The 801

12-03-2005, 06:36 PM

Report Accuses EPA of Slanting Analysis
Hill Researchers Say Agency Fixed Pollution Study to Favor Bush's 'Clear Skies'

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 3, 2005;

The Bush administration skewed its analysis of pending legislation on air pollution to favor its bill over two competing proposals, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Oct. 27 analysis of its plan -- along with those of Sens. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) -- exaggerated the costs and underestimated the benefits of imposing more stringent pollution curbs, the independent, nonpartisan congressional researchers wrote in a Nov. 23 report. The EPA issued its analysis -- which Carper had demanded this spring, threatening to hold up the nomination of EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson -- in part to revive its proposal, which is stalled in the Senate.

The administration's "Clear Skies" legislation aims to achieve a 70 percent cut in emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide after 2018, while Carper's and Jeffords's bills demand steeper and faster cuts and would also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which are linked to global warming. The Bush plan would also cut emissions of neurotoxic mercury by 70 percent, while Jeffords's bill reduces them by 90 percent.

"Although it represents a step toward understanding the impacts of legislative options, EPA's analysis is not as useful as one could hope," the Research Service report said. "The result is an analysis that some will argue is no longer sufficiently up-to-date to contribute substantially to congressional debate."

The congressional report, which was not commissioned by a lawmaker as is customary, said the EPA analysis boosted its own proposal by overestimating the cost of controlling mercury and playing down the economic benefits of reducing premature deaths and illnesses linked to air pollution.

EPA estimated the administration's plan would cost coal-fired power plants as much as $6 billion annually, compared with up to $10 billion in Carper's measure and as much as $51 billion for Jeffords's. It calculated that Bush's proposal would produce $143 billion a year in health benefits while Carper's would generate $161 billion and Jeffords would yield $211 billion. Carper's measure would achieve most of its reductions by 2013, while Jeffords's bill would enact even more ambitious pollution cuts by 2010.

EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said the agency based its cost estimates on mercury controls by gathering comments from boilermaker workers, power companies and emission control companies, whereas the Research Service used a single study to reach its conclusions on mercury.

"Clear Skies delivers dramatic health benefits across the nation without raising energy costs and does it with certainty and simplicity, instead of regulation and litigation," Witcher said. "Because of our commitment to see this become a reality, EPA went above and beyond to provide the most comprehensive legislative analysis of air ever prepared by the agency, so it does a real disservice to this discussion to have a report that largely ignores and misinterprets our analysis."

But aides to Carper and Jeffords said they felt vindicated by the congressional study.

"The CRS report backs up a lot of what we initially said about EPA's latest analysis, that it overstated the costs of controlling mercury and understated the overall health benefits of Senator Carper's legislation," said Carper spokesman Bill Ghent. "The report clearly states that there's no reason to settle for the president's Clear Skies plan because the legislation doesn't clean the air much better than current law."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/02/AR2005120201767.html?referrer=email

The 801

12-03-2005, 06:50 PM

Oil executives clarify task-force contacts

By H. Josef Hebert

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON —Five oil-industry executives acknowledged frequent company contacts with government officials to discuss energy issues but insisted that they had responded truthfully at a recent Senate hearing when they denied participating in Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy task force.

The exchange at the Nov. 9 hearing prompted accusations by some Democratic senators that several of the executives may have knowingly misled Congress. A report published a few days later found that White House logs showed representatives of some of the companies had visited officials of the energy task force.

New Mexico Sens. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Jeff Bingaman, its ranking Democrat, asked the executives to clarify any discrepancies. The senators released the executives' written responses on Wednesday.

John Hofmeister, chairman of Shell Oil, said Shell representatives did not meet with the task force but added, "Shell representatives did meet with the administration, including the vice president and his staff, on a broad range of energy-policy issues."

Exxon Mobil said its chairman, Lee Raymond, responded accurately when he said no one at the company participated in a task-force meeting — as the question was phrased by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.

In its letter, however, Exxon Mobil confirmed that company officials met with a Bush administration official for 45 minutes on Feb. 14, 2001, to discuss the "global energy supply and demand situation." On the same day, the company said, the same information was given to members of Congress and others. The Cheney task force issued its report on energy priorities in May 2001.

Lautenberg called the executives' clarifications "corporate doublespeak that only further demonstrates the need for a criminal investigation" of their Nov. 9 testimony.

There was no indication that either Domenici or Bingaman planned to press matters further. The White House has steadfastly refused to provide a list of oil companies that provided information to the Cheney task force, going to court to fight attempts to obtain such information.

Ross Pillari, chairman of BP America, said on Nov. 9 that he did not know whether anyone from his company participated in any task-force matters.

In his clarification, Pillari reiterated that he was "not personally involved in energy policy issues" in 2001. After looking into the issue further, he confirmed that "BP representatives did meet with (task-force) staff members."

advertising
They "provided them with comments on a range of energy policy matters ... much like we continue to do on a routine basis with members of Congress and the administration," Pillari wrote.

James Mulva, chairman of ConocoPhillips, also insisted that he had responded accurately when he said his company did not participate in the Cheney task force. Mulva said he since had learned that Archie Dunham, chairman of Conoco, and another Conoco official "had attended or participated in a task force meeting in 2001."

David O'Reilly, chairman of Chevron, wrote that Chevron representatives "did not attend any meetings with administration officials or staff for the purpose of discussing (Cheney) task force activities." But O'Reilly attached to his reply a letter he sent to President Bush on Feb. 5, 2001, emphasizing "we need to increase our energy supply" and discussing other energy issues.

"Chevron personnel routinely have and did have discussions on U.S. energy policy with officials in the administration and their staff," O'Reilly wrote in his response to Domenici and Bingaman.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002657005_oil01.html

The 801

12-03-2005, 07:06 PM

Summary of Study Findings for "Traveling Executive Class"

* From 1999 to late 2004, more than 620 White House officials have reported receiving more than $2.3 million in trips from companies and organizations, an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found.

* These trips included junkets for such high-profile officials as Alberto Gonzales, John Podesta, Sandy Berger, Ari Fleischer, Condoleezza Rice, and Tom Ridge.

* Ethics rules state that federal employees cannot accept such travel if it would "cause a reasonable person … to question the integrity of agency programs," but the Center found that a third of all the money spent on White House trips was paid for by organizations registered to lobby the federal government.

* In all, federal workers who advise the president accepted free travel from 216 companies and organizations that have spent more than $1.1 billion lobbying from 1998 to late 2004.

Lots more falsehoods planted by the Center for Public Integrity. You gotta get read this stuff, it is a riot. Or could cause a riot.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/lobby/report.aspx?aid=767

The 801

12-07-2005, 04:46 PM

Worst Vice President Ever!

Some old stuff, fun to review...

Yes, Dick,
You Are a Liarby Jeffrey Steinberg
Vice President Dick Cheney spent the second half of November ranting against Administration critics who dare accuse him of lying the United States into a disastrous war with Iraq. Speaking on Nov. 21 at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney snarled that anyone making such accusations is "reprehensible" and practically guilty of high treason. His scheduled 90-minute appearance at the primo neo-con think-tank in Washington, where his wife Lynne is a resident fellow, lasted a total of 19 minutes. Cheney came, he ranted, and he departed, without taking a single question.

The Vice President is a man with something to hide. The simple truth is: Cheney did lie, repeatedly, to bludgeon the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to several eyewitness accounts, Cheney personally lied to scores of members of the U.S. Senate, claiming that the White House had rock-solid proof that Saddam Hussein was close to building a nuclear bomb, and that war was the only option. No such evidence existed—and Cheney knew it.

Cheney's favorite Iraqi liar, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), now a deputy prime minister, all but gloated over his and Cheney's war-by-deception scam in an infamous Feb. 19, 2004 interview with the Daily Telegraph. Confronted on the piles of INC-fabricated intelligence that helped lead the United States to war in Iraq, Chalabi shrugged his shoulders, and said, "We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Not so. Now, despite Cheney's campaign of obstruction, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is scheduled to produce a Phase II report on the role of policymakers, starting with the Vice President, in the so-called "intelligence failures" leading up to the Iraq invasion. No doubt, there were some significant intelligence failures—notably, failures of nerve by senior intelligence community bureaucrats, to resist White House pressure to "spin" the intelligence to justify invasion. But the overriding factor in the rush to war was a campaign of lies by Cheney, and by what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (USA-ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, dubbed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal."

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Oct. 25, 2005, Colonel Wilkerson declared: "In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security—including vital decisions about postwar Iraq—were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift—not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.... But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.... It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time."

While the SSCI probe is expected to take months, and a parallel investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General into the role of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in intelligence fakery is not expected to be completed until March, there are already public caches full of "smoking guns," proving that the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal wittingly lied America into the Iraq War. And many of those lies had already been refuted by the U.S. intelligence community before the first bombs dropped on Baghdad on March 19, 2003.

Saddam and al-Qaeda
Senate Democrats have demanded that the White House provide the SSCI with the text of a Sept. 21, 2001 President's Daily Briefing (PDB), and a more in-depth CIA analysis delivered to the White House shortly afterwards, dealing with the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The White House has refused.

Why? One of Dick Cheney's favorite arguments for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. And according to news accounts, the Sept. 21, 2001 PDB made clear that there was no evidence of any Saddam/al-Qaeda ties. In fact, the intelligence estimate presented to President Bush, Cheney, and other top national security officials on Sept. 21, was that Saddam was an arch enemy of al-Qaeda, and had spied on it.

Despite this, and the more in-depth CIA study on why the Saddam/al-Qaeda ties were bogus, Cheney and company kept on lying that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Now, Lynne Cheney has brought the White House deception campaign to a new low. Appearing on Nov. 28 on National Public Radio, she launched into an hysterical defense of "her man," claiming that "Dick never said" that there were any links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks! Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Sept. 21, 2001 PDB came in response to demands from the White House for all available evidence of a Saddam link to the authors of the 9/11 attack. Five days before the PDB was delivered, President Bush had convened a War Cabinet meeting at Camp David, where the planned attack on Afghanistan was finalized. At that meeting, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, speaking for the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal, had called for an invasion of Iraq, claiming that Saddam was at the center of global terror and should be America's first target. The next day, President Bush signed a secret order, authorizing the military campaign against Afghanistan, but also ordering the Pentagon and CIA to begin plans for future action against Iraq.

On Sept. 19, the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a Pentagon advisory panel then chaired by neo-con Richard Perle, and populated by a collection of like-minded war hawks, convened a closed-door session. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz attended the meeting, which was addressed by INC head Ahmed Chalabi and Dr. Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian British intelligence Arab Bureau spook, who was a longtime booster of Chalabi. The topic was the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein in retaliation for 9/11. As the direct result of the session, one DPB member, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, was dispatched on a mission to London, to round up evidence that Saddam was behind the recent terror attacks, as well as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. London was the headquarters of the INC.

Atta in Prague
Shortly after Woolsey's first Defense Policy Board sojourn to London, the first news stories appeared, alleging that 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta had been in the Czech capital, Prague, on April 8, 2001, meeting with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Second Secretary of the Iraqi Embassy and an officer in the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. The "Atta in Prague" urban legend would serve as Cheney's favorite "smoking gun" on the issue of Saddam's hand in 9/11.

The ostensible source of the information was an "Arab student," working undercover for Czech intelligence, who had spotted the two men in a restaurant. The "student" would later relocate to London, raising some speculation that he may have been part of the INC disinformation machine from the outset. Later versions of the story claimed that Czech intelligence had photographed the meeting, because al-Ani was under surveillance as the result of an earlier alleged terror plot against American targets in the Czech capital. One well-placed U.S. military intelligence source recently told EIR that Czech intelligence had indeed surveilled the meeting, but had later determined that the man with al-Ani was not Atta.

Despite conflicting evidence, showing that Atta was in the United States on the date of the alleged Prague meeting, Vice President Cheney was among the first Bush Administration officials to jump the gun and proclaim the Atta-Baghdad ties. On Dec. 9, 2001, in an appearance on "Meet the Press," Cheney declared, "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."

On April 30, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in San Francisco, in which he publicly refuted the Atta-in-Prague story, citing the FBI's detailed evidence that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va. on that date. "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," he explained.

The FBI trashing of the Atta links to Iraq did nothing to deter Cheney. On another "Meet the Press" appearance on Sept. 8, 2003, the Vice President reiterated, "There has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen, in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center." Cheney went so far as to describe Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Cheney's Parallel Intelligence Stovepipe
To further counter the assessments of the official U.S. intelligence establishment that there were no Iraqi ties to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in October 2001, the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal created a secret "Iraq intelligence unit" in the office of Undersecretary Feith, Wolfowitz's policy deputy. This Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluations Group (PCTEG) initially consisted of two well-known neo-cons with no intelligence backgrounds: David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. They produced scores of reports, based on a combination of "cherry-picked" raw intelligence from the community's data base, and information gathered from outside sources, particularly from the Iraqi National Congress. Their reports claimed that the CIA, DIA, and other agencies had ignored "proof" of Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks, and similar "proof" of Saddam's nuclear weapons and other WMD programs. Wurmser would later serve as executive assistant to John Bolton, the State Department's top arms control official and a leading neo-con, and then move on to Cheney's office as the key Mideast aide, a post he still holds.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz kept the existence of the PCTEG secret for over a year, to conceal the fact that they had created a parallel intelligence organization, working behind the back, and at cross-purposes with the official agencies, including the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency. On Oct. 24, 2002, Rumsfeld finally admitted that he had commissioned "a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks."

Chalabi/INC-generated disinformation was "stovepiped" to Feith's office and to senior staff in the Office of the Vice President. Even when the Chalabi fabrications were passed to the CIA and DIA for official vetting, they often appeared in Cheney speeches before the agencies did their work. More often than not, DIA and CIA detailed vetting efforts showed that the purported intelligence was fabricated, grossly exaggerated, or impossible to independently corroborate.

A most revealing handwritten note by Dick Cheney has recently surfaced on a PCTEG document from the period. It reads: "This is very good indeed.... Encouraging.... Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

The Feith stovepipe ultimately became a bone of contention between the Administration and the Congress—especially after it was learned that officials of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), an Iraq war planning cell in the Office of Near East and South Asia (NESA), had given power-point intelligence briefings to Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley behind the back of the CIA and DIA. NESA/OSP, which was housed in Feith's office, was headed by William Luti, a transplant from Cheney's staff, who boasted to colleagues that he reported "directly to Scooter." Luti has since returned to Cheney's office.

On Sept. 16, 2002, as Cheney was cranking up the agitprop for an Iraq invasion, OSP briefers presented the "proof" of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection—retreading the already-discredited Atta-in-Prague gibberish. What highlighted the briefing, however, was a diatribe against the CIA, for "flawed" intelligence gathering and analysis methods. It was not until July 8, 2004—16 months after the invasion of Iraq—that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was able to get the Pentagon to declassify one of the three slides in question. It was headlined "Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information." The slide accused the intelligence community of applying too high a standard in vetting intelligence leads; and of overstating the frictions between "secularists and Islamists."

Following Rumsfeld's admission that he had created his own parallel intelligence and analysis team, the SSCI demanded that Feith submit a classified report, detailing the findings of the unit. Feith stalled for months, but finally produced a 16-page memo, citing 50 itemized instances where the PCTEG had found intelligence citations of the Saddam/al-Qaeda links.

That Oct. 27, 2003 memo was not just passed to Senators Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking members of the SSCI. It was promptly leaked to Stephen F. Hayes, a reporter for the neo-con Weekly Standard, who was, according to intelligence community sources, then working on a book on Saddam's alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks.

Hayes virtually supercopied the classified document, and published it in the Nov. 24, 2003 issue of the Weekly Standard, with annotated comments. The article was brashly titled "Case Closed," implying that there was no longer any question that the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection was real. Hayes began his story by summarizing the fractured fairy-tale case presented in the Feith memo: "Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda—perhapse even for Mohammed Atta—according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD."

In a highly unusual move, the Department of Defense issued a News Release, responding to the Hayes article, which read in part: "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate." Directly citing the classified annex which had been leaked and published by Hayes, the News Release asserted that the document "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."

Six weeks after the Hayes story hit the newsstands, and well after the Defense Department refutation, Dick Cheney gave an interview, on Jan. 9, 2004, to the Rocky Mountain News, in which he regurgitated the contents of the Feith memo, and commended Hayes and the Weekly Standard by name, for setting the record straight on the Saddam/al-Qaeda links. "One place you ought to go look is an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee. That's your best source of information," Cheney told the paper.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 9, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet, in response to questioning from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) about the Jan. 9 Cheney interview, said, "Senator, we did not clear the [Feith] document. We did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document."

What's more, on July 1, 2004, Director Tenet provided a more extensive written answer to Senator Levin's question about the CIA's assessment of the Atta/al-Ani meeting and the overall Iraqi role in the 9/11 attacks. On the Prague meeting, Tenet stated, "we are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred.... In the absence of any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred, we assess that Atta would have been unlikely to undertake the substantial risk of contacting any Iraqi official as late as April 2001, with the plot already well along toward execution." Several paragraphs later, Tenet also dismissed an Iraqi role in 9/11 (see box).

Cheney's open embrace of the classified document leaked to the neo-con weekly had already triggered yet another firestorm. On Jan. 28, 2004, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, wrote to President Bush, demanding an investigation into the Vice President by the White House Counsel. The letter pointed out that it is a crime to publicly confirm information illegally leaked. "Further," the letter read, "the Counsel should investigate whether any damage to national security was done by Mr. Cheney's statement." To this date, no action has been taken on the demand.

On Feb. 12, 2004, Senator Levin wrote to the Vice President, demanding to know whether the statements attributed to him in the Rocky Mountain News interview were accurate.

The Libby Draft
Another White House document demanded by the Senate intelligence panel but refused by Cheney, was the draft UN testimony for Secretary of State Colin Powell, written by Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and chief national security aide until his indictment on Oct. 28, 2005 in the Valerie Plame Wilson case.

According to numerous news accounts, two separate Libby drafts, totaling more than 90 pages, were tossed in the garbage by Powell, after he reviewed them with intelligence community analysts and senior officials, on the eve of his appearance at the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

The Libby drafts contained allegations against Iraq that were not backed up by intelligence community data—including the allegations of Mohammed Atta's Iraqi intelligence ties. Where did Libby get the bogus information? The answer to that question, sources report, has Cheney sweating bullets. It may be the "smoking gun" that proves that Cheney was running his own rogue disinformation operation, to fake the case for war.

Much of the evidence of Cheney's conniving is fortunately available, because Secretary Powell had delegated his chief of staff, Colonel Wilkerson, to assemble and run the task force of intelligence community specialists, who would prepare the Feb. 5, 2003 UN Security Council testimony. In a series of news interviews, Wilkerson spelled out a chronology of skirmishes between his task force and the "Cabal."

On Jan. 25, 2003, Scooter Libby and John Hannah, Libby's deputy national security aide and a former vice president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), delivered a briefing on their proposed UN testimony at the White House situation room.

According to a Sept. 29, 2003 account of that session in the Washington Post, by Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler: "On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. 'We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, Wow! Here we go again,' said one official who helped draft the speech. 'You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again.'... Other officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded. 'After one day of hearing screams about who put this together and what are the sources, we essentially threw it out,' one official present said."

Four days after the Jan. 25 situation room session, Libby and Hannah presented Powell with a 48-page draft text. Powell turned it over to Wilkerson and instructed him to take it to the CIA headquarters and scrub it for accuracy. Within 48 hours, the document had been shown to be based almost exclusively on sources the intelligence community had trashed as unreliable.

Libby came back with a second draft, this one 45 pages, containing much of the same material. Soon, this draft, too, was in the trash can, after careful scrutiny by Wilkerson and the team of CIA and DIA analysts assembled to vet the speech. "We fought tooth and nail with other members of the administration to scrub it and get the crap out," Wilkerson told Gentlemen's Quarterly on April 29, 2004.

In an interview with author James Bamford, Wilkerson added another tantalizing piece to the picture. Still describing Libby's efforts to shape the Powell testimony, the colonel complained, "It was all cartoon. The specious connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, much of which I subsequently found came from the INC and from their sources, defectors and so forth, [regarding the] training in Iraq for terrorists.... No question in my mind that some of the sources that we were using were probably Israeli intelligence. That was one thing that was rarely revealed to us—if it was a foreign source."

By the time that Secretary of State Powell had settled on a final draft for his UN testimony, sans much of the "bullshit," the Cheney Cabalists were beside themselves over their failure to convince the Secretary to go with the Atta-Saddam links. On the morning of Feb. 5, 2003, as Secretary Powell was resting in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, awaiting his UN Security Council appearance, a frantic Lewis Libby repeatedly phoned Colonel Wilkerson, to make one final pitch to get Powell to go with the "Saddam did 9/11" hoax. Wilkerson was already at the United Nations. In a Nov. 22, 2005 interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Wilkerson said, "I didn't take the call from the Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. I referred it to someone else." Nevertheless, Wilkerson did confirm that the purpose of the call was to press for inclusion of the bogus Saddam/al-Qaeda links.

Curveball
In his Security Council testimony, Powell cited what he claimed as hard evidence that Saddam had developed mobile biological weapons labs, which were producing weapons that posed a grave threat to the region. Powell has since called that testimony the low point of his long career.

The sole source on the mobile labs was an Iraqi informant codenamed "Curveball," who was controlled by the German intelligence service BND.

On Nov. 20, 2005, the Los Angeles Times published an exposé, based on interviews with five BND officials, revealing that the German government had warned repeatedly that "Curveball" was a fabricator and a drunk, his information highly suspect. Subsequently, German state radio and other German news outlets elaborated on the "Curveball" story, providing further details of repeated German intelligence warnings to the Americans that they increasingly viewed their source as thoroughly unreliable, and perhaps "crazy." The CIA later issued its own warnings that Curveball was yet another frontman for Chalabi's INC. As of 1996, the CIA had written off the INC as a collection of corrupt losers and fabricators.

The "Curveball" disinformation was another of Cheney's favorite fibs. Well after the Iraq invasion, and well after the CIA and the Defense Human Intelligence Service (Defense Humint) had concluded that "Curveball" was a liar, and that there was no evidence that Iraq had the so-called mobile bio-weapon labs, Dick Cheney appeared on National Public Radio and declared: "We know, for example, that prior to our going in, that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it's not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce, or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

Cheney's love affair with "Curveball's" fabrications was, at least partly, explained by the fact that Doug Feith's spin machine alone had produced 75 intelligence reports, based exclusively on "Curveball's" debriefings, which were passed into the hand of U.S. intelligence through Defense Humint, and were accessed by Feith's cherry-pickers.

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, otherwise known as the Silberman-Robb Commission, issued its final report to the President on March 31, 2005. The report contained a 31-page chapter dealing exclusively with "Curveball," detailing the battles that took place within the intelligence community over the vetting of that source. Ultimately, both CIA and Defense Humint concurred with the BND that "Curveball" was a liar. But the Silberman-Robb Commission catalogued a string of failures by the relevant intelligence services to communicate to policymakers that they had issued a "burn notice" on "Curveball" until after the disastrous Powell UN appearance and the start of the war.

Rendon Group's Info Warfare
After the CIA's mid-1990s dumping of Chalabi, the convicted bank swindler kept up his ties to such neo-con outposts as the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). When Bush-Cheney came into office in 2001, the Pentagon picked up the INC franchise, and gave a lucrative contract to a Beltway PR firm, The Rendon Group, to promote the overthrow of Saddam. The Rendon Group had literally created the INC back in 1992, on a secret CIA contract to begin covert operation to overthrow Saddam.

Under Bush-Cheney, the Rendon Group and INC ran a Pentagon-funded program, the Information Collection Program, through which Iraqi defectors were debriefed on Saddam regime crimes.

In December 2001, the INC promoted a defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to have worked at dozens of secret WMD sites in Iraq. A CIA polygraph exam exposed him as a liar. Yet, within weeks of submission of the CIA assessment, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Paul Moran were publishing "exclusive" stories based on interviews with al-Haideri. Cheney gave a series of speeches based on the Miller article.

On Sept. 8, 2002, as Cheney was gearing up the war drive, Miller wrote another "exclusive" INC-sourced story, claiming Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes that could only be used for centrifuges, a key component of a nuclear weapons program.

The State Department intelligence unit and the Department of Energy strenuously objected to the story. But based on Miller's article, and already-discredited reports that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa, Cheney et al. forced the war down the throat of Congress with images of "nuclear mushroom clouds"

OH, its lyndon larouche! Hide your mind, hide you mind!!!!!

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3247cheney_lie_dossier.html

The 801

12-10-2005, 01:06 AM

I got so much crap on my position about torture here, I had to post this. It looks like the administrations lapse in values and morals really paid off...For Bin Laden.

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: December 9, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts.

The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda was based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the C.I.A.'s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi's claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.

At the time of his capture in Pakistan in late 2001, Mr. Libi, a Libyan, was the highest-ranking Qaeda leader in American custody. A Nov. 6 report in The New York Times, citing the Defense Intelligence Agency document, said he had made the assertions about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons while in American custody.

Mr. Libi was indeed initially held by the United States military in Afghanistan, and was debriefed there by C.I.A. officers, according to the new account provided by the current and former government officials. But despite his high rank, he was transferred to Egypt for further interrogation in January 2002 because the White House had not yet provided detailed authorization for the C.I.A. to hold him.

While he made some statements about Iraq and Al Qaeda when in American custody, the officials said, it was not until after he was handed over to Egypt that he made the most specific assertions, which were later used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

Beginning in March 2002, with the capture of a Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah, the C.I.A. adopted a practice of maintaining custody itself of the highest-ranking captives, a practice that became the main focus of recent controversy related to detention of suspected terrorists.

The agency currently holds between two and three dozen high-ranking terrorist suspects in secret prisons around the world. Reports that the prisons have included locations in Eastern Europe have stirred intense discomfort on the continent and have dogged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit there this week.

Mr. Libi was returned to American custody in February 2003, when he was transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the current and former government officials. He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004, and his current location is not known. A C.I.A. spokesman refused Thursday to comment on Mr. Libi's case. The current and former government officials who agreed to discuss the case were granted anonymity because most details surrounding Mr. Libi's case remain classified.

During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation. American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation. They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.
Skip to next paragraph
The Reach of War
Go to Complete Coverage
Readers
Forum: The Transition in Iraq

Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had no specific knowledge of Mr. Libi's case. Mr. Fahmy acknowledged that some prisoners had been sent to Egypt by mutual agreement between the United States and Egypt. "We do interrogations based on our understanding of the culture," Mr. Fahmy said. "We're not in the business of torturing anyone."

In statements before the war, and without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and other officials repeatedly cited the information provided by Mr. Libi as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases."

The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.

Mr. Levin has since asked the agency to declassify four other intelligence reports, three of them from February 2002, to see if they also expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi's credibility. On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Levin said he could not comment on the circumstances surrounding Mr. Libi's detention because the matter was classified.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09intel.html?hp&ex=1134104400&en=6d17d434a1d2e517&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The 801

12-12-2005, 11:07 PM

Included for referance, a Lawrence wilkerson interview for the foreign press. Now make no mistake about it: when you see an interview with Wilkerson, you are reading the comments of Colin Powell. Wikerson is Powells Mouthpiece. I don't mean it in a bad way, but Powell owes the administration a hard time after they ruined him. And Wilkerson plows the fields for him. And I am sure Gladly. 801

INTERVIEW WITH EX-POWELL AIDE WILKERSON

"A Leaderless, Directionless Superpower"

Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was instrumental in helping then Secretary of State Colin Powell assemble the dossier against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now, however, he is one of the Bush Administration's sharpest critics. He spoke with SPIEGEL about America's disdain for international law, Vice President Dick Cheney's oversized influence, and the loss of US moral authority.

The Bush Administration has lost its ethical compass, says Wilkerson.

SPIEGEL: Colonel Wilkerson, hardly an insider of the Bush Administration has ever criticized it as sharply as you are now. Why?

Wilkerson: The straw that broke the camel's back, what made me finally decide to go public, was the issue of departure from the Geneva Conventions. It was the departure from international law and treaty with regard to what I perceive to be a policy that permeated the leadership from the Vice President through the Defense Department and out to the military forces in the field. In my view, it was not only damaging to the armed forces -- and I was a member of the Army for 31 years -- but also damaging ultimately to America's image and credibility in the world and damaging to our capability to win this conflict against Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others like them. You can't win what essentially is a war
of ideas by departing from your own ideas.

SPIEGEL: How has it come to this?

Wilkerson: What I saw from my perspective at the State Department was essentially involvement in what I prefer to refer to as the statutory process. The President gets advice from every side and ultimately goes away and makes his decision. What I saw was the President making a decision that appeared to be a compromise. He said it was indeed a new enemy and perhaps Geneva did not pertain. But at the same time he said very clearly in the same memorandum, which I saw, that all detainees should be treated in accordance with American values and the spirit of Geneva.

SPIEGEL: So what went wrong?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON
Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's closest aides and was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.

Wilkerson: In execution of that decision the other side won, the side who thought that terrorists are the new beast, and they had to be dealt with differently. That happened because this is the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, and he wanted it to happen. It was a secretive little known cabal, led by Cheney and Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld who short-cut the statutory process. In the case of Geneva they thought there were no holds barred, that the demand for intelligence was so great that there was enormous flexibility in how you interrogated prisoners. And I saw that go all the way down to the lowest level of the armed forces. And when you put those two pressures together, the demand for intelligence and the implicit fact that this isn't the old ball game, then you have opened Pandora's Box. You contaminate the armed forces and you can expect to have things like Abu Ghraib and deaths.

SPIEGEL: How many people have died in American detention?

Wilkerson: When I left the State Department, there were over 70 deaths of people in detention, some of them being investigated, some of them covered up.

SPIEGEL: Is the CIA torturing people?

Wilkerson: I don't know. If the President signed a presidential finding and authorized a certain select group of the CIA, highly trained, to do other than Geneva-type interrogation-techniques, only a very few people will know. I'm not even sure the Secretary of State would know about it.

SPIEGEL: You prepared Colin Powell's now famous speech for the Security Council in which he blamed Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida. Was this claim a lie to generate support for the war, as some democrats now allege?

Lawrence Wilkerson.
Zoom
AP
Lawrence Wilkerson.
Wilkerson: I don't know. I wish I did. I was the task force leader at the CIA, putting together Powell's presentation. I was housed there for five or six days and nights. Today, I know that the Germans warned about the credibility of their agent "Curveball", who stated that Iraq has mobile production units for biological weapons. Why wasn't I told? Why wasn't the secretary of state told? We used the information from the al-Qaida member Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi who claimed that Iraq was training the jihadis in chemical and biological weaponry. Now he has recanted. We are hearing that his confessions were obtained under less than Geneva methods -- waterboarding for example.

SPIEGEL: The administration was also choosing the facts that best illustrated the supposed dangers presented by Iraq and overselling the case for war, isn't that right?

Wilkerson: That is true, at least with regard to Douglas Feith, then the number three in the Pentagon. And there is no question that the vice president overstated the case. I mean, all you have to do is run his tapes. By the way, they tried to get the alleged Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraq Intelligence officials -- which was discounted by almost everyone -- into the presentation. But we refused.

SPIEGEL: Colin Powell recently said this is a blow to his reputation ...

Wilkerson: ... I call it the low point in my professional career. I mean, I look back on it, and I rack my brain again. I wasn't a novice. I had been an intelligence user for years. How did we get so fooled?

SPIEGEL: Have you been able to find an answer?

Wilkerson: Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought. He actually was a very smart man. He knew his principal enemy was Iran; his second most threatening enemy was his own people. And somewhere in there was the US, but way down at the bottom. And the only way he could maintain the brusque 'I'll knock you out if you try to hit me' attitude that he did was to maintain the myth that he had WMDs. And so he managed to conduct a disinformation campaign.

SPIEGEL: Shouldn't then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have ensured that President Bush was better advised than he proved to be?

Wilkerson: There was a single word used by countless people in the government to describe the National Security Council under Dr. Rice and that is "dysfunctional." And if you think about it for a moment, this dysfunctionality of the statutory process was a nice camouflage for the alternative decision-making process that revolved around the vice president.

SPIEGEL: Rice had the president's trust and seemed focused on becoming ever closer to him.
NEWSLETTER>
Sign up for Spiegel Online's daily newsletter and get the best of Der Spiegel's and Spiegel Online's international coverage in your In-Box everyday.

Wilkerson: It worked. She had her eye on the prize. And finally she became secretary of state.

SPIEGEL: The Pentagon always claimed that a stable government could be installed in Iraq within a matter of months. Was there a climate of arrogance?

Wilkerson: Yes there was. Incredible arrogance. I call it the administration of hubris. How could anyone look at that region and believe it? As opposed to the Pentagon, we in the state department never signed up to that idea that our troops would be greeted with flowers. There were so many mistakes from the very outset of the administration -- beginning with sticking our finger in the world's eyes with our rejection of Kyoto without offering an explanation. The gracelessness, the ineptitude of how we confronted the world made foreign policy and international relations in general very difficult in the first Bush term.

SPIEGEL: Now, though, the mood has changed dramatically and the American public is no longer supportive of Bush's Iraq policies. Should the US troops be pulled out of Iraq?

Wilkerson: There are two dimensions to that. First, because Secretary Rumsfeld made the decision not to enlarge the army two years ago, it's inevitable that they'll be pulled out. Otherwise we will break our Army and Marine Corps, sometime in 2006, or 2007. That's the reality. The second and far more important dimension is the situation in Iraq. We now have to finish the job, otherwise we will, at a minimum, have a civil war and the whole Middle East would be in danger; I could see a tragedy of monumental proportions developing. So I agree 100 percent with the President that we have to stay until we get it right -- and I hope that can be done in the one to two years we have before we destroy the Army and the Marine Corps.

SPIEGEL: There is a proposal from the Democrats whereby the President should acknowledge the mistakes that have been made and then ask the country and the world for renewed support.

Wilkerson: I think many Americans, including myself, would be encouraged by some admission of fault and some change. But I don't think it's in this president's disposition and character to do that.

SPIEGEL: Isn't the loss of America's moral authority the biggest problem?

US President Bush and Vice President Cheney. "Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought."
Zoom
REUTERS
US President Bush and Vice President Cheney. "Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought."
Wilkerson: Yes. Recently I had occasion to be on a panel with a former prime minister of Canada who said, 'It's not so much that we Canadians are anti-American, it's that we are very, very worried about a headless giant.' And that stuck with me because that is an apt metaphor in some cases for this superpower right now. It seems leaderless. It seems directionless.

SPIEGEL: Are there not indications of a more measured foreign policy now emerging?

Wilkerson: I hope so. There have been some changes, and I'm encouraged by them. Dr. Rice is doing some things that would indicate to me that she has learned and that she is working now off a sheet of music that sounds pretty sweet to our allies and friends. That's wonderful. But I still detect, especially from the vice president, a note of unbridled unilateralism that concerns me: the willingness to go it alone, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we're the big guy on the block, to hell with you. I mean that sort of attitude is out of place in the 21st century.

SPIEGEL: Haven't the neo-conservatives and their policies failed?

Wilkerson: They are not neo-cons. They are not new conservatives. They're Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. And to say that these people are dead, dormant or lying quiescent is not encouraging because there are enough of them left. And it's going to be incumbent on the rest of us, in this country at least, to watch these trends and make sure that their ugly head doesn't rise up and cause more problems in the future.

Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo

Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's closest aides and was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,388857,00.html

Bman

12-16-2005, 03:45 PM

has anyone ever posted this link in this thread?

http://www.jrmooneyham.com/mrbsh.html

enjoy!

Bman

12-16-2005, 03:47 PM

Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2003 by IRNA and Der Spiegel (Berlin)
US Nobel Laureate Slams Bush Gov't as "Worst" in American History

George A. Akerlof, 2001 Nobel prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

BERLIN - American Nobel Prize laureate for Economics George A. Akerlof lashed out at the government of US President George W. Bush, calling it the "worst ever" in American history, the online site of the weekly Der Spiegel magazine reported Tuesday.

"I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extradordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign policy and economics but also in social and environmental policy," said the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

"This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for (American) people to engage in civil disobedience. I think it's time to protest - as much as possible," the 61-year-old scholar added.

Akerlof has been recognized for his research that borrows from sociology, psychology, anthropology and other fields to determine economic influences and outcomes.

His areas of expertise include macro-economics, monetary policy and poverty.

©2003 Islamic Republic News Agency ( IRNA)

###

Text of Der Spiegel interview by Matthias Streitz

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Professor Akerlof, according to recent official projections, the US federal deficit will reach $455 billion this fiscal year. That's the largest ever in dollar terms, but according to the President's budget director, it's still manageable. Do you agree?

George A. Akerlof: In the long term, a deficit of this magnitude is not manageable. We are moving into the period when, beginning around 2010, baby boomers are going to be retiring. That is going to put a severe strain on services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. This is the time when we should be saving.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So it would be necessary to run a budget surplus instead?

Akerlof: That would probably be impossible in the current situation. There's the expenditure for the war in Iraq, which I consider irresponsible. But there's also a recession and a desire to invigorate the economy through fiscal stimulus, which is quite legitimate. That's why we actually do need a deficit in the short term - but certainly not the type of deficit we have now.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Because it's not created by investment, but to a large extent by cutting taxes?

Akerlof: A short-term tax benefit for the poor would actually be a reasonable stimulus. Then, the money would almost certainly be spent. But the current and future deficit is a lot less stimulatory than it could be. Our administration is just throwing the money away. First, we should have fiscal stimulus that is sharply aimed at the current downturn. But this deficit continues far into the future, as the bulk of the tax cuts can be expected to continue indefinitely. The Administration is giving us red ink as far as the eye can see, and these permanent aspects outweigh the short-term stimulatory effects.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And secondly, you disagree with giving tax relief primarily to wealthier Americans. The GOP argues that those people deserve it for working hard.

Akerlof: The rich don't need the money and are a lot less likely to spend it - they will primarily increase their savings. Remember that wealthier families have done extremely well in the US in the past twenty years, whereas poorer ones have done quite badly. So the redistributive effects of this administration's tax policy are going in the exactly wrong direction. The worst and most indefensible of those cuts are those in dividend taxation - this overwhelmingly helps very wealthy people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The President claims that dividend tax reform supports the stock market - and helps the economy as a whole to grow.

Akerlof: That's totally unrealistic. Standard formulas from growth models suggest that that effect will be extremely small. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has come to a similar conclusion. So, even a sympathetic treatment finds that this argument is simply not correct.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When campaigning for an even-larger tax cut earlier this year, Mr. Bush promised that it would create 1.4 million jobs. Was that reasonable?

Akerlof: The tax cut will have some positive impact on job creation, although, as I mentioned, there is very little bang for the buck. There are very negative long-term consequences. The administration, when speaking about the budget, has unrealistically failed to take into account a very large number of important items. As of March 2003, the CBO estimated that the surplus for the next decade would approximately reach one trillion dollars. But this projection assumes, among other questionable things, that spending until 2013 is going to be constant in real dollar terms. That has never been the case. And with the current tax cuts, a realistic estimate would be a deficit in excess of six trillion.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the government's just bad at doing the correct math?

Akerlof: There is a systematic reason. The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If so, why's the President still popular?

Akerlof: For some reason the American people does not yet recognize the dire consequences of our government budgets. It's my hope that voters are going to see how irresponsible this policy is and are going to respond in 2004 and we're going to see a reversal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What if that doesn't happen?

Akerlof: Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly. And people depend on those. It's only among the richest 40 percent that you begin to get households who have sizeable fractions of their own retirement income.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is there a possibility that the government, because of the scope of current deficits, will be more reluctant to embark on a new war?

Akerlof: They would certainly have to think about debt levels, and military expenditure is already high. But if they seriously want to lead a war this will not be a large deterrent. You begin the war and ask for the money later. A more likely effect of the deficits is this: If there's another recession, we won't be able to engage in stimulatory fiscal spending to maintain full employment. Until now, there's been a great deal of trust in the American government. Markets knew that, if there is a current deficit, it will be repaid. The government has wasted that resource.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which, in addition, might drive up interest rates quite significantly?

Akerlof: The deficit is not going to have significant effects on short-term interest rates. Rates are pretty low, and the Fed will manage to keep them that way. In the mid term it could be a serious problem. When rates rise, the massive debt it's going to bite much more.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why is it that the Bush family seems to specialize in running up deficits? The second-largest federal deficit in absolute terms, $290 billion, occurred in 1991, during the presidency of George W. Bush's father.

Akerlof: That may be, but Bush's father committed a great act of courage by actually raising taxes. He wasn't always courageous, but this was his best public service. It was the first step to getting the deficit under control during the Clinton years. It was also a major factor in Bush's losing the election.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems that the current administration has politicised you in an unprecedented way. During the course of this year, you have, with other academics, signed two public declarations of protest. One against the tax cuts, the other against waging unilateral preventive war on Iraq.

Akerlof: I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to engage in civil disobedience.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of what kind?

Akerlof: I don't know yet. But I think it's time to protest - as much as possible.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Would you consider joining Democratic administration as an adviser, as your colleague Joseph Stiglitz did?

Akerlof: As you know my wife was in the last administration, and she did very well. She is probably much better suited for public service. But anything I'll be asked to do by a new administration I'd be happy to do.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You've mentioned the term civil disobedience a minute ago. That term was made popular by the author Henry D. Thoreau, who actually advised people not to pay taxes as a means of resistance. You wouldn't call for that, would you?

Akerlof: No. I think the one thing we should do is pay our taxes. Otherwise, it'll only make matters worse.

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines03/0729-06.htm

NYer

12-18-2005, 09:33 AM

As an economist, Akerlof makes an excellent foreign policy and environmental pundit

The 801

12-22-2005, 06:56 PM

Bush sees good 2005, warns of terrorism threat

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US
President George W. Bush called 2005 "a good year for the American people," but cautioned that terrorists like those who carried out the September 11 attacks still posed a threat.

In brief remarks outside the White House as he headed to the Camp David presidential retreat for Christmas, Bush also pointed to elections in
Iraq and in
Afghanistan and said the US economy had grown stronger.

"This has been a year of strong progress toward a freer, more peaceful world and a prosperous America," he said. "It's been a good year for the American people."

Bush said a key priority in 2006 would be reconstruction efforts in the US Gulf Coast after the battering it received from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and another would be renewing a controversial package of anti-terrorism laws.

"It appears to me that the Congress understands we got to keep the Patriot Act in place, that we're still under threat, there's still an enemy that wants to harm us," he said.

The US Senate handed Bush a defeat overnight when they balked at the open-ended renewal of the law and only extended it by six months, citing civil liberties concerns amid a domestic spying controversy.

Bush had a special message of families of US soldiers overseas, telling them: "We stand with you and we pray with you for the safety of your loved one."

"We want to send our greetings to your loved one overseas and tell them how much we appreciate you serving for the cause of freedom and peace," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051222/pl_afp/usbushiraqterrorism_051222201244

Is it me, or am I living in a different country? I know he lives in a world of the top .1%, but does he have to rub it in my face?

The 801

12-26-2005, 11:08 AM

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not
ROBERT STEINBACK
rsteinback@MiamiHerald.com

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.

If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.

That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.

What is there to say now?

All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ''Happy Holidays'' could be a disguised attack on Christianity.

I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke -- speaking metaphorically now -- mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we'd follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.

Never would I have expected this nation -- which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty -- would cower behind anyone just for promising to ``protect us.''

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.

Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, ``What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?''

Bush would have us excuse his administration's excesses in deference to the ''war on terror'' -- a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn't know where tomorrow's first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection -- even when it's beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.

Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It's time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?

Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.

Ultimately, our best defense against attack -- any attack, of any sort -- is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn't understand or respect that. Do we?

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13487511.htm

DC Penguin

12-27-2005, 11:42 AM

Guys, thanks for the great thread. Incredible posts lately. The 801, Bman (as always) . . . wow!

Great reads! Thank you and a belated Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to you both!

JustAVoice

12-27-2005, 10:10 PM

...
If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution
...

um...the President did not claim to be operating under FISA authority. He claims to be operating WITHIN the law under Constitutional Authority as well as post-9/11 Congressional authority.

Tell this moron who wrote this article to get his facts straight....

knightroar

12-27-2005, 10:15 PM

um...the President did not claim to be operating under FISA authority. He claims to be operating WITHIN the law under Constitutional Authority as well as post-9/11 Congressional authority.

Tell this moron who wrote this article to get his facts straight....

no surprise here. you will travel far and wide to defend George W. Bush at all costs. :eek:

The 801

12-28-2005, 09:08 AM

Bush's counsel on spying now under close scrutiny
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Columnist | December 27, 2005

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush sought to reassure the country that his authorization of spying on Americans without warrants was a reasonable exercise of his power, he emphasized that his orders were always reviewed by the attorney general and the White House counsel.
''Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland," Bush said in his Dec. 17 radio address. ''The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president."

The current occupants of those jobs are Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers. Prior to 2005, Gonzales was White House counsel and John Ashcroft was attorney general.

The current dispute over whether the president had the authority to order domestic spying without warrants, despite a law against it, has put new focus on the legal officials who have guided Bush. And the qualifications of Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Miers could become a focus of the upcoming Senate hearings on the spying decision.

Legal advice given to the president in national security matters can hardly be of greater importance. Telling Bush that he lacks the authority to make a particular move could leave the country vulnerable to attack; assuring him that he has the power to override civil liberties could consign innocent suspects to imprisonment, abuse, or disappearance to secret holding areas in other countries.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's legal advisers have cleared the way for him to hold enemy combatants without trials; eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls and e-mails; place ever-greater numbers of government documents under a veil of secrecy; imprison a US citizen indefinitely on the suspicion of terrorist links; and, according to The Washington Post, operate a secret CIA prison in an Eastern European country.

In each case, the legal official responsible for assessing the extent of Bush's powers was Ashcroft, Gonzales, or Miers.

Defining the president's powers -- when he can act alone, when he's constrained by treaties, when he must seek congressional authorization -- is extremely difficult. If there's one area of the law where the framers of the Constitution relied on the good faith of the men and women in government, it's in adhering to a system of divided powers. Nonetheless, presidents and members of Congress have often disagreed on their respective powers, and the Supreme Court has approached such cases warily, fearful of upsetting the constitutional balance of power.

The determinations of Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Miers have had great weight because they effectively cut Congress out of the decision-making, at least until the Supreme Court could weigh in. But in spying cases especially, the targets weren't aware that they were being monitored, and thus could not challenge Bush in court.

By the standards of past attorneys general, Ashcroft and Gonzales were well qualified for the job. Still, neither of them had much occasion to consider the legal limits of presidential power before they took office. Ashcroft taught business law and later became attorney general of Missouri. He then spent 14 years as a governor and senator before becoming Bush's first-term AG. Gonzales was a partner at a corporate law firm before Bush became governor of Texas. He served as a legal adviser to the governor, and was briefly Texas secretary of state and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

By the standards of past White House counsels, both Gonzales and Miers were lightly qualified, since neither of them had Washington experience before guiding the president.

By contrast, two of President Clinton's White House counsels, Lloyd Cutler and Abner Mikva, were eminent attorneys with decades of experience in assessing the limits of federal power.

During her ill-fated Supreme Court nomination, Miers was castigated by conservatives for her lack of qualifications. But her years as a partner in a corporate firm would have been more useful on the Supreme Court, which hears dozens of business cases a year, than in her current job reviewing the legality of Bush's actions.

To be sure, Gonzales and Miers -- like Ashcroft before them -- have many excellent lawyers working beneath them. But as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. can attest from their own days in the Justice Department, junior lawyers are usually restricted to coming up with justifications for the decisions made by their bosses.

And in these cases, the boss's decisions have literally been matters of life and death.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/12/27/bushs_counsel_on_spying_now_under_close_scrutiny?m ode=PF

I always enjoy Justavoice's comments. Its just they belong in "Best President ever" thread. And I assume that when he refers to a moron, he is not referring to myself. - The "super sensitive" 801

JustAVoice

12-28-2005, 06:54 PM

no surprise here. you will travel far and wide to defend George W. Bush at all costs. :eek:

and my actions only pale in comparison to your pathetic need to respond in kind.

:mad_01:

al-Canine

12-28-2005, 07:27 PM

Hey kids, let's keep it civilized in here, please refrain from disparaging personal remarks. Thanks! :)

NYer

12-28-2005, 08:10 PM

December 28, 2005--Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/NSA.htm

al-Canine

12-28-2005, 10:13 PM

The 801

12-29-2005, 08:51 AM

Does anyone know if the bush administration bypassed the system put in place to perform these intercepts? Didn't a judge quit because of this?

The"gotta go find those details" 801

IBinFarteen

12-29-2005, 05:11 PM

Executive order #1 (CLinton) (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm)

Executive Order #2 (Carter) (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo12139.htm)

The 801

12-30-2005, 02:12 AM

Presidents all the same when scandal strikes

Published on: 12/28/05

Two of the most powerful moments of political déjà vu I have ever experienced took place recently in the context of the Bush administration's defense of presidentially ordered electronic spying on American citizens.

First, in the best tradition of former President Bill Clinton's classic, "it-all-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is" defense, President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to "monitor" phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to "detect" improper communications.

This example of presidential phrase parsing was followed quickly by the president's press secretary, Scott McLellan, dead-panning to reporters that when Bush said a couple of years ago that he would never allow the NSA to monitor Americans without a court order, what he really meant was something different than what he actually said. If McLellan's last name had been McCurry, and the topic an illicit relationship with a White House intern rather than illegal spying on American citizens, I could have easily been listening to a White House news conference at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal.

On foreign policy, domestic issues, relationships with Congress, and even their selection of White House Christmas cards and china patterns, presidents are as different as night and day. But when caught with a hand in the cookie jar and their survival called into question, administrations circle the wagons, fall back on time-worn but often effective defense mechanisms, and seamlessly morph into one another.

First, we get a president bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali. He knows he can't really tell the truth and he knows he can't rely only on lies. The resulting dilemma leads him to veer from unintelligible muttering to attempts to distract, and then to chest-beating bravado and attacks on his accusers.

Soon, he begins taking trips abroad and appearing at the White House podium with foreign leaders with minimal command of English, allowing him to duck for cover whenever scandal questions arise.

Of course, the president can't carry the entire stonewalling burden alone. The next actors to enter the stage typically are the president's press secretary and the White House counsel's office. Serious scandals tend to spawn congressional investigations and independent counsels. As Clinton quickly learned, and Richard Nixon before him, the best way to short-circuit such endeavors is to force the investigators and lawyers to fight like dogs for every inch of ground they get.

By using the White House counsel's office to bury investigators in a sea of motions, pleadings and memoranda, an administration can drag out an investigation to the point of exhaustion. By the time the investigation actually slogs through this legal maze to bring real charges or issue a report, the courts, public and media are so sick and tired of hearing about it that the final charges fall stillborn from the press.

A critical component of White House Scandal Defense 101 is rallying the partisan base. This keeps approval ratings in territory where the wheels don't start falling off. The way to achieve this goal is you go negative and you don't let up. If you're always attacking your accusers, the debate becomes one of Democrat vs. Republican, rather than right vs. wrong. Anyone who questions the legality of the decision to wiretap thousands of Americans unlawfully is attacked, as either an enabler of terrorists or a bitter partisan trying to distract a president at war.

Yet another tactic is to shore up your congressional base in order to avoid or at least control pesky oversight investigations. A president's job here is made far easier if his party maintains a majority in one or both houses. Even if your party doesn't enjoy control of either the House or the Senate, you can still achieve your desired goal, as did Clinton — America's master scandal handler. You've just got to work harder at it.

The signs are everywhere that the Bush White House is busily implementing all parts of this defense strategy. It would be refreshing if it decided to clear the air and actually be honest about its post-Sept. 11 surveillance. However, that's unlikely. The problem this president faces, as did his predecessors, is that full disclosure would lead to the remedy stage. No president wants to fight that end-game.

— Former U.S. attorney and congressman Bob Barr practices law in Atlanta. His Web site: www.bobbarr.org

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/1205/28edbarr.html

The 801

01-02-2006, 11:44 AM

CIA operative says Bush, military leaders let bin Laden escape
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jan 2, 2006, 06:19

The top CIA counterterrorism officer who tracked Osama bin Laden through the mountains of Afghanistan says the United States could have captured the terrorist leader if President George W. Bush and the American military had devoted the necessary resources to the hunt and capture.

In addition, says Gary Bernsten, a decorated espionage officer, the post-Cold War downturn in recruitment and attention to espionage has left a crippled spy agency that will need a decade or more to build up its clandestine service for the U.S. war on terrorism.

Berntsen led a paramilitary unit code-named "Jawbreaker" in the war that toppled the Taliban after the September 11 attacks.

He says his Jawbreaker team tracked bin Laden to Afghanistan's Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured the al Qaeda leader there if military officials had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war with Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden was able to escape.

His account contradicts public statements by Bush and former Gen. Tommy Franks, who maintained that U.S. officials were never sure bin Laden was at Tora Bora.

Berntsen says CIA Director Porter Goss faces an uphill battle to fill the agency's senior ranks with aggressive, seasoned operatives.

"He's probably more aggressive than most of the senior officers in the clandestine service. So I think he's having to pull them along a bit," Berntsen said in an interview.

"(Goss) is trying to improve the situation. But it's going to be tough. The rebuilding is going to take years. A decade, at least," he told Reuters late last week.

The CIA, widely criticized for lapses involving prewar Iraq and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, has seen its clandestine staff dwindle to less than 5,000 employees from a peak of over 7,000, intelligence sources say.

Experts blame a post-Cold War downturn in recruitment for a current lack of seasoned clandestine operatives that has been exacerbated by a rush to lucrative private sector jobs in recent years.

"We have a smaller number of really, really aggressive, creative members of our leadership in the senior service," said Berntsen, who recently published a book about his exploits in the war on terrorism, titled "Jawbreaker" (Crown Publishing).

Former CIA Director George Tenet told the September 11 commission in April 2004 the CIA would need five years to produce a clandestine service fully capable of tackling the terrorism threat.

Goss later said at his September 2004 Senate confirmation hearings that rebuilding the clandestine operation would be "a long build-out, a long haul."

President George W. Bush issued an order last year that called for a 50 percent increase in CIA clandestine officers and analysts to be completed "as soon as feasible."

"The CIA is moving aggressively to rebuild and enhance its capabilities across the board," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.

But intelligence sources say the rebuilding process has been complicated by disaffection for Goss' leadership within the clandestine service.

Years of double-digit growth in federal spending on intelligence that followed the September 11 attacks may also be about to end.

John Negroponte, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, has endorsed an intelligence budget for fiscal year 2007 that is relatively flat, with current spending levels believed to total about $44 billion for the 15-agency intelligence community. Fiscal 2007 begins in October.

Berntsen, 48, who also led the CIA Counterterrorism Center's response to the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, sued the CIA in July, accusing the spy agency of trying to stop him from publishing his book.

Gimigliano said the CIA reviewed Bernsten's book before publication only to ensure that it contained no classified information.

In the book, Berntsen says his Jawbreaker team tracked bin Laden to Afghanistan's Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured the al Qaeda leader there if military officials had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops.

But the troops were never sent and bin Laden was able to escape, he said.

His account contradicts public statements by Bush and former Gen. Tommy Franks, who maintained that U.S. officials were never sure bin Laden was at Tora Bora.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7932.shtml

Capital hill blue is an insider news report that has proven to be correct more often than not. - 801

pixikill

01-06-2006, 10:48 PM

http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2006/01/06/leunig0701_gallery__470x330.jpg

The 801

01-22-2006, 05:04 PM

When George Met Jack
White House aides deny the President knew lobbyist Abramoff, but unpublished photos shown to TIME suggest there's more to the story

By ADAM ZAGORIN AND MIKE ALLEN
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR

* Archive: The Man Who Bought Washington

Posted Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006
As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.

The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal—like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.

In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.

Most of the pictures have the formal look of photos taken at presidential receptions. The images of Bush, Abramoff and one of his sons appear to be the rapid-fire shots—known in White House parlance as clicks—that the President snaps with top supporters before taking the podium at fund-raising receptions. Over five years, Bush has posed for tens of thousands of such shots—many with people he does not know. Last month 9,500 people attended holiday receptions at the White House, and most went two by two through a line for a photo with the President and the First Lady. The White House is generous about providing copies—in some cases, signed by the President—that become centerpieces for "walls of fame" throughout status-conscious Washington.

Abramoff knew the game. In a 2001 e-mail to a lawyer for tribal leader Lovelin Poncho, he crows about an upcoming meeting at the White House that he had arranged for Poncho and says it should be a priceless asset in his client's upcoming re-election campaign as chief of Louisiana's Coushatta Indians. "By all means mention (in the tribal newsletter) that the Chief is being asked to confer with the President and is coming to Washington for this purpose in May," Abramoff writes. "We'll definitely have a photo from the opportunity, which he can use." The lawyer had asked about attire, and Abramoff advises, "As to dress, probably suit and tie would work best."

The e-mail, now part of a wide-ranging federal investigation into lobbying practices and lobbyists' relationships with members of Congress, offers a window into Abramoff's willingness to trade on ties to the White House and to invoke Bush's name to impress clients who were spending tens of millions of dollars on Abramoff's advice.

Abramoff was once in better graces at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, having raised at least $100,000 for the President's re-election campaign. During 2001 and 2002, his support for Republicans and connections to the White House won him invitations to Hanukkah receptions, each attended by 400 to 500 people. McClellan has said Abramoff may have been present at "other widely attended" events. He was also admitted to the White House complex for meetings with several staff members, including one with presidential senior adviser Karl Rove, one of the most coveted invitations in Washington.

Michael Scanlon, who is Abramoff's former partner and has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a Congressman, in 2001 told the New Times of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that Abramoff had "a relationship" with the President. "He doesn't have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one," Scanlon said. Nonsense, say others. A former White House official familiar with some Abramoff requests to the White House said Abramoff had some meetings with Administration officials in 2001 and 2002, but he was later frozen out because aides became suspicious of his funding sources and annoyed that the issues he raised did not mesh with their agenda. A top Republican official said it was clear to him that Abramoff couldn't pick up the phone and reach Bush aides because Abramoff had asked the official to serve as an intermediary.

The White House describes the number of Abramoff's meetings with staff members only as "a few," even though senior Bush aides have precise data about them. McClellan will not give details, saying he doesn't "get into discussing staff-level meetings." During a televised briefing, he added, "We're not going to engage in a fishing expedition." Pressed for particulars about Abramoff's White House contacts, McClellan said with brio, "People are insinuating things based on no evidence whatsoever." But he said he cannot "say with absolute certainty that (Abramoff) did not have any other visits" apart from those disclosed. Another White House official said, "The decision was made—don't put out any additional information." That reticence has been eagerly seized upon by some Democrats. Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada wrote to Bush last week to demand details, saying Abramoff "may have had undue and improper influence within your Administration."

Garza, the bolo-wearing former chairman of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, has fond memories of his session with Bush, which he said was held in 2001 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. According to e-mails in the hands of investigators, the meeting was arranged with the help of Abramoff and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. In an April 18, 2001, e-mail to Abramoff, Norquist wrote that he would be "honored" if Abramoff "could come to the White House meeting." Garza—known in his native Kickapoo language as Makateonenodua, or black buffalo—is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling more than $300,000 from his tribe. Through his spokesman, Garza said that during the session, Bush talked about policy matters and thanked those present for supporting his agenda, then took questions from the audience of about two dozen people. Garza told TIME, "We were very happy that Jack Abramoff helped us to be with the President. Bush was in a very good mood—very upbeat and positive." No evidence has emerged that the Bush Administration has done anything for the Kickapoo at Abramoff's behest.

Three attendees who spoke to TIME recall that Abramoff was present, and three of them say that's where the picture of Bush, Abramoff and the former Kickapoo chairman was taken. The White House has a different description of the event Garza attended. "The President stopped by a meeting with 21 state legislators and two tribal leaders," spokeswoman Erin Healy said. "Available records show that Mr. Abramoff was not in attendance."

—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/ Washington From the Jan. 30, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1151747,00.html

NYer

01-22-2006, 05:35 PM

The Money Trail

A Pox on Both Houses ...

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2005/12/12/GR2005121200286.gif

NYer

01-22-2006, 08:35 PM

And which President called off The Shadow Warriors? (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/01/60II/main507784.shtml)

The 801

01-24-2006, 05:53 PM

More crappy reporting from the right. No souces, just hearsay. Just posted for fun, and because it comes from the Reverand Moon's operation.

Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst

President Bush waved to the press on Jan. 22 after returning to the White House from Camp David. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.

"A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment," an administration source said.

Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.

Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush.

"Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president," the source said. "If we work hard, there could be a tie."

The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant.

The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying.

Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome.

"Impeachment is a remedy," Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. "After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price."

Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration's argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.
On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush, accused the president of "indifference" to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," Mr. Gore said.

"I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country."

Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration's domestic surveillance program.

The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the "Gang of Eight."

Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton.

"The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security," an administration source said. "We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them, our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress."

http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/impeachment.htm

NYer

01-24-2006, 07:42 PM

Andrew McCarthy: Listen In to This. (http://nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200601240827.asp)

AG Gonzalez crushes arguments against NSA International Surveillance. (http://powerlineblog.com/archives/012926.php)

The 801

01-25-2006, 08:54 AM

NYer,
Loved that McCarthy article, but his argument is too complicated to sell to the public. And that is the first time I have seen the word "insuperable", but I don't get too out much.

Let us be frank with one another here. They ( The NSA, Carnivore, whatever you want to call it) are watching you and me like hawks. We surf in the gray area where the software vacuums lack the sophistication to distinguish friend or foe. I am sure that after Regis set up this site, IH was put on a watch list. And likewise you and I. And our computers. And our google searches.

I hope that you don't mind that I don't appreciate that, but that is our culture.

Its just that I am a civil libertarian and hate that fact that we have no personal privacy anymore. That was another thing we lost in the sixties.

See you in the database. - 801

Alli

01-25-2006, 10:46 AM

Its just that I am a civil libertarian and hate that fact that we have no personal privacy anymore. That was another thing we lost in the sixties.

See you in the database. - 801
801, will you list specific examples of your privacy being violated? I keep hearing references to all of these violations, yet have not read one specific iota of evidence to prove these references true.

Thank you.

NYer

01-25-2006, 10:51 AM

Its just that I am a civil libertarian and hate that fact that we have no personal privacy anymore. That was another thing we lost in the sixties.

See you in the database. - 801

I appreciate your views on this touchy subject. However, to single out W would be to ignore the power exercised by every President since Ike. The American people apparently feel that this issue is a non-starter by a fair margin. Perhaps their grasp of the issue explains the performance of the NT Times. (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=NYT&t=1y)

The 801

01-27-2006, 05:50 AM

NYer,
ON this domestic spying issue, I look at it this way.
1) There is a formal mechanism for getting permission to wiretap, even after the fact, in matters of national security, through the FISA court.
2) Since being put in operation, FISA has permitted over 1900 wiretaps, rejected 5.
3) Jame Risen's book indicates that the NSA is actually monitoring major communication nodes, or switchs, not individuals. This indicates that the NSA is vacuuming information from many sources at once.
4) This leads me to believe that the reason the Bush administration is not using FISA is because they are not wiretaping individuals, they are vacuuming whole domestic communications networks, which would not be permitted under the 4th amendment, or FISA.
5) Sunshine is the best disinfectant for liberty.

NYer

01-27-2006, 09:05 AM

NYer,
ON this domestic spying issue ...

Intercepting communications originating outside the US is Not domestic spying.Moreover, intercepting enemy communications is SOP in wartime.Furthermore, as the President said, this cannot be viewed as a secret program if Congress had been briefed. But be that as it may, whatever you or I think, this issue seems to be winding a path toward the Supremes, just as Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus did so many years ago. Lastly, remember that you and I surrender more private info annually to the IRS. Perhaps the ACLU and its fellow travelers could do us all a favor and direct their ire more appropriately.

NYer

01-27-2006, 10:24 AM

How Many Buttons Will This Story Push?

Colombian authorities have broken up a counterfeit ring that manufactured passports for al-Qaeda and Hamas terrorists, used by the lunatics to enter the United States, according to the Colombian attorney general in charge of the investigation. The first hint that the ring existed came when three Iraqis traveled to Colombia on faked Israeli passports in 2002:

Colombia has dismantled a false passport ring with links to al-Qaida and Hamas militants, the acting attorney general said Thursday after authorities led dozens of simultaneous raids across five cities.

The gang allegedly supplied an unknown number of citizens from Pakistan, Jordan,
Iraq, Egypt and other countries with false passports and Colombian nationality without them ever stepping foot in the country.

An undisclosed number of those arrested are wanted for working with the al-Qaida terror network and the militant Palestinian group Hamas, said acting Attorney General Jorge Armando Otalora.

The counterfeit Colombian, Spanish, Portugese and German passports were used to enter the United States and Europe, he said.

Three Iraqis traveled to Colombia in 2002, before our invasion, on Israeli passports supplied by al-Qaeda and Hamas. That sounds like a good indication of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, I would think. Does anyone wonder what their final destination was, or how they planned on getting there? And does anyone else find it interesting that Hamas and al-Qaeda launched joint operations to send people to the United States back in 2002, or even earlier than that, well before we invaded Iraq? This also tends to put the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority elections in a new light. If they're teaming up with al-Qaeda on missions against the US, then we should treat them just the same as we do al-Qaeda, and wipe them out, regardless of their electoral status in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Colombians have identified eight suspects they believe are in the US and want extradited for prosecution. The NSA program just went from an academic exercise to a practical application. The Colombians know that at least eight people snuck through on faked passports and are now in the United States. Do you suppose that an NSA program designed to check international calls might help locate these suspects -- and perhaps help stop a planned attack on an American target? Obviously, this long-term and expensive project by the al-Qaeda/Hamas partnership has some grand mission in mind. They're not traveling to the US for their health; they want to stage new attacks on the American mainland.

How does everyone feel about that international surveillance now? Sounds like a pretty damned good idea, doesn't it?

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006224.php

The 801

02-03-2006, 08:12 AM

Capital Hill Blue is usually well wired. I post this as an experiment to see if the story developes.

Powell, Tenet, others told Bush he was breaking the law by ordering NSA spying
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jan 31, 2006, 09:06

Top-level administration officials four years ago told President George W. Bush he as “breaking the law” by ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and warned the President that his actions could bring his administration down.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet and others begged Bush to reconsider his executive order giving the NSA authority to wiretap phone calls and monitor emails of American citizens but their pleas fell on deaf ears.

“Mr. President, I fear you are heading down a course that could doom your administration,” Powell told Bush in a meeting in early 2002. “I urge you to reconsider.” Powell also argued against Bush’s plans to turn Pentagon spies loose on American antiwar groups, saying “such actions don’t belong in America.”

Powell wasn’t the only one worried about the legality of wiretaps. Then deputy attorney general James D. Comey, acting as attorney general while John Ashcroft was hospitalized, refused to sign off on Bush’s executive order, prompting then White House Counsel, and now attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to visit Ashcroft at his hospital bed in a failed attempt to get the AG to overturn his deputy.

Ashcroft, however, stood by Comey and told Gonzales that he could not condone the spying, even though he had authored the controversial, and rights-robbing, USA Patriot Act.

“This is not legal and the President is exceeding his authority,” Ashcroft said. “Jim (Comey) is right to oppose it.”

Then CIA director George Tenet, in a stormy meeting with Bush, told the President that use of the NSA to spy on Americans was a direct violation of the agency’s charter.

“This is illegal and a flagrant misuse of the agency and its technology,” Tenet said.

Those who opposed Bush on his actions, which the President claimed were justified under his powers as a “wartime commander-in-chief,” are no longer part of the administration. Bush fired Tenet (publicly, the CIA direction was allowed to resign). Powell and Ashcroft resigned shortly after Bush began his second term. Comey quit in disgust.

Those privy to the contentious White House meetings where all tried in vain to talk Bush out of his reckless course of action say the President’s allies in using the NSA to spy on Americans were Vice President Dick Cheney and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the man Bush tapped to replace Ashcroft.

Powell, top aides say privately, considering resigning early in Bush’s first term because of what he considered the President’s “reckless and irresponsible actions,” but stayed on because he still felt he could play a moderating role with the extremists in the administration.

“As a career soldier, Gen. Powell felt a duty to serve is country even when that service meant answering to those he considered wrong,” says a longtime aide who served with the general at the State Department as well as when Powell chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He was a moral man trapped in an immoral nest of vipers.”

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8087.shtml

The 801

02-03-2006, 08:47 AM

Now some commentary from the right.....

Bush Is Running Out of Alibis

by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted Feb 03, 2006

"The road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline," railed President Bush in his State of the Union. Again and again, Bush returned to his theme.

"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism. ...

"Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need. ...

"American leaders from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan rejected isolation and retreat."

Why would a president use his State of the Union to lash out at a school of foreign policy thought that has had zero influence in his administration? The answer is a simple one, but it is not an easy one for Bush to face: His foreign policy is visibly failing, and his critics have been proven right.

But rather than defend the fruits of his policy, Bush has chosen to caricature critics who warned him against interventionism. Like all politicians in trouble, Bush knows that the best defense is a good offense.

Having plunged us into an unnecessary war, Bush now confronts the real possibility of strategic defeat and a failed presidency. His victory in Iraq, like the wars of Wilson and FDR, has turned to ashes in our mouths. And like Truman's war in Korea and Kennedy's war in Vietnam, Bush's war has left America divided and her people regretting he ever led us in. But unlike the world wars, Korea and Vietnam, Bush cannot claim the enemy attacked us and we had no choice. Iraq is Bush's war. Isolationists had nothing to do with it. To a man and woman, they opposed it.

Now, with an army bogged down in Afghanistan and another slowly exiting Iraq, and no end in sight to either, Bush seeks to counter critics who warned him not to go in by associating them with the demonized and supposedly discredited patriots of the America First movement of 1940-41. His assault is not only non-credible, it borders on the desperate and pathetic.

"Abroad, our nation is committed to a historic long-term goal. We seek the end of tyranny in our world," said Bush. "Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends upon it."

Intending no disrespect, this is noble-sounding nonsense. Our security rests on U.S. power and will, and not on whether Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Cuba or even China is ruled by tyrants. Our forefathers lived secure in a world of tyrannies by staying out of wars that were none of America's business. As for "the end of tyranny in our world," Mr. President, sorry, that doesn't come in "our world." That comes in the next.

"By allowing radical Islam to work its will, by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself, we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals or even in our own courage," said Bush.

But what has done more to radicalize Islam than our invasion of Iraq? Who has done more to empower Islamic radicals than Bush with his clamor for elections across a region radicalized by our own policies? It is one thing to believe in ideals, another to be the prisoner of some democratist ideology.

Bush has come to believe that the absence of democracy is the cause of terror and democracy its cure. But the cause of terror in the Middle East is the perception there that those nations are held in colonial captivity by Americans and their puppet regimes, and that the only way to expel both is to use tactics that have succeeded from Algeria in 1962 to Anbar province in 2005.

Given the franchise, Arab and Islamic peoples from Pakistan to Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Egypt have now voted for candidates with two credentials. They seemed to be devout Muslims, and they appeared dedicated to tossing America out of the region and the Israelis into the sea.

With opposition also rising to his free-trade policy, Bush reverted to the same tactic: Caricature and castigate critics of his own failed policies. "Protectionists," said Bush, pretend "we can keep our high standards of living, while walling off our economy."

But it was protectionists from Lincoln to Coolidge who gave us the highest standard of living on earth. And the record of Bush's merry band of free-traders? The largest trade deficits in history, a $200 billion trade surplus for Beijing at our expense in 2005, and 3 million lost manufacturing jobs since Bush first took the oath.

If America is angry over what interventionism and free trade have wrought, George Bush cannot credibly blame isolationists or protectionists. These fellows have an alibi. They were nowhere near the scene of the crime.

It is George W. Bush who is running out of alibis.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=12168

NYer

02-03-2006, 09:53 AM

Ahhh Pleistocene Pat ... God Bless him ... Thanks, 801. W has a long way to go to top
http://www.danegerus.com/weblog/images/TyrantsTool.jpg

Who do you like in the Super Bowl?

The 801

02-10-2006, 09:07 AM

Ex-Cheney Aide Testified Leak Was Ordered, Prosecutor Says

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: February 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq's weapons capability in June and July 2003, according to a document filed by a federal prosecutor.

The document shows that Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was actively engaged in the Bush administration's public relations effort to rebut complaints that there was little evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed or sought weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The document is part of the prosecutors' case against Mr. Libby, who has been indicted on charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative to journalists.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said in a letter to Mr. Libby's lawyers last month that Mr. Libby had testified before the grand jury that "he had contacts with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate ('NIE')," that discussed Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. "We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

Mr. Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice last October in what Mr. Fitzgerald has charged was a willful misleading of investigators about his role in exposing Valerie Wilson as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Wilson is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from the government of Niger.

Ms. Wilson's identity was first disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, just after Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed column in The New York Times saying he had investigated the Niger claim and found little evidence to support it. Mr. Wilson charged that destroying his wife's undercover status was a way to discredit him and his assertions.

The prosecutor's note of Jan. 23 does not, however, make any reference to Mr. Libby's involvement in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity. It seems, rather, to be part of an effort by the prosecutor to demonstrate that Mr. Libby was engaged in using secret information to press the administration's case at the same time that Ms. Wilson's identity was leaked to reporters.

The letter was first reported Thursday by the National Journal, which said its sources had identified that one of the superiors was Mr. Cheney.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which was done in October 2002, said that Iraq "will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," but it included some dissenting views. The report was classified.

But amid doubts about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq some of which were attributable to Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article, the administration declassified the report on July 18.

Mr. Fitzgerald said in his letter that Mr. Libby discussed the contents of the classified report in a July 8 meeting — 10 days before it was declassified — with Judith Miller, then a reporter at The Times. Ms. Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify in the leak case, has told the grand jury that Mr. Libby told her about Ms. Wilson at the same meeting.

Mr. Fitzgerald said that Mr. Libby's testimony showed how Ms. Wilson's status was disclosed. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring, 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," he wrote.

Mr. Libby's lawyers have already suggested they will mount a defense in which they will not challenge the charge that he made misstatements about how he learned of Ms. Wilson's identity and whether he shared that information with reporters. They have said that any statements he made to investigators that might have been untrue were the result of his preoccupation with many serious matters of national security at the time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10leak.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Wow, where do you begin with a story like this?

NYer

02-10-2006, 09:33 AM

I agree ... this story appears quite damning ... If true and corroborated by Named Sources.

This story (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?_r=1&ei=5094&en=d6fcffd6820bf50d&hp=&ex=1139547600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin) may turn out to be more damning ...

I'll make the Popcorn ...

http://www.lovetoparty.co.nz/images/Popcorn%20Bags%20Large%20Pic.jpg

NYer

02-10-2006, 10:13 AM

BTW ... it appears from the story that Fitzgerald is leaking info about an ongoing criminal prosecution ... about Leaking ... The irony is palpable. Could it be that Libby's attorneys are making requests that are making Fitzgerald quite uncomfortable? Stay tuned ...

NYer

02-11-2006, 10:07 PM

My candidate for "worst president ever" is still Dhimmi Carter (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060210-110722-2189r.htm)

http://originaldo.com/Jimmy-Carter-Rat-Pack.jpg

The 801

02-13-2006, 10:33 AM

More Questions Raised About Delay in Reporting Cheney Misfire

By Greg Mitchell

Published: February 12, 2006 10:20 PM ET updated Monday

NEW YORK The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occured and called Vice President Cheney's office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but it is not known for certain that Cheney's office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christ Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

One of Powell's colleagues at paper, Beth Francesco, told E&P that Powell had built up a strong source relationship with the prominent ranch owner, Katharine Armstrong, which led to the tip. Powell is chief political reporter for the paper and also covers the area where the ranch is located south of Sarita, about 60 miles from Corpus Christi. Armstrong did not notify reporters at larger papers in Dallas, Houston, Austin or other cities.

Armstrong called the paper Sunday morning looking for Powell, who was not at work. When they did talk, Armstrong revealed the shooting of prominent Austin attorney Harry Whittington, who is now in stable condition in a hospital. Powell then called Cheney's office for the confirmation around midday. The newspaper broke the story at mid-afternoon--not a word about it had appeared before then.

The Cheney spokesman Powell spoke with, Lea Anne McBride, would not comment on whether the White House would have ever released the information had the Caller-Times not contacted them.

"I’m not going to speculate," McBride said, according to Powell. "When you put the call into me, I was able to confirm that account."

Francesco, at the Corpus Christi paper, said she felt it was a bit odd that her newsroom had not received any information about the shooting since "we often call law enforcement in area, even on weekends. We checked in and didn’t hear anything about it." In some states, all serious shooting incidents must be immediately reported to police.

While E&P was first to raise the question about the delay Sunday afternoon, Frank James, reporter in the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau, put his own spin on it later in the day, asking, "How is it that Vice President Cheney can shoot a man, albeit accidentally, on Saturday during a hunting trip and the American public not be informed of it until today?"

Indeed, others raised questions as well. "There was no immediate reason given as to why the incident wasn't reported until Sunday," The Dallas Morning News observed. "The sheriff's office in Kenedy County did not respond to phone calls Sunday."

The president, who was at the White House over the weekend, was informed about the incident in Texas after it happened Saturday by Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and was updated on Sunday, press secretary Scott McClellan said.

But neither the White House nor the vice president's staff announced the shooting. The Washington Post reported late Sunday that Cheney's office did not make a public announcement.

Asked by The New York Times why it did not make the news known, Cheney spokeswoman McBride said, "We deferred to the Armstrongs regarding what had taken place at their ranch."

Armstrong said later, according to The Associated Press, that everyone at the ranch was so "focused" on Whittington's health Saturday that it wasn't until Sunday she called the Caller-Times to report the accident.

In an odd disparity, Armstrong told the Houston Chronicle that Whittington, 78, was "bruised more than bloodied" in the incident and "his pride was hurt more than anything else." Yet he was airlifted to a hospital and has spent more than a day in an intensive care unit.

The Chronicle also reports Monday that hunting accidents are amazingly rare in Texas. In 2004, it said, the state's 1 million-plus hunters were involved in only 29 hunting-related accidents (19 involving firearms), four of which were fatal.

Time magazine on its Web site observed that Cheney is scheduled to join President Bush on Monday afternoon when he takes questions from reporters in the Oval Office, following a meeting with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. "White House aides can be expected to say that the Vice President did not shoot Whittington, which suggests a bullet, but rather sprayed him with birdshot, a type of ammunition made up of tiny pieces of lead or steel," Time predicted.

On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune's James wrote on the Washington bureau's blog at the newspaper's site, "When a vice president of the U.S. shoots a man under any circumstance, that is extremely relevant information. What might be the excuse to justify not immediately making the incident public?

"The vice president is well-known for preferring to operate in secret....Some secrecy, especially when it comes to the executing the duties of president or vice president, is understandable and expected by Americans.

"But when the vice president's office, or the White House, delays in reporting a shooting like Saturday's to the public via the media, it needlessly raises suspicions and questions of trust. And it may just further the impression held by many, rightly or wrongly, that the White House doesn't place the highest premium on keeping the public fully and immediately informed."

The New York Times reported late Sunday that Whittington was commissioner of the state's Funeral Service Commission. In 1999, George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, named Whittington to head the Commission, which licenses and regulates funeral directors and embalmers in the state. "When he was named," The Times revealed, "a former executive director of the commission, Eliza May, was suing the state, saying that she had been fired because she investigated a funeral home chain that was owned by a friend of Mr. Bush.

"The suit was settled in 2001, but the details were not disclosed."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001995719

NYer

02-13-2006, 11:03 AM

And as we all know, delays in reporting accidents have ended political careers.

http://www.nndb.com/people/182/000088915/kopechne-enl.jpg

Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment. (http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/chappaquiddick.htm)

The 801

02-14-2006, 04:38 PM

Listen, I don't own a TV, OK? So I didn't see this.

But I figure, if you connect the data points, nothing is going to happen to anyone involved in this , since the Feds have declined to get involved with the suit. I figure there must be a good reason.

The "Tubeless" 801

Billions Wasted In Iraq?Feb. 12, 2006

(CBS) The United States has spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars during its three years in Iraq, and more than $50 billion of it has gone to private contractors hired to guard bases, drive trucks, feed and shelter the troops and rebuild the country.

It is dangerous work, but much of the $50 billion, which is more than the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security, has been handed out to companies in Iraq with little or no oversight.

Billions of dollars are unaccounted for, and there are widespread allegations of waste, fraud and war profiteering. So far only one case, the subject of a civil lawsuit that goes to trial this week, has been unsealed. It involves a company called Custer Battles, and as 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reports, the lawsuit provides a window into the chaos of those early days in Iraq.

When U.S. troops entered Baghdad in the spring of 2003, there was no electricity, widespread looting and little evidence of postwar planning. With the American military stretched to the limit, the Pentagon set up the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to govern the country under Ambassador Paul Bremer, who began hiring private companies to secure and rebuild the country.

There were no banks or wire transfers to pay them, no bean counters to keep track of the money. Just vaults and footlockers stuffed with billions of dollars in cash.

"Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills. It was the Wild West," recalls Frank Willis, who was the No. 2 man at the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Ministry of Transportation.

The money was a mixture of Iraqi oil revenues, war booty and U.S. government funds earmarked for the coalition authority. Whenever cash was needed, someone went down to the vault with a wheelbarrow or gunny sacks.

"Those are $100,000 bricks of $100 bills and that’s $2 million there," Willis explains, looking at a photo of brick-shaped stacks of money wrapped in plastic. "This, in fact, is a payment that we made on the 1st of August to a company called Custer Battles."

Willis says the bricks of money were also sometimes referred to as footballs "… because we passed them around in little pickup games in our office," he says laughing.

Asked if he has any evidence that the accounting system was a little loose, Willis says, "I would describe it as nonexistent."

The $2 million given to Custer Battles was the first installment on a contract to provide security at Baghdad International Airport. The company had been started by Scott Custer, a former Army Ranger and Mike Battles, an unsuccessful congressional candidate from Rhode Island who claimed to be active in the Republican Party and have connections at the White House. They arrived in Baghdad with no money. Yet within a year they landed $100 million in contracts.

"They came in with a can do attitude whether they could or not. They always said yes," Willis says.

Did they have any experience?

"They were not experienced. They did not know what they were doing," Willis says.

Complaints about Custer Battles performance at the airport began almost immediately. Col. Richard Ballard, the top inspector general for the Army in Iraq, was assigned to see if the company was living up to its contract, such as it was.

"And the contract looked to me like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka," Ballard says. "Complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes, to be filled in later. They presented it the next day, and they got awarded a — about a $15 million contract."
Custer Battles was supposed to provide security for commercial aviation at Baghdad airport, including personnel, machinery and canine teams to screen passengers and cargo. But the airport never re-opened for commercial traffic.

Instead of canceling the contract or requiring Custer Battles to return the money, the Coalition Authority instead assigned them to operate a checkpoint outside the airport.

Asked how they did on that job, Ballard says, "They failed miserably."

Was anybody paying attention to this money and where it was going?

"There was significant concern," Ballard says. "But there just were not the people in theatre to monitor that kind of thing on a day-to-day basis."

The basic answer to the question, Ballard acknowledges, is "no."

According to Ballard, the contract required Custer Battles to provide sophisticated X-ray equipment to scan the contents of incoming trucks.

"These were multi-million dollar devices for which they received a considerable cash advance, so that they could procure them and then they never procured this equipment," says Ballard.

As for the bomb sniffing canine teams, Ballard says, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog. And the dog was incapable of operating in that environment."

Asked what he meant by "incapable of operating in that environment," Ballard says: "He would be brought to the checkpoint, and he would lie down. And he would refuse to sniff the vehicles."

The handler, Ballard says, "had no certificate and no evidence."

"So neither the dog nor the handler were qualified?" Kroft asked.

"I think it was a guy with his pet, to be honest with you," he replied, laughing.

In a memo obtained by 60 Minutes, the airport’s director of security wrote to the Coalition Authority: "Custer Battles has shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that they are swell fellows."

"I would agree with most of that," says Frank Willis.

"Even the 'war profiteers?' " Kroft asks.

"I think that what they were doing was of the nature of what I understand war-profiteering to be about — which is to get into a chaotic situation and milk every penny out of it you can, as fast as you can, before the opportunity goes away," Willis says.

The Coalition Authority not only refused to throw Custer Battles off the airport job, it wrote them a glowing review and continued to give them contracts including one to supply logistical support for a massive program to replace Iraq’s currency.

How did Custer Battles perform that contract?

"Absolutely abysmally. I mean, it was beyond a joke," says British Col. Philip Wilkinson.

Wilkinson was a colonel in the British Army and was assigned to the Coalition Authority’s Ministry of Finance and charged with providing security to convoys that traveled all over Iraq, loaded with $3 billion in cash. The trucks were supplied by Custer Battles.

"And you can imagine, open trucks with that sort of money on the back, was just a red hot target for not only terrorists, but criminals," Wilkinson says. "And, therefore, we needed trucks that were going to work. When those trucks were delivered to us, some of them were physically dragged into our compound."

Wilkinson says some of the trucks "were towed into the camp."

And Custer Battle’s response?

"When questioned as to the serviceability of the trucks was, 'We were only told we had to deliver the trucks.' The contract doesn't say they had to work," Wilkinson says. "Which, I mean, when you're given that sort of answer, what can you do?"

How did they get away with it?

"Oh," says Wilkinson laughing, "I really don't know. I mean it was just a joke. The assumption that we had was that they had to have high political top cover to be able to get away with it. Because it was just outrageous: their failure to deliver that which they were contracted to do."

In fact, the company continued to work in Iraq for another year, even after Robert Isakson, one of Custer Battle’s major sub-contractors, went to federal authorities with allegations of criminal misconduct. Isakson and another whistleblower claim Custer Battles bilked the government out of $50 million, and they’re suing the company on behalf of U.S. taxpayers to recover some of the money.

"Well, they approached me three times to participate in a — defrauding of the United States government," Isakson says. "They wanted to open fraudulent companies overseas and inflate their invoices to the United States government."

Asked if the fraud actually took place, Isakson says, "Two weeks later, apparently, I heard they began exactly the fraud they described to me."

According to a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Air Force, Custer Battles set up sham companies in the Cayman Islands to fabricate phony invoices that it submitted to the Coalition Authority with the intention of fraudulently inflating its profits.

According to a Custer Battles spreadsheet, which was left behind after a meeting with U.S. officials, the company submitted invoices on the currency contract totaling nearly $10 million, when its actual costs were less than $4 million.

Electricity costs of $74,000 were invoiced to the Coalition Authority at $400,000. And those trucks that didn’t work were bought on the local market for $228,000 and billed to the Coalition Authority for $800,000.

Mike Battles and Scott Custer are currently under federal investigation by the Department of Justice and declined to be interviewed for this story. But in videotaped depositions for the whistleblower lawsuit, Custer disavowed any knowledge of the phony invoices.

"Would you agree with me that it is highly improper for a contractor working under a time and materials contract to simply fabricate invoices and then hand them in for payment?" attorney Alan Grayson asked during the deposition.

"Yes, the short answer, I am not a government or legal expert, but I would think it is improper to fabricate anything you would know to be true," Custer replied.

Custer and Battles blame their problems on former employees, competitors and the bureaucratic incompetence of the CPA.

"I know we were sup