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Video: Alternative
Views
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Censured Casualties
features rare footage
of war crimes against the Iraqi people suffered during
and after the Gulf War. The footage is from former Attorney
General Ramsey
Clark in his attempt to document the injustice
of United States military actions in the region.
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Video: Alternative
Views
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Another Unknown
War
features a film on the
struggle of the indigenous people of West Papua to remain
sovereign in the face of an Indonesian invasion backed
by world capital. Footage of Noam
Chomsky on Western involvments in the region and
the relation to East Timor.
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Doug's New Books & Related
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TV/Radio
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
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Russell Mokhiber & Robert Weissman: 'Bush resigns'
If only!
The Smirking Chimp: "Russell Mokhiber & Robert Weissman: 'Bush resigns'"
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
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Monday, November 28, 2005
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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: 'Ohio's Diebold debacle: New machines call election results into question'
No doubt about it, e-voting is an unmitigated disaster and if isn't fixed soon the Bad Guys will just keep rigging and stealing....
The Smirking Chimp
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A Growing Wariness About Money in Politics
let's hope indeed that there is a backlash against the unparalleled corruption of Bush=Cheney-Rove Gang and their corporate allies...
A Growing Wariness About Money in Politics
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Salon.com Politics War Room | Politics
latest scam on Bush administration and Repug scandals from Salon:
"When the question is Republican politicians facing legal problems, the answer is: It's getting awfully hard to keep up.
Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty today to a charge of conspiring to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud. In the process, the California Republican admitted to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes from a defense contractor and other co-conspirators. "He did the worst thing an elected official can do — he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there," said U.S. Attorney Carol Lam. In a tearful appearance before the press a few minutes ago, Cunningham announced that he is resigning immediately from Congress. He said that he has forfeited the "trust of my friends and family" and vowed to cooperate with an ongoing investigation.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that at least half a dozen other members of Congress are the subjects of an ongoing investigation into the dealings of indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Sources tell the Post that Ohio Rep. Robert Ney and his chief of staff have both been warned that prosecutors are preparing a possible bribery case against them. Other Republicans in investigators' sights? The Post identifies Montana Sen. Conrad Burns and California Rep. John Doolittle as well as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who has already been indicted on an unrelated criminal charge in Texas.
DeLay's former press secretary, Michael Scanlon, has already pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the Abramoff probe and is helping investigators now. Authorities are still looking into the suspiciously timed stock sales of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. David Safavian, the top procurement official in the Bush administration and former chief of staff for Republican Utah Rep. Chris Cannon, has already been indicted. And there are so many state-level Republican officials under investigation that you really do need a scorecard to keep track.
And then there's the CIA leak case. The vice president's chief of staff has been indicted, and now Patrick Fitzgerald is talking about needing a new grand jury amid revelations that somebody leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Bob Woodward and more questions about what Karl Rove did or didn't tell the grand jury and why.
Christmas is still a month away, but for prosecutors around the country, Republican control in Washington is already the gift that keeps on giving.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [14:25 EST, Nov. 28, 2005]
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What ever happened to Scott McClellan?
On the White House Web site today, you'll find a photograph of the president phoning troops in Iraq and a copy of the Bush family's Thanksgiving dinner menu. What you won't find is a transcript of a Scott McClellan press briefing -- at least not a recent one.
As Think Progress notes, 19 days have passed since McClellan last delivered an on-the-record press briefing. On Nov. 9, McClellan appeared before the cameras in the White House press briefing room to spin away questions about the Republicans' poor showings in off-off-year elections. There have been a number of on-the-record White House press briefings since then, but not with McClellan at the lectern. Stephen Hadley has handled several. Condoleezza Rice has done one. Mike Green, a special assistant to the president, has appeared at several more. But no McClellan.
Except insofar as it would be an admission that there's a problem there, it wouldn't be particularly surprising if the White House found a way to ease McClellan and his press briefings out of the picture. After assuring the public that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby weren't involved in outing Valerie Plame, McClellan's credibility is pretty much shot. His press briefings have become little more than daily fodder for bloggers and the TV networks, providing fresh text and video every day to accompany stories about a White House under siege.
McClellan still seems to be around: A press release lamely claiming that Joe Biden shares the president's views on Iraq went out over his name over the weekend. But when Think Progress called the White House to find out if there would be a daily press briefing today, a press assistant said no -- and that there's nothing on the schedule for the week yet.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [13:36 EST, Nov. 28, 2005]
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The president, in denial and on a crusade
The president returns to Washington today after another vacation in Crawford, Texas, and the White House hopes that talk of immigration reform and the Samuel Alito nomination will distract the public from worries over the war in Iraq and continuing developments in the CIA leak case.
As for George W. Bush? He doesn't need any distracting. Two new reports -- one in the New Yorker, one in the New York Daily News -- suggest that the president is living in a state of denial about the troubles facing him and the country he is supposed to lead for three more years.
In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh tells the tale of a former senior administration official who visited Iraq after the 2004 presidential election and returned to inform Bush that the war wasn't going well. "I said to the president, 'We're not winning the war,'" the official told Hersh. "And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.'" Bush was "displeased" with the answer, the official told Hersh. "I tried to tell him. And he couldn't hear it."
Hersh paints the picture of a president who believes that he was chosen by God to lead the United States after 9/11, a man whose faith blots out any concern over setbacks in Iraq. "The president is more determined than ever to stay the course," a former defense official tells Hersh. "Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.'" The former official tells Hersh that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney reinforce the president's delusions by having him appear only in front of friendly audiences and keeping him "in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway." Bush, the former official says, has no idea that he's living in a bubble.
In the Daily News, Thomas DeFrank and Kenneth Bazinet say the state of denial extends well beyond Bush. They quote a "card-carrying member of the Washington GOP establishment with close ties to the White House" who dined recently with several senior presidential aides and left shaking his head. "There is just no introspection there at all," he said. "It is everybody else's fault -- the press, gutless Republicans on the Hill. They're still in denial." Another "close Bush confidant" says: "The staff basically still has an unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they're doing. They're talking to people who could help them, but they're not listening."
Meanwhile, the Daily News says, the president is growing paranoid about the people around him, furious over leaks about the mood inside the White House but unsure which of his aides is spreading the stories. One "knowledgeable source" says: "He's asking [friends] for opinions on who he can trust and who he can't."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [11:49 EST, Nov. 28, 2005]
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A "trophy video" from Iraq
From the "Can It Get Any Worse?" Department comes news of what appears to be a trophy video of somebody firing an automatic weapon at drivers in Iraq, all set to the tune of Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train."
The Sunday Telegraph broke the story yesterday, saying that the discovery of the video on a Web site "unofficially linked" to a major private security contractor operating in Iraq has prompted investigations by both the contractor and the British government.
Last year, the Bush administration granted the contractor, Aegis Defense Services, a $293 million contract for security work in Iraq. The contract was controversial at the time it was granted because of questions about the past of Aegis chief executive Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guard. Among other things, Spicer was accused of selling weapons to Sierra Leone in violation of United Nations sanctions.
While it's not clear whether Aegis employees were involved in making the video, the Telegraph says voices with Irish or Scottish accents can be heard on the tape as somebody fires rounds out of the back of a car. A spokesman for Aegis tells the Telegraph that there is "nothing to indicate" that the film clips are connected to the company. At the same time, however, the Web site on which the video was found also contains what appears to be a notice from Spicer in which he notes the "media interest in the site" and reminds "everyone of their contractual obligation not to speak to or assist the media without clearing it with the project management or Aegis London."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:21 EST, Nov. 28, 2005]
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From the prosecutor, more questions about Rove in the Plame case
For Karl Rove, Thanksgiving leftovers aren't the only thing that's getting old. Time magazine reported over the weekend that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is talking with another one of its reporters about Rove's role in the Valerie Plame case.
Time says that Fitzgerald will depose Viveca Novak about conversations she had with Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, beginning in May 2004. That would be almost a year after Rove, Scooter Libby and one or more other administration officials leaked Plame's identity to reporters, including Novak's Time colleague Matthew Cooper.
As the New York Times notes this morning, the summer and fall of 2004 were a "significant time" for Rove: It was then, the Times says, that Rove claims to have searched for and found an e-mail message to then Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley that reminded him that he had had talked with Cooper about Plame in July 2003 -- a conversation that Rove failed to mention when he was initially interviewed in the investigation.
Of course, the summer and fall of 2004 were a "significant time" for Rove in other ways, too: He was in the final stretch to Election Day, a day on which voters would go to the polls knowing -- thanks to White House lies and media complicity -- far less than the truth about the role Rove, Libby and others played in revealing the identity of a CIA agent for the president's political gain.
-- Tim Grieve
a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/print.html">Salon.com Politics War Room | Politics
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Sunday, November 27, 2005
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Jonathan Schell: 'The fall of the one-party empire'
Dreams of Empire by one-Party Repugs turn to ashes under Bush blunders
The Smirking Chimp
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Matthew Rothschild: 'Bush targets Al Jazeera? CNN head should get job back'
its appearing that former CNN head was right that Bush administration was targeting media....
The Smirking Chimp
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Gary Leupp: 'Bush the dupe?'
sounds like Bush is cracking up, shored up only by a small group of female enablers...
The Smirking Chimp: "Gary Leupp: 'Bush the dupe?'"
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Friday, November 25, 2005
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Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm - New York Times
what a joke that someone would hire FEMA incompetent Brownie for advice on planning; that anyone would consider this is an index of depth of Bush cronyism, that insider access is key to political process for Bush-Cheney Gang and that one can always buy favors and legislation with the right connections
'Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm - New York Times
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Mark Brzezinksi: 'Secret CIA prisons: Picking up where the Soviets left off'
The Bush-Cheney Gang as the historical successors to Stalinism
The Smirking Chimp
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Andrew Greeley: 'Is Bush lying about his lies?
The Bush-Cheney Gang are such liars they are now lying about lies
The Smirking Chimp
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Thursday, November 24, 2005
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Marshall Auerback: 'Bush's 'Compassionate Converatism,' a report card from the front'
the record is clear, Bush is a miserable failure....
The Smirking Chimp
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E.J. Dionne, Jr.: 'Dysfunctional democracy: Has Washington gone insane?'
E.J. Dionne is right, US Democracy is increasingly disfunctional while Washington lools insane
The Smirking Chimp
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George Monbiot: 'Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes'
George Monbiot is right: Falluja was the site of multiple US war crimes, one of the horrors of the horrific war
The Smirking Chimp
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Cheney's Reign
Here's a good analysis by Sidney Blumenthal of the role of Cheney in his co-administration:
"The long march of Dick Cheney
For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him -- and he's not about to give it up.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Nov. 24, 2005 The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.
Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" -- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.
Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.
The collapse of sections of the façade shielding Cheney from public view has not inhibited him. His former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, appears to be withholding information about the vice president's actions in the Plame affair from the special prosecutor. While Bush has declaimed, "We do not torture," Cheney lobbied the Senate to stop it from prohibiting torture.
At the same time, Cheney has taken the lead in defending the administration from charges that it twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war and misled the Congress even as new stories underscore the legitimacy of the charges.
Former Sen. Bob Graham has revealed, in a Nov. 20 article in the Washington Post, that the condensed version of the National Intelligence Estimate titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs" that was submitted to the Senate days before it voted on the Iraq war resolution "represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed [WMD], avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version." The condensed version also contained the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was seeking "weapons-grade fissile material from abroad."
The administration relied for key information in the NIE on an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball. According to a Nov. 20 report in the Los Angeles Times, it had learned from German intelligence beforehand that Curveball was completely untrustworthy and his claims fabricated. Yet Bush, Cheney and, most notably, Powell in his prewar performance before the United Nations, which he now calls the biggest "blot" on his record and about which he insists he was "deceived," touted Curveball's disinformation.
In two speeches over the past week Cheney has called congressional critics "dishonest," "shameless" and "reprehensible." He ridiculed their claim that they did not have the same intelligence as the administration. "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high opinion of their own analytical capabilities." Lambasting them for historical "revisionism," he repeatedly invoked Sept. 11. "We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001 -- and the terrorists hit us anyway," he said.
The day after Cheney's most recent speech, the National Journal reported that the president's daily briefing prepared by the CIA 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, indicated that there was no connection between Saddam and the terrorist attacks. Of course, the 9/11 Commission had made the same point in its report.
Even though experts and pundits contradict his talking points, Cheney presents them with characteristic assurance. His rhetoric is like a paving truck that will flatten obstacles. Cheney remains undeterred; he has no recourse. He will not run for president in 2008. He is defending more than the Bush record; he is defending the culmination of his career. Cheney's alliances, ideas, antagonisms and tactics have accumulated for decades.
Cheney is a master bureaucrat, proficient in the White House, the agencies and departments, and Congress. The many offices Cheney has held add up to an extraordinary résumé. His competence and measured manner are often mistaken for moderation. Among those who have misjudged Cheney are military men -- Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft and Wilkerson, who lacked a sense of him as a political man in full. As a result, they expressed surprise at their discovery of the ideological hard man. Scowcroft told the New Yorker recently that Cheney was not the Cheney he once knew. But Scowcroft and the other military men rose by working through regular channels; they were trained to respect established authority. They are at a disadvantage in internal political battles with those operating by different rules of warfare. Their realism does not account for radicalism within the U.S. government.
Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal thwarted his designs for an unchecked imperial presidency. It was in that White House that Cheney gained his formative experience as the assistant to Nixon's counselor, Donald Rumsfeld. When Gerald Ford acceded to the presidency, he summoned Rumsfeld from his posting as NATO ambassador to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld, in turn, brought back his former deputy, Cheney.
From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure. Under Ford, Rumsfeld designated Cheney as his surrogate on intelligence matters. During the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Congress investigated past CIA abuses, and the press was filled with revelations. In May 1975, Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times on how the CIA had sought to recover a sunken Soviet submarine with a deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. When Hersh's article appeared, Cheney wrote memos laying out options ranging from indicting Hersh or getting a search warrant for Hersh's apartment to suing the Times and pressuring its owners "to discourage the NYT and other publications from similar action." "In the end," writes James Mann, in his indispensable book, "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," "Cheney and the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community decided its work had not been significantly damaged."
Rumsfeld and Cheney quickly gained control of the White House staff, edging out Ford's old aides. From this base, they waged bureaucratic war on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, a colossus of foreign policy, who occupied the posts of both secretary of state and national security advisor. Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford administration, opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver. The Secret Service gave Cheney the code name "Backseat."
In 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney stage-managed a Cabinet purge called the "Halloween massacre" that made Rumsfeld secretary of defense and Cheney White House chief of staff. Kissinger, forced to surrender control of the National Security Council, angrily drafted a letter of resignation (which he never submitted). Rumsfeld and Cheney helped convince Ford, who faced a challenge for the Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan, that he needed to shore up his support on the right and that Rockefeller was a political liability. Rockefeller felt compelled to announce he would not be Ford's running mate. Upset at the end of his ambition, Rockefeller charged that Rumsfeld intended to become vice president himself. In fact, Rumsfeld had contemplated running for president in the future and undoubtedly would have accepted a vice presidential nod.
In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld undermined the negotiations for a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty being conducted by Kissinger. Fighting off Reagan's attacks during the Republican primaries, Ford was pressured by Cheney to adopt his foreign policy views, which amounted to a self-repudiation. At the Republican Party Convention, acting as Ford's representative, Cheney engineered the adoption of Reagan's foreign policy plank in the platform. By doing so he preempted an open debate and split. Privately, Ford, Kissinger and Rockefeller were infuriated.
As part of the Halloween massacre Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush, then the U.S. plenipotentiary to China. The CIA had been uncooperative with the Rumsfeld/Cheney anti-détente campaign. Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.
The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency's intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld's interest and served as coauthor of Team B's report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle for control of the Republican Party, intended to destroy détente and aimed particularly at Kissinger. Both Ford and Kissinger took pains to dismiss Team B and its effort. (Later, Team B's report was revealed to be wildly off the mark about the scope and capability of the Soviet military.)
With Ford's defeat, Team B became the kernel of the Committee on the Present Danger, a conservative group that attacked President Carter for weakness on the Soviet threat. The growing strength of the right thwarted ratification of SALT II, setting the stage for Reagan's nomination and election.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney became the Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore U.S. foreign policy initiative), Cheney was the crucial administration defender. At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from questioning Vice President Bush. Under his leadership, not a single House Republican signed the special investigating committee's final report charging "secrecy, deception and disdain for law." Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there had been no major wrongdoing.
The origin of Cheney's alliance with the neoconservatives goes back to his instrumental support for Team B. Upon being appointed secretary of defense by the elder Bush, he kept on Wolfowitz as undersecretary. And Wolfowitz kept on his deputy, his former student at the University of Chicago, Scooter Libby. Earlier, Wolfowitz and Libby had written a document expressing suspicion of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing perestroika and warning against making deals with him, a document that President Reagan ignored as he made an arms control agreement and proclaimed that the Cold War was ending.
During the Gulf War, Secretary of Defense Cheney clashed with Gen. Colin Powell. At one point, he admonished Powell, who had been Reagan's national security advisor, "Colin, you're chairman of the Joint Chiefs ... so stick to military matters." During the run-up to the war, Cheney set up a secret unit in the Pentagon to develop an alternative war plan, his own version of Team B. "Set up a team, and don't tell Powell or anybody else," Cheney ordered Wolfowitz. The plan was called Operation Scorpion. "While Powell was out of town, visiting Saudi Arabia, Cheney -- again, without telling Powell -- took the civilian-drafted plan, Operation Scorpion, to the White House and presented it to the president and the national security adviser," writes Mann in his book. Bush, however, rejected it as too risky. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was enraged at Cheney's presumption. "Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to outgeneral the generals," he wrote in his memoir. After Operation Scorpion was rejected, Cheney urged Bush to go to war without congressional approval, a notion the elder Bush dismissed.
After the Gulf War victory, in 1992, Cheney approved a new "Defense Planning Guidance" advocating U.S. unilateralism in the post-Cold War, a document whose final draft was written by Libby. Cheney assumed Republican rule for the indefinite future.
One week after Bill Clinton's inauguration, on Jan. 27, 1993, Cheney appeared on "Larry King Live," where he declared his interest in running for the presidency. "Obviously," he said, "it's something I'll take a look at ... Obviously, I've worked for three presidents and watched two others up close, and so it is an idea that has occurred to me." For two years, he quietly campaigned in Republican circles, but discovered little enthusiasm. He was less well known than he imagined and less magnetic in person than his former titles suggested. On Aug. 10, 1995, he held a news conference at the headquarters of the Halliburton Co. in Dallas, announcing he would become its chief executive officer. "When I made the decision earlier this year not to run for president, not to seek the White House, that really was a decision to wrap up my political career and move on to other things," he said.
But in 2000, Cheney surfaced in the role of party elder, above the fray, willing to serve as the man who would help Gov. George W. Bush determine who should be his running mate. Prospective candidates turned over to him all sensitive material about themselves, financial, political and personal. Once he had collected it, he decided that he should be the vice presidential candidate himself. Bush said he had previously thought of the idea and happily accepted. Asked who vetted Cheney's records, Bush's then aide Karen Hughes explained, "Just as with other candidates, Secretary Cheney is the one who handled that."
Most observers assumed that Cheney would provide balancing experience and maturity, serving in his way as a surrogate father and elder statesman. Few grasped his deeply held view on presidential power. With Rumsfeld returned as secretary of defense, the position he had held during the Ford administration, the old team was back in place. Rivals from the past had departed and the field was clear. The methods used before were implemented again. To get around the CIA, the Office of Special Plans was created within the Pentagon, yet another version of Team B. Senior military dissenters were removed. Powell was manipulated and outmaneuvered.
The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly energy plan has required secrecy, deception and subordination of government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to an end. Even projecting a "war on terror" as total war, trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is a device to invest absolute power in the executive.
Dick Cheney sees in George W. Bush his last chance. Nixon self-destructed, Ford was fatally compromised by his moderation, Reagan was not what was hoped for, the elder Bush ended up a disappointment. In every case, the Republican presidents had been checked or gone soft. Finally, President Bush provided the instrument, Sept. 11 the opportunity. This time the failures of the past provided the guideposts for getting it right. The administration's heedlessness was simply the wisdom of Cheney's experience.
-- By Sidney Blumenthal
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/11/24/cheney/print.html
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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
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Bush's Bust
Bush's Asia trip was a bust with nothing accomplished and embarassing the US as usual while at home debate on Iraq intensified and got nastier and Bush-Cheney Gang villains continued going down; here's Salon summary:
"If what's good for GM is good for the country ...
If you're George W. Bush, you've got to think that a day that begins with a ceremonial drink of Mongolian mare's milk isn't likely to get much worse. Would that it were true. The president returns from Asia today with little to show for his efforts, and the news that will greet him back home isn't exactly welcoming: General Motors has just announced that it will close nine North American plants and cut 30,000 jobs between now and 2008.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:09 EST, Nov. 21, 2005]
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From the president, nice words but nothing new
We clicked over to the White House Web site this morning to read the transcript of the president's latest comments on Iraq, but this headline caught our eyes first: "Cast Your Vote for the 2005 National Thanksgiving Turkey."
Oh, where to begin?
Fifty-four percent of the public thinks it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq. Sixty percent say the war hasn't been worth the cost. And while the country is perhaps more divided over what should happen next in Iraq -- the truth is, the Bush administration's policies have left the United States with no good options -- the White House seems to be realizing that the president can't dismiss calls for a prompt troop withdrawal by simply smearing the people who are making them.
In a brief session with reporters in Beijing Sunday, George W. Bush tried to put some distance between himself and the attacks on Rep. Jack Murtha. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania Democrat -- a man who served in Vietnam as part of his 37-year career in the Marine Corps -- said that he thinks it's time for the troops to come home from Iraq. By Friday morning, White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who didn't serve in the military, was equating Murtha with Michael Moore and saying he wanted to "surrender to terrorists." By Friday night, Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt, who didn't serve in the military, either, suggested that Murtha was a "coward" rather than a real Marine.
Sunday in Beijing, the president was making sure that his fingerprints weren't on any such smears. Bush called Murtha "a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman." He said Murtha is a "strong supporter of the United States military," and he said he knew that Murtha had reached his decision about the future of the troops "in a careful and thoughtful way."
Bush may get some pundit praise for toning down the attacks, but it's clear that the nice words don't change anything. Shortly after Bush spoke, Donald Rumsfeld made the rounds of the Sunday talkers in Washington and kept up the attack by suggesting that Murtha's words had undercut the troops in Iraq and provided hope to the enemy. And Bush himself made it perfectly clear in Beijing that he won't be swayed by Murtha or anyone else. Leaving Iraq "prematurely" would have "terrible consequences for our own security and for the Iraqi people," Bush said. "And that's not going to happen so long as I'm the president."
Ten more U.S. soldiers died over the weekend in Iraq, bringing the death toll close to the 2,100 mark. Another dozen will probably die before Thanksgiving.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [08:53 EST, Nov. 21, 2005]
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The ax begins to fall on the Abramoff gang
As if Republican legislators didn't have enough to worry about these days, what with Bush's plummeting poll numbers, Democrats on the (anti) warpath, grand jury investigations, and daily reports of fraud and death in Iraq, today the long simmering Abramoff lobbying scandal boiled over.
As reported by numerous outlets, Michael P.S. Scanlon, a business associate of Abramoff's, was charged today with conspiring to defraud multiple Native American tribes of millions of dollars.
Salon obtained a copy of the Justice Department filing; you can read it here.
By midafternoon, Roll Call was reporting that Scanlon had already reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and would testify against Abramoff.
But Abramoff and Scanlon aren't likely to be the only ones who take a fall. The Justice Department filing charges that Scanlon did "knowingly conspire, confederate and agree with Lobbyist A [Abramoff]" to "corruptly offer and provide things of value, including money, meals, trips and entertainment to federal public officials in return for agreements to perform official acts benefitting Scanlon, Lobbyist A, and their clients."
Note the plural with respect to "federal public officials." One member of the House of Representatives, widely believed to be Robert Ney, an Ohio Republican, is specifically singled out in the filing, though only under the pseudonym "Representative #1." Ney is known to have attended the infamous golf trip to Scotland in 2002 that was paid for by Abramoff. But Abramoff's net spread very, very wide. As legislators prepare to split town for Thanksgiving, one wonders how many of them are going to have a happy holiday.
-- Andrew Leonard
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House gets set to vote on bogus Iraq resolution
On Thursday, Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., shocked many of his colleagues with a heartfelt outburst against the war in Iraq. He even offered a resolution that, if passed, would force the president to withdraw all troops in Iraq ''at the earliest practicable date.''
Murtha may not have anticipated that the GOP would promptly seize the opportunity to offer their own resolution, one that states: "It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately." The Republican leadership scheduled a vote on the resolution for Friday evening.
Never mind that there is big difference between "immediately" and "the earliest practicable date." The Republicans are looking to embarrass Democrats by forcing them to vote on a bogus resolution, hoping thereby to gain ammunition for later political battles. As War Room was getting ready to publish this item, the House had just completed a vote on whether they could even have a vote on a resolution without it first having gone through committee. That vote passed, narrowly.
Liberal bloggers are now calling for a mass walkout, and War Room agrees. It's way past time for Democrats to show some real backbone.
Certainly, their past votes, when Democrats, fearful of a public backlash, caved in to the Bush administration's rush to war, offer an example of what doesn't work.
An echo of that time can be heard in a press release sent out today by Sen. John Kerry, titled "Don't Stand for 'Swift Boat' Style Attacks on Jack Murtha." In fairly strong language, Kerry "decries despicable attacks on Jack Murtha's patriotism and courage" and says that "it disgusts me that a bunch of guys who have never put on the uniform of their country have aimed their venom at a marine who served America heroically in Vietnam and has been serving heroically in Congress ever since."
"Whether you agree or disagree with Jack Murtha is irrelevant," says Kerry. "Express your outrage about the tired old Rovian 'Swift Boat' style attacks on Jack Murtha."
There's little question the attacks on Murtha are appalling -- late Friday afternoon, Roll Call reported that Republican lawmakers were saying that ties between Murtha and his brother’s lobbying firm, KSA Consulting, may warrant investigation by the House ethics committee!
Except, Kerry still seems to be missing the point. Nowhere in his press release does he say whether he disagrees or agrees with Murtha. Instead, just as he did during his campaign, he tries to play the patriotism card, without taking a strong stand on the war itself.
Democrats looking ahead to 2006 should take note. Let the Republicans play with their silly resolution. But don't try to weasel around what's at stake. The question is not whether we should support Murtha. It's whether we support the war.
-- Andrew Leonard"
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/
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Sunday, November 20, 2005
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Friday, November 18, 2005
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Salon.com | Woodward's disgrace
Bob Woodward has totally disgraced himself; for years he, like Judy Miller, has been a stenographer of power, a shill for those who tell him stories that he spins into mediocre books. I'm glad to see him go down, I think he was always overrated. Here's Joe Conason's take from Salon:
"Woodward's disgrace
He was once a great journalist, but his obsession with "access" turned him into a palace courtier and shill for the GOP.
By Joe Conason
Nov. 19, 2005 | Forced to reveal his strange secret about the Valerie Plame case, Bob Woodward has humiliated his trusting bosses at the Washington Post and exposed something rotten at the center of journalism's national elite. By withholding critical information from the Post's editors and pretending to be a neutral observer, Woodward badly compromised the values that he and his newspaper once embodied. A living symbol of the great constitutional role of a free press -- to hold government accountable -- has evidently degenerated into another obedient appendage of rogue officialdom.
With his relentless pursuit of "access," the literary formula that has brought him so much money and fame, Woodward placed book sales above journalism. Boasting of his friendly relationship with the president who facilitated his interviews with administration officials, he now behaves like the journalistic courtiers of the Nixon era.
To those who have observed Woodward's career since the glory of Watergate, including readers of his many bestselling books, the change in his role and outlook have long been obvious. For him, the cultivation of high-ranking sources is the very essence of journalism. And while there is no question that reporters owe a duty of confidentiality to their sources, it is also true that they owe candor to their colleagues and transparency to their readers.
Sadly, Woodward not only served as a silent accomplice of the Bush White House in its attack on Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, but went much further by publicly criticizing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of that attack -- and suggested repeatedly, up to the eve of the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, that the investigation should be curtailed. Now, instead, his own admission of involvement may have figured in Fitzgerald's indication Friday that he plans to call a new grand jury in the case.
Indeed, Woodward abused his position as a journalistic authority on intelligence and national security issues to denigrate the Fitzgerald probe. Last July 7, on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," he claimed to know that the outing of Plame's identity had created "no national security threat" and "no jeopardy to her life." He went on to mock the case: "There was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great." He didn't say then how he supposedly knew what consequences did or didn't flow from the CIA operative's exposure.
Ten days later, on CNN, Woodward told host (and Post colleague) Howard Kurtz that he didn't think any crime had been committed. He went on to complain about how long the leak investigation had taken. "The special prosecutor has been working 18 months. Eighteen months into Watergate we knew about the tapes. People were in jail." That kind of spin is more worthy of a Republican pundit than a Post editor (and of course Woodward never complained about the extraordinary length and expense of Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation, presumably because the sources in that case were leaking to the Post).
Woodward reiterated his exoneration of the White House on Oct. 27 -- and on that occasion, he told CNN's Larry King that he knew the CIA had completed its own assessment of the affair and found that no damage had been done in exposing Valerie Plame Wilson.
Only two days later, however, his own newspaper reported that the CIA had performed no formal damage assessment -- a process that doesn't begin until after any criminal investigation is finished. And Woodward neglected to tell King's audience that the CIA had originally demanded that the Justice Department investigate the leak because of its potentially serious effects on national security.
Those misleading remarks were only exceeded by his disingenuous statements about how the leak might have occurred. Denying that there had been a "smear campaign," he assured King that "when the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter."
Of course, Woodward knew then how the leak began, in very specific terms, and used his privileged position to help promote the Republican line. (For a full catalog of Woodward's media misbehavior in this case, see MediaMatters.org.)
According to the Post's ombudswoman, Deborah Howell, the public is now outraged over Woodward's conduct. They are confused by his actions and unconvinced by his explanations, which are contradicted by the timeline of the investigation. Post executive editor Leonard Downie, who bravely engaged in a chat with angry readers on Friday, was reduced to offering testimonials about Woodward's truthful character and bromides about his exceptional record.
"Bob Woodward never lied," declared Downie. Yet at another point in the same conversation, the Post editor conceded that a reader was "correct" in saying Woodward had been "dishonest in the extreme" and "probably destroyed his credibility." Those consequences of his "mistake," said Downie, would have to be measured against "Bob's exceptional record."
So will the contents of Woodward's next book on the Bush administration.
-- By Joe Conason "
Salon.com | Woodward's disgrace
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