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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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Sunday, April 30, 2006
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Saturday, April 29, 2006
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As Profits Soar, Oil Industry Unapologetic
A Band of Bandits that knows no shame.... but this too is something voters understand: letting the Oil Industry (i.e. Bush and Cheney) govern means that the industry runs amok and the public gets dumped on with price extortion and the Oil Bandits laugh to the bank
As Profits Soar, Oil Industry Unapologetic
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Prostitution Alleged In Cunningham Case
hookers in Watergate are part of the Repug-Lobby scandals, this should go some distance in bringing home the sleaze to wider audiences....
Prostitution Alleged In Cunningham Case
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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Randolph T. Holhut: 'The wake-up call on energy has arrived
Bring on new energy sources
The Smirking Chimp
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TPaul Craig Roberts: 'The world is uniting against the Bush Imperium'
Bring on the world against the Bush-Cheney Reich
The Smirking Chimp: "Paul Craig Roberts: 'The world is uniting against the Bush Imperium'"
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Tony Snow Becomes White House Press Secretary
Fox News Press Sec; Keith Olberman yesterday had a rich collage of soundbites in which Tony trashes Baby Bush, wait until he hears this stuff....
Tony Snow Becomes White House Press Secretary
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Bad Targeting
send Porter Goss home for his CIA McCarthyism blunder
and politicizing the CIA....
Bad Targeting
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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Bush Bumblers allegedly Fire Wrong Person for CIA Leaks
From Newsweek/MSNBC: it appears that the bombling Bush administration fired Mary McCarthy on false pretext! If true Porter Goss should be fired!
"Secrets of the CIA
A former colleague says the fired Mary McCarthy ‘categorically denies’ being the source of the leak on agency renditions.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
Updated: 8:03 a.m. ET April 25, 2006
April 24, 2006 - A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK.
The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, “categorically denies being the source of the leak,” one of McCarthy’s friends and former colleagues, Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy. Beers said he could not elaborate on this denial and McCarthy herself did not respond to a request for comment left by NEWSWEEK on her home answering machine. A national security advisor to Democratic Party candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Beers worked as the head of intelligence programs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and later served as a top deputy on counter-terrorism for President Bush in 2002 and 2003. McCarthy, a career CIA analyst, initially worked as a deputy to Beers on the NSC and later took over Beer’s role as the Clinton NSC’s top intelligence expert.
McCarthy's lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternooon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and "didn't even have access to the information" in The Washington Post story in question.
After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one quesiton during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said.
McCarthy, 61, a career CIA analyst who was working in the inspector general's office, was then told on Thursday that she was being fired. She was not escorted out of the CIA buiilding, the source said. She also had been assured that the CIA would protect her privacy--just one day before her name became publicly known as the agency official who had been dismissed for leaking to the press, the source said. Ironically, McCarthy, who presvously worked as chief intelligence official for the National Security Council during Bill Clinton's second term, was planning on retiring from the CIA soon to pursue a new career as a lawyer working on adoption and family cases.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano re-affirmed on Monday that an agency official had been fired after acknowledging “unauthorized contacts with the media and discussion of classified information” with journalists. Gimigliano and other administration spokespersons said they were prohibited by law from disclosing the identity of the person who was fired. But government officials familiar with the matter confirmed to NEWSWEEK that McCarthy, a 20-year veteran of the CIA’s intelligence—or analytical— branch, was the individual in question.
The officials, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive information, said that McCarthy had been fired after allegedly confessing during the course of a leak investigation based heavily on polygraph examinations that she had engaged in unauthorized contacts with more than one journalist regarding more than one news story. The only journalist so far identified by government sources as one of the unauthorized persons with whom McCarthy admitted contact is Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing details of a secret airline and prison network that the CIA operates to detain and interrogate high-level Al Qaeda suspects.
Priest’s most contentious story, published by the Post last November, alleged that the CIA had been “hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” Even though the Post said it decided, in response to administration appeals, not to identify the Eastern European countries involved in secret CIA detention operations, intelligence officials said at the time that the story caused potentially serious damage to agency activities. The officials said the CIA would be filing a “crime report” with the Justice Department regarding possible leaks of classified information. (Eric C. Grant, public affairs director of the Washington Post, says none of the paper’s reporters has been subpoenaed or talked to investigators in connection with this matter.)
A counter-terrorism official acknowledged to NEWSWEEK today that in firing McCarthy, the CIA was not necessarily accusing her of being the principal, original, or sole leaker of any particular story. Intelligence officials privately acknowledge that key news stories about secret agency prison and “rendition” operations have been based, at least in part, upon information available from unclassified sources.
British freelance journalist Stephen Grey, who published the first detailed revelations of the CIA’s secret airline system for transporting terrorist detainees in the London Sunday Times in late 2004, affirmed to NEWSWEEK over the weekend that “almost all” of the information that he assembled regarding the CIA operations came from “unclassified sources.” Several news organizations, including NEWSWEEK and The New York Times, reported stories about the CIA’s secret transport and detention operations based on airplane flight plan information which originally was assembled by Grey. Other foreign journalists put together early reports about CIA “rendition” operations—in which terror suspects allegedly were transferred by undercover CIA teams to a foreign countries where they were wanted for questioning—by using public record data bases to trace the ownership and history of suspicious private airplanes that were observed at foreign airstrips around the times that local terror suspects allegedly disappeared. Administration critics have described these renditions as the outsourcing of torture.
While acknowledging that information about the CIA operations was indeed available from unclassified sources, intelligence officials maintain that revelations like those made in the Post story about Eastern Europe could not have been put together without input from people who had access to classified information. These informants could confirm the stories and add detail to them. But the fact that McCarthy evidently is denying leaking the CIA prison story to the Post—and that other key information for stories revealing CIA detention and rendition operations originated with unclassified sources—does raise questions about how far the Bush administration will be able to press its crackdown on suspected leakers.
Two official sources familiar with the inquiry which led to McCarthy’s firing cautioned that news reports indicating that McCarthy was aggressively being pursued by the Justice Department for possible criminal violations were ahead of the facts.
The sources told NEWSWEEK that because McCarthy’s alleged acknowledgements that she leaked classified information were made as a result of an inquiry based on polygraph examinations, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for prosecutors to use any admissions she made in trying to put together any criminal prosecution. One of the sources, a law enforcement official close to the investigation, noted that polygraph evidence is normally inadmissible in criminal court cases because of judicial doubts about the reliability and credibility of lie-detector machines. Also, the official said, witnesses submitting to a polygraph examination usually give up their rights not to make self-incriminating statements. The use of any admissions McCarthy gave under these circumstances for a criminal investigation would therefore be problematic, the official indicated.
The law enforcement official and a counter-terrorism official familiar with the case indicated that because the polygraph evidence was likely unusable, any effort by prosecutors to make a criminal case against McCarthy would therefore have to be based on an entirely fresh reconstruction of evidence from other sources. The sources indicated that it was possible, though by no means certain, that prosecutors could still put together some kind of case against McCarthy from evidence untainted by the CIA polygraph inquiry that led to her firing.
The McCarthy case troubles some former U.S. intelligence officials, who note that the CIA, while aggressively pursuing leaks to the news media, has failed to take disciplinary action against any of its officials for the widely acknowledged intelligence failures of recent years. “Nobody got fired for September 11 and nobody gets fired for [mistakes about] WMD, but they fire someone for this?” said one former U.S. senior intelligence official. In the case of the September 11 attacks, a report by the same Inspector General’s office where McCarthy worked recommended the convening of CIA disciplinary boards for a number of current and former officials. But CIA director Porter Goss rejected the recommendation and has refused to allow even an unclassified version of the inspector general’s report to be publicly released. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, sent the CIA two letters seeking a public disclosure of the inspector general’s findings—one only a few weeks ago—but has yet to get a response.
At the same time, some former officials said, the use of polygraphs on officials inside the inspector general’s office is potentially controversial, given the fact that the inspector general is by statute supposed to be an independent officer. “This gives them [CIA management] entrée to the I,.G’s office which they’re not supposed to have,” said another former agency official. But a former CIA Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, said he was polygraphed by the FBI over the leak of a report the internal watchdog's office produced on Soviet mole Aldrich Ames in the mid 1990s. Hitz says that security concerns would override concerns about the IG’s independence.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who got into a dispute with McCarthy in the late l980s when she was his supervisor and remains critical of her management style, nonetheless says that he “never saw her allow her political [views] to cloud her analytical judgment.” Johnson maintains the Bush White House is “really damaging the intelligence community” by sending a message to career officials that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted.” This message, Johnson says, is destroying the intelligence community’s “professional ethos.”
A serving CIA official said that the day that McCarthy was escorted out of the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters, some former colleagues of McCarthy defended her, even while acknowledging they were not familiar with the details of the case. “She worked for me on the most sensitive national security material there is and I had no reason to think she ever did anything like what’s been alleged to have been done here,” said Beers. McCarthy was a “quality intelligence officer who handled the matters with skill and understanding,” he added.
Editor's Note: The original version of this report was updated shortly after its initial posting on April 24 to include comments from McCarthy's lawyer, Ty Cobb.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12466719/site/newsweek/
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Monday, April 24, 2006
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Foreign Affairs - Latin America's Left Turn - Jorge G. Casta?eda
Left Turn in Latin America: reaction against failures of neo-liberalism, reaction against Bush administration neo-imperialism, and assertion of local and national progressive traditions, looking good down there....
Foreign Affairs - Latin America's Left Turn - Jorge G. Casta?eda
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Bob Patterson: 'What will be displayed at the Bush Presidential Library?'
Bush Presidential Library should be a record of War Crimes and other misdeeds....
The Smirking Chimp
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The Smirking Chimp - Paul Krugman: 'The great revulsion'
the US public is finally experiencing a Great Revulsion against the Bush-Cheney Gang as body count increases daily in Iraq, gas prices soar, and life gets harder and meaner
The Smirking Chimp - Paul Krugman: 'The great revulsion'
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Saturday, April 22, 2006
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Senate Hearings on Bush, Now
Carl Bernstein calls for Senate Hearings investigating crimes of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Gang
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/articles/060417fege08
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The Worst President in History?
More and more US Historians are agreed: George W. Bush is the worst president in US history; Rolling Stone cover story by Sean Willenz
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history/print
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Vice Squad
article on pernicious influence of Cheney Thugs
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11423
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Does Condi Leak?
Claim that "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101648_pf.html
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Friday, April 21, 2006
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Stephen Pizzo: 'Forrest Gump's evil twin'
stupid is as stupid does; Bush as Moron. His administration confirmed its stupidity yesterday when in a sensitive public meetings with the Chinese President the Bush administration allowed a Falon Gong activist to pose as a reporter that it credentialed to break up the ceremony; a master of ceremonies introduced the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan's name!); and at the end Bush rudely grabbed President Hu, pulling him back into a photo session as he was walking away; what incompetents....
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=25777&mode=nested&order=0
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Sidney Blumenthal: 'Revolt of the generals'
Blumenthal on General's critique of Rumsfeld and call for his dismissal:
Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian
The analogy between Iraq and Vietnam has proved to be most compelling to the generals who planned and conducted the Iraq invasion. They kept to themselves their profound disquiet about the rapid rejection of the original plan for invasion that took 10 years to develop, the inadequate downsized force, the absence of preparation for the occupation, and the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military.
Almost all voted for Bush in 2000. Serving their civilian neoconservative superiors, they endured contempt. Donald Rumsfeld's closest aide, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, joked that the army's problems "could be solved by lining up 50 of its generals in the Pentagon and gunning them down", according to Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor in their new book on the Iraq invasion, Cobra II. In September 2001, Rumsfeld held a Pentagon meeting where he declared the "bureaucracy" - the career professionals - to be "a serious threat to the security of the United States".
The generals have been wary of engaging in public debate for fear of being misconstrued as political. But they are haunted by Vietnam and deeply influenced by HR McMaster's 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty, which argues that the joint chiefs of staff of the Vietnam era failed in their constitutional responsibility to object strenuously to misguided strategies. (McMaster is a general serving in Iraq.) As the generals have stepped forward to demand Rumsfeld's resignation, they speak in the language of McMaster's book.
On March 19, retired Major General Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi army, called Rumsfeld "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically". On April 2, retired General Anthony Zinni, former chief of US Central Command, said: "Poor military judgment has been used throughout this mission." On April 9, retired Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold wrote: "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat - al-Qaida."
On April 13, retired Major General John Riggs and Major General Charles Swannack, former commander of the 82nd Airborne, went public. "They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda," said Riggs. Swannack emphasised that Rumsfeld bore "culpability" for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
In response, the Bush administration has mounted a full-scale PR defence. Rumsfeld appeared in the guise of King Solomon on rightwing radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh's programme: "This, too, will pass." Bush proposed a syllogism: "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain." But the revolt of the generals, speaking for much of the serving senior officer corps, is unprecedented in scope and depth.
The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, resigned this week partly to distract attention from Rumsfeld. Clinging to Rumsfeld as indispensable to his strength, Bush reveals his fragility. Their denial extends beyond the realities of Iraq and its history to that of the US. Bush & co disdained nation building as something soft and weak connected to the Clinton presidency, just as they belittled and neglected terrorism as a Clinton obsession before September 11, and as the president dismissed history as weightless.
"History? We don't know. We'll all be dead," Bush remarked in 2003. "We cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. The living president has already sealed his reputation in history.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=25774 Email: sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com.
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John W. Dean: 'If past is prologue, George Bush is becoming an increasingly dangerous president'
John Dean sees Bush as increasingly dangerous. Excerpt: "Many political scientists believe it is possible to predict presidential performance. While no one can predict future events, the future performance of those who occupy the Oval Office can be ascertained, at least in a general fashion.
Political scientist James David Barber first showed the analytical and predictive potentials of psychology in studying presidents with his classic, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. This work, originally published in 1972, has been republished and updated on four occasions.
Barber first wrote -- long before Richard Nixon's troubles had fully unfolded but based on his scrutiny of Nixon's personality and character traits -- that Nixon would self-destruct in his second term. Since then, Barber has tested and retested his analytical tools, applying them to all the modern presidents up to and including George Herbert Walker Bush.
In retirement, Professor Barber did not apply his techniques to either Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. But shortly after 9/11, curiosity prompted me, to see how the incumbent president fared under Barber's predictive analysis. The results were anything but comforting.
Professor Barber's Analytical Framework
Before I offer the results of my analysis, a bit of background is essential.
While no system is infallible, and typologies have their weaknesses, Barber's prophetic results have proven extraordinary, for he has been uncannily prescient with his method. He takes five common elements -- character, worldview, style, power situations, and climate of expectations -- and using these elements he has assembled clusters of presidents since Theodore Roosevelt within which he finds a number of repeating baseline characteristics.
Social scientists often employ obtuse terms that appear less than user friendly, and Professor Barber is no exception. Yet when one actually becomes familiar with the jargon, it proves quiet handy. So it is with Barber's grouping of past presidents.
It is not possible to do justice to Barber's work in summary form, but those who are interested can examine his work for themselves. For my purposes, an overview suffices: At least a few key concepts -- and some of Barber's jargon -- are necessary to broadly understand his approach.
Column continues below ? Barber has catalogued presidents based on the similarity of their personalities and character traits. His first baseline is to describe them as either "active" or "passive" regarding their work. This he determines by looking at how much energy they invest in the work of the presidency. For example, Lyndon Johnson was a human dynamo; Calvin Coolidge slept eleven hours every night and took naps during the day.
The second baseline for Barber is how presidents react toward their work: "positively" or "negatively." Generally speaking, he seeks to determine if their political experiences are satisfying. To quote Barber, "The idea is this: is he someone who, on the surfaces we can see, gives forth the feeling that he has fun in political life?"
Examples of president who had fun notwithstanding the burdens of power are Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan -- placing them on the positive side of Barber's typology. No doubt Barber would have found Bill Clinton there as well
-- except perhaps toward the difficult end of his second term.
Barber's four categories are active/positive (Example: FDR), active/negative (Example: Nixon), passive/positive (Example: Reagan) and passive/negative (Example: Jefferson).
It is the active/negative group that is the most troubling.
The Troubles of Active/Negative Presidents
Active/negative types, broadly speaking, are aggressive in pursuing their political and policy aims, yet they get little true emotional reward from undertaking these endeavors.
In addition to Richard Nixon, Barber says Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson were active/negatives -- all presidencies that did not end well.
In his book and his other writings, Barber has noted that for active/negative types that "[l]ife is a hard struggle to achieve and hold power" -- one in which they are "hampered by the condemnations of a perfectionist conscience."
"[A]ctive/negatives pour energy into the political system, but it is energy distorted from within," Barber notes. He found that these presidents are "much taken up with self-concern," and they always want to know if they are "winning or losing, gaining or falling behind."
Active/negative evaluate themselves "with respect to virtue." They view their actions (if not the world) as being good or bad. Their "perfectionistic conscience" provides no room for growth through experience, for they expect themselves to be good at all they undertake. Their ethics result in "denial of self-gratification," for these men see themselves as self-sacrificing rather than self-rewarding. They are "concerned with controlling [their] aggression … reining in [their] anger."
These presidents are capable of generating "tremendous energies for political domination." They are also uniquely stubborn men, who become more rigid and inflexible as they proceed, for they become caught up in their own self-righteousness. And as Barber says, they mask their decisions not to budge, their rigidity, in whatever rhetoric is necessary, so that they can ride the tiger to the end. They also are our most secretive presidents.
Failure by these presidents is predictable because their flawed perceptions are often risky, they are gamblers, and their rigidity can easily plunge the nation into a tragedy. This occurred with Wilson -- whose presidency was marred by a failed peace accord, a disintegrating economy, and refusal to admit the impact of a debilitating stroke. It occurred with Hoover -- who ineffectively presided over the nation's most devastating economic depression. And it also occurred with Lyndon Johnson -- his Vietnam debacle and withdrawal from reelection. Finally, and most obviously, it occurred with Nixon -- forced to resign after Watergate .
With such presidents there is always "the potential for grievous harm," Barber warns, observing that while the nation has survived several such presidents, this is "cold comfort to those individuals and families who suffered for what these Presidents did."
Barber admonishes that when we find ourselves with an active/negative president, we have a situation that cannot be ignored -- for all such presidents are potentially dangerous.
Is George W. Bush An Active/Negative President?
There is little doubt in my mind that George W. Bush is an active/negative president. Based on the available information, he strikes me as a perfect fit. But because one of Bush's aides, a political scientist who has observed Bush at close range, sees him as otherwise, it caused me to take an even closer look.
Former Bush White House aide John J. DiIulio, Jr., a respected academic, has said he thinks that Bush is an "active/positive," because "he loves the job and is very energetic." Although DiIulio is not a presidential scholar (by his own admission), his comment caused me to examine his observation -- and my own.
DiIulio appears to be using shorthand because loving the job, per se, is not one of the criteria upon which Barber relies. And DiIulio appears to base his conclusion on Bush's public face -- and on an event DiIulio attended with Bush -- rather than on Bush's typical day to day behavior.
Barber's active/positive criteria requires a "relatively high self-esteem [with] … an emphasis on rational mastery," which is not Bush. Bush no doubt loves being head of state, enjoying the pomp of his high office, as well as the politics of the presidency. Yet there is no evidence he even likes being head of the government (for it involves far more intellectual rigor than Bush enjoys). In fact, Bush is like Nixon in that he gets out of the White House every chance he has to do so.
There is an abundance of evidence (from simply watching television coverage of the seldom smiling, often annoyed, forehead-wrinkled Bush) that demonstrates that Bush reaps a "relative[ly] low emotional reward" from the job -- to quote one of Barber's active/negative criteria.
Indeed, Bush clearly fits many of the traits that Barber relies upon to define his active/negative presidents. For example, Bush has a "compulsive quality, as if … trying to make up for something or escape from anxiety in hard work." Consider how he has immersed himself in continuous campaigning throughout his first term, while Cheney minds the store.
Continuing with Barber's criteria, Bush is clearly "ambitious, striving upward and seeking power." Indeed, few presidents have been so anxious to risk their political capital to enhance their power as Bush did in the 2000 Congressional races.
In addition, Barber notes that the active/negative president "has a persistent problem in managing his aggressive feelings." Bush seems to deal with his through strenuous exercise -- running and weight training -- which, for him, have (laudably) replaced alcohol as a way to "blow off steam."
Overwhelming Evidence Shows Bush Is An Active/Negative
In sum, I don't believe Professor DiIulio's judgment that Bush is an active/positive president is borne out by the facts. In my judgment, we do, in fact, have another active/negative president -- with all the attendant problems that appears to entail, based on Barber's analysis.
And if I am right, that bodes ill. George W. Bush has taken huge risks during his first term -- with his unprecedented tax cuts, his disregard for humongous budget deficits, and a preemptive and largely unilateral war in Iraq. At the same time, he stubbornly refuses to admit to so much as a single mistake. Under Barber's model, though, we have seen nothing yet. If this active/negative president gets a second term, Barber's model predicts these traits -- love of risk and dislike of admitting error -- will only become more aggravated.
Not since Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon has the nation been exposed to an active/negative presidency. It is not something to look forward to without the greatest vigilance.
As information about John Kerry unfolds in the coming weeks and months, it will be interesting to examine him by Professor Barber's predictive tools. Stay tuned.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040521.html
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006
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Italian Court Says Prodi Won Election - New York Times
Berlusconi goes down and hopefully will be in jail sooner rather than later; this should also be the fate of the Bush-Cheney Gang as the ship sinks, the rats jump off or drown, and the documentation of serious corruption and crimes multiplies...
Italian Court Says Prodi Won Election - New York Times
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Salon.com Politics War Room | Politics
DC Buzz on Bush administration unravelling from Salon: "The story behind Rove's new role?
We're not inclined to read much into the supposed change in Karl Rove's job at the White House. The Washington Post says that while Rove will retain his title of deputy chief of staff, he will "drop his portfolio as policy coordinator" and "once again" focus exclusively on politics. By our way of thinking, that's just a reflection of reality. Bush's approval ratings and tense relations with Congress mean there's not much of a policy agenda worth directing, and did anyone really think that Rove would spend 2006 focused on anything other than politics anyway?
But John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton and current head of the Center for American Progress, speculates that something else may be going on here. In a post at Think Progress, Podesta wonders if Rove has finally lost his security clearance -- and thus his ability to work on policy issues that pertain to national security -- as a result of his role in the outing of Valerie Plame.
As Podesta notes, an executive order Clinton signed in 1995 requires the prompt revocation of security clearances belonging to anyone who knowingly, willfully or negligently engages in action that "could reasonably be expected to result in an unauthorized disclosure of classified information." By leaking Plame's identity to reporters, Rove committed just such a violation. Yet as of November, at least, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that Rove still had his security clearance. As Jonathan Alter wrote at the time, "Having his security clearance yanked would not require Rove to resign as deputy chief of staff to President Bush. But it would prevent him from taking part in policymaking that relates to national-security issues, which would mean a much-reduced role in the Bush White House."
So is that what's happening now? Podesta raises the question, and with it this corollary: Even if Rove's security clearance hasn't been revoked as a result of the Plame case, shouldn't it be withdrawn now? If, as Rove says, he's going to make the war on terror a central campaign issue this year, is it really appropriate for him to have a security clearance that will help him do so?
Here's another, more obvious, question to ponder: If Rove is really going to spend the next seven months concentrating on partisan politics, why, exactly, should American taxpayers be footing the bill?
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [12:31 EDT, April 19, 2006]
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McClellan's replacement: The shortlist, plus one
The White House is said to be considering all sorts of Bush loyalists as possible successors for Scott McClellan.
If the president wants to dance with the ones who brung him, there's Fox News commentator Tony Snow, a former speechwriter for Bush I. If he really wants to remind everyone of the smashing success that the war in Iraq has been, there's former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor and former Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke. If he wants to keep it an inside job, as seems to be the plan in this shake-up that isn't really, there's counselor to the president Dan Bartlett, deputy press secretary Trent Duffy and former Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols. And if he wants to reach out to Republicans in Congress, there's Ron Bonjean, the communications director for Denny Hastert who, as the National Journal's Hotline notes, served as a spokesman for Trent Lott during his darkest days.
But if the decider in chief wants someone in the McClellan mold, why not pick up the phone and see if William Bennett is up for the job? When McClellan was asked last week whether the president knew that a team of experts had concluded that two trailers found in Iraq weren't mobile weapons labs at the time he was saying that they were, McClellan turned things around by demanding to know whether ABC News was going to apologize for reporting on the story in the first place. Now Bennett, a former Bush I and Reagan administration official, has taken things one step further. In response to the news that the Washington Post's Dana Priest and the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau had won Pulitzer prizes for revealing the Bush administration's use of secret prisons overseas and warrantless surveillance back home, Bennett suggested that the reporters should be put behind bars.
As Editor and Publisher reports, Bennett told CNN that the reporters "took classified information, secret information, published it in their newspapers, against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others, that they not release it. They not only released it, they publicized it -- they put it on the front page, and it damaged us, it hurt us ... As a result are they punished, are they in shame, are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer prizes -- they win Pulitzer prizes. I don't think what they did was worthy of an award -- I think what they did is worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward."
Of course, if Bennett were to get the job and the investigation were to go forward, he'd have to stop talking about it. Remember, the White House never comments on ongoing criminal investigations.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [11:55 EDT, April 19, 2006]
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Wait, there's a difference?
Scott McClellan's departure is apparently only one-half of today's White House shake-up. As the Associated Press is reporting, Karl Rove is "giving up oversight of policy development to focus more on politics with the approach of the fall midterm elections."
Joel Kaplan, who was incoming Chief of Staff Josh Bolten's No. 2 man at the Office of Management and Budget, will get Rove's current title of deputy chief of staff for policy. Rove will apparently remain at the deputy chief of staff level, too.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [10:08 EDT, April 19, 2006]
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McClellan resigns; will a Fox man replace him?
Scott McClellan has just resigned as White House press secretary. Appearing on the South Lawn of the White House with the president, McClellan said, "I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all, sir, and I will continue to do so as we transition to a new press secretary."
While we're not ones for dancing on the grave, we do note with some interest word of a possible successor to McClellan: As the New York Times reports this morning, White House officials have been talking about the press secretary job with Fox News commentator and radio talk-show host Tony Snow.
Tony Snow? That would be this man.
Sources tell the Times that White House officials have talked with Snow to gauge his interest in the job. Interested? He seems to have been auditioning for the job for years. A former speechwriter for the president's father, Snow has dispensed all sorts of pro-Bush wit and wisdom in his syndicated column and in his Fox appearances.
A few nuggets from the archives:
In an appearance on Fox earlier this year, Snow claimed that Valerie Plame wasn't a covert CIA officer at the time the Bush administration blew her cover, adding, "even her husband says she wasn't covert for six years." Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, has never said any such thing.
In a posting to his blog, Snow said that the White House ought to send flowers and chocolates to the New York Times reporters who broke the warrantless-spying story. Snow said the reporters had "saved the Bush presidency" by revealing that the president was doing such a good job of keeping tabs on al-Qaida, and he suggested that the story would work to Bush's political and polling advantage. Engaging in exactly the sort of false-choice argument he had made repeatedly, Snow wrote: "If we try to fight the war on terror with eyes shut and ears packed with wax, innocent people will die."
In a column on Iraq in December, Snow said it would be easy to call "Jack Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or any of the other wheezy prophets of the Defeatocrat Party as oddities were it not for the fact that their position on Iraq is deeply consonant with what the Modern Democratic Party has believed for 50 years." He then said that Democrats were stupidly -- and dangerously -- rejecting the president's "infinitely variable approach to the ever-shifting situation in Iraq" with a "weird faith in plans."
In a column following the vice president's shooting of Texas attorney Harry Whittington, Snow said reporters who pressed for answers were "fools" who had forgotten "the importance of behaving like human beings, rather than velociraptors." He added: "Most of us have tasted the milk of human kindness, and thus incline to support victims | |
