queenCITYrants

Let’s quit while we’re behind

2006-09-13T23:57:00.000-04:00

Let’s quit while we’re behind

By Christopher Buckley

“The trouble with our times,” Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”

This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.” That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!” There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s Families.” (Bo-ring.)

Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does “Mission Accomplished.” Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation....

Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?

A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terry Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?

The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.

Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.

George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”

What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

(Or was it Federalist 78?)

2006-06-14T19:54:00.000-04:00

Free your mind......

2006-05-19T02:04:00.000-04:00

In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter,

"I have sworn upon the altar of the God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man"

Republicans once again push forward on Gay Marriage Ban

2006-05-18T21:14:00.000-04:00

Ah, it's spring and you can just smell it in the air...... Rove trying to cook up another batch of divisive hate politics to get the far right to the polls come November..... gay rights are center stage once again. So what's next.... the rumblings of civil war or secession as the Fed tries to snatch away the rights of the states. And these are Republicans, the guardians of states rights. Someone wake me in 3 years when all of this is over. And, all we are talking about is "marriage" here..... shouldn't the religious doctrine of marriage be left up to the churches in this country (many of whom already ordain gay marriage). Couldn't we just end the debate.... issue anyone loving couple a simple "union" by the state (both gay and straight) and let the Priests, Rabbis, and the like worry about the marriage issue. This is political football with people's lives...... sickening.

Mom's day......

2006-05-13T18:58:00.000-04:00

For anyone who needs some Mother's Day inspiration ......

http://www.scott-o-rama.com/2006/05/13/in-honor-of-mom/

Francis Bacon

2006-05-13T11:56:00.000-04:00

Orwell

2006-05-13T11:25:00.000-04:00

"In a time of unversal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

"Asshole"

2006-05-09T09:25:00.000-04:00

For those that have not seen this..... it is worth a watch. "Asshole".

Ohio's Notorious FlagHag

2006-05-01T18:15:00.001-04:00

Mean Jean gets another reprimand or two or three (but who is keeping count).

Commission reprimands Schmidt

By John McCarthy, Associated Press

COLUMBUS - The Ohio Elections Commissaion on Thursday found that Republican U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt violated campaign law by claiming on her Web site last year that she had two college degrees when she had only one.

The commission, which ruled unanimously against Schmidt, issued a public reprimand for the violation.

The commission also dismissed a complaint that Schmidt's campaign filed against her opponent in Tuesday's primary, former U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, claiming he wasn't an Ohio resident.

It was the latest setback for Schmidt, who went to Congress last year in a special election to replace Rob Portman.

Schmidt was booed on the House floor in November for her comments criticizing Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam and is an opponent of the Iraq war.

She said: "Cowards cut and run, Marines never do."

She obtained a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Cincinnati in 1974.

The Web site said she also had received a bachelor's in education from Cincinnati in 1986.

A media call to the university revealed she had not done course work for the second degree.

A spokesman said Schmidt wasn't involved in the creation of her Web site and did not know its contents.

However, Commissioner William Mallory said Schmidt should have maintained control over her campaign material.

"The ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in the campaign rests with the candidate," Mallory said.

The reference to the second degree has been removed from campaign literature. Also removed were references to endorsements by the Family Research Council and U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

The commission found those claims to be false and in violation. The commission dismissed an allegation that U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot's endorsement of Schmidt also was false.

In dismissing the complaint against McEwen, the commission found that he was a resident of suburban Cincinnati. Schmidt's campaign had been claiming that his primary residence was in Virginia.

Designer mug shot..... oops, I did it again.....

2006-05-01T18:15:00.000-04:00

We can dream can't we......???

2006-05-01T18:08:00.000-04:00

Bringing "truthiness" to the Press Corps...

2006-05-01T17:40:00.001-04:00

I am sure everyone is aware of Colbert's performance at the press club. Here are some links to it....... wow, the tension in the air is palpable. It is almost difficult to watch it is so scathing..... and his contempt for these so-called jounalists is ripe. One of my favorites was the special podium replete with eject and Gannon buttons..... and a turn down the volume. "I can't heeeearrrrr youuuuuu".....

Crooks and Liars

You Tube

Democratic Underground

Just like much of America.... those in the press have been converted into whores that are much more interested in the pursuit of their own 'perceived' fame and celebrity.

"Mr. President" is in the Pink....

2006-05-01T17:40:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen Pink perform the song in this video you should watch this.........

"Mr. President"

Limbaughed

2006-04-29T18:17:00.000-04:00

One of the greatest hypocrites of our time has been arrested ONCE AGAIN. Truly a sad commentary on the American people that this guy enjoys any success. He plays to peoples fears, hatreds, prejudices, and ignorance. Instead of fame, this guy should be locked up.... oh, wait a minute, he probably will be...... remember this is his second arrest on drug charges.

Rush Limbaugh Arrested on Drug Charges
The Associated Press

Rush Limbaugh was arrested Friday on prescription drug charges, law enforcement officials said.

Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant issued by the State Attorney's Office, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the State Attorney's Office.

The conservative radio commentator came into the jail at about 4 p.m. with his attorney Roy Black and bonded out an hour later on a $3,000 bail, Barbera said.

The warrant was for fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, Barbera said.

Black said his client and authorities reached a settlement on a charge of doctor shopping filed Friday by the State Attorney.

Prosecutors seized Limbaugh's records after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion. They contend that Limbaugh engaged in "doctor shopping," or illegally deceived multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions.

He has acknowledged he became addicted to pain medication, blaming it on severe back pain, and took a five-week leave from his radio show to enter a rehabilitation program in 2003.

heck of a ride....

2006-04-28T19:35:00.000-04:00

By the people.....

2006-04-24T17:49:00.000-04:00

And from the people the movement grows...... the tyranny of majority rule (both houses of Congress and the executive branch) has remained unchecked and unbalanced........ so the states are speaking out and loudly........ I sit in wonder at how ridiculous the behavior in DC....... the Repubs charged after Clinton for every nuance of impropriety and were salivating for impeachment. Now that impeachment is actually warranted our one party rule cares NOT to take notice. And, where are the DEMS in DC.....??? They should be speaking out with anger and bravery, instead of cowering in their dark little corners.... a vacuum of leadership.

Bush Impeachment - The Illinois State Legislature Is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell
By Steven Leser

Utilizing a little known rule of the US House to bring Impeachment charges.

The Illinois General Assembly is about to rock the nation. Members of state legislatures are normally not considered as having the ability to decide issues with a massive impact to the nation as a whole. Representative Karen A. Yarbrough of Illinois' 7th District is about to shatter that perception forever. Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature. From there, Illinois House Joint Resolution 125 (hereafter to be referred to as HJR0125) was born.

Detailing five specific charges against President Bush including one that is specified to be a felony, the complete text of HJR0125 is copied below at the end of this article. One of the interesting points is that one of the items, the one specified as a felony, that the NSA was directed by the President to spy on American citizens without warrant, is not in dispute. That fact should prove an interesting dilemma for a Republican controlled US House that clearly is not only loathe to initiate impeachment proceedings, but does not even want to thoroughly investigate any of the five items brought up by the Illinois Assembly as high crimes and/or misdemeanors. Should HJR0125 be passed by the Illinois General Assembly, the US House will be forced by House Rules to take up the issue of impeachment as a privileged bill, meaning it will take precedence over other House business.

The Illinois General Assembly joins a growing chorus of voices calling for censure or impeachment of President Bush including Democratic state committees in Vermont, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and North Carolina as well as the residents themselves of seven towns in Vermont, seventy Vermont state legislators and Congressman John Conyers. The call for impeachment is starting to grow well beyond what could be considered a fringe movement. An ABC News/Washington Post Poll Conducted April 6-9 showed that 33% of Americans currently support Impeaching President Bush, coincidentally, only a similar amount supported impeaching Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigation. If and when Illinois HJR0125 hits the capitol and the individual charges are publicly investigated, that number is likely to grow rapidly. Combined with the very real likelihood that Rove is about to be indicted in the LeakGate investigation, and Bush is in real trouble beyond his plummeting poll numbers. His cronies in the Republican dominated congress will probably save him from the embarassment of an impeachment conviction, for now, but his Presidency will be all but finished.

Waking up from the damage that is done....

2006-04-24T17:39:00.000-04:00

On Waking Up Sleepless in the Middle of the Night
By John Brown

Sunday 23 April 2006

TO: The President

FROM: A former American diplomat

SUBJECT: Waking up in the middle of the night

Mr. President: Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night? Do you? Do you ever wake up sleepless in the middle of the night?

What have you done in Iraq? Do you ever realize, in the middle of the night, what you've done? Do you?

1. You've caused over 2,370 American soldiers to die in an impoverished land that never attacked us. Was that the right answer to 9/11 or the "threat" from Iraq? Do you ever ask yourself that question?

2. Because of your Iraq invasion, thousands of U.S. enlisted personnel are maimed, physically and mentally, for life. What can you tell these victims of your war? That you're honored by their duty towards you, our "mission-accomplished" commander-in-chief?

3. Your decision to go to war has led to the death of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Do you have any remorse for this, Mr. President? Or was it that, for you, Iraqis only really deserved to serve as props in "shock and awe" - your name for your made-for-TV porno/violence program at the beginning of the war, produced and distributed directly into our living rooms by the mainstream media? (Thank you, Fox News.)

4. Will you ever, ever accept responsibility for making torture all-American at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere? And the Statue of Liberty - why, tell us why, did you allow it to be replaced by that image of an abused, hooded, helpless prisoner on a box? Aren't you the least bit concerned at how America is seen by the rest of the world because of your war - as a brutal aggressor nation, dismissive of the opinions of mankind?

5. What about your mercenaries ("Pentagon contractors") that our tax dollars pay for? Who are they? What are they doing in their multi-thousands in Iraq, and to the Iraqis? Do you know? Or don't you care to know?

6. You said you wanted to "rebuild" Iraq - but isn't it true that all you've really done is construct a Roman-Empire-style camp, a "Green Zone" for Iraqi collaborators (whom you now mistrust) and U.S. personnel in the heart of Baghdad that is an invitation to insurgent mortars? Haven't you - tell the truth - destroyed in Iraq more than you have built? Haven't you?

7. You say Iraqis now live in a land of "freedom" - but what kind of freedom? How can it ever be like the Four Freedoms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt - freedom of expression and worship, joined with freedom from want and freedom from fear? As electricity fails and bombs terrify citizens in Baghdad, where is the freedom you promised Iraqis, Mr. President?

8. Your occupation of Iraq has led to a bloody sectarian conflict. Why do you and your ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad now blame the Iraqis for their problems? Don't you share responsibility for the desperate situation they are in?

9. Your trillion-dollar binge of destruction in the cradle of civilization - who will pay for it? The widows of our soldiers? Our young people, already too debt-burdened paying for their educations? Or their baby-boomer parents who may see their pensions evaporate to support your war?

10. Why can't you truthfully tell us, Mr. President, the reasons you led America into war? Was it for the WMD, for regime change, for the oil, for grand neocon visions, to avenge your father, to win elections at home? What were your real intentions? Are you afraid to tell us? Or is the truth that, deep down, you never really knew?

11. And, Mr. President, as you contemplate another war, this time against Iran, won't you ever wake up in the middle of the night, and stop more madness before it is too late?

--------

John Brown, who writes regularly for Tomdispatch and Tompaine.com, is a former diplomat who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles the Public Diplomacy Press Review, available free upon request at the site.

Conspiracy??? Only time will tell us.....

2006-04-24T16:09:00.000-04:00

DOCUMENTARY: 9/11 LOOSE CHANGE
Whether you accept the official 9/11 explanation or not, Loose Change is a fascinating look at unexplained issues surrounding 9/11 that you won't see on "the news."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848

The "decider"

2006-04-24T15:16:00.000-04:00

Wonderfully amusing if you have not yet heard it....

http://decider.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

Just the numbers, please...

2006-04-20T21:11:00.000-04:00

I like to keep track of what the war is costing the working taxpayer. We roughly have about 185,000,000 taxpayers. If you currently take what the war has cost to date.... it has cost each taxpayer $1800.00 thus far (or on loan so you have to add the future interest costs on the debt which continue to compound and accumulate). And, it is, of course, still rising as the war rages on indefinitely and expensively.

A staggering number if taken in real terms per taxpayer. What could you (or our country) have done with an extra $1800.00 to pump into our own economy. An aside, what if we had reasoned to take that $330,000,000,000.00 (or much less) and invested it in R&D and infrastructure to gain energy independence as other countries are doing. Not only would we have created jobs but our future would hold great promise.

Instead, we are still inexorably tied to the pump and imports.

The next time Bush goes to war (or any other president) maybe we should look at the big picture and see if we can actually afford it.

The day's rumination.

2006-03-27T12:30:00.000-05:00

Ruminating about some possible bumper stickers this morning:

"Bush/Cheney - in it's last throes"

"Bush Cheney - we're hear to listen"

"Bush/Cheney - No worries, we can't run again!"

"Bush/Cheney - the damage is done, we think!"

"Bush/Cheney - vote republican, we have only one way to go and that's up"

"Attack Globally, Overreact Locally"

Or lastly.... "Blame God, he told me to it"

Humpty-Dumpty and all the Kings Men

2006-03-17T22:42:00.000-05:00

Our war of choice, that we were told would substantially "pay for itself," has become one heavy burden to bear. Now running at $9.8 billion a month. Meanwhile here on the homefront..... life, as we have come to know it, is falling apart without a social parachute. Who would have ever thought that our reality would have been rewritten so quickly and to such an extreme. In six short years, we have been redefined as a militaristic nation and begun to dismantle our way of life at home via unaffordable health care, crippling debt, an accelerating decline of the middle class, a deteriorating civic infrastructure, the list is long. Is this reversible?

Interesting too that we seem to not be able to afford our hurricane relief..... and the Gulf Coast is still a MESS from what my friends who live there are telling me.

This week, Congress just approved another $78 billion for war costs..... making our outlay to date a whooping $337 billion, folks, and it ain't even close to over yet. And, that is on TOP of the Pentagon's already hefty budget of $440 billion just proposed by Bush. Yes, we cannot afford to fund schools properly, or Health Care, or........

BTW, we only approved $20 billion for hurricane relief. Our President certainly does have a gross set of priorities.

Lastly, Bush has decided to completely cut off any further funding for rebuilding Iraq (again, remember that we were told by Bush & Co that Iraq's oil money would pay for the rebuilding..... another policy that proved deadly wrong). So, as their country lay in ruins and on the verge of civil war (if not already engaged)...... I am sure that much needed stability is not a possibility when the promised resources to rebuild their country have evaporated. We've repeatedly been told that "you break it you buy it"...... unfortunately, the Bush neo-cons underestimated what it would take to put humpty-dumpty back together again. It looks like we cannot afford the fix so we are going to leave the Middle East in a state of disaster and probably Iraq will be engaged in a civil war, overrun by sectarian violence, immersed in right-wing ideology, strong alliances between Iran and Iraqi Shiites, and a veritable breeding ground for terrorism and Islamic extremism. Military experts pin one of the top reasons for the violence in Iraq on the fact that rebuilding has not occurred.

It appears that our ability to get this situation under control is turning out to be a cycle of repeated and increasingly dangerous mistakes and failures.

Twilight's Last Gleaming

2006-03-05T12:52:00.000-05:00

Twilight's Last Gleaming... By John Cory

Who are these people? These people who line their pockets with the lives of our loved ones? These gray men who lurk in shadows and kill the sunshine of democracy? These people who wear morality like a cheap suit pilfered from the collection plate of decency? Who are these people who have turned America into their own personal ATM machine? These are the people of the lie - Republicans.

Who are these people? These people who sit in spineless silence unable to speak in defense of America? These people who mime the words of our founders, afraid to act with independence? Who utter the words "We concede," instead of "We the People?" These are the people who lie down - Democrats.

Newspapers no longer serve the public, only their corporate masters. They have wedged themselves firmly between the cheeks of power, a tissue to sanitize the bullshit. The media has finally achieved the ultimate self-delusion; broadcasting sitcom politics, and talking points of the throne, it has become the court jester with tinkling bells and curly pointed shoes: useless, untrustworthy, and fused in falsehoods and facades.

This is twilight's last gleaming. Attention must be paid. Democracy is dying.

Bush and Company wants us to be afraid. Republicans sell us fear as they sell out America.

Democrats wait in the wings, picking up their pieces of silver to keep mum. Both political parties capitalize on all the fear.

Democrats think we will become so fearful of Republicans that we will have no other choice but to elect them. That is their incentive. Low profile, quiet acquiescence, and they think their silence will be rewarded.

This is not the time for silence. According to recent polls from Zogby, Fox News, Gallup and CNN, 72% of our troops believe the war in Iraq is a failure and we should withdraw. 64% of the public disapproves of Bush's handling of Iraq. 69% of Americans are against the Dubai Port deal. 52% do not find Bush "honest and trustworthy."

And yet Democrats can find no voice, no fight, no issue to unify them to protect "we the people." Major print and media outlets can find no reason to investigate Republican scandals, bribery and lies, no reason to question an administration that started a war with a lie and failed its own citizens when Katrina hit, by lying about what they did or did not know. Katrina, like 9/11, left the boy king wide-eyed and unprepared. Leader of the free world? Most Americans think not.

When it comes time for voting, here is what I will remember: the silence.

If there is a voice for America, let them speak now. Let them speak for the poor women who not only will find abortion illegal, but will not be allowed birth control and contraceptives. Let them speak for the old and infirm who will not be able to have healthcare and cost-effective drug prescriptions. Let them speak for true family values of providing for our veterans and protecting our troops with proper body armor and ending a false war so no more loved ones have to die for a lie.

But most of all, let them now speak up for the one precious gift that is America - Freedom. Freedom of speech - Freedom to dissent - Freedom from illegal domestic spying. Freedom, sweet freedom for which our fathers, brothers, and sisters have fought and died for over the past 230 years!

Hunter S. Thompson warned, "Big dark coming soon." Big dark is here.

Our Constitution hangs by a thread. Make no mistake, this is twilight's last gleaming. It's time to defend America, not sell it down the river of corporate greed. It is time to stand up, not slink away to fight another day, because there are no more days. The monarchs of mendacity under George Bush are dismantling democracy at every opportunity.

Democrats, you want my vote? Earn it! Get up off your ass and take a stand! Take back America. Stop whimpering. Throw out your Republican-lite Bush lickspittles and suit up for battle. We the people will support you if you speak up for the America we live in and want to preserve. You cannot claim victory simply because you kept the GOP from burying the Constitution while you let them drive it underground.

This is twilight's last gleaming. Who will speak up for America?

John Cory is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970.

Imagineering moves forward.

2006-01-25T00:27:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess it is pretty much official. Disney just bought Pixar which makes Mr. Jobs the largest shareholder at Disney and secures him (at a minimum) a seat on the board and most likely a very active role in shaping Disney's future. This is big news for Disney and Apple and the continued expansion and access to digital media. Personally, I see some pretty bright things on the horizon for all three since Mr. Jobs will now have complete control of two and partial control of the third. It is a great fit. Eisner being replaced by Iger made this dream team deal possible.

Remember, once again recently, Apple broke the digital media barrier with the video iPod and began selling digital video on the iTunes store. Groundbreaking because it also enhanced the market of the shows aired contrary to studio expectation. And, Disney was the first to sign up through their media outlets such as NBC.

I was pretty excited to see this move. This is truly visionary and what, imho, has made this country great..... independent thinkers that are willing to create outside the box. It is about seeing the possibilities!

Cult of Character

2006-01-10T18:21:00.000-05:00

The Character Training Institue is just one of many movements in this country to restore 'character' thru theology. Their drumbeat resonates... they want it like it was in the "good ole days". Curious, how good for a few can be so horrific for the many. Do we need to teach our children better values and responsibility. No doubt. But when you read this and look to what they are trying to teach, it will frighten you. It is completely evangelical-based, narrow, regressive, and most importantly, repressive.

It is interesting how some look at history in a quaint, revisionist way. From the beginning of civilization and history, there were those that tried to turn back the clock and find the "good old days." Roman Emperor Augustus sought strict moral reform which only really hurt those that had no power or money which was 99 percent of the populace. He reversed the clock and exercised strict edicts which divided and persecuted his people. Meanwhile, the wealthy houses of Rome did whatever they liked without fear of retribution. Or, during the middle ages when non-believers or free thinkers were burned at the stake and again most lived in poverty or were excluded from society. The same can be said for the Renaissance through the Enlightment and even into the industrial revolution.

In current historical terms, it is sad to see us look so fondly on our twentieth century history. Most of our country lived in what we, now, would consider to be some form of poverty until after WWII. Women had no rights, jobs, or voice in society, so were bound to their husbands. If they were abused or there was infidelity, for instance, they had no alternative but to stay with their abuser. Women were, in essence, property. Divorce was usually not an option. Since women have found their justifiable independence, divorce rates have climbed. So where does the moral compass sit upon this issue?

Blacks were enslaved in a cast system in this country for 100's of years and not until the 1960's did they find their place at the table. To this day, they are still climbing out from under centuries of deep prejudice and hate. Most recently, dignity and respect is being demanded from diverse groups from every quadrant of our society independent of race, heritage, nationality, origin, gender, or sexual orientation. We are just learning to understand the wonder and importance of difference and diversity in this world. The basic human right to be different.

We have seen many horrors on this planet as put forth by narrow theological interpretation and cultural prejudice. Let's hope we never again see the "good ole days". The list is long and varied, but all lead to the same common thread: fear of change, that desire to not understand what may be different, and the false exploitation of difference as reason to persecute or hate.

Difference is not a threat, but one of the amazing things that God bestowed upon the human race. After all, if we were all exactly the same what would be the point. This is the greatest challenge facing our world as we embark on a new century. The diversity and difference inherent in each and every one of us must be embraced and allowed to be realized. When you truly open your heart to diversity, you realize it is not a threat but leads to a greater understanding of not only the world around you but to yourself. That understanding is true morality, it opens your mind in ever increasing ways, and through it you learn the path to equality. No matter your theological affiliation, "character" is about love, kindness, charity, integrity, honesty and deeds. Sound familiar? Some would also equate those words to morality. Our lives should not be about rote and hypocritical rules that strictly define but offer no real guidance. This world is certainly complex but the rules by which we live it can be fairly simple.

Cult of Character
By Silja J.A. Talvi
In These Times

Monday 09 January 2006

How the 'secular' Character Training Institute is working to build evangelist Bill Gothard's vision of a First-Century Kingdom of God-one city, one state, one school board, one police force and one mind at a time.
From the outside the bland, unmarked exterior of the Character Training Institute's headquarters blends remarkably well into its immediate surroundings. This is a section of Oklahoma City that hasn't yet benefited from the nearby, upscale urban development intended to draw both tourism and business to the area. Both the downtown Greyhound Station and the county jail are situated a few blocks from here, which explains the number of forlorn, transient men and women wandering down West Main Street. For the

most part these folks seem to have more immediate priorities than paying attention to the dozens of foreign-looking visitors entering and exiting the 10-story Character Training Institute (CTI), which also serves as the headquarters of the International Association of Character Cities (IACC).

But one elderly woman wearing mismatched clothing and a weathered plastic visor ambles across the street to get a closer look. She leans against the wall and tries to peer inside, but the heavy double doors, darkened windows and drawn shades make it nearly impossible to do so.

"What's going on in there?" she asks a young man with a military-style haircut walking toward the door. He takes a polite moment to explain that this is a very important "Building Cities of Character" conference, sponsored by the IACC. Many people, he adds, have come from all over the world to be here. And with that, he disappears into the building. The woman tries, one last and unsuccessful time, to see what's going on inside.

"The Sin of Witchcraft"

Inside the institute, Arizona state treasurer David Petersen takes to the conference podium to tell how his state's Family Services Committee passed "Character Education Legislation."

"All schools now have it implemented," he says proudly. "We're fighting for the soul of this nation." Petersen is not being hyperbolic. He attributes his passion for "character" to a personal meeting with evangelist Bill Gothard.

Gothard, the 74-year-old, unmarried man at the head of the Oak-Brook, Illinois-based Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP)-which brings in an estimated profit of at least $63 million annually-has been in the evangelism business since 1964. Originally named the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, IBLP changed its name in 1990. All totaled, IBLP boasts that at least 2.5 million people have attended the organization's seminars and ministries in the United States and other countries, including Russia, Mongolia, Romania and Taiwan.

Although legally and fiscally independent, the CTI is for all intents and purposes a "secular" front group for Gothard's IBLP. In the last decade, the CTI has quietly gained entry into hundreds of elementary, middle and high schools, state and city offices, corporations, police departments and jails.

Though he never uses the term, Gothard's ideology fits into the framework of the burgeoning "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which aims to rebuild society according to biblical mandates. Within the Christian Reconstructionist worldview, modern-day chaos is directly attributable to the division of church and state and the consequent degradation of individual character.

For Gothard, the solution is restoring the United States-and then the rest of the world-to something that he calls "The Sevenfold Power of First-Century Churches and Homes."

The concept of obeying God-granted authority runs through virtually all IBLP-published materials. "The key to understanding authority is identifying four areas of God-ordained jurisdiction: parents, government, church leaders, and employers," reads an introductory passage to Basic Life Principles Seminar. "When a decision is to be made, we must ask, 'Whose jurisdiction is this under?' God gives direction, protection, and provision through human authorities. If we rebel against them, we expose ourselves to the destruction of evil principalities. ... This is why 'rebellion is the sin of witchcraft.' "

According to Gothard's interpretation, first century Roman Centurions were admirable figures of authority who followed their orders without question-the prototypes for the kinds of police officers that CTI instructor Ray Nash, the sheriff of Dorchester County, South Carolina, wants to create in his state and elsewhere.

Nash has conducted "Police Dynamics" training for numerous U.S. and international police departments.

"Really, what Police Dynamics is, in a nutshell, is biblical wisdom that's been packaged into a law enforcement message," Nash told Rev. Mark Creech in a November 2004 article for Alan Keyes' RenewAmerica Web site.
Character Cities Conference

"Leaders around the world are increasingly concerned by the decline in society's standards," CTI founder Thomas A. Hill writes in his introduction to the brochure inviting people to the IACC conference. "As you reflect on the past, you may ask yourself, 'Where did the good old days go?' and 'How did we get to this point?' The answer is rooted in a growing lack of personal character."

Anyone wanting to explore such questions and willing to fork over $360 for this annual three-day conference would be buzzed in through the double doors into an oddly serene and well-ordered environment.

Decorated in a faux-Victorian style, the lobby is spotless and dust-free, complete with displays of fake flowers in vases, rows of couches and psalm-quilted pillows. Low-level classical and hymnal music is piped in, but there are no television sets, radios or wall clocks to be seen. A busy group of young, unadorned women in ankle-length tan skirts, flats and dark polo shirts-and their adolescent male counterparts in pressed shirts and slacks-seem to make sure that everything runs on schedule. It doesn't take long to notice that the female roles are rigidly secretarial and/or service-oriented.

When they arrive at the lobby desk, registrants are handed their Character First! plastic binders. The cover announces "a new paradigm for personal growth," while the introductory letter from IACC Director Steven Menzel thanks attendees for their "commitment and determination to revitalize your community based upon the timeless attributes of character."

Over the course of the next three days, attendees will come to learn that absolutely everything bad happening in our society-from crime to divorce, from drug use to school shootings-can be explained by lack of character.
Instilling character

The CTI was founded in 1996 by Kimray Oil and Gas tycoon Thomas A. Hill. A tax exempt, nonprofit educational organization, the institute's mission is to instill 49 "Character Qualities" into four major civil institutions: family, business, education and law enforcement. In 1998 the CTI spread its wings and established the IACC, which aimed to make local governments "commit to develop character."

The Character Cities concept has caught on quickly: 160 cities ranging from Compton, California, to Hamburg, New York, 31 counties, and seven states-Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina-have now passed "character" resolutions and proclamations based on CTI's teachings and materials.

Nor has the CTI's influence been limited by American borders. Forty-seven international cities have already declared themselves Cities of Character, and at least one-third of the approximately 100 people attending the IACC conference arrived from foreign countries, including Romania, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Many have gone so far as to brand their localities with Character First! symbols, plaques, flags, pins, posters, brochures, books, mouse pads and calendars.

Understandably, the Character Training Institute tries to obfuscate the links between its work and Gothard's reconstructionist Christian vision.

"This is not religion, these are character traits," says John Thomas, vice president for global infrastructure services for Perot Systems Corporation, during one of three successive business-oriented presentations at the IACC conference.

Speakers emphatically and repeatedly stress that Character First! training has nothing to do with promulgating religion. Instead, attendees are told, the training promotes great character and, as a side benefit, drives up corporate profit margins. The Character First! DVD is chock-full of tales of incredible savings to businesses: Kimray's Hill, for instance, talks of workers' compensation dropping from $24,000 per month to a mere $2,000 to $4,000, while Todd Anderson, the vice president of C.P. Morgan, a home construction firm, brags about a tenfold increase in profitability attributable directly to CTI training.

The list of Character First! seminar attendees already reads like a who's who of top corporations and government institutions: McDonald's, Burger King, Aflac, Costco, Coca Cola, the Correctional Corporation of America, the Better Business Bureau, Tyson Foods, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the Arkansas Prison System and the U.S. District Attorney's office are all mentioned, in addition to more than a dozen school districts (including Denver, Memphis and Ft. Lauderdale), and eight healthcare companies and hospitals.

At the conference, attendees are told that the IACC exists "to support government and community leaders who want to develop character in themselves and encourage it in their families and communities."

Oklahoma City-and the state of Oklahoma in general-seems to have truly taken this to heart. Here, even the local county jail's elevators feature Character First! posters in Plexiglass displays, and juvenile detainees study character concepts with the jail chaplains. Each employee receives a Character Bulletin with his or her paycheck, explains Chaplain Argyle Dick. "We hire for character, and we fire, most of the time, for lack of character. ... We are always looking for new ways to saturate even more of our employees with character."

The Character Council of Central Oklahoma has even entered into a "covenant" with the regional career tech programs, covering 12 campuses. "That's our plan for getting character qualities into the hearts and minds of all students," explains Dr. Earlene Smith, the Education Committee chairman for the council.

Other examples abound throughout the conference: McDonough, Georgia, flies a City of Character flag outside of city hall; Owasso, Oklahoma, police squad cars sport a "City of Character" emblem on each vehicle; and the Character Council of Florida has ensured that all elementary schools will incorporate CTI training by 2006, and expand from there to higher grades.
Sign of the eagle

On the surface it does not appear as though Gothard is at all involved in the "secular" character training that the CTI provides to countless schools, city councils, state agencies, corporations and law enforcement agencies across the world. Hundreds of cities have also passed their own character resolutions, modeled on the IACC's materials. None of the CTI/IACC materials mention Gothard's name, but the more obvious attempts to hide the connections end there.

CTI founder Thomas Hill is also the board chairman for the IBLP-alongside other influential board members, such as Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas).

There's also an omnipresent eagle symbol, identically illustrated for both organizations, with different acronyms encircling the image of the bird taking flight. Each group also uses the exact same 49 Character Qualities-CTI's Character Qualities delete all the references to Jesus Christ. Several of Gothard's books (and other Christian books, including Bill Burtness' The Third Alternative: Christian Self-Government) are for sale in the back of the CTI/IACC bookstore.

Then there are the shoutouts that Phil Heimlich, a conservative pro-lifer and former Cincinnati city council member, gives to both Hill and Gothard at the IACC's "Building Cities" conference. One of the longest presentations at the conference is delivered by George Mattix, the international director for the IBLP's missionary efforts. He describes the extent of their successes in bringing IBLP teachings to children and teens in at least 30 countries, under the initial pretense of teaching English and character training.
Obedience, not willfulness

By the first day of the IACC conference, the main meeting room resembled a mini-U.N., complete with simultaneous translation for each of the non-English-speaking attendees.

The Philippines has one of the strong-est international delegations here, led by attorney Francis Tolentino, the former mayor of Tagaytay. (His brother now holds the same office.) Tagaytay became a City of Character back in 2000 and, with Tolentino's assistance, the first nationwide Character Conference was held in the Philippines in 2002, with conference materials provided by the IACC.

Tagaytay not only has an official "character oath," but an "official jingle, so that the character program will always be inculcated in the minds of the people." Tagaytay police officers wear a City of Character badge, says Tolentino, and the city now requires character training before a marriage license will be granted. Mayor Sally Lee of Sorsogon City speaks of similar initiatives in her city, where her "goal and objective [is] to really push through this kind of program."

Most of the domestic or international attendees seem familiar with the concepts espoused; indeed, the vast majority represent city and character councils, state or local agencies, school districts or businesses that have already bought into ongoing trainings and supplementary materials.

It's hard to ignore how much money there is to be made in this enterprise. To give a few examples: the Character First! resource disk set runs $40 per month, and the framed character posters cost $89 per month. The actual display cases for the monthly character qualities run from $435 (aluminum) to $685 (oak or cherry). For law enforcement, Sheriff Nash's "Police Dynamics" character concept-based DVD sets run $595 for each series.

But for those of us who aren't yet in the loop-or convinced yet that we need to buy into the whole package-the conference organizers make sure to drive "character" as close to home as possible. Each presenter is introduced by name, and then by how many years he has been married, and by the number of children and grandchildren he has. (There are only a handful of female presenters; each is introduced in similar fashion.) All presenters are given a certificate at the end of his or her presentation, and a CTI official announces which one of the 49 Character Qualities best describes that person's accomplishments. During some of the presentations, the word "character" is repeated anywhere from four to six times a minute.

As if that weren't enough, attendees are told constantly to refer to the laminated, pocket-sized list of the 49 Character Qualities that are essential for true success in life.

"Obedience: Quickly and cheerfully carrying out the direction of those who are responsible for me," reads one of the 49 Character Qualities. "Justice: Taking personal responsibility to uphold what is pure, right and true," reads another.

Each of the 49 Character Qualities is not only contrasted with its opposite ("Willfulness," for instance, as the opposite of "Obedience"); they are also paired with colorful animal figures and simplistic descriptions of how those animals represent these concepts. A mother wood duck and her ducklings represent "Obedience;" and "Justice" takes the form of a bull African elephant. Oklahoma City proclaimed September 25 a "ZOOrific Day of Character," with billboards and advertisements throughout the city encouraging parents to bring their children to the city zoo to learn about how various animals illustrate character traits.

The animal imagery isn't just reserved for the children's material; gigantic posters of the animals are plastered throughout the CTI headquarters, adjacent to posters featuring historical figures, such as Louisa May Alcott and Martin Luther King Jr., who, like the animals, are lauded for having displayed true character. (Little Women author Alcott, the poster explains, wrote to end her "monetary problems," but never lost sight of her primary responsibility to take care of her extended family.)

It's Not Really about the Animals

Chuck Coker is an authorized Character First! trainer. He is one of the first to start muddying the "secular" concept by mentioning that he engages in missionary work in the IBLP Moscow orphanage, among other locations. But Larry Rhoads, the executive director of Character First!, quickly brings the focus back to both business and the family. One story moves the audience to wild applause: He describes how he realized how important it was not to leave his dirty socks inside out before leaving them for his wife to wash, something he had apparently been doing for their entire married life. The true measure of character, as it's repeated in mantra-like fashion, is what you do when no one is watching.

It's perhaps for this reason that Dr. Joseph Ahne, another certified CTI trainer, decides to be upfront about everything on the last day of the conference, over a breakfast of pancakes and syrup eaten under poster-sized animals.

"They don't tell you this here, but it's all biblically based," Dr. Ahne says. "They use the animals to illustrate the points that are all from the Bible. You see, it's about becoming like Christ. Through teaching the character, we're teaching people how to be like Christ. We could all use that."

A former Methodist preacher, Dr. Ahne says that he has devoted his life to spreading the teachings of the IBLP and the IACC, which he translates into Korean. Every year, Ahne leaves his home in Chicago and spends five months in Korea, where he has a staff of six full-time employees. Ahne says that they have already reached 18,000 Koreans with a combination of character-based trainings. He explains that he has brought teenage boys to the United States for further education at the IBLP's ALERT training ranch in Big Sandy, Texas-as well as sending teenage girls to the IACC in Oklahoma City for their own form of service training. Home-schooling, he adds, is one of the biggest emphases of IBLP worldwide because the organization prefers that young people never get exposed to the pernicious influences in the public school system.

"We use this," he says, pointing to the Character First! binder in the middle of the table, "because we can't take religion into schools and government. But it's all based on the same thing."

Gothard's Vision

Each of the 49 Character Qualities in CTI's secular materials have their exact counterpart in IBLP materials. In books like Gothard's Power of Kingdom Living and The Sevenfold Power of First-Century Churches and Homes, they are typically referred to as "The Laws of the Kingdom."

The IBLP's "blue book," formally titled The Power for True Success, is carried around by many of the IACC officials. It explains the imperative for learning the 49 character qualities this way: "Character reveals the Lord Jesus Christ, since He is the full personification of all good character qualities." It continues, "understanding character explains why things happen to us, because all things work together for good to conform us to the character of Christ."

This book is now in the hands of most of the 1,200-strong Cincinnati police force, courtesy of a life insurance salesman and CTI cheerleader named Mike Daly who, along with Phil Heimlich, helped turn Cincinnati into a City of Character. The two worked hand-in-hand to implement the CTI training into nearly all facets of government and secondary education. During one of his trainings, Daly gifted curious officers with the religious books while telling them to become "apostles for character."

In the blue book and other IBLP materials, the 49 character qualities take on a more strident and extremist tone. "Obedience" is defined as the "freedom to be creative under the protection of divinely appointed authorities. All legitimate authority comes from God. He is the One who sets up rulers and takes them down. ... God ordained government to carry out his will in matters of justice."

"Those who violate God's laws are like citizens who commit crimes," Gothard explains in Sevenfold Power. "They are still citizens, but they lose certain rights and privileges that they otherwise would have enjoyed."

Apparently, sometimes the sinners and the criminals are one and the same. In recent years, IBLP has expanded into highly controversial religious juvenile boot camps and, most recently, into a partnership with the private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, which has announced its intent to bring the teachings to all of the prisons it owns.

To take but one example, the workbook materials distributed to the prisoners in the CCA-run Grants, New Mexico, women's prison include a breakdown of "basic life principles," including "Moral Purity," "Yielding Rights" and "Proper Submission."

"Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord," reads one of the biblical selections. Emphasis is placed on "courting" rather than "dating;" on women obeying their husbands; avoiding the "addiction" of all forms of music except for those written and/or approved by the IBLP; preserving marriage at all costs; and on the need for Christians to respect, obey and submit to church and government. These institutions and their rulers, as the workbooks explain, exist because of God's will.

Again, here is the fundamental premise: what the IBLP hopes will come of these myriad efforts on secular and religious fronts is a patriarchal, hierarchical Christian government that truly has no place for dissent, for disbelievers, or for those whose character qualities fall short of expectations. Government, from this viewpoint, is akin to the right hand of God: Nothing or no one should stand between the two entities, or question their right to rule over our lives.

"God ordained government to carry out His will in matters of justice. Rulers are to praise those who do well and punish those who do evil," reads the IBLP's Power for True Success. "Because civil authorities derive their power from God, they will be judged if they violate the Laws of God." Church leaders, fathers and husbands, and even business leaders, are given nearly the same power in this conception of a well-ordered society: "Employees are to obey employers with wholehearted service."

As Bill Burtness writes in a book sold in both the CTI's bookstore and through the IBLP, The Third Alternative: Christian Self-Government, civil government is "an institution ordained and given by God ... [and] Christians are the stewards of civil government as an aspect of their stewardship of society."

It is worth noting that the IBLP is just one organization whose ideals fit within the broader Christian Reconstruction movement. But Gothard and the IBLP, unlike many of their fellow organizations, do not appear to be looking for Christian allies in their quest. On the secular front, they alone seem to have accomplished more toward their end goal than most of their Christian Reconstructionist contemporaries, and the profit-making aspects of this large-scale venture cannot be underestimated.

The strategy, in this sense, has proved to be ingenious. After all, who wants to argue with "character"? What kind of person would object to such an innocuous-sounding concept? Couldn't we all benefit from having a bit more ethical character in the way that we conduct our day-to day-lives? Of course we could! And that's precisely the reaction that both the IACC and the IBLP have bet on.

IBLP's master plan appears to be well underway. That is, until inquiring minds finally begin to ask where, exactly, all of this is headed. What, pray tell, lies behind the smiling bears, elephants and zebras so ready and eager to deliver their character traits to you, your children and your community?

If they could talk, they might be able to tell you that all's not well in the peaceable kingdom, no matter how innocent it might look at first glance.

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of publications nationwide, including The Nation, Salon and the Christian Science Monitor. She is at work on a book about women in prison.

Kickback Mountain

2006-01-06T12:34:00.000-05:00

The tale of a boy that would be king.....

2005-11-14T01:37:00.000-05:00

Let's Try Baloney... By Eleanor Clift

The White House is way off track. Only something radical can rally Bush's presidency.

Things aren't getting better in Bush land. They had a horrific week with the election results. Virginia, a Red State, elected a new governor, Tim Kaine, a Democrat to the left of current Gov. Mark Warner, who's now a hot presidential prospect as a Democrat who can bridge the divide between Red and Blue America.

Events were no better elsewhere. Bombings of hotels in Amman, Jordan, begged the question: Why can't we capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born insurgent leader in Iraq suspected of carrying out the attacks-or Osama bin Laden for that matter? Al-Zarqawi moves beyond the borders of Iraq to become a regional threat while Vice President Dick Cheney, a veteran of multiple draft deferments, battles Sen. John McCain, a former POW, for pushing an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that puts the U.S. government on record opposing torture.

Something is deeply askew in the White House when the priorities are so off kilter. Unless events conspire to save President George W. Bush (ie: Iraq turns around, the economy improves for average workers (not just oil execs), and the price of energy comes down) he is heading for a full meltdown, a scary prospect when you realize he's president for three more years. What's needed now is the political imagination to change direction, the way President Bill Clinton did after Republicans took control of both the House and Senate in 1994.

Bush went on the offensive Friday, saying in a Veteran's Day speech that critics of his Iraq policies are undercutting American soldiers on the front lines. He also attacked Democrats who claim that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by the White House. But evidence to the contrary will make this a hard sell. It was the first time an American President used Veteran's day as a forum for a stump speech.

The people who most want Bush to succeed are the alumni of his father's administration, and they are in despair over the state of the White House. One former diplomat after three glasses of wine at an embassy dinner confessed that he has a recurring image of the White House as a crab with seven atrophied legs and one over-developed leg, which would be Karl Rove, pulling everything along. "If he goes, there's nothing left." Exhausted and demoralized Bush aides are turning on each other and leaking stories to the press, a breakdown in discipline that is new to the Bush operation. Friends of the senior Bush are blaming Cheney for usurping too much power, but that's why they wanted him there, as a minder for the man-child who should never have been made president.

This is a battle between the Bushes of Kennebunkport and the Bushes of Crawford, and who prevails will determine which direction Bush 43 goes for the rest of his term. The Connecticut crowd is headed by Bush 41 with Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, speaking for the father, James Baker the consigliore, and chief-of-staff Andy Card their mole. Scowcroft has terminally offended the White House with his anti-Iraq war views. "He might as well be dead," says the former diplomat. "If you say anything publicly, you're frozen out. You have to show comity toward them, or they won't listen to you."

Suiting up on the Crawford side is Rove, and of course Bush 43, who reinforce each other. If Bush sticks with Rove and goes to the right, there's a ceiling on his popularity at best of 45 percent. If he moves to the center, like the Bush 41 crowd would like, the base collapses and he doesn't necessarily pick up votes in the center. The administration is too far gone, the problems intractable.

Whenever Clinton got into trouble, he reached outside his White House, cleaned house, and developed the strategy of "triangulation" which positioned Clinton between the Democrats and the Republican Congress, and revived his presidency. The elder Bush's allies are pushing to bring in two or three new people who can talk to Bush and help fashion fresh approaches to the nation's problems in the State of the Union address early next year. Who might those people be? After a long silence, the diplomat suggested Jim Baker, who has come to the rescue before, but who is better suited to working behind the scenes. The Right distrusts him and would rebel if they saw Baker's fingerprints.

The other name offered was Condoleeza Rice, who Bush calls "mother hen." She spends time with him-biking, pumping iron and taking walks-or at least she did when she was national security adviser and didn't travel so much. "He likes people who affirm him and make him feel good about himself," said the diplomat, recalling Harriet Miers's note to then Gov. Bush that he was "deserving of the greatest respect." In this diplomat's assessment, having known the Bush family well, respect is the key word. Bush for years was the lost and hapless son of a respected, duty-bound father, and he's still playing catch-up in the family Oedipal drama.

Talking to Bush requires what those around him call the "baloney sandwich approach." It works like this: Your spouse has run up the credit cards. Confronting her will provoke a fight. So you flatter her, tell her what a great wife and mother she is; then present this teeny little problem the two of you can work together to solve because you love her so much. Bush's world has collapsed in on him. It's time to try something new, even if it's baloney.

Cincinnati Endorsements for November 8, please vote.

2005-11-07T14:55:00.001-05:00

Cincinnati Mayor:
Pepper (a difficult choice, both candidates are very strong)

Cincinnati City Council:
Crowley
Cranley
Bortz
Smitherman
Spencer
Berding
Lynch
Cole
Herd

Cincinnati Board of Education:
Cranley
Ingram
Reed
Russell

District Judges:
Grant (district 2)
Berry (district 2)
Rucker (district 3)
Good (district 4)
Metz (district 4)
Dameron (district 7)

Issues:
YES on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8.
No on 9.

Bush, fire Rove!

2005-11-03T14:49:00.000-05:00

Is Rove a Security Risk? By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek

Because he disclosed Plame's CIA identity to reporters, the Bush aide could (and should) lose his clearance. Under Executive Order 12958, signed by President Clinton in 1995, such a disclosure is grounds for, at a minimum, losing access to classified information.

Section 5.1 of Clinton's executive order prohibits "any knowing, willful or negligent action that could reasonably be expected to result in an unauthorized disclosure of classified information." While the law against revealing the identity of a CIA operative requires that the perpetrator intentionally disclosed such classified information (a high standard, which may be the reason Fitzgerald did not indict on those grounds), the executive order covers "negligence," or unintentional disclosure.

That means the only proper answer to a reporter's questions about Joseph Wilson's wife would have been something along the lines of, "You know I cannot discuss who may or may not be in the CIA." The indictment makes clear that this was not the answer Official A (Rove) provided when the subject was discussed with reporters Bob Novak and Matt Cooper.

The sanctions for such disclosure are contained in Section 5.7 of the executive order. That section says that "the agency head, senior agency official or other supervisory official shall, at a minimum, promptly remove the classification authority of any individual who demonstrates reckless disregard or a pattern of error in applying the classification standards of this order." Any reasonable reading of the events covered in the indictment would consider Rove's behavior "reckless." The fact that he discussed Plame's identity with reporters more than once constitutes a pattern.

In the past, other officials have lost their security clearances for much less - even without a pattern. Former CIA director John Deutch and former national-security adviser Sandy Berger (who got in trouble after leaving office) both lost their clearances when they took classified information home without proper authorization. More recently, officials of the Coast Guard were sanctioned when they warned relatives of a possible terrorist threat against the New York City subways before public disclosure of the threat.

Because Rove's apparent violation is covered by executive order, not legislated law, the issue of his security clearance is unlikely to wind up in criminal court. But he may face a civil suit from the Wilsons, who could seek damages because of the damage done to Plame's CIA career by the leak.

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. Some Democrats have asked the president to apologize for the Plame leak case - an unlikely event. But asking him to enforce executive orders could be a more legitimate line of inquiry.

Harry Reid's finest hour....

2005-11-03T13:53:00.000-05:00

It's Still There... By William Rivers Pitt

Harry Reid's so-called "stunt" on the Senate floor this past Tuesday - invoking Rule 21 to create a closed session, during which he demanded an investigation into how we were dragged to war in Iraq - brought the issue of the never-found weapons of mass destruction back into the daylight. It's about damned time. This ball of thorns is three years old now, and we have come nowhere near addressing its roots.

Recall, if you will, George W. Bush's State of the Union address from January of 2003. In that speech, he told us that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent (500 tons equaling one million pounds, by the way), 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium from Niger for use in Iraq's advanced nuclear weapons program.

The page on the White House web site detailing the existence of all this stuff is still there, by the way. None of the weapons they described in such dire tones actually exist, but that page is still sitting there in all its glory.

As of Wednesday morning, 2,032 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. 95 died in the month of September alone. More than 15,000 American soldiers have been wounded, many of these suffering permanently debilitating injuries, lost limbs and brain damage. There is no adequate accounting of the number of Iraqi civilians killed and wounded since the invasion and occupation began, but the toll easily reaches into the tens of thousands. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. The occupation, which was supposed to result in a rain of flowers from a grateful Iraqi populace, has lasted 959 days, with no end in sight.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were no al Qaeda terrorists there. Hussein did not support Osama bin Laden; indeed, bin Laden has wanted Hussein dead for years, because Hussein made it his business to slaughter every Wahabbist he could get his hands on. Now, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are roadside bombs that kill American troops by twos and threes. Now, Iraq is a magnificent training ground for terrorists of every stripe. Now, our so-called mission of democracy appears ready to birth a Shia-dominated theocracy with robust ties to the hard-liners in Iran, with a constitution not worth the paper it is printed on serving only to highlight the depth of this debacle.

How did we get here? The answer to this comes in three parts. Of course, we got here because the Bush administration lied with its bare face hanging out about the threat posed by Iraq. Recall, if you will, these gems:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." - Dick Cheney, Speech to VFW National Convention, 8/26/2002

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." - George W. Bush, Radio Address, 10/5/2002

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas." - George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, 10/7/2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there." - Ari Fleischer, Press Briefing, 1/9/2003

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more." - Colin Powell, Remarks to UN Security Council, 2/5/2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." - George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, 3/17/2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." - Donald Rumsfeld, ABC Interview, 3/30/2003

"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." - George W. Bush, Interview with TVP Poland, 5/30/2003

There are, literally, dozens more comments and declarations exactly like this. The best one, after that magically deranged comment from Bush claiming we actually found the stuff, came from Ari Fleischer on July 9, 2003, as he attempted to fend off questions about why no WMD had been located. "I think the burden," said Fleischer while channeling Orwell, "is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

Here's the funny part: Senator Kit Bond, Republican of Missouri, apparently spent a portion of YESTERDAY assuring people that the weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq, and that we would find them. Yes, this was Tuesday. Not last year or two years ago. Tuesday. Methinks someone missed a memo somewhere.

Right. So that's the easy part. They lied, repeatedly and with deliberate intent. They used the fears created by September 11 against the American people to get the war they wanted, to get the payday they wanted for their friends, to make sure they had a dead-bang winner of an issue to run on in the 2002 midterms. This administration has admitted no fault, made no steps to rectify the mess they have created, and appears willing to slog on indefinitely. This is, in the end, not at all surprising. Getting them to admit fault is almost certainly impossible.

There are others in this, however, who must also admit fault and come completely clean. Bush and his folks were not alone in this.

I wrote a book in August of 2002, two full months before the Iraq War Resolution vote and seven months before the invasion, called "War on Iraq." The book stated unequivocally that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no ties to Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda or 9/11, and thus no reason to go to war there. This book was subsequently translated into twelve languages and read all over the world. A copy was delivered to each and every member of the Senate.

If I knew this - me, wee little me - then how is it possible that all these Senators allowed themselves to be "tricked?" The answer to this is difficult. Did these Senators fall victim to a Pollyanna belief that Bush wouldn't deceive the country? Or were their actions motivated by political ugliness of the purest ray serene: the midterms were around the corner, a Presidential election was coming, a bunch of these Senators wanted to run for that office, and voting to approve the war was the most politically expedient option at the time.

Were they duped, or did they vote to protect their jobs and their positions and their aspirations? At least one Senator - Barbara Boxer - voted no because she read the National Intelligence Estimate, heard the dissenting opinions from the State Department, and decided the information coming from the White House did not jibe with the facts. If she got it right, how did the others fail so badly to do so?

The third player in this tragedy is the mainstream news media, led by the "august" New York Times. On Wednesday, the Times editors coughed up a moralistic scolding of the Bush administration regarding the WMD issue titled "Remember that Mushroom Cloud?" In it, the editors wrote, "Americans are long overdue for an answer to why they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Indeed, Americans are long overdue for an answer to this. To find one, however, the Times editors and the rest of the mainstream news media need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. It was the Times editors who allowed Judy Miller to run wild with scandal-riddled and corrupt bagman Ahmad Chalabi on the front page of the paper and claim that Iraq was practically swimming in weapons of mass destruction.

Once the Times said it, the rest of the news media felt more than comfortable repeating it, augmenting it, making it axiomatic, and in the process provided excellent cover for the Bush administration to push its invasion agenda. It had a good beat, and they danced to it with all their might, with visions of high ratings and advertising revenues dancing in their heads. Their failures are manifest today, and there must be a reckoning within newsrooms all across the country. Much of this is probably due to the mainstream media being bought up over the last decade by mega-corporations, most of which are deeply aligned with the GOP and big contributors to the party (ie: GE, Disney, Newcorp, Gannett, etc).

It has taken almost a thousand days for the wall of lies and disinformation surrounding this invasion to begin to crumble. A lot of people have been killed and maimed in the process. Others have had their livelihoods and reputations crushed for daring to speak truth to power. That wall was built by a threesome - the White House, the Senate who should have and could have known better, and a debased news media. Today, they all have blood on their hands.

It will not be enough for George W. Bush and this administration to admit fault, and never mind the fact that such a moment will almost certainly never come (this president has never taken responsibility for anything in his life). Those in the Senate who supported this invasion for whatever reasons, and those members of the news media who provided cover for the invasion by repeating the lies because it was easier than actually acting like journalists, owe a debt of sorrow and remorse to us all.

If the Senate and the media expect Bush to accept responsibility and admit fault, they must first do so themselves. The stain of their actions is still there, still with us. They must find the courage, today, to admit they were wrong. Reid's stand on Tuesday was an excellent beginning, but only a beginning. Unless this beginning is followed by action, the horrors created will remain with us, still there, going nowhere but deeper into darkness.

His administration has become its own republic of fear, and Bush is a prisoner to the right.

2005-11-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

One year after his re-election President Bush governs from a bunker. "We go forward with complete confidence," he proclaimed in his second inaugural address. He urged "our youngest citizens" to see the future "in the determined faces of our soldiers", to choose between "evil" and "courage". But as he listened that day, Vice-President Dick Cheney knew the election had been secured by a cover-up.

"I would have wished nothing better," declared Patrick Fitzgerald announcing the indictment of "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, "that, when the subpoenas were issued in August 2004, witnesses testified then, and we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005." Perilously before the last election.

On September 30 2003 President Bush emphatically stated that he wanted anyone in his administration with information about the Plame leak to "come forward". On June 10 2004 he pledged that anyone on his staff who leaked Plame's name would be fired.

However, when the Libby indictment was announced, Bush and Cheney praised him as a fine public servant. Still under investigation, Rove remains in the West Wing. But Cheney knew during the presidential campaign that he had discussed with Libby how to deal with Plame. Now Bush knows that Rove had enabled Robert Novak to publish her identity. Yet, the President still refuses to take responsibility and live by his words to clean house.

Libby's alleged cover-up was undertaken in the spirit of neoconservative Leninism. Any tactic is rationalised by the vanguard, which sets all policy and uses the party as its instrument. If he had testified truthfully in October 2004 the result would have consumed the final days of the campaign. His Leninist logic permitted him to protect the Republican cause, but he has tainted Bush's victory in history.

Bush took his 2004 win as a resounding mandate for a rightwing agenda. With each far-right turn, however, his popularity declined. Iraq acted as an accelerator of his fall. His nomination of Harriet Miers for the supreme court was an acknowledgement of his sharply narrowed political space. While the Republican masses supported him, the Leninist right staged a revolt. In Bush's cronyism and opportunism they saw his deviation. With the prosecutor's indictment imminent, Bush withdrew Miers. Broadly unpopular, he could not suffer a split in the party. His new nominee, federal judge Samuel Alito, a reliable sectarian, is a tribute to his bunker strategy.

Hostage to his failed fortune, Bush is a prisoner of the right. His administration has become its own republic of fear. Libby's trial will reveal the administration's political methods. Cheney, along with a host of others, will be called to testify. "Disunity, dissolution and vacillation" are hallmarks of "the path of conciliation", as Lenin wrote in What is to be Done. The vanguard on "the path of struggle" criticised for being "an exclusive group," must oppose any retreat proposed by the "opportunist rearguard". "We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire."

2000: a sad number

2005-11-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

As we climbed past 2000 dead Americans in Iraq alone, the military announced the deaths of seven more American soldiers and marines near Baghdad on Monday, making October the fourth deadliest month for troops here since the war began.

In February and March of last year, the American military counted fewer than 200 attacks a week on average. In the first week of this month, there were 723 attacks.

During this entire time our leaders, most notably Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld having constantly bombarded us with propaganda that makes the war looks rosier than is reality. Cheney just a few months ago said: "the insugency is in it's last throes." Or Mr. Bush in a press conference announcing that the training of Iraqi troops was going so well and they had "35 battle read battalions" whereas in reality Pentagon testimony before Congress the very next day was that "only ONE Iraqi battalion is capable of operating independent of coalition support."

Lies and liars. Such is the Bush White House.

Can we win back our country?

2005-11-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

Senator Harry Reid's Statement

Tuesday 01 November 2005

Sen. Reid just took the senate into closed session to discuss the body's failure to pursue 'phase two' of the senate intel investigation into the Iraq WMD intel failure.

Below are his remarks, as prepared for delivery, before taking the senate into closed session.

"This past weekend, we witnessed the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff and a senior Advisor to President Bush. Libby is the first sitting White House staffer to be indicted in 135 years.

"This indictment raises very serious charges. It asserts this Administration engaged in actions that both harmed our national security and are morally repugnant.

"The decision to place U.S. soldiers in harm's way is the most significant responsibility the Constitution invests in the Congress.

"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really about: how the Administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.

"As a result of its improper conduct, a cloud now hangs over this Administration. This cloud is further darkened by the Administration's mistakes in prisoner abuse scandal, Hurricane Katrina, and the cronyism and corruption in numerous agencies.

"And, unfortunately, it must be said that a cloud also hangs over this Republican-controlled Congress for its unwillingness to hold this Republican Administration accountable for its misdeeds on all of these issues.

"Let's take a look back at how we got here with respect to Iraq Mr. President. The record will show that within hours of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, senior officials in this Administration recognized these attacks could be used as a pretext to invade Iraq.

"The record will also show that in the months and years after 9/11, the Administration engaged in a pattern of manipulation of the facts and retribution against anyone who got in its way as it made the case for attacking Iraq.

"There are numerous examples of how the Administration misstated and manipulated the facts as it made the case for war. Administration statements on Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons capabilities and ties with Al Qaeda represent the best examples of how it consistently and repeatedly manipulated the facts.

"The American people were warned time and again by the President, the Vice President, and the current Secretary of State about Saddam's nuclear weapons capabilities. The Vice President said Iraq "has reconstituted its nuclear weapons." Playing upon the fears of Americans after September 11, these officials and others raised the specter that, left unchecked, Saddam could soon attack America with nuclear weapons.

"Obviously we know now their nuclear claims were wholly inaccurate. But more troubling is the fact that a lot of intelligence experts were telling the Administration then that its claims about Saddam's nuclear capabilities were false.

"The situation was very similar with respect to Saddam's links to Al Qaeda. The Vice President told the American people, "We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know he has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups including the Al Qaeda organization."

"The Administration's assertions on this score have been totally discredited. But again, the Administration went ahead with these assertions in spite of the fact that the government's top experts did not agree with these claims.

"What has been the response of this Republican-controlled Congress to the Administration's manipulation of intelligence that led to this protracted war in Iraq? Basically nothing. Did the Republican-controlled Congress carry out its constitutional obligations to conduct oversight? No. Did it support our troops and their families by providing them the answers to many important questions? No. Did it even attempt to force this Administration to answer the most basic questions about its behavior? No.

"Unfortunately the unwillingness of the Republican-controlled Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities is not limited to just Iraq. We see it with respect to the prisoner abuse scandal. We see it with respect to Katrina. And we see it with respect to the cronyism and corruption that permeates this Administration.

"Time and time again, this Republican-controlled Congress has consistently chosen to put its political interests ahead of our national security. They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican Administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why.

"There is also another disturbing pattern here, namely about how the Administration responded to those who challenged its assertions. Time and again this Administration has actively sought to attack and undercut those who dared to raise questions about its preferred course.

"For example, when General Shinseki indicated several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq, his military career came to an end. When then OMB Director Larry Lindsay suggested the cost of this war would approach $200 billion, his career in the Administration came to an end. When U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix challenged conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities, the Administration pulled out his inspectors. When Nobel Prize winner and IAEA head Mohammed el-Baridei raised questions about the Administration's claims of Saddam's nuclear capabilities, the Administration attempted to remove him from his post. When Joe Wilson stated that there was no attempt by Saddam to acquire uranium from Niger, the Administration launched a vicious and coordinated campaign to demean and discredit him, going so far as to expose the fact that his wife worked as a CIA agent.

"Given this Administration's pattern of squashing those who challenge its misstatements, what has been the response of this Republican-controlled Congress? Again, absolutely nothing. And with their inactions, they provide political cover for this Administration at the same time they keep the truth from our troops who continue to make large sacrifices in Iraq.

"This behavior is unacceptable. The toll in Iraq is as staggering as it is solemn. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives. Over 90 Americans have paid the ultimate sacrifice this month alone - the fourth deadliest month since the war began. More than 15,000 have been wounded. More than 150,000 remain in harm's way. Enormous sacrifices have been and continue to be made.

"The troops and the American people have a right to expect answers and accountability worthy of that sacrifice. For example, 40 Senate Democrats wrote a substantive and detailed letter to the President asking four basic questions about the Administration's Iraq policy and received a four sentence answer in response. These Senators and the American people deserve better.

"They also deserve a searching and comprehensive investigation about how the Bush Administration brought this country to war. Key questions that need to be answered include:

How did the Bush Administration assemble its case for war against Iraq?

Who did Bush Administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?

How did senior Administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?

What was the role of the White House Iraq Group or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics?

How did the Administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the Administration's assertions?

Why has the Administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements?

"Unfortunately the Senate committee that should be taking the lead in providing these answers is not. Despite the fact that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine many of these questions more than one and a half years ago, he has chosen not to keep this commitment. Despite the fact that he restated that commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing.

"At this point, we can only conclude he will continue to put politics ahead of our national security. If he does anything at this point, I suspect he will play political games by producing an analysis that fails to answer any of these important questions. Instead, if history is any guide, this analysis will attempt to disperse and deflect blame away from the Administration.

"We demand that the Intelligence Committee and other committees in this body with jurisdiction over these matters carry out a full and complete investigation immediately as called for by Democrats in the committee's annual intelligence authorization report. Our troops and the American people have sacrificed too much. It is time this Republican-controlled Congress put the interests of the American people ahead of their own political interests."

Fall to pieces....

2005-11-01T16:35:00.000-05:00

There's a theory going around Washington about why this year has gone so haywire for Bush, one that goes to Rove's essential strength. "These guys are very good at campaigning," says an outside adviser to the White House, "and not at all good at governing." As long as there is an election on the horizon, they function like a humming machine and their coalition stays in line. But in an environment where that isn't one, they fall apart.

It's all about priorities...

2005-10-31T14:02:00.000-05:00

5 years and counting....

2005-10-31T11:51:00.000-05:00

August 2, 2000
"George W. Bush will repair what has been damaged....On the first hour
of the first day, he will restore decency and integrity to the Oval
Office."
Dick Cheney, Speech to the 2000 Republican Convention

August 3, 2000
"My fellow citizens, we can begin again. After all of the shouting, and
all of the scandal. After all of the bitterness and broken faith. We
can begin again."
George W. Bush, Speech to the 2000 Republican Convention

October 30, 2005
"Barely a third of Americans -- 34 percent -- think Bush is doing a
good job ensuring high ethics in government, which is lower
than President Bill Clinton's standing on this issue when he left
office."
Washington Post/ABC News Poll

Absolute Corruption

2005-10-28T14:58:00.000-04:00

Why did they so need a war in Iraq?

2005-10-28T14:07:00.000-04:00

Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure... By Frank Rich

There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?

"It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war," writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass, tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave "not knowing the answer."

Shhh, the fascists have quietly usurped control!!!

2005-10-24T16:13:00.000-04:00

The Bunker Mentality... By William Rivers Pitt

I wrote to Ambassador Joseph Wilson last week to ask how he and his wife were bearing up, and to remind them that they had a lot of friends. "The outpouring of support has been of great comfort to us these past two years," he wrote back. "The stakes are enormous. This is all about whether our government can take us to war on lies without any fear of being held to account, and whether our democracy can survive the coalition of fascist forces that have seized control of the levers of power."

Heavy stuff. Yet if the desperation we are seeing on the part of defenders of this administration offers any clue, the fascists are running out of explanations. Take Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's performance on this past Sunday's version of Meet the Press. "I certainly hope," she said when asked about the Fitzgerald investigation into the deliberate outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars."

Some perjury technicality, eh? Waste of time and dollars?

Funny the difference almost seven years and two broken elections can make. Back on February 12, 1999, when Ms. Hutchison cast her vote to impeach a sitting president of the United States, she was of a different mind when it came to perjury. Her statement in Congress practically peeled the paint off the wall, so laden was it with outrage at the violation of an oath taken before the delivery of sworn testimony.

"The edifice of American jurisprudence rests on the foundation of the due process of law," Ms. Hutchison's best speechwriter wrote for her to read that day. "The mortar in that foundation is the oath. Every day, thousands of citizens in thousands of courtrooms across America are sworn in as jurors, as grand jurors, as witnesses, as defendants. On those oaths rest the due process of law upon which all of our other rights are based. The oath is how we defend ourselves against those who would subvert our system by breaking our laws. There are Americans in jail today because they violated that oath."

Here's the funny part. President Clinton violated that oath after being asked a bunch of questions about his personal life, his sex life.

It's a little different today. Anyone violating that oath in Fitzgerald's investigation, be they Lewis Libby or Karl Rove or Judith Miller or John Hannah, will have done so after being asked questions about the deliberate destruction, for political means, of a NOC agent for the CIA who was tasked to track any person, nation or group that might give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. They will have done so after being asked questions about the destruction of Ms. Plame's intelligence networks, which were assembled person by person in unfriendly lands to help her do her job.

They will have done so after being asked questions about how, exactly, this White House manufactured evidence of WMD in Iraq, by way of the White House Iraq Group and the Office of Special Plans, and sold it to the American people - the interruption of which by Joseph Wilson being the reason we are all dealing with this mess today.

Makes the last few years of the '90s seem a giant waste of time, eh?

Funny the difference a few years can make. There were a thousand things wrong in the '90s, to be sure, and more than a few of them stemmed from the government and, specifically, the White House. In those days, however, there was still a sense of optimism. We were in the world and of the world, yet still Americans, still strong and proud. We were riding high, having figured out how to have historic economic expansion and opportunity while still providing the money necessary for programs and policies that helped those who needed a hand. So much remained to be done, but the outlines of a blueprint for getting it done seemed to be out there.

Not so much anymore. Now, we are a nation that believes itself under siege, afraid of our own shadows, afraid of chickens and airplanes and subways and gasoline prices and storms and the nightly news and anyone who doesn't look like an American, whatever that means. Yellow. Orange. We fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. The enemy is all around us, we are told by this administration, ready to strike. Be ready, we hear. Be angry. Be afraid.

Psssst ... Joe Wilson is right. They are fascists, and this is what fascists do. They make people afraid. They turn a populace against an outsider while at the same time denying that populace information or even hope of a peaceful resolution. They mobilize for attack through intimidation and scare-tactics. Ask Herman Goering, who explained during the Nuremburg trials, "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Welcome to the bunker mentality, courtesy of George W. Bush and the folks who brought you the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, the escape and continued freedom of Osama bin Laden, the annihilation of faith in the business community by way of Enron, the annihilation of any sense of personal security by way of Katrina, the annihilation of our standing on the international stage, the big lie about weapons of mass destruction, and an awful lot of dead American soldiers. They used September 11 against you to get these things, or to get away with these things, depending on the need at hand. The result is a proud, great nation on its knees.

This whole situation with Fitzgerald and Plame and Wilson and Libby and Rove and the rest is but a symptom of the larger disease we endure. This White House bunkered itself in way back in 2001, relying only upon ideologically-vetted yes-men who all agreed upon a singular course of action. If Ms. Hutchison's performance is any indication, and it is, the walls of the bunker are closing in all around them.

Their failure to deal with straightforward facts, their reliance upon the idea that political ideology and political goals can render straightforward facts malleable and subject to change, their deliberate decision to run the government and manage the people by way of a Cold War mentality that uses fear as the prime motivator, their desire to control information through aspirations of absolute authority, has delivered the rest of us into the bunker with them.

It did not used to be this way. It does not have to be this way.

Breaking Ranks

2005-10-24T13:46:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Goldberg's Scowcroft Article: "Breaking Ranks"

In "Breaking Ranks" (p. 54), in the October 31, 2005, issue of The New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on the growing divide between the Bush Administration and its Republican critics. The criticism from Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, has been particularly pronounced, Goldberg writes. Scowcroft recalls advice he gave the first President Bush at the conclusion of the first Gulf War, when there was pressure to remove Saddam Hussein.

It would have been easy to reach Baghdad, Scowcroft said, but what then? "At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land. Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy' - but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?" Scowcroft then said of Iraq, "This is exactly where we are now. We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost."

Scowcroft has known George W. Bush for decades, but since the beginning of the Iraq war, he has been frozen out of the White House. "On the face of it," Goldberg writes, "this is remarkable," because Scowcroft's best friend is the former President Bush; the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was a Scowcroft protege; and Vice-President Dick Cheney is also a friend. "The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft told Goldberg.

"I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for thirty years. But this Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." When, in an e-mail, George H.W. Bush was asked about Scowcroft's most useful qualities as an adviser, the former President wrote that he "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not."

According to friends of the elder Bush, the "estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness," Goldberg writes. Scowcroft said he hoped for a better relationship with the son, and adds, "I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I'm just crazy about." Of the differences between father and son, Scowcroft said, "I don't want to go there."

Colleagues have paid particular notice to the relationship between Scowcroft and Rice, who worked closely during the first Bush Administration. Friends of Scowcroft recall a dinner in September of 2002, when discussion of the impending war in Iraq became heated. As Goldberg reports, Rice finally said, irritably, "The world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up."

"For Scowcroft," Goldberg writes, "the second Gulf war is a reminder of the unwelcome consequences of radical intervention, especially when it is attempted without sufficient understanding of America's limitations or of the history of a region." Scowcroft says, "I believe in the fallibility of human nature. We continually step on our best aspirations. We're humans. Given a chance to screw up, we will."

Miers' homework returned

2005-10-24T03:57:00.000-04:00

Miers' Answer Raises Questions... By David G. Savage

Legal experts find a misuse of terms in her Senate questionnaire 'terrible' and 'shocking.'

Asked to describe the constitutional issues she had worked on during her legal career, Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers had relatively little to say on the questionnaire she sent to the Senate this week.

And what she did say left many constitutional experts shaking their heads.

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, "the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause."

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.

"That's a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause," said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. "If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable."

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

"Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking," she said.

In the 1960s, the Supreme Court adopted the "one person, one vote" concept as a rule under the equal protection clause. Previously, rural districts with few voters often had the same clout in legislatures as heavily populated urban districts. Afterward, their clout was equal to the number of voters they represented. But voting rights experts do not describe this rule as "proportional representation," which has a specific, different meaning.

"Either Miers misunderstood what the equal protection clause requires, or she was using loose language to say something about compliance with the one-person, one-vote rule," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law. "Either way, it is very sloppy and unnecessary. Someone should have caught that."

Should we be asking.... are we safer?

2005-10-24T02:11:00.000-04:00

War in Iraq Fueling Global Insecurity, Canadian Spy Chief Warns... The Canadian Press

The head of Canada's spy agency strongly stated Thursday the US-led war in Iraq is making the world a less secure place.

"Diplomacy is not my field, security and intelligence is," CSIS director Jim Judd said at a conference on intelligence studies. "And I think from a security and intelligence perspective, the conflict in Iraq is creating longer-term problems, not just for Iraq but other jurisdictions as well."

The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said Iraq is becoming a "kind of a test bed for new techniques" for Islamic extremists.

Judd expressed concern about the dangers extremists from North America, Europe and the Middle East pose once they leave Iraq.

"It raises the longer-term question of what do they bode for the future?" Judd said.

Journalist and author Peter Bergen warned that the war in Iraq could spawn a new generation of trained warriors - the "shock troops of the new international jihad" - determined to carry out terrorist attacks against the West.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network has proven alluring to wayward extremists partly because western societies have done a poor job of challenging his arguments, terrorism experts told the conference.

Young students who attend the most radical Muslim schools are presented with a violent world view and taught to despise "corrupting western influences" from an early age, said Karin von Hippel of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"We've lost the moral high ground to the wrong people, and we need to get it back," von Hippel said.

Bergen said an attack by Islamic extremists on a major city with a radiological weapon - a conventional bomb that spreads radiation over an area of several blocks - "seems probable" in the future.

The conference, which continues through Saturday, has attracted about 360 security officials, academics and commentators, including well-known American journalist Seymour Hersh.

Hersh, who has reported extensively about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, said he has become fascinated by what he sees as a neo-conservative coup in the corridors of US power.

"The faster out of Iraq, the better it is," Hersh said.

Miers Received 'Excessive' Sum in Land Case

2005-10-23T18:27:00.000-04:00

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

The resulting six-figure payout to the Miers family in 2000 was despite the state's objections to the "excessive" amount and to the process used to set the price. The panel recommended paying nearly $5 a square foot for land that was valued at less than 30 cents a square foot.

Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award, but Miers, who controls the family's interest in the land, hasn't reimbursed the state for the difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.

The case raises new questions about Miers' judgment at a time when her nomination is troubled by doubts about her qualifications for the nation's highest court and accusations that she was chosen mostly because of her close friendship with President Bush.

Supreme Court justices, unlike other government officials, define potential conflicts of interest for themselves and are responsible for policing their own ethics.

"If Harriet Miers is confirmed, she'll be entrusted to make a large number of un-reviewable decisions about which cases to sit on," said Doug Kendall, the executive director of the Community Rights Counsel, a public-interest law firm in Washington. Kendall said the fact that Miers raised no red flags in the face of "clearly disturbing facts" in the land condemnation case doesn't say much for her ethical acumen.

Even though Miers was the president of her law firm, she says didn't know the specifics about the firm's campaign contributions to the judge.

The land, at the corner of North Westmoreland Road and Interstate 30 in west Dallas, was one of several parcels that Miers' father purchased in the area after World War II. The market value for the entire 18.74-acre lot, according to state tax records, was only $244,890. It is vacant and brush-covered.

The state wanted to build an off-ramp from I-30 onto Westmoreland Road and needed a small northeast corner of the Miers' lot to do it.

Texas law says that in condemnation cases, a judge must appoint three "disinterested" special commissioners to hear evidence, determine the "injury or benefit" of the state's action to the property owner, and rule on what, if anything, the state should pay for the property.

But there was an accumulation of shared interests - dating back years - among several of the parties that assembled in state District Judge David Evans' courtroom to settle the Miers' case.

Campaign finance reports in Dallas show that Miers' law firm, Locke Purnell Rain & Harrell, had contributed to Evans' political campaigns between 1993 and 2001. That included a $3,000 contribution in 1998, the year before the Miers' condemnation case appeared in Evans' court.

Evans declined repeated requests for an interview.

One of the three commissioners whom Evans appointed to hear the case was Peggy Lundy, a close professional friend and political ally of Miers.

Lundy is listed among Miers' "personal friends" by a conservative interest group, Progress for America, which supports her nomination to the high court.

"Mrs. Lundy's late husband, Judge Nick Lundy of Dallas, attended Southern Methodist University Law School with Harriet Miers and they have known each other for years," the group said in an Oct. 3 press release. In an interview Thursday, Lundy said she and Miers worked closely together on a commission set up to restructure Dallas' municipal court system. Lundy said that she recruited Evans to run for judge and served as the treasurer of his first campaign and as an adviser to several others.

Evans also appointed one of his campaign contributors, Cathie Adams, to work on Miers' case. At the time, she was president of the Dallas Eagle Forum, a politically active conservative organization that touts its "pro-family movement."

Scott Young, the Dallas lawyer who represented the Miers family in the case, never signed the settlement papers, and Miers never repaid the difference.

Kelley also said the state had no knowledge of the two commissioners' prior relationships with Miers and the judge.

"The judge appointed the commissioners. Our attorneys here … had no knowledge of the commissioners one way or another and assumed it would be a fair hearing," Kelley said.

The market value of the Miers' land had been depressed because it is located within a federal Superfund site that had been contaminated by an old lead smelter.

Criminal Presidency

2005-10-23T17:23:00.000-04:00

Finally it appears that the dark cloud of secrecy around the Bush administration [like a blood ritual] may finally be breaking as Republicans close to the situation are beginning to speak out. Previously, it appeared that no one would speak up due to the well known practice of character assassination by Rove that has always followed Bush. Either you tow the line or they would destroy your career and reputation. Dirty pool at it's dirtiest.

The coming article by Brent Scowcroft is just one more in growing line of whistleblowers on this administration. As their position weakens with the public they are finally seen as vulnerable. Sad that things had to get this bad before those that knew better began asking questions.

Old Bush vs. New

Washington - The Bush administration is bracing for a powerful new attack by Brent Scowcroft, the respected national security adviser to the first President George Bush.

A Republican and a former Air Force general, Scowcroft is a leading member of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, and his critique of both the style and the substance of the Bush White House, is slated to appear in Monday's editions of the New Yorker magazine.

The article also contains some critical comments on the handling of U.S. foreign policy by the current President Bush from his father, whose 1989-1993 presidency is hailed for deft management of the end of the Cold War, German unification, and the first Gulf war.

The new attack comes hard on the heels of the denunciation of "the cabal around Cheney's office" by Col. Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell in a widely reported speech to the New American Foundation in Washington this week. Wilkerson said the national security decision-making process was effectively "broken."

Scowcroft's criticisms will be taken seriously at the highest levels of the Bush administration because he is seen as a mentor by some of its senior figures, notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose political career began when she worked under Scowcroft as an adviser on Soviet affairs.

The attack also comes as President Bush's opinion poll approval ratings have sunk to a record low, around 37 percent, partly reflecting the ill-handled federal government response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf coast. But large majorities of Americans are also telling pollsters the country "is on the wrong track" and saying the Iraq war was a mistake as casualities mount and lies exposed.

The beleaguered Bush administration is also nervously waiting to see whether indictments in the CIA leak case are to be handed down next week against two key White House aides, Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby. The White House is also facing heavy flak from its conservative base over the controversial nomination of the president's counsel and friend, Harriet Miers, to the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. And traditional balanced-budget Republicans have been dismayed by the double deficit, a combined deficit on the federal budget and on the current account that adds up to over $1 trillion this year.

A cartoon in the Washington Post Friday depicted the Bush White House being inundated by "The Perfect Storm" of Miers, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Rove, the budget deficit, the investigation of Sen. Frist, and the indictment this week of the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, on charges of money laundering campaign funds.

Our morally bankrupt administration's policies

2005-10-23T16:42:00.000-04:00

Torture in Iraq

The following is an excerpt from "Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division," a report issued by Human Rights Watch on September 25, 2005. The full report is available at http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905.

"On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent [where prisoners were held]. It was sport. The cooks were all US soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was just a fucking cook. He shouldn't even be in with no PUCs [prisoners]."
-82nd Airborne sergeant,describing events at FOB Mercury, Iraq

"If I as an officer think we're not even following the Geneva Conventions, there's something wrong. If officers witness all these things happening, and don't take action, there's something wrong. If another West Pointer tells me he thinks, 'Well, hitting somebody might be okay,' there's something really wrong."
-82nd Airborne officer, describing confusion in Iraq concerning allowable interrogation techniques

Residents of Fallujah called them "the Murderous Maniacs" because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury (FOB Mercury) in Iraq. The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.

Why hasn't this been thoroughly investigated? Because the White House and the Pentagon are conducting an 'internal' investigation to protect themselves. This needs a special prosector to fully investigate these horrendous abuses which will forever stain our country's history.

Cheney and Rumsfeld controlled the dialogue

2005-10-22T13:31:00.000-04:00

Cheney 'Cabal' Hijacked Foreign Policy... By Edward Alden

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."

FEMA official in New Orleans blasts agency's response

2005-10-22T12:41:00.000-04:00

Regional director said top officials ignored his pleas for help

Marty Bahamonde, a regional FEMA director, testified before a Senate panel Thursday.

In the midst of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in New Orleans sent a dire e-mail to Director Michael Brown saying victims had no food and were dying.

No response came from Brown.

Instead, less than three hours later, an aide to Brown sent an e-mail saying her boss wanted to go on a television program that night -- after needing over an hour to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, restaurant.

The e-mails were made public Thursday at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing featuring Marty Bahamonde, the first agency official to arrive in New Orleans in advance of the August 29 storm. The hurricane killed more than 1,200 people and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate.

Bahamonde, who sent the e-mail to Brown two days after the storm struck, said the correspondence illustrates the government's failure to grasp what was happening.

"There was a systematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magnitude of the situation," Bahamonde testified. "The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch."

The 19 pages of internal FEMA e-mails show Bahamonde gave regular updates to people in contact with Brown as early as August 28, the day before Katrina made landfall. They appear to contradict Brown, who has said he was not fully aware of the conditions until days after the storm hit. Brown quit after being recalled from New Orleans amid criticism of his work.

Brown had sent Bahamonde, FEMA's regional director in New England, to New Orleans to help coordinate the agency's response. Bahamonde arrived on August 27 and was the only FEMA official at the scene until FEMA disaster teams arrived on August 30.

As Katrina's outer bands began drenching the city August 28, Bahamonde sent an e-mail to Deborah Wing, a FEMA response specialist. He wrote: "Everyone is soaked. This is going to get ugly real fast."

Subsequent e-mails told of an increasingly desperate situation at the New Orleans Superdome, where tens of thousands of evacuees were staying. Bahamonde spent two nights there with the evacuees.

On August 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that "estimates are many will die within hours."

"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical," Bahamonde wrote. "The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out."

A short time later, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening.

"He needs another [sic] 20 or 30 minutes," Worthy wrote.

"Restaurants are getting busy," she said. "We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise [sic], followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."

In an August 29 phone call to Brown informing him that the first levee had failed, Bahamonde said he asked for guidance but did not get a response.

"He just said, 'Thank you,' and that he was going to call the White House," Bahamonde said.

Senators on the committee were dismayed.

"We will examine further why critical information provided by Mr. Bahamonde was either discounted, misunderstood, or simply not acted upon," said GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who heads the committee. She decried the "complete disconnect between senior officials and the reality of the situation."

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, committee's top Democrat, said Bahamonde's story is "ultimately infuriating and raises serious questions which our committee's investigation must answer."

In e-mails, Bahamonde described to his bosses a chaotic situation at the Superdome. Bahamonde noted also that local officials were asking for toilet paper, a sign that supplies were lacking at the shelter.

"Issues developing at the Superdome. The medical staff at the dome says they will run out of oxygen in about two hours and are looking for alternative oxygen," Bahamonde wrote regional director David Passey on August 28.

Bahamonde said he was stunned that FEMA officials responded by continuing to send truckloads of evacuees to the Superdome for two more days even though they knew supplies were in short supply.

"I thought it amazing," he said. "I believed at the time and still do today, that I was confirming the worst-case scenario that everyone had always talked about regarding New Orleans."

the new American slave trade...

2005-10-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

Halliburton's New Low in Treachery... By Dave Zweifel

The Chicago Tribune produced an incredible story last week detailing how unsuspecting young men from poor countries are tricked into working in dangerous jobs for a Halliburton subsidiary in Iraq.

The two-part series retraced the journey of a group of Nepalese men who were lured to the Mideast with fraudulent paperwork that promised them jobs at a luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan, but instead wound up in Iraq working for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR, America's biggest private contractor there.

What was even more startling was the stories' revelation that the operation is financed with US taxpayer money.

According to the Tribune, American tax dollars and the wartime needs of the US military are fueling an illicit pipeline of cheap foreign labor into Iraq. Most of those falling for the fraudulent job offers are impoverished Asians who, the newspaper said, "often are deceived, exploited and put in harm's way with little protection."

The Tribune got on the story after 12 young civilians from Nepal were kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq and a few days later publicly slaughtered. The newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to Nepal, where they interviewed families and friends and soon discovered that thousands of men are routinely recruited for "good" Mideast jobs, but wind up in the most treacherous stretches of Iraq territory working in private jobs for the US military.

A brother of one of the kidnapped men told Cam Simpson, the Trib reporter, that the last time he heard from his brother was when he called from his supposed job in Jordan. He was being sent against his will to Iraq, the brother said, and then blurted out, "I am done for." The phone then went dead. The next time the young Nepalese was seen was on a TV screen two weeks later, his hands tied behind his back and a gun pointed at his head.

Simpson reported that the trail of those dozen men from Nepal revealed a chain of brokers, middlemen and subcontractors along the way, all of whom stood to profit from the trade.

To maintain the flow of cheap labor that is key to the military support and reconstruction in Iraq, the US military has allowed KBR to partner with subcontractors that hire workers from Nepal and other countries that prohibit their citizens from being deployed in Iraq, the story said. That means that the brokers operate illicitly and falsify documents that describe far different jobs near Iraq, which eventually turn out to be smack dab in the middle of the country.

"Even after foreign workers discover they have been lured to the Middle East under false pretenses, many say they have little choice but to continue into Iraq or stay longer than planned," the story continued. "They feel trapped because they must repay huge fees demanded by brokers."

KBR, which has a multibillion-dollar contract with the US Defense Department, pays the subcontractors for finding it employees to do the cleanup and rebuilding work in Iraq.

The tentacles of this war keep getting this country deeper and deeper into places we shouldn't be, including this atrocious practice that the Chicago Tribune has uncovered.

Say Cheese.... smug even in prison....

2005-10-21T23:35:00.000-04:00

Sweet vengeance rains upon the wicked.....

2005-10-19T15:36:00.000-04:00

A Texas court on Wednesday issued a warrant for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's arrest, and set an initial $10,000 bail before his first court appearance on conspiracy and state money laundering charges.

Travis County court officials said DeLay was ordered to appear at the Fort Bend County, Texas, jail for booking, where he'd likely be fingerprinted and photographed.

Gen Powell like others begin to speak out....

2005-10-19T10:24:00.000-04:00

Beyond the Miller-Libby game: people died.

Six weeks ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly that the pre-war speech he gave to the United Nations in early 2003 claiming vast evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be nonexistent was a "painful" and lasting "blot" on his career.

Though his language of regret was bitterly potent, and it was Powell's first in-depth interview since leaving office in January, the nation's press gave it subdued play, far from the front page, and let it die after one day's run.

"I'm the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world," he told ABC's Barbara Walters, "and it will always be part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now."

Powell blamed the detailed misinformation he spread before the U.N.-about stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons program-on "some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me."

His U.N. speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, less than two months before the U.S. invasion, did not sway the U.N. to support the war, but it did raise support for it with the American public.

Powell brought it up because it seemed to link directly to another story-the Plamegate investigation-that definitely is getting a lot of attention.

Wilson came back and reported he had found nothing to bear out the story. The documents supporting it seemed inauthentic. (Later it was established that they were actually forgeries. It was a hoax.) But the Bush administration brushed aside Wilson's findings and began presenting the story as authentic to Congress's key intelligence committees to rally votes for the war. Colin Powell, not told the Niger intelligence was bogus, was one of the presenters. Bush got his congressional war vote in early March.

Joseph Wilson, frustrated that his findings had been trashed, finally went public with an op-ed piece for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, laying out his information and accusing the administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the war. With this, the White House's Plamegate smear campaign-which seems to have begun months earlier out of the office of Cheney, the administration's leading hawk-apparently revved into high gear.

The day after Wilson's Times piece appeared, the White House retracted its Niger story. It was the first admission of falsehood or distortion in its case for the war.

The president has yet to admit he told massive untruths about WMDs and the Iraqi threat in his State of the Union address in late January 2003, just before U.S. forces went into battle. He even included the bogus Niger uranium story. Powell, in his U.N. speech some days later, removed the Niger story.

How does all this dovetail with Patrick Fitzgerald's Plamegate investigation? Let us count the ways. All the participants and the subject matter connect to the false claims about WMDs.

This leaked information is a direct outgrowth of all the untruths the Bush administration told to scare and con the public into supporting the war, then, at heart if not legally, the case is really about abuse of power by the executive branch.

What I find fascinating is that we're about to learn what happens when you bamboozle the public with empty words and false image-instead of trusting them with the truth, or something close to it. So then it becomes a game wrapped in a hoax-and the only goal is to get elected, not do what's good for the country.

And with a war, lots of people die. There's got to be some penalty for "leaders" who play that game-perhaps something more than a permanent blot on their record.

Rehearsed

2005-10-18T20:10:00.000-04:00

The "impromptu" talk between Bush and our troops in Iraq last week (mostly officers and all carefully screened and selected) had been reported as completely scripted by the White House. Of course, McClellan denied in a press conference later that day that the WH had so carefully manipulated the troops and their answers to fit the Administration's agenda.

But, once again, oops, tapes have just been released that show a WH aide going through each and every question even telling them how to breath and talk. Guess the WH didn't realize they were live.

Can this Administration get anything right. Karma is kicking their proverbial ass. The current White House is more scripted, manipulated, and drama-filled than the TV series "The West Wing".

Is it too early to start salivating?

2005-10-18T20:08:00.000-04:00

White House Watch: Cheney Resignation Rumors Fly, By Paul Bedard
US News and World Report

Sparked by today's Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney's office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"It's certainly an interesting but I still think highly doubtful scenario," said a Bush insider. "And if that should happen," added the official, "there will undoubtedly be those who believe the whole thing was orchestrated - another brilliant Machiavellian move by the VP."

Said another Bush associate of the rumor, "Yes. This is not good." The rumor spread so fast that some Republicans by late morning were already drawing up reasons why Rice couldn't get the job or run for president in 2008.

"Isn't she pro-choice?" asked a key Senate Republican aide. Many White House insiders, however, said the Post story and reports that the investigation was coming to a close had officials instead more focused on who would be dragged into the affair and if top aides would be indicted and forced to resign.

"Folks on the inside and near inside are holding their breath and wondering what's next," said a Bush adviser.

Is Bush imitating the old Russian model of cronyism.

2005-10-18T10:58:00.000-04:00

Political Screening for All Park Service Managers

The National Park Service (under White House orders) has started using a political loyalty test for picking all its top civil service positions. Under the new order, all mid-level managers and above must also be approved by a Bush administration political appointee.

The October 11, 2005 order issued by NPS Director Fran Mainella requires that the selection criteria for all civil service management slots include the "ability to lead employees in achieving the President's Management Agenda." In addition, all candidates must be screened by Park Service headquarters and "the Assistant Secretary [of Interior] for Fish, and Wildlife, and Parks," the number three political appointee in the agency.

The order represents a complete centralization of Park Service promotion and hiring in what has traditionally been a decentralized agency. More strikingly, the order is an unprecedented political intrusion into what are supposed to be non-partisan, merit system personnel decisions.

The President's Management Agenda includes controversial policies and proposals such as aggressive use of outsourcing to replace civil servants, reliance on "faith-based initiatives" and rollbacks of civil service rights.

"It is outrageous that park superintendents must swear political loyalty to the Bush agenda and parrot hokey mottos in order to earn a promotion," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The merit system is supposed to be about ability, not apple polishing."

The order applies to all hires for park superintendents, assistant superintendents and program managers, such as chief ranger or the head of interpretive or cultural programs. Overall, the policy applies to more than 1,000 mid-level management and supervisory positions in the Park Service.

"Presidents come and go but the civil service is designed to serve whoever occupies the swivel chair in the Oval Office," Ruch added. "It is downright creepy that now every museum curator, supervising scientist and chief ranger must be okayed by a high-level political appointee."

HOUSE WILL VOTE AS EARLY AS WEDNESDAY ON GUN LIABILITY EXEMPTION

2005-10-18T10:09:00.000-04:00

The powerful gun lobby is aggressively seeking to pass legislation that will provide unprecedented blanket liability exemption for gun manufacturers and dealers. The gun lobby has pushed for a vote this week that will free them from all responsibility for deaths and injuries resulting from their products. The vote this week is the last chance to stop this reckless bill.

The House Leadership, receiving instructions from the gun lobby, has refused to consider the disastrous consequences of this legislation. Particularly outrageous is that, if this bill is passed, a dealer may no longer be held accountable for knowingly selling weapons to terrorist organizations or cop killers. This is disgraceful and demonstrates the lengths to which Republican House Leadership will go to keep the NRA and the gun lobby happy.

TAKE ACTION AT http://www.nocrony.com/gun_liability.htm

It is time to put the priorities of our nation's safety ahead of those of the gun manufacturers. We need your support today! The vote will be Wednesday.

K, R, and W.....

2005-10-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

As a friend pointed out to me today.... interestingly the two last hurricanes in a row were Katrina and Rita. Or more tellingly: KR. The next one forming is Wilma off the coast of Texas. Or: W.

So we have KR (Karl Rove) and W that are wreaking great harm upon the South Coast of the US.

Karma through natures hand strikes a mighty blow wouldn't you say.

"greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

2005-10-16T23:23:00.000-04:00

Lt. Gen William Odom, director of the National Security Agency during President Reagan's second term, a scholar with a distinguished career in military intelligence, declared Bush's invasion of Iraq to be the "greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

the Miers spin....

2005-10-15T01:27:00.000-04:00

It does not get any better than what the Bush spinsters are putting out about Miers this week.

1. In trying to manipulate impressions of Bush's nominee.... they wanted to up her ante. When her educational credentials were questioned, they responded that Ms. Miers had gone to the "second best law school in Texas". Not exactly a glowing reinforcement for the highest court in the land where she will be debating with the best legal minds in the country who typically graduated top of their class from the Ivy League.

2. Bush also described Miers mind in a way that he "would know exactly what she would be thinking in 20 years". First of all, what a tragedy that Ms. Miers mind would be not only so beholden to Bush that he "knows" her opinions before she would but it also precludes the evolution, education, and growth of her mind that would be of absolute necessity for a Supreme Court Justice.

Can we just get this woman to politely withdraw her nomination.

The saga of the continuing Bush photo-op

2005-10-15T00:19:00.000-04:00

US President George W. Bush talks via a 'staged' video conference to carefully selected US National Guard troops. The questions President Bush asked were rehearsed and choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution. The soldiers answers were given to them and pre-selected.
This is not a leader but a thinly guised media front for what is becoming increasingly clear to be a very carefully orchestrated ruse on the American people by a very small and self-interested few. Hopefully, the curtain is being pulled away and the man behind will finally be exposed and we can begin to reclaim our country.

Global Energy Crisis - We Need Alternatives

2005-10-14T20:06:00.000-04:00

Survivor's Guide to the Energy Crisis

Panic has set in. With the price of oil hovering at more than $60 a barrel on world markets and forecasters predicting that we will soon see oil selling for $100 a barrel or more as worldwide oil reserves dwindle, politicians and business leaders are running scared. The global economy is beginning to slow, and there is talk about a new and sustained long-term global recession - some economists are even talking about a global depression - that could last for decades.

We are quickly waking up to the fact that the whole world runs by oil. We are an oil civilization. We grow our food with the help of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Our plastics, pharmaceutical products, and clothes are for the most part derived from oil. Our transport, power, heat, electricity, and light are all dependent on oil.

President Bush has half-heartedly called upon Americans to drive their automobiles less - more than half of the cars in the country are gas-guzzling SUVs - to save precious fuel. The White House has also asked federal employees to cut down on all but essential travel, to carpool, and to use public transportation. In addition, the president ordered White House thermostats to be turned to 72 degrees Fahrenheit to save energy.

Incredibly, at the same time Bush was proclaiming his newfound conversion to energy efficiency, the White House and Senate Republicans were working quietly behind the scenes to scuttle the only remaining six DOE regional energy efficiency field offices.

It appears that the president and his team do not understand the enormity of the energy crisis facing the United States and the world. The White House clearly needs guidance. The president should download the just published European Union Green Paper on Energy Efficiency (europa.eu.int/comm/energy/efficiency/index_en.htm). The paper lays out a detailed survivor's guide, a roadmap of what every individual, family, community, and country - including the United States - can do to cushion the cost shock of rising oil prices and dwindling supplies.

According to the report, the European member states alone could save at least 20 percent of their present energy consumption for a net savings of 60 billion euros per year, by enacting tough energy conservation programs across European society - in homes, commercial buildings, factories, and transport. The EU report says the United States could save far more with widespread adoption of energy conservation practices since the United States currently wastes approximately 50 percent more energy than the European Union to produce one unit of GDP.

The EU commission study says the average EU and American household could save as much as $1,200 per year in cost-saving energy efficient practices, thus offsetting much of the increased price of oil. The EU green paper is replete with detailed information on how to overhaul every aspect of our lives to achieve more energy-efficiency.

Proposals include incentives to purchase energy-efficient cars, reducing the national speed limit to 55 miles per hour, making alterations in homes and commercial buildings, like installing special insulation and storm windows, using long-lasting electric light bulbs, introducing software into appliances to save energy, renovating the nation's power grids to be more efficient, and other practices.

The White House, Congress, and the states will need to employ a range of strategies including taxation, public subsidies, economic incentives, and partnerships with industries, communities, and homeowners to make the transition to a truly energy-efficient society.

While government, industry, and consumers will have to spend some money up front to usher in literally thousands of energy efficient "best practices," the investment will boost the economy by creating millions of new jobs. Moreover, the cost savings of improved energy-efficiency will mean more money will be freed up to invest in other forms of sustainable economic development.

The United States should lead the way by declaring a state of "national urgency" and setting a goal of five years for fully executing the suggestions contained in the EU Commission's Green Paper on Energy Efficiency. After all, the United States consumes more than 25 percent of the fossil fuel energy used in the world, even though it has less than 5 percent of the global population. The United States is the world's leading energy-guzzler. Now, it should set an example and become the world's leading energy-saver.

The Worst President in History? New polling numbers

2005-10-14T18:16:00.000-04:00

Bush and the Republicans, Badly Slumping in Polls

US President George W. Bush struggled in the face of worsening opinion polls, including one survey that for the first time found a plurality of Americans think he will be viewed as a failed leader. In a new study by the non-partisan Pew Research Center, 41 percent said that Bush would be an unsuccessful president whereas only 26 percent say he will be successful.

Bush's job approval rating slid to 38 percent, and showed the US public increasingly concerned about the war in Iraq.

Just days before Iraqi voters cast ballots on a constitution, 53 percent of respondents told Pew that the US effort there is not going well, while over half say the decision to go to war was wrong - up from 44 percent in September.

On Wednesday, a poll by NBC and The WSJ found that a plurality of Americans, 48 percent, said they would prefer the opposition Democrats to control Congress compared to 39 percent who want Bush's Republicans. The gap between the two parties was the largest ever recorded. The Republicans hold a majority in both houses of Congress and face mid-term elections in November 2006 amid growing public concern over the war in Iraq, the economy, and high gasoline prices.

The poll also showed Bush's overall approval ratings dropping to an all time low of 39 percent. Anxious about Bush's plunging poll numbers, Republicans in Congress have begun to break ranks and defied the White House on important issues.

The poll also revealed overwhelming opposition to Bush among blacks. Only two percent said they approved of his performance as president, the lowest level ever recorded for a sitting President.

Investigations and indictments of prominent Republican lawmakers also appear to pose a serious threat for Bush's party.

Sixty-five percent said charges against Representative Tom DeLay, who has temporarily stepped aside from his post as House of Representatives majority leader, suggested illegal activity.

A majority of 57 percent said an investigation into possible insider trading by the Republican majority leader in the Senate, Bill Frist, indicated wrongdoing.

Destroying careers, a Bush legacy.

2005-10-14T16:11:00.000-04:00

The Fallen Legion: Casualties of the Bush Administration... By Nick Turse

In late August 2005, after twenty years of service in the field of military procurement, Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted. For years, Greenhouse received stellar evaluations from superiors - until she raised objections about secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) - a subsidiary of Halliburton, the mega-corporation Vice President Dick Cheney once presided over. After telling congress that one Halliburton deal was "was the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career," she was reassigned from "the elite Senior Executive Service... to a lesser job in the civil works division of the corps."

When Greenhouse was busted down, she became just another of the casualties of the Bush administration - not the countless (or rather uncounted) Iraqis, or the ever-growing list of American troops, killed, maimed, or mutilated in the administration's war of convenience- but the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming.

Since almost the day he assumed power, George W. Bush has left a trail of broken careers in his wake. Below is a listing of but a handful of the most familiar names on the rolls of the fallen:

Richard Clarke: Perhaps the most well-known of the Bush administration's casualties, Clarke spent thirty years in the government, serving under every president since Ronald Reagan. He was the second-ranking intelligence officer in the State Department under Reagan and then served in the administration of George H.W. Bush. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he held the position of the president's chief adviser on terrorism on the National Security Council - a Cabinet-level post. Clarke became disillusioned with the "terrible job" of fighting terrorism exhibited by the second president Bush - namely, ignoring evidence of an impending al-Qaeda attack and then putting the pressure on to produce a non-existent link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. (His memo explaining that there was no connection got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. Do it again.'"). Demoted then quit, January 2003.

Paul O'Neill: A top official at the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Nixon and Ford (and later chairman of aluminum-giant Alcoa), O'Neill served nearly two years in George W. Bush's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury before being asked to resign after opposing the president's tax cuts. He, like Clarke, recalled Bush's Iraq fixation. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein needed to go," said O'Neill, a permanent member of the National Security Council. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" Fired, December 6, 2002.

Flynt Leverett, Ben Miller and Hillary Mann: A Senior Director for Middle East Affairs on President Bush's National Security Council (NSC), a CIA staffer and Iraq expert with the NSC, and a foreign service officer on detail to the NSC as the Director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, respectively, they were all forced out by Elliott Abrams, Bush's NSC Advisor and a neo-con, when they disagreed with his policy toward Israel. Said Leverett, "There was a decision made to renege on the commitments we had made to various European and Arab partners of the United States. I personally disagreed with that decision." In addition, "Richard Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money… We took the people out of Afghanistan in 2002 to begin preparing for the war in Iraq who could have caught al Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. According to Josef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terror and Unconventional Warfare, Abrams "led Miller to an open window and told him to jump." He also stated that Mann and Leverett had been told to leave. Resigned/Fired, 2003.

Larry Lindsey: A "top economic adviser" to Bush who was ousted when he revealed to a newspaper that a war with Iraq could cost $200 billion. Fired, December 2002.

Ann Wright: A career diplomat in the Foreign Service and a colonel in the Army Reserves resigned on the day the U.S. launched the Iraq War. In her letter of resignation, Wright told then-Secretary of State Colin Powell: "I believe the Administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them." Resigned, March 19, 2003.

John Brady Kiesling: A career diplomat who served four presidents over a twenty year span, he tendered his letter of resignation from his post as Political Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. He wrote:

"…until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer. The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."
Resigned, February 27, 2003.

John Brown: After nearly 25-years, this veteran of the Foreign Service, who served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev and Belgrade, resigned from his post. In his letter of resignation, he wrote: "I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq. The president has failed to: explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for the ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; [and] to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration." Resigned, March 10, 2003.

Rand Beers: When Beers, the National Security Council's senior director for combating terrorism, resigned he declined to comment, but one former intelligence official noted, "Hardly a surprise. We have sacrificed a war on terror for a war with Iraq. I don't blame Randy at all. This just reflects the widespread thought that the war on terror is being set aside for the war with Iraq at the expense of our military and intelligence resources and the relationships with our allies." Beers later admitted, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure… As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out." Resigned, March 2003.

Gen. Anthony Zinni: A soldier and diplomat for 40 years, Zinni served from 1997 to 2000 as commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command in the Middle East. The retired Marine Corps general was then called back to service by the Bush administration to assume one of the highest diplomatic posts, special envoy to the Middle East (from November 2002 to March 2003), but his disagreement with Bush's plans to go to war and public comments that foretold of a a prolonged and problematical aftermath to such a war led to his ouster. "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption," said Zinni. Failed to be reappointed, March 2003.

Gen. Eric Shinseki: after the Army's chief of staff, told Congress that the occupation of Iraq could require "several hundred thousand troops," he was derided by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (a neo-con). Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "took the unusual step of announcing that Gen. Eric Shinseki would be leaving when his term as Army chief of staff ended." Retired, June 2003.

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: A Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force who served in the Department of Defense's Near East and South Asia (NESA) Bureau in the year before the invasion of Iraq, she wrote in her letter of resignation:

"…while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made… What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Hussein occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the office of Mr. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense."
Retired, July 2003.

Col. Charles "Jack" Pritchard: A retired U.S. Army colonel and a 28-year veteran of the military, the State Department, and the NSC, who served as the State Department's senior expert on North Korea and as the special envoy for negotiations with that country, resigned because the "administration's refusal to engage directly with the country made it almost impossible to stop Pyongyang from going ahead with its plans to build, test and deploy nuclear weapons." Resigned, August 2003.

Major John Carr and Major Robert Preston: Air Force prosecutors, they quit their posts in 2004 rather than take part in trials under the military commission system President Bush created in 2001 which they considered "rigged against alleged terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." Requested and granted reassignment, 2004.

Captain Carrie Wolf: A U.S. Air Force officer, she asked to leave the Office of Military Commissions due to concerns that the Bush-created commissions for trying prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were unjust. Requested and granted reassignment, 2004.

Col. Douglas Macgregor: He retired from the U.S. Army and stated: "I love the army and I was sorry to leave it. But I saw no possibility of fundamentally positive reform and reorganization of the force for the current strategic environment or the future… It's a very sycophantic culture. The biggest problem we have inside the… Department of Defense at the senior level, but also within the officer corps - is that there are no arguments. Arguments are seen as a sign of dissent. Dissent equates to disloyalty." Retired, June 2004.

Paul Redmond: After a long career at the CIA, Redmond became the Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the DHS. When he reported at a congressional hearing in June 2003, "that he didn't have enough analysts to do the job… and his office still lacked the secure communications capability to receive classified reports from the intelligence community… that kind of candor was not appreciated by his bosses and, consequently, he had to go." Resigned, June 2003.

John W. Carlin: the "Archivist of the United States was pushed by the White House… to submit his resignation without being given any reason. It is suggested Bush may have wanted a new archivist to help keep his or his father's sensitive presidential records under wraps. Although he had stated his wish to serve until the end of his 10-year term, and 65th birthday in 2005, Carlin surrendered to Bush administration pressure. Resigned, December 19, 2003.

Susan Wood and Frank Davidoff: Wood was the Food and Drug Administration's Assistant Commissioner for Women's Health and Director of the Office of Women's Health; Davidoff was the editor emeritus of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine and an internal medicine specialist on the FDA's Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee. Wood resigned in protest over the FDA's decision to delay yet again, due to pressure from the Bush administration, a final ruling on whether the "morning-after pill" should be made more easily accessible - despite a 23-4 vote, back in December 2003, by a panel of experts to recommend non-prescription sale of the contraceptive, called Plan B. In an email to colleagues, Wood, the top FDA official in charge of women's health issues, wrote, "I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled." Days later, Davidoff quit over the same issue and wrote in his resignation letter, "I can no longer associate myself with an organization that is capable of making such an important decision so flagrantly on the basis of political influence, rather than the scientific and clinical evidence." Wood: Resigned, August 31, 2005. Davidoff: Resigned, September, 2005.

Thomas E. Novotny: A deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services and the chief official working on an international treaty to reduce cigarette smoking around the world. He had privately expressed frustration over the administration's decision to soften the U.S. positions on key issues, including restrictions on secondhand smoke and the advertising and marketing of cigarettes." Resigned, August 1, 2001.

Joanne Wilson: The commissioner of the Department of Education's Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), she quit, according to the Washington Post, "in protest of what she said were the administration's largely unnoticed efforts to gut the office's funding and staffing" and attempts to dismantle programs "critical to helping the blind, deaf and otherwise disabled find jobs." On February 7, 2005 the Bush administration announced that it would close all RSA regional offices and cut personnel in half. Quit, February 8, 2005.

James Zahn: a "nationally respected microbiologist with the Agriculture Department's research service" stated that "his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study," which "identified bacteria that can make people sick - and that are resistant to antibiotics - in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms"; and that "he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms." As a result, "Zahn resigned from the government in disgust." Resigned, May 2002.

Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro: Oppegard and Spadaro were members of a "team of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining." According to the EPA, this had been "the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States." Oppegard, who the headed the team, "was fired on the day Bush was inaugurated… All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor Department… he was placed on administrative leave-a prelude to getting fired." Two months before his 28th anniversary as a federal employee, and after years of harassment due to his stance, Spadaro resigned. "I'm just very tired of fighting," he said. "I've been fighting this administration since early 2001. I want a little peace." Oppegrad: Fired, January 20, 2001. Spaddaro: Resigned, October 1, 2003.

Teresa Chambers: After speaking with reporters and congressional staffers about budget problems in her organization, the U.S. Park Police Chief was placed on administrative leave. Then, according to CNN, just "two and half hours after her attorneys filed a demand for immediate reinstatement through the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that ensures federal employees are protected from management abuses," Chambers was fired. "The American people should be afraid of this kind of silencing of professionals in any field," said Chambers. "We should be very concerned as American citizens that people who are experts in their field either can't speak up, or, as we're seeing now in the parks service, won't speak up." Fired, July 2004.

Martha Hahn: The state director for the Bureau of Land Management, "responsible for 12 million acres in Idaho, almost one-quarter of the state" for seven years, Hahn found her authority drastically curtailed after the Bush administration took office. She watched as the administration blocked public comment on mining initiatives and opened up previously protected areas to environmental degradation. After she locked horns with cattle interests over grazing rights, she received a letter stating she was being transferred from her beloved Rocky Mountain West to "a previously nonexistent job in New York City." "It's been a shock," she said. "I'm going through mental anguish right now. I felt like I was at the prime of my career." Hahn was told to accept the involuntary reassignment or resign. Resigned, March 6, 2002.

Andrew Eller: spent many of his 17 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protecting the Florida panther. But when his research didn't jibe with a huge airport project slated for the cat's habitat - and Eller refused to play along-he was given the boot. "I was fired three days after President Bush was re-elected," said Eller. "It was obviously reprisal for holding different views on whether or not the panther was in jeopardy, and pointing out that they were using flawed science to support their view." Fired, November 2004.

Mike Dombeck: The chief of the Forest Service resigned after a 23-year government career. In his resignation letter, the pro-conservation Dombeck stated, "It was made clear in no uncertain terms that the [Bush] administration wants to take the Forest Service in another direction ...." Resigned, March 27, 2001.

James Furnish: A political conservative, evangelical Christian, and Republican who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 as well as the former Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service (who spent 30 years, across 8 presidential administrations working for that agency), Furnish resigned in 2002 due to policy differences with the Bush administration. "I just viewed the administration's actions as being regressive," said Furnish. In acting according to his conscience, instead of waiting a year longer to maximize retirement benefits, Furnish lost out on about $10,000 a year for the rest of his life. Resigned, 2002.

Mike Parker: In early 2002, Parker, the director of the Army Corps of Engineers testified before Congress that Bush-mandated budget cuts would have a "negative impact" on the Corps. He also admitted to holding no "warm and fuzzy" feelings toward the Bush administration. Soon after, he was given 30 minutes to resign or be fired. In the wake of the devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Parker's clashes with Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, can be seen as prophetic. Parker remembered one such incident in which he brought Daniels, the Bush administration's budget guru, a piece of steel from a Mississippi canal lock that "was completely corroded and falling apart because of a lack of funding," and said, "Mitch, it doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates - either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame." He recalled of the incident, "It made no impact on him whatsoever." Resigned, March 6, 2002.

Sylvia K. Lowrance: A top EPA official who served the agency for over 20 years, including as Assistant Administrator of its Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for the first 18 months of the Bush administration, Lowrance retired, stating, "We will see more resignations in the future as the administration fails to enforce environmental laws." she said, "This Administration has pulled cases and put investigations on ice. They sent every signal they can to staff to back off." Retired, August 2002.

Bruce Boler: An EPA scientist who resigned from his post because, he said, "Wetlands are often referred to as nature's kidneys. Most self-respecting scientists will tell you that, and yet [private] developers and officials [at the Army Corps of Engineers] wanted me to support their position that wetlands are, literally, a pollution source." Resigned, October 23, 2003.

Eric Schaeffer: After twelve years of service, including the last five as Director of the Office of Regulatory Enforcement, at the EPA, Schaeffer submitted a letter of resignation over the Bush administration's non-enforcement of the Clean Air Act. He later explained:

"In a matter of weeks, the Bush administration was able to undo the environmental progress we had worked years to secure. Millions of tons of unnecessary pollution continue to pour from these power plants each year as a result. Adding insult to injury, the White House sought to slash the EPA's enforcement budget, making it harder for us to pursue cases we'd already launched against other polluters that had run afoul of the law, from auto manufacturers to refineries, large industrial hog feedlots, and paper companies. It became clear that Bush had little regard for the environment-and even less for enforcing the laws that protect it. So last spring, after 12 years at the agency, I resigned, stating my reasons in a very public letter to Administrator [Christine Todd] Whitman."
Resigned, February 27, 2002.

Bruce Buckheit: A 30-year veteran of government service, Buckheit retired in frustration over Bush administration efforts to weaken environmental regulations. When asked by NBC reporter Stone Phillips, "What's the biggest enforcement challenge right now when it comes to air pollution?," the former Senior Counsel with the Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, and then Director of EPA's Air Enforcement Division, was unequivocal: "The Bush Administration." He went on to note that "this administration has decided to put the economic interests of the coal fired power plants ahead of the public interests in reducing air pollution." Resigned, November 2003.

Rich Biondi: A 32-year EPA employee, Biondi retired from his post as Associate Director of the Air Enforcement Division of the EPA. He stated, "We weren't given the latitude we had been, and the Bush administration was interfering more and more with the ability to get the job done." Retired, December 2004.

Martin E. Sullivan, Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan: Three members of Bush's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, they all resigned from their posts to protest the looting of Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities. In his letter of resignation, Sullivan, the Committee's chairman, wrote, "The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction," while Lanier castigated "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and the loss of cultural treasures." Resigned, April 14, 2003.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, eyes began to focus on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the political appointees running it. What had happened to the professionals who once staffed FEMA? In 2004, Pleasant Mann, a 17-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency's government employee union told Indyweek:

"Since last year, so many people have left who had developed most of our basic programs. A lot of the institutional knowledge is gone. Everyone who was able to retire has left, and then a lot of people have moved to other agencies."

Disillusionment with the current state of affairs at FEMA was cited as the major cause for the mass defections. In fact, a February 2004 survey by the American Federation of Government Employees found that 80% of a sample of remaining employees said FEMA had become "a much poorer agency" since being shifted into the Bush-created Department of Homeland Security. What happened to FEMA has happened, in ways large and small, to many other federal agencies. In an article by Amanda Griscom in Grist magazine, Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, made reference to the "unusually high" rate of replacement of scientists in government agencies during the Bush administration. "If the scientist gives the inconvenient answer they commit career suicide," he said.

However defined, the casualties of the Bush administration are legion. The numbers of government careers wrecked, disrupted, adversely affected, or tossed into turmoil as a result of this administration's wars, budgets, policies, and programs is impossible to determine. Although every administration leaves bodies strewn in its wake, none in recent memory has come close to the Bush administration in producing so many public statements of resignation, dissatisfaction, or anger over treatment or policies. The aforementioned list of casualties includes among the best known of those who have resigned or left the administration under pressure (although not necessarily those who have suffered most from their acts). Perhaps no one knows exactly how many government workers, at all levels, have fallen in the face of the Bush administration. Those mentioned above are just a few of the highest profile members of this as yet uncounted legion, just a few of the names we know.

NOTE: If you know of others, or are one of the "fallen legion" yourself, please send the information (and whatever supporting material you would care to supply) to fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com with the subject heading: "fallen legion" to add another name to the "wall." This is a subject TomDispatch would like to return to in the future.

Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University and as the Associate Editor and Research Director at TomDispatch.com. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex, the homeland security state, and various other topics.

Ohioans: Vote YES on Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5.

2005-10-14T14:50:00.000-04:00

You Can Help Restore Confidence in Ohio's Democracy: YES on Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5!

As we count down to Election Day, November 8th, activity is underway in every corner of Ohio to restore trust, confidence, and faith in government by passing the Reform Ohio Now Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5!

It is so important that you help pass Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5 on November 8th! We must amend the state constitution to make our election system fairer so that legislators don't manipulate voting for their political gain.

Issue 2: Makes it easier to vote by allowing all Ohioans to vote by mail (many states already have mail balloting in place).
Issue 3: Helps stop the influence of big money in elections by greatly reducing campaign contributions.
Issue 4: Stops the politicians from drawing their own legislative districts and puts an independent commission in charge of this process.
Issue 5: Places a bi-partisan board of supervisors in charge of Ohio's elections, instead of a partisan official who backs candidates and takes sides in elections. Just remember the shenanigans that Kenneth Blackwell tried to pull in 2004 to manipulate the elections.

--Your Allies at People For the American Way

Bush Administration ignored pre-war assessments

2005-10-13T13:26:00.000-04:00

Report Says White House Ignored CIA on Iraq Chaos... By Douglas Jehl

A review by former intelligence officers has concluded that the Bush administration "apparently paid little or no attention" to prewar assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq.

The report appeared publicly for the first time this week in Studies in Intelligence, a quarterly journal. The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is part of the C.I.A. but operates independently.

The review was conducted by a team led by Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence. It acknowledged the deep failures in the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs but said "the analysis was right" on cultural and political issues related to postwar Iraq.

Two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 had predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

Those reports were by the National Intelligence Council, the highlevel group responsible for producing the government's most authoritative intelligence assessments.

Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies have been notably more gloomy than the White House and the Pentagon about prospects for stability in Iraq. In the summer of 2004, newspaper articles about those reports so angered some Republicans that they accused the agency of trying to undermine President Bush.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was to have addressed the issue as part of a second phase of its inquiry that began with a study of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons program. But the Republican-led committee has shown no sign of producing a report.

The review was one of three conducted by Mr. Kerr and his team, but it is the only one that was unclassified. It described as "seriously flawed, misleading and even wrong" most of the conclusions reached by the C.I.A. before the invasion of Iraq about President Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

But Mr. Kerr offered praise for prewar intelligence reports on issues other than Iraq's weapons programs, saying that they "accurately addressed such topics as how the war would develop and how Iraqi forces would or would not fight."

Mr. Kerr also praised what he called perceptive analysis by intelligence agencies on the issue of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, a subject on which the agency clashed with the White House by concluding that there were no substantive links.

Mr. Kerr said the agency had also accurately "calculated the impact of the war on oil markets" and "accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq."

Frist in the corruption chain of events.

2005-10-13T11:57:00.000-04:00

And then there was Frist..... he was just issued a subpoena by the SEC for his alleged insider trading. As his spin has been that he did nothing wrong since it was a blind trust, it has come to light that the trust was not so blind but controlled by none other than his brother. Too bad the same cell that they locked away Martha could not be reserved for him..... but, alas, maybe he will get a nice roommate by the name of Bruno.

Outrage!

2005-10-13T09:58:00.000-04:00

Why is it that all the Republicans appear to be able to sink their teeth into these days are issues of Gay rights and marriage (why do they care about this), abortion rights, and cover-ups. Meanwhile their cronies are getting richer and richer by the minute on the blood and despair of the average American. Where is our outrage? Where is our true morality? Who have we become?

Our Constitution disgraced......

2005-10-13T09:36:00.000-04:00

More eyewitnesses to U.S. torture of detainees pierce the Bush administration's cover-up

The outlook of Richard Nixon was that he was above the law. Watergate disabused him of the notion. The position of George W. Bush is that he is a law unto himself. - Lincoln Caplan, editor of Legal Affairs (Yale Law School), September 2005

Have we ever had a situation like this, where presumably this warlike status could last for 25 years, 50 years, whatever it is? - Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, during oral arguments, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004

The torture of detainees was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers. Soldiers said they felt welcome to come to the PUC [Person Under Control] tent on their off hours to 'Fuck a PUC' or 'Smoke a PUC.' 'Fucking a PUC' referred to beating a detainee, while 'Smoking a PUC' referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. - "Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division," Human Rights Watch, September 2005

Since 9-11, the steadily increasing dislocation of our system of government—most vividly demonstrated by the Bush administration's systematic abuses of detainees (a/k/a prisoners), including torture. But despite the huge amount of documented evidence, only low-level soldiers have been disciplined. The top of the chain of command—Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al.—is untouched by the Defense Department's "investigations" of itself.

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, there was a continuing, fractious debate on how to prevent one branch of government (the executive) from overpowering the other (the legislative). The Supreme Court had yet to realize its full identity until John Marshall became chief justice in 1801. (Earlier, Alexander Hamilton erroneously called it "the least dangerous branch.")

In 1866, Lincoln, dead by then, was sternly rebuked by the Supreme Court (Ex Parte Milligan) for the unconstitutional powers he had taken during the Civil War. Said the Court:

"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances." (Emphasis added.)

But George W. Bush, as commander in chief, ignores that ruling in the forbidding name of national security as he keeps declaring that this nation is an example to the world—of freedom and the moral values of a constitutional democracy.

As National Public Radio's excellent national security correspondent Jackie Northam said during her September 25 report on this Human Rights Watch exposé: "There's just too many reports like this from captains, sergeants, officers, non-commissioned officers, that we can't keep ignoring it."

I have large files of such reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights First, the Center for Constitutional Rights, The New England Journal of Medicine (about military doctors' complicity in these often savage abuses of prisoners), and New York University law school's Center on Law and Security. But with Republican control of Congress (including the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment at home), all the protectors of the Constitution can do is keep hanging on.

From the Human Rights Watch report: "Residents of Fallujah called them 'the Murderous Maniacs' because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the U.S. Army's 82 nd Airborne Division . . . stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury in Iraq. The soldiers considered this [description of them] a badge of honor."

The report discloses that two non-commissioned officers and a captain, Ian Fishback, in multiple interviews with Human Rights Watch investigators, say that "torture of detainees took place almost daily . . . from September 2003 to April 2004. . . . The acts of torture and other cruel or inhuman treatment . . . include severe beatings (in one incident, a soldier reportedly broke a detainee's leg with a baseball bat); the application of chemical substances to exposed skin and eyes; forced stress positions . . . sometimes to the point of unconsciousness; sleep deprivation [for days on end]; the stacking of detainees into human pyramids; and, the withholding of food and water."

For 17 months, Captain Fishback raised his concerns within the army chain of command, and the army agreed to conduct an investigation "only after he had contacted members of Congress [including Senator John McCain] and considered going public with the story." Days before the Human Rights Watch report was released, the captain was told he couldn't leave the base to meet with members of McCain's staff "without approval and that approval was being denied because his commanding officer felt [he] was being naive and would do irreparable harm to his career."

The captain, however, refuses to be muzzled.

Dobson in commune with Bush, Rove.

2005-10-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

Why did George Bush and Karl Rove confer with the likes of James Dobson (a far right evangelical) regarding the appointment of Harriet Miers when they did not even bother to meet with members of their own party or Congress prior to the nomination?

According to Dobson, that information included "that Harriet Miers is an evangelical Christian; that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life; that she had taken on the American Bar Assn. on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion; [and] that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life."

Also, of note, apparently their short list got much shorter as they queried others about the job and no one wanted to be nominated by Bush. So, I suppose, it finally got short enough that they 'had' to take Miers. This is a very sad state of affairs.

George, ever thought about expanding your search to actual qualified candidates instead of focusing on just the women's choice issue?

Miers 'affection' for Bush

2005-10-12T11:39:00.000-04:00

The notes passed back and forth between George and Harriet sound like the giddy nothings of a high school girl to her boyfriend. Not from a successful attorney to her boss.

Miers has repeatedly gotten all goo-goo-eyed over George..... calling him the "most brilliant man she had ever met". Does she even know ANYONE else???

Why is this woman nominated to a lifetime position to one of the most important jobs in our country? Because she sent him little notes of admiration over the years? And, as Bush says, just "trust me". Sure George, because that has really gone well for us over the last 5 years..... trusting you.

Harriet told George in a 1997 birthday card "Dear Governor GWB, you are the best governor ever" and "At least for thirty days -- you are not younger than me". In a separate note to her boss, said she hoped his twin daughters recognize their parents are "cool."

Bush told Miers in a birthday note in 2000: "Have a great life!"

Wow, such profundity in those heartfelt communication. They have to be the two smartest people I know.

10 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal

2005-10-12T11:33:00.000-04:00

10 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal

Reply to: anon-102351114@craigslist.org

01) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

03) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

04) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

06) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

07) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

08) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

09) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Where is the Bush promised recovery package?

2005-10-12T11:26:00.000-04:00

It was Sept. 15 when President Bush, in his shirt sleeves, strode out to a lectern set up in an eerie, nearly empty Jackson Square in New Orleans to tell the American people about his bold plan to rebuild the devastated Gulf Coast. "As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well," he said. "And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."

Toward that end, Mr. Bush proposed a Gulf Opportunity Zone to provide tax incentives and loans for small businesses, including minority-owned ones. He asked Congress to pass what he called an Urban Homesteading Act, which he said would provide, through a lottery, free building sites on federal land for low-income citizens. "Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives," the president said.

That was a month ago. This week, the only talk about legislative action has come from the conservative Republicans calling for new holes in the social safety net, while the president remains mum about that - and just about everything else. Administration officials have yet to put forward any kind of legislative blueprint for Congress on the Gulf Opportunity Zone. A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Trent Duffy, told reporters that the proposal is "pending in Congress," whatever that means. He waved off any idea that "the White House would send a big 'Here's Our Recovery' package."

But, of course, that was exactly what Americans expected the White House to do. There seems to be no coordinated plan, no single person in charge of making the recovery happen. With this president, there is a vast gulf between words and action.

Americans were understandably dismayed when confronted with President Bush's slow response to the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina. They were equally dismayed by the evident lack of disaster expertise among the men the president had tapped to handle such emergencies. Mr. Bush was supposed to have put an end to that dismal story when he spoke at Jackson Square. But that seems to have been nothing but a grand and meaningless gesture. Where are the actual programs he's supposed to be putting into place to rebuild the city? Administration officials say they have located about 4,000 federal properties that could be provided as part of the urban homesteading proposal Mr. Bush announced in New Orleans. That is a drop in the bucket when compared with the actual need; more than a quarter of a million homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina. How will the recovery work? Who will decide how much to spend, and on what?

Yes, there is an expectation that the White House will send a big Here's Our Recovery package to Congress. Where is it?

Where are we?

2005-10-12T03:23:00.000-04:00

To question our moment as Americans.... are we stronger as a country? Are we safer as a country?

Have we lost our pride and sense of who we are? Have we lost our way... our direction?

We now live in a world where we have lost the respect of our neighbors. Terrorism is increasingly nipping at our heels because we have engaged in a war for reasons that we are not fully aware.

Who will now listen to us when we cry out. Who will listen to us when we need the aid and support of the world. We have lost our voice.

We have lost ourselves.

Impeach Bush.... Americans are OK with the idea.

2005-10-12T03:12:00.000-04:00

Stunning New Poll: Americans Favor Bush's Impeachment If He Lied about Iraq.

By a margin of 50% to 44%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company.

Crying wolf....

2005-10-11T11:48:00.000-04:00

With our cute but uninformative color coding and the constant false alarms of terrorist alerts, it will be a real test to see if and when a real terrorist alert is issued whether anyone decides to pay attention. This Administration is so glib about issuing the alerts without real evidence that the public is becoming increasingly desensitized.

I know it is hard to imagine this Administration rushing to something without checking out the intelligence or the bearer of such news.

In the latest of such alerts, the NYC subway system was paralyzed last week due to an imminent attack by al queda. Low and behold, the Iraqi 'informant' that handed the information to DHS has recounted his information as a hoax.

And, to think, every time the Administration needs a distraction, we have a terror alert which causes what... "terror" and costs our cities millions.

US Backed Government Officials being sought for missing 1 billion dollars.

2005-10-11T11:13:00.000-04:00

Iraq has issued arrest warrants against the defense minister and 27 other officials from the U.S.-backed government of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi over the alleged disappearance or misappropriation of $1 billion in military procurement funds, officials said Monday.

Those accused include four other ministers from Allawi's government, which was replaced by an elected Cabinet led by Shiite parties in April, said Ali al-Lami of Iraq's Integrity Commission. Many of the ex-US officials are believed to have left Iraq, including Hazem Shaalan, the former defense minister who moved to Jordan shortly after the new government was installed.

For months, Iraqi investigators have been looking into allegations that millions of dollars were spent on overpriced deals for shoddy weapons and military hardware, apparently to launder cash, at a time when Iraq was battling a bloody insurgency that still persists.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated a car full of mortars near an entrance to the fortified Green Zone on Monday, killing a U.S. soldier and six Iraqis in one of a string of insurgent attacks in which at least 13 other Iraqis also died.

Gunmen opened fire on a convoy carrying delegates from the Arab League in Baghdad during the organization's first visit to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The league has met resistance from Shiite and Kurdish leaders as it tries to piece together a reconciliation conference with Sunnis. A policeman was wounded in the shooting, but no one in the delegation was hurt.

The violence comes five days ahead of Iraq's key vote on a new constitution, which Kurds and the majority Shiites largely support and the Sunni Arab minority rejects. Sunnis are campaigning to defeat the charter at the polls, though officials from all sides have been trying up to the last minute to decide on changes to the constitution to swing Sunni support.

Whether the constitution passes or fails, Iraq is due to hold elections for a new parliament on Dec. 15. The corruption allegations are a blow to Allawi as he tries to assemble a coalition of moderates to run against the current ruling Shiite-led coalition in the election in a bid to get back into the government.

With U.S. backing, Allawi was named head of the first transitional government after the U.S. returned sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, but his Iraqi List party did poorly in January parliamentary elections that swept the Shiite-Kurdish coalition into power.

Besides Shaalan, warrants were issued against Allawi's labor, transportation, electricity and housing ministers, as well as 23 former Defense Ministry officials, said al-Lami, who heads Iraq's De-Baathification Commission, part of the Commission of Public Integrity.

He did not name all the officials, and Shaalan and the ministers could not be reached for comment.

An attempt was under way to strip Shaalan, a member of parliament, of his immunity from prosecution. Parliament met Monday to do so but did not have a quorum.

"The warrant was issued against Shaalan due to the corruption allegations regarding the missing $1 billion in the Iraqi Defense Ministry. As soon as his immunity is lifted, the country where he is now living will be asked to extradite him to Iraq," al-Lami said, without naming the country.

Another crony is nominated.

2005-10-11T11:04:00.000-04:00

The list of Bush appointees who seem to be rising on political connections rather than expertise continues to grow. A recent example is President Bush's choice to head a key office at the State Department that coordinates the delivery of life-sustaining emergency aid to refugees of foreign wars, persecution and natural disasters. The nominee is Ellen Sauerbrey, the former Maryland state legislator and twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor who was state chairman of Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign.

In 2002, Mr. Bush nominated her for another patronage job, to serve as the American representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. There she has relentlessly pressed an anti-abortion and anti-family-planning agenda at international conferences meant to focus on urgent problems like sexual trafficking and the spread of AIDS.

Ms. Sauerbrey has no experience responding to major crises calling for international relief. As assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, she would oversee a vital $700 million a year bureau that coordinates with private relief groups and other international players like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to set up refugee camps and arrange for adequate food, protection and other crucial assistance. She also would oversee the admissions of refugees for permanent resettlement in the United States. Once again, this is a post for an established expert in the field.

Another gap in Homeland Security.

2005-10-11T10:25:00.000-04:00

It has just come to the attention of Congress that the federal government is years behind in fulfilling a congressional mandate to give people who live within 20 miles of a nuclear plant iodine pills, which can help prevent thyroid cancer should a plant melt down in, say, a terrorist attack. After 9/11, Congress required that the pills be offered by the end of 2003. The official in charge of the program blamed "bureaucratic indecision" stemming from a fight over which agency was in charge.

And, once again, we ask as Americans, who is running our government?

Secrecy... the new way to govern?

2005-10-11T01:15:00.000-04:00

Bush's Veil Over History... By KITTY KELLEY

SECRECY has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts's tenure in the Justice Department, President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. And he has been spectacularly effective, making Richard Nixon look almost transparent.

But perhaps the most egregious example occurred on Nov. 1, 2001, when President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, under which a former president's private papers can be released only with the approval of both that former president (or his heirs) and the current one.

Before that executive order, the National Archives had controlled the release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which stipulated that all papers, except those pertaining to national security, had to be made available 12 years after a president left office.

Now, however, Mr. Bush can prevent the public from knowing not only what he did in office, but what Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did in the name of democracy. (Although Mr. Reagan's term ended more than 12 years before the executive order, the Bush administration had filed paperwork in early 2001 to stop the clock, and thus his papers fall under it.)

Bill Clinton publicly objected to the executive order, saying he wanted all his papers open. Yet the Bush administration has nonetheless denied access to the documents.

The administration's effort to grandfather the Reagan papers under the act raises a red flag. President Bush's signature stopped the National Archives from a planned release of documents from the Reagan era, some of which might have shed light on the Iran-contra scandal and illuminated the role played by the vice president at the time, George H. W. Bush.

What can be done to bring this information to light? Because executive orders are not acts of Congress, they can be overturned by future commanders in chief. But this is a lot to ask of presidents given the free pass handed them by Mr. Bush.

Other efforts to rectify the situation are equally problematic. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has repeatedly introduced legislation to overturn Mr. Bush's executive order, but the chances of a Republican Congress defying a Republican president are slim.

There is also a lawsuit by the American Historical Association and other academic and archival groups before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. A successful verdict could force the National Archives to ignore the executive order and begin making public records from the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.

Unless one of these efforts succeeds, George W. Bush and his father can see to it that their administrations pass into history without examination. Their rationales for waging wars in the Middle East will go unchallenged. There will be no chance to weigh the arguments that led the administration to condone torture by our armed forces. The problems of federal agencies entrusted with public welfare during times of national disaster - 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina - will be unaddressed. Details on no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected corporations like Halliburton will escape scrutiny, as will the president's role in Environmental Protection Agency's policies on water and air polluters.

This is about much more than the desires of historians and biographers - the best interests of the nation are at stake. As the American Political Science Association, one plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, put it: "The only way we can improve the operation of government, enhance the accountability of decision-makers and ultimately help maintain public trust in government is for people to understand how it worked in the past."

The death of a presidency.....

2005-10-10T17:30:00.000-04:00

Is This the Death of America? By Dermot Purgavie [The Mirror UK]

America's sense of itself - its pride in its power - has been profoundly damaged.

This week Karen Hughes, long-time political adviser to George Bush, began her new mission as the State Department's official defender of America's image with a tour of the Middle East.

She might have been more help to her beleaguered president had she stayed at home and used her PR skills on her neighbours. At the end of a cruel and turbulent summer, nobody is more dismayed and demoralised about America than Americans.

They have watched with growing disbelief and horror as a convergence of events - dominated by the unending war in Iraq and two hurricanes - have exposed ugly and disturbing things in the undergrowth that shame and embarrass Americans and undermine their belief in the nation and its values.

With TV providing a ceaseless backdrop of the country's failings - a crippled and tone-deaf president, a negligent government, corruption, military atrocities, soaring debt, racial conflict, poverty, bloated bodies in floodwater, people dying on camera for want of food, water and medicine - it seemed things were falling apart in the land where happiness is promoted in the constitution.

Disillusioning news was everywhere. In the flight from Hurricane Rita, Houston evacuees fought knife fights over cans of petrol. In storm-hit Louisiana there were long queues at gun stores as people armed themselves against possible looters.

America, which has the world's costliest health care, had, it turned out, higher infant mortality rates than the broke and despised Cuba.

Tom De Lay, Republican enforcer in the House of Representatives, was indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate was under investigation for his stock dealings (move over Martha Stewart). And Osama bin Laden was still on the loose.

Americans are the planet's biggest flag wavers. They are reared on the conceit that theirs is the world's best and most enviable country, born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.

They rejoice that "We are No.1", and in many ways they are.

But events have revealed a creeping mildew of pain and privation, graft and injustice and much incompetence lurking beneath the glow of star-spangled superiority.

Many here feel the country is breaking down and losing its moral and political authority.

"US in funk" say the headlines. "I am ashamed to be an American," say many letters to the editor. We are seeing, say the commentators, a crumbling - and humbling - of America.

The catalogue of afflictions is long and grisly. Hurricane Katrina revealed confusion and incompetence throughout government, from town hall to White House.

President Bush, accused of an alarming failure of leadership over the disaster, has now been to the Gulf coast seven times for carefully orchestrated photo opps and costing the taxpayers millions and shutting down the real work to be done out of security concerns.

But his approval has dropped below 40 per cent. Public doubt about his capacity to deal with pressing problems is increasingly growing.

Americans feel ashamed by the violent, predatory behaviour Katrina triggered - nothing remotely similar happened in the tsunami-hit Third World countries. They feel ashamed by the deep racial and class divisions it revealed.

The press has since been giving the country a crash course on poverty and race, informing the flag wavers that an uncaring America may be No.1 on the world inequities index.

The US has 37 million living under the poverty line, largely unnoticed by the richest in a country with more than three million millionaires.

The typical white family has $80,000 in assets; the average black family about $6,000. It's a wealth gap out of the Middle Ages. Some 46 million can't afford health insurance, 18,000 of whom will die early because of it.

The US, we learn, is 43rd in the world infant mortality rankings. A baby born in Beijing has nearly three times the chance of reaching its first birthday than a baby born in Washington. Those who survive face rotten schools. On reading and maths tests for 15-year-olds, America is 24th out of 29 nations.

On the other side of the tracks, 18 corporate executives have so far been jailed for cooking the books and looting billions. The prosecution of Mr Bush's pals at Enron - the showcase trial of the greed-is-good culture - will be soon and possibly further revealing.

But the backroom deal lives on and, in an orgy of cronyism, billions of dollars are being carved up in no-bid contracts awarded to politically-connected firms for work in the hurricane-hit states and in Iraq.

The war, seen as unwinnable, is becoming a bleak burden, with nearly 2,000 American dead. And over two-thirds of the public now think the invasion was a mistake.

The war costs $6 billion a month, driving up a nose-bleed high $331 billion budget deficit. In five years the conflict will have cost each American family $11,300, it is said.

Mr Bush says blithely he'll cut existing programs to pay for the war and fund an estimated $200 billion for hurricane damage. He won't, he says, rescind his tax cuts. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says Mr Bush is "disconnected from reality".

Americans have been angered by a reports that US troops have routinely tortured Iraqi prisoners. Some 230 low-rankers have been convicted - but not one general or Pentagon overseer. Disgruntled young officers are leaving in increasing numbers.

Meanwhile, further damaging Americans' self image, there's Afghanistan. The White House says its operations there were a success, yet last year Afghanistan supplied 90 per cent of the world's heroin. An export that had been wiped out by the taliban but now in resurgence.

America's sense of itself - its pride in its power and authority, its faith in its institutions and its belief in its leaders - has been profoundly damaged. And now the talking heads in Washington predict dramatic political change and the death of the Republicans' hope of becoming the permanent government.

The Last Days of Bush...

2005-10-10T15:31:00.000-04:00

How Bush should renovate the West Wing
By Joe Klein, TIME columnist

President Bush's second term is less than nine months old. With 1,200 days left in office, the President needs a Grand New Policy Proposal to take the focus off his second term slump.

As the Harriet Miers burlesque unraveled last week, adding to a cacophony of presidential woes, I happened to check the calendar: it was only the first week of October 2005.

What an awful year for the President and the country. There was the failure of Social Security reform, a good idea that was misplaced as the Administration's top priority.

There was the shameless political grandstanding in the Terri Schiavo case. There was Katrina. There is the stench of corruption rising from the Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff scandals and the appointment of so many hacks and cronies to positions of power.

There is the possibility that Karl Rove and other top Administration officials will soon be indicted in the Valerie Plame leak case.

There was, and is, the failure to deal head-on with the Iraq war and make the necessary adjustments -- more troops, more pressure on the corrupt and Iranophilic government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari -- that might secure a better outcome.

The higher gasoline prices portend a very expensive home-heating winter. About the only thing that went well for Bush was the nomination of the indisputably excellent John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

Well, only 1,200 days to go -- which means, of course, that Bush has plenty of time to resurrect himself; in fact, he will probably survive several boom-and-bust cycles before Jan. 20, 2009, rolls around.

George W. Bush's presidency has always limped along... until originally it was transformed on Sept. 11, 2001. But you can't order up an act of God -- and even another terrorist attack on American soil might only serve to reinforce the doubts about Bush's leadership that Iraq and Katrina have raised.

A more likely way to regain footing would be a Grand New Policy Proposal. All of us high- minded pundits would just be thrilled if the President decided to launch an energy-independence Manhattan Project to help extricate the nation from the thrall of the oil sheiks.

Bush has been touting Jimmy Carter- like conservation pinpricks in recent weeks; the air conditioning in the White House has been turned down. But it would be very un-Bush to call for the 50(cent)-per-gal. gasoline tax that even some conservatives are supporting.

In fact, it's far more likely that the next Grand New Policy Proposal will be another tax cut gussied up as tax "reform," perhaps even the abolition of the progressive income tax, replaced by a sales or flat tax. But that sort of thing would probably meet the same fate as Social Security reform. Congress has turned balky. The public may be skeptical of huge tax blowouts so long as more pressing problems -- like Iraq, the federal deficit, the economic iffiness caused by high gasoline prices-- are untended.

A Republican Senator proposed a third route privately last week.

"This Administration has been excellent at politics and spin," he told me. "It hasn't been very good at governance. Perhaps it's time for Bush to do what Ronald Reagan did to shore up his White House in the final years -- bring in a team of terrific managers, people with credibility from Day One."

Faced with the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan brought in Howard Baker and then Ken Duberstein as chiefs of staff, Frank Carlucci and then Colin Powell as National Security Advisers (Powell told Reagan, in no uncertain terms, that Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, who was running an illegal war from the White House basement, had to go).

It's probably time to renovate the West Wing staff under new leadership. And there aren't three people in the Pentagon who can understand why Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense after presiding over one of the great debacles in American military history: the failure to prepare for the Iraqi insurgency.

It was interesting to watch Bush return again and again to New Orleans after Katrina -- each visit more desperate and incredible than the last, each serving only to reinforce the public notion that he was trying to talk his way out of a situation that he had failed to manage properly.

Bush's bold ideas and soaring rhetoric have come to seem a dodge, a way to avoid the serious scut work involved in actually running the country. "Maybe he should give his dad a call," the Republican Senator said, referring to Bush the Elder's meticulous foreign policy, "and find out how to do it."

Another Bush crony bites the dust.....

2005-10-10T13:36:00.000-04:00

Flanigan Withdraws as Nominee for Deputy Attorney General

The Bush administration's choice for deputy attorney general has withdrawn his nomination amid mounting questions from Senate Democrats over his dealings with indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and over his role in shaping controversial interrogation policies.

"While Mr. Flanigan's nomination has been withdrawn, troubling questions remain about the Bush administration's torture policies and Abramoff's dealings with the administration and the Republican leadership of Congress," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin.

Several Democrats had also complained about Flanigan's lack of experience as a courtroom prosecutor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, compared Flanigan to the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, who resigned amid complaints over the US response to Hurricane Katrina.

Flanigan is a senior vice president and general counsel to Tyco International. Company spokeswoman Sheri Woodruff said he will remain at the company in those positions. (Ah, yes, TYCO.... that bastion of corporate corruption and tax evasion).

The Plame Case: How about Focusing on the Real Issues?

2005-10-09T23:17:00.000-04:00

This article by an ex-CIA intelligence analyst is shocking in it's unwrapping of the deceit and and probable treasonous activities of the administration. Read and be sad for what our leadership has become. Reminds you of those corporate cronies that cook the books for their own profit.

By Larry Johnson

Want to know one reason why the CIA has been unable to recruit spies? Just reflect on how a potential recruit would react to the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operations officer.

The investigation into which administration officials compromised Plame, wife of former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, is nearing completion. Lost in the recent spurt of press reporting, however, is the fact that the outing of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day, her carefully cultivated network of spies) has done great damage to US clandestine operations - not to mention those she recruited over her distinguished career.

Ms. Plame, a very gifted case officer, was a close colleague of mine at the CIA. Her dedication and courage were made abundantly clear when she became one of the few to volunteer to assume the risks of operating under non-official cover - meaning that if you get caught, too bad, you're on your own: the US government never heard of you.

The supreme irony is that Plame's now-compromised network was reporting on the priority-one issue of US intelligence - weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it was made clear to all, including active and potential intelligence sources abroad, that even when high-priority intelligence targets are involved, Bush administration officials do not shrink from exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The harm to the CIA and its efforts to recruit spies instinctively wary of the risks in providing intelligence information is immense.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Wilson publicly exposed an important lie - and the president as liar-in-chief - when Wilson debunked reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Still, as Wilson himself has suggested, the primary purpose of leaking his wife's employment at the CIA was not so much to retaliate against him personally, but rather to issue a warning to others privy to administration lies on the war not to speak out. Administration officials felt they needed to provide an object lesson of what truth tellers can expect in the way of swift retaliation.

... and It Was All Based on a Forgery

Whether or not indictments come down, our domesticated mainstream media probably will continue to play down the damage to US intelligence. Even more important, they are likely to ignore completely the very curious event that started the whole business - the forging of documents that became the basis of reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger for its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Together with other circumstantial evidence, the neuralgic reaction of Vice President Dick Cheney to press reports that he was point man for promoting the bogus "intelligence" report suggests that he may also have been its intellectual author/authorizer.

Yes, I am suggesting that it may have been an inside job. Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby may well have had a hand in commissioning the forgery, as a way of manufacturing an intelligence report, with "mushroom cloud" written all over it - in order to deceive Congress into approving an unnecessary war. The more you look into the whole affair, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Why, for example, would Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) adamantly refuse to investigate the provenance of a forgery used to start a war?

And why did former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the UN on February 5, 2003, decide to delete from his very long laundry list of spurious charges against Iraq its alleged attempt to acquire uranium from Niger? Even though he himself had avoided repeating the famous "16 words" used by President Bush just five weeks before (see below), Powell was forced to listen stoically as Mohammed El-Baradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on worldwide TV that his own and outside experts had concluded that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." The White House left it to Powell to concede that El-Baradei was correct, and Powell eventually did so.

Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to shed light on some of this.

These are some of the key neglected issues underneath the superficial who-said-what-to-whom-when treatment that has characterized most press reporting. Small wonder that many of those trying to follow this important story are missing the forest for the trees. It is important that a fuller story be available to citizens of this country, to enable us to judge the enormity and significance of what happened. Accordingly, my Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues and I thought it would be useful to boil down into digestible, chronological form the key facts at the beginning of the story:

February 13, 2002: According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's "Report on the US Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" of July 2004 (pp 38-39), Vice President Cheney asked his CIA morning briefer for the CIA's analysis of a report, which he had seen in a Defense Intelligence Agency publication, alleging that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In response, the Director of Central Intelligence's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) issued an intelligence assessment with limited distribution. It said, "Information on the alleged uranium contract between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a foreign government service report that lacks crucial details, and we are working to clarify the information and to determine whether it can be corroborated." The assessment also noted, "Some of the information in the report contradicts reporting from the US Embassy in Niamey (Niger). US diplomats say the French Government-led consortium that operates Niger's two uranium mines maintains complete control over uranium mining and yellowcake production." The CIA sent a separate version of the assessment to the Vice President's office, which differed only in that it named the foreign government service.

February 19: Officials of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) have told the Senate committee that DO managers - not Valerie Plame - decided to send former ambassador Wilson to Niger to make immediate inquiries. Wilson, who was acting ambassador in Baghdad when the 1991 Gulf War began, had earlier served in Niger, and had wide contacts there. On February 19, after meeting with DO managers and other intelligence community officials at CIA headquarters, Wilson was commissioned to go to Niger and investigate.

February 26: Ambassador Wilson arrived in Niger. He determined during the course of his visit that there was no substance to the allegation that Iraq was trying to procure uranium in Niger. The US Ambassador to Niger told the Senate Committee that Ambassador Wilson's conclusion was the same as that reached earlier by the US embassy in Niamey.

Early March: Vice President Cheney asked his CIA briefer for an update on the Niger issue. According to the Senate report on the pre-war performance of intelligence, Cheney had not forgotten his original request. And so CIA officers immediately debriefed Ambassador Wilson on the results of his trip, wrote up his report, and disseminated the report on 8 March (p. 42 of the Senate report).

Fall of 2002: CIA officials repeatedly warned the administration and Congress not to accept as fact the claim that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium. According to the Senate report (p. 54), the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency told Senator Kyl, for example, that the CIA did not agree with the British view that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium. On October 6, 2002, CIA Director Tenet called Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley to warn him not to introduce the bogus information into the speech being readied for the president to use the next day (just three days before Congress voted to authorize war). Hadley removed the passage from the speech (p. 56).

January 28, 2003: In his State of the Union Address, President Bush included the (in)famous "16 words," saying, "The British government has learned (sic) that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

May: Vice President Cheney's office was irate over a May 6 article by New York Times columnist Nick Kristof regarding the mission of a "former US ambassador" to Niger, and in particular to Kristof's assertion that the Vice President had instigated the trip. According to former senior CIA officials, Cheney's aides were "very uptight about the vice president being tagged that way."

June: The White House, with the participation of Karl Rove and Lewis Libby (and, according to one recent report, the president and vice president themselves), conceived and then executed a plan to discredit Ambassador Wilson. A variety of reports from journalists and others show that as early as the end of May, White House officials were trying to dig up dirt on Ambassador Wilson. And the State Department drafted a top-secret memorandum on the Iraq-Niger affair, identifying Valerie Plame by her maiden name.

July 13: Robert Novak, citing two Administration sources, identified Valerie Plame by name as a CIA operative. Plame was still under cover when Novak published her name, thus compromising not only Plame, but also the many agents she had recruited. She conducted several overseas missions as part of her cover job.

Betrayal. There is no other word for it. Except some might call it treason.

Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The Maker of US Policy

2005-10-09T21:37:00.000-04:00

What a stroke of luck that God's advice to George Bush fits so neatly alongside US national interests.

God, apparently addressing the president each time as "George", had told him, in three separate briefings: "Go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan ... go and end the tyranny in Iraq ... go and get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security."

It's perhaps surprising that divine revelation should so precisely coincide with state department policy during the Bush administration. A fundamentalist believer would explain this overlap by saying that the president is simply being obedient to God, but it seems rather convenient to have a supreme overlord whose politics so closely mirror your own. The really interesting question for Bush would be whether God has ever told him he was wrong about anything, whether the Maker has broken administration policy as well as making it.

Bush has spoken openly about his personal conversation with God in the past and in this very week could probably benefit from wearing his sacred heart on his sleeve, as his Christian-right supporters are upset by the nomination to the supreme court of White House counsel Harriet Miers, who is not thought by hard line believers to have put in enough knee-time in public.

Bush's previous religious admissions have suggested that God was a kind of vice-president, whereas it now seems that George is the running mate.

The political risk of this is obvious. If God is directing American foreign policy, He is presumably also advising on domestic issues, such as Supreme Court nominations. If so, Bush would face the fascinating task of explaining to the Christian right why God advised against a Supreme Court justice who was too associated with Christian fundamentalists.

And, even before the Palestinian insight into his beliefs, we can guess that the president's theology was in a mess. Throughout his five years in office, Bush has sustained a simple old Sunday-school world view in which external evil threatens American interests and is then met by force which believes it has God on its side. Of interest is the fact that the perceived aggressors (Bin Laden, Saddam) also feel divinely justified by God is no more of an obstacle to this belief system than it has been for the religious throughout history. Just think of this as Bush own "crusade".

Hurricane Katrina, though, severely challenges this exegesis. What can a president of such simple religious faith have made of the devastation of America by what insurance policies call an act of God? Whereas even an event as terrible as 9/11 could be sustaining and confirmational for someone of Bush's apparent Manichean convictions, a sudden drowning of the chosen invites only agonized study of the Book of Job. This affront to Bush's relationship with God may explain his public bewilderment during the weather crisis.

What we would give to know what Bush's secretary of higher state said to him after those events. But the president is likely to be less confessional to foreign politicians about these matters from now on.

There's nothing inherently dangerous about a leader having religious beliefs - politicians can be just as lethal if they believe too devoutly in themselves - but this president has kicked all decision-making upstairs. And, even though American politics is theistically inclined, this is understood as too steep a genuflection.

The political capital is spent....

2005-10-07T17:07:00.000-04:00

It appears that W is all out of his "political capital".... as increasingly Republicans are voicing strong oppostion against his mismanagement of the presidency.

Republicans in both houses of Congress are formally requesting Bush to pull the nomination of his 'good friend' Miers for Supreme Court Justice. In fact, the calls are coming primarily from the right side of the aisle against one more crony appointment. Guess they are beginning to worry about going down with his ship.

Katrina Benefit October 12th.

2005-10-07T16:07:00.000-04:00

George full of grace....

2005-10-07T15:57:00.000-04:00

George Bush: "God Told Me to End the Tyranny in Iraq".... [from the The Guardian UK]

Our president told the Palestinians that God talked to him about Middle East peace.

George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr Bush revealed the extent of his religious fervour when he met a Palestinian delegation during the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egpytian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, four months after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Everyone I am sure remembers those well orchestrated photo ops.

One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."

Mr Bush went on: "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." Mr Bush, who became a born-again Christian at 40, is the most overtly religious leader to occupy the White House.

Soon afterward, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz carried a transcript of the meeting, containing Mr Bush's remarks.

The BBC will air the transcript publicly this Monday in a piece called 'Elusive Peace'.

Religion also surfaced as an issue when Mr Bush and Tony Blair were reported to have prayed together in 2002 at his ranch at Crawford, Texas - the summit at which the invasion of Iraq was agreed upon. Mr Blair has repeatedly refused to admit or deny the claim.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, who was also part of the delegation at Sharm el-Sheikh, told the BBC programme that Mr Bush had said: "I have a moral and religious obligation. I must get you a Palestinian state. And I will."

Bush, speechless...

2005-10-06T10:22:00.000-04:00

This is hysterical.... Andy Dick as Bush speechwriter.

Unreported: the Bush pardons this last week.

2005-10-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

Bush pardons 14 on day DeLay is indicted....

What better day to slip in a few more "get out of jail free" cards? Of the 14 Bush pardons delivered yesterday, three were for drug charges, four were white collar crimes. And amazingly, one of the pardons issued by our "security president" was for this crime: Property damage by use of explosives and destruction of an energy facility; 18 U.S.C. 844(i) and 1366(a)

Taken along with yesterday's diary which reported the decline in federal prosecutions for white collar, drug, and terrorism charges, it makes it very clear that the question Democrats should be asking is "do you feel safer than you did 4 years ago?"

Justice Department Releases List of Pardons Granted by President Bush, US NewsWire 9/28/2005.

Bush's rosy spin.... but the reality just keeps getting more gloomy.

2005-10-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

Of Iraq's 86 battalions, only one ready to fight.... alarming Senate committee.

The number of the Iraqi army's 86 battalions that can fight insurgents without U.S. and coalition help has dropped from three back down to one, top U.S. generals informed Congress on Thursday. They also said the security situation in Iraq has worsened and is too uncertain to predict large-scale American troop withdrawals anytime soon.

Gen. George Casey, who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said there are fewer Iraqi battalions at "Level 1" readiness than there were a few months ago. Both Republican and Democratic senators expressed deep concern that the United States is not making enough progress against a resilient insurgency.

Officials did not say specifically why two battalions are no longer rated at Level 1 and thus unable to operate on their own.

Rumsfeld, generals grilled...

Senators bristled at the disclosure that only one Iraqi army battalion is ready to fight on its own, including rare blunt criticism from Republicans. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he thinks the United States has not had enough troops to fend off insurgents permanently. McCain also chastised Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who retires as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Thursday, for being overly optimistic because "things have not gone as we had planned or expected nor as we were told by you, General Myers."

Myers replied: "I don't think this committee or the American public has ever heard ME say that things are going very well in Iraq."

'Loss of public confidence'

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she was discouraged by the lack of readiness by the Iraqi security force. She said that it "contributes to a loss of public confidence in how the war is going," and that "it doesn't feel like progress when we hear today that we have only one Iraqi battalion that is fully capable."

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the committee, said he thinks that if Iraqis do not reach a political solution that is agreeable to minority Sunnis by the end of the year, the United States should consider a timetable for withdrawal.

"That's not setting a date for departure at this time," Levin said. "That's simply conveying clearly and forcefully to the Iraqis that the presence of our forces in Iraq is not unlimited."

Things that make you go hmmmmm....

2005-10-06T09:31:00.000-04:00

While scanning Reuters today.... I found this little tidbit....

US finds fever bacteria during war protest weekend.

Small amounts of a bacteria that cause "rabbit fever" were found on Washington's National Mall during the Iraq protest march on Washington. The largest anti-war protest in American history.

The CDC said several government environmental air monitors in the Mall area detected low levels of Francisella tularensis bacteria that cause tularemia, commonly known as rabbit fever, on September 24-25. The CDC said it issued an alert on Friday night as a precaution so medical personnel were aware of the situation and could report any suspected cases. Rabbit fever cannot be passed from person to person but rather is an airborne disease.

Symptoms of the disease include: sudden fever, chills, headaches, conjunctivitis, diarrhea, muscle aches, joint pain, dry cough and progressive weakness.

On the CDC's website it states that "the bacteria can be used as a weapon if made into an aerosol that could be inhaled."

"The bacteria that cause tularemia occur widely in nature but can be isolated and grown in quantity in a laboratory, although manufacturing an effective aerosol weapon would require considerable sophistication."

The germ that causes tularemia is considered a biohazard because it is highly infectious and was tested in the 1960s by the United States as a biological weapon.

The air monitors are part of the nationwide "Biowatch" system installed to sample the air in major metropolitan areas daily for pathogens that could be used in a biological attack on the United States.

It's your war after all...

2005-10-06T09:15:00.000-04:00

A mere 32 percent of Americans now approve of Bush's handling of the war, which he launched in 2003 citing the threat of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capabilities....

Mr. Pres, I know you are distracted by all the corruption and crony charges that surround you.... and all those Americans that need your help due to Katrina.... that damn downturning economy.... paying for that BIG budget of yours..... I could go on and on here but hopefully you have a handle on the woes of your administration. Wow, do you need a vacation. A permanent one.

But, back to Iraq, what ARE you doing to do with YOUR war???

I realize you rarely think outside your little box, but I really do think you owe an explanation to those almost 2000 dead Americans, the scores of our maimed soldiers who lives have been altered forever, not to mention all the innocent Iraqis who are either dead or whose lives have been destroyed by your folly.......

...... it's not just we Americans who are waiting and watching. The world is tuned in and waiting..... and waiting..... and waiting.....

God are you there....

2005-10-06T09:09:00.000-04:00

The not-so-reverend James Dobson, right wingnut and guru of hatespeak, has just announced that God has spoken to him and is considering the judicial nominee, Harriet Miers. He apparently will get back in touch with Dobson and 'let him know' what he decides.

Those little voices in his head could, by chance, be his inner demons playing a little game with him. God, what do you think?

Even more abuses reported by Army and Bush is trying to stonewall efforts to correct it.

2005-10-05T13:27:00.000-04:00

Soldier Reports More Abuses to Senators

An Army captain has reported new allegations of detainee abuse in a different area of Iraq. And has met Tuesday with Senator John McCain and staff aides on the House Armed Services Committee and gave them additional accounts of abuse.

Captain Fishback said that since he and two other former members of the 82nd Airborne Division last month accused soldiers in their battalion in Iraq of routinely beating and abusing prisoners in 2003 and 2004, several other soldiers had contacted him and asked him to relay to lawmakers their own experiences.

In separate statements to Human Rights Watch, Captain Fishback and two sergeants related their experiences as they recounted how members of the First Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, had repeatedly beaten Iraqi prisoners, exposed them to extremes of hot and cold, and stacked them in human pyramids at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.

The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Led by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a group of Republicans wants to have amendments imposing restrictions on the detention, interrogation and prosecution of prisoners tacked onto the $440 billion military spending bill the Senate is to vote on by weeks' end.

Senators offered the same proposals in the summer as the Senate worked on a bill setting Pentagon policy. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., scuttled that bill in part because of White House opposition to the detainee proposals.

Undeterred, McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, resurrected his legislation this week. His amendment would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in U.S. custody and require all U.S. troops to follow procedures in the Army Field Manual when they detain and interrogate suspects.

On Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was reintroducing his proposal that would define "enemy combatant" and put into law procedures for prosecuting detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

As it did before, the White House last week threatened a veto over the proposals, arguing they would tie the president's hands during wartime. Which isn't that the point? To tie these guys hands so that they act in a manner that respresents ALL Americans and not just the rogue nature of Cheney or Rumsfeld. We are asking for accountibility from an Administration that does not understand what that means.

However, this time the administration did not send Vice President Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill to personally lobby McCain, Graham and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman who supports the amendments.

"I hope there is a realization that this is the right thing to do," McCain said Tuesday.

At the same time, Democrats plan to continue to push their own proposal that would establish an independent commission to investigate allegations of prisoner abuse. The Pentagon already has done several of its own investigations and argues that another would be redundant. But that is like the prosecutor investigating himself for impropriety.

McCain, Graham and Warner decided that standards for handling detainees were needed in light of allegations of mistreatment at the Navy's Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and now growing to every detention facility.

Since July, a list of retired generals and admirals backing the effort has doubled from 14 to 28.

"It is now apparent that the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere took place in part because our men and women in uniform were given ambiguous instructions," the retired officers said in a letter dated last month. "Our service members were denied clear guidance, and left to take the blame when things went wrong. They deserve better than that."

In recent weeks, even new and worse claims of abuse and reminders of Abu Ghraib have been in the headlines.

Human Rights Watch, a U.S. rights organization, reported that soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division systematically tortured Iraqi detainees in 2003 and 2004.

Last week, a federal judge in New York ordered the release of dozens more pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, rejecting government arguments that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Maybe the only to combat this administration is through all out assault and complete transparancy of their heinous actions.

Another crony resigns.... but why?

2005-10-05T11:22:00.000-04:00

MORE THAN 10 days have passed since Lester M. Crawford abruptly announced his resignation as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. At the time, he stated nothing more than it was "time to step aside." Mr. Crawford had been confirmed as commissioner only two months previously, after holding the job of acting commissioner for a year and a half (and spending a good chunk of that time struggling to be confirmed).

Mr. Crawford has denied an allegation of financial impropriety. The FDA refuses to say anything on the matter.

Certainly Mr. Crawford's brief term contained no shortage of political controversies. Among them was a promise he made to Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to make a decision about the emergency contraceptive Plan B approved by the FDA's scientists. When he broke that promise within weeks of winning Senate confirmation, delaying approval further, the FDA's top women's health official resigned in protest, stating she could no longer work for an agency that politicized regulatory decisions that are supposed to be made on scientific and legal grounds. Does that mean the FDA no longer has an independent, apolitical standing? If the issue really is corruption, or personal behavior, as some who know Mr. Crawford claim -- then to say so would help clarify the relationship with the White House.

Another major public official has resigned; the administration owes the public an explanation.

Clinton on the ground...

2005-10-05T10:34:00.000-04:00

President Clinton is on the ground in New Orleans and talking to the people about what they need to formulate a plan for better response. He is acting in his ever increasing role as peacemaker and philanthropist for our country.

"We drew in a lot of money," Mr. Clinton said, "but what we want to try to do is set up a system to fund things the government won't fund or can't fund."

Most importantly, he wants to make sure that aid is delivered to those in need and to wipe away some of the red tape and bureaucracy of trying to deliver the relief.

Snow Job...

2005-10-04T09:03:00.000-04:00

Bush's 'work' wife....

2005-10-04T08:29:00.000-04:00

From the beginning of George W. Bush's presidency, his professional life has been so closely intertwined with Harriet Miers' that some White House insiders jokingly refer to her as the president's "work wife." And she was the lawyer whom Bush trusted to handle some of his most sensitive and important tasks, even before he entered the Oval Office.

Born and raised in Dallas, educated at Southern Methodist University and deeply involved in her evangelical Christian church, Harriet Ellan Miers is a child of Texas, and her roots there run parallel to those of the president who nominated her to the Supreme Court.

As governor of Texas, Bush chose her to take over a financially troubled state lottery commission. When questions arose in the 2000 presidential campaign about favoritism in the Texas Air National Guard, Bush tapped Miers to handle the problem.

After they left Texas for Washington following the 2000 presidential election, Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial "presidential daily briefing" hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

And this year it was Miers who brought word to the president that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was retiring, it was Miers who interviewed potential successors and told others they were passed over, and Miers who ended up winning the nomination herself.

Presenting her with a legal award (Bush loves awards), he quipped that "when it comes to a cross-examination, she can fillet better than Mrs. Paul." During visits to the president's ranch near Crawford, Texas, she has been known to grab a chain saw and help clear brush.

"Harriet wanted to run the Lottery Commission. Harriet likes to run everything she gets near," Wood said. "She is very driven. She may be wrong, but she is never in doubt…. She is a control freak."

When Bush was elected president in 2000, Miers was named his assistant and staff secretary. She read and approved virtually every piece of paper that crossed his desk. She later was promoted to assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff, and in February became White House counsel.

And we have the same old theme song for this presidency.... "Let the circle be un-bro-ken".

"This is not about who they are. This is about who we are," said McCain.

2005-10-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

Rogue Soldiers or Rogue President? Scapegoating Small-Fry... By Ray McGovern

The news that yet another Army private, Lynndie England, 22, of Fort Ashby, West Virginia, has been convicted and sentenced for posing for the infamous photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, while her superiors duck responsibility, is a sad commentary on the extent to which the Bush administration has corrupted the US Army.

The reminder of the photos of those inexcusable activities was sickening enough, and England deserves to be punished. But I am of the old-Army school where officers took responsibility for the actions of those under their command. For anyone who cares to look, there is abundant documentary evidence that the Army brass and its civilian leadership are responsible for the torture. They continue to dance away from taking responsibility.

They choose, instead, to stone the woman, like the hypocrites of Bible fame, contending that the photos inflamed the insurgency in Iraq. It is the torture, not the photos, that inflames the insurgency. And responsibility for the torture reaches directly up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief himself. Perhaps when even more repulsive photos and videos of torture at Abu Ghraib are released, as a federal judge has now ordered, the American people finally will be jarred awake.

So far, the silent acquiescence with which Americans - including our institutional churches - have greeted President George W. Bush's open assertion of a right to torture some prisoners evokes memories of the unconscionable behavior of "obedient Germans" of the 1930s and early 1940s. Thankfully, despite the hate whipped up by administration propagandists against people branded "terrorists," polling conducted last year showed that most Americans reject torturing prisoners. Almost two-thirds held that torture is never acceptable.

Yet few speak out - perhaps because President Bush says he too, is against torture, and our domesticated media have successfully hidden from most of us the fact that the president has added a highly significant qualification. On February 7, 2002, the president issued an order instructing our armed forces "to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva" (emphasis added). In the preceding paragraph, the president determined that Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees "do not qualify as prisoners of war." Never mind that there is no provision in the Geneva Conventions for such a unilateral determination.

Speedy Gonzales

In taking this position, Bush had to overrule then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only one of his senior advisers with experience in combat. On January 26, 2002, Powell sent to then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales formal comments on the latter's MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT: "DECISION RE APPLICATION OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION ON PRISONERS OF WAR TO THE CONFLICT WITH AL QAEDA AND THE TALIBAN."

This is the Mafia-like memorandum in which Gonzales not only branded some Geneva provisions "quaint" and "obsolete," but also reassured the president that he could probably escape domestic criminal prosecution for violating the US War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 USC 2441), as well. Here is what Gonzales told the president on this key point:

... it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.
Meanwhile, back at the State Department, Powell apparently thought the memorandum was still in draft. But Gonzales, who knew what the president wanted, did not wait for Powell's formal comments. Rather, on January 25, Gonzales sent his final draft to the president, thereby shielding him from dissonance like Powell's written observation that exempting detainees from Geneva protections "will reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops."

Gonzales was already aware of Powell's opposition, and in his own memo the former White House counsel and now attorney general was dismissive of Powell's request that the president reconsider the argument that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees are not prisoners of war under Geneva. In a short paragraph tacked onto the bottom of a list of "negatives," Gonzales took brief note of Powell's objections. Gonzales's paragraph speaks volumes in the light of subsequent abuses in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo:

A determination that the GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] does not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine US military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.
Last week, over a dozen high ranking military officers sent a letter to President Bush, pointing out that "It is now apparent that the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere took place in part because our men and women in uniform were given ambiguous instructions, which in some cases authorized treatment that went beyond what was allowed by the Army Field Manual."

A pity that Colin Powell limited himself to writing memos to the president's lawyer.

The photos from Abu Ghraib, and the more recent Human Rights Watch report describing "routine" torture by the once highly professional 82nd Airborne Division, offer graphic evidence that Powell's misgivings were well-founded. The report relies heavily on the testimony of a West Point graduate, an Army Captain who has had the courage to speak out after 17 months of trying in vain to go through Army channels.

Human Rights Watch Director Tom Malinowski has noted, "The administration demanded that soldiers extract information from detainees without telling them what was allowed and what was forbidden. Yet when the abuses inevitably followed, the leadership blamed the soldiers in the field instead of taking responsibility." A Pentagon spokesman has dismissed the report as "another predictable report by an organization trying to advance an agenda through the use of distortion and errors of fact." Judge for yourselves; the report can be found at http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905/. Grim but required reading.

Pictures Worth a Thousand Words

After seeing the photos from Abu Ghraib last year, Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia took a strong rhetorical stand against torture. But then he quickly succumbed to White House pressure to postpone Senate hearings on the subject until after the November 2004 election.

In July, Warner joined two other Republican Senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, in attempts to introduce amendments against torture to the defense authorization bill. The amendments would require that US forces revert to the standards set forth in Army Field Manual (FM 34-52) for interrogating detainees held by the Defense Department. The manual prohibits the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Another amendment that has been discussed would require that all foreign nationals "be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross." This would prohibit sequestering unregistered "ghost detainees" at prisons like Abu Ghraib and secret CIA interrogation centers.

Inured as I thought I had become to the gall of top Bush administration officials, I found the White House reaction shocking. On the evening of July 21, Vice President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill to dissuade the three Senators from proceeding with the amendments. But the Senators were not cowed - not then, at least. Four days later on the floor of the Senate, John McCain - who knows something of torture - made a poignant appeal to his colleagues to hold our country to humane standards in treating captives, "no matter how evil or terrible" they may be. "This is not about who they are. This is about who we are," said McCain.

The following day Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pulled the Pentagon spending bill off the floor, sparing Bush the political risk of vetoing the much needed defense authorization bill simply because it included amendments requiring the protections for detainees - protections already required not only by international law but also by US criminal statute.

Yesterday, the White House again warned lawmakers not to add any amendments on the treatment of detainees. It will be interesting to see if, in the end, the Senators cave in to White House pressure. For if they do, they will be providing yet another congressional nihil obstat for the general approach so succinctly voiced by the president to then-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in the White House on the evening of 9/11. According to Clarke, the president yelled, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, he is now a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Exclusive interview with Gen Karpinski re: Abu Ghraib.

2005-10-03T21:16:00.000-04:00

Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration... By Marjorie Cohn

I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will ... Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.

Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the now famous torture photographs were taken in fall of 2003. She was reprimanded and demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners. On August 3, 2005, I interviewed Janis Karpinski. In the most comprehensive public statement she has made to date, Karpinski deconstructs the entire United States military operation in Iraq with some astonishing revelations.

When Karpinski got to Abu Ghraib, "there was a completely different story than what we were being told in the United States. It was out of control. There weren't enough soldiers. Nobody had the right equipment. They were driving around in unarmored vehicles, some of them without doors ... So, knowing that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, they pushed them out anyway, because those two three-stars wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose."

Karpinski said that General Shinseki briefed Rumsfeld that "he can't win this war, if they insist on invading Iraq, he can't win this war with less than 300,000 soldiers." Rumsfeld reportedly ordered Shinseki to go back and find a way to do this with 125,000 to 130,000, but Shinseki came back and said they couldn't do the job with that number. "What did Rumsfeld do?" Karpinski asked rhetorically. "If you can't agree with me, I'm going to find somebody who can. He made Shinseki a lame duck, for all practical purposes, and brought in Schoomaker. And Schoomaker got it. He said, 'Oh yes sir, we can do this with 125,000.'"

Karpinski says she did not know about the torture occurring in Cellblocks 1-A and 1-B at Abu Ghraib because it took place at night. She didn't live at Abu Ghraib, and nobody was permitted to travel at night due to the dangerous road conditions. The first she heard about the torture was on January 12, 2004. She was never allowed to speak to the people who had worked on the night shift. She "was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them."

When Karpinski inquired, "What's this about photographs?" the sergeant replied, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking." When Karpinski asked to see the log books, the sergeant told her that the Criminal Investigation Division had taken everything except for something on a pole outside the little office they were using.

"It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. "And then a handwritten message over to the side that appeared to be the same handwriting as the signature, and that signature was Secretary Rumsfeld's. And it said, 'Make sure this happens' with two exclamation points. And that was the only thing they had. Everything else had been confiscated."

Karpinski tried to get information, but "nobody knew anything, nobody - at least, that's what they were claiming. The Company Commander, Captain Reese, was tearful in my office and repeatedly told me he knew nothing about it, knew nothing about it," Karpinski said. But in a later plea bargain he entered into after the Taguba Report came out, "Captain Reese said that not only did he know about it, but he was told not to report it to his chain of command, and he was told that by Colonel Pappas. And he claimed that he saw General Sanchez out there on several occasions witnessing the torture of some of the security detainees."

The first time Karpinski got any clarification about the photographs was January 23, 2004. The criminal investigator, Colonel Marcelo, came into Karpinski's office and showed her the pictures. "When I saw the pictures I was floored," Karpinski said. "Really, the world was spinning out of control when I saw those pictures, because it was so far beyond and outside of what I imagined. I thought that maybe some soldiers had taken some pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire or in their cell or something like that. I couldn't imagine anything like what I saw in those photographs."

Marcelo told her, "Ma'am, I'm supposed to tell you after you see the photographs that General Sanchez wants to see you in his office." So Karpinski went over to see Sanchez. She said that "before I even saw the photographs, I was preparing words to say in a press conference - to be up front, to be honest about this, that an investigation is ongoing and there are some allegations of detainee abuse."

But Sanchez told Karpinski, "'No, absolutely not. You are not to discuss this with anyone.' And I should have known then," she said, "and I know that Sanchez was hopeful for a four-star promotion even then, in January of 2004. And I thought it had probably most to do with the election coming up in November 2004, and that this could really move the Administration out of the White House if it was exploited. So naively, I just thought, you know, they're going to let this investigation go and they're going to handle it the way it should be handled."

Karpinski said, however, "The truth has been uncovered, but it's been suffocated and it has not been released with the results of the investigation." She added, "McClellan and Rumsfeld can get up on their high horse and say that there've been no fewer than 15 investigations that were conducted. But every one of those investigations is under the control of the Secretary of Defense. And every one of those investigations is run and led by a person who can lose their job under Rumsfeld's fist."

"We're never going to know the truth until they do an independent commission or look into this independently," Karpinski maintains. "This is about instructions delivered with full authority and knowledge of the Secretary of Defense and probably Cheney. I don't know if the President was involved or not. I don't care. All I know is, those instructions were communicated from the Secretary of Defense's office, from the Pentagon, through Cambone, through Miller, to Abu Ghraib."

Karpinski describes what happened when General Geoffrey Miller arrived at Abu Ghraib: "The most pronounced difference was when Miller came to visit. He came right after Rumsfeld's visit ... And he said that he was going to use a template from Guantánamo Bay to 'Gitmo-ize' the operations out at Abu Ghraib."

"These torture techniques were being implemented and used down at Guantánamo Bay and, of course, now we have lots of statements that say they were used in Afghanistan as well," Karpinski said. Although Miller has sworn he was just an "advisor," Miller told Karpinski he wanted Abu Ghraib. Karpinski replied, "Abu Ghraib is not mine to give to you. It belongs to Ambassador Bremer. It is going to be turned over to the Iraqis." Miller replied, "No it is not. I want that facility and Rick Sanchez said I can have any facility I want." Karpinski said, "Miller obviously had the full authority of somebody, you know, likely Cambone or Rumsfeld in Washington, DC."

Miller's representative, General Fast, turned the prison over to the Military Intelligence brigade for complete command and control, Karpinski said. "There was no coordination with me or Colonel Pappas. There was no discussion about chain of command."

Abu Ghraib housed primarily Iraqi criminals. Although many of the "security detainees" were kept at Abu Ghraib, most of the interrogations took place at a higher-value detention facility in Baghdad, according to Karpinski.

The Army discriminates against the reservists in general, and female officers in particular, Karpinski said. "It's really a good old boys' network," she said. "Come hell or high water, they're going to maintain the status quo." While she was made the scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, no one above her in the chain of command has been reprimanded.

Karpinski reveals that there was "no sustainment plan" because "there were a lot of contractors - US contractors exclusively - who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq." At the Coalition Provisional Authority, Karpinski "saw corruption like I've never seen before - millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at that time," she said. "You take a request down - literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control."

Speaking about the war, Karpinski said, "Iraq was a huge country, and when you have people largely saying now, 'He may have been a dictator, but we were better under Saddam,' this Administration needs to take notice. And at some point you have to say, 'Stop the train, because it's completely derailed. How do we fix it?' But in an effort to do that, you have to admit that you made a few mistakes, and this Administration is not willing to admit any mistakes whatsoever."

Janis Karpinski is no longer in the military. She is writing a book that will be published by Miramax in November. In April, she received a form letter from the Chief of the Army Reserves, "warning me - warning me - about speaking about Abu Ghraib, and that everything was still under investigation." She then got "a letter saying that he understands that I'm writing a book and I should submit the transcript for review."

"And my lawyer responded simply by telling him that I was a private citizen and I don't fall under the same requirements, which he had to acknowledge, because that's true. I'm not ignorant, and I'm not going to reveal any classified information in anything I write," Karpinski said, "but I don't need to, because the truth is the truth, and it doesn't have to be classified. It is definitely staggering, but the truth is the truth."

Truthout videos.

2005-10-03T20:23:00.000-04:00

There are two amazing videos on Truthout.org.

The first is an interview with a respected member of the British Pariament, George Galloway, who is touring America.

The second is an inspirational video of the recent peace march on Washington. A Film by Chris Hume.

Both are powerful and should be watched. My personal congratulations to Truthout for the constant search for reason and wisdom and truth.

An aside, a recent British poll done by an ultra-conservative media organization (owned by Rupert Murdoch) states that an overwhelming 86 percent of the Britons want their troops removed immediately from Iraq. Even more chilling is the complete revolt by the Iraqi government in Southern Iraq and open rebellion against British forces there. The Iraqi government has cut all ties to the British military in Southern Iraq.